Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals; hence his famous argument in The Savage Mind that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.
