With Paleolithic Politics, Barry Cooper is the first political scientist to propose new interpretations of some of the most famous extant Paleolithic art and artifacts, using his background in political theory and philosophical anthropology. Cooper, who has written extensively on Eric Voegelin’s political science, takes up the enterprise of applying Voegelin’s ideas to an analysis of portable and cave art. He specifically applies Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness, his concept of the compactness and differentiation of consciousness, his argument regarding the experience and symbolizations of reality, and his notion of the primary experience of the cosmos. Cooper demonstrates the political significance of the earliest expressions of human existence and is among the first to argue that political life began 25,000 years before the Greeks.
