The Dawn of Negarchy: Questioning David Stasavage's Categories in *The Decline and Rise of Democracy*

David Stasavage's The Decline and Rise of Democracy makes a valuable contribution to political theory by questioning in a serious way Western presumptions about the Hellenic origins of democracy. From Tlaxcala and the Huron Confederacy in North America to Ancient India and beyond, Stasavage brushes the dust from the copious evidence of a global pattern of democratic governance that is hardly confined to the West as we have so long been taught. One might ask, if there is so much evidence, and if there were so many of these Athens-like democracies all over the world, why are we just now hearing about it? The answer, Stasavage suggests, is two-fold: Eurocentric bias and category errors.

It does make some sense that the Western academy would conveniently overlook the evidence of non-western democracy. Aside from the normal blinders of ethnocentrism, the politics of colonialism surely plays a role. Spreading democracy became a keystone justification for both European colonialism and American imperialism in the 20th century. However, the conceit of democracy's European genesis is, according to Stasavage, owed to more than Western chauvinism. Key to Stasavage's contribution in his latest book is the distinction he posits between “modern democracies” and “early democracies.” Modern democracies (such as the USA, South Korea, etc.), as Stasavage's points out, have representative assemblies, checks and balances, but also the classical features of the Weberian state: extensive bureaucracies, bounded territories and populations, and monopolies on violence. In particular, Stasavage makes much of the early modern English innovation of giving parliamentary representatives full decision power once elected, rather than their parliamentary actions being subject to nullification by their constituencies. "Early democracies” are generally smaller, and they lack some of these modern features. This category, as Stasavage constructs it, includes the well-known ancient Mediterranean republics as well as a wide variety of non-European, non-monarchical systems of local, regional, and confederated governance. 

The semi-nomadic Wendat (Huron) Confederacy is one of Stasavage’s main examples of an early democracy. The Wendat Confederacy had a tiered, norm-based system of regular council meetings with broad participation in decision power at the lower tier. The Wendat chiefs nominally heading this system of assemblies had no bureaucracy, nor any military force distinct from the council members themselves. Moreover, representation at the higher council followed a strict version of the delegate model of representation. According to the author, representatives often carried specific instructions from their home councils, and constituencies could effectively declare the decisions taken by their representatives null and void if they disagreed with them. Moreover, if coercion was attempted, constituencies basically had what Stasavage calls the "exit option." They could, when push came to shove, withdraw physically and politically from this system of governance.

The Decline and Rise of Democracy has enjoyed positive reviews from academics, and rightfully so in my opinion. However, it is with respect to Stasavage’s fairly radical revision of categories that points of criticism can been raised. At least one reviewer has quibbled with his arguably overly broad use of the term “democracy.” Part of the work this term seems to do for Stasavage is to gloss over the conventional distinction between state and non-state societies. The basic claim of the book that democracies were widespread cold be undermined by those who would hold that democracies are necessarily a type of state and that many of these “early democracies” were not truly states. Where exactly one draws the line between state and non-state societies is a notoriously vexing question, and arguments on such points are not always useful. Here, however, the question may not be merely semantic. As Stasavage duly notes, the idea that “primitive” non-state societies were more democratic and egalitarian than early state societies has been generally accepted for some time. If these early democracies can be dismissed as non-state societies, then they may not be democracies in any sense that would fundamentally change the prevailing Western narrative of political history.

Stasavage does intend to change the narrative, and he does indicate in several places that he considers his early democracies to be states, but here, at least to some degree, he strains the concept. In making the argument that state formation is related to caloric production in Chapter Three, which is titled "Weak States Inherited Democracy," Stasavage begins by paraphrasing Douglass North’s quite broad definition of the state as “an entity that extracts revenue in return for protection.” Taken at face value, and with the broad definition of revenue Stasavage applies, this definition makes the state an overly broad category that could encompass any form of protection racket (even perhaps including the patriarchal nuclear family on some interpretations). Later in Chapter Three, Stasavage uses terms like "more complex forms of central governance" or "governance above the community level" seemingly as stand-ins for the term "state." He writes, "the number of calories you can pull from the ground determines whether you have [central] governance but not the type of governance.” The two types (of “central governance above the community level”) are autocracy and democracy, which in this loosened sense of “democracy” boils down to governance by council versus governance through a bureaucracy headed by a single person. Therefore, many of the early democracies he discusses amount to some sort of council governance above the immediate community level, and it is on this basis that he groups them together with the classical Mediterranean polis republics.

The categorical gestalt shift Stasavage proposes ought to be taken seriously and engaged critically. Doing so, I believe, raises further questions. Was Athens a state? Was Sparta? Was Carthage? If so, when did they become states? We know that Athens and Sparta emerged from the Greek Dark Ages, a time after the collapse of the larger Mycenaean states, and even Stasavage agrees no states existed in Greece for a few centuries after the Bronze Age collapse. So, at some point the warlord-centered, aristocratic villages of Dark Age Greece became the state-like, sometimes-democratic poleis of the classical age. Stasavage writes, "In the new Greek states that emerged after the Bronze Age collapse, the rulers lacked bureaucracies, and they instead found themselves obliged to rule through consultation." At some point, however, Athens did develop enough of a bureaucracy to carry out large-scale public works projects, build a naval empire, and do things like compensate citizens monetarily for their time spent on political participation. The fact that such large scale collective actions through a sophisticated bureaucracy were accomplished in a non-monarchy with relatively broad power-sharing seems to be what was exceptional about the Mediterranean city-state republics (not all of which were Greek, as the case of Carthage indicates). Like classical Athens, the Huron Confederacy used a relatively complex system of council governance, but it otherwise lacks many of the state-like features of Athens and other republican Mediterranean cities of the Iron Age. A quote from a Jesuit Father describing the Wendat (Huron) society suffices to raise questions about whether “state” is the right word to describe their social institutions:

I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger.

None of this is to disparage the Wendat Confederacy, which after all was highly functional in that it allowed some two dozen towns of around 1000 people each to coexist in relative peace and fend off hostile neighbors. In fact, it could just as well be a disparagement to call such a system a state as to deny it that categorization. This would likely be the view of anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who held the view that the function of many norm-based institutions in non-state societies was precisely to “ward off the state.” Importantly, I am also not trying to argue that Stasavage is on the wrong track in terms of the overall thrust of his project, which, as I take it, is to recognize and learn from a rich but neglected global history and pre-history of democratic governance. I share this goal, and I believe he has struck a rich vein with this research, but it seems to me that we can better illuminate this global history if we revise Stasavage's categories in a few ways.

In the first place, I would propose to replace “democracy” with “negarchy.” “Negarchy” was coined by international relations theorist Daniel Deudney to describe political institutions that consciously ward off or negate hierarchy or check the concentration of power. For Deudney, negarchy is primarily a characteristic of the subset of states called republics. However, Deudney also uses the term to characterized his own vision of nuclear-age global governance, which he says would differ significantly from a "world state,” in that it would comprise a limited set of institutions principally aimed at solving the nuclear security dilemma, and would fall short of becoming a sovereign entity. I am interested here not in litigating the merits of Deudney’s nuclear one-worldism, but simply in borrowing the concept. If negarchy refers to republic-like global institutions above and beyond the state, there is no reason it cannot also be useful as a descriptor of institutions "below" and before the formation of full-fledged states. Negarchy in this sense could characterize ancient republics, modern "democracies," power-checking institutions of global collective action, and the complex of power-sharing and power-checking norms and practices that comprise some of the sophisticated non-state or proto-state governance structures Stasavage includes as early democracies. It is important for my purposes (and also true to Deudney’s intentions) to point out that negarchy is not anarchy in the sense of resistance to all political structure. The point of negarchy is not to prevent collective action, but rather to ward off hierarchy and concentration of power while solving collective action problems. Indeed, resisting heirarchy is itself a key collective action project of negarchy.

There is an additional reason why negarchy is a better term than democracy for what I take to be Stasavage's purposes. He admits that many of his early democracies were aristocratic or oligarchical. What ties them together is not political egalitarianism. It is, rather, the fact that they have various institutions of power-sharing that persist recognizably over time in repeated iterations of group decision making about resource allocation, internal conflict resolution, and making war and peace with outside groups. In other words, they solve collective action problems without monarchy, and while actively resisting monarchy. Such systems of institutions for collective action and power sharing might be called democratic if power were shared broadly. But they need not be democratic. Power could be shared among a small group of elites, as indeed it often was in historical republics. 

In place of Stasavage's binary distinction between early and modern democracy, both posited as kinds of state, I suggest three categories of negarchies: 

1. Non-state negarchies. Provisionally and hypothetically, I would place in this category Iceland before 1200 CE, the Huron and Iroquois confederacies, early Israel under the Judges, and probably some of the earlier or less institutionalized poleis of the Greek Dark Ages. This would be far from an exhaustive list, and there are many interesting historical cases mentioned in Stasavage’s book, such as the “Songye republics” of Central Africa, about which I know too little to place them in this category or the next. With that said, it seems to me none of the above examples can convincingly be tarred with the brush (or claim the mantle) of statehood. Governance in such societies is often episodic, populations are usually small or dispersed, and there is no clear monopoly on violence. (Although, in some cases such as Dark Age Greece and Medieval Iceland, there is arguably an oligopoly on violence due to Iron Age military technologies, which made war-gear expensive.) There is no appreciable bureaucracy in these societies, as Stasavage notes. There is usually no written language, laws act as norms rather than as laws in a stricter sense, and enforcement of collective judgements is informal and communal, sometimes being entirely dependent on the aggrieved parties and their allies. However, such societies extend beyond a single village or band, they solve significant collective action problems without propounding a monarch, and often they are consciously warding off monarchy, heirarchy, or even the state itself through purpose-built, norm-based institutions.
2. Early republics. These can be thought of as small-state negarchies without "modern" characterisitics. Athens, the Dutch Republic, Tlaxcala, and probably the ancient republican mahajanapadas of the Ganges River valley would be in this category. Many of these polities were quite aristocratic. In cases such as Venice, Carthage, and Sparta, all women and a majority of men were excluded from formal political power. Still, it is an accomplishment that thousands of upper-middle class citizens shared power in these states and, without a monarch, governed effectively enough for state survival. The city-states of the Indus Valley civilization deserve mention here as well, though they cannot be confidently placed in any category due to the fact that we have only archaeological evidence to learn from. However, if we go by the evidence we have, these were large, complex, literate, highly planned cities that provided advanced public goods such as indoor plumbing, public baths, and region-wide standardization of weights and measures. Yet in these cities we have none of the usual evidence of monarchy or even significant hierarchy—no palaces, no elite burials, no centralized storage facilities, nor evidence of significant violence or wealth disparity. Such a society seems impossible without something like republican governance. Indeed, Because the Indus Valley cities appear to have existed in a confederation with one another, necessitating some kind of federal governance, we cannot be certain that they do not belong in the next category.
3. Modern republics. This is Stasavage’s category of “modern democracies” unchanged, except that I suggest the term “republic” is more suitable. These are modern state negarchies that are usually liberal and typically much larger in territory and population—think of Ghana, Germany, the USA, India, Brazil, etc. Stasavage points to the following characteristics: complex bureaucracies, broadly egalitarian voting rights, and representative legislatures whose statutes are binding on constituents. These modern negarchical states can be undemocratic in a variety of ways, and democratic in a variety of ways. But their constitutions have been relatively effective at preventing the centralization of power in complex, bureaucratic states where the impetus to centralization of power is strong.

There are a few reasons why I think it is worth splitting these categorical hairs. First, the word “democracy” is not a perfect fit for what Stasavage acknowledges are often exclusive or aristocratic forms of council government, sometimes extremely so. “Republic” or “republicanism” might be a better fit, but I think there is a reason Stasavage doesn’t use this term. In many cases, the simple fact of council governance above the community level doesn’t necessarily entail the state-like characteristics of the classical res publica. This may be part of the reason he sticks with “democracy,” even though he acknowledges that he is playing fast and loose with this term. “Negarchy” better pinpoints what is common to the wide range of anti-monarchical societies and institutions in question.

Secondly, I have anarchist adjacent reasons—inspired by authors like Pierre Clastres, David Wengrow, David Graeber, Gille Deleuze, and Felix Guattari—for wanting to separate what Stasavage calls democracy and what I am calling negarchy from statehood. If we do so, we can better appreciate how institutions in a wide range of societies may not only function to ward off monarchy, but also in some cases may function to ward off the state itself. This perspective also highlights what may be, in the grand scheme of history, a forgotten and neglected aspect of republicanism: its inherent anarchism. Additionally, to insist on making states a more exclusive category is to highlight some of the non-Western polities that are more convincingly analogous to the classical Mediterranean republics, such as those mentioned in second category above. The most well attested example is Tlaxcala, but archeological and historical evidence points to several others as well.

Finally, casting too wide a conceptual net may suggest excessive optimism about the prospects of our modern, democratic republics today. One of the features of the classical "Western Civ" version of the history of republicanism is that it depicts republics as rare and fragile, and in need of energetic and vigilant stewardship. This is connected to what Stasavage calls the “torch theory” of democracy. The theory teaches us that Athens lit the torch, passed it to Rome, then to the Renaissance Italian republics, who passed it to England, France, and America, who passed it to the world. Democracy on this view is a fragile, flickering Western flame, and if it goes out, it’s gone. Indeed, this fragility seems to be on display at this particular time in history. But Stasavage rejects the torch theory. Democracy, he says, is a deep and wide tradition, a child of human nature, and an inheritance of all humanity. In this way, he sounds a note of optimism in a time of democratic pessimism. Indeed, it is high time to point out that complex power-sharing institutions are not a purely Western phenomenon, and that democracy has been incubated in a wide variety of complex systems of governance above the level of the village or small community. But a note of caution is also needed. We should not downplay the difficulty and historical rarity of preserving democratic institutions as a society transitions into statehood. As Stasavage himself points out, it becomes much more difficult to avoid the autocratic alternative as populations grow, technology accretes, bureaucracies expand, and more and bigger collective actions are undertaken. There is some merit to the torch theory, but the important lesson is that it isn’t an exclusively Western torch. Ancient Greek republics were not unique, as we have long been taught, but they were part of a small global club.