Theories of the State and Early State Formation: New Insights from the Archaeological Turn in Political Theory

 

"The Government" is something you'll hear people talk about a lot. And you'll even hear everyday people talking about "the State" from time to time, at least in the USA. But usually by "the state" they mean their own state government, as in, "do you work for the state?" If you hear people talking about "the State" in the abstract, well then you're probably talking to someone who has some familiarity with scholarship in fields like political science, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, or history. It's a term I use a lot as a professor of political theory. But like many abstract terms that are useful to social theorists, it's bedevilingly difficult to define. 

Definitions are over-rated, it's true. But there are certain scholarly fields in which it becomes really hard to avoid the definitional problem. In the case of "the State," it's especially hard for archaeologists and anthropologists to avoid the definitional puzzle. They often find themselves arguing over what is and isn't a state. Political scientists, on the other hand, usually are less concerned with the definition of the state. In the middle of the twentieth century, most political scientists in the non-Marxist West abandoned the whole concept as too metaphysical and unscientific. Some political theorists have resurrected the concept in recent decades, but political scientists more broadly mostly study how states work in the contemporary world and how they interact with one another, without examining the concept itself too closely. One thing states themselves have done is develop institutions for mutually recognizing one another as a legitimate state. In this practical and political way, states have solved their own definitional problem in the contemporary political context. So, political scientists, sociologists, economists, and even historians can usually just take the state for granted and avoid, if they wish, the definitional questions, and even worse, the metaphysical ones.

Such questions harder for anthropologists to ignore because they have historically sought out for study societies very different from their own. Anthropologists almost always live in nation-states, and so in seeking out societies of a very different kind, they've often felt compelled to mark a distinction between their own type of society and the societies they study. Similarly, archaeologists in studying the deep past, in which social formations typically appear very different to our own modern ones, have been drawn toward the same sort of distinction, which becomes the state vs. non-state distinction.

Beyond these academic disciplines, most complex societies throughout history have tended to mark a distinction between their own "civilized" society and "uncivilized" outsiders, a moniker usually applied to those groups living in more ecologically marginal territories, in smaller, less-dense population groupings, with less sedentary ways of life. So, from the perspective of more complex or "state" societies, such distinctions always seem to have a normative dimension that leans favorably to the state form. And that normative outlook may account, at least partly, for the tendency to mark a distinction between states and non-state societies. Suspicion that there is a chauvinistic, normative viewpoint at work can, furthermore, fuel critiques of the very category of the state, particularly from indigenous and post-colonial perspectives. Perhaps there is no such thing as the state? Isn't it just a social construct engineered by colonizers to de-legitimize the lifeways of those they would like to exploit and dispossess?

If you decide you want to deconstruct a concept or category like the state by way of definitional fault-finding, you'll discover it's pretty easy to do. "Where exactly is the line between state and non-state?" you might ask. When exactly did your state become a state? And what exactly made the difference? And why exactly does that particular moment or that particular set of characteristics mark the transition to statehood? Definitive answers to such questions are always weak. The same game of deconstruction can be played with any categorical concept, and all concepts are categorical.

Ultimately, though, such games of conceptual deconstruction, while they are useful in chastening overly-rigid deployments of "logical" argumentation, exhaust their usefulness quickly as they approach epistemological nihilism. Recognizing and theorizing conceptual distinctions are as important as recognizing and understanding their limitations. Theorizing the State is important in this general way, and more particularly, it is especially important if one's goal is to understand, critique, and question current political realities, as well as understanding alternatives to these realities, including past, present, and future alternatives to the State. 

Where anthropologists and archaeologists seem to focus on definitional questions more than other fields, we political theorists, for our part, do share with these fields an abiding interest in the related question of why states (or if you wish, "complex political societies") first emerge, as this question bears upon the normative questions that are central to political theory. Knowing why states first emerged provides at least a possible basis for knowing what states ought to be and do. If they arose as voluntary agreements among equals, then we might conclude that states are fundamentally legitimate and they ought to provide equal opportunities and protections to all. If they arose as machineries of domination, by which pastoral warrior bands could systematically fleece sedentary farmers, then perhaps states are fundamentally illegitimate and ought to be overthrown, at least if we identify with the farmers.

Many theories of that State offered by political theorists have been primarily theories of the modern European state and/or post-colonial states. This would apply (though in various ways) to works on this topic by Marx and Engels, Carl Schmidt, Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Charles Tilly, Benedict Anderson, and Timothy Mitchell. However, confusion may arise if we conflate the origins of the modern European state and the post-colonial state with the origins of states more broadly, and particularly if we implicitly or explicitly expect the early modern origin stories of European states to speak to the essence of the State more broadly. 

The formation of modern states out of the plural European system of highly unstable and bureaucratically very weak medieval feudal kingdoms constitutes a peculiar chapter of world history--one which is well worth studying given its global impact, but also one which is not generalizable as a global and transhistorical model of of state-formation. The fluctuating European feudal power-centers of the early Middle Ages can only very tenuously and doubtfully be called states. What was most exceptional about Europe in this period was the protracted period of statelessness--the so-called "Dark Ages"--that persisted a context of considerable economic, cultural, and technological advancement, a context inherited from the preceding Mediterranean states of the Classical Age. Indeed, knowledge and memory of states--particularly the Roman one--was an important part of that cultural context. But only in the late medieval period, after long centuries of feudal anarchy, was the state re-realized in Northern and Western Europe, 

The fact that European modern states developed with discernible fealty to the Roman model is important. The "modern" (European) state in this sense was a secondary (or tertiary or quaternary) metastasization of earlier states. They were inspired and induced by prior Mediterranean city-states, which were themselves ultimately inspired and induced by Egypt and the Mesopotamian states. While the European context is important, if we wish to understand the State more comprehensively and essentially, it is necessary to look at pristine state formation and early states, not just in the Near East, but around the world and at different time periods. 

Detailed primary study of pristine or autochthonous states and the non-state contexts out of which they developed has necessarily been the work of archaeologists and anthropologists. Recent revelations from archaeological fieldwork, especially, as well as significant theoretical work by archaeologists like Norman Yoffee (Myths of the Archaic State, 2009) and Ian Hodder (The Leopards Tale, 2011), have offered promising material for better understanding pristine states and their contexts. Social theorists in other fields have likewise shown increasing interest in archaeology's findings in recent decades. Autochthonous state formation (and nomadic resistance to early states) is the specific focus of James C. Scott's Against the Grain. Wengrow and Graeber's The Dawn of Everything similarly makes wide-ranging use of recent archaeological research to develop a theory of state formation that emphasizes the diversity and complexity of non-state societies while marking a clear transition to the "stuckness" of the state form, which they see as a tipping point to a radical closure of societal possibilities. In a similar vein, David Stasavage's The Decline and Rise of Democracy is an exposition of archaeological and anthropological evidence of widespread and complex "early democracies," which he posits as an alternative pathway to political complexity, which avoids the "bureaucratic alternative" represented by the well-known pristine states in China, Mesopotamia, and Meso-America. 

Although conceptualizing the distinction between state and non-state societies is not the explicit or primary purpose of the above mentioned works, collectively, this recent body of scholarship offers resources for a renewed understanding of that distinction—its limitations, but also it’s usefulness, and even perhaps its reality. The consensus that emerges from these works and other recent work in this vein points to a few key features of pristine states and their formation. First, the earliest states tend to emerge very suddenly. Norman Yoffee, who is involved in interdisciplinary collaborative research on complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, likens early state formation to a phase change, such as the freezing of water. Water, of course, does not gradually harden. Rather, as temperature lowers, it reaches a point at which rapid crystalization becomes an immanent possibility, although requiring some impurity around which the crystallization process can begin.

The second feature of early state formation emerging over recent decades is that the specific reason for or “efficient cause” of state formation seems to vary hopelessly. Managing irrigation, distributing agricultural surplus, organizing class domination or conquest, trucking and bartering, and military organization have all, alone or in various combinations, been posited as grand rationales for early state formation. Although all of these theories can find some support from specific sites, none of these theories has been definitively supported in archaeological research of recent decades. It seems increasingly difficult to settle on one “purpose” common to all or even most pristine states. The military rationale of states arising for collective security seems to have particularly been called into question. Caral in the Andes, for example, seems to have had nothing to do with collective defense, but rather formed from an economic partnership between farmers and fishers. Moreover, recent research as suggested new rationales for state formation that previously had not been taken seriously. The discovery of complex neolithic cultic centers complete with massive public works accomplished by apparently pre-pottery and pre-agricultural nomadic foragers, suggests that the first city-states may have emerged as religious or cultural projects, rather than for economic, security, or agricultural reasons. 

Thirdly, while a particular pathway to the early state cannot be established, one traditionally recognized feature of early states has not been strongly challenged by recent research. However the state arises, it is, once formed, recognizable primarily by the features of hierarchy tending toward monarchy.