#wengrow

An origin for ‘the state’ has long been sought in such diverse places as ancient Egypt, Inca Peru and Shang China, but what we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections. There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart. As we noted, there are now planetary bureaucracies (public and private, ranging from the IMF and WTO to J. P. Morgan Chase and various credit-rating agencies) without anything that resembles a corresponding principle of global sovereignty or global field of competitive politics; and everything from cryptocurrencies to private security agencies, undermining the sovereignty of states.  If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’. Slaves could not have friends because they could not make commitments to others, since they were entirely under someone else’s power and their only obligation was to do exactly what their master said.

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