The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

They were far, far more physically diverse than humans are today; and presumably their social differences were even greater than their physical ones. In other words, there is no ‘original’ form of human society.

‘killer ape’ fantasies that emerged in the 1960s, seared into collective consciousness by movies

But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.

Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe,

At this point it should be clear that what we are really talking about, in all these cases, is not the ‘birth of the state’ in the sense of the emergence, in embryonic form, of a new and unprecedented institution that would grow and evolve into modern forms of government.

In terms of the specific theory we’ve been developing here, where the three elementary forms of domination – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration and heroic politics), almost all these ‘early states’ could be more accurately described as ‘second-order’ regimes of domination.

Already towards the end of the Old Kingdom, ‘nomarchs’ or local governors had made themselves into de facto dynasties.

In other words, whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned – with charismatic figures just as vainglorious and competitive, perhaps, as those we know from ancient epics, but far less bloodthirsty.

In summary, the transition from Old Kingdom to First Intermediate period was not so much a shift from ‘order’ to ‘chaos’ – as Egyptological orthodoxy once had it – as a swing from ‘sovereignty’ to ‘charismatic politics’ as different ways of framing the exercise of power.

Much like the search for the ‘origins of inequality’, seeking the origins of the state is little more than chasing a phantasm.

One could go further. It’s not clear to what degree many of these ‘early states’ were themselves largely seasonal phenomena (recall that, at least as far back as the Ice Age, seasonal gatherings could be stages for the performance of something that looks to us a bit like kingship;

do). If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.136

the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’

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; a...

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.

Women are regularly depicted at a larger scale than men, a sign of political superiority in the visual traditions of all neighbouring lands.

They hold symbols of command, like the staff-wielding

with no male presiding and appear flanked by supernatural creatures and dangerous animals.147 Most male depictions, on the other hand, are either of scantily clad or naked athletes (no women are depicted naked in Minoan art); or show men bringing tribute and adopting poses of subservience before female dignitaries.

agricultural trap

But to continue with Scott: barbarian monarchies remained either small-scale or, if they did expand – as was spectacularly the case under figures like Alaric, Attila, Genghis or Tamerlane – the expansion was short-lived. Throughout much of history, grain states and barbarians remained ‘dark twins’, locked together in an unresolvable tension, since neither could break out of their ecological niches. When the states had the upper hand, slaves and mercenaries flowed in one direction; when the barbarians were dominant, tribute flowed to appease the most dangerous warlord; or alternatively, some overlord would manage to organize an effective coalition, sweep in on the cities and either lay waste to them, or more typically, attempt to rule them, and inevitably find himself and his retinue absorbed as a new governing class. As the Mongolian adage went, ‘One can conquer a kingdom on horseback, to rule it one must dismount.’