Olive Grove, by Vincent van Gogh (Date: 1889)
A reminder
Administered society is only a staging post (4th of 10) in a longer project. Many monumental transformations of society’s governance have yet to make their appearance, though none will be quite as colossal and discontinuous as ‘the’ state formation. A central part of my thesis of the evolution of society is that elements of past types do not disappear. They are incorporated and stay with us in positive forms alongside newer features. Reasons for the decline of societal types are always to be found in the origins of a new type. There were reasons for their coming into existence, yet they eventually cease to serve those purposes. Later features have their origins in successful efforts to subsume or tame older features that had become dysfunctional.
But since older dominant differentiations still exist at some level they have a potential to reappear, sometimes very rapidly—in historical terms—in destabilising forms. This ‘disordering…