Anarchy vs Hierarchy
‘Anarchic Energy’, by Conroy Maddox (Date: 1939)
The earliest states were formed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and from the perspective of the general analysis of state origins the two geographical areas provide a highly productive contrast. Mesopotamian states originated in cities. The principal causes of their formation were economic (agriculture and exchange), and the administrative and political organisations emerged simultaneously to regulate economic activity.
In Egypt it was the other way around. The state was created (quite rapidly by territorial expansion) and the cities gradually emerged as administrative, political, religious, and economic centres. There are a number of possible reasons for this difference, which will have to be examined in the respective contexts. Broadly, however, whereas in Mesopotamia the rural economy drove settlement size, urbanisation, and technological as well as administrative innovations, it is possible that Egypt was focused initially on establishing social order in the countryside and lacked economic capacity to support the growth of complex cities.
Before examining these regions of origin, and, later, China’s state origins (for convenience, these three state origins will be examined from different societal-typological perspectives) I want to clear up a number of theoretical-conceptual points of debate. Several debates about ancient cities and city-states have already been aired on Social Science Files. I will start by taking sides in respect to one, on the function of hierarchy [below]. I will follow this with an argument about simultaneous economic and political origins of governed cities. And I will discuss the ‘patrimonial state’ and the meaning of ‘institutions’ before the evidence on Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Food on the table vs food on a spear
Whilst I can appreciate the arguments that power and authority can be distributed in ‘cities’ in a variety of ways, I do not believe that cities beyond a certain size and level of complexity could have functioned without ‘hierarchies’ in governance. Hierarchy, implies socioeconomic and political differentiation and administrative specialisation. It also implies centres of authority, domination, divisions of labour, and so on.
States, classically defined, are inescapably hierarchal. Administration demands bureaucracy, which itself is inherently hierarchical. One could say ‘you like it or you leave it’, but people throughout history have for the most part not spurned hierarchy even when they profess to dislike it emotionally. During the process of modernisation hierarchical states emerged because they were needed on practical grounds, and the only significant departure from that trend has been our desirable modern decentred separation of powers, which was only made possible because of what preceded it.
I started Social Science Files partly in response to a book published in late 2021, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin 2021). It is an informative but undisciplined book by an anthropologist and an archeologist who do not bother to hide their anarchist political agenda.
Yet there are good reasons why hunter gatherers eventually chose livelihoods with hierarchy over the what Graeber and Wengrow call “three primordial freedoms”: “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships”. I side with Ian Morris who wrote a pithy critique in mid-2022 in which he points out that the book lacks social science “method”. There is no point in beating about the bush: I will briefly quote Morris on the beneficial hierarchy.
The first point I underline is that hierarchy made certain things possible (starting with the agricultural revolution, but not forgetting military defences of society, and the structures of private organisations as well as of public law, administration, and political representation, all of which are intrinsically ‘hierarchical’). The second point I highlight is that hierarchy has undoubtedly been the historical norm. [SEE BELOW]
Quoting Ian Morris on anarchist pipe dreams
[‘GW’ = Graeber and Wengrow in Dawn of Everything]
… All living things, from amoebas to elephants, can increase their populations when conditions are favourable. When monkeys or other animals multiply, however, they continue to live in troops of roughly the same size. There are no simian cities. We humans are unique in our ability to scale up our permanent settlements. So far as we know, there were no year-round, sedentary communities with even 1,000 residents before Beidha, Basta, and Çatalhöyük, around 7000 BCE; none above 10,000 residents before Uruk, Susa, Tell Hamoukar, and Tell Brak in the Near East and Majdanetske, Taljanki, Dobrovodi, and Nebelivka in Ukraine, all roughly around 3500 BCE; none above 100,000 before Nineveh, around 700 BCE; none above 1 million before Rome, around 50 BCE; and none above 10 million before New York, London, and other early-twentieth-century super-cities. …
… Although we have continued to evolve biologically since 7000 BCE, we are still more or less the same animals as we were then. What has evolved out of all recognition is our institutions, giving us the organizational tools for cooperation on much larger scales; and evolutionary anthropologists have consistently concluded that, through most of history, top-down hierarchy has been what made this possible. …
… Specialists dispute how egalitarian some of these cities were, but GW’s observation that “the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization” seems reasonable. However, the conclusions they draw from this are less so. These examples, they suggest, add up to “a surprisingly common pattern” in which “a dramatic increase in the scale of organised human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites”, which “is robust enough, not just to upend the conventional narrative but to open our eyes to possibilities we would otherwise never have considered”. The truth is that we just don’t know why a few urban systems got along perfectly well without palaces or elite cemeteries; but we do know that it really was only a few systems, and that the vast majority of ancient cities did have rich, powerful rulers. To be convincing, a general theory must explain both the overall trend toward hierarchy and the occasional egalitarian exceptions, rather than just declaring that one pattern trumps the other. …
… GW have no method. The anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend’s book Against Method is most famous for its offhand comment that “anything goes”, but its larger argument could—perhaps did—provide a playbook for Dawn of Everything. …
… GW never set out a method for judging how well evolutionists’ theories, or their own [freedom] alternative, fit the facts, let alone make the effort to isolate testable propositions. … If the evolutionists are right, farming societies should generally be more politically and economically unequal than foraging ones, and agrarian empires should generally be more unequal than smaller-scale agricultural groups. Settlements should typically be bigger in farming societies than in foraging ones, and in imperial than in state-level ones. Larger cities should be more organized and hierarchical than smaller ones. The regions where farming began first should also be the ones where permanent governments and cities appear first. And so on. …
[Ian Morris, ‘Stop making sense’, UC Riverside, Institute for Research on World-Systems Cliodynamics, free link https://doi.org/10.21237/C7clio0057261]
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‘The Anarchist’ by Felix Vallotton (Date: 1892)