New Theory of Charisma Causality in Domination
Origins of kingdoms and states [Dawn of Everything]
Graeber and Wengrow wrote:
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree …
… Just as access to violence, information and charisma defines the very possibilities of social domination, so the modern state is defined as a combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field. It seems only natural, then, that we should examine history in this light too; but as soon as we try to do so, we realize there is no actual reason why these three principles should go together, let alone reinforce each other in the precise fashion we have come to expect from governments today. For one thing, the three elementary forms of domination have entirely separate historical origins … [In] ancient Mesopotamia … initially the bureaucratic-commercial societies of the river valleys existed in tension with the heroic polities of the hills and their endless petty princelings, vying for the loyalty of retainers through spectacular contests of one sort or another; while the hill people, in turn, rejected the very principle of administration. Nor is there any compelling evidence that ancient Mesopotamian cities, even when ruled by royal dynasties, achieved any measure of real territorial sovereignty, so we are still a long way here from anything like an embryonic version of the modern state …
… [A] standard story of human political evolution told by earlier generations of scholars was that states arose from the need to manage complex irrigation systems, or perhaps just large concentrations of people and information. This gave rise to top-down power, which in turn came to be tempered, eventually, by democratic institutions. That would imply a sequence of development somewhat like this:
Administration ➞ Sovereignty ➞ (eventually) Charismatic Politics
Contemporary evidence from ancient Eurasia now points to a different pattern, where urban administrative systems inspire a cultural counter-reaction … in the form of squabbling highland princedoms (‘barbarians’, from the perspective of the city dwellers), which eventually leads to some of those princes establishing themselves in cities and systematizing their power:
Administration ➞ Charismatic Politics ➞ Sovereignty
This may well have happened in some cases – Mesopotamia, for example – but it seems unlikely to be the only way in which such developments might culminate in something that (to us at least) resembles a state. In other places and times – often in moments of crisis – the process may begin with the elevation to pre-eminent roles of charismatic individuals who inspire their followers to make a radical break with the past. Eventually, such figureheads assume a kind of absolute, cosmic authority, which is finally translated into a system of bureaucratic roles and offices. The path then might look more like this:
Charismatic vision ➞ Sovereignty ➞ Administration
What we are challenging here is not any particular formulation, but the underlying teleology. All these accounts seem to assume that there is only one possible end point to this process: that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by modern nation states in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century …
… A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between. In that sense, this chapter is not truly radical: for the most part, we are telling the same old story; but we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states. We are considering, instead, the possibility that – when looking at those times and places usually taken to mark ‘the birth of the state’ – we may in fact be seeing how very different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of violence, knowledge and charisma: our three elementary forms of domination …
… If Chavín – a remote precursor to the Inca – was an ‘empire’, it was one built on images linked to esoteric knowledge. Olmec was, on the other hand, an ‘empire’ built on spectacle, competition and the personal attributes of political leaders. Clearly, our use of the term ‘empire’ here is about as loose as it could possibly be. Neither was remotely similar to, say, the Roman or Han, or indeed the Inca and Aztec Empires. Nor do they fulfil any of the important criteria for ‘statehood’ – at least not on most standard sociological definitions (monopoly of violence, levels of administrative hierarchy, and so forth). The usual recourse is to describe such regimes instead as ‘complex chiefdoms’, but this too seems hopelessly inadequate – a shorthand way of saying, ‘looks somewhat like a state, but it isn’t one’. This tells us precisely nothing.
What makes more sense, we suggest, is to look at these otherwise puzzling cases through the lens of our three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics – outlined at the start of the chapter. In doing so, we can see how each stresses a particular form of domination to an exceptional degree and develops it on an unusually large scale. Let’s give it a go.
First, in the case of Chavín, power over a large and dispersed population was clearly about retaining control over certain kinds of knowledge: something perhaps not that far removed from the idea of ‘state secrets’ found in later bureaucratic regimes, although the content was obviously very different, and there was little in the way of military force to back it up. In the Olmec tradition, power involved certain formalized ways of competing for personal recognition, in an atmosphere of play laced with risk: a prime example of a large-scale, competitive political field, but again in the absence of territorial sovereignty or an administrative apparatus. No doubt there was a certain degree of personal charisma and jockeying at Chavín; no doubt among the Olmec, too, some obtained influence by their command of arcane knowledge; but neither case gives us reason to think anyone was asserting a strong principle of sovereignty.
We’ll refer to these as ‘first-order regimes’ because they seem to be organized around one of the three elementary forms of domination (knowledge-control, for Chavín; charismatic politics for Olmec), to the relative neglect of the other two. The obvious next question, then, is whether examples of the third possible variant can also be found: i.e. cases of societies which develop a principle of sovereignty (that is, grant an individual or small group a monopoly on the right to use violence with impunity), and take it to extreme lengths, without either an apparatus for controlling knowledge or any sort of competitive political field. In fact, there are quite a lot of examples …
… So far, then, we have seen how each of the three principles we began with – violence, knowledge and charisma – could, in first-order regimes, become the basis for political structures which, in some ways, resemble what we think of as a state, but in others clearly don’t. None could in any sense be described as ‘egalitarian’ societies – they were all organized around a very clearly demarcated elite – but at the same time, it’s not at all clear how far the existence of such elites restricted the basic freedoms we described in earlier chapters. There is little reason to believe, for instance, that such regimes did much to impair freedom of movement: Natchez subjects seemed to have faced little opposition if they chose simply to move away from the proximity of the Great Sun, which they generally did. Neither do we find any clear sense of the giving or taking of orders, except in the sovereign’s immediate (and decidedly limited) ambit …
… The kingdom of Egypt and the Inca Empire demonstrate what can happen when the principle of sovereignty arms itself with a bureaucracy and manages to extend itself uniformly across a territory. As a result, they are very often invoked as primordial examples of state formation, even though they are dramatically separated in time and space. Almost none of the other canonical ‘early states’ appear to have taken this approach.
Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, for instance, was made up of dozens of city-states of varying sizes, each governed by its own charismatic warrior-king – whose special, individual qualities were said to be recognized by the gods, and physically marked in the outstanding virility and allure of his body – all vying constantly for dominance. Only occasionally would one ruler gain enough of an upper hand to create something that might be described as the beginnings of a unified kingdom or empire. It’s not clear whether any of these early Mesopotamian rulers actually claimed ‘sovereignty’ – at least in the absolute sense of standing outside the moral order and thus being able to act with impunity, or to create entirely new social forms of their own volition. The cities they ostensibly ruled over had been around for centuries: commercial hubs with strong traditions of self-governance, each with its own city gods who presided over local systems of temple administration. Kings, in this case, almost never claimed to be gods themselves, but rather the gods’ vicegerents, and sometimes heroic defenders on earth: in short, delegates of sovereign power that resided properly in heaven. The result was a dynamic tension between two principles which, as we’ve seen, originally arose in opposition to one another: the administrative order of the river valleys and the heroic, individualistic politics of the surrounding highlands. Sovereignty, in the last resort, belonged to the gods alone …
… 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. First-order regimes like the Olmec, Chavín or Natchez each developed only one part of the triad. But in the typically far more violent arrangements of second-order regimes, two of the three principles of domination were brought together in some spectacular, unprecedented way. Which two it was seems to have varied from case to case. Egypt’s early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty.
We should emphasize that it’s not as if any of these principles, in their elementary forms, were entirely absent in any one case: in fact, what seems to have happened is that two of them crystallized into institutional forms – fusing in such a way as to reinforce one another as the basis of government – while the third form of domination was largely pushed out of the realm of human affairs altogether and displaced on to the non-human cosmos (as with divine sovereignty in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, or the cosmic bureaucracy of the Classic Maya) …
… Just to be utterly clear about what we are saying here, when we speak of an absence of charismatic politics we are talking about the absence of a ‘star system’ or ‘hall of fame’, with institutionalized rivalries between knights, warlords, politicians and so on. We are most certainly not speaking about an absence of individual personalities. It’s just that in a pure monarchy there is only one person, or at best a handful of individuals, who really matter. Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government – and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one – then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same …
… No doubt charismatic local leaders had always existed in Egypt; but with the breakdown of the patrimonial state, such figures could begin to make open claims of authority based on their personal achievements and attributes (bravery, generosity, oratorical and strategic skills) and – crucially – redefine social authority itself as based on qualities of public service and piety to the gods of their local town, and the popular support those qualities inspired. 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 …
… 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 …
… The state, as we know it today, results from a distinct combination of elements – sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field – which have entirely separate origins. In our thought experiment of two chapters ago, we showed how those elements map directly on to basic forms of social power which can operate at any scale of human interaction, from the family or household all the way up to the Roman Empire or the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu. Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma. Ancient political systems – especially those, such as the Olmec or Chavín de Huántar, that elude definition in terms of ‘chiefdoms’ and ‘states’ – can often be understood better in terms of how they developed one axis of social power to an extraordinary degree (e.g. charismatic political contests and spectacles in the Olmec case, or control of esoteric knowledge in Chavín). These are what we termed ‘first-order regimes’.
Where two axes of power were developed and formalized into a single system of domination we can begin to talk of ‘second-order regimes’. The architects of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, for example, armed the principle of sovereignty with a bureaucracy and managed to extend it across a large territory. By contrast, the rulers of ancient Mesopotamian city-states made no direct claims to sovereignty, which for them resided properly in heaven. When they engaged in wars over land or irrigation systems, it was only as secondary agents of the gods. Instead they combined charismatic competition with a highly developed administrative order. The Classic Maya were different again, confining administrative activities largely to the monitoring of cosmic affairs, while basing their earthly power on a potent fusion of sovereignty and inter-dynastic politics …
… Of course, monarchy, warrior aristocracies or other forms of stratification could also take hold in urban contexts, and often did. When this happened the consequences were dramatic. Still, the mere existence of large human settlements in no way caused these phenomena, and certainly didn’t make them inevitable. For the origins of these structures of domination we must look elsewhere. Hereditary aristocracies were just as likely to exist among demographically small or modest-sized groups, such as the ‘heroic societies’ of the Anatolian highlands, which took form on the margins of the first Mesopotamian cities and traded extensively with them. Insofar as we have evidence for the inception of monarchy as a permanent institution it seems to lie precisely there, and not in cities. In other parts of the world, some urban populations ventured partway down the road towards monarchy, only to turn back. Such was the case at Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, where the city’s population – having raised the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon – then abandoned such aggrandizing projects and embarked instead on a prodigious programme of social housing, providing multi-family apartments for its residents.
Elsewhere, early cities followed the opposite trajectory, starting with neighbourhood councils and popular assemblies and ending up being ruled by warlike dynasts, who then had to maintain an uneasy coexistence with older institutions of urban governance. Something along these lines took place in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, after the Uruk period: here again the convergence between systems of violence and systems of care seems critical. Sumerian temples had always organized their economic existence around the nurturing and feeding of the gods, embodied in their cult statues, which became surrounded by a whole industry and bureaucracy of welfare. Even more crucially, temples were charitable institutions. Widows, orphans, runaways, those exiled from their kin groups or other support networks would take refuge there: at Uruk, for example, in the Temple of Inanna, protective goddess of the city, overlooking the great courtyard of the city’s assembly.
The first charismatic war-kings attached themselves to such spaces, quite literally moving in next door to the residence of the city’s leading deity. In such ways, Sumerian monarchs were able to insert themselves into institutional spaces once reserved for the care of the gods, and thus removed from the realm of ordinary human relationships.
The Source:
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Penguin Books 2021 [pp. 365-369, 382-383, 390-39, 396, 409-417, 431, 507-508, 517-518]
Social Science Files releases intelligence for deciphering the evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.