One of the greatest mysteries in political philosophy and science is the formation of states. If we humans lived for the most part of our existence in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, we voluntarily gave up our freedom and came to live in states that pose huge restrictions on individual freedom. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau came up with the idea of the Social Contract. However, it is clear that the idea of such a contract is merely metaphorical and by no means describes the true mechanics of state formation that happened not voluntarily but rather more spontaneously.
The conventional story is that humans came to live in centralised societies with the transition from foraging to farming. However, forms of centralised power already existed in complex hunter-gatherer societies, while they are absent in horticultural societies. Subsistence strategies alone aren’t enough to explain the phenomenon of states.
Kinship, network connection and status all play a crucial role in state formation. Status distinctions were not very pronounced in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, which rarely had leaders. While kinship does play a role, it is minor to food producers. Exogamy is the rule and the degree of relatedness within a band is very low. When conflict arises or the band grows too big, some members simply split off and join a new one (fission/fusion).
In food producers like pastoralists or slash and burn horticulturalists we tend to find a high degree of endogamy as status and wealth can be inherited and endogamy prevents their dissipation. Human relationships within the clan are still highly egalitarian and leaders (big men) still have a more advisory role than inherited power. Leaders play a much bigger role than in foragers band, though, and segmentary societies can scale up quickly through them in case of conflict and war. Even though egalitarianism is typical within a group, clans often see others as inferior, a political position called social dominance orientation (SDO).
Farming has often been seen as central in the road to state formation as foragers and pastoralists are much harder to fit into a hierarchical state. Horticulture alone isn’t enough, though. Highly hierarchical community-oriented tasks like irrigation farming would be necessary to create an inegalitarian society with people voluntarily following leaders and assuming their roles within a hierarchy in order to avoid conflict.
Political scientists distinguish between four different extreme political positions, each of which can be assigned a specific mode of subsistence: hunting (anarchism), gathering (communism), herding (SDO), and farming (authoritarianism).
Irrigation often has been suggested to be a direct cause of state formation. However, critics of this idea point out that states typically formed only much later. Irrigation, therefore, didn’t directly produce states, however it provided the basis for later state formation by producing a hierarchical bureaucracy.
David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) believe that state formation happened when two types of governance came together:
Early Uruk, for example, does not appear to have been a ‘state’ in any meaningful sense of the word; what’s more, when top-down rule does emerge in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, it’s not in the ‘complex’ metropolises of the lowland river valleys, but among the small, ‘heroic’ societies of the surrounding foothills, which were averse to the very principle of administration and, as a result, don’t seem to qualify as ‘states’ either. If there is a good ethnographic parallel for these latter groups it might be the societies of the Northwest Coast, since there too political leadership lay in the hands of a boastful and vainglorious warrior aristocracy, competing in extravagant contests over titles, treasures, the allegiance of commoners and the ownership of slaves. Recall, here, that Haida, Tlingit and the rest not only lacked anything that could be called a state apparatus; they lacked any kind of formal governmental institutions. One might then argue that ‘states’ first emerged when the two forms of governance (bureaucratic and heroic) merged together.
These heroic societies were most likely pastoralist tribes that had taken up aspects of farmer life, especially material wealth, that had been measured only in livestock previously. The first step towards statehood, therefore, took place when those “heroic” pastoralist tribes conquered farmer fortifications and cities and established themselves as the ruling class and thus mixing decentralised and centralised forms of organisation that frequently led to wars between city-states and feudal systems.
Geneticists have found that modern Europeans have three genetic sources: Anatolian farmers, Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists and European hunter-gatherers. I have argued that most people tend towards one of the three types and correspond to the four temperaments (here in MBTI):
The final step to statehood could only happen in the unification of city-states. However, kinship lineages were a huge impediment to unifications, which can be seen in the pastoralist empires in the past (Mongols, Vikings, Huns, etc.) that fell apart as quickly as they were established. The last key ingredient to state formation was therefore hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and universalism. Ironically, even though hunter-gatherer type people are averse to central power (anarchists), unification was typically driven by hunter-gatherer types. They typically achieved unification by introducing universal law and weakening kinship ties. This created more distributed networks again. Some examples would be Muhammad, Charlemagne and Garibaldi. On the flip side, hunter-gatherer types are also the wariest ones when it comes to central power and are the first critics of corruption and abuse of power.
The process I have described was already described quite accurately by Hesiod in his 5 ages around 700 BC:
- Golden Age – The Golden Age is the only age that falls within the rule of Cronus. Created by the immortals who live on Olympus, these humans were said to live among the gods and freely mingled with them. Peace and harmony prevailed during this age. Humans did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to very old age but with a youthful appearance and eventually died peacefully. Their spirits live on as "guardians". Plato in Cratylus (397e) recounts the golden race of men who came first. He clarifies that Hesiod did not mean men literally made of gold, but good and noble. He describes these men as daemons upon the earth. Since δαίμονες (daimones) is derived from δαήμονες (daēmones, meaning knowing or wise), they are beneficent, preventing ills, and guardians of mortals.
- Silver Age – The Silver Age and every age that follows fall within the rule of Cronus's successor and son, Zeus. Men in the Silver age lived for one hundred years under the dominion of their mothers. They lived only a short time as grown adults and spent that time in strife with one another. During this Age men refused to worship the gods and Zeus destroyed them for their impiety. After death, humans of this age became "blessed spirits" of the underworld.
- Bronze Age – Men of the Bronze Age were hardened and tough, as war was their purpose and passion. Zeus created these humans out of ash tree. Their armor was forged of bronze, as were their homes, and tools. The men of this Age were undone by their own violent ways and left no named spirits; instead, they dwell in the "dark house of Hades". This Age came to an end with the flood of Deucalion.
- Heroic Age – The Heroic Age is the one age that does not correspond with any metal. It is also the only age that improves upon the age it follows. It was the heroes of this Age who fought at Thebes and Troy. This race of humans died and went to Elysium.
- Iron Age – Hesiod finds himself in the Iron Age. During this age, humans live an existence of toil and misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights with brother and the social contract between guest and host (xenia) is forgotten. During this age, might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing; babies will be born with gray hair and the gods will have completely forsaken humanity: "there will be no help against evil." (from Wikipedia)
The Golden Age corresponds to foraging, the Silver Age to the transition to farming. The Bronze Age was literally the age of Steppe pastoralists tribes and the first age in which metallurgy played a huge role, namely in the production of weapons. The Yamnaya brought Indo-European languages to Europe and Western Asia. They could have done so only by subjugating the local farmer populations. The Heroic Age is fundamentally only a continuation of the Bronze Age during which pastoralist tribes become more complex by partially adopting farmer hierarchy and materialism. The Iron Age, finally, was an age in which all three tribes were mixed, forager types often making up the lowest stratum of society, slaves, or outcasts. Around the age of Hesiod, the Axial Age started. It was an age in which prophets, poets and hunter-gatherer type leaders tried to make the world more egalitarian again with various social innovations.
Remnants of these ages can be seen in India, which has a hierarchical system of varnas that is functionally organised, a kinship-based system of jatis that evolved from segmentary lineages and outcasts, mostly people whose recent ancestors were hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers themselves, of who India still has a few left.
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