"The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration. It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or cooperation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement."
"Rousseau's story about how humankind descended into inequality form an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic, but nowadays it's mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering."
"For obvious reasons, Hobbes's position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau's by those leaning left."
"The first thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchy were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve."
"The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human - that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally,' even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws?"
"[Native] Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus."
"In conclusion, [Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest."
"[from Turgot:] We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex 'commercial civilization', in which the poverty and dispossession of some - however lamentable it may be - is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole."
"How is it that Europeans are able to turn wealth into power; turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods - which exists, at least to some degree, in any society - into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants, workmen, or grenadiers, or simply to feel that it was no concern of theirs if they were left dying in a feverish bundle on the street?"
"To Americans like Kandiaronk, there was no contradiction between individual liberty and communism - that's to say, communism in the sense we've been using it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who aren't actual enemies can be expected to respond to one another's needs. In the American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of 'baseline communism', since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive."
"The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property [...] there was a strong emphasis on ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one's direct control)."
"while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way."
"When we are capable of self-awareness, it's usually for very brief periods of time: the 'window of consciousness', during which we can hold a through or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we're talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end."
"There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them... It's often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often to serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs."
"If there is a riddle here it's this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens - supposedly the wisest of apes - allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?"
"What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbors?"
"the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all."
"American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like - provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors - unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or 'egalitarian people such as Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid - what contemporary European observers often referred to as 'communism' - was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy."
"As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God's judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires."
"In working the land, one 'mixes one's labour' with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke's disciples, didn't do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, 'improving landlords' but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and 'if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or 'destroyed' like savage beasts.' In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything form outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvee labour and debt peonage."
"To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that - quite unlike free societies - we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C.B. Macperson meant by 'possessive individualism'. Just as every man's home is his castle, so your right not be killed, tortured, or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on."
"What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of almost all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will."
"Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one's wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one's community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours - who would, increasingly, also become your employees."
"Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it's not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful. Northwest societies, then, were warlike because they simply didn't have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food."
"We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological 'culture areas'."
"Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing."
"Theirs [the Neolithic] was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase, the likelihood, of securing a favourable outcome. Their 'laboratory' was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation, was, moreover, highly successful."
"The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return."
"there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighborhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square these two dimensions of our experience."
"households cannot simply schedule their daily labour in line with their own needs. They also have to consider their obligations to other households, which in turn have their own obligations to other, different households, and so on. Factoring in that some tasks - such as moving flocks to highland pastures, or the demands of milking, shearing and guarding herds - may require the combined efforts of ten different households, and that households have to balance the scheduling of numerous different sorts of commitment, we begin to get a sense of the complexities involved."
"Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains."
"perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory... On this definition, a government is a 'state' if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf."
"We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?"
"As we've seen, this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon - indeed, if 'the West' has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms."
"In other words, 'landed property' is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state's monopoly of violence within a territory."
"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."
"What really concerns us about these three principles is that each has become the basis for institutions now seen as foundational to the modern state. In the case of control over violence, this is obvious. Modern states are 'sovereign': they hold the power once held by kings, which in practice translates to von Ihering's monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within their territory... In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy... administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on 'official secrets' of one sort or another... the danger, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it's generally felt that they should be."
"People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power."
"When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a 'patrimonial system': that is, one in which all the kings' subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king."
"Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge, as a sizeable sector of Egypt's population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors."
"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."
"Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the 'village bureaucracy' comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations - about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom... Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangements, even those founded on arbitrary violence, an air of even-handedness and equity."
"Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence. What we wish to emphasize at this point is how frequently the most violence inequalities seem to arise, in the first instance, from such fictions of legal equality. All citizens of a city, or all worshippers of its god, or all subjects of its king were considered ultimately the same - at least in that one specific way. The same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities applied to all of them, whether as individual or, in later and more patriarchal times, as families under the aegis of paterfamilias."
"What's important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, and their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects' unique situations. This is what gives the word 'bureaucracy' such a distasteful association almost everywhere today."
"[we noted] how the English word 'free' ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning 'friend' - since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, [the freedom to create or transform social relationships...] One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we'd suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable - in a nutshell, bureaucratized."
"As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence."
"Jaspers called this the Axial Age, a term since expanded by others to include the period that saw the birth of all today's world religions, stretching from the Persian prophet Zoroaster (c.800BC) to the coming of Islam (c.AD 600)."
"As a result, the social sciences were conceived and organized around two core questions: (1) waht had gone wrong with the project of Enlightenment, with the unity of scientific and moral progress, and with schemes for the improvement of human society? And: (2) why is is that well-meaning attempts to fix society's problems so often end up making things even worse?"
"The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India, and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men's houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change - forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement - was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison. This obviously made it easier to describe the people anthropologists studied as having a way of life that was timeless and unchanging."
"Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting 'real' scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming, as outside the scope of social theory entirely."
"If something did go terribly wrong in human history - and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did - then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."
"The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is essentially based on the power of the individual (by implication, a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn't even exactly a right, since rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations; it's simply power - the blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited 'by force or law'.
"Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more 'complex' the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains or command, which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decide to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom - to refuse orders - and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don't do as they're told. As we've seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out."
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