2.4 Privileges, Rights, and Elite Dynamics

four hundred years moved back and forth along the dimensions of social organizations that define basic and mature natural states.

2.4 Privileges, Rights, and Elite Dynamics

The example of Republican and Imperial Rome provides clear evidence that no teleology pushes societies to move along the progression from simpler to more complex natural states. No forces inevitably move societies along the continuum from fragile to basic to mature natural states. Societies appear as capable of regression as progression.20

The logic of the natural state offers some insight into why the forces operating on limited access societies do not produce an inevitable progression from simpler to more complex forms of social organization. The forces of double balance are an important element of development within the natural state. In order for the public organizations of the state to become more sophisticated, private-sector organizations must develop. The development of public and private organizations must proceed together, including the degree of specialization and division of labor within and among organizations, the ability to own and transfer real estate and movable wealth, the ability to monitor and record the activities of the organization, the degree to which external third-party enforcement of agreements is used and, in large enough organizations, the ability to provide internal third-party enforcement.

As basic natural states emerge from fragile natural states, support for organizations is vested in powerful members of the dominant coalition. Elites have strong interests to promote trade and specialization and division of labor. They also have strong interests to define their privileges with respect to one another as elites. Initially these privileges are fluid, the result of the dynamics of the coalition. However, if a coalition stabilizes, the creation of public law institutions can in part be a mechanism for resolving elite conflicts. Our third proposition or prediction is that:

The origin of legal systems lies in the definition of elite privileges.

Legal systems initially develop to enforce unique and personal elite privileges, including the privilege to form organizations. The organizations

20Over the last decade, for example, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Russia all seem to be regressing as they nationalize, control, or outlaw once-independent organizations. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany regressed from a mature to a basic natural state as it forced previously independent organizations into the orbit of the state.

formed by elites often contain elements of both public and private organizations; for example, the manor in medieval England or the town in medieval Germany. Early legal forms can be credible among elites because they individually possess the power and incentives to discipline each other, through extralegal means if necessary. The existence of a court or laws for elites does not imply rule of law or unbiased enforcement. Powerful individuals will probably receive more favorable treatment (as reflected in the Salic law). If, however, a privilege is held by all elites, then not only do the incentives of all elites align to maintain that privilege but also the shared nature of a privilege makes it possible to transform the privilege into a right. For example, in medieval England, as we will see in Chapter 3, major lords all possessed the right to hold their own manorial courts. Their rights created a shared interest in maintaining those courts (sometimes in opposition to or in competition with the king’s courts).

As elites form more powerful organizations, it becomes more credible for elites to believe that arrangements defined by the internal rules of the dominant coalition will be followed. More powerful elite organizations provide elites with both the ability to discipline the coalition and incentives to support the shared institutions that support their organizations. An important consequence follows when private elite organizations have some degree of independence from the state and freedom of action, even if it is limited. When elite organizations have an enhanced ability to discipline (or reward) the state for violating (honoring) its commitments, then natural states are better able to credibly commit to more sophisticated public organizations as well. This is the virtuous side of the logic of the natural state. If and when limited elite rights to form organizations emerge, basic natural states move closer to mature natural states. Mature natural states cannot develop without more sophisticated private organizations.

The process of converting elite privileges into elite rights secured by a balance of political and economic interests does not happen automatically, however, because there is an equally powerful and persistent reason for elites to convert rights into privileges. The dominant coalition holds together only if the balance of economic and political interests can be maintained. If circumstances change, and they always do, there may be incentives to shift resources or privileges to elements within the coalition in order to maintain balance. It may be difficult, if not impossible, however, to make small marginal changes to arrangements. If a faction within the coalition becomes more powerful, it maneuvers to get more rents or it threatens to fight or leaves (and perhaps returns to fight). Intra-elite relationships are always more or less dynamic, and are never static. As natural states

develop, they do not reduce the uncertainty or dynamism of the dominant coalition. Instead, they manage to secure more sophisticated public and private elite organizations that sustain a wider range of adjustments to changing circumstances that do not require transforming elite rights back into elite privileges. When such dramatic adjustments are required, natural states often suffer partial or complete breakdowns in the dominant coalition, and civil war, rather than legal adjustments, can be the result. In those circumstances, mature natural states can quickly move back toward social arrangements typical of a basic or even a fragile natural state.

2.5 Origins: The Problem Scale and Violence

The discovery of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals began the Neolithic revolution ten thousand years ago. The growth of cities, new production technologies, and new forms of social organization transformed human societies over the following five thousand years. Archeological evidence reveals the emergence of groups of larger than several hundred people for the first time in human history. Regardless of the causes of the Neolithic revolution – climate change, genetic change, the discovery of agriculture, or a new social technology – we need to understand how societies managed to become substantially larger beginning five to ten thousand years ago.

Larger societies required new ways to manage and control violence. Basic social units in foraging orders (bands or family groups) were typically groups of twenty-five to fifty individuals. Larger social units (tribes or local groups or big-men collectivities) range up to five hundred people. For each of these ways of organizing social interaction, increasing size produces increasing intragroup conflict and what Rappaport called the “irritation coefficient”: “sources of irritation . . . increase at a rate greater than population size. If population increase were taken to be linear, the increase of some kinds of dispute . . . might be taken to be roughly geometric” (1968, p. 116). The increasing violence and disorder with group size, ceteris paribus, conform to the generally observed positive correlation between the level of violence and size of population in modern societies.21

The numbers twenty-five and two hundred recur in anthropological research. The modal size of the basic foraging social group appears to be

21Johnson’s (1982) notion of scalar stress suggests that human cognitive limits begin to be reached when six or seven items have to be attended to simultaneously, so that six groups of six people, 36 people, or six groups of six, 216 people, might be natural sizes for groups.

around twenty-five people (Kelly, 1995, pp. 209–16). Agglomerations of bands or family groups were often around two hundred people. Service’s (1971) categories of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state correspond to groups of roughly this size, with perhaps one thousand as a modal unit for chiefdoms. Johnson and Earle (2000, p. 32) transform Service’s categories into family groups (including the family/camp and family/hamlet), local groups (both acephalous and big man), and regional groups (both chiefdoms and states). The size of these different societies is bounded at the upper range by problems of managing violence.22 Although the evidence is contested, small societies seem to experience high levels of violence (Keely, 1996; LeBlanc, 2003; Steckel and Wallis, 2006).

Although new archeological evidence is accumulating, evidence about what happened five or ten thousand years ago is too limited to make inferences about social organization in the Neolithic societies. However, three sets of available evidence are relevant to the question of social organization and scale. Ethnographic studies of small-scale societies in anthropological research abound and suggest similarities in organization of societies that increase in size from local to regional polities, or from tribes to chiefdoms.23 Related work includes the literature on the structure of “pristine” societies, the first large-scale civilizations to arise in different parts of the world that appear to have done so without external influence (Trigger, 2003). Finally, we have evidence on the incidence of human-induced violence in New World societies based on archeological evidence of skeletal remains (Steckel and Rose, 2002).

Johnson and Earle (2000) draw together evidence on nineteen ethnographies of societies at different scales. Of particular interest is the transition between local and regional groups, or between big-man societies and chiefdoms. In big-man societies, an individual or family leads the group and enjoys more wealth but is subject to considerable constraint from the larger group. The big man leads by building a personal following. The big man usually possesses the key privilege (or performs the function) of controlling trade between his group and other groups.

22Johnson and Earle (2000, p. 246) provide a table with population breakdowns across 19 of the ethnographic cases consistent with size breaks at 25/30, 200/250, and 1,000 (although the fit is not perfect, as one would expect). Service (1971) discusses size categories and types. Dunbar (1996) suggests that the optimal size of a human group, based on studies of brain size and group size in primates, is about 150. Bandy (2004) studies the fusion–fission process in Mesoamerican societies.

23Earle (1997, 2003), Johnson and Earle (2000).

The emergence of chiefdoms involves a more complicated form of political economy of social organization. Earle identifies three types of power – economic, military, and ideological – and argues that chiefdoms emerge when “the material flows of the political economy provide the wire that binds the sources of power together” (1997, pp. 207–8). In Earle’s words:

In chiefdoms, control over production and exchange of subsistence and wealth creates the basis for political power . . . Economic power is based on the ability to restrict access to key productive resources or consumptive goods . . . Control over exchange permits the extension of economic control over broader regions, . . . The real significance of economic power may be that the material flows through the political economy can be used by the chief to nurture and sustain the alternative power sources . . . (1997, p. 7).

The coalition, which the chief heads and that always controls trade, is distinct from the common people through some form of social identification (an important function of ideology). Violence and coercive power are inherent elements of larger social groups, but the groups are held together not only by the threat of coercion but by mutual interests (Earle, 1997, p. 106). The creation of elites requires the social construction of social personas. The emergence of chiefdoms, of societies of more than one thousand members, appears to be associated with institutions that reflect the logic of the natural state.

State is a term of art with a specific meaning in anthropology, but less so in political science and economics. States are distinguished from chiefdoms by size and structure and include formal administration of government. For anthropologists, states do not appear until populations rise into the hundreds of thousands.24 In contrast, what we define as the natural state arises as societies reach populations of one thousand or more, and new forms of integrated political and economic organization develop to limit violence. As Earle recognizes, “The fundamental dynamics of chiefdoms are essentially the same as those of states, and . . . the origins of states is to be understood in the emergence and development of chiefdoms” (1997, p. 14). We add the logic of natural state to the approach of Johnson and Earle: the key link that constrains military power is embedding the individuals who direct military power in a network of privileges. By manipulating privilege, interests are created that limit violence.

The emergence of social hierarchy in early societies results directly from the creation of privileged elites. Ancient civilizations do not afford us a

24For recent investigations into the archaeology and anthropology of pre-modern states see Smith (2004), Farghar and Blanton (2007), and Blanton and Farghar (2008).

direct view of early developments at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, but they do give us a clear picture of early natural states. All these societies were theocracies.25 All had interlocking sets of religious, economic, political, military, and educational elites; indeed, in many the highest leaders were simultaneously priests, warriors, and kings or princes. As Service (1975) argued, any state that rules by coercing subjects and rivals must continually risk war against both its own subjects and its rivals. Successful societies “wage peace,” in Service’s evocative phrase. Securing peace prepares the ground for beliefs to grow up in the population at large about the legitimacy of the system. Those beliefs are consistent with positive incentives for powerful individuals to maintain the peace, in contrast to societies where a balance of terror is all that ensures order. Ideology, both in material culture and in the religious and educational organizations of elites, interlocks with the logic of the social order.

The implication is that chiefdoms and states exhibit the characteristic organization of natural states, and they should therefore experience lower levels of violence than the foraging order. Using recently developed forensic techniques for inferring the existence of human-induced violence from skeletal evidence, Steckel and Wallis (2006) show that the rate of humaninduced violence in a sample of New World individuals declined as the size of the population increased. Individuals living in small foraging groups had significantly higher rates of human-induced trauma. We summarize the results in the appendix to this chapter.

The anthropological evidence suggests that the increasing scale of human societies is associated with the emergence of social organizations implied by the logic of the natural state. The political economy of chiefdoms expresses the logic of the natural state. All of the pristine ancient civilizations were societies with strong theocratic hierarchies in which limited access to economic, political, military, and religious functions played a key role in identifying the social persona of elites. The evidence from skeletal remains suggests that, as the scale of societies increased, human-induced violence declined.

25Service includes Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River, China, Mesoamerica, and Peru. Trigger excludes the Indus River civilization, and includes the Aztecs and Incas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the Yoruba and Benin peoples of West Africa in the eighteenth century. Trigger does not require civilizations to be “pristine” in the sense of being the first civilization to develop in its part of the world (2003, pp. 28–9). Freid (1967), Feinman and Marcus (1998), and Yoffee (2005) offer alternative frameworks for interpreting early civilizations and more recent anthropological work on the origins of “archaic states.”