The problem of the state runs through the history of anthropology. This is as much due to the nature of the object—the state as a mode of grouping and control of people—as to the history and presuppositions of anthropology itself. The question has a long philosophical heritage culminating in the *Enlightenment: thinkers as different as †Locke, Diderot and †Rousseau all thought that structured and centralized political organization begins from a state of nature, from an aggregate of individuals left to their own devices, good or bad, innocent or industrious, according to the particular view of each author. From these speculative reconstructions emerged the idea of a primitive contract marking the beginning, in some way, of modern political society. We can see how central the juridical paradigm was to these conceptions of the state, quite apart from the spectral notions of contract and sovereignty. It is precisely this paradigm that was questioned by the late nineteenth-century historical research—on ancient society and ancient law respectively—of *L.H.Morgan and †H.S.Maine.
It is notable that these precursors of modern anthropology, whose work has made a lasting impression on later approaches to politics, were both concerned to identify the point of transition between two great modes of organization in the *evolution of humanity: the first founded on †gens, †phratry and † tribe; the second on territory and *property (Morgan 1877). There is a move away from the idea of a state of nature being replaced by the notion of the political state, consisting of people wilfully bound together by contract. Yet an opposition remains, this time between two ‘states of *society’, one primitive and based on bonds of *kinship, the other with a state: the appearance of property and the significance of territoriality mark the passage from one mode of organization to the other.
Substituting an explanation which aims to expose the objective material conditions for the appearance of the state, in place of the hypothesis of a collective subjective act, nevertheless retains the philosophical presupposition of a dichotomy between two worlds. This leaves open the question deriving from this presupposition, the problem of the origin of the state. Thus a vast anthropological project takes form: as there is an essential difference between the state and all earlier forms of political organization, it is necessary to identify the nature of this difference in order to understand the source of this new type of political system.
Working from Morgan’s data, †Engels ([1884] 1972) saw the emergence of the state as a consequence of the division of society into antagonistic *classes. The state is then defined as the instrument of the dominant class whose members ensure that it maintains order and peace and that all within the society feel secure, while at the same time perpetuating their ascendancy over the subordinate classes. This vision of a coercive apparatus that operates ‘above society’ in the mystified consciousness of the oppressed, and which ensures the reproduction of the phenomena of exploitation and oppression to the benefit of the dominant group, finds empirical support in the correspondence between the development of private property and the existence of state forms. Engels draws upon Greek, German and Roman examples to back up the idea of a causal sequence which links in succession private appropriation, *inequality, economic oppression and political †hegemony. Underneath this version of the genesis of the state we find the primacy of the economic †infrastructure so dear to †historical materialism. Morgan and Engels have been subjected to two types of criticism: the first questioned the universality of the causal hypothesis, the second challenged the evolutionist presuppositions of their research. These criticisms correspond to two distinctive approaches to the state in anthropology.
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