Political Order and Political Decay Read Free

societies have no central source of authority. As with band-level societies, they tend to be highly egalitarian and have no third-party enforcement of laws. They prevailed over band-level societies largely because they were capable of achieving enormous scale simply by pushing back the dating of common ancestry. Both band- and tribal-level societies are rooted in kinship and hence human biology. But the shift to tribal organization required the emergence of a religious idea, belief in the ability of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect health and happiness in one’s current life. This is an early example of ideas playing a critical independent role in development.
    EMERGENCE OF THE STATE
    The next important political transition was from a tribal to a state-level society. A state, in contrast to a band or tribe, possesses a monopoly on legitimate coercion and exercises that power over a defined territory. Because they are centralized and hierarchical, states tend to produce higher degrees of social inequality than earlier kinship-based forms of organization.
    There are in turn two broad types of state. In those described by the sociologist Max Weber as “patrimonial,” the polity is considered a type of personal property of the ruler, and state administration is essentially an extension of the ruler’s household. The natural forms of sociability, reliance on family and friends, are still at work in patrimonial states. A modern state, on the other hand, is impersonal: a citizen’s relationship to the ruler does not depend on personal ties but simply on one’s status as citizen. State administration does not consist of the ruler’s family and friends; rather, recruitment to administrative positions is based on impersonal criteria such as merit, education, or technical knowledge.
    There are numerous theories about what is called “pristine” state formation, the formation of the first states out of tribal societies. There were necessarily a number of interacting factors at work, such as the availability of agricultural surpluses and the technology to support them, and a certain level of population density. Physical circumscription—what is called “caging,” the bounding of territories by impassable mountains, deserts, or waterways—allowed rulers to exercise coercive power over populations and prevented enslaved or subordinated individuals from running away. Patrimonial states began to form in many parts of the world around eight thousand years ago, primarily in fertile alluvial valleys in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Valley of Mexico.
    Development of modern states, however, required specific strategies for shifting political organization away from family- and friends-based organizations to impersonal ones. China was the first world civilization to establish a nonpatrimonial, modern state, which it did some eighteen centuries before similar political units appeared in Europe. State building in China was driven by the same circumstances that necessitated centralized states in early modern Europe: prolonged and pervasive military competition. Military struggle created incentives to tax populations, to create administrative hierarchies to provision armies, and to establish merit and competence rather than personal ties as the basis for recruitment and promotion. In the words of sociologist Charles Tilly, “War made the state and the state made war.”
    Modern states have to move beyond friends and family in the way that they recruit officials. China did this by inventing the civil service examination as early as the third century B.C. , though it was not routinely used until later dynasties. Both the Arabs and Ottomans came up with a novel approach to the same problem: the institution of slave-soldiers by which non-Muslim boys were captured, taken from their families, and raised to be soldiers and administrators loyal to the ruler and lacking ties to the