Hence we are back to the Gilgamesh problem from the Preface. The Despotic Leviathan creates a powerful state but then uses it to dominate society, sometimes with naked repression. What’s the alternative? Before answering this question, let’s return to the other problem with Hobbes’s account—his presumption that statelessness means violence.
The Cage of Norms
Though the human past is replete with instances of Warre, there are plenty of stateless societies (living under the “Absent Leviathan”) that managed to control violence. These range from the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo rain forest to several large agricultural societies in West Africa, such as the Akan people of modern Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. In Ghana the British administrator Brodie Cruickshank reported in the 1850s that
the paths and thoroughfares of the country became as safe for the transmission of merchandize, and as free from interruption of any description, as the best frequented roads of the most highly civilized countries in Europe.
As Hobbes would have expected, the absence of Warre led to flourishing commerce. Cruickshank observed, “There was not a nook or corner of the land to which the enterprize of some sanguine trader had not led him. Every village had its festoons of Manchester cottons and China silks, hung upon the walls of the houses, or round the trees in the marketplace, to attract the attention and excite the cupidity of the villagers.”
You couldn’t have such bustling enterprise in a society that was incapable of resolving conflicts and ensuring some type of justice. Indeed, as the French trader Joseph-Marie Bonnat observed later in the nineteenth century:
It is to the exercise of justice, in the small villages, that the first hours of the day are devoted.
How did the Akan people exercise justice? They used (social) norms—customs, traditions, rituals, and patterns of acceptable and expected behavior—that had evolved over generations.
Bonnat described how people gathered around for consultation. The elders are “accompanied by those in the village who are not working,” and they “go and sit under the most shady tree, the slaves following their master and carrying the chair on which he is to sit. The company, which always includes a large part of the inhabitants, goes to listen to the debate and takes the part of one of the litigants. On most occasions the matter is arranged amicably, the guilty person paying the costs; this consists usually of palm wine which is distributed to those present. If the matter is serious, the penalty consists of a sheep and also of a specified quantity of gold dust.”
The community listened and used its norms to decide who was guilty. The same norms then ensured that the guilty desisted, paid up, or undertook another form of restitution. Though Hobbes saw the all-powerful Leviathan as the fountainhead of justice, most societies aren’t that different from the Akan. Norms determine what is right and wrong in the eyes of others, what types of behaviors are shunned and discouraged, and when individuals and families will be ostracized and cut off from the support of others. Norms also play a vital role in bonding people and coordinating their actions so that they can exercise force against other communities and those committing serious crimes in their own community.
Although norms play an important role even under the auspices of a Despotic Leviathan (could the Third Reich have survived if all Germans thought that it lacked all legitimacy, stopped cooperating with it, and organized against it?), they are critical when the Leviathan is absent because they provide the only way for society to avoid Warre.
The problem for liberty, however, is multifaceted. The same norms that have evolved to coordinate action, resolve conflicts, and generate a shared understanding of justice also create a cage, imposing a different but no less disempowering sort of dominance on people. This too is true in every society, but in societies without centralized authority and relying exclusively on norms, the cage becomes tighter, more stifling.
We can understand how the cage of norms emerges and how it restricts liberty by staying in the Akan country and studying the account of another British official, Captain Robert Rattray. In 1924 Rattray became the first head of the Anthropological Department of Asante, one of the largest Akan groups, and part of the British colony of the Gold Coast, now Ghana. His job was to undertake a study of Asante society, politics, and religion. He transcribed an Asante proverb thus:
When a chicken separates itself from the rest, a hawk will get it.
For Rattray this proverb captured a critical aspect of the organization of Asante society—that it was molded by immense insecurity and potential violence. Though the Asante eventually developed one of the most powerful states in precolonial Africa, this state was founded on basic social structures dating from an era before centralized political authority emerged. Without effective state institutions, how could you avoid “a hawk”? Norms had evolved to reduce vulnerability to violence and exposure to those who could carry it out, providing some protection against hawks. But at the same time, they imposed their cage; you would have to surrender your freedom and stand with the other chickens.
Even in stateless societies some people were more influential than others, had more wealth, better connections, more authority. In Africa these people were often the chiefs, or sometimes the most senior people in a kinship group, the elders. If you wanted to avoid the hawks, you needed their protection and you needed numbers to defend yourself, so you attached yourself to a kin group or lineage. In return, you accepted their dominance over you, and this is what became the status quo, enshrined in Akan norms. As Rattray put it, you accepted “voluntary servitude.”
A condition of voluntary servitude was, in a very literal sense, the heritage of every Ashanti; it formed indeed the essential basis of his social system. In West Africa it was the masterless man and woman who ran the immanent danger of having what we should term “their freedom” turned into involuntary bondage of a much more drastic nature.
By involuntary bondage of a “much more drastic nature,” Rattray meant slavery. So if you tried to free yourself from the chains of voluntary servitude, most likely you would be captured by hawks, in this instance slavers, and sold into slavery.
Indeed, a lot of the Warre in Africa was rooted in different groups trying to capture and sell others into slavery. Many vivid accounts describe the experience of Africans who were caught up in this trade. One, the story of Goi, was translated into English by a missionary, Dugald Campbell. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Goi lived in the south of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the lands of a Chief Chikwiva from the Luba people. His father died when he was young and he grew up with his mother, sister, and brother. One day
a war party appeared, and came yelling along the path shouting their war cries. They attacked the village and killed several women. They caught young women, chased and captured us boys, and tied us all together. We were driven to the capital and sold to the slave traders, who nailed wooden shackles on our feet.
From there Goi was taken to the coast, “Dragged thus from my house and from my mother, whom I never saw again, we were driven along the ‘red road’ to the sea.” The road was “red” because of all the blood spilled along it. By this time Goi was so weak and emaciated from starvation and constant violence that he was almost worthless.
Reduced to a skeleton, a mere shadow, and unable to travel, I was carried round the villages and offered for sale. No one was willing to give a goat or a hen for me … Finally one of the missionaries named “Monare” paid a coloured handkerchief for me, worth about fivepence, and I was free. So at any rate they told me, but I did not believe it, for I could not understand what freedom meant, and I thought I was now a slave of the white men. I did not want to be free, for I would only be caught and sold again.