We’ll see in a moment that some traditional societies were populous enough to need general-purpose bureaucrats. However, states are even more populous and need specialized bureaucrats differentiated vertically and horizontally. We state citizens find all those bureaucrats exasperating: alas again, they’re necessary. A state has so many laws and citizens that one type of bureaucrat can’t administer all of the king’s laws: there have to be separate tax collectors, motor vehicle inspectors, policemen, judges, restaurant cleanliness inspectors, and so on. Within a state agency containing just one such type of bureaucrat, we’re also accustomed to the fact that there are many officials of that one type, arranged hierarchically on different levels: a tax agency has the tax agent who actually audits your tax return, serving under a supervisor to whom you might complain if you disagree with the agent’s report, serving in turn under an office manager, serving under a district or state manager, serving under a commissioner of internal revenue for the whole United States. (It’s even more complicated in reality: I omitted several other levels for the sake of brevity.) Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle describes an imaginary such bureaucracy inspired by the actual bureaucracy of the Habsburg Empire of which Kafka was a citizen. Bedtime reading of Kafka’s account of the frustrations faced by his protagonist in dealing with the imaginary castle bureaucracy guarantees me a sleep filled with nightmares, but all of you readers will have had your own nightmares and frustrations from dealing with actual bureaucracies. It’s the price we pay for living under state governments: no utopian has ever figured out how to run a nation without at least some bureaucrats.
A remaining all-too-familiar feature of states is that, even in the most egalitarian Scandinavian democracies, citizens are politically, economically, and socially unequal. Inevitably, any state has to have a few political leaders giving orders and making laws, and lots of commoners obeying those orders and laws. State citizens have different economic roles (as farmers, janitors, lawyers, politicians, shop clerks, etc.), and some of those roles carry higher salaries than do other roles. Some citizens enjoy higher social status than do other citizens. All idealistic efforts to minimize inequality within states—e.g., Karl Marx’s formulation of the communist ideal “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—have failed.
There could be no states until there was food production (beginning only around 9000 BC), and still no states until food production had been operating for enough millennia to build up the large, dense populations requiring state government. The first state arose in the Fertile Crescent around 3400 BC, and others then arose in China, Mexico, the Andes, Madagascar, and other areas over the following millennia, until today a world map shows the entire planet’s land area except for Antarctica divided into states. Even Antarctica is subject to partly overlapping territorial claims by seven nations.
Types of traditional societies
Thus, before 3400 BC there were no states anywhere, and in recent times there have still been large areas beyond state control, operating under traditional simpler political systems. The differences between those traditional societies and the state societies familiar to us are the subject of this book. How should we classify and talk about the diversity of traditional societies themselves?
While every human society is unique, there are also cross-cultural patterns that permit some generalizations. In particular, there are correlated trends in at least four aspects of societies: population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. With increasing population size and population density, the acquisition of food and other necessities tends to become intensified. That is, more food is obtained per acre by subsistence farmers living in villages than by small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, and still more is obtained per acre on the intensive irrigated plots cultivated by higher-density peoples and on the mechanized farms of modern states. Political decision-making becomes increasingly centralized, from the face-to-face group discussions of small hunter-gatherer groups to the political hierarchies and decisions by leaders in modern states. Social stratification increases, from the relative egalitarianism of small hunter-gatherer groups to the inequality between people in large centralized societies.
These correlations between different aspects of a society aren’t rigid: some societies of a given size have more intensified subsistence, or more political centralization, or more social stratification, than do others. But we need some shorthand for referring to the different types of societies emerging from these broad trends, while acknowledging the diversity within these trends. Our practical problem is similar to the problem faced by developmental psychologists discussing differences among individual people. While every human being is unique, there are still broad age-related trends, such that 3-year-olds are on the average different in many correlated respects from 24-year-olds. Yet age forms a continuum with no abrupt cut-offs: there is no sudden transition from being “like a 3-year-old” to being “like a 6-year-old.” And there are differences among people of the same age. Faced with these complications, developmental psychologists still find it useful to adopt shorthand categories such as “infant,” “toddler,” “child,” “adolescent,” “young adult,” etc., while recognizing the imperfections of these categories.
Social scientists similarly find it useful to adopt shorthand categories whose imperfections they understand. They face the added complication that changes among societies can be reversed, whereas changes in age classes can’t. Farming villages may revert to small hunter-gatherer bands under drought conditions, whereas a 4-year-old will never revert to being a 3-year-old. While most developmental psychologists agree on recognizing and naming the broadest categories of infant/child/adolescent/adult, social scientists use numerous alternative sets of shorthand categories for describing variation among traditional societies, and some scientists become indignant at the use of any categories at all. In this book I shall occasionally use Elman Service’s division of human societies into four categories of increasing population size, political centralization, and social stratification: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. While these terms are now 50 years old and other terms have been proposed since then, Service’s terms have the advantage of simplicity: four terms to remember instead of seven terms, and single words instead of multi-word phrases. But please remember that these terms are just shorthand useful for discussing the great diversity of human societies, without pausing to reiterate the imperfections in the shorthand terms and the important variations within each category each time that the terms are used in the text.
The smallest and simplest type of society (termed by Service a band) consists of just a few dozen individuals, many of them belonging to one or several extended families (i.e., an adult husband and wife, their children, and some of their parents, siblings, and cousins). Most nomadic hunter-gatherers, and some garden farmers, traditionally lived at low population densities in such small groups. The band members are sufficiently few in number that everyone knows everyone else well, group decisions can be reached by face-to-face discussion, and there is no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization. A social scientist would describe a band as relatively egalitarian and democratic: members differ little in “wealth” (there are few personal possessions anyway) and in political power, except as a result of individual differences in ability or personality, and as tempered by extensive sharing of resources among band members.