Was the State Inevitable

Abstract

This article poses the problem to what extent the emergence of the state was inevitable. According to some anthropologists the development of the (early) state was the inevitable outcome of the evolution of politi-cal organization. The sequences developed by scholars such as Service (1971), and Fried (1967) place the state at the highest level of development, and suggest, moreover, that under normal circum-stances the state level would be reached. This orthodox view has come recently heavily under fire. Practically all contributors to the collection volume Beyond Chiefdoms. Pathways to Complexity in Africa (Keech McIntosh, ed., 1999) reject this unilinear view, and state that numerous developments can be pointed out that produced complex societies, but not the state (for similar views: Crumley 1987, 1995). Instead of the development of hierarchy, these authors point to the development of heterarchy, i.e., a society in which power and leadership is divided over several groups or persons, or, as Crumley (1995: 30), formulated: ‘a system in which elements are unranked relative to one another or ranked in a variety of ways depending on conditions’. And indeed, the ethnographical record shows many cases of heterarchy – but also of states. In the recent volume Alternatives of Social Evolution (Kradin, Korotayev, Bon-darenko, De Munck and Wason, eds., 2000), several of the con-tributors describe evolutionary developments that led to heterarchi-cal forms of sociopolitical organization – though other contributors to the volume do not neglect state formation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.