[...] we have to begin with a very basic question, what is a state and what does it mean for a society to be non-state? This is one of those distinctions that is very important, but one generally doesn’t learn until fairly late in education (typically in specialized undergraduate courses), with the result that a lot of folks never cover it.
Now “the state” is one of those phenomena that wasn’t born as an ideological construction, it is not a product of thought, but of reality. Humans had states before they theorized about them and could recognize that some societies (‘state societies’) were noticeably different than other societies (‘non-state societies’).
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‘The state’ as an idea wasn’t invented once, but rather independently created several times in several places in history. We generally call these self-developed states (as opposed to cases where the state was adopted in imitation of or pressure from existing states) ‘pristine states’ (or ‘primary states’). I don’t know that there is agreement on the precise count of pristine states, but the core examples are broadly agreed on: states independently developed (in chronological order) in at least 1) Mesopotamia, 2) Egypt, 3) India, 4) China, 5) Mesoamerica and 6) the Andes mountains. Variously appended to that list are the developments of states in what is today Bolivia, Hawai’i, Polynesia and Ghana.
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At the core of all of these recurrent factors is a central definition, famously stated by Max Weber, which reduces the state down effectively to a single point. The state is, “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” There are a few quirks there, of course. The monopoly is on legitimate force, not all force: every society has criminals, which is the word we use for individuals who wield illegitimate force; in a sense, the creation of the state is the process of getting a critical mass of people to reclassify all of the wielders of force save one as criminals.
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Note that, like all social institutions, the state is a question of perception and customs: it is the perception of legitimacy that matters, precisely because that perception is what enables the state to recruit the purveyors of physical force to deal it out and to ensure that the broader society does not resist its application.
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So what is a non-state society? Well, that’s quite simple: it’s any society which does not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. As you might imagine, this can be a rather broader category! In the case of our ‘barbarian’ non-state societies, however, the matter is fairly simple. As we saw last week, these societies have a bunch of fellows who wield legitimate military force: the Big Men, who can mobilize their network of clients. As we’ll see, the military system relies on these fellows to function. But note the distinction: a Roman general only wields military force when the state authorizes him to do so, whereas a Gallic or Celtiberian Big Man wields military force in his own right, as a function of his social position and that force is regarded as legitimated by his social position, rather than some delegated power from a central authority. Indeed, as we’re about to see, these civitates do have ‘central authorities,’ but they’re very weak, in part because the people in those societies understand that certain men are allowed – indeed, ‘supposed’ – to wield military force independent of those communal governing structures.
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Fundamentally the problem here is actually simple to state: military force isn’t wielded by governing institutions, it is wielded by individual aristocrats who are only loosely directed by governing institutions. The council doesn’t raise an army, each of the aristocrats does, at which point they can cooperate or not cooperate. Because military force isn’t centralized into the governing institutions, but is distributed among the aristocracy (and even beyond that, more broadly among the armed populace), we see it wielded regularly against the governing institutions or in contravention of their wishes. In short, power in these societies isn’t institutional, it is personal and thus fragmented.
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In practice, we see this lack of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force play out in two kinds of independent aristocratic military action: war by warlords and war by ‘youths.’
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What is important to note here is not merely the ability of these aristocrats to dispose of force, but the legitimacy of that force. Allucius is, as far as we can tell, entirely within his rights – indeed, his obligations – to fight for Scipio to return the favor. The iuvenes are acting within expectations in their bellicosity (it was traditional! Diod. Sic. 5.34.6) and relative independence. When an aristocrat raises their private army to redress a grievance, that isn’t a malfunction of the system, but the system working as intended, working as everyone understands it should work. Caesar notes as much, that of the aristocrats, “no one suffers his own to be oppressed or defrauded, for if he does otherwise, he has no influence at all among his own” (Caes. BGall. 6.11.4). In short, this sort of self-help and independent use of physical force was expected; it was failure to use one’s power and influence that way which damaged legitimacy.
From the article:
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