The Rise And Fall Of The State 

(This page contains an abbreviated version of the text with explanatory notes and references excluded to aid readability; for the full version of the text including notes and references, please click here. Points in the text at which there is additional material are marked (**); clicking on (**) will transfer you to the equivalent point in the full version of the text.)

Introduction

With the exception only of some remaining 'primitive' societies, many of them in Africa, we all nowadays live in a nation state, which has a local monopoly of power and doesn't hesitate to use it to maintain its control over its citizens.

The growth of states and their powers on such a scale is a very recent phenomenon and owes much to technological development. It has taken place in the last 500 years, which is a bare 15% of recorded history, and a tiny fraction of the 50,000 or so years during which modern humans are thought to have occupied permanent settlements, requiring some type of hierarchical and/or administrative organization.

Broadly speaking, the emergence of the nation state has gone hand in hand with the suppression or outright destruction of the collective way of life which had evolved among human groups over hundreds of thousands of years. Law, trade, kin-group society and morality have changed out of all recognition as the State has gradually taken over control of all these aspects of human life.

Although they have done some good, nation states have been responsible for some very negative events and trends in the last few hundred years, especially the global wars of the 20th century. It may be that humans have learnt something from this experience, and that the EU, the UN and other global bodies represent the beginnings of a new, post-State period in human cultural development.

It may also be true that technology, which allowed the State to develop in the first place, will now 're-empower' the individual, and will encourage a return to more collective ways of living, to which human nature is suited better than it is to the remote and impersonal State.

The section of the GroupsRus site is devoted to a description of how the State came into existence, and the consequences that has had for human beings. A further section, Groups in Modern Society examines how a re-assertion of the groupish nature of humans through economic freedom, better communications and the Internet may lead to a post-State period in human affairs.

BACK TO TOP

Emergence Of Settled, Hierarchical Human Communities

Early human social groups developed cognitive resources and behavioural skills which allowed group size to increase from the maximum 30 or so individuals typical of primate groups to a limit of about 150 by the time of the arrival of homo sapiens, about 250,000 - 400,000 years ago. Or it may have been the other way around, that larger groups demanded greater skills; or a bit of both.

(**)

This level of social skill was already enough for humans to compete successfully against the competition, both animal and Neanderthal. Nature was not tamed, but could be lived with. Inter-group trade, by the way, seems to have been a pronounced feature of human society long before settlements appeared.

(**)

The human way of life remained largely nomadic and based on hunter-gatherer groups until a point when the invention of farming allowed permanent human settlements to form, and these eventually came to be substantially larger than 150 individuals.

The adoption of a settled way of life may or may not have been an adaptation driven by competition to survive. It may have been forced by climatic or population pressures, or adopted voluntarily, or was perhaps a result of competition between different human groups. Whatever the reasons for the origin of settlements, the adaptations needed for these larger groups to be successful included initially the development of a more sophisticated hierarchy, greater division of labour, and the strengthening of social structures such as marriage.

At some point during the transition from nomadic to settled existence, mythic cultural influences (controls, if you will) gave way to religion. Finally, the emergence of social communication of information between generations (writing, books, schools) and the use of texts (eg the 10 Commandments) allowed institutionalized control of large groups by a small religious or military elite. This stage occupies the early parts of recorded history (it wouldn't exist for us if recording hadn't been possible!) including the Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

This all took of the order of 250,000 years to happen, and can loosely be characterized as 'cultural' change, contrasted with the preceding 'genetic' evolution of groupish social skills including the facility for language, moral structures, emotional complexity and expanded consciousness.

These topics are dealt with more exhaustively in The Evolution of Groupishness and The Role of Consciousness in Society. The difference between 'genetic' and 'cultural' aspects of social humans is however key to any discussion of how society should be constituted. 'Cultural' traits can be re-engineered; 'genetic' traits cannot, or at least can only be suppressed at great psychic risk, exactly what has in fact happened under the modern State.

BACK TO TOP

The State and Trade

Highly organized, settled communities clearly existed by 10,000 years ago based on archeological evidence, although we are limited as to how much we know about their cultures because writing was not invented until about 6,000 years ago. However, trade seems to have played a central role in their development.

There is something to be learned from surviving Stone-Age tribal cultures as to how things might have been 10-30,000 years ago. There are obvious dangers in generalizing from what happens to be true today to what may have been the case 40,000 years ago. On the other hand, all known primitive societies show a high degree of underlying cultural similarity.

Among primitive societies, division of labour seems to take place to a marked degree even within an area in which groups are in constant touch with one another, and even in the absence of environmental features to drive it. Groups which develop and practise different skills will inevitably need to trade with each other; the suggestion here is that the propensity to trade may be the cause rather than the result of division of labour, with the benefit being a more harmonious, or at least less bloodthirsty system of communal inter-group alliances.

(**)

Here we may see the first origins of the modern city-state, and eventually of the nation-state, and it is based on the genetically hard-wired propensity of individuals to trade as members of their group.

Reaching firmer ground, about 10,000 years ago, it's clear that the use of pictorial symbols was a feature of trade in the pre-historic period. Clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia c. 8,500 BC as a means of describing and recording the contents of a shipment; and were gradually replaced by lists impressed on clay, using symbols which were a mixture of direct pictorial images (ten pictures of a stylized chicken = 10 chickens) and derivative (abbreviated?) symbols which can be viewed as the precursor of symbolic writing as such.

It is likely that the growing sophistication of the counting and recording systems used primarily in trade is linked to the emergence of major centres of population requiring large scale imports of food and other commodities. The need for accurate recording can also be tied to the emergence of a governing elite which needed and wanted to tax the production and movements of goods.

(**)

Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind sees the development of the list (4th millennium BC) as a key feature in the development of the State: 'List arrangement can facilitate the sorting, summarizing and classifying of items and can reveal patterns otherwise not discernable. With the invention of visual lists, the newly created state could acquire, analyze and digest the information it needed to function.'

NB The use of the work 'state' to describe societies at such a period needs to be highly circumscribed. These societies may have employed slave labour and may have been repressive in religious terms; but the prevailing, collective, even egalitarian way of life inherited from history was not about to change for millennia to come. The State at that time had neither the desire nor the means to control the minutiae of human life.

By 2,000 BC, we begin to be able to describe the workings of nations such as Rome with greater confidence, and it is clear both that commercial life had a central role in the life of cities and that the state as such played little or no role in the supervision of daily human life, which was left to the ancient 'folkways' to administer.

(**)

The city-states of Europe provided a settled environment in which trade could flourish, and they were certainly not the expression of feudal power; on the contrary, they were created on the basis of the guilds, associations of traders of various types, and commercial law was developed by the guilds in the form of codes of conduct. This was even more true internationally (so far as that term has a meaning before nation states existed). The Hansa is the supreme expression in Europe of the pre-eminence of private commercial law; it is nowadays hardly remembered, but in its day the Hanseatic League, uniting the traders of modern Germany and the Baltic States was the strongest and longest-lived institution in Northern Europe. For hundreds of years it provided a legal and social framework within which commercial acitvity could take place.

(**)

The Hansa and the European city-states were straightforward expressions of groupish behaviour among traders and craftsmen, confronting the State (still quite weak) rather than within it.

(**)

The pattern of 'the flag follows trade' applied also in early Aztec civilizations. In the Aztec Empire (AD 1200 - 1500), the state had perhaps more power than was the case in Europe, but international or long-distance trade was still organized around a structure of merchant guilds which seems to have been remarkably similar to the European model, operating with a quasi-independent legal structure, and making much use of privately sponsored marketplaces.

(**)

BACK TO TOP

The Hegemony of the Nation State

The years 1400 - 1600 saw, at least in Europe, the emergence of powerful monarchs and princes in what later came to be nation-states.

De Jouvenel says that 'sovereignty', in the sense of the over-arching power of the sovereign, was a 17th century construction, and that all previous societies regarded themselves as being assemblages of individuals subject to a common law, which applied to the sovereign (if there was one) as much as to any other citizen. For instance, in Rome, 'what they saw in their mind's eye was not a person, Rome, but rather the physical reality of a collection of individuals beloning to a group'.

Tracing the growth of the power of the monarch and then the State, de Jouvenal points out that in mediaeval times such power was severely tramelled by the 'Lex Terrae', the customs of the country, 'which was thought of as a thing immutable'. 'And when the English Barons uttered their Nolumus leges Angliae mutari (We object to changes in the laws of England), they were only giving vent to the general feeling of the time.'

Building on the growing reality of centralized power came the Nation State, for which printing seems to have been the necessary evolution - a way of educating, informing, controlling masses of people who would have been beyond the reach of copyists.

(**)

Prior to the 16th century, the consciousness of all individuals other than very well educated ones was unaffected by direct delivery of printed ideas. Without the resulting development of patriotism, the financing and bloodshed of the national wars of the 18th to 20th centuries would hardly have been possible.

This is not to say that nations as such had not existed prior to the 15th century. Proprotkin points to Merovingian France and 12th century Russia as being national in character, but: 'These nations . . . were nevertheless kept together by nothing else but a community of language, and a tacit agreement of the small republics to take their dukes from none but one special family.'

'The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism . . . produced Europe's first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans.'

(**)

In Europe, the boundaries of nation states as they emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries have got very little to do with the historical inter-play of noble families, and everything to do with the vernacular print-languages (it's almost possible to use the expression, 'cultures') which gained dominance, although this wasn't always along ethnic boundaries. In Ireland, for instance, (part of Britain at the time) English elbowed out Gaelic, and it was only much later that the Irish independence movement (like all such movements, closely associated with its own language) was able to hit back. Plenty more examples spring to mind, and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which, amazingly, continued to use Latin as a state language until 1840) offers many of them.

Once the State had attained power and respectability, it also took on some of the personal attributes of the sovereign who had in most cases preceded it.

De Jouvenal notes that the State became personified only in the 19th century. 'The Romans . . . looked upon the Roman people as an assemblage of human beings: not, it is true, just any assemblage, but one which was held together by ties of law to the end of a common advantage. They never imagined that this assemblage could be the parent of a 'person' who was distinct from the persons making it up. Where we now say 'France, with the sensation of talking about a real person, they used to say, according to the date of the speaker, either 'the people and commons of Rome', or 'the Senate and people of Rome'.'

Throughout Europe, the State used the power it had gained by the 18th century to demolish the remnants of collective life, by arrogating to itself the supervision and conduct of the law, of education, of social provision, and of many other areas of life. In England, for example, the enforced enclosures of the 18th century converted the commonly-held majority of English land into the estates of the nobility. 'And sheep do drive out men'. It probably wasn't done out of any animus towards the people, simply out of greed; but the effect was just as deadly to communal life.

Marriage is another (collective) human institution whose control was in due time taken over by the State (via a period in which the Church controlled it) but for most of our social existence it was a matter between two kin-groups.

(**)

BACK TO TOP

Groups and the Nation State

Within the nation state, groups have had a chequered career. Some groups have been used by the State as a means of delivering or supporting moral structure, of which the most obvious is organised religion. At one time mutual and cooperative organisations, which had their roots in smaller, local communities, were also important, along with private clubs or groupings, for the delivery of education, medicine, welfare and other social goods. The State has arrogated and centralised these roles of private groups, with predictably bad results; even the church has now been disestablished in many countries (eg the UK). The State evidently thinks that it doesn't need any help in proselytizing or giving moral guidance; or rather, its paranoid need to control everything has led it to chuck the moral baby out with the bathwater of independent action.

Some types of group are non-threatening to the State, and maintain their activities over long periods of time without interference from above. Social clubs, recreational groupings (eg cricket clubs), the Ramblers' Association, operatic and dramatic clubs, motorists associations and investment clubs are all examples of innocent association in the State's eyes; although occasionally legislation reaches out to influence or control some aspects of their activities.

Other types of group are regarded as menacing or immoral by the State, and are proscribed, pursued or heavily controlled as a result. In the UK, Mosley's Back Shirts and their modern day descendant the National Front are examples. On the whole, nation states' problems in this direction were largely limited to their own territories, simply because the maintenance of a potentially subversive organisation across the borders of nations was physically difficult, fairly easy to detect, and even easier to stop.

The most important consequence of the effective ethical monopoly of the Nation State is that its model of top-down moral suasion (the 'Nanny State') is unsuited to the way in which the human mind works, leaving individuals without an effective internalised moral structure. Litter, suicide, rape, violence, thuggery and the rest are the all too obvious result. Humans, though, won't be stopped from associating with each other (even hoodies are being groupish) and it is not surprising that the growth in power of the State - denying individuality on the one hand - is matched on the other hand by an explosion of interest in association. People's individuality is reinforced, even perhaps created, on the basis of associative building blocks, and what the major institutions of society no longer provide for them they will always seek to provide for themselves.

Many associations (groups, clubs, call them what you will) play an ethical role in addition to their 'groupish' contribution. Lots of them exist for charitable purposes, or have such purposes in addition to their basic role ('Friends' organisations at schools, for instance). Many more have sets of internal rules which control the behaviour of members during group activities, or even in some cases beyond. A London gentlemens' club will be quick to censure or expel a member whose public conduct is thought unacceptable. The member of a tennis club who persistently cheats will quickly find that this reputation dogs him both inside and outside the gates of the club.

As noted above, commercial activity is of its essence groupish, and all attempts by the Nation State to control it notoriously come unstuck. And because of their groupish origins, commercial organisations used to behave in a collective way, until the State alienated them as it has alienated individuals by taking away their social responsibilities. All over Europe, the early city-state behaved in a collective way, ensuring that food, for example, was provided to the market on behalf of the citizens at large, and allowing individual traders access to supplies only once the collective good was assured. Thus Charles Gross, writing about Liverpool among many other cities: 'The merchants and the sailors were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the expenses of transportation.' According to Gross, these customs continued in many cities until as late as the 17th century.

Although in the modern mind, trading is essentially an activity carried out by individuals, and the joint stock company is thought of as a recent innovation, it is clear from the last section that trading by an early human kin-group was almost certainly thought of as a group activity. Much later, the mediaeval guild is an expression of the groupishness of trading as an activity. The city-states themselves seem to have evolved from the 'market-place', which had a special protected status quite similar to that of consecrated ground (and maybe even stemming from the same mythic roots).

(**)

Although the State has pretty well extinguished the private sector in moral provisioning, even in the 21st century there are still groupish organizations which maintain the ancient, collective virtues as a way of life in defiance of 'modern' life, such as the Amish in the US and the Hutterites in Europe. For David Sloan Wilson, the Hutterites are a testament to the success of groupish, anti-individualistic living: 'By fostering a selfless attitude towards others and minimizing the potential for exploitation within groups, they are spectacularly successful at the group level.'

The continued success of such organisations gives hope that there is individual life after the State. See The Rise and Fall of the State (not yet available).

BACK TO TOP

The Failure of the State

There was a major debate in the late 19th century between 'individualists', inheritors of 18th century rationalism, and 'collectivists', often socialists. Individualists believed that humans had taken on board the moral structures necessary for society to function, and that the State could therefore be minimalist.

(**)

Collectivists addressed a different agenda, believing that only the State could be relied upon to ensure the provision of moral and material goods to the majority of the population.

In terms of the academic argument, by the end of the 20th century, individualism had won out over collectivism, but individualists had thrown the groupish baby out with the collectivist bathwater, helped along by the discrediting of group selection as a primary evolutionary mechanism.

In terms of real-politik, however, the State had won, since between approximately 1600 and 1900 it comprehensively took over the legal systems which traders and other collectively-based social institutions had developed, as it would later take over education and the provision of other social goods. And Russia was still to come.

It's not unreasonable to date the decay of group-driven society from the fact of the emergence of the nation state. Benedict points out that: 'all profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias'. In this way the group consciousness that was so strong in humans up to the late Middle Ages was overwhelmed by the power of 'national' consciousness.

The State takeover of commercial law had only adverse results: by the 19th century, traders, especially international ones, were so dissatisfied with State legal systems that they re-invented their own legal systems through the arbitration process. In the 20th century the State was busy once again trying to nationalize arbitration (States after all are run by lawyers!). However, globalization has undermined the nation state and has given a new lease of life to independent (private) commercial law. The WTO is nothing but the Hansa writ large.

The battle between the State and the folkways for control of law and regulation is at its peak in the early 21st century. Governments legislate and regulate ever more furiously as the complexity of life in modern society becomes ever greater. But they are on a losing wicket, even if they don't yet see it.

There has always been a strand in philosophical thought that advocated the minimally intrusive State. There have even been individual politicians who believed in 'rolling back' the State. Many politicians pay lip service to this idea, but judged by their deeds almost none of them measures up to the ideal. So it is not to governments that we should look for salvation from increasing and inappropriate legislation; instead, it will be delivered by globalisation, much helped along by the Internet, and the empowered individual.

Globalization began in the commercial sector, as described above, with international dispute resolution through arbitration, and it has spread to most economic sectors. International - and often global - conventions, ruling bodies, courts, treaties etc etc now cover shipping, airlines, banking, insurance, telecommunications, investment, intellectual property, and even the environment, to pick just some of the most obvious examples. Governments have no power to intervene once they have signed up to such international instruments.

It's a curiosity of the modern world that competition (even the little remaining competition between nations, which may have been driving social evolution) is being legislated away by the globalization process. Nowadays it is 'managed' competition. That's a worry perhaps, in so far as global institutions have monopolies for the most part, and even the saintly WTO is liable to go astray if it doesn't have competition. So far, at any rate, globalisation has been a success: the WTO, the OECD, the UN, the IMF, Greenpeace, Medecins Sans Frontieres, WIPO appear mostly to be beneficial monopolies, although the recent history of the OECD shows what can happen if an entrenched monopoly, however beneficent, falls into the wrong hands.

Largely but not entirely because of the fight against money laundering and terrorism, international co-operation is now beginning to impact on taxation and some aspects of criminal law.

It really is only a matter of time before the legislative canvas of a national government will be limited to a few, minor domestic fields, and what is important is that the power which is seeping away from nations is not seeping towards a mighty international ruler (pace the European Community), but into the hands of consultative, rule-based , democratic, international bodies, of which the WTO is the most obvious example.

It's an open question whether the WTO is more groupish than a nation state, but its procedures (and those of any other multinational body) are a good deal more transparent and democratic than those of any State, which is a major step in the right direction. What will definitely reintroduce 'groupish' law into the affairs of individuals is however the Internet.

At first, the Internet could be seen as anarchic. By empowering the individual, libertarians hoped, the Internet would eat away the fabric of the State from the inside. In fact, the Internet can be used (or abused) by the State just as readily as by the individual. So far, it's difficult to say who is ahead!

Long term, though, the libertarians were probably right, in the sense that the Internet is ideally suited to the development of new models of cooperation between people, whereas its uses for the State are limited to the collection and dissemination of data, and interactions with citizens (financial and otherwise). It doesn't seem likely that the Internet will change the nature of the State (itself an expression of groupishness taken to a pathological extreme); however it will allow the State to become more effective in the exercise of its power over individuals. (See the US information collection systems; the UK's data retention law etc).

(**)

BACK TO TOP

The State and the Individual

Jung frequently wrote on the predicament of the individual vis-a-vis the State, and the psychological consequences of the individual's powerlessness. From The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future) 1957, Collected Works 10, for example: 'It is small wonder that individual judgement grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, ie is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life-carrier, whereas in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State. . . . The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it.'

Jung is however ambivalent about the role of religion in countering the State, and has no very exact prescription to offer for the predicament of the modern individual other than self-knowledge.

At the same time, it is clear that the typical individual's understanding of her position in society has evolved substantially in the last few hundred years. You could say that consciousness has enlarged to take in many more dimensions of a social being. At a stretch, you could say that whereas 500 years ago, for most people morality was largely unseen and unfelt at a conscious level, with behaviour being driven by unconscious structures, now a far larger proportion of people would be able to give a coherent account of their ethical positions. You could say that this amounts to the emergence of moral structures out of the unconscious into the conscious, accompanied by a reduction in the role of overtly external moral controls. However, you would also have to say that the moral structure which has emerged into consciousness is much weaker than its original unconscious forbear, and that people on the whole are much less inclined to accept external moral controls (even though the State is far more able to enforce them).

One notable aspect of the modern consciousness is its focus on the passage of historical time. There is no particular reason to suppose that an evolved consciousness, to the extent that its contents might result from genetic endowment, would have a sense of historical time. For what purpose? The awareness of time in human consciousness is therefore perhaps a cultural product. It is a concept which has been injected into consciousness as part of a group-driven need for the acceptance of society as a complex organism, the idea of progress, the idea of civic responsibility, and other adjuncts of the nation state. This is just one of the ways in which consciousness is used both by external agencies and by the unconscious as a means of delivering desired behaviour by the individual. Others will appear below.

(**)

After the Nation State comes what, for the individual? There have always been individuals who were strong and clear-seeing enough to have their own moral structures, but they were a tiny minority. Increasing economic wealth, better education (sort of!), more leisure, and better access to information have created very large numbers of people with some independence of action; but there are no structures to accommodate them. The old institutions which incorporated groupish ideas have decayed, and 'let 1,000 flowers bloom' when imposed on a top-down basis merely creates 999 weeds for every flower.

Neumann also points to the unevenness of development of the modern personality. Even a well-educated person can be a mixture of new and old groups: 'For example, as a technologist he may be living in the present, as a philosopher in the period of the Enlightenment, as a man of faith in the Middle Ages and as a fighter of wars in antiquity - all without being in the least aware how, and where, these partial attitudes contradict each other.' (Not a bad description of Tony Blair or George Bush?) And this was written 50 years ago.

Durkheim recognizes the psychic distance between the individual and the modern state, and postulates a range of intermediate 'groupish' organisations which can assist in socializing individuals: 'The state is too remote from individuals, its connections with them too superficial and irregular, to be able to penetrate the depths of their consciousness and socialize them from within . . . a nation cannot be maintained unless, between the state and individuals, a whole range of secondary groups are interposed.'

The 'whole range of secondary groups' postulated by Durkheim is explored in detail in Groups in Modern Society.

BACK TO TOP