Five Forms of Primitive Society
[A] - Bands
[B] - Tribes
[C] - Chiefdoms
[D] - Federation/paramount Chiefdomship
[E] - State
Six Forms Of The Modern State
[1] - The Princely State
[2] - The Kingly State
[3] - The Territorial State
[4] - The State Nation
[5] - The Nation State
[6] - The Market State
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_Peace,_and_the_Course_of_History
[A] - BANDS
A band is a small, autonomous group of people (often as low as twenty, and never more than a few hundred) made up of nuclear families that live together and are loosely associated with a territory on which they hunt. A band political structure is typically found amongst societies with a hunter- gather economy. Band societies have no specialized roles. Social order is maintained through the informal mechanisms of gossip, ridicule and avoidance - in other words through public opinion.
[B] - TRIBES
A tribe is of the order of a large collection of bands, but it is not simply a collection of bands. The ties that bind a tribe are more complicated than those of bands. Leadership is personal-charismatic-and for special purposes only in tribal society; there are no political offices containing real power, and a "chief" is merely a man of influence, a sort of adviser. The means of tribal consolidation for collective action are therefore not governmental.
Technically, the tribe is a group of bands. The tribe is, of course, a larger society tied together by familiar bonds. Family structures known as lineages, clan, moieties, and phratries form the primary bonding mechanisms. The local groups that compose a traditional tribal society are communal and strongly social, with members linked by kinship ties.
Tribes have developed kin-based mechanisms to accommodate more sedentary life, to redistribute food, and to organize some communal services. Public opinion plays a major role in decision making.
Tribal people tend to think in certain ways. They tend to be egalitarian, think humans are part of nature itself, the world is composed of dualities that form a harmony, and life is designed to work for the good of the community - good of the whole. Tribal people also stress consensus in determing what is good for the whole.
One of the easiest tribes for us to examine since we live in Arizona is the Hopi. Hopi traditional political organization can be called a theocracy. Traditionally, Hopi villages were ruled by established clan theocracies. The High Priest of a village was (and still is) called the kikmongwi and served as father of the village. The kikmongwi usually appointed at least one spokespman to make his wishes known to the outside world, and to serve as a source of information about the world. Various Crier Chiefs, Kiva Chiefs, and other leaders formed the village government; clan relationships usually dictated who would receive specific ceremonial and governing positions. Each Hopi village was autonomous with various villages having special clan and religious relationships with one another. In a sense, traditional Hopi government was not democratic. It is true that the priests, religious leaders, warriors, and kikmongwis would listen to various opinions before making decisions, but government was not necessarily by consensus. Yet Hopi are deeply tribal in the way they think and consensus was and is important. They would and do think in terms of what is good for the whole when leadership considers a decision. So they balance the need for leadership and their tribal ways of thinking.
[C] - CHIEFDOMS
Chiefdoms are societies headed by individuals with unusual ritual, political, or entrepreneurial skills. The society is kin-based but more along hierarchical lines than a tribe. Chiefdoms are associated with greater population density and display signs of social ranking.
The chiefdom society is also more complex and more organized, being particularly distinguished from tribes by the presence of centers which coordinate economic, social and religious activities.
Whereas tribes have some grouping that can informally integrate more than one community, chiefdoms have some formal structure integrating multi-community political units. The formal structure could consist of a council with or without a chief, but most commonly there is a person-the chief-who has higher rank and authority than others. The position of chief, which is sometimes hereditary and generally permanent, bestows high status on its holder.
Unlike a tribe in which all segments are structurally and functionally similar, a chiefdom is made up of parts that are structurally and functionally different from one another. A ranking system means that some lineages, and the individuals in them, have higher or lower social status than others.
Chiefdoms can be divided into ones that take on a more simple, kin-based organization and those that are more complex where there is a more developed regional hierarchy with a paramount chief and lesser chiefdoms. The simpler form has centralized decision making for better mobilization of manpower and exploitation of resources than is possible in a tribal form of society. The more complex chiefdom has a greater measure of authority but still lacks a bureaucracy to administer food surpluses nor to distribute and store resources. The society is more divided along two lines - nobility and commoners. Nobility tends to compete for leadership, prestige, and religious authority making the chiefdom relatively unstable.
[D] - FEDERATION/PARAMOUNT CHIEFDOMSHIP
A union of a number of distinct tribes or chiefdoms. Chief rules from largest settlement. Smaller settlements ruled by sub-chiefs generally related to the chief and under his control.
The father of Pocahontas and the brother of the chief Opechancanough, who organized the great assaults on the Virginia colony in 1622 and 1644, Powhatan (a.k.a. Wahunsunacock) was the ruler and also the architect of a paramount chiefdom that covered nearly all of eastern Virginia when Jamestown was founded in 1607. As a paramount chief his powers were considerable, but they fell short of what the English expected of a "king."
http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_031100_powhatan.htm
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/glues/societyintro.html
THE MODERN STATE
Families in the late 1400s tried to enhance their authority and security, promising those living under their authority security from an attack from outside forces.
Constantinople fell to Islam in 1494 after its wall was broken by projectile-firing cannon. Nicolo Machiavelli, Italian diplomat and political philosopher, wrote in 1519 that "No wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days."
[1] - THE PRINCELY STATE
Europe was changing. The expansion of a money economy was breaking down the old agricultural feudalism and a new order of legitimacy was needed. Italian cities were the great money powers of the time and had come to rely on professional soldiers. Ruling families were creating a political entity called the "princely state."
Machiavelli, wrote of walls, towers and moats having become obsolete and of princely states needing an alternative form of security. For his city of Florence he believed there should be a conscripted militia. A princely state, he believed, needed a professional armed force rather than seasonal mobilizations by medieval knights.
A prince, wrote Machiavelli, should act in the interest not just of himself but in the interest of the state. He wrote that a prince should create institutions that serve and evoke loyalty from his subjects, and that the state should maintain permanent embassies in other lands and diplomacy based on good information.
Machiavelli was intertwining ... constitutional and strategic capabilities. It was a move away from a prince ruling merely by decree. It was a move from private authority to the formation of public authority. In other words, a prince should be a servant of the state.
The state exists to master violence. The state began with the establishment of a monopoly on violence within the homeland. A state that does not protect its citizens from violent crime and does not protect the homeland from attack by other states would have ceased to fulfill its most basic reason for being.
[2] - THE KINGLY STATE
With weapons development and the organization of greater bodies of troops for warfare, the "kingly state" arose -- a larger entity than the princely state.
As had a prince in a princely state, a king, writes Bobbitt, promised his subjects security from attack from without, and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, "ratified the role of the kingly state as the dominant legitimate form of government in Western Europe."
The modern secular state was beginning and wars of religion were at an end. Kingly states were territorial powers and developed some rivalry with the Roman Catholic Church, whose powers spanned individual states.
The kingly state was a domain of absolute authority that made the king the personification of the State, and kingly states took on the added promise of internal stability. They had large professional armies that were great investments, and large-scale pitched battles were seldom risked. Frederick the Great was a typical ruler of such a state.
[3] - THE TERRITORIAL STATE
Since the 17th century, the basic form of government has been the sovereign territorial state, that is, the exclusive ruler of a distinctive domain. Such sovereignty was a mixture of external recognition, states that were organised and behaved in a way acceptable to other members of the international system, and the capacity to prevail over lesser powers within and to exclude trans-territorial political actors.
Once such a form of exclusive government is established it requires legitimisation, since it imposes on the subject one primary loyalty instead of the competing claims of the various political and social agencies of the Middle Ages. That loyalty was first supplied by religion; overcoming the religious wars enabled states to territorialise their religious constitutions and to exclude competing confessional claims on loyalty. Only then could states be really sovereign and build legitimisation on the basis of religious identification and dynastic loyalty. The model states in that regard were England, the Netherlands and Sweden – all could complete the transition to nation states without fundamental upheaval.
Territoriality and nationalism still dominate the forms of state legitimisation, despite high levels of international trade and cultural interchange. The reasons why territorial forms of government continue to predominate and only they are unlikely to be superseded by international agencies or trans-territorial political forces are fourfold:
• It is still a fundamental principle of the international system that there be no territory without an effective and exclusive ruler who can bear the responsibility for events arising from within its borders. Without such rulers ‘black holes’ are created that suck in and destroy the prevailing forms of international order through terrorism and crime.
• It is also the case that an open international economy, a space of exchange between national territories, only works if it is defined and defended by public power, which in the last instance means states. So-called transnational companies realise this and cluster in the G7; over 90% of the FT 500 global companies are based in North America, the EU or Japan.
• Trans-territorial political agencies have two key defects: they are exclusive and thus weakly legitimate, a fact that limits the political claims of most non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and they find it hard to control members, they have the option of voluntary compliance (most NGOs) and extra-legal compulsion (criminal and terrorist networks).
• The populations of most states are not economically mobile. They are neither rich enough nor poor enough to move, lacking the skills of the international technocracy or the desperation of economic migrants. Thus they share the national territory as a community of fate.
[4] - THE STATE NATION
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, kingly states that survived developed into state-nations. Nations are societies (older than civilization), and state-nations are states that provide its people civil and political rights of popular sovereignty. Britain was one such state-nation. The French Revolution transformed France from a kingly state to a state-nation.
A state-nation was a state that was mobilized as a nation. It was a national, ethnocultural group. The state-nation did not take direction from common people -- in other words, the nation. The state-nation was not responsible to the nation; rather it was responsible for the nation.
But the state-nation trusts the common people enough to arm them. It was the state-nation that brought about the great military conscriptions -- which Napoleon exploited.
The "Long War" as the Reason for the Nation State:
The “Long War” is a term for the conflict that began in 1914 with the First World War and concluded in 1990 with the end of the Cold War. The Long War embraces the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam and the Cold War.
The Long War can be understood as a single conflict fought over the constitutional issue of what form of the nation-state—fascist, communist or parliamentary—would succeed the imperial states of the 19th century.
During World War I, Bolshevism gained strength in the Russian Empire and fascism developed in Italy. And in the wake of the Great War, Bolshevism solidified its power, fascist states arose, first in Italy and then in Germany -- and a military regime in sympathy with fascism arose in Japan. Fascism lost in World War II. The Soviet Union continued to declare its brand of government as the legitimate form of government -- superior to other forms of government -- in the era known as the Cold War. The Cold war ended in 1990. The authoritarian rule of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies had vanished, as had the rule of the Japanese militarists. The Soviet Union had collapsed. What was left after 1990 was a predominant recognition of liberal democracy as the legitimate form of government.
As we move from the nation-state to the market-state, deterrence and assured retaliation cannot provide strategic stability because threats to the state today are ubiquitous and easy to disguise. We cannot deter various novel forms of mass destruction because of the indeterminate sources of such attacks. The strategy of nuclear weapons cannot protect the critical infrastructures—including the virtual infrastructure of public confidence and security—of the new market-state. This will not eliminate reliance on weapons of mass destruction, however. It might even bring about conditions that make their use more likely.
We can devise doctrines and institutions that are capable of providing common goods for the new society of market-states. These common goods include organizing expeditionary forces to destroy terror networks, developing shared missile defense systems, providing security guarantees as a means of averting weapons proliferation, resisting the regionalization of trade, and creating markets in education, environmental protection, and public health. (Failing to do so, we will set the stage for a cataclysmic war in the early decades of this century.)
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/bobbitt/qna.html
http://www.fsmitha.com/review/r-bobit.html
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_733jsp/
http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/pbobbitt/shieldofachilles/bookexcerpt.html
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15353/the-shield-of-achilles-by-philip-bobbitt/
