and philosopher of history Michael Oakeshott as referring to the idea of the state, but, as Spicer points out, it can refer to any form of human association.
The political theory concerning the role and meaning of local asso- ciations not only acknowledges that such local self-governance arrange- ments existed but that they are actually vital to the health of the larger polity. Consider the following quote from a study by the historians John McNeil and William McNeil:“we . . . need face-to-face, primary commu- nities for long-range survival:communities like those our predecessors belonged to, within which shared meanings, shared values, and shared goals made life worth living for everyone . . . perhaps the most critical question for the human future is how cell-like primary communities can survive and flourish with the global cosmopolitanflows . . .” (2003, p. 326; emphasis added.)
From a different point of view, studies of groups in evolutionary biology, sociobiology, and anthropology are of direct importance to the under- standing of local associations. David Wilson and others (2008, p. 7) observe that the group is making its comeback as a unit of analysis; David Wilson and Edward Wilson write at the end of their article that “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” (2007, p. 348) Groups are vital to individuals. Without them the likelihood of survival is significantly reduced. Within any primate group there is status differentiation through the establishment of rank, and this works best with a small group size (De Waal, 1982). When group size increases, primates have the tendency to split into two or more units, and larger groups can only be created through a hierarchical clustering of smaller groups (Dunbar, 1992, p. 485). This finding is also tested and confirmed for human associations. Interestingly, these various groups can be and often are interconnected. Even small hunter-gatherer groups today
“live in complexly structured social universes that involve several different levels of grouping.”(Dunbar, 1993, p. 685) That is, they live in small groups of 30 to 50 individuals (like an overnight camp) that are somewhat embedded in an intermediate level of 100 to 200 people (such as a more permanent village or a clan or lineage group culturally defined), which, in turn, is part of a large population unit with 500 to 2,500 members and can be called a tribe (Dunbar, 1993, p. 686).
This social order is the result of a bottom-up effort to coordinate actions for survival, such as avoiding potential conflict (Leeson, 2008, p. 69) or searching for food and shelter. After Friedrich Hayek, economists came to call this“spontaneous order”or coordination without command (see also
Tullock, 1994) which seems to be one solution to the tragedy of the commons. Intriguingly, it is then assumed that such spontaneous orders cannot easily, if at all, be replaced by the deliberate creation of some upper- local authority. In fact, efforts to subordinate individuals and their sponta- neous order will destroy local coordination (Polanyi, 1951, pp. 35–36, p. 112). Matthew Lange distinguished four ideal types of coordination structures: bureaucratic, associational, market, and clientelist (2005, p. 50).
The first is most associated with the national or territorial state and facilitates large-scale coordination. He regards the second as illustrative of voluntary groups. The latter two are coordination mechanisms but less relevant to the central concerns of this book.
So what is the difference between the bureaucratic and associational approaches? Political theorists prescribe the necessity of local associational life, while evolutionary biologists, sociobiologists, and anthropologists describe and explain it. For centuries, and in the slipstream of Thomas Hobbes, it was believed that the only choice people had was that between an absolute state or anarchy. However, local associational life existed through- out the millennia and has been simply overlooked as a basic and founda- tional set of institutional arrangements important not only for the survival of human groups but also for the endurance of the larger polity. Their centrality and contribution to our understanding of public administration as a study was further recognized with the Nobel-Prize–winning work of Elinor Ostrom on the economic and social features of self-governing associational systems (Ostrom, 2009).
When, how, and why did these local associations and—later—political communities emerge? Thefirst question, when, is fairly easily answered:
From about 10000 BCE humankind changed from living in small-scale, egalitarian societies to complex stratified states at extreme rapid speed (Corning, 1983; Hallpike, 1985, p. 136; Roscoe, 1993, p. 111; Massey, 2007, pp. 2–4). The transition from hunter-gatherer and nomadic to agricultural and sedentary society is often referred to as the neolithic revolutionand involved the domestication of plants and animals, allowing people to settle down and produce a surplus. This encouraged population growth and paved the way for urbanization. Hamlets became villages, and some villages became towns, or small cities, or even city-states. The latter has been defined as: a central state with a surrounding, dependent hinterland within a day’s walk from the central town/city (Hansen, 2000a, p. 19). The formation of ever larger political entities is a universal process, since states emergedindependently, though at different times, in at least six different regions in the world: Mesopotamia, Egypt, India,
China, Mesoamerica, and South America.3 These are referred to as the pristine states.
Theories about how this happened are, so far, characterized by a focus on processes of increased societal complexity, increased functional differ- entiation of the political and economic communities, and centralization of political power. Until the early 1980s these processes were explained mainly in terms of unilinear stage models.
Stage models are based on the assumption that the size of political regimes increases over time.4The most well-known is the one developed by Elmer Service (1962; 1967, pp. 111–144) who describes political development as proceeding from band, via tribe and chiefdom, to state.5While his studies do not focus on the state, it does not stop him from noting that state bureaucracies play a cardinal role in the solution to social problems as well as in the dissolution of political regimes (Service, 1975, pp. 320–321).
The bands and tribes mentioned in Table 2.1 are basically undifferentiated political regimes, mainly because their population size is small, their head- men have little formal authority, and they lack an organizational apparatus to help uphold their authority. The state (or empire) is the end-stage in this stage model, and the chiefdom is the bridge between the more or less acephalous bands and tribes and the bureaucratic state (Earle, 1987, p. 279). Writing at about the same time, Robert Fried described social- political development as one moving from egalitarian (such as band, tribe), to ranked (for instance, chiefdom), to stratified (such as state) societies
3On a side note, the British statistician Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, posited that universal social laws could only be those that concerned phenomena that emerge independently; that is, whose emergence cannot be explained by a similar development elsewhere. The configuration of domestication, urbanization, and state formation appears to be an excellent example and is, to our knowledge, the only example. Galton’s observation hinges on human agency as the source for copying behaviors and social arrangements. That states emerged in various parts of the world without there being any evidence of copying behavior could very well be explained by similarity in environmental changes that were global in scope. The end of the last ice age and the subsequently more favorable conditions for agriculture are an excellent example of that kind of global environmental change.
4As far as we know there are no stage models specific to CPR-management systems or other local associational systems; therefore, the following only concerns state and city- state systems.
5In all fairness, Service was not thefirst to describe political development in those terms.
That honor must go to Ibn Khaldûn who published in 1377 a history of the world. See ibid. (2005/1967),The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History(translated and introduced by Fran Rosenthal). Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 91–128.
(1967). Colin Renfrew focused on the chiefdom, a polity characterized as transitional, having a permanent chief who fulfills various functions (military leader, legislator, priest, judge), having fairly clear territorial boundaries, and some degree of redistribution of resources (1973, p. 543; 1974, p. 78).Group- oriented chiefdomshave a relatively low level of technology, some craft special- ization, and periodic distribution of resources (usually food) on special occasions. Individualizing chiefdoms have identified princes (for instance, the Celtic chiefdoms, see Arnold and Gibson, 1995; or the Polynesian chief- doms, see Service, 1975, p. 150) and a somewhat institutionalized redistri- butive system (Service, 1975, pp. 74 and 79), but do not have an internally specialized government apparatus (Yoffee, 2005, p. 25; Wright, 2006).
While attractive in their simplicity, stage models suffer from several problems. Jonathan Haas observed that Service, Fried, and Renfrew pre- sented their anthropological stage models as fact, even though they are not supported by the ethnographic and archaeological record (1982, p. 12; see also Claessen and Van de Velde, 1987, p. 3). Christopher Hallpike pointed out that social evolution could not be fruitfully described in stages because social reality manifests itself in multiple configurations, and advocated instead an analysis based on principles or generalizations addressing society’s increased complexity.6
A second type of critique concerned the centralization bias of stage models, which emphasized exclusionary (i.e., individualizing) strategies in the pursuit of political power and paid too little attention to corporate (that is, group-oriented) strategies (Blanton and others, 1996, p. 2; Haas, 2001b, p. 242).Exclusionary strategiesfor the acquisition of power are usually wealth- based, whilecorporate or collective strategiesin the pursuit of power are most often knowledge-based (McIntosh, 1999, p. 17). Tribal societies and their governing arrangements in contemporary Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and Oceania, even when embedded in territorial states (see next chapter), are excellent examples of such a corporate or collective orientation. Insofar as tribal societies have multiple centers of power, as is, for instance, the case in Africa (McIntosh, 1999, p. 22), they can be labeled polycentric. Good examples include the Andrantsay in the southwest
6Hallpike, 1986, p. 29. The six principles or generalizations of Hallpike (1986, p. 6) are:
increased social network size; social order via simplification of social relations and representations; increased differentiation and specialization of relations and principles of order; people socialized into accepting core principles and inescapable features of their society; selection of certain aspects of the world in terms of these core principles;
and capacity for change relative to the creative synthesis of preexisting but unrelated elements.
central highlands of late eighteenth century Madagascar, the Baganda in mid-nineteenth century Eastern Africa, and the Imerina in the central highlands of Madagascar in the late eighteenth century (for these three, see Wright, 2006). But they also include the tribal societies in the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia up to the middle of the twentieth century (Scott, 2009), in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent (including Pakistan and Afghanistan), and aboriginal groups in Australia to this day. CPR- management systems provide yet another example of knowledge-based, collective communities. However, polycentrism can also exist under exclu- sionary strategies, of which the feudal European Middle Ages are an example.
A third line of critique is that a linear representation of political development implicitly assumes that smaller units dissolve into larger ones: bands into tribes, tribes into chiefdoms, and chiefdoms into states.
However, throughout history smaller units have become part of but did not always, possibly even not often, dissolve into a larger entity. State and tribes not only coexist but they may actually sustain one another, as the cases of Transjordan tribal populations during the Hashemite regime (early twentieth century) (Alon, 2005) and, more recently, of tribal communities in Afghanistan have shown. Acknowledgment of tribal sovereignties in Australia, Africa, and North America in the later part of the twentieth century has strengthened, rather than undermined, the overall claim to sovereignty by the territorial and national state. Also, territorial or national states have started to help settle leadership disputes between tribes and/or acknowl- edged tribal sovereignty. An example of the former is the 2003 Traditional Leadership and Framework Act of South Africa;7an example of the latter is the status of Native-American tribes as sovereign in their own right.
A fourth line of critique concerns the fact that most research has focused on the elites (Brumfiel, 1992, p. 555) and, we add, on the top level of government. Obviously, the activities of local officials are recorded much less than those of their upper-local chiefs and kings, and thus there is much less information available about local associations in general (including historical CPRs) and, more specifically when these existed, of local government bureauc- racies. There are some exceptions (Foster, 1982; Wright and others, 1969;
7Upon this act, the South-African government is authorized to settle disputes about tribal leadership. This was done, for instance, recently for the Bapedi tribe. The Bapedi was a paramountcy since the sixteenth century that had become a kingdom in the 1790–1820 period; because several lineages claim the leadership, the state had to mediate.
Walters, 1970) and there may be more, but we will not know until the many clay tablets still awaiting transcription have become available.
Given the focus on top government levels and their elites, political change has often been conceptualized as a“rise and fall of . . .”(fill in the blank) with little, if any, attention to the fate of the various local communi- ties and associations. Perhaps they were in turmoil once the upper-local regime folded, but perhaps they were not. So complete is the focus upon the rise and fall of upper-local political regimes that the continuity provided by the local communities and associations is overlooked. Indeed, there is evidence throughout history that local communities and associations were vital to society. For instance, in ancient Sumer the governing body of a village (for instance, the abba asagǎ or field fathers) continued to function when the assembly of city rulers (unken) chaired by a“big man”
(lugal) responsible for adjudicating disputes between city-states and for deciding on peace and war, disintegrated because of some natural or man- made disaster (Westenholz, 2002, p. 27). There is no reason to assume that it was different elsewhere. Archaeological research has shown that the notion of a“dark age”8in Ancient Greece between the twelfth and eighth centuries BCE and in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the flash of the Carolingian empire is much overstated. Also, no matter how upsetting events during the French Revolution or the Third Reich were, there was much continuity not just in terms of elites continuing in office, but also at the local associational level. It is upon the latter’s continuity that upper-local political regimes could rise and fall. To be more precise, a local regime could grow its sphere of influence via conquest, amalgamation, or otherwise and become, temporarily, the center of an upper-local polity at regional (chiefdom) or a supraregional polity at an even higher level (state, empire).