Living Without Domination by Clark Samuel

Author:Clark, Samuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

States: Summary and Conclusions

I have characterised states in general as one particular social form among the many possible for humans. They are centralised, territorial, differentiated institutions, which create or increase, and assign, an immense range of capacities. In the common human situation of being without and uninfluenced by states, we very rarely create them, and when we do, the transformation is not an unambiguous increase in complexity. Our modern states are a recent, historically unique development, which adds further techniques and forms, including bureaucracies, armies and nationalism, to the basic pattern of the state. Again, their appearance is not best thought of as an increase in complexity, both because ‘complex’ is multivalent and because there are senses of the term in which that appearance is a simplification of human life.

Because of their current ubiquity, it is easy to find the existence and spread of states unsurprising. However, anyone who wants seriously to argue that states, and especially our current state-infested arrangements, were very likely, must deal with three strong counterarguments: pristine states have appeared only very rarely; the development of modern states involved a series of apparently adventitious victories and inventions; and for most of the time there have been humans, there have not been states. This does not entirely preclude an argument that (modern) states were not actually as unlikely as I have made them appear: it does make such argument difficult.

I have analysed states by considering their historical development in the context of the human landscape. As I have emphasised throughout this section, states are just one of many ways humans can organise, and have organised themselves. Further, the alternative to having a state is not chaos. There are multiple and differently ordered alternatives to the state social form (I consider two of them in more detail in Chapter 4).

As I argued in my Introduction, anarchism cannot be characterised merely as anti-statism. But anarchists certainly are against states, as one disastrous and currently ubiquitous social form, among other possibilities. In my next section, I consider another non-state social form against which anarchists should and do set themselves.

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