A journey: Between pre-modern and modern statehood

An initial sensible way of approaching the characteristics of the modern state is to compare it with its pre-modern counterpart. The historical literature on pre-modern statehood speaks of states in the minimal sense of simply the existence of a relatively ‘autonomous political unit’ (Carneiro 1970: 733).

And when discussing the gradual rise of the primitive or early pre-modern state forms, emphasis is typically put on the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ initiated roughly 10-12,000 years ago – that is, the pivotal shift from a Paleolithic seasonal life of hunting and gathering to a Neolithic life of agricultural production and more permanent settlements. Importantly, the spread of agriculture and agricultural settlement – which appeared largely independently in many places and at different times, starting in the Middle East around 9000 BC (in south-eastern Turkey, Iran and the Levant) and then in places like China, Central and South America (e.g., Harari 2014: 77-79) – involved and triggered a number of key social, institutional and organizational mechanisms integral to state-formation processes.

To start out, the agricultural revolution implied the twin dynamics of the cultivation of plants (implying vegetable wheats and storable cereal) and the management of domesticated animals (such as sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, chickens), allowing for population growth, economies of scale and new water and tool-making techniques (e.g., Smithsonian Institution 2011: 18-9; Diamond 2002). Harari (2014:

80-97) describes the organized cultivation of wheat, associated with the shift towards permanent villages, as part of a Faustian ‘wheat bargain’: while the overall population would increase markedly, agricultural life, compared to that of the nomadic and sensual hunter-gatherer, was much more decease-ridden and involved physically hard and psychologically self-disciplining work. Importantly, in contrast to the seasonally-based nomadic wildlife, one may argue that permanent settlement implies an attempted fixation of social structures over time, a territorial investment with the expectation of a certain continuity. Arguably, it seems, with increased temporal fixation and organizational investments comes increased motivation for seeking territorial protection. Partly historically approximating Hegel’s (2008: 265) formative analytical distinction between internal and external sovereignty, one may say that out of the processes of agricultural domestication – the move to farming-based permanent settlement and beyond – comes not only the idea of the ‘domestic’ or ’home’ but also the constitution of a ‘need’

for territorial protection. The process of domestication thus dialectically institutes two of the main traits of generic statehood (that is, whether pre-modern or modern), namely internal/domestic social and

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resource management and externally-oriented capacities for war-making (e.g., to protect the village against unwelcome intruders).

Eventually, around 3000 BC, larger, more organized and complex settlements appeared in the form of cities and civilizations. Uruk, the world’s first city or walled urban settlement, emerged in the region of Sumer in Southeastern Mesopotamia. In Uruk, pictographic writing appeared for the first time together with the crafting of bureaucracy and military techniques. Other city-states of southern Mesopotamia included, for example, Nippur, Kish, Ur. Besides the crafting of complex social and organizational structures, the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia were seemingly structured around early forms of social ‘stratification’ (Aguilera-Barchet 2015: 13). Also ancient Egypt stands out as an especially complex and organized form of civilization and kingdom. Under Pharaoh-based dynastic Egyptian rule, we see not only the flourishing of engineering, craftsmanship, arts, hieroglyphic writing, ship-building but also complex bureaucracy. Of course, Pharaoh-anchored bureaucracy had, as Service (1975: 230) puts it, a ‘patriarchal character’ – compered to modern bureaucratic practices, it can be seen as a form of ‘familistic aristocratic theocracy’. That said, Egyptian bureaucratic centralization nevertheless involved not only such positions as a ‘chief of fields’ (in charge of agriculture) and a

‘master of largesse’ (in charge of livestock) but, notably, the Grand Vizier (Ibid.) – that is, the highest official, a form of ‘permanent secretary’ to the Pharaoh. Other important ancient civilizations, preempting modern state-formation processes, appeared in China around the Yellow River region.

From the Shang dynasty (most likely the first Chinese dynasty emerging around 1800 BC) and onwards, we see a gradual process of increasing organizational complexity involving relative organizational centralization and stability and increased bureaucratic and military efficiency. With this pre-modern history in mind: in the pre-modern post-Neolithic journey from egalitarian primitive society (non-ruler driven bands and tribes), through politically organized or ruler-driven multi-village chiefdoms (whether simple, compound or consolidated), to complex city-states and empires (Service 1975; van Creveld 1999: 1-52; Carneiro 2000), one can locate the early contours of a key mechanism of later modern statehood, namely the territory-centered centralization and institutionalization of political power (see, e.g., Service 1975: 8; Poggi 1990: 18).

Arguably, one can learn a great deal about the generic mechanisms of state-formation when observing the evolution of the pre-modern types; they reveal insights that are useful for looking at the logic of the later modern trajectory. Firstly, in the pre-modern state-formation trajectory, we see a

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constitutive mixture of externality (acquisition or protection) and internality (internal evolution) (e.g., Carneiro 1970: 736) – a generic dialectic that is also integral to the constitution of modern statehood, which is typically construed as a double process involving both internal and external pressure (Møller 2012: 20-1; Kaspersen & Gabriel 2008). Secondly, pre-modern state-formation trajectories reveal the internal mechanism-based character of this (doubly constitutive) process. As Service (1975: 7, emphasis added) points out, ‘not only did some of the archaic civilizations probably develop independently; they also developed surprisingly similar kinds of new cultural features’. This combination of independent developments producing shared outcomes – a combination that also holds for the initial agricultural revolution, in which agriculture spread independently at different times, in different regions – is important for understanding state formation: ‘since it happened several times independently we immediately wonder (…) what causes or repetitive processes were at work’ (Ibid.: 6-7, emphasis in original). In this sense, one can meaningfully study generic mechanisms located across otherwise varying temporal, geographical and institutional settings; and as shall be seen later, and as argued more generally in chapter 4, it makes sense, in a parallel manner, to examine cross-cutting contemporary ‘commonalities’ (notably Streeck 2012b) – that is, in this study’s case, the generic and endogenously-anchored organizational and functional mechanisms and traits tied to liberal-capitalist democratic statehood.

Thirdly, a cursory juxtaposition of pre-modern and modern statehood reveals that the distinction between the two categories is one of both cumulative continuation and qualitative change. In many ways, Weber’s work is representative of this duality. On the one hand, he placed his overall rationalization thesis within a long-term historical trajectory. In Weber’s (1948: 323-359) fascinating Intermediate Reflections (Zwischenbetrachtung) – with the translated subtitle Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions – he speaks, somewhat preempting Luhmann and (less so) Bourdieu, of the crucial differentiation of value spheres (Wertsphären), i.e. the political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual spheres, somehow leading towards, or triggering, modernity or the rationalization process.¹⁰⁷ According to Weber, the differentiation and rationalization of the different value spheres follows from both their own internal rationalization logic and through the clash with religion, in particular the major universalist and ‘world-denying’ salvation/world religions emerging from around 1000 BC, which forces each sphere to provide a ‘competing form of salvation’ (Bellah 1999: 293;

107 See Bellah (1999) for a productive account of Weber’s Intermediate Reflections.

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Weber 1948: 330). In a rather complex way, Weber situates his rationalization thesis in an more than two millennia old value-anchored trajectory – locating ‘rationalizing potentialities’ in the Axial age (Bellah 1999: 280) – and even points to India, not the Western world, as the original ‘cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the world’ (Weber 1948: 323).

Moreover, when Weber (e.g., 1978: 1402) refers to, for example, the Egyptian and Chinese civilizations he sometimes emphasizes their, to use Bellah’s term, bureaucratizing and ‘rationalizing potentialities’.¹⁰⁸ In this way, Weber’s ‘rationalization’-oriented view – which, in contrast to Marx’s (1990: 874) ‘reification’-oriented historical trajectory that focuses on the relatively recent ‘process that divorces the worker from the ownership of production’,¹⁰⁹ emphasizes the long-term co-evolutionary dialectics of institutionalized political power and capitalistic profit-making and the millennia-old emergence of an ideational ‘methodical way of life’ (Weber 1948: 327) – in some sense supports the view that modern statehood can be seen as a long-term cumulative continuation of pre-modern structures and mechanisms having ‘rationalizing potentialities’.

On the other hand, Weber’s work also systematically points to the qualitative uniqueness of modern forms of organization and institutionalized relations of economic and political power. At the very same time as Weber (1978: 1402) reaches back to, for example, ancient Egypt to locate

‘rationalizing potentialities’, he immediately qualifies this: while a non-private property state bureaucracy ‘would be similar to the situation in ancient Egypt’, such a situation, were it ever to be fully realized, would nevertheless ‘occur in a much more rational – and hence unbreakable – form’.

While, as he points out in a conference intervention in Vienna in 1909, ‘to this day, there has never been a bureaucracy that could have come even close to Egyptian bureaucracy’ and that it is ‘clear that today we are rushing inexorably towards a development that follows precisely this model’, this is now done ‘on a technically refined, more rationalized, i.e., on a far more mechanized basis’ (Weber 1909).

108 When, towards the end of Economy and Society, Weber (1978: 1402, emphasis in original) discusses the possibility of statehood without private capitalism, he pessimistically argues that ‘[s]tate bureaucracy would rule alone’, comparing this to ‘the situation in ancient Egypt’. Reflecting on the possibilities of a full ‘machination’ of social life, the existence of a sublime and all-engulfing form of ‘rational bureaucratic administration’, Weber (Ibid.) commented that in such a situation people might be ‘as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt’.

109 Although notice that when Marx (1990: 876, fn. 1) launches his epochal historical-theoretical analysis of the

‘primitive’ emergence of capitalism, he proceeds to study the critical case of England fully aware that it was in the Italian city-states ‘where capitalist production developed earliest’.

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Compared to the modern ‘contractually employed official’, in the Egyptian ‘hydraulic’ bureaucracy (Weber 1978: 198), the ‘officials were slaves of the Pharaoh, if not legally, at least in fact’ (Weber 1948: 208). With the pharaoh as ‘the source of law, governing by inspired decisions’ (Service 1975:

230), Egyptian bureaucratic domination differs markedly from Weber’s (1948: 196-8; see also 1978:

218-220) well-known six ideal-typical dimensions of modern bureaucracy. The same would obviously, and to an even larger extent, apply to chiefdoms which, although based on ‘centralized direction’, implied ‘hereditary hierarchical status arrangements with an aristocratic ethos’ (Service 1975: 16).

Importantly, as I shall discuss later, a key element separating pre-modern from modern statehood is the latter’s relative activation of officialdom/formality and impersonality (or emergentist corporate-institutional abstractness).

In this context, it is uncertain whether Charles Tilly’s (1990) distinction between ‘states’ and

‘national states’ covers the key elements that are central to the transformation from pre-modern to modern statehood. In Tilly’s (1990: 1, 2) framework, states are defined as ‘coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories’, while national states are defined as

‘relatively powerful, centralized, and differentiated sovereign organizations’. But do these aspects adequately capture the difference between pre-modern and modern statehood? Does Tilly’s neo-Weberian definition adequately capture the neo-Weberian, i.e. formal and bureaucratic, character of modern statehood or, importantly, the significance of, as shall be argued below, the emergentist, impersonalized, corporate-institutional logic of a modern state? ¹¹⁰ Moreover, as shall be discussed later, conceptions in line with Tilly’s neo-Weberian, and arguably neo-positivist, explicit overemphasis on the immediately observable organizational means of the state, critically neglects the functional dynamic of modern statehood, a functional side that shall be appreciated later in this chapter and throughout the study more generally.

In sum, one can say that it is useful to operate with an understanding of the modern state that is able to capture both the cumulative continuations and the qualitative changes instituted through the shift

110 Of course, Tilly might to some extent be excused since his intention with the term national state is not necessarily to produce a definition of the modern state but simply an intermediate concept placed in between pre-modern states and what he calls ‘nation-states’, defined as ‘a state whose people share a strong linguistic, religious, and symbolic identity’ (Tilly 1990: 3).

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from pre-modernity to modernity. As I shall argue in the next chapter, the always gradual and never-ending character of modern statehood – our inability to locate, in a fully exhaustive manner, all of the defined attributes of statehood ‘out there’, i.e. the necessary discrepancy between ideal-types and real world entities – motivates us to operate with alternative terms such as ‘state-crafting’, which alludes to the always already ongoingness of statehood, the artful and always unfinished making of stateness.