For the next few posts (I, II, III), I want to take a look at how some ‘tribal’1 peoples raised armies, in contrast to the way that ancient (or later) states raised armies. As moderns, we are so familiar with the way that states function that the far older systems of non-state organization and mobilization end up feeling quite alien: difficult to understand and to some modern observers, implausible. But these were real systems that really raised large armies which really did compete – sometimes quite successfully – with larger, more centrally organized states.
So we are going to look at how some of these armies were raised: first the social structures that provided the foundation for the system, then the non-state political structures which facilitated mobilizing the whole community collectively, and then finally discuss briefly the sort of armies that result from these systems. That means this week we’ll be mostly focused on the structures of non-state agrarian societies, setting in place the building blocks from which we’ll recruit our armies, rather than getting to much of the recruiting itself.
But this is also a useful opportunity to cover non-state societies generally and to explain what makes them non-state. I’ve found in online discussions that folks often want to blur this particular distinction and it is tempting to do because non-state polities often have structures that, at first blush, look like state institutions. You could absolutely describe a Gallic civitas (or ‘tribe’) in a way that makes it sound like a state on par with the Roman Republic (or vice-versa), but that requires ignoring important distinctions between institutions and customary, personalistic forms of non-state organization and governance, distinctions which ought not be blurred because they are quite meaningful.
Now we can’t cover every sort of non-state organizing system and I don’t intend to. Instead, we’re going to look more narrowly at a broad ‘family’ of systems in pre-Roman ‘barbarian Europe,’ by which I mean a band of territory running from the interior of Spain (particularly the uplands of the Meseta), through what is today France (then Transalpine Gaul) and Northern Italy (then Cisalpine Gaul), into Germany and the broader Danube basin. To the Romans, the peoples of these regions were the Celtiberians (along with other Celtic-language speaking Spaniards the Romans and Greeks often grouped with them), the Gauls (living in what is today France, the Alps, Northern Italy and the broader Danube River basin) and to a lesser extent Germanic speaking peoples, a group the Romans will call the Germani, but who are not coterminous with modern Germans or German-language speakers, but broadly lived across the Rhine.2 We’re also going to pick a time period, in particular we’re going to focus on the period from the third century to the end of the first century BC, in part because that gives us a nice good chunk of literary evidence and also because it is where my own research tends to focus.
Now I want to note something right out: these are three different cultural groupings, with different and distinct material cultures and cultural practices. They do have similar military mobilization systems, which is why I think I can treat them here together, but of course any analysis like this is going to obscure some of those differences. So while this is intended as a general primer, one’s next step in investigating any of these cultures would of course be to get specific, because each group is going to be different and indeed there will be differences within groups (that is, the Celtiberians are not exactly the same as other Celtic-language speakers in Spain, nor are all of the Gauls everywhere precisely the same, and so on).
Another thing to get out of the way, before we start is the language I am going to use to refer to these folks. Saying ‘non-state polity’ over and over again is terribly cumbersome and irritating. The normal English usage here would instead be to say ‘tribe,’ but that has all sorts of problems. For one, it mauls the Latin etymology, where a tribus is not a polity, but a component of one. But more broadly the word ‘tribe’ meaning a non-state polity bigger than a clan but smaller than a chiefdom is troublesome too, lot the least of which because the largest non-state polities aren’t always run by a ‘chief’ or ‘petty king.’ Instead, I’ve increasingly come to borrow the Latin usage and describe these polities as civitates (sing. civitas), ‘citizen-communities,’ because that’s what the Romans called them, both before and after they were conquered by Rome. That said, some uses of ‘tribal’ here are going to be unavoidable for clarity without spiraling into academic language, so I don’t promise to entirely banish the word.
Likewise, I am going to use a lot of the terms the Romans use for components of this society: equites, principes, iuvenes and so on. These are necessarily imperfect: they are, after all, Latin words, translations not only of language but of concept for a Roman audience. But they’re at least much closer to the original societies than their frequent modern translations, while the original words these societies – which do not write to us – used are long lost to us.
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I should not that the artwork of non-state Iron Age Europe doesn’t tend to feature human figures very often, with the result that there are very few depictions of them – even fewer depictions of non-elite humans in basically any condition.
(Bibliography Note: The bibliography on these Iron Age (pre-Roman) non-state societies is, as you may imagine, fairly vast, but split across several languages, with work on the Gauls dominated by works in French, while scholarship on the Celtiberians is overwhelmingly done in Spanish and work on Roman-era Germanic-language speakers split over quite a few languages. On Gallic warfare, the standard references, though somewhat aged, on Gallic warfare are J.-L. Brunaux, Guerre et Religion en Gaule, Essai D’Anthropologie Celtique (2004) and J.-L. Brunaux and B. Lambot, Armement et Guerre chez les Gaulois (1987). Particularly useful for the current effort is N. Roymans, Tribal Societies in Northern Gaul: An Anthropological Perspective (1990), which offers an overview of social structures in Gaul, including both Celtic-language and Germanic-language speaking peoples. On the Celtiberians, the best starting place is certainly F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera, a translation of the original F. Quesada Sanz Armas de la antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010). For more detail than this, one must rapidly dive into Spanish however. On Celtiberian social structures and their ties to war, in particular, P. Ciprés, Guerra y Sociedad en la Hispania Indoeuropea (1993). Meanwhile, the Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age, C. Haselgrove et al. eds. (2023) is finally actually published (somewhat ironically just a couple of months are I joked about its status) and offers wide-ranging overviews both regionally and topically, though it is – as much such handbooks are – priced for libraries, not for mortals.)
The Subsistence Basis
As I’ve noted in the past, one of the best ways to start thinking about any historical society is to begin with the subsistence foundation it is built on, because how people get food to eat and other basic necessities is going to shape everything else in a society. Because subsistence structures the daily labor of the vast majority of any pre-modern society, it dictates the daily and seasonal rhythms of life, the major concerns everyone is focused on (how to get enough food to live), and thus the social structures created around those constraints.
And here, there tends to be quite a lot of confusion. The Roman-era Gauls and Germani tend to exist in popular culture as the ‘barbarians’ par excellance and so get pulled in with lots of ‘barbarian’ tropes (which we have discussed) even when they don’t apply here. So they’re depicting as always eating a lot of meat and living in the middle of dense forests, to the point that people often think of Gauls or Germani as being nomadic herders eating meat all of the time, or even hunter-gatherers, because that’s how they imagine ‘barbarians.’
And that is…quite wrong!
All of these people we’re looking at – Celt-language speakers in Spain, the Gauls (who are also Celtic-language-speakers) and the Germani – were all agrarian societies, which is to say the main source of subsistence, providing the vast majority of calories for everyday life was farming, particularly cereal farming. Why cereal farming? Because wheat (and barley) as crops can support a lot more people for a given unit of land or labor than basically any other option available to these societies, so they tend to dominate. This being Europe and Europe having received its farming system from Egypt and the Near East, that means the primary crop is wheat, supported by things like barley and rye, along the horticulture of vegetables. One difference from our discussion of ancient Mediterranean farming is that the other two legs of the Mediterranean triad – olives and grapes – are less common in this period outside of Spain (south Spain actually ends up as a big olive production region in the Roman period). Wine cultivation in what is today France is mostly a product of the Roman period; in the pre-Roman (that is, pre-58BC) period, wine is an expensive import good in Gaul, whereas beer is the locally produced alcohol.
These societies are, of course, also engaging in some animal husbandry, but it is not of the nomadic sort we discussed with the Mongols, instead it seems to be a mix of transhumant pastoralism of the sort we discussed back when we talked about cloth production or else ranching. In the latter case, in these sorts of agricultural economies, ranching animals for meat (like cows) is a capital-intensive endeavor – cows are expensive and you could support a lot more people turning that pasture over to wheat – and so it tends to be done by the rich to produce what are, in effect, luxury foods. It is the case that these societies, especially the elite may have eaten rather more meat than the general populace in the more densely populated, more urban societies of the Mediterranean, but these folks are not primarily pastoralists eating a meat-and-dairy diet, they’re mostly farmers supplementing a diet that is primarily made up of grains (and beer made from grains) with fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy – relatively small amounts (by modern standards) for all but the very wealthy.
That cereal-farming based subsistence system is going to determine a whole mess of social structures which are then going to be essential for understanding how these societies raise armies, particularly because, without state institutions, these social structures are all these societies have with which to organize military force. Effectively the subsistence system here is going to determine both the basic building block that exist for an army to be built out of and also the relations between those blocks. Now outlining all of the complex ways cereal farming shape pre-modern societies would be a blog series in its own, but fortunately, we already did that series, so I can just hit the basics here and those of you who want more information can head over and read the full farming series.
The vast majority of societies of this sort consist of what we may call peasant farmers: households that exist on effectively the smallest possible size of farm that can support their family. They may own this farm, or they may be tenants or sharecroppers on land owned by large landholders, the ‘Big Men,’ we’ll get to in a moment. The pressures that produce this accumulation at the bottom are fairly simple: families both tend to split up farms over generations, because parents want all of their children to be able to make a living, while at the same time farming households tend to grow to the limit of what their farm can support, because folks don’t generally want to kick their family members out to starve if they don’t have to. The natural result is that, even as new land may be cleared and brought under cultivation and the population may be growing, most farming households accumulate at the same basic minimum of subsistence and just a bit more.3
For these small farmers on the edge of subsistence, the main problem is risk and variability. Farming is unpredictable and a failure in yields means starvation, consequently, society is largely shaped by the risk-mitigation strategies of small farmers. In particular, farmers tend to form dense horizontal social networks (meaning networks with social equals – other peasant farmers) with other farmers so they can rely on the help of other peasant farmers in bad times. That means village or town society is not a bunch of atomized households, but a very dense network of interconnected families who all have ties and pull on each other. These ‘clan’ ties mean a lot in these societies, because you rely on them to eat when times are rough.
Big Men and Small Farmers
The small farmers also cultivate vertical ties with our next group of people, the large landholders or ‘Big Men.’ We term these relationships patron-client relationships and the general system is often called ‘clientelism’ (or as the Romans would have it, clientela or patrocinium). Because while there are all sorts of pressures that tend to cause households to accumulate at subsistence, socially, you can also see the potential for a family with a lot of land – because land is the primary productive resource – to achieve ‘escape velocity’ as it were. With enough wealth (in land), a landholder can invest in expensive capital – mills, animals, tools – to make his already large landholdings more efficient (and also to ‘loan’ out on favorable-to-the-landholder terms to those who don’t have them). With enough wealth (in land), that same landholder can also shape political and social institutions to his benefit.
The small farmers here might be tenants, farming on land owned by the Big Men with their Big Farms, or they might own their own small plots but be substantially reliant on the Big Man anyway. When a family needs more land to farm because they have more mouths to feed, they’ll need to sharecrop or rent that land from the Big Man. When they need food or money to cover a bad harvest, they’ll go into debt to the Big Man. When they need capital (in objects, not money) they can’t produce – tools, mills, draft-animals, weapons – they’ll need to rely on the Big Man. When they need justice, their property protected or their disputes resolved, they’ll need to go to the Big Man for it. The big man is the patron, the small farmer the client.
What that means is that these ‘big men’ tend to become the leaders – or despots, if you prefer – of their local society, especially because of their key roles in resolving disputes and redistributing wealth. Nathan Goldwag actually had an excellent examination of these sorts of structures as they appear, in an idealized form, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire among the Hobbits. Modern folks, because their lives are so extensively structured by the state, tend to imagine that without the state – in a ‘state of nature’ – they’d be more free, but that is not the case! Instead, the rule of these local Big Men (along with the social pressures created by the need to maintain those horizontal relationships) can be quite suffocating and total; the Big Man often feels quite fine to regulate elements of one’s life that all but the most totalitarian of states might well deem private. To be fair to the Big Men, they tend to imagine their role much as Tolkien does, as generous and benevolent overseers of society and in some cases their peasants might even agree; people in the past tended to believe their own values, after all. That said, one cannot help but notice that any time the little folk are given a chance to limit the power of the Big Men, they do so, so on the whole one cannot say that the little folk were always so enamored of the guidance of the Big Men.
Economically, the Big Men are large landholders, but that doesn’t just mean they are a larger version of the small farmers. The key thing that distinguishes the Big Man, from an economic perspective, is that he has a large surplus, both in absolute terms, but also relative to overall production. Because the Big Man runs his estate to produce wealth, rather than to support a family, he can cut labor down closer to what the land actually requires (whereas peasant households, as units of labor, are almost always too large for their farms). At the same time, he can employ riskier strategies or shift risk on to the little farmers, enabling great efficiency in production, by, for instance, specializing in certain crops. And he has a lot more capital – animals, tools, and so on – which also improve yields.
That surplus production can in turn be used to support people doing things other than farming. That might be craftspeople producing goods that farming households can’t (like metal tools and weapons), or it might be thugs who help the Big Man enforce his idea of ‘justice.’ Or it might be poets and artists who produce things that reinforce the idea that the rule of the Big Man is Right and Just and Good. It might also be mobilizing the community towards collective works, like building a town wall, usually with the Big Man employing the specialists directly and using his little farmers – his clients – as the bulk labor. He might also use his wealth to create all sorts of prestige goods he can use as gifts or – even better, especially from the perspective of our relatively poor non-state societies – acquire prestige objects from wealthier foreign societies (we’ll come back to this in just a moment). All of which feeds back into the vertical relationships, because he can then provide these things to smaller farmers who cannot acquire or produce them themselves, the big man’s end up the reciprocal bargain (though, again, because the Big Man has the power here, the bargains favor him).
Now these are general features of clientelism – or as the Romans would say, clientela – in agrarian societies, but obviously the precise structure of these patronage relationships is going to vary. While archaeology can clue us in to emerging social hierarchies – we can see Big Men archaeologically because they have lavish burials, for instance – it cannot tell us much about the underlying customs and social relationships, as unlike grave goods or human remains, customs do not survive when buried in the ground. There, we are reliant on literary sources and here of course comes the immediate problem: all of our literary sources about Gauls, Celtiberians and Germani are written by Greeks and Romans, who not only have their own agendas but may not particularly understand these communities. They’re also translating local customs, which can blur terms and meanings as well, but we have no real way to work our way back to the pre-translated (both lingustically and culturally) original. We’re stuck with the sources we have.4
Nevertheless, it is what we have. Our literary sources comment repeatedly on the clientelistic structure of these societies, particularly Gallic society (e.g. Polyb. 2.17.12, Caes. BGall. 6.11-13, 6.15.2, Diod. Sic. 5.29.2, for the Germani, note Tac. Germ 13-14), but only rarely in any great amount of detail. Caesar, in his Comentarii de bello Gallico (“Commentaries on the Gallic Wars”) offers the most sustained descriptions. On the one hand, he comments, seemingly picking up on the way that aristocrats would protect their clients that, “It seems to have been instituted for this purpose since ancient times, so that no one of the commons should be in want of help against the more powerful, that no one [of the aristocrats] suffers one of his own to be oppressed or defrauded, for if he does otherwise, he won’t have any authority among his own at all” (Caes. BGall 6.11.4). That sounds relatively good.
On the other hand, Caesar says about the overall balance of power in Gallic society that, “the plebs [by which he means the commons] are held almost in the condition of slaves” because “the man, oppressed either by debt or by the magnitude of their payments [read: rents, Latin: tributum] or by the injustice of the power, give themselves in servitude to the aristocrats [nobiles, lit: ‘the notable ones’]: they have the same rights in all things over them as a master does over slaves” (Caes. BGall. 6.13.2).5 Even as oligarchicly minded, no Roman is going to write that that “the plebs are held almost in the condition of slaves” as a good thing and I think the clear implication of this line is that even Caesar is somewhat taken aback by just how strongly subordinated the little farmers are in this system.
That’s not actually so surprising. Again, folks tend to assume that absent government structures, the little guy gets a fairer shake, but a big part of the development that we see in early civic governments (e.g. Solon’s reforms at Athens, or the Struggle of the Orders in Rome) is that the civic expression of the state tended to provide a mechanism by which the commons might demand better treatment than what came before. Of course, we also want to be aware of just how limited that evidence is: Caesar is describing the customs in one part of Gaul and we simply lack a similar discussion of power-distance in Celtiberia or the rest of the La Tène material culture sphere (broadly associated with Gallic settlement) or among Germanic-language speakers. Still, Caesar’s assessment ought to caution us against assuming that these relationships were generally ideal or that farmers living before the advent of the state lived in some anarchic utopia.
Aristocrats and Retinues
So at this point, we have vertical relationships between the small farmer clients and their aristocratic Big Men, and horizontal relationships amongst the small farmers. That leaves, of course, horizontal relationships between the aristocrats.
Now we’ll get into how these aristocrats fight and how they are equipped a little later in the series, but we do have to note at the outset these are not just military aristocrats but warrior aristocrats. I often use the term ‘military aristocrats’ to describe a social aristocracy whose existence is largely justified through its military role – that is, this is how it generates legitimacy. But of course that military role can be about political and military leadership (the Roman nobiles are a good example of this) rather than personal martial valor. And certainly our non-state principes do serve as the military leaders, the generals and officers, of their societies. But what we see in artwork and especially in burial customs hammers home how quite a lot of their social position is based on their role as warriors, to the point that it seems like the possession of arms was a requirement for full membership in these communities (a point we’ll come back to).
Now of course, not all of the large landholders are equally large landholders. Some of these Big Men are very big, while others are merely large. To the small farmers socially clustered around them, the difference probably doesn’t matter that much, but of course in the relations between these men it might matter a great deal.
Now once again, relationships between aristocrats are not typically something our sources allow us a lot of insight into. But we can see some things. First, our sources, particularly the Latin-language sources,6 tend to distinguish between two layers of the aristocracy: the broad aristocracy they call the equites (‘horseman, cavalry’) while there is a sub-group of these they call the principes (‘first men, chief men’). In essence, you have little Big Men (equites) and Big Big Men (principes).7 From what we see, it is the principes that generally hold the reins of government, but we’ll come back to that next week.
Now of course a note of caution: I am going to use these Latin terms – equites and principes – because they are what our sources use, but of course no Celtiberian or Gaul is going to be calling themselves this because these are Latin terms. However, I think it is better to use the words our sources do than – as some translators are wont – import later terms like ‘noble’ or ‘knight’ or ‘chief,’ because those modern English terms come with a lot of baggage. I don’t want to imply, for instance, that these fellows exist with a rigid order of titles like the late medieval aristocracy – they certainly don’t appear to! And a ‘chief’ may as well refer to elected leaders in some societies, hereditary ones in others. Here, equites in the sense of ‘men rich enough to afford horses’ and principes in the sense of ‘leading men’ will do just fine, even if we have to be aware that our Latin sources are bending some – unknowable to us – original word and meaning to suit Roman political terminology.
What we also see is that the most powerful of these principes are often able to form their own personal retinues, often mounted. The Aedui princeps Dumnorix had a private cavalry guard, while the Sotiates principes Adiatunnus was reported to have some six hundred permanent retainers (Caes. BGall. 1.18, 3.22). A Celtiberian aristocrat, Allucius, raised a handpicked force of 1,400 cavalry (Livy 26.50.14). These individuals are, of course, surely exceptional and these numbers may be inflated, but the point is these permanent retainers are unlikely to be drawn from the small farmer clients – rather, they’re the product of horizontal relationships between aristocrats. You can tell, to be blunt, because these fellows are mostly mounted and poor farmers both do not have horses and have not practiced to fight on horseback.
There are a few different structures for horizontal relationships between aristocrats, some we can see clearly in the sources and some we might assume from the structure of these societies. Crucially, unlike the vassalage-based polities you may be more familiar with, these ties seem to have often been less formal and rigid, though no less binding. In particular, all of these Big Men don’t necessarily owe allegiance to a singular king – most of these polities do not have kings and what kings they have are more first among equals than true monarchs – but rather are bound together by these horizontal ties and (we’ll get to this next time) relatively weak communal governing institutions.
One form we see clearly are marriage alliances between aristocrats, frequently between different civitates, establishing bonds that might reach across the relatively fragile polities of non-state societies. Thus part of the root of Dumnorix’ power were a set of marriage alliances, including not just his own marriage but also those of his mother (presumably a second marriage) and his sisters (Caes. BGall. 1.18). Likewise, the Chatti and Cherusci seem to have had a habit of intermarrying to form alliances (e.g. Tac. Ann. 11.16.2, Strabo 7.1.4).
But it is equally clear that the very biggest Big Men must also have taken smaller aristocrats as their clients as well, though our sources rarely get this granular. Whereas the relationship between the Big Men and their small farmers was effectively one of domination, the relationships between aristocrats was couched in terms of friendship, hospitality and gift exchange. This is what Polybius means when he says that the Gauls “placed a great emphasis on friendship” – sure, everyone likes having friends, but he means a rather particular, political form of friendship. So for a very big Big Man, many of the horseman in his cavalry retinue are other, slightly smaller aristocrats who hold close to him for the things he can provide.
And what can the biggest of Big Men provide? Well, of course, one advantage is that these fellows tend to be the central organizing figures in political factions and thus have access to power. But they also have greater access to goods and wealth and here we get into the role of a gift economy. To maintain their position, these aristocrats need to participate in gift-exchange with other aristocrats (and possibly with some important clients) and so need suitably impressive gifts to give. Remember, these relationships are not set in stone, so everyone in this system may be continually recalculating who it is in their advantage to support. So the wealthy and powerful Big Man is going to look for opportunities – in that feasting, hospitality and gift exchange – to display that he is the ‘correct choice’ for other aristocrats to support. That means giving high prestige gifts, with the inequality of the gifts often being the point of the exchange, a visual, public expression of the inequality and reciprocity between you.
If that makes no sense, consider it playing out for a moment (or alternately, you can read Beowulf, where these sorts of exchanges happen at multiple points): the wealthier aristocrat holds a feast and his junior retainers visit. They know that gift-exchange is expected and that their fellow aristocrats will judge their status and importance based on the gifts they bring, so they bring some pretty nice things. But the senior aristocrat has to outdo them all in his counter-gifts both to show that he can provide positive benefits to his retainers (in exchange for their military service) and to display his own wealth and power. Looking at burial evidence, it seems pretty clear that for the upper-most tier of aristocrats, expensive imported goods served a valuable purpose here. If your junior aristocrat offers you some, say, good locally produced beer and you respond with imported Greek wine, you’ve not only outdone him, but you’ve signaled that – unlike these local elites – you, the bigger Big Man, are plugged into to much wider, cross-regional networks of exchange and patronage. That is a very valuable message!
Another form of horizontal aristocratic bond we see are warrior bands of ‘youths,’ often analogized with the Irish fian. Our Latin sources typically call these fellows iuvenes, ‘youths,’ a term in Latin that indicates an individual in their late teens or twenties. We’ll come back to these fellows later, but I want to tag their existence now: one ‘feature’ of these sorts of polities is the struggle of the formal political leadership to actually control their societies iuvenes, who might otherwise be engaging in private military action, formed into smaller warrior societies or bands. It’s not hard to see how these bands of aristocratic ‘youths’ might transition, as those young men one by one inherit their fathers’ wealth and estates, into lasting political bonds. Indeed, one imagines that, for the son of a smaller big man, attaching yourself to the warrior band of the son of a much larger big man might be a pretty good strategy for political and economic advancement, in time.
Finally, it seems very likely that aristocrats also engaged permanent, full-time retainers. Our sources rarely comment on these fellows – if you’ve picked up the sense that our sources rarely look below the most powerful of the principes, you would be correct – but the size of some of the retinues we see seem to necessitate their existence. The exception to this are warrior-retainers called devoti in Latin and apparently soldurii by at least some of the Gauls (Caes. BGall. 3.22). These followers reportedly pledge their lives to their leader, promising that should he die violently, they would die with him or else commit suicide; Plutarch (Sert. 14.4) reports the same custom in Spain; in exchange, they’re maintained in the leader’s household. Of course this gets comment from our sources precisely because they think it is so unusual from a Greek or Roman perspective, though the sense we get is that this was not unusual in these cultures. No source tells us where these fellows would come from, but to think by analogy to other similar societies, the second sons of the lesser elite – men trained to fight like aristocrats, but without the wealth to sustain that lifestyle – would make a lot of sense.
So we have a lot of systems – marriages and other kinship relations, hospitality and ritualized friendship, warrior bands and full-time retainers – that bind these aristocrats together. And then those aristocrats, in turn, have most of the poorer rural population bound to them as clients, tying the whole society together without state institutions. These are the ties that these societies will use to mobilize armies in the absence of state institutions. In some sense, as we’ll see, what makes a polity – the civitas – is less a clear political boundary than simply a group of aristocrats that regularly work together because they are bound by these ties.
- That is, larger non-state polities
- In particular, the Germanic-language-speakers the Romans are calling Germani include the Franks (who will end up being French), Angles and Saxons (who will end up being English), along with Goths, Burgundians, Lombards and so on who end up in Spain, France and Italy respectively, though in none of these cases did they fully or even mostly replace the native population. The Dutch today also speak a Germanic language, but the Romans tended to treat the inhabitants of the ancient low countries, the Belgae and the Frisii, as being something of their own thing (both seem to be Celtic-language speakers). Likewise, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are all Germanic languages, but the Romans generally don’t seem generally to have had Scandanavians in mind when they talked about the Germani, in part because the Romans are at best only dimly aware of the region. Consequently it is important to avoid the mistake, well documented in C.B. Krebs’ A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (2012) of conflating the really broad group of Germanic-language speakers in, say, Tacitus to modern Germans.
- In practice, this tends to mean rather large households of c. 5-10 members, on small farms usually around 5 acres or so, a natural range of size that recurs broadly in wheat-farming cultures.
- And no, broadly speaking, I do not think that later Celtic-language speaking peoples or customs offer much help. We’ve discussed this before, but one of the great distortions, I think, in the history of various Celtic-language speaking peoples is their tendency to get wrapped up in the nationalism of modern Celtic-language speaking peoples, which in turn assumes that these folks can be understood as one grand unity, when it is by no means clear that they can be.
- I think one has to be pretty careful with translation in this sort of thing, by the by. Caesar is explaining to a Roman audience an unfamiliar (to them) culture, so he is using Roman equivalents and terminology. But a translator and a modern reader introduce even more layers of interpretation, so that, for instance, what the Gauls understand as their aristocracy, Caesar translates to the nearest Latin equivalent, nobiles (again, literally ‘the notable, known ones’) which a modern translator might render ‘nobles,’ leading a modern reader to assume this is some sort of titled, medieval-style aristocracy when all Caesar really means here may be ‘the big men, who tend to be the sons of big men.’ One of those reasons historians put so much weight on developing language skills.
- Which seem, especially when in comes to Gaul, to be quite a lot more careful than our Greek language sources. I suspect this has to do with proximity and familiarity, as most of our Greek-language sources are not from areas as immediately exposed to Gallic cultural contact as Italy. Heck, one of our key sources here, Livy (Titus Livius) live in Padua (then Patavium) which, when he was born, was still part of Cisalpine Gaul, so he may have been rather more familiar!
- E.g. Caes. BGall. 2.28, 7.4; Tac. Hist. 5.19; Livy 21.25.7, 21.31.7, 22.21.7, 32.30, 34.21.2
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This piece could have been titled: “Try That in a Small Town.” Even these days, relationships get mighty personalistic and clientist in such places, at least in the USA. A lot of things don’t change that much.
Small Town Tyrant is the link I immediately thought of when that bit about extreme control came up.
The second post in the farming series relatedly made some sense of the sharecropping/plantations/etc. history I’d heard about back in school, at least in painting a clearer picture of what that was about and where it might have come from for similar reasons.
To a much lesser extent, sure. You don’t depend on those relationships to survive though, it’s just a very natural way for humans to interact. Increasingly people satisfy these needs through Internet messaging or what I can only term political identities rather than local relationships.
Plus these places are increasingly rare. This is partially because of intentional social engineering that incidentally atomized the public, namely the American style suburbs, but a lot is subsistence related.
As the moral shire link emphasizes global capitalism and industrialization tend to disintegrate these relationships, both because industrial surplus removes their need and because capital holders don’t need the vertical social integration and can’t spend time to navigate it. The horizontal layers are much stronger because humans *like* friendships, but the vertical ones are all sterilized, rebuilt to extract capital.
This is actually a vital part of understanding peasant socialism. You have these peasants with horizontal structures suddenly thrust into a world where their vertical hierarchies are outdated and their labor is both less necessary and paradoxically more productive producing chaotic change.
Then strangers start replacing the traditional aristocrats, levying taxes and soldiers in the form of rent, talking of wars for the survival of the nation. When socialist firebrands start spreading word of class consciousness and the concept of a unifying horizontal structure to replace the current system it makes a natural sort of sense. On a local scale the horizontal support networks are already communal.
I think this discussion of peasant socialism is pretty great. It reminds me a lot both of what Eric Hobsbawm talks about in his essays about peasants and politics (especially with regard to South America), and of the situations I remember reading about in a Latin American history class back in college. In particular, I think you’re right to point out the confluence of factors that lead to peasant socialism emerging exactly when it did: the increasing productivity of labor, the increasingly precarious situation of the peasants, the actual *decline* in their status as traditional landlord relationships were replaced by modern capitalism, and the spread of modern socialist ideology.
In parts of South America, of course, modern socialist ideology was combined with a deliberate effort to look back to the Inca Empire as a sort of pre-colonial proto-socialist model, so it’s hard to draw a strict division between “forward looking” and “backwrd looking” perspectives. But I don’t think this is unique to the South American context, either.
It’s absolutely part of east Asian socialism too; Pol Pot is the most clear example, to frankly disastrous effect. He had a romantic view of the traditional Peasant farmer and their Khmer identity and communal lifestyle. His solution to the fact that not everyone was a farmer was to…get rid of everyone who wasn’t a farmer. Or forcibly convert them to farmers. Resulting in the complete demographic collapse of the nation. Mao had a broadly similar philosophy, but to less openly malicious results mostly because he wasn’t a complete monster.
Less disastrously so was the original Vietnamese socialist movement, but the complexities of that movement deserve their own analysis. Ho Chi Minh was a traditionalist scholar of Confucianism, but he had significant foreign education and the actual policy became dominated by the revolutionary struggle for independence, for obvious reasons. Domestically the early Vietnamese system had *actual* diffusion of power and responsibility between the chairman (Ho Chi Minh) and the general secretary, who he appointed but whom actually carried out the reform. Hence when the general secretary screwed up Ho Chi Minh could actually appoint a new one, which may have prevented some of the excesses of Mao or Pol Pot’s doubling down on failed land reform policies.
Even then there are fascinating tales of how the early Vietnamese land reform systems actually became dominated by the landlords; the local councils naturally became dominated by then, and the government had to try multiple times to break the system (resulting in excessive violence, but not, to my knowledge, large scale starvation). The Peasants were tolerant of Vietnamese landlords, they mostly hated *French* ones.
It’s telling that in these societies the revolutionary leaders ended up being a form of middle class local intellectual-Mao’s background was as the son of a wealthy landlord, Ho Chi Minh was a Confucian scholar although, notably, his general secretaries were often of actual peasant stock, and Pol Pot was the son of his villages wealthiest landowner. Very often these movements were the traditional local “big men” acting as heralds of a new system that promised to reestablish the relevancy of the horizontal social ties and abolish the vertical ones.
The fact that very often these big men had *no idea what they were doing* is telling; Pol Pot mostly stands out as being particularly insane and stupid, a detached “intellectual” trying to re-establish an ideal of a peasant society that *never actually existed*, prone to the worst of revanchism, racial stereotyping, ethnic mythologizing, and gross generalization.
Corrections: most of Vietnamese general secretaries up to the land reform came from Confucian scholar families.
If you’re referring to the anti landlord campaign, then yes that confirms my understanding- there was excessive violence (although the actual number of executions seems to be disputed, estimates vary by a factor of 100) but no starvation. Ho Chi Minh went on radio afterwards, expressed regret over the excessive executions (he even broke down and wept on the radio), blaming it on too much influence from Chinese/Maoist advisers, and released some political prisoners and even returned some land.
On a completely different note, I think it’s interesting how modern day socialist / postcommunist Vietnam really has continued to be a *party state*, without falling into the pitfalls of one-man rule that befell some other socialist countries. It really does seem to be the *party* that’s in charge (like the ideal of how a one-party state is supposed to work), rather than a single man. They’ve had seven leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, and I didn’t even know the names of any of them after the third, without looking them up, which probably says something about their low profile: three out of the seven have also been removed by the party. It sounds from what you’re saying that that was even true in Ho Chi Minh’s time as well.
Orwell noted that such movements tended to be dominated by the middle class. He told an anecdote about the time he went to a town hall for information while living among the poor. His friends thought that they wouldn’t give it out. (The clerk was uncooperative, he got some but not all the information.) He concluded it was that middle-class people tend to expect results from their actions.
Orwell noted that such movements tended to be dominated by the middle class. He told an anecdote about the time he went to a town hall for information while living among the poor. His friends thought that they wouldn’t give it out. (The clerk was uncooperative, he got some but not all the information.) He concluded it was that middle-class people tend to expect results from their actions.
That really depends on the situation. The early Soviet leaders were mostly from the intelligentsia (as were the formative people in other revolutionary movements in the Russian empire), and then as noted, so was Ho Chi Minh. Mao was the son of a wealthy landlord, as was Castro (he was the semi-legitimate son of one of the wealthiest landowners on the island). On the other hand, party cadres in the Soviet Union after the 1930s (when Stalin purged the party) were largely drawn from peasant or worker origins, and a lot of the leaders of the Warsaw Pact communist states (Gottwald, Ulbricht, Novotny, Tito, Zhivkov, etc.) were genuinely either working class themselves or from working class families.
Part of that comes down to the changing class definitions. People are rightly critical of life under Marxist-leninist states, but conditions manifestly improved compared to even prewar tsarist Russia, clique era China, or the various colonies.
The fact that second or third generation leaders were from more working class stock is an indication of how economic improvements enabled political engagement by the lower classes. In a meaningful sense all the listed leaders had the same material class, even if their social class differed. An early 1900s middle class intellectual probably had about the same living standard as a mid or late 1900s worker.
In other words…the system kinda worked. Not necessarily fully, but enough.
On the other hand actually being a leader allowed extreme excess in the Soviet sphere. It’s just that getting to be a leader wasn’t really hereditary. If nothing else Vasily Stalin saw to that.
That could equally indicate that those in power wanted the mindset of lack of power.
Yes actually, if I’m interpreting you right. You can interpret that as mostly mythmaking, that the leaders wanted the appearance of being lower class than they were. There’s real evidence it’s not so, *and* real evidence it is. What I said regarding living conditions can be spoken to generally, but the specific biographies are going to be subject to revisionism and we can’t ignore that.
As an aside, there are fascinating tales of how Stalinist Russia notably differed from Nazi Germany, and a lot of it comes to the desired affect of the regime. I forget from whom, but I listened to a talk about how Stalin had prisoners ask forgiveness, publicly, of the people for their “crimes”, whereas Hitler just shot them. Even at its most authoritarian there was a meaningful desire to appear egalitarian, equal, and humanist amongst the Soviets.
Even if effectively they were effectively just jackboots in red rather than black, they did seem to care about appearance.
> I forget from whom, but I listened to a talk about how Stalin had prisoners ask forgiveness, publicly, of the people for their “crimes”, whereas Hitler just shot them. Even at its most authoritarian there was a meaningful desire to appear egalitarian, equal, and humanist amongst the Soviets.
I dunno, to me that just seems like psychological sadism.
I mean, if a tyrannical dictator accused you of, I dunno, murdering your mother, feeding her corpse to starving orphans, and afterwards engaging in necrophilia with her, wouldn’t it be worse if you were forced to publicly confess to it? (Especially on pain of actually killing your mother, who for the purposes of this hypothetical was alive and well the entire time.)
No, there was no general rule that ‘conditions manifestly improved’.
In Russia, Lenin first destroyed the country with the civil war, which had been caused by his coup, and War Communism. After Lenin died Stalin instituted a regime so oppressive and exploitative he made Czar Nicholas II look like an angel by comparison.
Under Stalin the living standards of the peasantry, the largest group, declined as a result of the forced collectivisation of agriculture he had introduced to extract as much grain as possible to be exported to pay for the import of industrial equipment.
By contrast, under Czar Nicholas II most land had already been owned by the peasantry, either individually or through communes, instead of nobles and other large landlords. However, curiously that is seldom mentioned.
I admit that Lenin and Stalin had done more to improve education and health care than would likely have been the case in a continuation of the czarist system*. However, that is not much of a consolation for the millions of people who had died as result of the famines caused by collectivisation or ‘denomadization’ or which had perished when they were forcibly moved into new factory cities with cattle train wagons. (On a sidenote: another positive thing the Bolsheviks did was abolishing the corporal punishment of children in schools; however, that was a very small positive compared with all the negative things that they had done.)
* Though, Lenin had actually overthrown the Republic and I have no idea how that government would have performed in those fields.
There also were subgroups of the population whose living standards had increased, like educated proletarians, whom I had once heard described as the ‘main beneficiaries of Stalinism’. However, once again that is not much of a consolation for the people who had died in the ‘dekulakization’ or ‘de-Cossackization campaigns’.
And before somebody goes on about how ‘Stalin at least had industrialized Russia’, Russia already was industrializing under Czar Nicholas II. Stalin might have sped up the process; however, that was only achieved through use of the massive application of state terror to expropriate from peasants to fund industrialization and to move population into factories.
The above paragraph is not just my personal opinion. The question of how Stalin would have compared with a counterfactual continuation of the Czarist economy had been investigated by economists. They had also compared both with Japan and concluded that the Russian economy could have achieved growth comparable to under Stalin, and without disproportionate costs, if it had behaved like that of inter-war Japan; however, I am unsure whether that would have been feasible under the environment of a Czarist or non-Bolshevik Republican Russia.
Source: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/stalin-and-soviet-industrialisation
Then there is Mao.
Whilst I admit he at first had done a great job ruling his country, at least for a Communist; for example, his barefoot doctor program greatly improved public health in a large poor country. He afterwards destroyed his country by launching the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
There are good reasons why diaspora Chinese who had, either themselves or their ancestors, lived through the Great Leap Forward and/or Cultural Revolution tend to disagree with the CCP’s claim that ‘Mao was 70% good and 30% bad’.
Tus, I appreciate your reply and may revisit it, but I have significant reasons to dispute the core assertions of those economists. The general consensus is that the Soviets did, in fact, improve the living standard of most people and that the tzar was either unwilling or unable to do the same.
That you can find economists arguing otherwise is not convincing to me because you can find economists arguing for literally every pro establishment opinion possible, including many that are either counterfactual or literally impossible. There’s very little inherent authority to publishing an economics paper, so I’d need to really, really dig into it to see if I agreed with their analysis.
That said, I absolutely want it to be true because it implies the devil’s bargain of the vanguardists was just a lie, and is consistent with my view of the point of no return: namely when Lenin ordered the military to fire on the peasant socialists rather than allow a transfer if power. If their concerns were 100% valid it’d really simplify my ethical position.
“The general consensus is that the Soviets did, in fact, improve the living standard of most people and that the tzar was either unwilling or unable to do the same.”
Of whom? How was this consensus determined? What are qualifications of those who form it, and how did they obtain the information to do so?
Economists and social scientists, growth rates and GDP measures a long with nutritional profiles and cost of living analysis, a combination of verifiable data and Soviet reported yields. While a lot of that data can be questioned there’s enough verifiable data to say that the Soviet economy grew a ton and that this translated to increased living standards, along with the increased military spending. Notably, very few people challenge that.
The real question is how you prove policy did this, or that other policy wouldn’t. In general you simply can’t, with a few exceptions where we know that some policies don’t work. That’s the part I can’t really engage with right now; it’s been too long since I cached my conclusions there, I’d need to re read a ton.
> Economists and social scientists, growth rates and GDP measures a long with nutritional profiles and cost of living analysis, a combination of verifiable data and Soviet reported yields
This is wrong. the soviet regime used 1913 as a baseline figure for its internal assessments. even if you ignore the fact that the internal figures were full of lies, those 1913 figures were not surpassed for decades, in some cases until not after ww2.
That, after 30 years, they were finally doing as wee as when they started is not praiseworthy, it’s an utter, abject failure in what used to be the fastest growing economy in europe.
> The real question is how you prove policy did this, or that other policy wouldn’t. In general you simply can’t, with a few exceptions where we know that some policies don’t work.
I think we can agree that apologize for those who slaughtered millions and tens of millions of your their own people and failed economically is a policy that never ends well…
That said, I absolutely want it to be true because it implies the devil’s bargain of the vanguardists was just a lie, and is consistent with my view of the point of no return: namely when Lenin ordered the military to fire on the peasant socialists rather than allow a transfer if power. If their concerns were 100% valid it’d really simplify my ethical position.
Both of you are wrong because even if you take the Acemoglu essay as correct, for the sake of argument, it doesn’t actually address the merits of rule by a vanguard party in general, or socialism in general. It’s specifically about the Stalin model of rapid industrialization, primitive socialist accumulation via immiserating the peasantry, etc., and confined to the Soviet Union. Vanguard party rule existed before Stalin and after Stalin, the Soviet economy underwent lots of changes before his ascension to power and after his death, and there were lots of other socialist states out there (most of which, for example, didn’t experience anything like the three Soviet famines). The alternatives considered by Acemoglu and his coauthors isn’t “libertarian socialism” or whatever, it’s an economy with a greater reliance on markets. One of the people they cite explicitly thinks that Stalinism hampered the Soviet economy *relative to the New Economic Policy*, which still involved rule by the Communist Party, just with market prices, freedom of trade, small scale private ownership, etc..
I think that the case for rule by a vanguard party, to some degree, is correct- you’re not going to get socialism otherwise, and I think even the Socialist Revolutionaries would have had to turn *somewhat* authoritarian if they had been faced with the challenges of actually carrying out a revolution- but I definitely think that Bukharin’s model of gradual industrialization and more freedom for the peasantry would have been a better alternative to Stalin, and I also think that at least some degree of market socialism would have been a better alternative to the pure command economy.
The fact that second or third generation leaders were from more working class stock is an indication of how economic improvements enabled political engagement by the lower classes.
I think that’s definitely part of it- expanding mass education, and in particular trying to increase political consciousness and awareness among peasants and workers, is going to have that effect. But I also think two other things were probably involved as well. We know that, at least today, people from outside elite or professional-managerial backgrounds tend to be lower in, what the psychologists call “openness”, and that includes openness to wild new ideas about politics. (That might sound politically incorrect, but I’m a fairly low openness guy myself, at least compared to progressives, so I’m actually not saying it as a criticism, more the contrary). In 1900 it took a fair amount of openness to be a socialist since it was literally an untested idea that only existed in books (and if you expand the definition of socialism, in far-off times and places like the Inca empire or various hunter-gatherer tribes). In 1945, or even more in say 1960, it wasn’t a wild new theory- there were actual socialist states out there, and the question “socialism or capitalism” wasn’t about “how do you like this brand new theory” and more about “how much do you like the existing socialist model compared to the existing capitalist model”.
And then also of course, there’s the impact of WWII which destabilized the existing order and created a power vacuum, where there were new opportunities to rise up the political ranks, for people who might not have had such opportunities before. Tito for example, his path to power was by leading a guerrilla army.
I guess one of the few postwar Eastern European leaders who was from an upper middle class / intelligentsia background was Enver Hoxha in Albania, and he was the most ideologically extreme / far-Left of the lot. Which confirms my personal feeling that working class leaders are generally going to be more ideologically “grounded”, for lack of a better word, more pragmatic and focused on keeping the lights running, and less fond of pursuing extreme ideological dreams, than ones from an intellectual / intelligentsia background.
I also should amend my comment to say, worker or artisan background- Tito was apprenticed as a locksmith before the war, which probably would fit more in the artisan than in the strictly “proletariat / worker” category.
But that isn’t the only option: religion is another one. I cant help wondering if something like this helps explain the MAGA crowd: did globalization somehow disrupt their moral economy in a way that I am not aware of? It might explain a lot.
2008 did. We’re still coming to terms as a society with what that financial crisis meant, but the core of it is that we had a group of elites tanking the economy to increase their relative share of wealth. To do this they exploited peoples desire to buy a home and trust in the American dream, along with the weakness of deregulated government agencies and the complacency of for-hire credit agencies that are supposed to curtail risky investment.
This created a huge real estate bubble where poor people were misled into indebting themselves to an astounding degree and middle class people were manipulated into buying their debt. Meanwhile the rich extracted wealth from both, and in the end got bailed out so they could make *more* loans when their insane ones failed.
The end result was that the poor lost their homes, the middle class their investments, and the rich got a whole lot richer as a percentage of wealth, once the consequences of the bailout became clear.
However, and this is key, it was all perfectly in line with capitalism. Nothing about the actions of the 2008 financial crisis was irrational from the perspective of making money.
For westerners the foundational promise of capitalism is that it’ll create wealth and that you’ll get to own a home, if only you do the work, buy in, don’t rely on handouts, and save money.
The poor bought a home and worked. The middle class were frugal and invested wisely. The credit agencies did what they needed to for repeat business. Everything was just…part of the system.
So 2008 showed that entirely as a rational expression of capitalism the rich will rob you, devalue your home, tank your savings, and nothing you can do can ever get the money back. In fact, your paying them to do it. Don’t like that? Both parties agree on it. Want to see someone prosecuted? Tough luck. Nothing illegal here.
In the wake of that there have been two reactions; to reject capitalism and to double down on capitalism. Either try to “purify” the system, or completely get rid of it.
Purify, there, largely means get rid of the jews. And the gays. And the liberals. And the “welfare queens”. And the government, but only the government when it’s not keeping those people down, and…
In other words, 2008 broke capitalism. Now we only have fascism, socialism, and the delusional middle.
There is nothing capitalistic about forcing people to bail out banks playing with x10 leverage. One of the big differences between capitalism and socialism is that in capitalism, the central planners (we call them “investors”) have their necks on the line. In capitalism, the planners who properly identify good companies and allocate resources to them get more money, while the ones who invest in bad companies lose their shirts. It’s called skin in the game, which Mao and Stalin, and the government-supported bankers did not have.
As far as I can see, banks are only allowed to invest customer capital as historical baggage from the 18th century when various financiers were tasked with concocting wild scams on the public to fund European governments (such as the South Sea Company). In any other context, if you take customer money and invest it and claim it’s all safe, the government will not guarantee your wild x10 leverage trades and then invent increasingly more elaborate regulation to excuse the periodic inevitable failures that come with using other people’s money for x10 leverage trading. They just put you in prison (ideally before you lose the money, as soon as you take it and start playing with it).
One day, narrow banks will be the only legal type of bank. Today, the Fed actively cracks down on narrow banks. I have no explanation for it that does not involve malice.
BTW, in 2022 when FTX went bankrupt, people were very glib about crypto. SBF was playing with customer money and is rightfully in jail.
In the same year when overleveraged banks started going bankrupt, the same glib people were much more compassionate in their coverage. After SVB failed, the Fed started offering below-market loans, basically bailing out the rest of the industry. Where was the bailout for FTX? Where were the prison sentences? Why is Binance getting more police attention than institutions that we *know* are playing with customer money?
Yeah, yeah, they’re regulated, so they’re allowed to play with customer money. The regulations don’t stop them from going bust without regular tax dollar injections, but they do show they have nice suits and lots of cronies, and ultimately that’s enough to corrupt the government into looking past an entire industry playing with customer money.
@honhonhonhon That as may be, but I think the public perception is more important than the reality in instances like this. Perhaps rewording it as ‘2008 broke the public’s faith in capitalism’ would be more accurate.
It’s less about whether what happened was a natural function of the system or not, but whether people .
Of course, one method of rectifying that if the system is indeed not broken is to go about saying ‘what happened was an aberration that shouldn’t happen again’, but it does allow for both things to exist as motivational drivers. The reality, and the public perception of that reality.
It’s not that the system isn’t broken, it’s that it’s broken in a way that “more goverment” (represented by both fascism and socialism) won’t fix. The fix is capitalistic – stop bailing them out, stop regulating them, let the banks go bust the same as every other type of investor goes bust. Government involvement should be limited to general anti-fraud enforcement, aka putting everyone in prison as soon as you find out they’re using oblivious people’s money, same way you would put Martin Shkreli or SBF in prison.
A couple points above are way off base. First, mortgage-backed securities are not sold to retail investors in 2008 or today, so no middle-class people lost their savings in such investments. Second, for better or worse, capitalist governments have been bailing out banks for 200-plus years now: it’s simply a feature of actually existing capitalism. Third, banks like SVB serve social functions, the provision of investment capital and maintenance of financial exchange systems, which crypto exchanges do not. Maybe those two functions could be separated, but for historical reasons they are combined. As a Burkean conservative, I’m inherently skeptical of schemes for radical reform. (And Burke only saw the horrific results of one major revolution; the next two were even worse.)
Well, at least we agree that they have these privileges for historical reasons – as an artifact of those times 200 years ago when financiers were tasked with scamming the public to finance their governments. They would not be given this type of velvet glove treatment if banking law were being written from scratch today, with a modern understanding of risk, leverage, contract law wrt using other people’s money etc.
Hon, that’s a complete failure of analysis on every level. There’s everything capitalistic about forcing people to bail out banks. Every single capitalist state has has incredibly strong state intervention on the side of the owning class and will continue to do so. You need to drill it through your head and into your soul that ***EVERYTHING*** people have told you about how capitalism creates consequences for investors is just a lie. Believing in it is anti empiricism at this point.
And Mao and Stalins societies just aren’t the relevant here, except as an example of what can go wrong with revolutionary violence. Which is important, but not because it’s socialism. Neither ever implemented a socialist society, they even said so; they claimed to be transitional. Forever.
In a philosophical sense capitalists will leverage power to *create* governments to shield themselves from consequences for lending. It’s well attested in historical sources, and is basically what capitalism is; a system for offloading the risk of investing money. They do this by creating power systems that implicitly favor class, wealth, and abstract ownership, like police, courts, credit agencies, and private services. Capital isn’t just money, it’s *social power*, it’s *privilege*. It’s a right to a share of profits because of class, explicitly shielded from risk.
If you’re arguing for a system of lending where risk mitigation is illegal it’s not capitalism, it’s just a market economy. A heavily government regulated one, because what you’re describing as ideal is literally only achievable with the government reforms your saying you think are wrong; it’s completely incoherent.
In a direct sense if the government didn’t bail out investors the damage was already done. The only difference would have been that no lending would be done, creating a complete failure of monetary flow. The bankers manipulated events such that *not* bailing them out would be disastrous.
The solution wasn’t to not inject money into the economy. It was to inject money then line every single banker and creditor against the wall and shoot them, or at least imprison them forever, before instituting a broad wealth reform to redistribute wealth to their victims. The only institution capable of doing that is the government. That sucks, it’s incredibly risky, revolutionary violence using the state is **super sketchy**, but the state monopoly on violence and the structure of the legal system makes it the only means of reform.
Look, I feel the need to step back here; if your conclusion after watching 2008 is that capitalism is great except for the government, when weakening government reforms directly caused it, *and* your solution is government reform…you don’t know what’s going on in your own head, and you really need to. This is the defining moment of our times.
That kind of incoherency is directly what people living in fascist states actually believed. The average German in 1930’s Germany didn’t think they were changing capitalism, just making it more patriotic and pure. They honestly deluded themselves into supporting government oversight of capitalism that picked winners while believing it wasn’t government intervention.
In other words, not to put a point on it… you’re part of who I was talking about when I said fascist there. This isn’t an insult, you didn’t get there from idealogical hatred, but your foundational buy in to the system will inevitably lead you down the reactionary rabbit hole and to allying with reactionaries.
And crypto is hated by institutions because it’s openly a scam on every level, and yes, it’s a competing scam with institutional ones. I really can’t go into this, without being condescending I think you’re already working from a massively deficient understanding of society and I just can’t engage with why crypto is also bad, but lots of people have already pointed out why it’s completely useless. Go watch Dan Olsen’s video series, he’s right.
Ey, that’s factually wrong. Specifically, middle class Americans did invest in subprime mortgages because the fraudulent credit agencies marked them as AAA and AA, letting pensions and other collective savings accounts invest in them. This was particularly bad because of deregulation of the markets under conservatives like Reagan, Bush, and to a lesser (but real!) extent Clinton.
This also hit other countries middle class which bought American debt too, through the same mechanism. That’s why the crash was so bad, and it was, again, a result of the rational interests of all the actors involved.
And yeah, even if you think I’m completely insane, understand that basically everyone who lived through the crisis, particularly as a kid, is violently resentful of the entire thing on some level and all moral pretenses for society at large have been broken into little pieces by it.
I don’t mind institutions hating crypto, I think they should also hate other people who gamble with customers’ money to the same extent, and treat them equally.
As for capitalists building their own governments – maybe. But that only makes it more important to argue against the whole “well-regulated capitalism” spiel that has been popular my whole life. Those well-meaning regulations are what allow crony capitalism. Let them sink or swim on their own merits.
“As far as I can see, banks are only allowed to invest customer capital as historical baggage from the 18th century when various financiers were tasked with concocting wild scams on the public to fund European governments (such as the South Sea Company).”
The idea that banks take customer deposits and invest them is very common as an understanding of how banks work. It’s very easy to envision if you think of a bank as a a man in a top hat with a big strongroom full of gold coins, which is kind of how we all start out thinking about banks.
It’s wrong, I should emphasise, but it’s wrong in an interesting way, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be stupid to believe it.
This is a very clear explanation of what modern banks actually do https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy
(Note, apart from anything else, that while money you have in a bank account is capital *to you*, it is not capital *to the bank*. To the bank, it is a liability.)
This is clear to me ajay, and is not at all my objection. Investing with other people’s money is totally fine (I do it too in my margin account). What made SBF a criminal is that he lied to the people whose money he was using – he did not tell them that he’s risking their money. Same thing every bank is doing.
Now you will say, banks are not lying about this. Everyone knows that they invest the money. Banks exist in this Schrödinger space where everyone knows that, but when they are about to go bust and vaporize everyone’s savings, suddenly we have to protect the oblivious consumer and bail them out.
Again, the Fed is actively *opposed* to licensing narrow banks which do not have this problem. In every other circumstance, misleading consumers that their money is safely deposited while you actually invest it at x10 leverage is criminal fraud, regardless of whether you lose it or not.
You will say that this is fine because banks are regulated. I say that those regulations are not needed and allow banks to continue this risky and fraudulent gambling with the deposits of unaware customers (and to excuse the inevitable bailouts). We need only one set of rules, the same ones that apply to everyone else – you take depositor money to gamble with, you either inform those depositors and make sure they’re good for it, or you go to prison. And when you lose the money, well, the depositors agreed to take the risk so you don’t need a bailout.
Government-sanctioned FTX-style fraud is not an essential part of payment processing (see Visa) nor investing (see Vanguard). Coupling these things is just a historical artifact.
But the banks write the rules. Any system which produces inequality will always have that problem. The idea that you can just enforce a single ruleset and be done is ahistorical because without regulation the banks will underwrite a system to shield themselves from liability and run away with the profits while offloading the toxic assets, until they’ve done this enough that they own the economy and are now the government, oops.
It’s telling that the systems, like crypto, which enforce a single unalterable set of rules are the most fraudulent. The rules being clear just makes the exploitation unreversible as soon as someone promises something and doesn’t deliver. The problem isn’t the lack of clarity or certainty, it’s the lack of accountability. This is irrespective of the fact that even crypto doesn’t actually have a set of rules, forks exist and are used to resolve disputes that are bad for the controlling oligarchy, so it’s just a system where the little guy has rules and the big ones have suggestions.
And yeah, I know I mispegged you on crypto, my apologies, but I’m bringing it up because it’s a system that’s supposed to be doing what you seem to want.
I’m not even saying having agencies that exist to rewrite the rules in competition with the banks is a solution, it’s certainly not a stable one. It’s a better one than doing nothing though, as shown by the fact that every time those agencies are weakened it blows up in our faces.
I actually just don’t want the banks to, in some senses, exist. Or maybe to exist, but not for staples which would be decommodified. But a regulated market is a better short term state than nothing.
>I actually just don’t want the banks to, in some senses, exist.
When you remove the ability to lie to customers about what you’re doing with the deposits, banks functionally cease to exist. What you’re left with is a plain old money market fund/hedge fund/private credit fund/payment processor. Which of these, depends on what the former bank decides to do in its new circumstances.
Perhaps you’ll find this to be a mere semantic argument but I could not resist 🙂
This is one bizarre conversation- we simultaneously have people arguing that “America in 2008 wasn’t capitalist” and that, say, the Warsaw Pact states in 1965 weren’t socialist. Neither of which is a claim I hear very often.
You can define these terms however you want, of course, so if you want you can define socialism as a stateless, moneyless society. I don’t think that definition is either useful or interesting however, since I don’t think a stateless society without centralized authorities is ever going to exist. I think debating the costs and benefits of, say, Czechoslovakia in 1965 is interesting and productive, since societies like that serve as a prototype and future socialist states are going to need to build on their experience, taking what worked, discarding what didn’t, and making their own tradeoffs between the costs and benefits: I don’t really see the point of debating a stateless, moneyless socialist society where everything is distributed according to need, since that kind of society has never existed.
DCmorinmorin is also wrong when he says that the socialist states never claimed to have achieved socialism. They didn’t claim to have achieved *communism*, which is a separate issue, but a number of them did claim to have achieved socialism- the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and probably others although I haven’t checkd.
I can’t remember the last thing I read that kept giving me King Of Dragon Pass flashbacks so much.
Do we have any sense for how much land a given ‘big man’ family would need to support the lifestyle of the ‘equites’ or ‘principes’, or is that information not available in our sources?
Seems to me like a continuum. You have your peasants, then your peasants with some decent surplus to maintain a little homespun capital and a couple extra hands, then Guy What Owns A Plow And Accessories, Guy who mostly manages rather than gets in the dirt, guy who only manages and so on up the line by degrees. The horizontal relationships between peasants ought to be as not-entirely-horizontal as those between the aristocrats. Eventually, you are big enough that you have clients who are really in your power and the Big Men have to deal with you on increasingly even terms until voila, you are definitely an aristocrat.
I imagine this also depends a lot on a given societies level of rigidity among aristocrats, who can certainly erect barriers of various sorts that may create a clearer line to jump.
Sorry if I wasn’t quite clear, but that’s not really what I meant. I was more going along the lines of this: If the lines, blurry as they may be, between “Guy What Owns a Plow and Accessories” and “Guy who mostly manages rather than gets in the dirt” are anywhere, it’s in how much land they own which permit the differing lifestyles they demonstrate. Land means wealth and wealth means status and a very different set of activities.
What I’m asking is what are the land ranges between those different groups? How much land do you need to be a “Guy who mostly manages rather than gets in the dirt”?
Depends on the region. In Iceland one could be a major Big Guy and still haul dung (Gunnar of Lithend is one such – a warrior, well-connected, a judge and leader of his district, yet out sowing in the spring). In Gaul – in medieval times maybe 15 acres lifted you into yeoman class, while a small manor – one that could support a single cavalryman – was around 120 acres of arable: 25 peasant farms.
Depend on time and places : medieval knight would need 600-1000 acres. So my guess gallic aristocracy need 200+ acres to maintain smaller horse
The medieval knight is an aberration: the 500 acres (i.e. 250 hectares) is needed to equip a man with full plate armour, a charger, a couple of pack horses and a retinue of a few fully armed servants.
When we talk about the size of a farm needed to equip a riding warrior, it is instructive to look at 17th century Sweden. There, any peasant could pay their taxes by equipping and hiring a cavalry soldier instead. That was a big investment, but it carried prestige, a chance of loot and the tax burden was high. Thus, this shows the probable lower bound for equipping a cavalryman. Typically, a Finnish farm trying to do this would have some 10 hectares of field, which means a farm that can, in modern agricultural conditions, maintain about five or six milk cows. So, this would be about the lowest possible income at which you would be able to equip an early modern cavalryman: a horse, a pistol, a sword, a cuirass and equipment for the horse.
I would say that 3 or 4 hectares of field in ancient Gaul would be enough for somebody to become a riding warrior if they really wanted that, as the land there is more productive (and iron-age Gaullish farming is probably about as advanced as 17th century Finnish farming, where iron plow was still mostly unknown.)
“I would say that 3 or 4 hectares of field in ancient Gaul would be enough for somebody to become a riding warrior if they really wanted that, as the land there is more productive (and iron-age Gaullish farming is probably about as advanced as 17th century Finnish farming, where iron plow was still mostly unknown.)”
Have a look at a nice, and accidentally comparatively well-documented, case from 15th century AD Gaul.
D´Arcs.
4 hectares of field.
Also 4 hectares of forest and 12 hectares of pasture.
And no, you cannot simply conclude that meat was scarce because the land would feed more people as a wheat field. No. Much or most of the land is unfit for fields. Too stony, too swampy, too sandy for wheat… but good enough for pasture. Europeans were “farmers” because there were usable patches of fields dispersed around the land mostly near everywhere, in contrast to say Mongolia (too dry for wheat, even on good soils) or Lappland (too cold) – but they had a lot of land which was only good for pasture.
Anyway, back to D´Arcs. Before 1429, they were Big Men and Women… but not nobles. D´Arcs owned exactly the only stone house in the village of Domremy. Savings of about £200 or 300 (the French pound/livre). Jacques d´Arc held office collecting taxes from his neigbours and commanding village militia.
Note Big Women. Jacques d´Arc had moved to Domremy from a place named Ceffonds some distance away. It is suggested that the stone house – remember, the only stone house in the village – was owned not by him but by his wife Isabelle Romee. Note the nickname Romee. It is suggested that she went to a pilgrimage to Rome some time – which was not usual for peasant girl. Isabelle also had a brother who was NOT a peasant – he was a cleric.
Anyway, D´Arcs were classified on the peasant side of Big Men till 1429. 5 adult children: 3 sons, 2 daughters, Jeanne the youngest of 5.
In 1429, d´Arcs were made noble. Does it seem a big leap from a rich peasant like d´Arcs to poor nobles?
How many £££ did Jeanne actually earn for her surviving family by saving France?
There’s also the Guy Who Only Works The Fields During All Hands On Decks sort of thing. Hired hands can make it very slippery by handling some amount of the routine work, perhaps all of it in slow times.
I dont know the exact meassures, nor the conversion to ammount of land, but you can go to Solon or servius tullius, and look at the ammount they ask for to be part of x class, if i remember correctly solon uses medimnoi, so volume of arids (aka wheat) and the romans used money. Its not a straight answer but should be convertible more or less easily into some ammount of land. If you dig deeper you should have a lot more of this class of edicts to classify people for the army and civic rights across the world to get some kind of guesstimate about the ammount of land
I recently read the Deverry series by Katharine Kerr. It’s fantasy, set hundreds of years after a Gaulish tribe fled Roman into the sea and washed up on another world. Low-level warfare is a constant in the series, and that usually means a bunch of minor aristocrats bound together by friendship, kinship, or marriage, each bringing their own small retinue of riders.
There are a lot of things that seem really odd from a historical standpoint, like how everyone fights exclusively with swords instead of spears, and infantry is almost never used, but you get the sense that the author has reasons for those things that make sense in the fantastic and idiosyncratic culture she’s created.
I find myself scratching my reading this post because (1) it’s unclear what definition of “state” is being used here and (2) as Ebenezer Scrooge points out, much of what is described here can be found in societies widely agreed to be “state” societies.
If you define state in terms of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force over a given territory, and are willing to apply that narrowly enough to exclude e.g. 12th century France from the ranks of states, it seems quite plausible than 1st century BCE Gaul also had no states… but even then I’m not sure it’s clear from our literary sources. When the elders of Gergovia expelled Vercingetorix, perhaps they had every reason to *think* they had a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in Gergovia and its supporting agricultural lands, right up until the point Vercingetorix overthrew them.
And—speaking to point (2)—I found it strange that you cite Tolkien’s Shire as an example of how this sort of society can work, because as much as Tolkien (somewhat implausibly) insists the Shire has no state institutions beyonds the sheriff’s department and the post office, Tolkien’s depiction of the Shire appears to be heavily influenced by the rural England of his childhood (circa 1900). Even if you argue the Shire is a better match for a slightly earlier period of English history (we never see a steam train on-screen, though they are rather famously mentioned at point), the presence of the post office means the Shire cannot be based on England prior to 1635, at which point I think everyone would agree England was a state.
I think it’s valuable to read the article on the Shire, which lays this out.
Yes, the Shire is based on later rural English society but in fact this links back to your above comment about such arrangements existing within states. E.g. the Shire emulates a non-state segment of the state of England e.g. the relationships between Yorkshire ruralites. What the article basically posits is that the Shire lacks any real institutions of government and instead primarily functions on the social networks of the big hobbits (Tooks, Bagginses, Brandybucks and so on) and their clientelistic relationships with the Gamgees and Cottons. Until one fellow, Saruman-backed Lotho, gets big enough to essentially impose a state. In point of fact, based on that article, I think it’s quite plausible that the shire lacks state institutions beyond those two (vestiges of Arnor), even if we strip away the fantastically high degree of social comity the hobbits enjoy (bloody intergenerational Hobbit feuds are an amusing concept).
We know that the Shire has several “biggest of the Big Men”–the Mayor (most of the Shire), the Thain (military leader), and the Master of Brandybuck Hall (hereditary; it’s notable that Buckland is more like a colony associated with the Shire than a farthing). How these are selected isn’t clear, but it’s clear they have some power. For example, the Sheriffs were able to be increased, and while Sam, Merry, and Pippin obviously object to the degree it was increased, they don’t seem to object to the idea of the increase as such–ie, they acknowledge it’s an abuse of power but they don’t view the concept as such as oppressive. Similarly, the idea of sharing food when times were lean was engrained enough that the Hobbits went along with it at first, implying that there was a central government of some sort. And they were certainly capable of putting together an army (the wolves, the Old Took vs the goblins, etc).
That said, the author himself said repeatedly that the government was weak and everything we see shows that personal authority was more important than legality. Maggot wasn’t any sort of official, but was able to field a descent-sized army when he put his mind to it, for example. And Frodo ended up being a powerful figure despite actively avoiding that outcome. The Party at the start of the books shows the sort of gift-giving that Bret discusses–magical items, items from Erebor, a famous wizard in attendance, all those signs that Bilbo is a good person to be friends with.
I sort of get the sense that the Shire was run by the big families, but the government existed for emergency measures and ceremonial purposes (ie, as an excuse to have feasts).
“How these are selected isn’t clear,”
We know the Mayor is elected every 7 years at the Free Fair (I take this as being a Fair every year, but elections every 7, but that’s headcanon), which also provides a handy assembly to headcanon in legislative functions like changing laws or approving an expansion in the number of Bounders (the Prologue mentions such expansion, and implies that’s up to the Mayor, but doesn’t hint at how they’re paid or fed.)
The Thain and Master seem to be simply hereditary, though the Tooks somehow picked up the Thainship when the Oldbucks dropped it to move to Buckland and become the Brandybucks.
In one of the Letters (214), Tolkien talks about family ‘headship’, with Bilbo having a thankless job of settling disputes among other Bagginses. Otho was already ‘head’ of the Sackvilles and was angling to be Baggins head too, rather indecorously ambitious of him. I guess Lotho inherited his ambition.
Titular headship usually the oldest male, but also a dyarchy with his wife, and his widow possibly taking up the headship. Lalia the Great married in and ran the Tooks for 22 years, until she died in an “accident” involving Pippin’s well-rewarded sister. But Lalia wasn’t Thain, which as a military role was strictly male.
I’m not sure that state institutions would be required for the hobbits to share food in lean times. If you go back and review the “bread, how did they make it” series Dr. Devereaux wrote a few years back, he goes into more detail on this: it is routine in peasant-village societies for food to be shared among the populace in the event of localized or individual difficulties, or difficulties that hit some areas harder than others. It is likewise not uncommon for ‘big men’ to arrange for food aid to be brought into an area if they have the means of doing so.
Still, I don’t disagree with the broad conclusion- some quasi-state institutions existed in the Shire, but existed mainly for ceremonial and emergency purposes.
I don’t think they’d be required, and we do see discussions of possible mechanisms. For example, birthday parties include a lot of food sharing–not usually as much as Bilbo’s party, but enough that it contributed to raising little Hobbits. And Hobbits in general seem very willing to share food. Farmer Maggot provided a second supper for the trio walking to Buckland, for example (though that was partially a joke and a sign that old transgressions were forgiven). It’s worth noting here that Hobbits appear to be a society where members trust one another to an extremely high degree; this tends to support your argument against mine.
I also think that the Hobbits had some system in place. As I said, the excuse that the Men the Boss brought in used was sharing food, and while people objected to the degree they don’t seem to have objected to the notion. If you came into my home and took my food on the grounds that it needed redistributed I’d object quite strongly; it’d be a fundamental violation of how our society works. Since we don’t see that (not until things get REALLY bad), it’s safe to assume that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened–rare, but not unimaginable.
Imagine what would happen if they didn’t have such a system. Big Hobbits would either hoard or distribute food, as they saw fit. Those hoarding the food would have strong incentives to hoard more, leading fairly quickly to raids and violence. This could be averted if the Big Hobbits made agreements among themselves, or like Buckland are willing to be relatively isolated, but it’s also something that an existing government, however weak, could take over. And it’d make sense to have someone who’s got some title or authority outside the Big Hobbit structure to direct the redistribution, because any Big Hobbit that did so would be accused of hoarding (thus defeating the purpose of the exercise).
Maybe, though I could see a scenario where, much as how ‘big men’ among the Gauls had to be willing to fight and keep order among their clients to retain prestige and ‘big man’ status, the ‘big men’ among the hobbits would have to be willing to feed guests and the needy, at least within reason.
Big men can’t go around gathering up each other’s food because, well, by definition if you are a big man you have enough status that others can’t just grab your stuff without consequence.
However, you’re not wrong that there almost had to be SOME pre-existing custom surrounding food re-distribution for “the Boss” to exploit and overuse. I don’t think that (among hobbits) the kind of conflict you describe would be a necessary result if there wasn’t such a custom, but the evidence suggests that there was, I think.
And—speaking to point (2)—I found it strange that you cite Tolkien’s Shire as an example of how this sort of society can work, because as much as Tolkien (somewhat implausibly) insists the Shire has no state institutions beyonds the sheriff’s department and the post office, Tolkien’s depiction of the Shire appears to be heavily influenced by the rural England of his childhood (circa 1900).
I remember reading somewhere (can’t remember exactly where, unfortunately) that a law-abiding Englishman before WW1 might easily spend his life having nothing to do with any state institution other than the Post Office. Obviously that’s an exaggeration, but it makes sense that Tolkien, picturing the English state of his childhood, would think “Post office, police, and some vague higher government working in the background but not actally affecting people’s day-to-day lives.”
I’ve lived in parts of the world where official government interaction is extremely limited. If I weren’t a foreigner there I would’ve never, ever dealt with the local government.
Mr X, I believe you are thinking of A. J. P. Taylor in “English History, 1914-1945”
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.
Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so.
The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. … broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.”
I think this is a very middle/upper class view of English life – the lower classes were both more regulated and more dependent on the state. It’s also specifically English – the British state was a major presence in Irish life (both with sticks and carrots – repression and land reform).
I’ll add that the British state in 1914 was, like Republican Rome, often very informal in its operation. There was a great deal of state activity that took place in clubs, country houses or just with a word between old public school chums.
There may not have been a draft, but the British state had impressment of sailors for a very long time and used it to make up a very large fraction of their navy.
It caused a war with America too.
Though that doesn’t exactly counter the above statement, since impressment was long over by 1914 and also they didn’t impress people from the countryside when it was active anyway.
Just noting that as is often the case he’s glossing over some aspects of the past that run counter to his point.
Impressment effectively ended with the end of the napoleonic wars.
True, but it greatly narrows the timeframe of any perceived idyll of English liberty within Britain, if one has to treat it as having begun no sooner than the Napoleonic Wars. Though there would always be the classist response of implicitly not treating sailors as being quite ‘real,’ being citizens in good standing.
“Why, they’re just one step up from outright ruffians, don’t you know, what really matters is whether a gentleman of means has to worry about the law meddling in his affairs, scandalous if that happens, tut-tut.”
But, to be clear, this view of history, even English history, being in some ways rosy and exaggerated and to a large extent true only when we focus on the upper and upper-middle class, doesn’t negate the valid observation that this image is what’s inspiring Tolkien when he writes hobbits. Just as, say, even apart from the outright mythical elements, the Epic of Gilgamesh takes what is probably a rather romantic and ‘heroicized’ version of Mesopotamian kingship, with the average king not being some sort of glorified Herculean figure in person.
In both cases, this is a story that tells you how a certain culture’s story-making class imagined the culture, not whether people actually lived that way on the regular.
I’m a little surprised you didn’t refer back to some of your discussion of the Rohirrim (I don’t recall whether this was the Helm’s Deep series or the RoP post). Obviously that’s a state society but IIRC the implied structure of the elites you lay out there is very similar to the one here, although ofc centered on the king.
So do I understand correctly that the line here between “state” and “non-state” is essentially “Has formal institutions capable of controlling big men”?
So e.g. “When King Fred died we all decided to follow King Bruce. As it happens, he’s the son of King Fred, the son of King Bruce sr.” is non-state but once you write down “When Bruce dies his son becomes king and so on in that fashion” or “When the king dies the sons of Bruce, Jim, Hank, Bruce, the Guy What Talks to God, and the representative of the Hill Guys pick a new king” then you have a state, assuming everyone then pretty much abides?
There are several different definitions of state, and the line between state and non-state societies isn’t a sharp line but a blurry, fractal-shaped boundary. States having monopolies on the legitimate use of force is a common definition, but that tends to suggest that an awful lot of Medieval Europe is a non-state society (given that kings had little power to keep their nobles from warring against each other), and there is still a pretty clear difference between, say, Norman England and the Lakota.
I personally would tend to draw the distinction as one where the state creates a locus of authority which is independent of the personalities of the people in power, that is the, the office itself holds the authority, and an office-holder is deriving their power because they hold the office, as opposed to they have the power from other means, and that power induces others to follow their authority. To be pithy, a state is where you have power because you have authority, whereas a non-state is where you have authority because you have power.
So if Trump is elected the United States will devolve into a non state polity? (lol)
If Trump is elected, he will hold power because he holds the office of President, not as a result of power he accumulated outside of that office. He won’t be able to deploy the US Armed Forces in his capacity as Some Random Billionaire or even as Popular Guy With Half The Country, but in his capacity as President of the United States.
On the other hand there have, historically, been periods where effective local authority was directly portioned to millionaires or popular individuals. During the gilded age companies literally had armies, when they didn’t just hire a police force or the actual army to break strikers.
Trump actually does have some capacity to levy a militia or private army, albeit one that is manifestly less effective than the US army because no shit. He did so on January 6th, but it was…not very good at doing what he wanted.
What reasonable people fear is not that his office of the presidency will let him misuse the federal army, because the fact that it’s given to him by *authority* curtails its usage, but that he’ll be able to *paralyze* such institutions and instead rely on more easily corruptible ones (three letter agencies, state police forces, maybe sections of the national guard) or these militias. This is sufficient to create horrific violence, and is often how actual genocides are enacted.
The Rwandan genocide is instructive here. The army wasn’t fully complacent, but it was kept inactive. It’s also how lynching happened-the police weren’t often the ones actually doing the murder, but they stood by unless someone tried to stop it.
Trump actually does have some capacity to levy a militia or private army, albeit one that is manifestly less effective than the US army because no shit. He did so on January 6th, but it was…not very good at doing what he wanted.
An ad hoc group of protestors is not the same as a private army. By your standard, most political movements in the English-speaking world are able to levy their own armies.
What reasonable people fear is not that his office of the presidency will let him misuse the federal army, because the fact that it’s given to him by *authority* curtails its usage, but that he’ll be able to *paralyze* such institutions and instead rely on more easily corruptible ones (three letter agencies, state police forces, maybe sections of the national guard) or these militias. This is sufficient to create horrific violence, and is often how actual genocides are enacted.
“Reasonable people” can look at Trump’s first term in office, and see that he never attempted to enact “horrific violence”, much less “actual genocides”, and that the “more easily corruptible agencies” spent most of their time trying to undermine him.
Reasonable people can look at your comment history and conclude your either a troll or would cheer as brown people were carted to the camps, so I think the miscommunication here is that I’m talking to actual humans, not the scum I flick off my boot.
And the distinction between an army and a political movement is being armed. That’s a large part of why governments need to be very careful with how they engage with them.
Trump supporters have already organized into explicitly armed militas for him, with a demonstrated willingness to violate the law and even improvise weapons as part of mobs. Trump demonstrably has the capacity to levy troops, you’d have to be completely idealogically blind to assert otherwise.
If anyone is curious, yes, there were political movements with paramilitary wings in the past century of US history that i’d classify as private armies. The black panther party and KKK come to mind as household names, but various socialist unions and company police organizations, as well as the pinkertons or various county or metropolitan police fraternities, qualify. Some might be less arguably political organizations, but they were private armies.
Reasonable people can look at your comment history and conclude your either a troll or would cheer as brown people were carted to the camps, so I think the miscommunication here is that I’m talking to actual humans, not the scum I flick off my boot.
You spread paranoid fantasies about imminent genocide, but “the scum I flick off my boot” is exactly the sort of rhetoric that actually does lead to mass violence.
Reasonable people can look at your comment history and conclude your either a troll or would cheer as brown people were carted to the camps, so I think the miscommunication here is that I’m talking to actual humans, not the scum I flick off my boot.
I didn’t vote for trump in 2016 (although i considered it more seriously than I ever have for a Republican before) or in 2020, and I think he was a terrible president (and would continue to be one in a second term). That said, I don’t think there was any horrific violence in his first term (unless you count the spike in homicide rates in 2020) and I doubt there will be horrific (internal) violence in his second term either. He might be responsible for a lot of international violence if he starts a stupid war with China or Iran, though.
“You spread paranoid fantasies about imminent genocide, but “the scum I flick off my boot” is exactly the sort of rhetoric that actually does lead to mass violence.”
Because I’m parodying your views by saying the part you so desperately wish you had the big brass balls to say about brown people publicly, dumbass. Do I need to cite you equating every precolonial nation to literal savages to justify the British colonial empire, again? Maybe I’m not giving you credit,but takes some cajones to argue that I’m being rhetorically crude given *your* history.
Hector, I’d have said the same three years ago and did..but things have gotten soooo much worse rhetorically. Trump already treated immigrants like crap and flirted with institutional mechanisms that are extremely concerning-definitionally concentration camps, just not death camps-but the invasion rhetoric is literally out of Nazi Germany.
Likewise modern MAGA talking points about trans people are literally just translations of The Storm articles about how homosexuality is a moral degeneracy spread by socialist pedophile Jews. Optionally minus the Jews; the Gazan genocide has resulted in two trajectories for right wing commentators. One, they hate Jews more than Palestinians, so hate themselves into calling it a genocide and continue using dog whistles. Two, they either hate Muslims more or are grifters, so they attack the left while very explicitly saying this proves they aren’t Nazis.
Of course drop coverage for a week and people are Soros posting again. Fascists have short attention spans and are prone to doublethink.
I will also say that I don’t actually think a genocide is likely. Much more likely are sporadic expressions of violence and truly atrocious, unenforceable, laws. But it’s likely enough to represent the single largest risk to most Americans right now. Mostly because we’re basically safe from everything except state violence as a society. Is that enough to seriously fear? Still no…but it’s a reasonable concern, and should certainly influence politics.
I fear this comment thread is drifting slightly from the point, and generating less light than heat as it does so.
As one of the 96% of the world population who aren’t inhabitants of the USA, I fear we’re in for several months of Trump Derangement Syndrome 2.0 @demorinmorinmorin etc, with no real hope of succeeding, I’m begging y’all to not bother this time. It’s pointless and maybe counter productive.
Pointless because this is mostly a history blog and discussion about history, not current USA politics. Bringing up Trump all the time just pisses people off who might otherwise agree with you. Foreigners like myself (Australian) can’t vote in the US election, but I presume you would prefer foreign opposition or at least lack of cooperation with potential Trump decrees, so it doesn’t help to piss us off either.
You might also notice that there’s quite a range of political views present in the comments. “I want to overthrow capitalism and I’m terrified that Trump might win” may indeed encourage people to vote, just not in the way you want.
I know US progressives are convinced that Trump is the greatest threat to truth, justice, and democracy in the history of history itself: Arnold Toynbee in the afterlife must be overjoyed with how strongly they believe in his Great Man theory of history. But I suggest that the complement to this belief is the lack of progressive goals, plans, or dreams other than “No Trump!” and this is a possible explanation for the relative lack of change under Biden. People were mobilised to vote against Trump, they did so, mission accomplished. I suggest that if y’all want meaningful change in US society / governance you need to campaign for it. Don’t settle for winning the election and then back to business as usual.
Would I ask Trump supporters to STFU also? Yes, but there are way way fewer declarations of Trump support here, so I don’t think it necessary.
Um. No, I’ll bring up current politics as much as I want, yes it’s that important, no I’m not worried about turning people against my position by hammering that the representative of a political ideology is a fascist.
This scattershot of criticism is completely ineffectual and, to be frank, reports more about you than me in my eyes. For one, who said anything about just voting and doing nothing else? The importance of voting is demonstrable because it’s one of the few systems of power where we’ve successfully campaigned for even some semblance of equality, but it’s not the end all be all. It’s just the minimum possible. Biden was never going to do anything major because that’s not what voting for him was for. It was an attempt to stop the bleeding.
And people who vote for Trump out of spite that I’m a socialist were A. Going to do that anyway, B. Going to self destruct into fascism at some point on their current trajectory, and C. Not worth my time. I believe what I believe and hiding that is just going to weaken both my ideology, society at large, and me as a person.
And finally, people with political ideologies so seeped in racism as Mr. X shouldn’t have a voice here. Or anywhere. There are certain beliefs that need to be disqualifying from any semblance of normalcy, and belief in the legitimacy of ethnic cleansing and racial empire is one. The flaw with our current systems of discourse is that we’re so redpilled on civility that we let absurdities like that go unchallenged if they are technically civil and in the right place, which is idiotic. Shout them down *everywhere*.
As one who has been reproved by OGH for inappropriate language–I referred to another commenter as having “tarted up” his argument–I note with amusement that referring to other commenters as “scum that I flick off my boot” does not apparently cross any red lines here. Like most academic speech regulation, OGH’s regulations seem to depend heavily on the substantive political valence of what is said.
Ugh… I am going to dip into this once, and only once.
@ey81, are you sure Bret merely didn’t read dcmorinmorin’s comment?
And with all due respect, if Mr. X defended a colonial empire’s historically verified atrocities and explicit racist policies by saying that its ‘subjects’ were ‘savages’, then he *is* a racist.
As it is, claiming that the OGH/Bret is unfair while avoiding rebutting the charges of racism leveled at Mr. X, and now you, is a bad thing.
Thank you for your time.
Now to wash my hands of this matter; dcmorinmorin and scifihugh can take care of themselves.
And with all due respect, if Mr. X defended a colonial empire’s historically verified atrocities and explicit racist policies by saying that its ‘subjects’ were ‘savages’, then he *is* a racist.
I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone “savages”. Nor, for the record, have I ever called anyone “scum” either.
As one who has been reproved by OGH for inappropriate language–I referred to another commenter as having “tarted up” his argument–I note with amusement that referring to other commenters as “scum that I flick off my boot” does not apparently cross any red lines here.
Referring to other commenters as “scum that I flick off my boot”, whilst also expressing the intention to derail future threads with contemporary politics, regardless of what others think about this.
Bret/The OGH has reproved *me* for derailing threads with contemporary politics, and I’m no conservative, so I don’t think he has been biased.
And no, you did not call anyone savages, Mr. X, but defending the British Empire by over-emphasizing the flaws of the nations it colonized or puppeted can be construed as doing so more subtly.
That said, I will concede that you have not personally attacked anyone in any explicit terms.
But to be honest, Bret/The OGH has explicitly stated more than once that he does not like butting his head into the comment threads. This is probably why.
And no, you did not call anyone savages, Mr. X, but defending the British Empire by over-emphasizing the flaws of the nations it colonized or puppeted can be construed as doing so more subtly.
When arguing against a popular misconception, it’s often necessary to emphasise those facts that contradict the misconception rather than those that don’t. In the case of colonialism, the common misconception nowadays is that the pre-colonial world was one big idyllic hippie commune and that the impact of colonialism was entirely, 100% negative.
I am pretty sure that no one here is *actually* foolish enough to believe that pre-colonial societies were somehow immune from the flaws of the rest of humanity.
Colonialism *is* a net negative and the power imbalance from European technological advancement, itself born from the extreme competition and warfare of fragmented European Polities, was used to exploit and oppress to an extent un-rivaled by most pre-colonial societies.
But as a person of color descended from colonized people, in a country still suffering the aftereffects of colonialism and neocolonialism, I can safely say that anyone who believes we were a peaceful race who lived in harmony with nature and each other before getting colonized is patronizing, sterotyping, and harming their own arguments by being such.
I don’t believe anyone here has explicitly said that we were such, though, just as you never used the word ‘savages’.
I am pretty sure that no one here is *actually* foolish enough to believe that pre-colonial societies were somehow immune from the flaws of the rest of humanity.
Nobody would be so foolish as to explicitly state such a thing, but most colonialism discourse implicitly presupposes it.
Colonialism *is* a net negative and the power imbalance from European technological advancement, itself born from the extreme competition and warfare of fragmented European Polities, was used to exploit and oppress to an extent un-rivaled by most pre-colonial societies.
Case in point. Most of the exploitative and oppressive practices people criticise European colonialism for were also enthusiastically practised by the peoples they colonised.
If you don’t want to be insulted, don’t insult me. I never contradicted what you said, but if you really want to dispute Colonlialism being a *net* negative, then it’s quite clear you’re not debating in good faith.
Wow, the ancient Jews slaugthered all those Amalekites in biblical times; that surely means that Ancient Israel was not a hippy commune of total innocents and so the European Nazis’ Holocaust can be defended by saying that they were simply doing what the ancient Jews did (and whose descendants are being accused of doing to Palestinians right now)!
Hey, if my good faith is spat on, best to withdraw it!
If you don’t want to be insulted, don’t insult me. I never contradicted what you said, but if you really want to dispute Colonlialism being a *net* negative, then it’s quite clear you’re not debating in good faith.
I was referring to the bit about “was used to exploit and oppress to an extent un-rivaled by most pre-colonial societies”, as evidenced by my use of the words “exploitative” and “oppressive”. Pre-colonial societies were known to commit outright genocide on occasion, and it’s hard to oppress people to a greater extent than that.
Wow, the ancient Jews slaugthered all those Amalekites in biblical times; that surely means that Ancient Israel was not a hippy commune of total innocents and so the European Nazis’ Holocaust can be defended by saying that they were simply doing what the ancient Jews did (and whose descendants are being accused of doing to Palestinians right now)!
Was the US justified in occupying Germany and Japan and forcing them to stop waging wars against everyone?
Was the US justified in occupying Germany and Japan and forcing them to stop waging wars against everyone?
Supplementary question: Tribal warfare is, proportionately speaking, often much more deadly than even big modern wars like WW1 or 2.* Assuming that it was justifiable for the US to occupy Germany and Japan and force them to become less violent, would it also have been justifiable to occupy a tribal society and force them to become less violent?
* “Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year,” https://web.archive.org/web/20060706042537/http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HG04Aa02.html
All of you – that is quite enough. Rather more than enough, I think.
This is a post on pre-modern, indeed properly ancient armies, not contemporary politics.
Eh, even if he started enacting policy though non-state means, such as recruiting supporters to do various things, that would still be a state, just a sort of Octavian-esque transformation of one.
IMO, to destroy the state, he’d have to hollow it out and replace it with his own system. In Communist states, there was often a separate and parallel Communist Party hierarchy that operated at all levels of government, and in some sense had the real power. So if something like that were put in place, where there was some Trump Party with people at various levels, and all member of civil government had to check with their closest Trump Party member before doing anything important, that’d be a start. And then he could just abolish civil government bit by bit, so instead of having to ask person A who’d ask the Trump Party guy, you’d just ask the Trump Party guy directly yourself. At that point, I’d say that the US would have become a non-state polity.
(Not that I think that will happen.)
It’s called “Project 2025,” it’s been publicly discussed for months, and they’re already processing applications.
It’s kind of interesting.
We came from discussing how non-states were capable of raising armies to what exactly is a non-state to how socialist were the socialist block (clearly a state) to is financial capitalism really capitalism to abolish the banks because they are the wrong type of fraud to finally an unorganized and mostly unarmed mob of protestors very vaguely incited by a sitting president is a private army to people who might be understood to have said somethings they actually didn’t are fascists and should not have a right to take part in discussions because this is how democracy works.
Let’s just get back to this history thing maybe? In a minute.
Looking from Europe, most don’t like Trump. I don’t like Trump. Some don’t like Trump because he’s such a goofy nuisance as a public person. Some don’t like him because they think he’s too right wing and chaotic even by US standards. Some think he’s bad because he was allegedly and now is officially a criminal. Though some were all to happy to just go with the legal shenanigans just so they would have a sound argument and need not bother anymore. Removing somebody from the ballot for formal reasons rarely solves underlying issues though.
Even conservatives in many European countries literally don’t like Trump and his way of transforming the everything.
Though some also assign to Trump changes that began before his term and continued under Biden and would have happened under that Clinton woman, too. But seriously, none of this is fascism. Even Italian post fascist politicians dislike Trump.
Even if we went with “Trump is going to end democracy and he is building a private army right now” which I seriously doubt, he is not turning the US into a non-state.
Non-States are ruled by shifting, fluid alliances of those who have (parts of) the means to do business, trades and violence. Those who make people follow them by their practical importance rather than their assigned and agreed role.
I don’t see how a modern economy would run without a somewhat predictable, somewhat formalized central authority. Which means a state. Every modern instance of non-state inside a failed state vacuum I am aware of is a painful disaster and a tragedy to the people involved. Even the states of authoritarian power cliques are states. All factions agree that the state is actually a good thing which they should rule, not abolish.
Pre-Roman pre-state societies discussed here didn’t have this but could organize some specific sort of army if needed. Life was quite bad from a modern POV. Freedom and privacy were limited, poverty to the point of starvation was common. Think you are an upper echelon guy with ten to thirty times the average guy’s means and still have to personally work your arse off at least twice a year for food supply.
If anything, becoming a state or being absorbed into a state was progress. Of course being personally enslaved or killed and starting from the bottom of the hierarchy was something to avoid.
This presumes people controlling in modern states have authority or that people in pre modern non-states didn’t. It legitimizes modern definitions of authority, in other words, in a way that isn’t ethically or rationally defensible in historical context.
In truth the definition is simpler; a state is a dominant institution of power in it’s region, which has power over all occurances within that region. The reason pre state societies aren’t states is because there’s no singular authority, no politic that commands the region as geographically and culturally defined. The Gauls has no final authority. Rome did; SPQR.
You can use definitional games to create smaller states with more effective local authority within a larger state, or global super states from hegemonic empires, but I’m a very real sense those definitional games are what politics is about, nationally and internationally; a struggle to assert, steal, compel, or enforce those legalistic and practical definitions so an authority has control in a region. That’s 90% of what states do.
> This presumes people controlling in modern states have authority or that people in pre modern non-states didn’t. It legitimizes modern definitions of authority, in other words, in a way that isn’t ethically or rationally defensible in historical context.
Sorry, but why? The missi domini had power. Not because they where counts and bishops (although they were) but because the King said their office has power. A roman consul head power, not because he was a big landowner (although he was), but because hw was voted into office. Their authority hung on the office, not on the wealth or military power they controlled in their own name.
> In truth the definition is simpler; a state is a dominant institution of power in it’s region, which has power over all occurances within that region.
This does not sound like the weak states of antiquity I read about. Also, isn’t that the same as the definition above, just ignoring the people that actually run those states?
> The missi domini had power.
But that’s Frankish Charlemagne around 800 AD, not pre-Roman Gauls around 300 BC
The weak states of antiquity? The states of proper antiquity weren’t weak. Sure, Athens was small, but it has tremendous control over it’s formal borders compared to, say, Charlemagne or Richard the (pick one). Are you referring to the post roman kingdoms? Then absolutely it’s applicable there, those states, in a meaningful sense, weren’t real. The rulers had nominal authority but not actual control, and that made them manifestly distinct from modern states or the states of antiquity. The power that rulers did had was either deeply personal or explicitly because of their personal lands, but more pertinently was often less in a region than the local landowners.
My point is merely that it’d be more comprehensive to say the state of Avignon rather than lump it in with the state of France, prior to the centralizing reforms of the early modern period. It’s not that the state gained rightful authority, it’s that it gained real power to enforce that authority, or the compliance of locals to respect it (as not all power is compelled, even in pre democratic states). If that makes borders messy, fluid, and gradual rather than discrete, such was the ground truth.
“Sorry, but why? The missi domini had power. Not because they where counts and bishops (although they were) but because the King said their office has power. A roman consul head power, not because he was a big landowner (although he was), but because hw was voted into office. Their authority hung on the office, not on the wealth or military power they controlled in their own name.”
Actually, no. The missi domini did not have power from authority. The system collapsed on the death of Charlemagne himself and rapidly devolved; Charlemagne has power that was based on his relationships, land, and armies, but the titles he left behind were extraordinarily fragile. In a meaningful sense the Holy Roman Empire didn’t exist except on paper for most of its span, and the fact that it couldn’t exert actual power greater than the local authorities was a big part of this. Charlemagne’s actual rule is best understood as a brief state of…statehood, before chaos or regional divisions took hold and new states or non state regions took over.
But my actual point is that the difference between the missi domini and a Gallic nobles personal representative is that the missi domini represent the definitively biggest man on campus, whereas you can never be sure of that with the gaul. If a Gallic leader had gained enough power to declare himself the sole authority, and enforce that claim, then he’d be rulling a state. The titles, system, or means of power don’t matter.
The Roman Consuls, in contrast, *did* have power *from* the institution. In a very real sense the Roman state was whatever was within reach of Roman garrisons or one of the consular armies, whomever was helming it, but in another very real sense that citizenship reforms actually created a real sense of identity that created non-forced compliance in many regions. But regardless Rome was a state because it had no other authority challenging it in places where it had control. That it’s authority was created via more enduring means just made it a stronger one.
State authority is a continuum and can be distributed. US federal authority, for instance, has limits when it comes to the constituent states, and the states devolve powers to cities and counties. Medieval people did not expect the king to manage the town sewers – there were layers. The Carolingian state was managed by counts overseen by missi, local assemblies all free men were expected to attend, priests, bishops and archbishops with Rome as a final resort and so on. Kings appointed counts, issued charters, summoned nobles to councils and meetings to debate and ratify their decisions and counts and bishops did likewise in their domains.
In the period roughly 1000-1200 royal power declined in France and Italy, but local power continued and was then subsumed back into central power. The limitations on royal power should not be mistaken for the absence of the state.
I disagree. The lack of central authority in France very specifically acts as an argument against France being a state.
The American system was meant to specifically establish the *states* as states as well. The national government was supposed to be an alliance of these states, not the defining nation state. It failed, due to complex factors that I can’t go over here, but include that the central thesis of the system-the the states are less tyrannical than the federal government-was bunk and this rapidly became apparent.
The reason pre state societies aren’t states is because there’s no singular authority, no politic that commands the region as geographically and culturally defined.
I’m amazed and alarmed that 3+ people think this worthy of support, because the flaw in the logic here is fairly considerable: regions “as geographically and culturally defined” are, in greatest part, politically constructed.
Gaul is only a “Region” to you because it was centralized as such by the Romans, and loosely corresponds to the modern day nation-state of France, in whose interest it therefore is to further emphasize any primordial unity.
In its day, it was merely one area of consideration of the human phenomenon, very loosely suggested as such by geographical traits; within that compass operated a grand multiplicity of cultures and societies, of which many indubitably possessed sociopolitical foci — around which the true regions of that time formed.
Ultimately, your definition comes down to a naively nationalistic presumption of a sort of Gallic Lebensraum, a manifest destiny of dominion over an anachronistic border, the realization of which is integral to the existence of a state. In such a case one must certainly wonder at the Ancient Greeks who, primitive and tribal non-state peoples as they surely were, yet managed to form such a profound impression in the minds of the Western world.
Circling back to this a bit later, I think it may be a little harsh. Under the passage you quote, the reason to call a given Gallic political-cultural entity “not a state” isn’t because the entity doesn’t rule all of Gaul. It’s because the entity generally doesn’t even exercise consistent rule over “the city it’s centered in plus immediate surrounding countryside.”
To take an example, Sparta is generally considered to be a state, even though it never ruled all of Greece. It never even, so far as I know, ruled all of the Peloponnesus, which (being nearly an island in its own right) would have made a reasonable foundation for a “geographically and culturally defined region.”
But what matters here is that the institutions that we collectively refer to as ‘Sparta’ did rule somewhere. That you could draw some set of boundaries on a map and point to them and say “this is Spartan territory, and the rules here are made by Spartan institutions, not just by individuals who happen to be powerful and who call themselves Spartans.” A Greek polis had institutions that could draw some specific set of boundaries around themselves and say that this was the “geographically and culturally defined” region they ruled.
I would argue that, indeed, much of Medieval Europe is a non-state society. Which, for a gamer side-note, is a reason why the Crusader Kings series is so wildly different from other Paradox Grand Strategy games – it’s trying to represent non-state structures. (And fails when it tries to model states like the Byzantine Empire that still functioned in its timeframe.)
It’s also worth noting that there is a continually moving target. At certain times and places there was actually one central authority for a region, at other times at least one family held de-facto authority and hence you had a microstate, in some places a city-state dominated the area, and at others those previous structures shattered and you ended up with basically transitional chaos where interpersonal relationships took over.
The Holy Roman Empire arguably transitioned back and forth between each and every possible state of being within each span of thirty miles across ten centuries, so it’s hardly like one state of being was the rule.
I’d actually argue that CK3 fails most when trying to model true stateless societies-it’s best at modeling transitional states, where there is some degree of nominal authority and hierarchy but there’s no ossification of any of the rules or structures involved, and worst at modeling a loose confederation of family ties because it insists on modeling areas of influence as discretely owned provinces when they were truthfully neither discrete nor often legally defined. It helps that most stateless societies had been outcompeted in the timeframe, but I struggle to accept the idea that some Cumanian Khan was disputing ownership of his vassals fort.
Becoming a state is really is fractal and an ongoing process.
France under Louis XIII and XIV (roughly 2000 years after the period OGH is talking about) was definitely a state, but had a real problem with nobles who held office. They often held office because they were sold it, but they also had legitimacy from being nobles and having those horizontal relations with other nobles and vertical with clients.
One of the attempts to centralize things was trying to get office holders who didn’t buy the office and were not nobles (at least to start with). This would mean that they held the office purely by being appointed, and so had no other source of support than the monarch.
Needless to say, these office holders were not popular with the nobility. Some of the office holders were ennobled, often for good work but sometimes just to get the nobles to actually sort of work with them.
> States having monopolies on the legitimate use of force is a common definition, but that tends to suggest that an awful lot of Medieval Europe is a non-state society (given that kings had little power to keep their nobles from warring against each other)
This definition makes understanding Medieval Europe a lot easier to me. I was reading on the Teuton knights and how they were supported by this king/pope, but went to war with this king. Where the hell was the Holy Roman Empire in all of this?
However, if we accept that Medieval Europe was essential a non-state, so “Big Men” could (and kind of were expected to) go to war with anyone, then the whole history makes a lot more sense to me.
Working from the “legitimate use of violence” definition, I would differentiate it like that:
Non-State: King Bruce asked Jim to do something, Jim refused. King Bruce wants to punish Jim (using violence). Jim may resist (using violence). Hank now has to weigh his relationship to King Bruce, his relationship to Jim, his own impression of how bad Jim violated norms by refusing, if King Bruce had been nice enough to Jim to demand his compliance, and the chances of success of either. Depending on that he may assist King Bruce, or Jim, or neither.
State: King Bruce asked Jim to do something, Jim refused. King Bruce wants to punish Jim (using violence). Jim may resist (using violence). Hank doesn’t have to think much about what to do, he assumes that Jim will be punished and there is either nothing he can do about it or nothing he wants to do about it.
In a non-state society the rules (even if written down) are guidelines, the decision to follow them is made on a case by case basis. In a state society there is either widespread agreement about following the rules and their interpretation so that a rule-violator will be isolated or the government is powerful enough that no one can stop it from enforcing its interpretation of the rules. Usually it is a combination of both.
I’m not entirely sure Rohan would count as a state society. A non-state society may have moments of broad agreement where it acts almost like a state, and a state society may have a temporary breakdown of order where different actors decide on their own who to fight for and against. We would need to observe Rohan over a longer time to see what state of affairs is “normal” for them.
Except that in many of these cultures, the formal way of passing down knowledge is verbal. Which does raise the possibility of Jim and Hank differing about whether it changed.
Nevertheless, there are unquestionable kingdoms where the throne descended by law without writing.
But ‘civitas’ doesn’t necessarily mean non-state, right? If I remember correctly the Romans would also call Rome, Capua, Carthage, Athens, etc. ‘civitas’ as well.
So using ‘civitas’ to mean ‘non-state polity’ isn’t really more accurate than shortening the latter to ‘polity’ would be.
I may be wrong about this, as it’s based on my college Latin which is now much more distantly in the past than I like to think about – if I’m off base here, hopefully someone can correct me.
My understanding of the word is that “civitas” most specifically means a body of citizens – not necessarily citizen in the modern sense, but the community of people with a (not necessarily equal) voice in the politics of their community, whatever those politics might look like. So the Romans – as in the people of Rome, themselves – would be a “civitas” with a state, while the Gauls would be a “civitas” without one – at least not in the formal sense.
My point being that the Romans absolutely did, to the best of my knowledge, understand the term to cover a wide range of peoples, including what we’d today call “non-state” societies.
And, since the definition of a “state” is kind of hairy (it’s tough to get a good, specific definition that doesn’t feel overly broad or overly restrictive), I think that’s a good a term as any to describe the sort of folks we’re talking about here.
So provide a better alternative.
Bret explained why he didn’t want to use other modern words, and why he’s using the word he chose even though it isn’t perfect. Within this post (and presumably future posts in the series) the meaning is clear.
The most important meat mammal in this region (down to the present, for the eastern half of it at least) was the pig. And not just in this region! When meat was added to the Cura Annonae, the Roman bread dole, that meat was pork.
The thing about pigs is that you don’t need a lot of land to raise one, and because the meat is so fatty it’s relatively easy to preserve–so slaughtering one isn’t a commitment to have a community-wide feast & eat it all before it spoils. Big Men and Big Big Men would definitely own many swine, but it would have been possible for a prosperous farming family to raise a pig, or a group of related families to raise a small number together.
There were chickens, but they seem to have still been Special Exotic Fighting birds, not yet a flock-per-farmyard.
Do the Latin sources talk about cheese-eating, milk-drinking, and dairying among the Celts/Germanii? Romans who travelled north of the Alps would be going up a “lactase persistence gene” gradient, and would be encountering more people for whom raising cows for milk made sense. Only a Big Man can raise bovids for meat, they need a lot of pasture for a single payoff. Much smaller farmers can have a milch cow, who pays off on a smaller level for many days.
If I remember correctly, Greeks and Romans ate a lot of hard cheese (which has little to no lactose), and commented on the barbarians’ strange habit of drinking milk.
Not by the time of empire. Pliny the Elder noted that Camal Milk was best to drink when mixed with water, implying they were plenty familiar with drinking all forms. He also notes that soft cheeses were very good but needed to be eaten soon, and favored certain cheeses over others.
He did think a Gallic beverage that is, best I can tell, a fermented milk was weird.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137:book=11:chapter=96&highlight=cheese#note-link1
The next page has his cheese texts. Also a random Zoraster reference, wasn’t expecting that.
The Romans had been pastoral milk-drinkers earlier, because their religious rites often required milk. Even when wine was used, it was ritually called milk, especially when the rite was a female-only.
One thing I always remembered is when Aristotle (in his “Politics”) talked about why the barbarians (that is, Scythians) were quite the warriors, he concluded that “it must be that they all drank milk since very young”.
I hear that it does wonderful things for bone density.
Pork is still very big in much of Europe. Almost a majority of Germany’s meat consumption; more than 1/3 of Spain or Italy (and the plurality meat); over 1/4 of France, tied with seafood. And the plurality, or second to seafood, in several other countries too. Dominance by poultry is more of a thing in the Americas, also Australia, and Israel.
AIUI chickens-as-food have traditionally been more about the eggs, with stew as an end-of-life use.
Yes, that’s what I meant by it being dominant in the present day “in the eastern half of this region” — meaning Germany and adjoining areas.
Brett notes that olives & their oil don’t make it north of the Mediterranean. But that doesn’t mean people went without cooking fat! Then as now, people north of the olive oil zone used animal fats for cooking: butter or pork fat. This was all part of a characteristic European mixed farming pattern, where subsistence farmers mostly grew cereals, but also raised small numbers of pigs, dairy cows, and later chickens. Subsistence diets weren’t as strictly vegetarian as what Brett is used to studying in Greece & Rome.
The climate in which it is cool enough to leave your milk to let the cream rise is exactly the climate in which it is too cool to raise olives. How’s that for odd coincidences?
Even though that’s a fact I was unaware of, I can state with confidence that it’s not a coincidence at all. Crop olives are a domesticated varietal, and were even in the ancient world. Developing a domestic plant without the scientific method is expensive; you plant a bunch of seeds with a mixed and only partially known parentage and you pray, and the plants that don’t die become some of the parents of your next attempt.
Conducting that process when it gives you a local monopoly on cooking oil is worth it; where the climate can give you butter you don’t spend generations fighting the climate to produce olive oil.
Chicken as a common meat is pretty recent. Hoover could use the campaign slogan “a chicken in every pot” in 1932 to promise prosperity if he were elected. Note that it’s “in every pot”, not “on every farm”, i.e. the chicken is being eaten.
Raising chickens for relatively inexpensive meat instead of eggs pretty much requires modern farming techniques.
Yes/no. Chickens were often raised for their meat intentionally, not only for eggs. Like any other animal, you can raise it with the intent of harvesting the meat in the future. Rather conveniently for the farmer, you don’t need all the roosters. Chicken would not have been a routine food, of course, but something of a special meal for most.
I think it depends on your definition of “common.” Is “common meat” defined as “the thing we eat most often regardless of absolute frequency,” “the meat we eat a few times a day,” “the meat we eat about once a day except during lean times,” or “the meat we eat with every meal?”
Some of those benchmarks are more attainable with, say, 1900-era or 1800-era technology than others.
When you let eggs develop into chickens about half of them are useless for egg laying purposes: these days I believe that the ones from egg-laying breeds tend to be killed very early (and possibly ground for animal feed), but I believe that in modern-traditional (20th century) farming communities of Europe they tended to be allowed to grow up to the point when it is possible for humans to eat them.
And in some places, they were common enough that they weren’t called *meat*, that term was reserved for the luxury cow meat only bought at special times during the year (some older people still do this)
Since like horses and cattle chickens naturally have a dominant male presiding over a harem of females, the practice used to be to castrate excess male chicks which were then called capons. They would be raised to young maturity and then slaughtered much like steers.
People in the Baltic region would have had access to a pretty productive fishery too, although I don’t know how aware the Romans were of people that far north.
When did sheep become a major thing in England? And why did goats never really take off in Europe the same way they did in other parts of the world?
Goats were more popular in southern Europe. Cattle gave more milk, and were more common in northern Europe because they were also used heavily as draft animals.
Sheep were more heavily used for milk in the medieval time, until the horse collar shifted oxen off draft duties.
You can breed sheep for milk, or for wool, but it appears you have to choose.
There are actually sheep breeds that are wool, milk, and meat breeds, but they tend to be less specialized.
The why is actually pretty simple; hair sheep (less or no wool) require less maintenance, specifically because they have to be sheered.
Lower maintenance animals are better for meat production because you have less investment in each one, and therefore they are bred to reproduce more.
Most sheep breeds that lactate for extended periods also breed quickly, because lambs trigger lactation and it’s easier to breed longer periods of lactation into breeds with more lambs. Because progress in lengthening lactation is incremental you want to start from a fecund variety.
Hence milk sheep are optimized for low maintenance, which is reinforced by the economics of meat production.
Hence you generally have low maintenance meat and milk sheep that you breed frequently and don’t overly mind slaughtering or high maintenance wool sheep you put more time into and thus preserve as long as possible, not both. Most breeds are thus one or the other because of generations of prior effort.
Even then nothing stops you from breeding for all three, or milk and wool, but if you’re going to do that most breeders recommend hybridizing specialist breeds rather than reinventing the wheel. Or buying a breed that’s moderately good at all three, like the Icelandic, presumably because it was a farm animal.
For a sheep of a given size, there’s only so much protein and calories to go around. Lots of wool would mean less meat and/or milk.
*Wool* is why sheep have always been more popular in Europe than goats. Wool was produced in the Ancient Near East & the Mediterranean area, but linen was also available. Flax doesn’t do as well further north, and as we all know it’s not nearly as warm as wool.
Chickens were raised for eggs. You culled the roosters, possibly made capons of them, and sold them to the rich who could afford such expensive meat, and you killed the hens and stewed them when they were past laying, but they were for eggs.
A Renaissance writer described eggs as an example of cheap and easy-to-get food, and chicken as an example of expensive and hard-to-get food.
The Talmud uses “the size of an egg” as a unit of measure, because everyone knew how big a chicken egg was. Poking around, I found a PhD thesis “The ecology of chickens: an examination of the introduction of the domestic chicken across Europe after the Bronze Age” (Jacqueline Pitt, Bournemouth U. 2017) with evidence that up through the early 1st century CE chickens were found in Europe, but weren’t much used for food: their bones are found in urban sites, not rural ones. Her conclusion: they were used for ritual or cockfighting purposes, not eggs and definitely not meat on a regular basis.
That’s a key factor in medieval peasants and meat. Nearly all of the animals that could be consumed as meat were much more valuable if sold or used for other products as long as possible. Do you really want to eat that rooster if you can sell it for money you could save towards another pig or cow, or other supplies?
As well as domestic animals, peasants ate small game – wild birds caught with nets or lime, hares, hedgehogs, fresh-water fish, snails and so on. Medieval peasants commonly had a kitchen garden with vegetables and herbs and right to gather in forest or marsh. Still a heavy cereal diet, but not as much as commonly imagined.
There’s also domestic pigeon and squab; wikipedia says pigeon is the world’s oldest domesticated bird
It also bears emphasizing that a lot of this talk breaks down when fishing becomes involved, because a fishing fleet can generate a tremendous amount of cheap calories *if* the society has heavily invested in producing one.
We can actually see this in isotopic analysis of bones; communities near the sea are enough fish that their bones have stable carbon and nitrogen isotope concentrations that are indicative of meat eating.
Other isotopes can even establish that they ate seafood specifically because their bone isotope ratios are intermediary between local groundwater and seawater.
In other words, certain communities are enough fish that we can see it in their bones. It’s likely that England, Scotland, and Scandinavia would have starved but for fishing, and the economics of that are wildly different.
Should’ve been ate fish, not are fish, but I do love the lovecraftian implications.
It also bears emphasizing that a lot of this talk breaks down when fishing becomes involved, because a fishing fleet can generate a tremendous amount of cheap calories *if* the society has heavily invested in producing one.
Right, it’s (for example) been known for a long time that the population of the Inca Empire was relatively well fed (even the Spanish themselves commented on that) and while that’s often attributed to the existence of the highly productive potato, and to the economic model of that society, I’m sure the fact that they are next door to one of the world’s most productive fisheries also played a role. The coast next to that highly productive fishery also has an extremely dry climate, which would lend itself well to drying the fish for preservation. (I’ve lived before in places without refrigeration, and in my experience you can preserve fish for months if you get it really bone dry, which takes some skill).
The genetic studies seem to indicate that the original European hunter-gatherers left a bigger imprint in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries than they did anywhere else (the genetic contribution is IIRC around 45-50% in Estonians and Sami and almost negligible in southern Europe), and i’ve seen that attributed to the fact that the hunting gathering lifestyle in the Baltic and Scandinavia (because of marine resources) was more feasible than it was elsewhere.
IIRC most meat – including birds and fish – were subject to game restrictions from the local lord, and wouldn’t have been a typical part of a peasant’s diet. Rabbits were the exception, and usually didn’t have any limits on how many you could catch and consume (at least in High Middle Ages England).
That there was a law somewhere is only weak evidence people followed it, even ignoring that this legal code was limited in geographic scope. Many places had either exceptions for hunting rights or had peasant land where it was allowed. If I remember England was particularly draconian here, unusually so, and we still see regional archeological evidence of meat enriched diets, particularly on the coast.
to Brett – restrictions on hunting and fishing were part of the customs of the manor, and these pretty much always allowed some of each. Poaching was a thing when there was an urban market for game meats (so from the 17th century).
I researched caponization after wondering how the heck you castrate something whose testes aren’t external. Apparently it’s an internal surgery procedure! Remarkable that the birds (mostly) survived without complication in premodern times.
On top of the ease of preserving pork, part of the reason you don’t need much land to raise them is because they don’t really need dedicated pasture space at all. They’ll eat nuts and other things they can find for themselves if you drive them into the nearest stand of trees, and they’ll dig up roots from out of a bare field, and so on.
Peasant agriculture always uses animals to extract value from land otherwise unsuitable for cultivation, but pigs (and chickens) are particularly good about it because they don’t compete with the crops hardly at all.
Pigs are also great in a urban setting. Because they eat literally everything. Human waste if need be. While it may not sound appetizing to a modern western audience, this is still practice in some parts of the world.
One thing with regards to cattle is that even when it existed meat and milk was often ancillary to fertilizer, and pasture was often less of a food production thing than a cap on the efficiency of your cereal production: You need a certain amount of pasture to get enough fertilizer to keep your actual food crops growing (and the milk and meat you get is an ancillary benefit of that)
And again I am struck by how well the writers of Asterix did their research, or had a feel for their history. In “Asterix and the Big Fight” (le combat des chefs) the romans try to entice the people of Asterix’s village to switch camp by having the chef of a romanised village fight with their chef, thereby trying to prove that the other chef is a better option to follow, as Big Men have to prove to their people that they are the better warrior, and therefor the better choice.
And in the album “Asterix and the Roman Agents” (la Zizanie) you see the roman agent doing the gift giving to a lesser person (Asterix) instead of to the (nominal) chief. This brings the hoped for tension within the societal relations, that the agent was aiming for.
I am frankly (heh) shocked by the lack of a reference to “wild boar” when Prof. Devereaux was discussing Gallic diet.
Modern folks, because their lives are so extensively structured by the state, tend to imagine that without the state – in a ‘state of nature’ – they’d be more free, but that is not the case!
That’s a misuse of the term “state of nature”. It doesn’t refer to a situation without a state, it refers to a situation without a society, in which everyone basically does their own thing. If you’re a client of a big man, you’ve already left the state of nature.
On the other hand, more than it refers to any actual historical condition, it refers to the condition of living in a thought experiment where some guy who has never lived without both society and a state tells you what he thinks it would have been like.
In that sense, the usage is precise.
Of course it’s a thought experiment, but it’s a thought experiment which refers to living without a society. Using it in connection to non-state, big-man-based societies is still incorrect.
Isn’t that kind of the point? The “state of nature” does not necessarily describe human societies at any point in their history, and certainly doesn’t describe any human society that postdates the invention of agriculture. If you try to do without the state, you are going to have to deal with the Big Man one way or another.
Right-anarchists (libertarians) shrug and don’t see the problem. Left-anarchists propose to do so by abolishing the concepts of land ownership, wage labor, or both.
Oh, there are many problems with the state of nature concept, and even more problems with political ideologies that seek to return us to such a state (or “return” us, since I don’t think human beings have ever lived like that historically). But “Big man societies tend (in some unspecified way) to be more oppressive than state societies” isn’t one of them.
Circling back to this later, well. I can certainly accept people saying that it’s false that ‘big man’ societies were less oppressive than state societies (we could at least debate that point). But I cannot agree that the manner in which ‘big man’ societies are described as ‘more oppressive’ is vague. I’ve seen it explained in detail too many times.
The thesis is generally that the ‘big man’ will necessarily have economic and social interests in aspects of your life that the state is going to be predisposed to ignore because it cannot profit from controlling them. For instance, the ‘big man’ has much more incentive to ruin your life in an attempt to get you to agree to sell a chunk of your land to him, or to get specifically involved in the marriage plans of your family members that a member of his family is interested in, and so on.
From the perspective of the state, this kind of taxpayer-on-taxpayer conflict is almost always a net negative, but for local ‘big man’ governance, it becomes a way to strengthen one another.
(to clarify, I said ‘strengthen one another’ at the end when I meant ‘strengthen themselves,’ and didn’t catch it until too late)
Very useful post for me, as I am engaged in building an RPG campaign setting exactly in the period of transition between organization of this kind into a monarchical state system. I’m curious to know how substantially the life of the small farmer (or burgher) changes as the Big Man above him changes from a rich notable to a titled aristocrat.
Also curious to what extent, if any, systems like this are thought to have been present in the pre-historical period for the Romans themselves. Seems as though Roman clientela may just be a more polite, bloodless form of this kind of relations, persisting in reduced form after the state has usurped its major function in organizing warfare.
As for the notion, apparently still in currency, that existing in these kind of informal non-state power structures is more liberating for the individual… I have too many friends from nations where those kinds of clan networks are still very influential to be rose-tinted about it, but for anyone who still is, this post may be a healthy corrective. Imagine someone robbed your house and you had to go to, like, the guy who owns a bunch of local Hyundai dealerships for help.
You get a sense of that in some of the sagas. EG in Egil’s Saga the jarl (big man) sees no future in Norway when Harald Fairhair comes calling – he will be at the king’s beck and call and have no respect in his district. The bonders (free peasants) are also wary that their local rights to justice and participation in affairs will be over-ridden.
For that matter, the US has some of that. Justice in the States is often a “local” matter, i.e. a state one instead of federal.
“Don’t make a federal case of it” was a saying. The idea being that it didn’t require the distant federal government to make a ruling on the matter.
Of course we see recent attempts to make a federal case out of everything, since a criminal act can apparently now be charged up to four different times: as a state criminal act, as a federal criminal act for violating the victims rights, and the defendant can (I think) be pursued civilly for damages in both state (for the act) and federal (for rights violation) courts.
No one is enthusiastic about a distant court ruling on the justice of a case – unless you think that the nearby court will rule against you.
There is an old Russian story, about an old lady whose apartment was robbed. Instead of going to the police (or militsya, depending on when the tale is told), she goes to the local criminal kingpin (there is a Russian term: ‘vor v zakone’ – ‘thief-in-law’ seems to be the go-to English translation; it’s more than “merely” a criminal Big Man, it’s already past the point where it’s an established class in criminal society; sort of like a criminal noble class?).
“Isn’t there a law among thieves, do not steal from your neighbours?”, she asks.
On the next day, all of the loot is back on her doorstep, with a bottle of moonshine as a bonus for moral expenses.
One of my sisters has a story where she left a resturaunt in New Haven Conneticut, and did not find her car where she had left it. She reentered the resturaunt and asked if she could use their phone as her car had been stolen. The manager was VERY concerned about this, “Your car was stolen, while you were eating HERE.” He made some phone calls and her car made a miraculous reaperance.
If it’s one of the restaurants I’m thinking of, the scuttlebutt was that that neighborhood was, um, “protected”.
Yes, from the description in the post, the relations between the aristocrats sounded a lot like the “polite language” that I’ve heard can be used by mafia and mafia-like organizations. “Friends”, “associates”, “families”, “wise guys”, etc. Of course you check with your local Big Man before making major life decisions, why wouldn’t you? (Especially on his daughter’s wedding day…)
History of the Early Middle Ages begins to look a lot different once you realize your country started as a successful protection racket. *nodnod*
“The truth is, they bring certain modes of conflict resolution from all the way back in the old country, from the poverty of the Mezzogiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt.”
“The Sicilian Mafia” by Diego Gambetta is really, really good on this. And very readable for non-academics!
error:
“just a couple of months are I joked about its status”
are -> after
Typo, first picture caption:
“I should not that the artwork of non-state Iron Age Europe”
ITYM “note”
The description of the ties and gift economy of elites in such a society is the kind of thing that really helps me to have a stronger sense of what the value might be of being a “king” in terms where actually exercising much in the way of governing power is highly limited. That is, the gratification from being among all of these impressive people with their retinues and their fancy clothes and knowing that you stand above them, have some of their deference.
I’m often curious about what ends up making the big men big, the historical factors behind accumulating so much more property than one’s fellows. I think a lot of people cynical about aristocracy tend to assume that it’s just people who managed to gather a band of thugs to dominate others, and that’s probably not totally absent, but descriptions like this make me think there’s a strong social element to it; everything from being somebody among a bunch of smallholders who could make the case (or be a bit underhanded) to accumulate a bit more than their neighbours all the way over to being rewarded with land for providing service in the house of an existing big man, motivated to do so for those reasons of showing off and that being a necessity of how you grow military force to just plain sincerely liking those retainers and wanting to give them nice things.
(Also placed in the context of weak or absent kings and phrasing how this isn’t late Medieval vassalage to make a sense that aristocracy originates first and then a monarch emerges to bind them all to one authority, rather than aristocrats being the delegates of an already supreme monarch.)
I think the Moka system in eastern Papua New Guinea is a good example of how such a system can sustain itself (and also arise) bloodlessly: The vertical ties are basically based on “return of investment” in the form of gifts – if somebody wants to become a Big Man (or move up the Big Man hierarchy), they first have to convince the people they have horizontal ties with to provide them with starting capital, on the promise of giving back a bigger gift later, when they used that capital to enter into a profitable gift exchange with somebody else.
This shows that a Big Man doesn’t necessarily have to be military in nature, their role also overlaps with that of the merchant: They have the surplus and thus time to travel to another village and exchange gifts with the people there, providing their village with goods they could not otherwise acquire.
On the other hand, the Moka system also shows the inherent instability of such non-state systems: As having high status is defined by the “return of investment”, as the Biggest Big Man, you are also obligated to keep giving increasingly lavish counter-gifts, which, since the agricultural production of the region is limited, essentially means running a Ponzi scheme: You have to use the gifts you get to repay previous gifters. Long-term, you will run out of funds, and have to accept a loss in status – either gradually, as you give smaller and smaller counter-gifts, or suddenly, when you’re being put on the spot and can’t pay at all, and thus also lose all face.
See also the Potlatch custom of the Pacific Northwest, where families would gives gifts and feasts to establish themselves as leaders.
“a Big Man doesn’t necessarily have to be military in nature”
It’s true that it’s not a requirement. But before towns and industry it’s hard to get rich by farming. So raiding others and taking their (slowly accumulated) stuff would have been about the only way to get stuff quickly.
The most likely route to getting the stuff required to be a Big Man involves going off raiding the people off in foreign areas, i.e. far enough away that they talk different and are unlikely to be relatives of some sort.
Most Big Men would have become one by going on raids as part of some other Big Man’s party and being successful. Then getting other people to follow them on further raids, and also being successful at that.
If you get a reputation for being successful at raiding, and being generous with the results, then you become a Big Man. You keep being a Big Man by continuing to do this.
It’s hard to keep being successful though. So you start to come up with rules that tend to cement your role as a Big Man, often religious in nature. There’s a reason Big Men the world over have some sort of “divine blood” tales attached, from the king of Hawaii to the characters in Homer to the king of England.
I’m pretty sure that through the majority of history, the majority of wealthy people have gotten that way heavily if not primarily off the back of land ownership. Like, going far away to do war for the sake of bringing back material goods is kind of difficult, because it costs money to travel far away and even more money to bring heavy things back with you.
The main thing people have ever gone to war to acquire has been land.
On the other hand the Vikings (and a civilization cycle earlier the Sea Peoples) made good use of the ability of boats to economically carry off plunder. Though of course they were also on the lookout for places that looked like good prospects for colonizing.
The trick is that since foreigners are just as interested in going to war to acquire land as your own people would be, there’s a strong correlation between getting to be a major landowner for any length of time, and having the ability to arrange for a robust armed defense of that same patch of land.
Furthermore, ‘big man’ status beyond just the formal minimum of ‘has land’ is often going to revolve much more heavily around questions of prestige, where warfare becomes more important. Any local ‘big man’ has an income stream from the tenants on his farmland, but the ones who get high status within the community are the ones who have that and also a reputation as successful cattle raiders or whatnot.
> The most likely route to getting the stuff required to be a Big Man
I would expect this to vary a lot by society.
Even if a society started out with completely even land distribution, you can get smaller and bigger men naturally. Some families have lots of children and divide the land among them as far as it will go; some families have one child who inherits two people’s worth of land, or else have different inheritance policies where one gets it all and the others nothing. After a few generations you have many people on the most minimal subsistence plots, or outright landless, while a few others have several people’s worth of land. No violence or exploitation yet!
And then, as Bret described in the past, the big landowners can take more risks and get more economies of scale, improving their productivity, and also buy out or indebt small landowners who have a bad harvest, thus becoming even Bigger.
(Not to mention merchants who may accumulate a lot of money through trade, and then convert that to land by buying people out.)
Raiding other peoples for moveable goods (metal, slaves), or actual genocide and conquest, are of course huge mechanisms of inequality too, but you can go over time from equality to inequality without anyone doing anything wrong.
(Even “have too many kids” might not be something done ‘wrong’. If every family has 4 pregnancies, but by the luck of disease the Browns have 4 survive to adulthood while the Greens have 1, the Green kid is going to get a lot more land.)
And of course once you’re a Big enough man to have surplus and afford good armor and horses or just being big and healthy, then accumulating more stuff via warfare becomes more feasible too. Snowball effect.
That assumes community acceptance of those rules of inheritance. Some agricultural communities actively worked against this mechanism of inequality by redistributing land or communal ownership.
That assumes community acceptance of those rules of inheritance. Some agricultural communities actively worked against this mechanism of inequality by redistributing land or communal ownership.
There’s one culture i know of where until at least relatively recent times there was almost no right of inheritance- when a man died his house was burned and his cattle were killed and eaten collectively by the community. (Maybe other moveable property was allowed to be inherited, but this was a culture where cattle were the main form of wealth so that’s what really mattered).
Of course, if you are simply ruthlessly amassing land and wealth, you may succeeded in getting that, but there is also, like you say, a self-reinforcing positive cycle in becoming a “big man”: if you are starting with a bit over the average wealth, and are good at showing initiative, and managing the network of mutual trust and giving, you end up having a lot of gravitas.
This means you will need to get involved for those who depend on you, and in a pre-state society, this will involve violence, in addition to negotiation. Otherwise, you are betraying people’s trust in you. The violence, if successful, will bring loot, which helps you to build a larger network.
The main point here is that you may end up as a local notable without actually trying too heavily, simply because you play your part well and are good with people. In fact, if you manage it like that, you probably have real local support, and legitimacy.
I write this a bit from experience, because I happen to live in a rural community and can see how the networks around me work. Of course, without recourse to violence, but still, the mechanics described here by Bret are not too foreign to me.
I think it really can’t be overstated that on some level, somebody just going “I’m going to sell my surplus cloth over in the next village, do you have anything you want to sell that I should bring along?” or “You and Bob seem to be fighting a lot recently. I can probably get him to back off, if you’re willing to agree to my compromise proposal” a few times in a row is basically already forming the vertical relationships that will accelerate them into Big Man status in their local community – no violence required.
Well, up to a point. Big man status isn’t very stable unless there’s a stable basis of wealth that gives you the means to continue exercising your influence over the long run. This is why big men tend to be landholders with holdings above and beyond the needs of supporting a peasant household.
If you don’t have land, or something similarly prestigious or reliable as a revenue-generator of some kind, then it limits how much status you can gain on a permanent basis.
You start to see formal relatively fixed status hierarchies when there is storable food (grains usually) or an urgent demand for mediation. Internal violence is rarely a recipe for success – it breeds rivals and resentment. Offering effective arbitration is a more common approach.
There’s also the justice or arbitration element. Even nobles get tired of fighting and need some recognised point of final call. Kings tended to have a sacerdotal role which elevated them above even the highest aristocrat (‘there’s a divinity doth hedge a king…’), and be tied into both wider networks and religious powers.
State formation begins around temples and other religious centres (Ur, Thebes etc), and kingships from a run of luck in one family (Cyrus, Chlodovech, Theodoric, Harald Fairhair, Cerdic …) which signals divine favour
The knight as a social phenomenon is young, though: it appeared only during the crusades, first with the professed knight of the orders militant, then as their secular imitation.
So, the knights belong to an era where the West European politics are already very clearly states. In fact, the knightly ideal is a part of the state formation process, just like the oaths of peace: sublimating the warrior ideals into something that is more amenable to a legally governed state. As Christian theology is, to large extent, a product of such a state, the late Roman empire, it was natural for the church to support this process.
The knight as we recognize it is young (oaths to protect the weak etc.), but it was an attempt to reconcile the warrior-aristocrat with a Christian context.
The warrior-aristocrat, as we’re seeing in this article, is very old – it predates the state.
“Patrimonial Society” is the term I’d go with.
That means nothing other than “society were stuff is inherited”. Which is neither unique to pre-state societies, nor even universal amongst them.
Now I feel like I’m expecting an essay question to compare the social structures described in this week’s post from last week’s…
Judging from the other comments, it looks like it’s not just me that’s unsure about the distinction between state and non-state polities. Perhaps a fireside about this topic would be good? I’m vaguely aware that different definitions have been put forward by different authors, in everything from anthropology to international relations, but I’m unsure of their details or implications. It would be nice to go over some of these definitions (or just the orthodox one in ancient history circles), why it’s useful to distinguish between state and non-state polities, their distinguishing features, and how the transition from one to the other works.
I know it’s touched on in this blogpost and others, but having it separate would provide a clearer foundation and not muddle together this general distinction with the specific features of Celtic societies. Not to mention that such a historiographical discussion touching on more abstract points is one of the things this blog does best.
It’s quite difficult to nail down “state versus nonstate.” We can easily point to certain things as a central example of “this is a state” and others as “this is not,” but at the margins the two shade into each other very smoothly.
I remember that one of my professors in college, an archeologist, said one of his driving questions was why people allowed for the rise of kings and other despots. This article (and the early series about grain production) have partially answered that, as people in many of these societies had already lived under despots long before the emergence of kings. Rather than their power being derived from laws, the local despots’ power was simply the end result of economic inequality. Instead of giving their freedom away to a king, most people didn’t have it anyway.
The parallels between rise of kings and the falls of democracies into dictatorships seem to be surprisingly limited. The loss of freedom looks like it may have originated in the inequality of land ownership, with formation of kingdoms just being one big man gaining power over the others, with the bulk of the population being just as disenfranchised as before. What might be more notable is not the the development of non-state societies into kingdoms but into democracies, but even these tended to be dominated by the big men (in turn allowing for the emergence of the classic tyrants).
Even thinking in terms of “freedom” is probably unhelpful: that implies things like having rights guaranteed by laws or (conversely) there being a state that can compel you to do things against your will. These are not things that apply to pre-state societies because they (almost by definition) lack those institutions. Also, these are typically communities were family obligation, duty, social expectations, and a web of personal relationships are so overwhelmingly powerful that individual freedom is severely curtailed – or rather, it isn’t even a concept that people think in terms of.
To draw an imperfect analogy, do you think that a member of a gang bemoans the diminishment of their personal freedom when their gang boss (or their boss’s boss) becomes stronger? Or do they rejoice at the fact that they are now safer and can look forward to better rewards for continued service? I’m now saying that pre-state societies are exactly like the mafia, but in some aspects they are more similar to it than to state societies.
Specifically, in the sense that membership of a community, protection (both economic and violence related), and possibility for advancement are intrinsically tied to personal relationships with a Big Man (or Bigger Man if one a is a Big Man oneself). That this personal relationship comes with obligations, restrictions on ones behaviour, and the potential for abuse is all true but nothing special: all personal relationships come with those. It’s stronger in this case because of how profoundly unequal the power balance is, but that doesn’t mean it’s useful to cast it as loss of some abstract “freedom”.
yea, i think it’s much more useful to compare these societies in terms of levels of economic and social inequality, rather than to talk about abstract “freedom”. Which, like you say, isn’t a concept that would have made much sense to most people for most of history, and might not be something they valued highly even if they understood it.
I’m tempted to suggest that the difference between ancient democracies and oligarchies is that in the oligarchies the other Big Men choose which Big Man (from among this year’s candidates) gets to hold the magistracies, and in the democracies, the clients of the candidates always vote for their Big Man, but it’s the clients of the other Big Men who make the choice.
In the most democratic democracies, there are some peasants who are clients of the state as a whole rather than of a specific Big Man, and they always get to vote as they choose rather than having to vote for their patron when he’s a candidate.
feudalism ended with the rise of absolutism. Replacing local tyrants with central tyrants.
Good one. I’m looking forward to read the next part.
And thanks for the link to the The Moral Economy of the Shire. Very good too.
Somehow I have fallen off the email notifications/Subscriber list and no matter how often I sign up again, this never gets done.
The way you’re describing the vertical ties reminds me a lot of the Roman patron-client system. Does that suggest that Roman system evolved out of similar “Big Man” dynamics, or is the apparent similarity mainly due to our sources “translating” the local customs into a Roman cultural context? If it’s the former, then was the Roman patronage system even all that special, or was it simply a system that existed in many different agrarian societies?
Also, I was somewhat surprised by this:
“to think by analogy to other similar societies, the second sons of the lesser elite – men trained to fight like aristocrats, but without the wealth to sustain that lifestyle – would make a lot of sense.”
Does this imply that primogeniture was the norm among non-state agrarian societies? I would’ve thought that partible inheritance was more common.
It’s fair to call the patron-client system an example of Big Man dynamics, but it should be noted that (like all versions of that dynamic) it has its own peculiarities: In the patron-client relationship, the thing exchanged were rarely material gifts, and more abstract services. The patron and clients “lent” each other their political influence – itself an interplay with the Roman democratic system, in which a vote (or voice in the forum) was the currency of politics, compared to say, the feudal system, where what the vassal had to offer was their military strength, because that was the political currency.
As for promogeniture, inheritance is complicated, and I don’t think any society ever cleanly breaks into “pure primogeniture” or “pure partible inheritance”. But as much as an aging patrician will attempt to set up all his sons with enough wealth to make a living (via partition), there will always be parts of the inheritance that can’t be divided, most notably the house itself – so you have to select one child to be the inheritor, and all the others will by necessity be forced to find new lodgings somewhere. Thus, the exact term “second sons” might not be correct in all cultures, but the general principle applies pretty universally.
Indivisible property can still be divided into abstract shares and distributed among inheritors. French castellans sometimes bequeathed all of their sons equal shares of the family castle, which meant that all of them could continue to use it as a residence and could pass down such rights to their sons, and on and on.
Entirely true, but it requires rather more abstract and legalistic notion of ownership. It also requires that rights related to indivisible property can themselves be divided, ie, that there are enough bedrooms in the castle or that the tax income from the adjoining lands can be split up (it’s made up of cash or grain or something else that’s fungible).
Or it can be actual division.
My father’s oldest brother inherited the family farm, including the house. But he already had his own house nearby.
He had four children. They remodeled the house into four apartments with separate entrances, one for each.
For the castle, it might have been dividable into “wings” or areas that can be designated as such. Many English large houses had those, e.g. one wing for the lord, one for the eldest son when he gets married, etc.
“As for promogeniture, inheritance is complicated, and I don’t think any society ever cleanly breaks into “pure primogeniture” or “pure partible inheritance”.”
Then for maximal confusion there’s the hybrid practice of splitting the inheritance between sons but giving the first born a “double portion.” 🙂
Feudal – more usefully medieval – life included more than war (although the nobility saw war as their avocation – but then so did Roman nobles of the Republic). The currency was loyalty – one’s vassals were fideles, offering council and support in judgement. In the roughly two centuries when central rule was weak the commonest words in charters and oaths are ‘love’ and loyalty’.
“there will always be parts of the inheritance that can’t be divided, most notably the house itself”
That’s actually a classic case of something the Romans could divide. If you have a small farmstead being inherited by two heirs who both lived with the deceased, they could just own the house and the farm as a joint property to be divided at some indefinite point in the future, potentially not even in their own lifetimes.
You can divide quite a lot where there is willingness and creativity. At one point in the Golden Ass, Apuleius writes about a fuller who discovered his wife cheating on him with an attractive young man. The husband declares that he is not one for retribution so rather then divorce his wife and split the estate, the two of them should stay together and continue to share the estate, including taking turns with the attractive young man. So it’s doable.
It still seems reasonable to suppose that the Roman patron-client system in which the main political currency exchanged back and forth was votes and legal support within the state apparatus of the Roman polity as a whole would be an outgrowth of earlier systems more like those of other cultures with ‘big men.’
Even without primogeniture some (not specifically second, just more adventurous) sons of the lesser elite may prefer to gain good horses, armor and weapons as inheritance and leave lands and house to their less adventurous siblings. Such practice was sometimes described in Norse sagas, although there warships were the most valuable part of inheritance for such “adventurers”.
Since this came up regularly in the article, I’d like to point out that most modern anarchists* are aware that a complete lack of social institutions would allow people who get some power to leverage it against the community. That’s why they want to set up a different set of institutions which actively distribute power, which are too complicated (and include too many pre-emptive responses to obvious criticisms) to explain in this comment.
Also too varied, because anarchists disagree on many things.
*With the arguable exception of anarcho-capitalists. Arguable not because a significant number of ancaps adjust their political beliefs to account for the issue at hand, but because many anarchists argue that anarcho-capitalism has as much in common with anarchism as national socialism has with socialism. (Reminder: The Nazis threw socialists and their allies into death camps.)
It should be noted that this is one of the few things most anarchists agree on.
many anarchists argue that anarcho-capitalism has as much in common with anarchism as national socialism has with socialism. (Reminder: The Nazis threw socialists and their allies into death camps.)
Given how many of Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and Mao’s victims were also socialists, I’m not sure that you can use that as evidence that Nazis weren’t socialists.
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), [note the name] suppressed the Socialist and Communist parties and their related labor unions because they were pro-Russian not because they were socialist. The leftists appologists for the Soviet Union in the Cold War era liked to pretend that this showed the enormous difference between the Communists and the Nazis. It didn’t. The Soviets were perfectly willing and eager to anathematize and persecute other socialist sects within Russia, such as the Trotskyites and the Mensheviks.
No, they suppressed them because socialism was a Jewish conspiracy to weaken Germany spread by cultural Marxists i.e. liberal professors. Who were also gay. And pedophiles. And secret Jews.
The myth that it was just because they supported Russia is active revisionism verging into Holocaust denialism. Don’t whitewash Nazi madness, nothing they were doing was coherent.
And leftists hate the Soviets. I suspect there’s more support for the Soviets among the US far right than the majority of the US left these days; the far right like their tanks and parades. I can’t speak to other countries.
there are reasons for the Nazis’ actions. Saying they are just mad people doing incoherent things both underplays their danger and the future danger of people falling for Nazism again.
And none of those reasons are sane. The Nazi actions make sense from the insane pretenses they believed, but the world they believed in wasn’t real-anti empiricism was a major part of their philosophy.
To put it another way, nothing dangerous about the Nazis involved them believing correct things or forming reasonable beliefs. They were wrong about basically everything at all times, from the strength of their enemies to the history of their own civilization. They just successfully convinced a bunch of people to give them a powerful industrial country to militarize, and then to follow them to war. That’s what made them dangerous.
Nazis repressed all dissenting politics. Even before WWII, you could end up in a concentration camp for being a Catholic Christian Democrat or a Liberal Democrat.
Your point about “socialism” is inaccurate, anyhow. I’m Germany, the largest party that an American would call “socialist” was the SPD, the Social Democrats. This party was the force that had formed the Weimar Republic, and which was not obedient to any foreign country. And which continued in West Germany (and today’s unified Germany) as a faithful supporter of the democracy of the FRG.
The defining feature of the German Social Democracy was its patriotism and unwillingness to have a violent revolution. This reflected itself in the fact that SPD supported the WWI, and after the war, the defence minister Noske suppressed the communist violence using armed force , in favour of bourgeois democracy.
Here’s the trick-the Marxist-leninists aren’t socialists either. Originally they were at least aware enough to say this, the Marxist-leninists vanguard state was supposed to transition to socialism. That just never happened, because it became easier to replace the existing class structure rather than destroy it, and much more profitable for the truly awful people whom helmed these nations.
This is pretty explicit with Lenin. He took charge, gained popularity with the military, and as soon as he started to lose power had them shoot protestors and arrest socialists. From them on Russian socialism became increasingly non socialist.
None of this makes the Nazis socialist. In their own rhetoric they’re pro capitalist and privatized business, albeit with the government retaining the ability to decide winners and services to ethnic, traditionalist, germans. In other words they’re about as socialist as the modern Republican party.
No true Scotsman?
Anyway if the Soviets were not socialist then the worldwide anti-imperialist movement supported by the Soviet Union were not socialist either. China, Vietnam, Cuba,etc… would also be not socialist.
Which means the “true socialists” both are so few in number compared to the “fake” ones and haven’t done much to affect and change the world at all.
No true Scotsman is a fallacy when you *change the definition of a term* to get around a logical counterexample. The definition of socialism hasn’t changed, I’m just pointing out that the Marxist-leninists don’t qualify. They specifically don’t qualify because two of the original criteria are for a stateless society, and for workers to own the means of production. In a Marxist leninists society *the state* owns the means of production, so it can’t be socialist.
This is, again, noted by Lenin. The state was a tool to redistribute wealth to end the state, which failed because the incentives (and personalities) of power led the vanguard leadership to repress dissent and sever the democratic ties between people and state, which let Stalin completely transform the system to his personal benefit.
The lesson is that democracy is necessary to socialism. Even if the state is a tool of reform, it must be made subject to the people.
Now the fact that Marxist leninists socialism hasn’t existed doesn’t mean states which try to achieve socialism don’t exist, but it does invalidate the idea that Nazis killing socialists isn’t evidence they weren’t socialists because vanguardists also killed socialists. The entire vanguard political philosophy treads on dangerous ground and as actually implemented it rapidly divorced itself from any real idealogical roots in favor of strengthening the state. It’s more similar to Nazism than any other system influenced by socialist thought.
Which, to be clear, includes American and European democracies. Social-democrats (the idealogy, not the parties per say) were instrumental in implementing the workers rights reforms and financial regulations that fueled post depression recovery and post war booms. Those are socialist reforms, even if they don’t do enough to make the countries socialist.
Basically, realities complicated, but not in a way that makes Nazis socialists.
“Socialist” is, anyhow, a pretty bad word, as it has several meanings. In the usual Cold War European parlance, it would mean those people who were leftier than social democrats, but who were not communists, or at least not orthodox supporters of Soviet or Chinese communism. Except in France, where “socialists” were mostly social democrats.
In common American speech, British Labour is quite as “socialist” as Pol-Pots Red Chmers.
And you may have almost any other definition between those two, depending on time and place.
Dcmcmorinmorin seems to be using the word “socialist” in the former sense. As such, this is not a bad choice, but as you say, the meaning of the word becomes so narrow that actual socialists have rarely had any power at all.
That is why is prefer not to use word “socialist”. It doesn’t really mean a thing.
also remember many “true” socialists supported the imperialist WW1 while the “fake” ones like Bolsheviks opposed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Socialist_Conference_of_1915
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Allied_Socialist_Conferences_of_World_War_I#London.2C_Feb._1915
??? No, they clearly opposed it?
The Nazis were only interested in economic forms in so far as they worked with or against their racial and military goals. They were neither socialist or capitalist or syndicalist anything else in that line – the ideology centred on ‘race’ and war.
The Nazis had a vision for the postwar economy. Adam Tooze lays out the broad contours in the Wages of Destruction. In short, planned society, caste system to keep a third of the racially favored population agrarian, heavy restriction of lending, elites with capital ownership.
The Nazis were very weird in addition to being very evil. We tend to forget the weird stuff because it’s so foreign to our conception of politics. I think it’s unfortunate that we forget the weirdness because it seems like a useful indicator of extremism becoming dangerous.
Yes, so I suppose it makes more sense to instead use such arguments like: that under the Nazis the income share of the top 1% increased; that the Nazi state generally preferred to manage the economy by bribing/enticing big business to do what they want they want rather than directly forcing them; or that as the NSDAP grew it came at the expense of non-leftwing parties, as evidenced by the combined vote percentages for Socialists (SDP) & Communists (KPD) remaining about the same when the Nazi vote share grew*.
As Pseudoerasmus had done here: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/05/06/fascists-part-2/
* Curiously enough, support for the Catholic Zentrum also remained mostly constant during the Nazi rise. Does that mean that Nazism was as antithetical to traditional Catholicism as to Socialism?
* Curiously enough, support for the Catholic Zentrum also remained mostly constant during the Nazi rise. Does that mean that Nazism was as antithetical to traditional Catholicism as to Socialism?
A comparison of the Catholic population of Weimar Germany with the results of the 1932 General Election suggests that this was indeed the case:
https://imgur.com/WIW92J5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1932_German_federal_election#/media/File:November_1932_German_federal_election_-_Charts.svg
* Curiously enough, support for the Catholic Zentrum also remained mostly constant during the Nazi rise. Does that mean that Nazism was as antithetical to traditional Catholicism as to Socialism?
A comparison of the proportion of Catholics in each region with the Nazi vote share in 1932 suggests that this was indeed the case. (I tried posting links to some maps showing these things, but apparently it got eaten by the spam filter. It’s easy enough to Google, though.)
Yes. Yes it would.
I should note here that I’m not in the “the Nazis were actually left-wing” camp due to all of the reasons you’ve cited, most saliently the fact that they sought to co-opt rather than kill the bourgeoise.
I think the following is relevant to a discussion of the political structure of Classical era Celtic society:
Gretzinger, J., Schmitt, F., Mötsch, A. et al. “Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe.” Nat Hum Behav (03 Jun 2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01888-7
“The European Iron Age north of the Alps is characterized by the two key archaeological cultures Hallstatt (800 to 450BCE) and La Tène (after 450BCE until the beginning of the Roman period around 50BCE), which have been, to a different degree, described as ‘Celtic’. Today regarded problematic as an ethnonym, the name ‘Celtic’ was first mentioned in Greek sources from the late sixth century BC, and it is abundantly used in antique sources for societies associated with the La Tène culture . Apart from this historical record and its association with the later Hallstatt and La Tène cultures, there is also a connection to linguistic evidence for a common prehistoric language family across large parts of Europe (the Celtic languages). Indeed, the pan-European patterns and linguistic evidence for cultural connections during this time are complex and encompass a vast region from the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles throughout Central Europe and as far east as Anatolia (during the third century BCE). While older research assumed an exclusive emergence of this later pan-European phenomenon in a relatively narrowly defined area northwest of the Alps, newer perspectives suggest a model of polycentric emergence in a wide area between the Atlantic coast and southwestern Germany5. One of these core regions was located in present-day eastern France, Switzerland and southwestern Germany. Between 600 and 400BCE (Hallstatt D and La Tène A), this area stands out in its archaeological importance, as highlighted by rich ‘princely’ burials (‘Fürstengräber’).
“These burials are characterized by monumental burial mounds and luxurious grave goods such as ceremonial wagons, furniture, gold jewellery, imported goods from the Greek and Etruscan cultural spheres, or extensive drinking and dining services. Such rare and precious objects have typically been considered indicative of outstanding social status. Throughout the early Iron Age, warrior and sacral-religious representations within those princely burials increasingly conglomerated, merging worldly and spiritual power, perhaps more comparable to sacral kings rather than mere chieftains. After their death, members of this princely elite were entombed below imposing monuments and became commemorated as heroic ancestors. As this development progressed, some of these individuals were buried and worshipped in a god-like manner11 in large ceremonial complexes, such as the burial monuments near the Glauberg in Hesse, erected in the early La Tène period around 400BCE15. Accordingly, those monumental princely burials would represent the manifestation of dynastic systems of power, in which political hegemony was at least partially based on biologically inherited privilege, a hallmark of early complex societies.
“The nature of the early Celtic political system, especially the importance of biological kinship, has been highly controversial to this day. Some scholars interpret these deceased as ‘village elders’, who acquired their high social status through personal achievement during their lifetime without the precondition of inheritance. The existence of extraordinarily wealthy child burials, indicative of superb social power and prestige, seems to contradict this hypothesis of self-acquired prestige, since those young individuals could hardly achieve such a status during their short lifetime but instead must have inherited it. The argument for hereditary status among elite families is further supported by the recurrent combination of symbols of power such as gold jewellery, precious drinking vessels and wagons associated with the ritual authority of the deceased princes and princesses. A central aspect of a dynastic system of hereditary power is biological relatedness. While there are other forms of kinship, including social relatedness such as fosterage or adoption, which are notoriously difficult to infer from burial archaeology, biological relatedness can be conclusively reconstructed using genetic data. Ancient DNA (aDNA) is therefore a unique tool to address this question but has so far been unsuccessful. In this Article, we present genome-wide evidence for the early Celtic society of southwestern Germany and its political organization in the sixth and fifth century BCE.”
I think you significantly underestimate the importance of animal husbandry in those societies (maybe with the exception of Southern Gaul, which may be closer to Mediterranean). There are at least three reasons why animal husbandry was way more important:
1. Not all land is good for growing grain, but a lot of that suboptimal land is suitable as pasture. Hills and mountains are one example, but there are also wetlands and so on. And a lot of land suitable for agriculture may be covered by forests, and cutting those forests down requires a lot of labor and time, but oak and beech forests are excellent pastures for swine (and cattle and sheep can graze in forests as well). Also, some land may be laid fallow to recover its productivity and used as pasture during this time.
2. Animal husbandry requires way less labor than agriculture, since several herdsmen can manage a large herd of livestock. So maybe “you could support a lot more people turning that pasture over to wheat”, but if you do not have those people to begin with it is reasonable to use that land as pasture. And I assume population density was pretty low (especially in Northern Gaul and Germania), so there wasn’t a lot of pressure to turn all pastures into grain fields.
3. Livestock is a safer investment in a situation of common raiding and small-scale warfare. You can hide animals behind a palisade of your village in case of a raid (or just during the night), but you can’t hide your grain fields, which can be burnt by the enemy (especially if they are situated far away from your village).
So I think that your idea that “European barbarians” were agriculturalists and not pastoralists isn’t exactly correct. They were both, with importance of agriculture and animal husbandry varied from one region to another. For example, both Caesar and Tacitus stated that animal husbandry was more important to Germanic peoples than agriculture. Those statements may be somewhat exaggerated, of course, but they show how Romans saw those peoples.
Did the people discussed in this essay have cities? Are there any known examples of cities without states, or of states without cities?
Polynesia would qualify as having states without cities, right?
What’s the definition of “city” being used here? Polynesians weren’t nomads (though they may have traveled far to trade, and colonize new lands); they built permanent settlements which might be small by modern standards, but cities were generally a lot smaller a thousand years ago.
I mean, i’d say some Pacific Island nations barely have cities (as opposed to “large towns with lots of modern amenities”) *today*. Many of these are really low-population societies. Tonga had a maritime empire back in the day and their capital *today* has under 25k people.
It’s kinda difficult to describe, they had some fairly large settlements (though much smaller than mediterranean cities, they are sometimes larger than medieval cities) whether they count gets into the weeds of what counts as a “City”
Graeber and Wengrow, in Dawn of Everything, discuss a long series of cities that they claim arose before the state and remained for a long time independent of the state. They discuss mainly Uruk, Ukrainian mega-sites, Mohenjo Daro and Teotihuacan, but they give references for several others, e.g. in southeastern Shandong and northern Shaanxi.
Opinions vary on the strength of their arguments (as referenced by our host in his footnote), but I think there is quite a bit of evidence for at least some of those stateless cities.
> In particular, the Germanic-language-speakers the Romans are calling Germani include the Franks (who will end up being French), Angles and Saxons (who will end up being English)
This almost seems like some bizarre “Allied version of history”, where the British and French are the *real* Germani.
> Because wheat (and barley) as crops can support a lot more people for a given unit of land or labor than basically any other option available to these societies
It’s probably been said before, but: wheat OP, plz nerf
Wait until you hear about rice or potatoes.
“How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe” is either the name of a pending book on personal philosophy, or a truly niche Youtube instructable…
Having now read the article, I’m going to revise my assessment of the title to ‘not nearly as niche as you’d think Youtube instructable’.
Definitely leaning towards the book on personal philosophy. Think of it as the new ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’.
For the written records of nonstate societies, many don´t write. A few either do, or write down extensive corpora of literature concerning their recent nonstate history.
A Celtic society is actually among these few: the Irish mythology written down in what was still effectively nonstate Ireland.
But as pointed out by Bret, the societies of Celts did vary. The nonstate Celts of mainland Gaul do not seem to have regarded the nonstate Celts of Great Britain as the same people – let alone the nonstate Celts of Ireland. On the side of Irish Celts, “Gaill” – the standard word for aliens – is likely derived from “Gaul”.
But we don´t have, from mainland Gaul (nor from lowland British Celts) the kind of literary corpus that exists for nonstate Ireland.
Moving on to nonstate Rome and Italy, the main narrative sources that exist for nonstate Rome, like Titus Livius, derive from late 1st century BC, and show anachronisms derived from the state viewpoint. There was Cato´s Origines – but it does not exist.
As for Roman clientage being in the popular assembly not war… well, the Fabii fought a private war against Veii and fell with 306 men. Were all of these patrilineally born Fabii, from monogamous marriages? Or were any of the 306 clients? Or how about Attus Clausus?
Now, another nonstate society we DO have extensive corpus about is nonstate Greece, to the East of Rome. The Epics. From two authors (Homeros and Hesiodos).
The total lack of serious institutions at Ithaca for Telemachos and Penelope to appeal to suggests that Ithaca was not a state. King Odysseus sailed off to war and no popular assembly was called for 20 years. No formal regent in his absence – Mentor was charged with private assistance to household, and ineffective at that. No routine handling of trials.
And this is not unique. Not only the Suitors got away with neither formal condemnation nor approval till faced by Odysseus´ self-help, but Aigisthos´ coup against Agamemnon was also unopposed. Aigisthos is not shown exercising High Kingship outside Mycenae, but neither is Orestes.
Note how helpless Odysseus is raising an army on the second try. On his first try, he did raise a contingent of 600…700 men for Troy. How? We know the backstory of just two, and neither was an example of family loyalty. Antiphos was on Odysseus´ ship and was eaten by Polyphemus – his brother Eurynomus, unaware of Antiphos´ fate, was one of the suitors. And the other was Eurylochus, husband of Odysseus´ sister Ctimene… who functions as leader of opposition when Odysseus leads his men into trouble.
When Odysseus cones back, he raises his son, two of his favourite slaves on promise of manumission of something similar (out of likely 200+ male slaves he owns – Eumaios heads a team of 5 slaves, and reports about 50 similar teams owned by Odysseus). And then discusses and is dissuaded from looking for more loyal slaves to recruit – instead plotting to slaughter 109 men with just 4 men by trapping them unarmed in a house. Odysseus does not seem to even discuss recruiting freemen – the sons, brothers and nephews of the 600+ men he sailed to Troy 20 years before.
About the nature of wealth… Note how secondary “land” is in the Epics as wealth. Rich people are incidentally mentioned as holding fields, immigrants are given land… but no one ever fights for land. People fight for revenge, and for movable wealth. Slaves, metal items and above all domestic animals. The suitors are impoverishing Odysseus by eating his animals, not by taking over his lands.
The Irish mythology also seems to concentrate on owning and raiding for animals.
And Romans? “Pecunia” derives from “pecus” which means cattle. Again, emphasis on ownership of animals, not land.
What is the closer analogue to Gaul?
> The total lack of serious institutions at Ithaca for Telemachos and Penelope to appeal to suggests that Ithaca was not a state.
Would the apocryphal quote, “”L’État, c’est moi”, be more appropriate for a non-state society?
> for movable wealth. Slaves, metal items and above all domestic animals. The suitors are impoverishing Odysseus by eating his animals, not by taking over his lands.
So, capital?
“Would the apocryphal quote, “”L’État, c’est moi”, be more appropriate for a non-state society?”
Well, Laertes was alive but not a state. Odysseus, when he came back and identified himself, was not really a state for his identity – he had to fight for the position.
For France, while Louis XIV (miscounted, too small number) is very far from Gaul or Odyssey, how about the sons of the real Louis I?
When Louis I died in 511, his eldest son Theuderic was 24… but his younger sons Chlodomer, Childebert and Chlothar were midteens or Chlothar even younger. Compare Telemachos who, at 20, was treated as a child and unable to protect his household. Well, the sons of Louis got shares of kingdom… there was an institution of kingdom of France, which could be shared to midteen boys and did not disperse on attempting to hand it to midteen boys, in pieces.
How much was Gaul of Louis I and of Gregory of Tours a state society like Gaul of Vercingetorix was not?
And yes, much of the “capital” consisted of animals and slaves, both of which have “capita”.
I think Louis I (Chlodovech) was more King of the (west) Franks than King of France – but the Franks as a whole had a consciousness of their identity and their nobility a good idea of the extent of Frankish rule (over the Aquitainians, Burgunds and Provencals) – all of which formed a realm under the Merovingian family.
Vercingetorix led a coalition of tribes. Other Gallic tribes fought with the Romans or against them as their leaders decided. There was no Gallic realm (we don’t know much about how tight governance was within tribes – some may have been closer to states than others).
Testing to see if you can post here without subscribing to the blog itself.
Also, dcmorinmorinmorin, thanks for your arguments, though I do not agree with all of them.
And by that, I agree with 90% of them.
And quite frankly, equating every pre-colonial people to savages to justify [Insert European Colonial Empire Here] is wrong and I am glad you argued against that, dcmorinmorinmorin.
Thank you.
Indeed, it would be wrong to do that, which is why it’s really great that no one who comments here has actually done that
Mr. X literally has implied it. Not stated, implied. I tried extending the benefit of the doubt to him earlier and he refused it, saying, ‘Case in Point, you are casting precolonial societies as peaceful and utopian’.
While we’re at it, I have issues with your Islamophobia.
I’ll go even further and say that you must have the blood of Muslim civilians on your hands, directly or indirectly, and you feel no guilt.
To what extent should we expect the common farmers to speak the same language as the big men? To have the same culture (material and immaterial), to the extent it is meaningful to ask the question across the wealth/power gap? It would be awfully convenient if the “primordial homogeneity”, so to speak, of these societies/areas broke at exactly the same moment they enter visible history (as a result of entering visible history with getting subjugated by an empire), but that seems increasingly unlikely the more I think about it.
Separately: do the sources draw an analogy between the bands of iuvenes and Alexander’s syntrophoi?
To what extent should we expect the common farmers to speak the same language as the big men?
Well, the big men needed to be able to communicate with their dependents, and I’m not aware of any evidence suggesting that the two classes spoke two separate languages.
Initially Brythonic-speaking peasants and their eventual descendants successively came under the overlordship of Latin, Anglosaxon, Norse, then pidginized Norse+Latin+Frankish speakers. So today they speak a pidgin of three, previously-diverged Germanic languages, plus Latin (transmitted via French).
Likewise, on the south shore of Spain, the Turdetanian- and Iberian-speaking (which languages may not have been Indoeuropean) peasants’ descendants may have found it useful to learn, at one time or another, Punic, Latin, Vandal, Arabic, or ex-Latin.
Hence the question: were the “Gaulish-speaking Gauls” who e.g. Caesar beat up a homogeneous population, or were the elites Gaulish-speaking while the peasantry would have spoken a mixture of Gaulish, their previous language (probably some relatively related Celtic) and a pidgin of the two?
Correspondingly: the La Téne material culture (including military goods) only dates from 450 or so. But by 387 Brennus fights Rome, by the early 200s there are Gauls invading Greece. In something like two centuries, this stuff has spread over a range from Portugal to Anatolia (with the Galatians). “That’s not luck, that’s skill” — they were playing bowling with everyone else, by the looks of it. Hence the question — if the Gaulish elite in fact conquered some preexisting peasantry around 400, to what extent would have the hybridization/”syncretism” have merged their cultures, vs. to what extent would the peasantry still have its earlier culture?
Hence the question: were the “Gaulish-speaking Gauls” who e.g. Caesar beat up a homogeneous population, or were the elites Gaulish-speaking while the peasantry would have spoken a mixture of Gaulish, their previous language (probably some relatively related Celtic) and a pidgin of the two?
I don’t think Caesar gives any indication that there were linguistic differences between the upper and lower classes, so it looks like any such differences had been ironed out by his time, at least in Gaul itself.
Correspondingly: the La Téne material culture (including military goods) only dates from 450 or so.
La Tene culture does, but that Hallstatt culture from which it derived dates back several centuries more. Even if we only count from the beginning of La Tene, though, that’s still some 400 years before Caesar’s time, plenty long enough for the linguistic situation to settle down (by way of comparison, it’s approximately the same amount of time that separates us from Shakespeare).
I don’t think Caesar gives any indication that there were linguistic differences between the upper and lower classes, so it looks like any such differences had been ironed out by his time, at least in Gaul itself.
Been a while since I read him, does Caesar give muchindiction of linguistic variation whatsoever? I don’t see any reason to take the existence of some monolithic Gallic language as a prior, considering especially that Caesar quite obviously interacted with a very sizable range of different societies in Gaul, spread out over considerable distances and in often distinct ecological niches.
This is a highly decentralized human diaspora spread over a very large area. It seems entirely inconceivable to me that there could be any less than hundreds of different dialects in play, many of the latter mutually unintelligible — in effect, different languages entirely.
As far as I know, there are (were?) some hypothesis, that in Gaul only aristocracy was actually Celtic, while peasants were Ligurian, Iberian or Aquitanian (proto-Basque). But even this was the case during the initial Celtic expansion, it seems that at the time of Caesar those non-Celtic peasants were mostly assimilated.
Late to the discussion here, but how did “pre-state” tribal society differ from “post-collapse” feudal society?
“a big part of the development that we see in early civic governments (e.g. Solon’s reforms at Athens, or the Struggle of the Orders in Rome) is that the civic expression of the state tended to provide a mechanism by which the commons might demand better treatment than what came before.”
Interesting. That seems to imply a more “bottom-up” model of state formation, when I’d only really heard of the “top-down” model before. Where can I read more about this?
Or am I misinterpreting the above sentence, and it actually means that states were still formed in a top-down manner, but also coincidentally ended up helping the common people?
In the conflict between a central government (King, Assembly, etc) and local Big Men, the government can appeal to the supporters of the Big Men by offering them better treatment. Or the local not-Biggest men might offer support to curtail the demands of the Biggest Man.
Sort of a blend, I think–the formation is still top-down, but made in response to the demands of the common people. Also, such mechanisms tend to make competition among the elites somewhat lower-stakes as well, as they tend to decrease the likelihood of losing the power struggle resulting in losing your life.
The state forms first – both Athens and Rome were monarchies first. After their kings were abolished and replaced with oligarchic forms of government, we see this shift, though it takes quite different forms in both.
Welp, I tried extending the benefit of the doubt to Conservatives here, and they turned out to be Anti-Muslim (I am not a Muslim, btw, although I am not White), Pro-Colonialist, and they have shown no sign of wanting to argue in good faith or with actual data that isn’t from an Islamophobe, a Racist, or a Corporatist Libertarian who believes that businesses and bankers *should* conspire against the public.
ey81 even spat at our host by accusing him of bias!
Boot them out, Bret Devereaux. They provide nothing useful except hysterical screaming about how climate change isn’t real and how big government should be dismantled and all legitimate use of force should be in the hands of the Big Men, *screw the weak*.
First… please run a grammar/spellchecker. As an example: “… just a couple of months are I joked about its status)”
Second… am I misperceiving, or is that same social structure that the Mob has. as do all inner-city gangs?
One issue: I am under the impression that stirrups were not invented until the 700s CE. You keep referring to fighting mounted, while I thought that the Romans, for example, used horses to close, then dismounted to fight.
Let me also offer another view of the gift-giving: Hrold Kraki’s Saga (brilliantly retold by Poul Anderson).
There were plenty of ancient people who fought mounted without stirrups. It was more physically demanding to do so, but not at all impossible. It did make certain specific styles of mounted warfare much more difficult (you don’t see nearly as many heavy shock cavalry), but mounted warfare in general was entirely possible.
The relationship between small and big farmers in this model sounds a lot like a basic description of the Roman villa system. It’s funny how these peoples developed similar socioeconomic relations to the Romans even before they were conquered by them.
> The natural result is that, even as new land may be cleared and brought under cultivation and the population may be growing, most farming households accumulate at the same basic minimum of subsistence and just a bit more.
I can’t help wondering if this is the reason why, despite modern farming, we still haven’t managed to tackle poverty in some part of the world. Are we as a species designed to somehow live at the limit of survival, except if provided with birth control?