Talk:State

nice! i like this already —unsigned comment by 190.212.56.112 (talk) 01:18, 24 November 2010.

On the origin and rise of the state

A place to store thoughts on the origin of the state.

Jared Diamond speaks about the how an elite can maintain popular support while maintaining a more comfortable lifestyle than commoners (Guns, Germs and Steel, p.276-278):

• Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
• Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways.
• Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. (Noting that 'more primitive' society groups are in fact rather violent.)
• Construct a justifying ideology or religion. (As an additional benefit, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other - by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. It gives also people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attacks.)

He lists the reasons for states' triumphs over simpler entities when the collided (p.281-286):

• states usually enjoyed an advantage of weaponry and other technology
• a large numerical advantage in population
• a centralized decision maker has the advantage of concentrating troops and resources
• the official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally

Diamond also theorizes about the origin of the state (p.283). He notes that the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated that states are formed by a social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest, came to the agreement that they would be better off in a state than in simpler societies and voluntarily did away with them. But observation and historical records have failed to uncover a single case of a state's being formed in that ethereal atmosphere of dispassionate farsightedness. Smaller units do not voluntarily abandon their sovereignty and merge into larger units. They do so only by conquest, or under external duress.

Diamond claims that food production and 'societal complexity' stimulate each other. Further, he claims complex centralized societies are uniquely capable of organizing public works, long-distance trade and activities of different groups of economic specialists.

So, what are his ultimate reasons for the emergence of states (p.286-287):

• the problem of conflict between unrelated strangers, which increases with the size of groups
• growing impossibility of communal decision-making
• "Large societies can function economically only if they have a redistributive economy in addition to a reciprocal economy. Goods in excess of an individual's needs must be transferred from the individual to a centralized authority, which then redistributes the goods to individuals with benefits."
• densely populated regions require large and complexly organized societies

On the other side, the political theorist Albert Jay Nock and the economist Murray Rothbard suggested a typical pattern in history nearly the opposite of Diamond's. They hypothesized that states arise when some nomadic people, who have been repeatedly raiding a nearby society of relatively peaceful farmers over an extended period, come to realize that it is more profitable to settle right in the farming community as rulers, enabling them to continually raid the productive population in the form of taxes. (See Nock, 1935, and Rothbard, 1978.)

More on this later. Pestergaines 17:51, 21 May 2012 (MSD)

Distinction between public and private

How do we distinguish between public and private sovereigns? E.g. if all the governments, national, state and local, were abolished, wouldn't you as private landowner be at that point a government over all who choose to enter your property? Maybe some ethical rules of proportionality would apply, e.g. you couldn't shoot someone for mere theft, and such behavior might result in ostracism or counterattack if the prevailing norms condemned such behavior. But you could expel someone from your land for whatever reasons you deemed appropriate. Those reasons could include non-payment of rent. Isn't a tax basically rent imposed by a sovereign? A sovereign is like a super-landlord, is he not? FormerContributor-78162cb3 (talk) 05:36, 17 July 2012 (MSD)