Archeological Findings: The Origin of the State: War

Sociologist Franz Oppenheimer theorized that the state was born out of war.

From Mr. Oppenheimer

The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors."

No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. [1] Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organisation, or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately 'wolf states'." (p. 15)

Recently some archeologists have found evidence in support of Mr. Oppenheimer’s theory.

From the New York Times, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip Charles Burris]

Some archaeologists have painted primitive societies as relatively peaceful, implying that war is a reprehensible modern deviation. Others have seen war as the midwife of the first states that arose as human population increased and more complex social structures emerged to coordinate activities.

A wave of new research is supporting this second view. Charles Stanish and Abigail Levine, archaeologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have traced the rise of the pristine states that preceded the Inca empire. The first villages in the region were formed some 3,500 years ago. Over the next 1,000 years, some developed into larger regional centers, spaced about 12 to 15 miles apart. Then, starting around 500 B.C., signs of warfare emerged in the form of trophy heads and depictions of warriors, the two archaeologists report in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

Dr. Stanish believes that warfare was the midwife of the first states that arose in many regions of the world, including Mesopotamia and China as well as the Americas.

The first states, in his view, were not passive affairs driven by forces beyond human control, like climate and geography, as some historians have supposed. Rather, they were shaped by human choice as people sought new forms of cooperation and new institutions for the more complex societies that were developing. Trade was one of these cooperative institutions for consolidating larger-scale groups; warfare was the other.

Warfare may not usually be thought of as a form of cooperation, but organized hostilities between chiefdoms require that within each chiefdom people subordinate their individual self-interest to that of the group.

“Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it,” the anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley writes in his book “War Before Civilization” (Oxford, 1996).

The primary innate instinct of every state is to establish and preserve political control through violence.