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~ .Landau, Amer. J. Public Health 54, 85 (1964) . tion on property values . See R . J . Anderson, 69 . P .

erson, 69 . P . Stocks, "British Empire Cancer Campaign,"


'~ If one accepted this evidence as conclusive, Jr,, and T. D . Crocker, "Air Pollution and' " supplement to "Cancer in North Wales and
it would follow that the annual costi of air residential property values," paper presented Liverpool Region," part 2(Summerfield and
pollution, because of health effects, would run at a meeting of the Econometric Society, New Day,, London, 1957) .
between $14 billion and $29 billion . York, December 1969 ;, H . O . Nourse, Land 70 . G . Dean, Brrt . Med. l . 1, 1506 (1966) .
65. See J. H. Schulte ; Arch. Environ . Health 7, Econ . 43, 181~ (1967) ; R. G . Ridker, Eco- 71 . A . H. Golledge and A . Ji Wicken, Med.
524 (1963) ; A . G . Cooper, "Carbon Mon- nomic Costs oj' Air, Pollution (Praeger, New Officer 112, 273 (1964).
oxide,'," U .S. Public Health Serv. Publ. No . York, 1967) ; R . Gl Rldker and! J . A . Hen- 72 . W . Haenszel, D . B . Loveland, M . G . Sirken,
1503 (1966) ; Effects o/' Chronic Exposure to ning, Rev. Econ . Statist . 49, 246 (1967) ; R ., l : Nat . Cancer lnst, 28, 947 (1962) .
Low . Levels ot, Carbon Monoxide on Human N. S. Harris, G . S . Tolley,, C. Harrell, ibid . 73 . The research discussed in this, article was
Health, Behavior, and Perjormance (National 50, 241 (d968) : supported by a grant from~ Resources for the
Academy of Sciences and National Academy 67. P. Buell, J . E . Dunn, Jr., L. Breslow, Cancer Future,, Inc . We thank Morton Corn, Allen
of Engineering, Washington ; D .C .,, 1969) :, 20, 2139 (1967) . Kneesec, and John Goldsmith for helpful
66: Another way to estimate the cost of air pollu- 68 . E . C . Hammond and D . Horn, l. Amer . Med . comments. Any opinions and remaining errors
tion is to examine the effect of air pollu- Ass. 166, 1294 (1958) . are ours.

It was not the product of "genius" or


the result, of chance, but the outcome
of a regular and determinate cultural
process . Moreover, it was not a unique
event but a recurring phenomenon :
states arose independently in different
places and at different times . Where
A Theory of the Origin the appropriate conditions existed, the
state emerged .
of the State
Voluntaristic Theories
Traditional theories of state origins are considered
Serious theories of state origins are
and rejected in favor of a new ecological hypothesis . of t!wo general types : voluntaristic and
coercive . Voluntaristic theories hold
that, at some point in their history,
Robert L. Carneiro
certain peoples spontaneously, ration«
ally, and voluntarily gave up their in-
dividual sovereignties and united with
other communities to form a larger
For the first 2 million years of his it' seems desirable to discuss, if only politicali unit deserving to be called a
existence, man lived in bands or vil- briefly, a few of the traditionall theories . state. Of such theories the best' known
lages which, as far as we can tell,, Explicit theories of the origin of the is the old Social Contract theory, which
were completely autonomous : Not until state are relatively modern . Classical was associated especially with the name
perhaps 5000 B .C . did' villages begin writers like Aristotle, unfamiliar with of Rousseau . We now know that no
to aggregate into larger political units . other forms of politicali organization, such compact was ever subscribed to
But, once this process of aggregation tended to think of the state as "nat- by human groups, and! the Social Con-
began, it continued at a progressively ural," and therefore as not requiring tract theory is today nothing more
faster pace and led, around 4000 B :C :, an explanation . However, the age of, than al historical curiosity .
to the formation of the first state in exploration, by making, Europeans The most widely accepted of modern
history. (When I speak of a state I aware that many peoples throughout voluntaristic theories is the one I call
mean an autonomous politicali unit, the world lived, not' in states, but in the "automatic" theory . According to
encompassing many communities with* independent villages or tribes, made this theory, the invention of agriculture
in its territory and having a centralized the state seem less natural, and thus automatically brought into being a sur-
government with the power to collect more in need of explanation . plus of food, enabling some individualfi
taxes, draft men for work or war, and Of the many modern theories of state to divorce themselves from food pro-
decree and enforce laws.) origins that have been proposed, we dhction and to become potters, weav-
Although it was by all odds the most can consider only a few . Those with ers, smiths, masons, and so on, thus
far-reaching political develbpment in a racial basis, for example, are now creating an extensive division of labor .
human history, the origin of the state so thoroughly discredited that they Out of this occupationali specialization
is stilli very imperfectly understoodL In- need not be dealt with here . We can there developed a political integration
deed, not one of the current theories also reject the belief that the state iss which united a number of previously
of the rise of the state is entirely satis- an expression of the "genius" of a independent communities into a state .
factory . At one point or another, all of people (2),, or that it arose through This argument was set forth most fre-
them, fail. There is one theory, though, a "historical accident ." Such notions quently by the late British archeologist
which I believe does provide a con- make the state appear to be something V . Gordon Childe (3) .
vincing explanation of how states began . metaphysical or adventitious, and thus
It! is a theory which I proposed once place it beyond scientific understanding . The author is curator of South American
ethnology in the departmentt of anthropology
before (1), and which I present here In my opinion, the origin of the state at the American Museum of Natural History,
more fully . Before doing so, however, was neither mysterious nor fortuitous . New York, New York.

21 AUGUST 1970 733

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Y

~ The principal difficulty with this Coercive Theories exception to this rule? Might there not
theory is that agriculture does not au- be, somewhere in the world, an ex-
tomatically create a food surplus . We A close examination of history indi- ample of a state which arose without
know this because many agricultural' cates that only a coercive theory can the agency of war?
peoples of the world produce no such~ account for the rise of the state . Force, Until a few years ago, anthropolo-
surplus . Virtually all Amazonian In- and not enlightened self-interest, is the gists generally believed that the Classic
dians, for example, were agriculturai,, mechanism~ by which political evolution Maya provided such an instance . The
but in aboriginal times they did not has led, step by step, from autonomous archeologicaU evidence then available
produce a food' surplus . That it was : villages to the state . gave no hint, of warfare among the
technically feasible for them to pro- The view that war lies at the root early Maya and led scholars to regard
duce such a surplus is shown by the of the state is by no means new . Twenty- them as a peace-loving theocratic state
ifact thaf, under the stimultls of Euro- five hundred years ago Heraclitus wrote which had arisen entirely without war
pean settlers' desire for food, a number that "war is the father of all things ." (~14) . However, this view is no longer
of tribes didl raise manioc in amounts The first careful study of the role of! tenable . Recent archeological discov-
well above their own needs, for the warfare in the rise of the state, how- eries have place& the Classic Maya in
purpose of trading (4) . Thus the tech- ever, was made less than a hundred a very different light. First came the
nical means for generating a food sur- years ago, by Herbert Spencer in his discovery of the Bonampak murals,
plus were there ; it was the sociali mech- Principles of Sociology (8) . Perhaps showing the early Maya at war and
anisms neede& to actualize' it that were better known than Spencer's writings reveling in the torture of war captives .
lacking. on war and the state are the conquest Then ; excavations around Tikal re-
Another current voluntaristic theory theories of' continental writers such as vealed large earthworks partly sur-
of state origins is Karl Wittfogel's "hy- Ludwig Gumplowicz (9), Gustav Rat- rounding that Classic Maya city, point-
draulic hypothesis :" As I understand zenhofer (10), and' Franz Oppenheim- ing clearly to a military rivalty with
him, Wittfogel sees the state arising er (11) . the neighboring city of Uaxactun~ (15) .
in the following way. In certain, arid Oppenheimer, for example, argued Summarizing pres .nt thinking on the
and' semiarid areas of'~ the world, where that' the state emerged when the pro- subject, Michael D. Coe has observed
village farmers had to struggle to sup- ductive capacity of settled agriculturists that "the ancient! Maya were just as
port themselves by means of small- was combined with the energy of pas- warlike as the . . . bloodthirsty states
scale irrigation, a time arrived when toral nomads through the conquest of of the Post-Classic"' (16) .
they saw that it would be to the ad- the former by the latter (11, pp. 51- Yet, though warfare is surely a prime
vantage of all concerned to set aside 55) . This theory, however, has twoo mover in the origin of the state, it can«
their individual autonomies and merge serious defects . First, it fails to : account not be the only factor. After all~ wars
their villages into a single large po- for the rise of states in aboriginali have been fought in many parts of the
litical unit capable of carrying out irri- America, where past'oral nomadism was world where the state never emerged .
gation on a broadl scale . The body of unknown . Second, it is now well estab- Thus, while warfare may be a neces-
officials they create& to devise and ad- lished that pastoral nomadistn did not sary condition for the rise of t'he state,
minister such extensive irrigation works arise in, the Old World until after thee it is not a ; sufficient one . Or, to put it
brought! the state into being (5) . earliest states had emeraed . another way, while we can identify
This theory has recently run into Regardless of deficiencies in par- war as the nrechanism of state forma-
difficulties : Archeological evidence now ticular coercive theories, however, there tion ; we need also to specify the con-
makes it appear that in at least three is little question that, in one way or ditions under which it gave rise to the
of the areas that Wittfogel cites as ex- another, war played a ; decisive role in state .
emplifying, his "hydraulic hypothesis"- the rise of the state . Historicall or arche-
Mesopotamia„ China, and Mexico- ological evidence of war is found in
full-fledged states developed well before the early stages of state formation in Environmental Circumscription
large-scale irrigatiom (6) . Thus, irriga: Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China,
tion did not play the causal role in Japan, Greece, Rome, northern Eu- How are we to determine these con-
the rise of the state that Witt'fogel rope, central Africa, Polynesia, Middle ditions? One promising approach is to
appears to attribute to it (7) . America, Peru, and Colombia, to name look for those factors common to areas
This and all other voluntaristic the- only the most prominent examples . of the world in which states arose in-
ories of the rise of the state founder Thus, with the Germanic kingdoms d'ugcnously-areas such as the Nile, ~
on the same rock : the demonstrated of northern Europe especially in mind, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus valleys in ~
inability of autonomous political units Edward Jenks observed that, "histori- the Old World and' the Valley of Mex- ~
to relinquish their sovereignty in the cally speaking„ there is not' the slightest' ico and the mountain and coastal vai ~
absence of' overriding external con- difficulty in proving that all political leys of Peru in the Nhw : These areas W
straints . We see this inability mani- communities of' the modern type [that' differ from one another in many ways ~
fested again and again by political units is, states] owe their existence to suc- -in altitude, temperature, rainfall ; soil N
ranging from tiny villages to greatem- cessful warfare" (12) . And' in reading type, drainage pattern ; and many other ~
pires . Indeeds one can scam the pages Jan Vansina's Kingdoms of the Sa- features . They do, however, have one 0
of history without finding a single genu- vanna (13), al book with no theoreticali thing in common : they are all areas of GO
ine exception to this rule . Thus, in ax to grind ; one finds that state after circumscribed agricultural land: Each
order to account for the origin of the state in central Africa arose in the of' them is set off by mountains, seas,
state we must set aside voluntaristic same manner. or deserts, and these environmental fea-
theories and look elsewhere . But is it really true that there is no tures sharply delimit the area that simple
734 SC[ENCE,, VOL. 169

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