Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Source: http://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/tghk0127
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
Source: http://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/tghk0127