Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation

Description

Where did the state come from? Where is it going? This study in politogenesis shakes up the status quo. Worshiping Powercuts through inadequate theories of early state formation to offer a new analysis of the roles that kinship, religious practice, and commerce have played in stifling self-organization. Gelderloos's partisan approach to human social complexity is highly innovative, yet comprehensible to the layperson. A formidable assault on a social institution whose contemporary ubiquity renders it almost invisible. Peter Gelderloosis an anarchist writer originally from Virginia. He is author ofHow Nonviolence Protects the State,Consensus, andAnarchy Works. Introduction I. Take Me to Your Leader:: The Politics of Alien Invasion II. Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology III. Save Me from Yourself: The Statist Spread of Salvation Religions IV. Sleeper States and Imperial Imaginaries: Authority’s Afterlife and Reincarnation V. The Modern State: A Revolutionary Hybrid VI. Zomia: A Topography of Positionality VII. Chiefdoms and Megacommunities: On the Stability of Non-State Hierarchies VIII. They Ain’t Got No Class: Surpluses and the State IX. All in the Family: Kinship and Statehood X. Building the Walls Higher: From Raiding to Warfare XI. Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order XII. A Forager’s Mecca: Dreams of Power XIII. From Clastres to Cairo to Kobane: Learning from States Bibliography