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.
Author(s): Peter Gelderloos
Publisher: AK Press
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 286
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
