Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology

Synopsis

In this seminal, founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres takes on some of the most abiding and essential questions of human What is power? What is society? How, among all the possible modes of political organization, did we come to choose the monolithic State model and its accompanying regimes of coercion? As Clastres shows, other and different regimes do indeed exist, and they existed long before ours ― regimes in which power, though it manifests itself everywhere, is nonetheless noncoercive.