Power in Pre-Agricultural Societies

Holcombe, Randall G.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-48667-9_5

Randall G. Holcombe²

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Abstract

Insight into the nature of power can be gained by looking at power relationships in hunter-gatherer societies that have relatively simple social structures. These societies have little in the way of capital goods and their consumption goods are perishable, so when group members produce more than they can immediately consume, they share what they have produced with the group. Different methods of sharing are examined. Institutions are based on personal knowledge all group members have of each other, which limits the size of these societies. All power is combined as social power in these clan-based societies. Labor is the primary factor of production in these societies, and one check on the abuse of power is that people can leave, and when they do, they take their labor with them.

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Notes

1.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 5.
2.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1950 [orig. 1651]).
3.
See, for example, Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (New York: Viking, 2012), who describes life in twenty-first-century pre-agricultural societies.
4.
Diamond, The World Until Yesterday.
5.
Larry Neal and Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 24.
6.
Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (New York: The Viking Press, 1949), p. 78.
7.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 4.
8.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937 [orig. 1776]), p. 3.
9.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
10.
There is a literature on libertarian anarchy built on the ideas of David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1973), and Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1973), that explains how private institutions can do everything government does, and through voluntary agreements rather than relying on coercion. The anthropology literature on hunter-gatherer societies casts some doubt on this conclusion.
11.
Diamond, The World Until Yesterday, p. 455.
12.
Pinker, The Better Angels, p. 46.
13.
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, Issue 3859 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243–1248.
14.
Lotte Hedeager, Iron-Age Societies: From Tribe to State in Northern Europe, 500 BC to AD 700 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), p. 87.
15.
Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 3–4.
16.
This idea is developed by Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
17.
Personal characteristics can play a major role in relationships that are based primarily on socially ascribed characteristics. People purchase the services of a doctor or a financial advisor based primarily on the socially ascribed characteristics of those positions, but in both cases the purchaser of the services may develop a trust in a particular doctor or financial advisor. Few people would insist on buying only from a particular cashier at a retail store, but many people have a strong preference for their own doctor or financial advisor.
18.
Keith F. Otterbein, How War Began (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), p. 80.
19.
Marshall Sahlins, Stone-Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), pp. 92–93.
20.
Sahlins , Stone-Age Economics, p. 125, does note that sometimes hunters and others who possessed food would hide it so they did not have to share with the group.
21.
Rabindra Nath Chakraborty, “Sharing Culture and Resource Conservation in Hunter-Gatherer Societies,” Oxford Economic Papers 59, no. 1 (January 2007), p. 63.
22.
Sahlins articulated this idea of the original affluent society at a conference in 1966. His presentation is published as Marshall Sahlins, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” In Richard B Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), pp. 85–99.
23.
James Suzman, Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). The larger story in Suzman’s book is how economic development around them is crowding out the way of life that the bushmen had maintained for thousands of years.
24.
Daryll Forde and Mary Douglas,. “Primitive Economics,” ch. 2 in George Dalton, ed., Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1967), p. 15.
25.
Chakraborty, “Sharing Culture and Resource Conservation in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.”
26.
Bowles and Gintis, A Cooperative Species, p. 107.
27.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economics,” p. 17.
28.
This simple calculation assumes the shirker bears a cost from reducing the shirking, and that the benefit to the group is spread equally among the remaining members.
29.
Robin I.M. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution 22, no. 6 (1992), pp. 469–493.
30.
This idea is developed in Randall G. Holcombe, “The Economic Theory of Rights,” Journal of Institutional Economics 10, no. 3 (September 2014), pp. 471–491.
31.
Manning Nash, “The Organization of Economic Life,” ch. 1 in George Dalton, ed., Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1967), p. 9.
32.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,,” p. 23.
33.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,” p. 21.
34.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,” p.22.
35.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,” p.26.
36.
Otterbein, How War Began, p. 78.
37.
Dean Lueck, “Common Property as an Egalitarian Share Contract,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 25, no. 1 (September 1994), pp. 93–108, makes the case that in some cases, common property may generate greater wealth than private property—a suggestion that pooling may be a more efficient way to allocate resources than reciprocity in some cases.
38.
One can see a similar tension in contemporary societies. The modern welfare state amounts to a pooling of some of society’s resources based on an ability to pay principle, with the extreme case being Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Marx’s statement is from Marx, Karl 1970 [orig. 1875]. “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 [orig. 1875], pp. 13–30. These examples show that it is not necessarily only low-productivity individuals who may favor pooling. Support for the welfare state, and socialism, is much broader.
39.
Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 257.
40.
Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
41.
Ronald Cohen, “Paradise Regained: Myth and Reality in the Political Economy of the Early State,” ch. 4 in Henri J.M. Claessen and Pieter van de Velde, Early State Economics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), p. 110.
42.
Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, p. 61.
43.
Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, p. 65.
44.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,” pp.24–25.
45.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,” p. 19.
46.
Forde and Douglas, “Primitive Economies,” p. 22.
47.
William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 40.
48.
Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950 [orig. 1871]), ch. 8.
49.
Neal and Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World, p. 33.
50.
Norman Ault. Life in Ancient Britain: A Survey of the Social and Economic Development of the People of England from Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1920), p. 202.
51.
Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything, p. 9.
52.
Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981) argues that moral progress consists of a continual expansion of beings regarded by members of a group as persons.
53.
Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday.
54.
Holcombe, “The Economic Theory of Rights,” notes that people are only able to exercise rights to the extent that they can claim and enforce them.
55.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1950 [orig. 1651]). While Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, Rothbard, For a New Liberty, and others have argued that private organizations would protect rights more effectively than government, Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press1973), p. 7, provide a counter-argument, and “observe that governments were able to define and enforce property rights at a lower cost than could voluntary groups, and … these gains became even more pronounced as markets expanded.” But there is no need to engage in a debate on the issue, because the fact is that government undertakes this role everywhere, even if it does so through its use of force.
56.
While this analysis emphasizes the institution of money, the development of financial institutions more generally has also played a substantial role, especially in establishing capital markets—the key market in capitalism. A good discussion appears in William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). See also Richard Sylla, “Financial Systems and Economic Modernization,” Journal of Economic History 2, no. 2 (June 2002), pp. 279–292, who offers a good discussion, with emphasis on financial markets in the United States and Japan.
57.
James Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,” Man 17, no. 3 (September 1982), pp. 431–451.
58.
Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,” p. 434.
59.
Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,” p. 433.
60.
Chakraborty, “Sharing Culture and Resource Conservation in Hunter-Gatherer Societies,” p. 66.

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Department of Economics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Randall G. Holcombe

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Holcombe, R.G. (2020). Power in Pre-Agricultural Societies. In: Coordination, Cooperation, and Control. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48667-9_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48667-9_5
Published: 24 July 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48666-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48667-9
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