The simultaneous emergence of new institutional forms to organize larger social units and new
agriculture techniques suggests that either institutional or technical innovation may have been the driving
force in the revolution. New archeological evidence suggests that sedentism preceded domestication of
plants, implying that institutional change probably preceded technical change (Gebauer and Price 1992).
Regardless of whether institutional change was the driving force in the Neolithic revolution or a response to
changing opportunities, the new Neolithic institutions must have created new ways of structuring human
interaction. We offer a new approach to Neolithic institutional change consistent with conundrum posed by
the archeological record: why were people willing to live in cities where their health was lower than in the
surrounding hunting and gathering societies?
After briefly reviewing the existing economic and anthropological hypotheses about the Neolithic
revolution, we present a theory of the state consistent with the conundrums in the archeological record and
capable of explaining the emergence of large social units several millennia ago. The heart of the theory is
what North, Wallis, and Weingast call the “natural state” (North, Wallis et al. 2006). In a natural state, the
political system manipulates economic privilege to create rents that can be used to create social order and
reduce violence. We then set forth the methodology and the skeletal evidence showing that urban life was
relatively unhealthy but also considerably less violent. Consistent with their ideas, we argue that institutional
change in the form of well-organized elite coalition with relatively well-defined elite property rights reduced
violence to the point that early cities because attractive places to live despite their adverse effect on health.
Any method of reducing violence requires inducing militarily powerful individuals to stop fighting.
The natural way of doing this is to weld a number of powerful individuals into mutual, credible agreements
with each other to stop fighting. In order for these agreements to be credible, however, the military elites
must lose something significant if they choose to fight each other. Credible agreements require that each
military elite must perceive that it is in his own interest and in the interests of the other military elites not to
fight. The solution is for the military elites to agree to enforce each other’s exclusive property rights in the
land, labor, capital, and valuable economic functions that they control. Because each elite member of the
dominant coalition has exclusive rights to the surplus produced by his assets, and because that surplus
declines if violence breaks out, it is possible to create a coalition of elites that simultaneously creates and
enforces elite privileges (including property rights) and reduces the level of violence in society.
Viewing a nascent state as a coalition of powerful individuals who credibly commit to end violence
against each other is preferable to a model in which a monopoly of coercive power gives rise to the state.
Gaining a preponderance of military power requires the organization of significant numbers of individuals.
Rather than finessing how this organization originates and maintains itself, our approach begins by
identifying the organizational mechanism at work. Moreover, a state that rules by coercing subjects and rivals
is continually waging, or threatening to wage, war against its own subjects and its rivals. Belief systems in
which the legitimacy of the state is tied to the provision of order can never emerge in such a system, since the
explicit agreement between the powerful is cooperate or else. Instead, Elman Service argues that successful
social organizations “wage peace” (Service 1975). That is, the social system secures peace and cultivates
beliefs about the legitimacy of the system, which are consistent with the fact that powerful individuals have
positive incentives to maintain the peace, rather than living in a social order where a balance of terror is all
that insures order.
Our review of the evidence as well as new data we bring to the table show that violence was the
common lot of hunter-gatherer societies. Property rights are only enforced by the force of arms. As a result,
the emergence of a natural state does not reduce the rights of non-elites and transfer them to elites. Instead,
elites create newly defined and enforced rights for themselves. In turn, a natural state allowed non-elites to
obtain protection at the cost of reduced health. The attraction of an agrarian society was not a higher physical
standard of living, it was a safer life and thus, presumably, greater utility.
Second, the theory of the natural state predicts that early states all should share a common
organization form in which elites dominate economic, political, and social privileges. The sixth section of the
paper compares the theoretical predictions to the anthropological evidence of the formation of early states.
Again, the evidence provides a consistent picture of the structure of early states that fits neatly with the
predictions of the natural state theory
Fancy Forms of Paperwork and the Logic of Financial Violence
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Originally Posted by Montmorency
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