Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

IV. Choosing Statelessness: A Brief History of State Evasion 
It is often assumed that primitive societies are, well, primitive because they lack the 
institutions that define politics for us. They lack a centralized political entity that has the 
sovereign authority to make final decisions over a given territory. More specifically, they lack a 
codified legal system, which includes both primary laws about the actual conduct of humans and 

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secondary rules for resolving conflicts over the primary laws themselves (Hart 1961, 92; Finnis 
1980, 7). In short, primitive societies are thought to be non-political because they lack a state.
But even this language – that such societies 
lack
a state – is symptomatic of the broader problem, 
which is a unidirectional and transparently self-congratulatory view of progress: “that history is a 
one-way street, that societies without [state] power are the image of what we have ceased to be, 
and that for them our culture is the image of what they have to become” (Clastres 1987, 18). The 
implicit assumption here is that these societies are in some way 
deficient
for not having a state – 
they are, to use the standard words, primitive, savage, backward or undeveloped.
10
In other 
words, our very vocabulary makes it difficult to appreciate the politics of non-state societies, to 
recognize their agency and to appreciate “the depth of their political philosophy” (Clastres 1987, 
44). Instead of condemning non-state societies to the dustbin of history (or, should I say, “pre-
history” – that term we use to conveniently cast aside thousands of years of non-state societies), 
we would do well to consider their ongoing relevance to our contemporary situation. 
It is not that these societies 
lack
a state, but that, at least in some cases, these societies 
have developed a politics to 
avoid
the state. The argument here is not only is there an alternative 
to the state, but that people who have witnessed state-making projects, seen the potential to be 
incorporated into them, and have instead actively chosen to evade them. As Scott has 
demonstrated, there is a long but often overlooked history of communities opposing the logic of 
centralization and resisting incorporation into nation-states. “The huge literature on state-
10
The view that such societies are backward is not only the result of their not having a state, but also because of a 
common that hunter-gather and subsistence agricultural economies are characterized by a constant search for food 
and struggle for survival. But, such a view is generally mistaken. Marshall Sahlins (1968) famously described 
hunter-gather societies as the ‘original affluent society,’ noting that they lived well with approximately three to five 
hours of work per day:
“An affluent society is one in which all the people’s wants are easily satisfied…A fair case 
can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, 
leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other conditions of society…Rather 
than anxiety, it would seem, hunters have a confidence born of affluence, or a condition in which all the people’s 
wants (such as they are) are generally easily satisfied.”

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making…pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive 
statelessness. This is the history of those who got away…Gypsies, Cosacks, polygot 
tribes…fugitive slave communities, the Marsh Arabs, San-Bushmen, and so on” (Scott 2009, x).
Scott’s work