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

V. Power Without Sovereignty: Why the Chief Is Not a Nascent State
The evidence presented above challenges the standard assumption that states are a) an 
inevitable and natural development and b) that states are so clearly superior to a condition of 
statelessness that anyone presented with the option to remain in the “state of nature” or authorize 
a sovereign would choose the latter. It seems, rather that (and I am only scratching the surface) 
that many communities have seen the state and sought to avoid it. However, could it be that 
while primitive societies have self-consciously resisted incorporation into particular nation-
states, they have not themselves transcended the logic of the state? My aim in this section is to 
take insights from anarchist anthropology to shed greater light on the internal politics of non-
state societies and, in particular, the organization of power within these societies. I will focus in 
particular on the work of Pierre Clastres, who has been instrumental in this regard, having spent 
decades investigating power among the Indian tribes of the Amazon. Though they do not have 
formal states, he wondered, do they not have power? His question, then, is “whether, when there 
is neither coercion nor violence, is it impossible to speak of power?” (Clastres 1987, 11). 
In interpreting the politics of such societies, one is immediately confronted with the 
apparent reality that most tribes do have chiefs and, therefore, one must immediately ask whether 
the chief is simply a nascent state: Were the social group larger and bureaucratic technologies 
better developed, would the chief not look similar to our modern conception of a state? To put 
this differently, do such societies actually offer an alternative to the Leviathan or, rather, have 
they merely developed a more primitive version of the same phenomenon? In other words, are 
these really non-state societies, at all? On one level, such an objection is mere question-begging.
The question that is at issue is precisely why these societies have not developed larger 
populations, with greater bureaucratic organization and more “advanced” technological control.

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To assume that they are simply “pre-political” in this sense and are ultimately moving in the 
direction of Western societies is symptomatic of the deeply problematic assumptions about 
progress noted above. However, there is a more direct and, I think, satisfying answer to the 
challenge: While there are chiefs, these chiefs do not monopolize political power and, most 
surely, are not nascent states. As Clastres (
ibid
. 11 – 12) argues: 
All, or almost all, are headed by leaders, chiefs, and – this decisive feature merits 
attention – none of the caciques possesses any ‘power.’ One is confronted, then, 
by a vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would 
be called power are actually without power; where the political is determined as a 
domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination; where, 
in a word, no relationship of command-obedience is in force. This is the major 
difference of the Indian world, making it possible to speak of the American tribes 
as a homogenous universe despite the extreme diversity of cultures moving within 
it. 
While relationships of command and obedience are often equated with political power, 
for Clastres, coercion and subordination are not always constitutive of power. Non-state 
societies do have their own logic of power, but it is a logic which prevents the development of 
relationships of command and obedience from arising. 
Political power is 
universal
…it manifests itself in two primary modes: coercive 
power, and non-coercive power. Political power as coercion is not the