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

VI. War Against the State: How Primitive Violence Disperses Rather than Centralizes 
In Charles Tilly’s (1975, 42) apt words: “War made the state, and the state made war.”
The reasons for this are fairly straight-forward. The efforts to implement taxation and other 
forms of extraction (which were often the goal of the various foundational state-making projects 
discussed above) were, of course, met with resistance and, as such, required military force to 
implement. “So turned the tight circle connecting state-making, military institutions and the 
extraction of scare resources from a reluctant population” (
ibid.
, 23-24). If the result of these 
processes was the creation of an army, that army was then turned outward. War against other 
communities tended to “promote territorial consolidation, centralization, differentiation of the 
instruments of government and monopolization of the means of coercion, all the fundamental 
state-making processes” (
ibid
. 42). Hobbes’s theoretical account of the creation of the Leviathan 
and Tilly’s empirical account of the same process both bear the marks of a centripetal logic of 
power. And, as established states carried out additional wars the logic was always to bring more 
territory and more power to the center. 
But must war, and more broadly violence, always bear this tendency or express this 
centripetal logic? Having established that the ‘internal’ politics of the tribe is organized so as to 
prevent the rise of the state, I now turn my attention to the “external” politics of the Indian – that 
is, to the conflictual and, at times, violent relationships between tribes. Hobbes principle of 
violence is one of unification: the way to resolve the conflict, violence and fear in the state of 
nature is to unify society’s violent force into a single entity, the Leviathan. Precisely because the 
state would be capable of exercising overwhelming violent coercion it would be able to eliminate 
all other violent threats, thereby making a peaceful society possible. But in granting the state a 
monopoly on legitimate violence we have created an entity with the capacity for great and grave 

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forms of violence. In this sense, the sovereign state “is the proverbial fox guarding the hen 
house” (Martel 2007, 12). In this section, I suggest that non-state societies adopt a centrifugal 
logic of violence; that the function of conflict and war is to disperse populations and decentralize 
power. While this clearly is still not an ideal solution to the problem of violence, it may be 
preferable to the Hobbesian solution insofar as it avoids obvious problems with granting a 
monopoly on legitimate violence to a single entity. To be clear, this is not meant as an 
endorsement of violence, but rather as a way of fleshing out the two logics of power.
It is first necessary to distinguish between different types of violence and aggression, not 
all of which are created equal. Fromm in 
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
(1973, 19)
 
argues that the term aggression has been used equivocally, enabling it to equally describe “the 
behavior of a man defending his life against attack, to a robber killing his victim in order to 
obtain money, to a sadist torturing a prisoner.” In doing so, violence and aggression have not be 
well understood and have, in fact, lumped together phenomena that should be distinct. Fromm 
(
ibid.
19 – 20) proffers a useful distinction between aggression (biologically adaptive, life-
serving aggression) and destruction (biologically nonadaptive, malignant aggression). While 
both certainly involve violence, only the latter is a malignant kind of aggression which seeks to 
control or destroy entire populations. He is particularly concerned, justifiably, with destructive 
aggression – the proclivity to kill one person is certainly bad, but the penchant for killing or 
dominating entire peoples is abominable. “While we find in all cultures that men defend 
themselves against vital threats by fighting (or fleeing), destructiveness and cruelty are minimal” 
in many societies (
ibid
. 204). 
Fromm carries this distinction further by utilizing ethnographic and archaeological 
evidence to examine violence in thirty primitive tribes. He ultimately classifies these societies 

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into three categories: 1) life-affirmative societies, 2) nondestructive-aggressive societies and 3) 
destructive societies. In ‘life-affirmative societies’ “there is a minimum of hostility, violence, or 
cruelty among people, no harsh punishment, hardly any crime, and the institution of war is 
absent or plays an exceedingly small role” (
ibid
. 194). “Nondestructive-aggressive societies” are 
similar to the first system in that they are not destructive, “but differ in that aggressiveness and 
war, although not central, are normal occurrences, and in that competition, hierarchy, and 
individualism are present” (
ibid
. 195). “Destructive societies’ are quite distinct from the 
previous two systems and are characterized by a great deal of “violence, destructiveness, 
aggression, and cruelty, both within the tribe and against others, a pleasure in war, 
maliciousness, and treachery” (
ibid
.). This classification shows that not all non-state societies 
are similar in regards to their internal authority or uses of violence. Indeed, on Fromm’s 
analysis, 28 percent fell into the first category, 50 percent in the second category and 22 percent 
in the final category. While some primitive peoples are indeed destructive, others seem to be 
almost entirely peaceable. I mention this so as not to give the false impression that violence and 
war was endemic to all non-state peoples, even though I am focusing on violence in this section.
In some ways, the most interesting group for the purposes of this essay are the 
nondestructive-aggressive societies, which use violence, but do so in a way that does not create – 
and perhaps prevents – centralization and domination. How did these nondestructive-aggressive 
societies utilize violence and warfare in ways that did not tend in this direction? Violence can 
take many different forms and one important distinction can be made between violence which 
seeks to assault versus violence which seeks to destroy, enslave or conquer. It is this latter form 
of violence that is most likely to tend toward centralization. Ruth Benedict (cited in Fromm 
1973, 175) argues that, although warfare among North American Indian tribes was common…

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…the idea of conquest never arose in aboriginal North America, and this made it 
possible for almost all these Indian tribes to do a very extreme thing: to