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

VII. Lessons from The Indian: Centrifugal Power Today 
My aim in this chapter has been to mobilize insights from anarchist anthropology to show 
that there is an alternative to sovereignty and centralization. That, if we take seriously those 
primitive societies, we can perhaps find within them lessons relevant for us today. In particular, 
that advocates of freedom as non-domination – a position I believe puts one in natural tension 
with the state – would do well to consider how a centrifugal logic of power might enhance that 
freedom today. If a centripetal logic of power – one that tends toward sovereignty and 
centralized power – is a grave threat to freedom as non-domination, then perhaps a centrifugal 
logic of power – one that tends toward the non-sovereignty and dispersal of power – can better 
enable freedom as non-domination. Centrifugal power minimizes the opportunities for 
domination or, at least, minimizes the extent of domination because it undercuts extreme power 
inequities that make domination possible. In subsequent chapters of the dissertation, I consider 
the relevance of centrifugal logic of power for democratic theory. As Hardt and Negri (2004, 80) 
suggest: 
“[W]e should take a lesson from Pierre Clastres, who, while investigating the 
nature of war from an anthropological perspective, argues that we should never 
view the wars of the oppressors as the same as the wars of the oppressed…We 
need to grasp the kind of struggles that Clastres sees and recognize their adequate 
form in our present age.”
In short, what forms might the centrifugal logic of power take in a contemporary context? It is 
this challenge that I aim to take up in the subsequent chapters by theorizing certain social 
movement practices as the “adequate form in our present age” of the Indian mobilized against 

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the Leviathan. In particular, I argue that direct action and networked organization activate 
centrifugal power and, in so doing, have radically democratic potential.
Before moving onto these issues, though, let me conclude with a final dilemma. Clastres 
(1987, 218) concludes his seminal work with the following passage:
It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class 
struggle. It might be said, with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of 
peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the State.
An important question remains, though. How could such societies have structured their political 
life so as to avoid something they would never have seen: a powerful central state?
13
The answer 
seems to be lost on Clastres, though it should have struck him clearly. As Graeber (2004, 22) 
notes: “Amazonians were not entirely unaware of what elementary forms of state power might be 
like – what it would mean to allow some men to give everyone else orders which could not be 
questioned, since they were backed up by the threat of force.” Indeed, it is well documented that 
many of the societies Clastres studied used rape as a tool to enforce gender roles and a certain 
division of labor between men and women. Such a realization – one that ought to dispel overly 
romantic conceptions of Indian life – helps provide an answer to the obvious question noted 
above. 
Perhaps Amazonian men understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, 
backed by force, would be like because they themselves wield that sort of power 
over their wives and daughters. Perhaps for that very reason they would not like 
to see structures capable of inflicting it on them (
ibid
. 23).
The challenge that the Indian presents to the Leviathan, therefore, is not simply a utopian 
alternative. In presenting the politics of non-state societies my aim is not to idealize such people 
nor is this a call to “go back” to a “primitive” way of living. Rather, my contention is that these 
13
Such a question is not relevant to the subjects of Scott’s study who had (and have) clear exposure to the state, but 
this question is relevant to Clastres who was studying communities that were far removed from state-making 
projects. 

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societies offer a fundamentally different (though, of course, still problematic) way of confronting 
the basic problems of human existence. They offer an answer that does not rely on the sovereign 
state, that political entity that seems so natural, so unavoidable and so necessary to us today.
While contemporary political theory seems to largely eschew Hobbes for more liberal thinkers, 
at its core, much political theory, liberalism included, is still rooted in Hobbes’ statist solution 
and his centripetal logic – a logic that can lead only to sovereignty. And, as I have endeavored to 
show, sovereignty is fundamentally at odds with freedom. For this reason, the ghost of the 
Indian – the ghost of those who rejected the Leviathan and show us that there is another way – 
ought to continue to haunt statist societies and political theorists alike. 

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