by Will Durant
Communism could survive more easily in societies where men were always on the move, and danger and want were ever present. Hunters and herders had no need of private property in land; but when agriculture became the settled life of men it soon appeared that the land was most fruitfully tilled when the rewards of careful husbandry accrued to the family that had provided it. Consequently—since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups—the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose. Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began.43a As the pressure of population increased, and older lands were exhausted, such reclamation went on in a widening circle, until, in the more complex societies, individual ownership became the order of the day. The invention of money coöperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property. The old tribal rights and traditions reasserted themselves in the technical ownership of the soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation between the old and the new, private property established itself definitely as the basic economic institution of historical society.
Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter’s wives and children sufficed to do the menial work. The men alternated between the excited activity of hunting or war, and the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The characteristic laziness of primitive peoples had its origin, presumably, in this habit of slowly recuperating from the fatigue of battle or the chase; it was not so much laziness as rest. To transform this spasmodic activity into regular work two things were needed: the routine of tillage, and the organization of labor.
Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are working for themselves; where they work for others, the organization of labor depends in the last analysis upon force. The rise of agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. Butchery and cannibalism lessened, slavery grew.44 It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war.
Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race acquired its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard or persistent work if he could avoid it without physical, economic or social penalty. Slavery became part of the discipline by which man was prepared for industry. Indirectly it furthered civilization, in so far as it increased wealth and—for a minority—created leisure. After some centuries men took it for granted; Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable, and St. Paul gave his benediction to what must have seemed, by his time, a divinely ordained institution.
Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division of labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality of natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. “In the primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and free, no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between chief and followers.”45 Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak.* Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace.
CHAPTER III
The Political Elements of Civilization
I. THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT
The unsocial instinct—Primitive anarchism—The clan and the tribe—The king—War
MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government; the Kubus of Sumatra “live without men in authority,” every family governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom more than twelve together; the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of ten tents or so; the Australian “horde” is seldom larger than sixty souls.1 In such cases association and cooperation are for special purposes, like hunting; they do not rise to any permanent political order.
The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan—a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups had no chiefs at all,2 and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war.3 Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appears at its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed.4 The Iroquois and Delaware Indians recognized no laws or restraints beyond the natural order of the family and the clan; their chiefs had modest powers, which might at any time be ended by the elders of the tribe. The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves—and honored their pledge—to keep the peace, and one sees no great gap between these “savages” and the modern states that bind themselves revocably to peace in the League of Nations.
It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In Samoa the chief had power during war, but at other times no one paid much attention to him. The Dyaks had no other government than that of each family by its head; in case of strife they chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him strictly; but once the conflict was ended they literally sent him about his business.5 In the intervals o
f peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kingship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined—and derived from—the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.
How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another’s land. “How well it is”—they apostrophized their soil—“that you are covered with ice and snow! How well it is that if in your rocks there are gold and silver, for which the Christians are so greedy, it is covered with so much snow that they cannot get at it! Your unfruitfulness makes us happy, and saves us from molestation.”6 Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves—certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the “Great Peace” for three hundred years.7 But for the most part war was the favorite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups.
Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace. (How many railroads today begin in strategy and end in trade!) Above all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government. Property was the mother, war was the father, of the state.
II. THE STATE
As the organization of force—The village community—The psychological aides of the state
“A herd of blonde beasts of prey,” says Nietzsche, “a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, . . . such is the origin of the state.”8 “The state as distinct from tribal organization,” says Lester Ward, “begins with the conquest of one race by another.”9 “Everywhere,” says Oppenheimer, “we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state.”10 “Violence,” says Ratzenhofer, “is the agent which has created the state.”11 The state, says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.12 “The state,” says Sumner, “is the product of force, and exists by force.”13
This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders.14 For agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.*
The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization—from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of the thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere.15 “Without autocratic rule,” as Spencer said, “the evolution of society could not have commenced.”16
A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination—the family, the church, the school—to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the “subject”* sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.
III. LAW
Law-lessness—Law and custom—Revenge—Fines—Courts—Ordeal—The duel—Punishment—Primitive freedom
Law comes with property, marriage and government; the lowest societies manage to get along without it. “I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East,” said Alfred Russel Wallace, “who have no law or law-courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal.”17 Herman Melville writes similarly of the Marquesas Islanders: “During the time I have lived among the Typees no one was ever put upon his trial
for any violence to the public. Everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom.”18 The old Russian Government established courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in fifty years those courts found no employment. “Crime and offenses,” reports Brinton, “were so infrequent under the social system of the Iroquois that they can scarcely be said to have had a penal code.”19 Such are the ideal—perhaps the idealized—conditions for whose return the anarchist perennially pines.
Certain amendments must be made to these descriptions. Natural societies are comparatively free from law first because they are ruled by customs as rigid and inviolable as any law; and secondly because crimes of violence, in the beginning, are considered to be private matters, and are left to bloody personal revenge.
Underneath all the phenomena of society is the great terra firma of custom, that bedrock of time-hallowed modes of thought and action which provides a society with some measure of steadiness and order through all absence, changes, and interruptions of law. Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy. A law of economy works in instinct and habit, in custom and convention: the most convenient mode of response to repeated stimuli or traditional situations is automatic response. Thought and innovation are disturbances of regularity, and are tolerated only for indispensable readaptations, or promised gold.
