Politics is basic to the organization of society (371), and one of the longest-running debates in anthropology concerns what people are naturally like. Do we need states to keep us from killing each other? Thomas Hobbes said yes. Margaret Mead, writing in 1940 in the middle of a world war, said warfare is only an invention and not a biological necessity (359) — and the archaeological record has since backed her up. Using Kenneth Guest’s Essentials of Cultural Anthropology chapter on “Politics and Power,” this 2024 class examines the anthropological evidence against the assumption that humans are naturally violent, and asks what that means for how we organize society today. (Commissions earned) For broader context, see the Power Analysis hub.
Key Concepts
- Hobbes’s “Bellum omnium contra omnes” — the war of all against all — was a thought experiment about the state of nature, not an observation, and it became the argument for a Leviathan.
- We rejected Hobbes for politics and adopted him for economics: Adam Smith’s invisible hand accepts in the market exactly the self-interested competition Hobbes said the state must suppress.
- Margaret Mead published “Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity” in 1940, mid-World War II, arguing from societies that had no concept of going to war (359).
- Bands, tribes, and chiefdoms are descriptive terms used mostly by archaeologists, and Guest reads them as a continuum rather than fixed stages (362–365).
- The typology carries colonial fingerprints: Europeans asked “take me to your chief” and ascribed permanence to whoever was temporarily in charge (365).
- Humans are equidistant evolutionarily from chimpanzees and bonobos — chimps turn aggressive over contested food, bonobos diffuse tension through sex — so nothing makes us more like one than the other (372).
- There is no archaeological evidence for organized warfare before 13,000 years ago, with an increase around 6,000 years ago associated with agriculture and city-states (373).
- Max Weber defined the state as a community that “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (368) — and assuming an arrested person must be guilty, before knowing anything, is that legitimacy operating as hegemony.
Hobbes and the War of All Against All
Thomas Hobbes gave us “Bellum omnium contra omnes”—the war of everyone against everyone. This wasn’t an observation but a thought experiment about what people would be like in their natural state: every person for himself, constant conflict. From this philosophy came the argument that we need a Leviathan, a strong state apparatus to stop people from being violent to each other.
Interestingly, while we rejected Hobbes for political organization (we need government to stop the violence), we embraced similar logic for economics. Adam Smith’s invisible hand suggests that if everyone follows their self-interest and competes, everything works out fine. Market competition is acceptable; political competition requires state control. This philosophical tension runs deep in how we organize society.
The question underneath is practical, not abstract. Can we be a society that does not kill each other, or do we need police around all the time to make sure of it? And without police, do we devolve into anarchy—not the good anarchy, the bad anarchy?
Margaret Mead: Warfare Is Only an Invention
When anthropology came along some 300 years after Hobbes, anthropologists were supposed to provide evidence for one position or another. Margaret Mead’s 1940 essay “Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity” was daring to publish in the middle of World War II (359). The United States wasn’t involved yet, but things were starting to heat up.
Her argument: if you actually go out and look at other societies, they don’t all fight each other. She gave examples of societies where you could describe war and get an uncomprehending look in return—people who didn’t even have a concept of going to war. It is the same blankness the Tiv brought to the ghost in Hamlet in Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush”: not disagreement, but a category that isn’t there.
This remains the core anthropological contribution to debates about human nature and violence. We are neither naturally violent nor naturally peaceful—we are extremely shaped by our cultural environment.
Bands, Tribes, and Chiefdoms: A Critical View
Guest introduces the classic typology: bands, usually associated with hunter-gatherers, generally egalitarian, with fluid leadership—temporary leaders chosen democratically or by consensus, and they do fine (362). Tribes are larger organizations mostly associated with herding societies, with different forms of leadership (363). Chiefdoms have a more permanent leader and are mostly associated with larger agricultural societies (364). In all of these cases people organize themselves outside state or government control. There are conflicts and violence and perhaps even wars, but they are not the dominant fact of life.
These are descriptive terms used mostly by archaeologists—the people looking for bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states all the time—and there is a problem with the typologies (365). “Tribe” and “chief” carry connotations outside anthropology. Most people simply assume tribes are chiefdoms, because tribes have chiefs, which makes the anthropological distinction sound strange. And the words bring up images of people with feathers in their hair.
More importantly, all these societies were interacting with each other, and colonialism reorganized them. The Europeans’ first question after “where’s your gold?” was “take me to your chief.” If a society had no permanent leader, colonizers would ascribe permanency to whoever was temporarily in charge. Every band, tribe, and chiefdom in the record has been influenced by colonialism.
Guest reads these as a continuum rather than fixed forms, with groups and individuals moving back and forth. David Graeber and David Wengrow push further: societies sometimes changed seasonally, looking more like a band in summer and more like a tribe or chiefdom in winter. The idea that societies are fixed in these categories is incorrect. But thinking about different forms of political organization as possibilities—as experiments in how people organize themselves—remains valuable. For more, see the course on The Dawn of Everything.
Why Hobbes Came Back
Up until twenty or thirty years ago the anthropological perspective was winning: people accepted that we don’t necessarily need to fight each other, that this is something we do culturally. In recent years Hobbes has come back into fashion, in part because we always seem to be fighting. Guest’s fourth edition opens onto Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What goes in the fifth edition? Gaza—he missed it by a year.
Every time we turn around there is more. There’s always someone hating someone. War seems normalized and permanent (373), and it is hard to hold onto the anthropological perspective against that.
The Evidence Against Natural Violence
One way to hold onto it is to remember the bonobos. Chimpanzees and bonobos are two separate species (372). We didn’t know about bonobos for a long time—there are fewer of them and they look like they might be chimpanzees. Humans are equidistant from both evolutionarily: we shared a common ancestor, and the chimps and bonobos branched off later.
In controlled environments, chimpanzees encountering food they might be tense over do tend toward aggression. Bonobos given a pile of food go into sex with each other to diffuse the tension. So it depends which side of humanity you think you’re on. But nothing evolutionary makes us more like one than the other. (The most famous case of chimpanzee “warfare,” at Gombe, involved chimps whose hierarchies had been altered by researchers who provisioned them—one rose to dominance by rolling a kerosene can down a hill to make noise. Jane Goodall, who died in October 2025, later said she regretted habituating them that way.)
Archaeologically, there is no evidence of organized warfare before 13,000 years ago—one group battling another—with an increase around 6,000 years ago associated with agriculture and city-states (373). For much of our evolutionary history there is no evidence of warfare at all. Sporadic interpersonal violence, yes, but not much of that either.
And consider what an army requires: extensive training (374). Basic training is a process by which you are broken down and built back up so you can follow orders and kill someone without thinking about it very much. Many who go through it and go to war come back with long-term psychological effects. This is not something people naturally do; they have to be trained into militarization. For the evolutionary argument that warfare is not genetic, see the work of Agustín Fuentes.
Anthropologists also have to ask who sends people to war. My grandfather’s philosophy was that if they come over here you fight them, but you don’t go somewhere else to fight somebody. If we all did that we probably wouldn’t have as much war. And who benefits? Not only politicians but the people selling arms (358). When we say we are giving aid to Ukraine, some of that is food aid—but often it is aiding our own weapons manufacturers by giving them more business.
So it is difficult to insist that this isn’t our natural state, because it is entrenched. It has been normalized and seems permanent. The word to emphasize is “seems.”
Weber, the State, and the Monopoly on Violence
Guest cites Max Weber’s definition, which has become the touchpoint in almost any social science reference. Weber, writing about a century ago in “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), defined a state as “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force [coercive authority] within a given territory” (368).
Work through what that means. If someone starts hitting me, I can defend myself. If I hit back and he stops—can I knife him? No. I am not supposed to escalate. Once I have defended myself and am no longer under assault, I am supposed to call the police, and they can use force, and that is legitimate. That is how it works. Though if you call the police, be aware that they are allowed to use legitimate force, and legitimate means whatever they think it is.
Here is the test. If police walked into this classroom, put me in handcuffs, and walked me out, what would you think? That I did something bad. You would assume it before knowing a single fact. We grant that the state has the right to do this.
That assumption is hegemony (368)—power operating through consent rather than force alone. We agree that arrested people are bad, so you just go get them. For a fuller treatment, see Gramsci and Hegemony.
In practice the definition probably doesn’t apply to a lot of the world’s states, including our own. It works best where there is gun control. Without it, everyone feels entitled to their own legitimate use of force, and the police show up armed into a situation where everybody is already shooting.
States as Fluid and Fragile
Do nation-states still have hegemony over their territory? A great deal travels across borders—people and goods both—and how much control states should have over that was a huge issue in the last election, and not only in this country (367).
However bad things get, Guest tells us, humans might not want to do what you are trying to make them do. Dominance is never absolutely complete (378). Which leads somewhere interesting: state dominance may not be as dominant as we thought, and states may be more fluid and fragile than they present themselves (367).
If people have the agency to resist dominance, what should anthropologists be studying? Often it is precisely the movements outside state control and outside state hegemony that are trying to address these issues (379). For how people fight back, see Resistance, Refusal, Revolution, Reconciliation. For refusal as both political stance and anthropological method, see Audra Simpson’s work at The Anthropology of Refusal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does anthropology study politics and power?
Because political organization is fundamental to how societies work (371), and because anthropological evidence challenges widespread assumptions about human nature. The discipline provides cross-cultural evidence about how people have organized themselves—with and without states, with and without warfare—that complicates philosophical claims about inevitable violence or necessary hierarchy.
What did Margaret Mead argue about warfare?
In “Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity” (1940), Mead argued that warfare is a cultural invention rather than a biological drive (359). Her evidence came from societies that had no concept of organized violence against another group—people who responded to descriptions of war with incomprehension. She published it during World War II, which made the claim considerably harder to make.
What is the anthropological perspective on war and violence?
That humans are neither naturally violent nor naturally peaceful, but extremely shaped by cultural environment. The evidence includes societies without a concept of warfare, the archaeological absence of organized violence before 13,000 years ago (373), and the extensive training required to make soldiers (374). War seems normalized—but “seems” is the key word.
What is Weber’s definition of the state?
Max Weber defined the state as “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (368). States claim the exclusive right to use violence—police can arrest you, armies can wage war—while individuals are not permitted to escalate conflicts independently. The legitimacy rests on hegemony: we consent to state power as natural and proper before we examine it.
Are bands, tribes, and chiefdoms real stages of social evolution?
No. They are descriptive terms used mostly by archaeologists, and Guest presents them as a continuum rather than fixed forms, with groups moving back and forth (365). Graeber and Wengrow go further, noting societies that reorganized seasonally. The typology also carries colonial fingerprints, since Europeans looking for chiefs frequently created permanent ones where leadership had been temporary.
Course Navigation
This lecture on why anthropology studies politics uses chapter 12 of Essentials of Cultural Anthropology by Kenneth Guest. (Commissions earned) Following Anthropocene Anthropology, the course continues with Anthropology of Religion. For more on structures of power, see the Power Analysis Hub.