Chapter 10 of The Dawn of Everything tackles one of anthropology’s most persistent obsessions: finding the origin of the state. Graeber and Wengrow argue this search is a fool’s errand, much like searching for the single origin of inequality. We’re not looking for historical truth—we’re projecting our present condition backward, assuming everyone was inevitably marching toward bureaucracy, borders, and monopolies on violence. This lecture is part of the Dawn of Everything course and the site’s Power Analysis hub.
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Key Concepts
- Searching for “the origin of the state” is, for Graeber and Wengrow, a fool’s errand—like searching for the origin of inequality. It projects our own condition backward and assumes everyone was already on the road to becoming us.
- Max Weber’s famous definition—a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a territory, from a 1919 lecture—fails for most of history: early rulers’ claims to control violence held about the same status as their claims to control the tides or the weather.
- It barely describes the present either. Castle-doctrine and stand-your-ground laws show citizens explicitly reserving “legitimate” violence to themselves rather than granting it to the state.
- Rival definitions fail too: the crude Marxist “states protect the ruling class” rules out states ever doing anything else, and “states coordinate complex societies” is circular—complexity implies a state, a state implies complexity.
- Graeber and Wengrow break state power into three elements that can exist independently: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucratic secrecy), and individual charisma.
- Kim Kardashian’s Paris jewelry robbery is the worked example: personal property is held either by the threat of violence (guards), by control of information (a safe combination only you know), or by charisma (convincing everyone you deserve it).
- “First-order regimes” show the elements apart: the Olmec built colossal ball-player heads on charismatic politics with little evidence of warfare or bureaucracy; Chavín organized esoteric knowledge—labyrinths, hallucinogens, acoustic effects—without militarism or ruler cults.
- The “shape of time” problem, after George Kubler: labels like “pre-dynastic,” “post-classic,” and “collapse” cast people as waiting for kings or declining from a peak. Post-classic Maya art looks “clumsy” only if you would rather have magnificent art commissioned by a ruler who tore hearts from living bodies.
The Problem with Defining “The State”
Max Weber’s famous definition—”a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its borders”—has dominated political theory since 1919. (For more on symbolic power and how states operate on the ground, see Anthropology of State Power.) But as Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate, this definition fails on multiple fronts. Early rulers who claimed to control violence did so with about as much authority as they claimed to control the tides or weather. Their claims were grandiose but not absolute. Even in contemporary America, the castle doctrine and stand your ground laws reveal that many citizens explicitly reject the state’s monopoly on violence, preferring to take “legitimate” violence into their own hands.
Graeber and Wengrow trace this definition back beyond Weber to Rudolf von Jhering, described as “the Mark Twain of German jurisprudence”—a brilliant but tragic figure whose influence on state theory remains underappreciated. (The attribution is theirs; the lecture notes it is hard to locate the line in Jhering’s own writing.) But regardless of its intellectual pedigree, the definition simply doesn’t describe most of human history, and barely describes the present.
Alternative definitions fare no better. The crude Marxist version—that states exist to protect ruling class wealth and maintain exploitation—eliminates the possibility that states might serve other functions. The functionalist claim that states necessarily emerge to coordinate large, complex societies creates circular reasoning: every time we see complexity we assume a state must exist, and every time we see a state we assume it must be managing complexity. As chapters 8 and 9 already demonstrated, early cities managed remarkable complexity without hierarchical, authoritarian state structures. (See Egalitarian Cities for the Ukrainian mega-sites evidence.)
Three Elements of Domination
Instead of searching for THE defining characteristic or THE origin moment, Graeber and Wengrow break state power into three distinct elements that can exist independently or in various combinations:
Control of Violence (Sovereignty): The familiar monopoly on coercion within a territory. This manifests in property rights maintained through “a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence.” You’re not supposed to squat on someone’s land, and if you do, armed enforcement will remove you. The authors use a contemporary example—Kim Kardashian’s $10 million jewelry robbery in Paris—to illustrate how personal property requires either the threat of violence (security guards) or control of information (a secret safe combination) to maintain.
Control of Information: Bureaucratic knowledge, state secrets, combinations to safes. This is the realm of administration and record-keeping. In the modern state, this appears as the intelligence apparatus and administrative capacity—the infrastructure that supports figures like James Bond, licensed to kill but dependent on massive state bureaucracy for weapons, intelligence, and logistics.
Individual Charisma: The ability to convince others that you deserve special status or possessions simply because you’re extraordinary. The authors acknowledge this concept becomes somewhat circular—when we list “the most charismatic people in the world,” we tend to name those who are already powerful. Is a politician charismatic because they rose quickly, or did they rise because they were charismatic? Did the richest men become wealthy through charisma, or have they used wealth to purchase the trappings of charisma?
Modern states typically combine all three elements within what we call a “competitive political field”—democracy. We accept James Bond’s licence to kill because he’s supposedly controlled, in the last instance, by elected leaders who derive authority from popular choice. But as Graeber and Wengrow note, this “competitive” political field often functions more like a sporting event where citizens are reduced to spectators watching larger-than-life figures compete. When large majorities tell pollsters they want neither of the likely nominees, and get them anyway, it’s worth asking how competitive the field really is.
First-Order Regimes: The Elements Separated
The crucial insight is that these three elements don’t necessarily emerge together or progress inevitably toward combination. To demonstrate this, Graeber and Wengrow examine what they call “first-order regimes”—societies organized around primarily one form of domination while largely ignoring the others.
The Olmec provide an example of charismatic politics without bureaucracy or militarism. Famous for their colossal stone heads depicting what appear to be ball players in helmets, Olmec society seems to have been organized around sporting charisma. These enormous monuments required significant coordinated labor, yet archaeological evidence suggests minimal warfare or bureaucratic administration. They had charismatic ball player politics, but left violence and esoteric knowledge largely unorganized.
Chavín in South America represents the opposite emphasis: control of information and esoteric knowledge without corresponding interest in violence or personal charisma. This was a pilgrimage center where people came for shamanic journeys and hallucinogenic experiences. The architecture includes labyrinthine passages designed to be navigated while under the influence of psychoactive substances, with acoustic properties that created sound effects echoing off walls. Chavín controlled spiritual knowledge and esoteric experience but shows little evidence of military organization or charismatic leadership cults.
The authors note there are also “quite a lot” of examples of societies that monopolized violence without bothering much about knowledge control or charismatic politics—which will be explored in the next section on the Natchez.
Contrasting the Aztec and Inca with the Maya
The Aztec and Inca empires combined all three elements—military control, bureaucratic administration, and charismatic leadership—making them recognizable as “states” by conventional definitions. The Aztec Triple Alliance was based on military conquest and tribute extraction, organized around a warrior aristocracy. The Spanish, despite their professed horror at human sacrifice, recognized this as a familiar form of governance similar to their own system of kings, subordinate officials, taxation, and territorial conquest.
The Inca were even more administratively sophisticated, famous as excellent bureaucrats. Uniquely, Inca power centers were located in the mountains—reversing the usual pattern where mountains serve as refuge from state power. The quipu (knotted strings) served as their administrative technology for record-keeping, and some scholars believe these constituted a form of three-dimensional writing capable of storytelling, not merely accounting (though the Spanish burned most quipu, making verification difficult).
Because both empires were centralized and hierarchically organized with clear centers of command, they were relatively easy for the Spanish to conquer. Once you recruited dissatisfied subjects (like the Tlaxcalans who hated the Aztecs) and toppled the central authority, the entire administrative apparatus could be co-opted. This contrasts sharply with the 40-year Chichimeca War to the north, where the absence of centralized state structures made Spanish conquest far more difficult. The Spanish never fully conquered these more decentralized peoples.
The Maya present an especially interesting case. During the Classic period, they were organized as hierarchical kingdoms producing magnificent art—some of the greatest the world has ever seen. But by the time of Spanish contact, Maya society had become much more dispersed and decentralized. Art from the post-classic period is often described as “clumsy” and “less worthy of appreciation” compared to classic works.
Graeber and Wengrow pose a provocative question: “How many of us would really prefer to live under the arbitrary power of a petty warlord who, for all his patronage of fine arts, counts tearing the hearts out of living human bodies among his most significant accomplishments?” Would you choose magnificent art produced through forced labor and human sacrifice, or “clumsy” art in a decentralized society where people weren’t conscripted or ritually killed? The answer depends on whether you’re the king, the artist, or an ordinary person.
The Shape of Time
This discussion leads to what the authors call a digression but is actually one of the chapter’s most important interventions. Drawing on George Kubler’s 1960s book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, they challenge how we impose narrative structure on history.
We constantly use temporal markers that treat people as merely waiting for what comes next: the “pre-dynastic” era (as if people were just marking time until kings arrived), the “pre-agricultural” period, the “post-classic” (implying decline and decadence). We speak casually of civilizations “collapsing”—a term that might mean political collapse, population collapse, economic collapse, or some combination. Jared Diamond built an entire book around the concept without carefully distinguishing what exactly “collapsed” in different cases.
Alfred Kroeber—Franz Boas’s first doctoral student, whose dissertation was famously short—spent much of his career trying to identify patterns of cultural growth and decline. His book Configurations of Cultural Growth represents decades of work attempting to find laws or patterns in how cultures develop. He ultimately concluded he couldn’t find any; things just seemed to go their own way, willy-nilly.
The example of ancient Egypt illustrates the problem. The division into Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom wasn’t created by Egyptians themselves but by archaeologists about a century ago trying to impose order on the past. People living during the “Middle Kingdom” didn’t think, “Well, I guess we’re in the middle kingdom now.” Meanwhile, we celebrate literature like The Story of Sinuhe and the proliferation of Osiris cults as cultural achievements, forgetting these emerged in contexts of military conscription, forced labor, and persecution of minorities—many of whose grandparents “were living quite peaceful lives in the preceding dark ages.”
From the perspective of museums, art history, and literary studies, we focus on great periods producing great works. But if you were actually living then, you might have preferred the supposedly “dark” periods with their “clumsy” art but without conscription and forced labor. We privilege what kings commissioned over what ordinary people might have chosen.
The Shape of Space
This same distortion applies to how we map political power across space. Maps of the Spanish and Portuguese empires at their peak around 1790 show astonishing reach—from Argentina through Mexico and the Caribbean, even into what is now Alaska and most of the present United States. This trans-oceanic empire controlled by two small places on the Iberian Peninsula seems remarkable.
But actual Spanish control was often limited to cities and small stretches of territory. In the larger spaces between—much of the Amazon, northern Mexico—Indigenous peoples in what Spanish authorities dismissively called “tribes” or “segmentary societies” continued living largely outside Spanish control. The Portuguese claimed Brazil but had little actual say over what happened in Amazonian territories. Spain controlled Mexico City but not necessarily everything to the north.
We shouldn’t view history from the “empire perspective,” measuring significance by what states and kings produced. The impressive monuments and literary works that fill museums often required exactly the forms of domination—forced labor, military conscription, human sacrifice—that made ordinary people’s lives worse, not better.
Implications
By breaking state power into three separable elements and demonstrating that societies have combined them in radically different ways—or emphasized one while ignoring others—Graeber and Wengrow undermine origin narratives. There was no single moment when “the state” crystallized. There was no inevitable progression from one form to another. These elements of domination can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in various configurations.
This matters because origin stories serve political functions. If we believe states emerged inevitably from human nature or societal complexity, then our current arrangements seem natural and unchangeable. If instead we recognize that humans have experimented with radically different combinations of sovereignty, administration, and charismatic politics—sometimes emphasizing one, sometimes none, sometimes all three—then our present configuration appears as just one possibility among many.
The Olmec chose charismatic ball player politics without bureaucracy. Chavín chose esoteric knowledge without militarism. The Maya decentralized and produced “clumsy” art but freed people from forced labor and sacrifice. Each represents a different answer to how societies might organize authority. None represents a stage in an inevitable progression. And that means we’re not stuck with what we’ve inherited.
Questions This Lecture Answers
Why do Graeber and Wengrow call the origin of the state a fool’s errand? Because there is no magical switchover point at which people suddenly began living under states. States rise and fall and come in and out of the picture. The search mostly projects our own condition backward, treating past peoples as if they were already on the road to becoming us and could not deviate from it.
What’s wrong with Max Weber’s definition of the state? Weber’s 1919 formulation—a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a territory—doesn’t fit most of human history. Early rulers either made no such claim or made one that carried about as much force as their claim to control the tides. It barely fits the present either: castle-doctrine and stand-your-ground laws show citizens reserving “legitimate” violence to themselves.
What are the three elements of domination? Control of violence (sovereignty over a territory), control of information (bureaucratic knowledge and secrecy), and individual charisma (persuading others you deserve special status). Modern states fuse all three, but Graeber and Wengrow argue they are separable and don’t arrive as a package or in a fixed sequence.
What is a “first-order regime”? A society organized around primarily one of the three elements while largely ignoring the others. The Olmec built colossal ball-player heads on charismatic politics with little sign of warfare or bureaucracy. Chavín organized esoteric knowledge—labyrinths, hallucinogens, engineered acoustics—without militarism or ruler cults. Other societies monopolized violence without much caring about knowledge or charisma.
What is the “shape of time” problem? Borrowing from George Kubler, it’s the habit of imposing narrative shape on history: “pre-dynastic,” “post-classic,” “collapse.” These labels cast people as waiting for kings or declining from a peak, and they privilege what rulers commissioned. Post-classic Maya art is called clumsy—but decentralization may have freed people from conscription, forced labor, and sacrifice.