Society Against the State

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text inanthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as theregulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is thateconomic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character oftribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can therebe a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refusescoercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offersexamples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchicalleadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usualnegative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique ofour own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at theSorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay andVenezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifthsection of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair ofReligion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is thetranslator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator ofAnti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.