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57 There are no larger human groups nor any greater challenges to collective action theory than polities, the autonomous political communities that characterize human macrosociality. Their most recently emergent form, the nation-state, represents an especially acute problem because, in these colossal “imagined communities ” (Anderson 1991), no member knows more than a tiny fraction of the rest, and yet somehow they manage to cohere and continue through time. In one guise or another, the nature of polities and the processes that propel their development have occupied anthropology and archaeology from their earliest days. Recent thought, however, dates to the 1950s and the beginnings of political evolution1 as a research field. Since then, three basic types of theory have emerged, and though each has focused primarily on the evolution of polities, none could avoid either explicitly addressing or implicitly assuming something about their nature—about why they are formed in the first place and how they are socially reproduced. From the 1950s to around 1980, when the field was still dominated by cultural anthropology, these three approaches became known as the voluntaristic (also the integrative or functional) approach, the conflict (or coercive) approach, and the systems (or multivariant) approach. In their essentials, none of these lines of thought was original; all can be traced back to the Enlightenment or even earlier, to thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Their claim to distinction, though, was to modernize, expand, and clarify earlier thought and embed it more securely in the 3 War, Collective Action, and the “Evolution” of Human Polities Paul Roscoe 58 Paul Roscoe ethnographic and archaeological evidence. Voluntaristic theories (e.g., Service 1975) were based on the proposition that humans form polities to capitalize on some benefit that can best or only be secured through collective action. Members might perceive a common benefit to building or extending irrigation systems, subsistence redistribution mechanisms, surveillance and defensive systems, or some other public work, and they designate or strengthen a political center in order to organize the system for the benefit of the group. Conflict approaches (e.g., Carneiro 1970) took a far darker view of political evolution and the nature of polities, presenting both as the product of exploitation . In Carneiro’s circumscription theory, for instance, political evolution is pictured as stimulated by population growth and enabled by circumscribed conditions (i.e., circumstances that tie people down by making it difficult or undesirable for them to relocate). Polities then expand in size and become politically more centralized as one polity succeeds in conquering, incorporating, and then exploiting the labor of others. By implication, since people do not voluntarily submit to exploitation, the approach assumes that polities are held together not by collective interest but by coercion: a minority military elite oppressing a majority under conditions that prevent the latter from escaping the oppression of the former. Systems theories sought to combine the voluntaristic and conflict approaches. One version proposed that, at some points in the trajectory of their political evolution , systems develop through voluntaristic processes, while at other points the processes are coercive. Another version proposed that both processes operated simultaneously (for a summary, see Cohen 1978). By the 1980s cultural anthropology had become more interpretative and had largely surrendered the study of political evolution to archaeology. The voluntaristic approach was transformed into managerial (or adaptational) models (see review by Diehl 2000). To the extent that human behavioral ecology and “collective action” models address large-group cooperation and political centralization, they too fall into this camp (e.g., Blanton and Fargher 2008; Shennan 2008). The conflict approach became the political (or exploitative) model (e.g., Arnold 1993; Dye 2009; Hayden 1995). As for the systems approach, archaeologists had already sketched its elementary forms (e.g., Flannery 1972; Rathje and McGuire 1982; Wright 1978), and more recently it is apparent in appeals to combine heterarchy with hierarchy (Crumley 1995) or “bottom-up” with “top-down” approaches (e.g., Carballo, chapter 1). The names may have changed, and there have been many elaborations and modifications in the details, but the core approaches remain largely the same. Criticisms of these three approaches are numerous. The voluntaristic approach proposes that polity members voluntarily surrender their sovereignty to a political center in return for a set of expected benefits, but it is difficult to understand in what sense individuals can be said to surrender autonomy. The conflict approach views polities as held together by force, but force generates distress in those subjected to it and is therefore...

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