It was argued in chapter 4 that, from the archaeological point of view, the localization of dedicated political and administrative functions rarely predates the seventh century, while the reconstruction, proposed in chapter 5, would suggest that state organization remained comparatively underdeveloped at the time of the eighth-century settlements in the west. This, however, begs the question as to how one defines a “state.” Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the Greek polis was actually a stateless society. Firstly, it is reasoned, the notion of a state as an “abstract public power above both ruler and ruled” - a definition popularized by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan of 1651 - does not seem to apply to the Greek polis, which was simply identified with its citizens. Secondly, the polis lacked the coercive apparatus or “monopoly of legitimate violence” that Max Weber saw as a defining characteristic of the modern state, preferring to resort instead to self-help and self-defense. Thirdly, the fact that the polis lacked a standing army should suggest a certain nonchalance with regard to external sovereignty - another defining feature of the state.
The reasoning is not entirely unimpeachable. In the first place, the modern state may often be identified with the citizen body as much as with the institutions by which it is governed, while there are hints in the literary sources that the Greeks did sometimes view the polis as an abstract public power above the citizens. Thus, Thucydides (8.72.1) describes how, after the oligarchic coup at Athens in 411, the new government “sent ten men to Samos to reassure the camp and to show them that the oligarchy had not been established to the detriment
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Of the polis and of its citizens.” In the second place, although self-help certainly existed in the Greek world for crimes such as adultery, nocturnal burglary, treason, and violation of exile, similar legal provisions also continued in force in European states as late as the nineteenth century, while literary attestations of public prisons and references to the public administration of capital punishment might lead one to suppose that the polis did have a certain monopoly of force. In the third place, poleis such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Argos - at least in the Classical period - do seem to have possessed standing armies comparable to those of many European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The concept of the “stateless society” was formulated by the anthropologists Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard in their research into political systems in Africa: both the Tallensi and the Nuer were categorized as such. But Fortes and Evans-Pritchard contrasted their stateless society not with Hobbes’ definition of the Early Modern State, but with what they termed a “primitive state,” as represented by the Zulu or the Bayankole. The features that, for them, distinguished a primitive state from a stateless society were a centralized authority with administrative and judicial institutions and cleavages of wealth, privilege, and status, corresponding to the distribution of power and authority. It should be clear that the Greek polis corresponded more to the primitive state than to the stateless society and, in the chapters that follow, we will consider the emergence of such characteristic features, beginning with the evidence for the nature of leadership and authority in the early Archaic period.
World History
