The State
The Earliest Forms Of Government
Author: Wilson, Woodrow
Part I.
1. Nature of the Question. - The probable origin of government is a
question of fact, to be settled, not by conjecture, but by history. Some
traces we can still discern of the history of primitive societies. As
fragments of primitive animals have been kept for us sealed up in the earth's
rocks, so fragments of primitive institutions have been preserved, embedded in
the rocks of surviving law or custom, mixed up with the rubbish of accumulated
tradition, crystallized in the organization of still savage tribes, or kept
curiously in the museum of fact and rumor swept together by some ancient
historian. Limited and perplexing as such means of reconstructing history may
be, they repay patient comparison and analysis as richly as do the materials
of the archaeologist and the philologian. The facts as to the origin and early
history of government are at least as available as the facts concerning the
growth and kinship of languages or the genesis and development of the arts and
sciences. Such light as we can get from the knowledge of the infancy of
society thus meagrely afforded us is, at any rate, better than that derived
from a priori speculations founded upon our acquaintance with our modern
selves, or from any fancies, how learnedly soever constructed, that we might
weave as to the way in which history might plausibly be read backwards.
2. Races to be studied: the Aryans. - For purposes of widest comparison
in tracing the development of government it would of course be desirable to
include in a study of early society not only those Aryan and Semitic races
which have played the chief parts in the history of the European world, but
also every primitive tribe, whether Hottentot or Iroquois, Finn or Turk, of
whose institutions and development we know anything at all. Such a world-wide
survey would be necessary to any induction which should claim to trace
government in all its forms to a common archetype. But, practically, no such
sweeping together of incongruous savage usage and tradition is needed to
construct a safe text from which to study the governments that have grown and
come to full flower in the political world to which we belong. In order to
trace the lineage of the European and American governments which have
constituted the order of social life for those stronger and nobler races which
have made the most notable progress in civilization, it is essential to know
the political history of the Greeks, the Latins, the Teutons, and the Celts
principally, if not only, and the original political habits and ideas of the
Aryan and Semitic races alone. The existing governments of Europe and America
furnish the dominating types of to-day. To know other systems which are
defeated or dead would aid only indirectly towards an understanding of those
which are alive and triumphant.
3. Semitic and Turanian Instance. - Even Semitic institutions, indeed,
must occupy only a secondary place in such inquiries. The main stocks of
modern European forms of government are Aryan. The institutional history of
Semitic or Turanian peoples is hardly part of the history of European forms of
governments: it is only analogous to it in many of the earlier stages of
development. Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian races alike seem to have passed at
one period or another through similar forms of social organization. Each,
consequently, furnishes illustrations in its history, and in those social
customs and combinations which have most successfully survived the wreck of
change, of probable early forms and possible successive stages of political
life among the others. Aryan practice may often be freed from doubt by
Semitic or Turanian instance; but it is Aryan practice we principally wish to
know.
4. Government rested First upon Kinship. - What is known of the central
nations of history clearly reveals the fact that social organization, and
consequently government (which is the visible form of social organization),
originated in kinship. The original bond of union and the original sanction
for magisterial authority were one and the same thing, namely, real or feigned
blood-relationship. In other words, families were the original units of
social organization; and were at first, no doubt, in a large degree separate.
The man and his wife and offspring lived generally apart. It was only by slow
stages and under the influence of many changes of habit and environment that
the family organization widened and families were drawn together into
communities. A group of men who considered themselves in some sort kinsmen
constituted the first State.
5. Early History of the Family; was it originally Patriarchal? - The
origin of government is, therefore, intimately connected with the early
history of the family. It is the more unfortunate that the conclusions to be
drawn from what is known of the beginnings of the family should furnish matter
for much modern difference of opinion. This difference of opinion may be
definitely summed up in the two following contrasted views: -
(1) That the patriarchal family, to which the early history of the
greater races runs back, and with which that history seems to begin, was the
family in its original estate, - the original, the true archaic family.
The patriarchal family is that in which descent is traced to a common
male ancestor, through a direct male line, and in which the authority of
rule vests in the eldest living male ascendant.
(2) That the patriarchal family, which is acknowledged to be found in one
stage or another of the development of almost every race now civilized, was a
developed and comparatively late form of the family, and not its first form,
having been evolved through various stages and varieties of polyandry
(plurality of husbands) and of polygyny (plurality of wives) out of a possibly
original state of promiscuity and utter confusion in the relations of the
sexes and of consequent confusion in blood-relationship and in the government
of offspring.
In brief, it is held on the one hand that the patriarchal family was the
original family; and on the other, that it was not the original but a derived
form, others of a less distinct organization preceding it.
6. The Evidence. - It is of course impracticable to set forth here the
miscellaneous evidence which has been swept together concerning so very
obscure and complex a question. Suffice it to say that among many primitive
races cases abound of the reckoning of kinship through mothers only, as if in
matter-of-course doubt as to paternity; of consanguinity signified throughout
the wide circle of a tribe, not by real or supposed common descent from a
human ancestor, but by means of the fiction of common descent from some bird
or beast, from which the tribe takes its name, as if for lack of any better
means of determining common blood; of marriages of brothers with sisters, and
of groups of men with groups of women, or of groups of men with some one
woman. In the case of some tribes, moreover, among whom polygamy or even
monogamy now exists, together with a patriarchal discipline, it is thought to
be possible to trace clear indications of an evolution of these more civilized
forms of family organization from earlier practices of loose multiple
marriages or even still earlier promiscuity in the sexual relation.
The peoples, however, among whom such confusions of sexual relationships
have been observed are not those who have emerged upon the European field.
Among almost every European folk there is clear, unbroken tradition running
back to a patriarchal power and organization. Roman law, that prolific mother
of modern legal idea and practice, bears impressed upon every feature of it
indubitable marks of its descent from a time when the father ruled as king and
high priest in the family. Greek institutions speak hardly less unequivocally
of a similar derivation. No belief is more deeply fixed in the traditions of
the great peoples who have made modern history than the belief of direct
common descent, through males, from a common male ancestor, human or divine;
and nothing could well be more numerous or distinct than the traces inhering
in the very heart of their polity of an original patriarchal organization of
the family as the archetype of their political order.
7. The Warrantable Conclusion. - The evidence of more confused marriage
relationships, moreover, is nowhere of such a character as to warrant the
conclusion that promiscuity in sexual connections has among any people marked
the first or any regular stage of social development. "All the evidence we
possess tends to show that among our earliest human ancestors the family, not
the tribe, formed the nucleus of every social group, and, in many cases, was
itself perhaps the only social group." "It seems probable, moreover, that
monogamy prevailed almost exclusively among our earliest human ancestors." ^1
Promiscuity belongs, not to the most primitive times or to the regular order
of social life, but rather to exceptional seasons of demoralization or
confusion; to times of decadence rather than to the origins of the race.
Polyandry has grown up only where the women were fewer than the men, and has
almost necessarily broken down when the numerical balance between the sexes
was restored. Polygyny "has been less prevalent at the lowest stages of
civilization, - where wars do not seriously disturb the proportion of the
sexes; where life is chiefly supported by hunting, and female labor is
consequently of slight value; where there is no accumulation of wealth and no
distinction of class, - than it is at somewhat higher stages." ^2 Where it
does exist, it is invariably confined to a small minority of wealthy and
powerful men; the majority, from choice or necessity, are always monogamous.
First and last, the strong monogamous instinct, which man shares with all the
higher orders of beasts, has tended to exclude promiscuous or multiplied
sexual connections, and to build up a distinct family order round about
monogamous marriages.
[Footnote 1: Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 538, 549.]
[Footnote 2: Id., 548.]
The efficient races who have dominated the European stage, at any rate,
came into their place of leadership and advantage under the discipline of the
patriarchal order of family life. Whether with several wives or with only
one, the father was chief and master among them, and the family showed that
clear authority and close organization which was to serve in fullness of time
as the prototype and model for the State.
8. From the Patriarchal Family to the State. - Among these Aryan peoples
there was first the family ruled by the father as king and priest. There was
no majority for the sons so long as their father lived. They might marry and
have children, but they could have no entirely separate and independent
authority during their father's life save such as he suffered them to
exercise. All that they possessed, their lives even and the lives of those
dependent upon them, were at the disposal of this absolute father- sovereign.
Such a group naturally broadens in time into the 'House,' or gens, and over
this too a chief kinsman rules. There are common religious rites and
observances which the gens regards as symbolic of its unity as a composite
family; and heads of houses exercise many high representative and probably
some imperative magisterial functions by virtue of their position. Then, as
the social order widens, Houses are in their turn absorbed. The first
distinctively political unit, no doubt, was the Tribe: broader than the gens
and tending to subordinate it; a body in which kinship must still have been
deemed the bond of union, but in which, nevertheless, it must have been a very
obscure bond indeed, and in which family rights must steadily have tended to
give way before the establishment of a common order within which the House
served only as a unit of membership and a corporation for worship.
Tribes at length united to form a State. In days of nomadic habit the
organization of the Tribe sufficed, and no more fixed, definite, or effective
order was attempted. But when a people's travelling days were over, a settled
life brought new needs of organization: a larger power must have sprung up
almost of itself. Then a very significant thing happened. The State in effect
ousted both the House and the Tribe from their functions as political units,
and came itself to rest, not upon these for foundation, but upon the family,
the original formation of the social substructure. Tribe and gens served
henceforth only as religious corporations or as the convenient units of
representation in the action of the State.
9. Prepossessions to be put away. - In looking back to the first stages
of political development, it is necessary to put away from the mind certain
prepossessions which are both proper and legitimate to modern conceptions of
government, but which can have found no place in primitive thought on the
subject. It is not possible nowadays to understand the early history of
institutions without thus first divesting the mind of many conceptions most
natural and apparently most necessary to it. The centuries which separate us
from the infancy of society separate us also, by the whole length of the
history of human thought, from the ideas into which the fathers of the race
were born; and nothing but a most credulous movement of the imagination can
enable the student of to-day to throw himself back into those conceptions of
social connection and authority in which government took its rise.
10. The State and the Land. - How is it possible, for instance, for the
modern mind to conceive distinctly a travelling political organization, a
State without territorial boundaries or the need of them, composed of persons,
but associated with no fixed or certain habitat? And yet such were the early
tribal states, - nomadic groups, now and again hunting, fishing, or tending
their herds by this or that particular river or upon this or that familiar
mountain slope or inland seashore, but never regarding themselves or regarded
by their neighbors as finally identified with any definite territory.
Historians have pointed out the abundant evidences of these facts that are to
be found in the history of Europe no further back than the fifth century of
our own era. The Franks came pouring into the Roman empire just because they
had had no idea theretofore of being confined to any particular Frank-land.
They left no France behind them at the sources of the Rhine; and their kings
quitted those earlier seats of their race, not as kings of France, but as
kings of the Franks. There were kings of the Franks when the territory now
called Germany, as well as that now known as France, was in the possession of
that imperious race: and they became kings of France only when, some centuries
later, they had settled down to the unaccustomed habit of confining themselves
to a single land. Drawn by the processes of feudalization (secs. 313, 323,
351, 352), sovereignty then found at last a local habitation and a name.
11. The same was true of the other Germanic nations. They also had
chiefs who were the chiefs of people, not the chiefs of lands. There were
kings of the English for many a year, even for several centuries after A. D.
449, before there was such a thing as a king of England. John was the first
officially to assume the latter title. From the first, it is true, social
organization has everywhere tended to connect itself more and more intimately
with the land from which each social group has drawn its sustenance. When the
migratory life was over, especially, and the settled occupations of
agriculture had brought men to a stand upon the land which they were learning
to till, political life, like all the other communal activities, came to be
associated more and more directly with the land on which each community lived.
But such a connection between lordship and land was a slowly developed notion,
not a notion twin-born with the notion of government.
12. Modern definitions of a State always limit sovereignty to some
definite land. "A State" - runs the modern definition - "is a People
organized for law within a definite territory." But the first builders of
government would not have found such a definition intelligible. They could
not have understood why they might not move their whole people, 'bag and
baggage,' to other lands, or why, for the matter of that, they might not keep
them moving their tents and possessions unrestingly from place to place in
perpetual migration, without in the least disturbing the integrity or even the
administration of their infant 'State.' Each organized group of men had other
means of knowing their unity than mere neighborhood to one another; other
means of distinguishing themselves from similar groups of men than distance or
the intervention of mountain or stream. The original governments were knit
together by bonds closer than those of geography, more real than the bonds of
mere contiguity. they were bound together by real or assumed kinship. They
had a corporate existence which they regarded as inhering in their blood and
as expressed in all their daily relations with each other. They lived
together because of these relations; they were not related because they lived
together.
13. Contract versus Status. - Scarcely less necessary to modern thought
than the idea of territoriality as connected with the existence of a State, is
the idea of contract as determining the relations of individuals. And yet
this idea, too, must be put away if we would understand primitive society. In
that society men were born into the station and the part they were to have
throughout life, as they still are among the peoples who preserve their
earliest conceptions of social order. This is known as the law of status. It
is not a matter of choice or of voluntary arrangement in what relations men
shall stand towards each other as individuals. He who is born a slave, let
him remain a slave; the artisan, an artisan; the priest, a priest, - is the
command of the law of status. Excellency cannot avail to raise any man above
his parentage; aptitude is suffered to operate only within the sphere of each
man's birthright. No man may lose 'caste' without losing respectability also
and forfeiting the protection of the law. Or, to go back to a less developed
society, no son, however gifted, may lawfully break away from the authority of
his father, however cruel or incapable that father may be; or make any
alliance which will in the least degree draw him away from the family alliance
and duty into which he was born. There is no thought of contract. Every man's
career is determined for him before his birth. His blood makes his life. To
break away from one's birth station, under such a system, is to make breach
not only of social, but also of religious duty, and to bring upon oneself the
curses of men and gods. Primitive society rested, not upon contract, but upon
status. Status had to be broken through by some conscious or unconscious
revolution before so much as the idea of contract could arise; and when that
idea did arise, change and variety were assured. Change of the existing social
order was the last thing of which the primitive community dreamed; and those
races which allowed the rule of status to harden about their lives still stand
where they stood a thousand years ago. "The leaving of men to have their
careers determined by their efficiencies," says Mr. Spencer, "we may call the
principle of change in social organization."
14. Theories concerning the Origin of the State: the Contract Theory. -
Such views of primitive society furnish us with destructive dissolvents of
certain theories once of almost universal vogue as to the origin of
government. The most famous, and for our present purposes most important, of
these theories is that which ascribes the origin of government to a 'social
compact' among primitive men.
The most notable names connected with this theory as used to account
for the existence of political society are the names of Hooker, Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau. It is to be found developed in Hooker's
Ecclesiastical Polity, Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Civil Government, and
Rousseau's The Social Contract.
This theory begins always with the assumption that there exists, outside
of and above the laws of men, a Law of Nature. ^1 Hobbes conceived this Law to
include "justice," "equity," "modesty," "mercy"; "in sum, 'doing to others as
we would be done to.'" All its chief commentators considered it the abstract
standard to which human law should conform. Into this Law primitive men were
born. It was binding upon their individual consciences; but their consciences
were overwhelmed by individual pride, ambition, desire, and passion, which
were strong enough to abrogate Nature's Law. That Law, besides, did not bind
men together. Its dictates, if obeyed, would indeed enable them to live
tolerably with one another; but its dictates were not obeyed; and, even if
they had been, would have furnished no permanent frame of civil government,
inasmuch as they did not sanction magistracies, the setting of some men to be
judges of the duty and conduct of other men, but left each conscience to
command absolutely the conduct of the individual. In the language of the
'judicious Hooker,' the laws of Nature "do bind men absolutely, even as they
are men, although they have never any settled fellowship, never any solemn
agreement, amongst themselves what to do or not to do; but forasmuch as we are
not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of
things needful for such a life as our Nature doth desire, a life fit for the
dignity of man, therefore to supply these defects and imperfections which are
in us living single and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek
communion and fellowship with others. This was the cause of men uniting
themselves at first in politic societies." ^2 In other words, the belligerent,
non-social parts of man's character were originally too strong for this Law of
Nature, and the 'state of nature,' in which that Law, and only that Law,
offered restraint to the selfish passions, became practically a state of war,
and consequently intolerable. It was brought to an end in the only way in
which such a condition of affairs could be brought to an end without mutual
extermination, namely, by common consent, by men's "agreeing together mutually
to enter into one community and make one body politic." (Locke.) This
agreement meant submission to some one common authority, which should judge
between man and man; the surrender on the part of each man of all rights
antagonistic to the rights of others; forbearance and cooperation. Locke
confidently affirmed "that all men are naturally in that state [a state, i.e.,
of nature], and remain so till, by their own consents, they make themselves
members of some politic society." It was only as the result of deliberate
choice, in the presence of the possible alternative of continuing in this
state of nature, that commonwealths came into being.
[Footnote 1: For the natural history of this conception of a Law of Nature,
see Maine, Ancient Law, Chap. III. Also post, secs. 269-271.]
[Footnote 2: Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I., sec. 10.]
15. Traditions of an Original Lawgiver. - Ancient tradition had another
way of accounting for the origin of laws and institutions. The thought of
almost every nation of antiquity went back to some single lawgiver at whose
hands their government had taken its essential and characteristic form, if not
its beginning. There was a Moses in the background of many a history besides
that of the Jews. In the East there was Menu; Crete had her Minos; Athens her
Solon; Sparta her Lycurgus; Rome her Numa; England her Alfred. These names do
not indeed in every instance stand so far back as the beginning of government;
but they do carry the mind back in almost every case to the birth of national
systems, and suggest the overshadowing influence of individual statesmen as
the creative power in framing the greater combinations of politics. They
bring the conception of conscious choice into the history of institutions.
They look upon systems as made, rather than as developed.
16. Theory of the Divine Origin of the State. - Not altogether unlike
these ancient conceptions of lawgivers towering above other men in wisdom and
authority, dominating political construction, and possibly inspired by divine
suggestion, is that more modern idea which attributes human government to the
immediate institution of God himself, - to the direct mandate of the Creator.
This theory has taken either the definite form of regarding human rulers as
the direct vicegerents of God, or the vague form of regarding government as in
some way given to man as part of his original make-up
17. The Theories and the Facts. - Modern research into the early history
of mankind has made it possible to reconstruct, in outline, much of the
thought and practice of primitive society, and has thus revealed facts which
render it impossible for us to accept any of these views as adequately
explaining what they seek to explain. The defects of the social compact
theory are too plain to need more than brief mention. That theory simply has
no historical foundation. The family was the original, and status the fixed
basis, of primitive society. The individual counted for nothing; society -
the family, the tribe - counted for everything. Government came, so to say,
before the individual and was coeval with his first human instincts. There
was no place for contract; and yet this theory makes contract the first fact
of social life. Such a contract as it imagines could not have stood unless
supported by that reverence for 'law' which is an altogether modern principle
of action. The times in which government originated knew absolutely nothing
of law as we conceive it. The only bond was kinship, - the common blood of the
community; the only individuality was the individuality of the community as a
whole. Man was merged in society. Without kinship there was no duty and no
union. It was not by compounding rights, but by assuming kinship, that groups
widened into States, - not by contract, but by adoption. Not deliberate and
reasoned respect for law, but habitual and instinctive respect for authority,
held men together; and authority did not rest upon mutual agreement, but upon
mutual subordination.
