Polybius and the Dialectic of Forgetting (Or, Theoretical Models in the Classical World)

(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, written as part of research for this project.)

The extant fragments of book VI of Polybius’ Histories contain a famous (in certain circles) discussion of the “cycle of regimes” (VI.5.10-9.14). The story goes more or less like this.

Human beings start in something like the “state of nature,” without arts or sciences, and in particular without highly developed moral norms, where we herd together like other animals following the strongest or most daring man (the basic primate pattern, we might say today: I can’t help viewing a lot of the stuff I’m reading right now through the lens of Boehm’s book, and this post will be no exception). This is what Polybius calls “monarchy” (μοναρχίαν), where the authority of the leader is limited by his physical strength and daring. This sort of “natural monarchy” then evolves towards kingship (βασιλεία) properly speaking, which is no longer a simple hierarchy sustained by strength and daring but a moral community where the authority of the leader is very much constrained by relatively egalitarian ideas about justice. In such a community, the king does not attempt to distinguish himself from his subjects by their dress or in their food and drink, and he gains the support of others only insofar as he coordinates the enforcement of community norms (VI.6.11-12), even as he may be weak and infirm; tendencies to domination are effectively kept in check.

Polybius explains the development of these ideas about justice as the result of spontaneous reflection about reciprocity (VI.6.5-10): because we expect others to reciprocate our good deeds, and value the good deeds of others, norms codifying those expectations emerge, in turn sustaining the authority of those leaders who coordinate their enforcement. Our “natural” ideas of justice are thus quite egalitarian (cf. the use of “democratic” language to describe these norms in all regimes: VI.8.4 πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας, VI.9.4 τὴν ἰσηγορίαν καὶ τὴν παρρησίαν), though they will accommodate some hierarchy to the degree that a leader can enforce them. But Polybius argues that this sort of “egalitarian” kingship is not stable; insofar as kingship becomes hereditary (something that is common, Polybius suggests, due to the popular belief in the inheritability of virtuous dispositions) it develops necessarily into tyranny, i.e., a regime where egalitarian community norms no longer constrain the leader. The increase in the security of the position of the king’s heirs, which comes also as a result of other changes (e.g., the emergence of resources such as fortified places that can be monopolized by the leader), increases their temptations to try to dominate others. They begin by trying to distinguish themselves from the others by dress or other signals (VI.7.7), and end by trying to obtain more material resources and reproductive advantages than anyone else in the community. The basic mechanism of change in the Polybian theory of change appears here for the first time: security of position enhances a human tendency to domination (as I was writing this, I came across this recent piece by Ryan Balot that makes a similar point).

But this tendency to domination is counterbalanced by an apparently equally natural tendency to resent domination in the name of the earlier egalitarian community norms. The “best” men – those who are most high-spirited and resentful of domination – will tend to rise up and overthrow the tyrant in the name of these norms, setting themselves up in their place. As speculative political history and anthropology, this is perhaps not self-evident (why would tyranny necessarily give rise to aristocracy rather than democracy or a renewed kingship?), though in general I think Polybius gets the basic features of long-run political development right, even if modern anthropologists would insist on a finer gradation of steps from the basic primate hierarchy to relatively acephalous egalitarian societies to “big man” societies to the kind of morally constrained “chiefdom” that corresponds to Polybius’ notion of kingship and eventually to tyranny. At any rate, the transition from tyranny to aristocracy does fit the history of Rome well enough (and remember, Polybius is writing a history of the growth of Roman power). But as a depiction of a common political psychology, Polybius’ idea is very much on target, insofar as human nature does seem to contain both tendencies towards domination (at least among males) and tendencies to resent domination, and our “default” social norms are mostly egalitarian.

We could thus say that political change, in the Polybian story, is all about the emergence of egalitarian norms, their violation by individuals capable of accumulating resources, and the restoration of such norms by those outside the “winning coalition” who still value such norms. The pattern is repeated at the next step in the cycle. As time and generations pass, the sons of aristocrats become again secure in their position, and again engage in attempts to dominate others in contravention of community norms: this is the beginning of oligarchy. Polybius describes how these new leaders no longer have any experience of the previous egalitarian norms (ἄπειροι δὲ καθόλου πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας), and have forgotten the misfortunes that led their parents to rise up against tyrants (VI.8.4-5). There is a kind of normative drift: signs of distinction that had been freely given to their parents for their services are interpreted by their sons as things that they deserve naturally, so that the relatively egalitarian norms that had regulated the conduct of their parents no longer regulate their own conduct. What happens instead is that the oligarchs abandon begin to pursue unrestrainedly material and other advantages: they take from others without reciprocating. But the egalitarian norms still remain strong within the rest of the population, and so eventually the people rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, banding behind any leaders who credibly promise to enforce the old moral norms. The people, however, remember with fear both the kings (and their transformation into tyrants) as well as the more recent oligarchs (note the emphasis on memory, which is partly the historian’s domain); they thus decide to manage their affairs by themselves, and democracy is born.

In democracy, as in aristocracy or kingship before, egalitarian norms remain strong as long as some are alive who experienced the previous form of domination; but when the experience is lost (with the grandchildren of the founders of democracy, VI.9.4-5), their influence weakens. People begin to take such norms for granted, and those with resources (the wealthy) begin to attempt to “aim at pre-eminence,” i.e., attempt to dominate others. This competitive struggle among rich individuals sets in motion a process of far-reaching social disintegration, where each wealthy individual corrupts the people by turning their desires in the direction of material accumulation and accustoming them to getting what they want by raiding the wealth of other wealthy individuals. This turns the democracy into a rule of violence (χειροκρατίαν), where multiple demagogic leaders compete to dominate by promising each other’s wealth to the people; the process ends with the masses turning into beasts again (cf. ἀποτεθηριωμένον, VI.9.9), i.e., returning to the state described at the beginning of the cycle, herding like the other animals without real social norms, and eventually getting a new “master,” a new leader who is only limited by his capacity for violence, though under social conditions that are different from those operating at the beginning of the cycle.

In summary, Polybius claims that simple regimes develop according to the following cyclical pattern: pre-social state of nature/natural monarchy->;kingship->;tyranny->;aristocracy->;oligarchy->;democracy->;mob rule/post-social state of nature->;natural despotic monarchy (repeat). This “theory” has sometimes been criticized by modern scholars (see, e.g., von Fritz, p. 84) for its apparently “deterministic” or “rigid” sequence of changes, and indeed Polybius’ presentation is a far cry from the nuanced discussions of political change found in Plato (on which he claims to draw, though Polybius’ discussion is very different from what we find in books VIII and IX of the Republic and in the Statesman) and Aristotle (whose discussions of the problem of political change in book V of the Politics he may not have known, given the possible loss from public view of a lot of Aristotelian writing between the third and the first century ADBC). Moreover, the “theory” of the cycle of regimes sits uneasily with Polybius’ “historical” sensibilities; it is abundantly evident to any observer of historical reality that regimes sometimes change in ways that do not fit a clear pattern (as it was to Aristotle, for example, who criticized – wrongly - Plato for a similar idea). Democracies sometimes turn into oligarchies (as when the Thirty took power in Athens in 404BC), monarchies into democracies, and in general any kind of regime into any other kind, as Aristotle documented in exhaustive detail in book V of the Politics. Writers who knew their Polybius well often tactfully pointed this out after summarizing Polybius’ “theory.” Thus Cicero notes in De Re Publica I.68, after a discussion of regime change that is obviously influenced by Polybius, that regimes tend to change in ways that do not necessarily fit any simple pattern (a remark that is attributed to Scipio, who had been a friend of Polybius in real life), and Machiavelli notes that a community would be unlikely to experience all the stages of change described in the theory before it was taken over by a more stable and better organized state (Discourses I.2 – there is a bit of a puzzle here, for though Machiavelli is clearly describing something like Polybius’ theory, he knew no Greek, and book 6 of Polybius had not been translated at the time). Given that Polybius was not politically or historically naïve, it seems unlikely that these observations would have escaped him.

Yet the criticism is unfair. Polybius explicitly indicates that he is simplifying the “more precise” discussions found in Plato and other philosophers (VI.5.10), which he finds too complicated for pragmatic purposes. The “simplified” theory of the cycle of regimes is not to be taken as an accurate representation of historical reality, but as something like a “model” in the sense in which economists use the term: a distillation of the incentives and other influences affecting the main political actors in a regime, and pragmatically useful as a tool for analyzing political changes in more complex regimes, like the Roman one. (Polybius’ “solution” to the difficulties of the cycle, the “mixed regime,” is also best understood as that sort of model, though that is a subject for another post). These incentives are not simply incentives to behaviour (as in much modern rational choice theorizing) but to character: the model describes how certain characters emerge endogenously from certain regimes, given some assumptions about human nature and about the preservation of historical memory.

What is especially neat about Polybius’ presentation of the “cycle” of regimes is how he ties experience and forgetting with the natural tendencies to both attempt and resent domination in the explanation of political change. Constitutions change for the worse because people forget their experience of earlier attempts of some to dominate others, or rather, because the people who overthrow bad regimes are unable to pass on this experience with sufficient clarity to their children as the children’s position in society becomes increasingly secure. Without real fear of domination (which mostly comes from actual experience of such attempts), egalitarian norms do not survive, a point that applies as much to the newly victorious Rome of Polybius’ time as to other polities. (Incidentally, this seems to indicate that the historian’s role is to remind his audience of these misfortunes, a point argued at some length by Balot with many examples from the rest of the Histories). Thus we have a dialectic between the tendencies to resent domination (which sustain egalitarian norms) and the tendencies to dominate (which corrupt these norms): as one gains the upper hand, it immediately begins to weaken. This dialectic is also a process of corruption: healthy norms are first destroyed among a small elite, then among a larger elite, and finally among the entire people as the historical memory of domination is lost first among the heirs of the monarch, later among the heirs of the larger elite that overthrew the tyrant, and finally among the people themselves through the corrupting effects of the competitive struggle for position among rich individuals. A secure, healthy simple regime is in a sense bad for the education of its leaders, whereas a certain kind of misfortune is a good education, a theme that Polybius emphasizes throughout the Histories.

Ultimately, of course, this “model” of political change is used by Polybius to understand and analyze Roman history: Rome was successful insofar as its leaders instinctively chose courses of action that constantly prevented them from giving full rein to their dominating tendencies (e.g., the “checks and balances” of the Roman mixed constitution, which has, I think, been much misunderstood by modern historians who point out, rightly, that Rome during Polybius’ lifetime was basically an oligarchy; but that is another topic) and will be unsuccessful insofar as it achieves full security (as is evident from the later books of Polybius’ Histories, or at least of what remains of them). The model may be historically implausible (in its assertion that typically tyrannies turn into aristocracies, and oligarchies into democracies, for example) but it is no more implausible than some of the rational choice models of political change in use today (which are useful too, I should note), and it has the added benefit of incorporating a plausible moral psychology. By contrast, Aristotle’s exhaustive description of political change in book V of the Politics, though empirically better informed and starting from a basically plausible principle about how the violation of norms about justice leads to political change (where justice is always understood as a form of equality, though differently in different regimes), seems to miss the forest for the trees. Aristotle spends too much time looking at purely accidental causes of political change (“exogenous shocks” in the contemporary economic jargon, such as foreign conquest or institutional drift), or exploring varieties of a single cause of political change (the attempts to dominate others by high-status individuals), whereas Polybius’ model almost begs to be formalized as a story about the interaction between tendencies to domination and tendencies to resent such domination in the absence of perfect memory about the consequences of domination, and it seems readily applicable to a variety of cases even when it cannot explain them completely. From this point of view, it does not surprise me that Polybius’ simplified story was much more influential, historically, than Aristotle’s complex and empirically informed catalogue of the causes of political change: it identifies a key cause of political change for ill, and suggests ready remedies (basically, keeping the fear of domination alive through “checks and balances,” a remedy that is mentioned by Aristotle as well, but only among many other suggestions, some major, some minor).

Cicero and Machiavelli on Fear and Love

(Warning: some thinking out loud about some passages of Cicero and Machiavelli, in the course of doing some research for a work in progress. A footnote of interest to historians of political thought or political theorists with a historical bent, perhaps.)

Cicero, Philippics 1.33-34 (the Perseus text is unaccountably missing the last lines of 1.33; a full translation is found here):

What I am more afraid of is lest, being ignorant of the true path to glory, you should think it glorious for you to have more power by yourself than all the rest of the people put together, and lest you should prefer being feared by your fellow-citizens to being loved by them. And if you do think so, you are ignorant of the road to glory. For a citizen to be dear to his fellow-citizens, to deserve well of the republic, to be praised, to be respected, to be loved, is glorious; but to be feared, and to be an object of hatred, is odious, detestable; and moreover, pregnant with weakness and decay. And we see that, even in the play, the very man who said, "what care I though all men should hate my name, so long as fear accompanies their hate?" [The Latin is much more concise and lapidary: "oderint, dum metuant"] found that it was a mischievous principle to act upon.

I wish, O Antonius, that you could recollect your grandfather of whom, however, you have repeatedly heard me speak. Do you think that he would have been willing to deserve even immortality, at the price of being feared in consequence of his licentious use of arms? What he considered life, what he considered prosperity, was the being equal to the rest of the citizens in freedom, and chief of them all in worth.

Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVII:

Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse. But when a prince is with his army, and has under control a multitude of soldiers, then it is quite necessary for him to disregard the reputation of cruelty, for without it he would never hold his army united or disposed to its duties.

At first glance, it looks as if Cicero and Machiavelli were presenting diametrically opposed positions: Cicero argues that a political leader should avoid being feared, and that it is better that he be loved, whereas Machiavelli suggests that it is fine if the prince is feared. This fits in with the "standard view" concerning Machiavelli's relationship to Cicero (see, e.g., Skinner; consider also, for example, the discussions in The Prince asserting that generosity or honesty are inessential to political leaders, which clearly reverse Cicero's discussion of the need for these virtues in On Duties). There are some (partial) dissents (e.g., Colish), but in general the consensus seems to be that Machiavelli and Cicero present fairly opposed views of the virtues of political leaders.

Yet it is clear from these passages that both Machiavelli and Cicero agree that being hated is fatal to a political leader. They differ mostly insofar as Cicero seems to think that becoming feared without incurring hatred is unlikely, whereas Machiavelli is more sanguine about this possibility. But even this difference can be attributed to the fact that Cicero is considering the kinds of actions that someone who used to be an equal (Antony) would have to do in order to become dominant; and in his view (perhaps exaggerated for rhetorical effect?) these actions are likely to incur hatred alongside fear, and are unlikely to bring real and durable fame. And that thought does not seem to be in conflict with Machiavelli's views at all.

Unrelated point: working through Cicero's Philippics after reading Boehm makes me think that the upper level of Roman society behaved very much like a tribe with a strong ethos of equality, despite the otherwise tremendous material and status inequalities in Roman society. Like tribesmen everywhere, Cicero and his contemporaries among the senatorial class seemed to be extremely sensitive to suggestions that this or that person aimed to become dominant over them, and expended great energy arguing over the symbols of such domination (the office of the dictator, crowns, funeral monuments, public thanksgivings), even as the real threats to their equality lay in the ability of the proconsuls to basically create private armies during their long periods of imperium away from Italy (by Marc Antony's time, they could sometimes spend 5 years on campaign away from Rome). Also, it is amazing how the Romans of the time, like many of the tribes described by Boehm, had few mechanisms to deal with persistent attempts at domination other than assassination. It's actually kind of astounding the sheer violence present in the background of politics at Rome in the waning days of the republic – people are being killed right and left, the senate is often surrounded by armed men, and prominent political figures, Cicero included, are always conscious of the very real threats to their physical safety. And yet they seemed to think that such extrajudicial killings were often quite legitimate, though they of course disagreed about which ones! Late republican Rome was really a Machiavellian jungle, and Cicero was very good at surviving in it; it would seem unlikely if Machiavelli's ideas about political survival were entirely alien to Cicero.

Footnotes on Things I’ve been Reading: Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999).

This is a book about human “political nature.” Clearly the mature fruit of a long life of anthropological research, the book considers a question that goes back to Hobbes and Rousseau: the origins of inequality (or rather, of equality, in this case) and its relationship to “human nature.” To answer this question, Boehm draws on a wealth of ethnographical and archeological evidence, as well as studies of primate societies (primarily chimpanzees and bonobos, but also baboons and gorillas).

The starting point of the book is the observation that, though human societies range from the extremely egalitarian to the abjectly despotic, and our closest primate relatives create basically despotic groups, human forager bands are always extremely egalitarian (Boehm knows. He obviously read almost all significant ethnographies of forager bands as of the late 1990s). This egalitarianism is of course partly due to basic material causes: in a forager society with little division of labor it is difficult to stockpile durable resources or acquire scarce skills in ways that can be exploited for political advantage, as Rousseau saw, especially when dissatisfied individuals have a relatively cheap (though not costless) exit option (people can move between bands easily). But the material causes are not the whole story, as the despotic forager social groups created by our close primate relatives, who also have little “property,” show. In particular, human forager bands are politically egalitarian (and not just economically egalitarian), recognizing no real, permanent authorities (there are typically no chiefs or “alpha males,” and decisions are made by consensus) and displaying a “democratic” ethos of autonomy where each individual thinks himself the equal of the rest (Whether women are considered equals within the band varies from forager band to forager band, partly depending on environmental factors and patterns of exogamy, but for the most part women in forager bands tend to have higher status than women in other forms of society). Boehm tells some striking stories about the general ineffectiveness of “chiefs” in forager bands: people who try to give orders in them basically get ignored.

This observation about forager societies is important because it seems reasonably well established that foraging societies were our “ancestral societies,” i.e., the environments where any natural dispositions that human beings possess even today evolved. We probably lived for at least 100,000 years in such societies before we came up with different forms of social organization, and so the (controversial, but at least plausible) assumption is that insofar as human beings have a political nature, it would be manifested most clearly in such societies, or at least it would have been shaped in such societies (though it is not clear that the forager societies of today are good proxies for the forager societies of 100,000 years ago): there should be a sense in which we were ecologically adapted to life in such societies (rather than in contemporary complex societies). The question is, then, what explains the egalitarianism of forager bands, both current and historical? And is the explanation for forager egalitarianism something that we can attribute to “human nature”?

Boehm’s main thesis is that forager egalitarianism is sustained by moral communities that enable the rank and file to build coalitions to put down would-be “alphas.” Forager bands, in his view, have “reversed” dominance hierarchies that prevent bullies and aggressors from creating a dominance hierarchy of their own: egalitarianism is sustained by the coordinated dominance of the strong by the weak. Without the ability of the rank and file to form large coalitions to put down would-be dominators, the primate tendency is to establish dominance hierarchies, as we see in chimpanzees and bonobos; but the ability to form large and stable coalitions in turn depends on the development of the capacity for symbolic communication, and, to a lesser degree, of projectile weapons. (Low-ranking chimpanzees can sometimes band together and put down alpha males, as the chimpanzees at Yerkes Primate Research Center are reported to have done, but they do not seem to be able to create stable coalitions that get rid of the entire dominance hierarchy, unlike human beings). This seems right to me: in order for status equality to be resilient against attempts to subvert it, it requires a vigilant community to sanction upstarts and bullies; and the vigilance of the community is primarily made possible by a set of norms that strongly promote values such as generosity, sharing, and the like and proscribe certain forms of arrogance, etc., as Boehm notes.

But Boehm goes further: he argues that the emergence and maintenance of egalitarianism in forager societies supports a view of human “political nature” that he calls “ambivalent:” human beings (especially males) display tendencies towards dominance, just like chimpanzees and bonobos (though within a group the strength of these tendencies will be variable, of course), but they also resent being dominated, and in humans that resentment of domination is able to generate strongly egalitarian societies in the right material circumstances. (Boehm suggests that the same resentment of domination can be observed in chimpanzees and bonobos, though without the ability to form stable coalitions for egalitarian purposes they can’t do much about it, especially since male chimps and bonobos do not have an “exit” option: solitary males who leave the group are liable to be killed on sight by other groups). Hobbes and Rousseau, in other words, are both right: in the “state of nature” it is the case both that “every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate that he sets upon himselfe” (Leviathan XIII) which leads to attempts to dominate others (to “extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage,; and from the others, by the example,” what Hobbes also calls “glory”), and that this very same tendency, when combined with the ability to form large coalitions, informed by an ethos of equality (and with a general lack of “property,” understood as durable and potentially scarce resources that can be exploited to create personal forms of dependence, as Rousseau noted), results in the sort of fierce independence that Rousseau praised in the Second Discourse, at least under the right material conditions (little division of labor or durable property). By contrast, similar tendencies among chimpanzees or bonobos evolved into more or less stereotyped dominance and submission behaviors (which make sense from an evolutionary perspective, since they seem to obviate the need for actual conflict over resources, with its attendant risk of death) and the development of clear status hierarchies.

The most interesting and controversial part of Boehm’s book is in the last couple of chapters, where he tells a story about how the emergence of egalitarian moral communities in our distant forager past changed the selection pressures operating on human beings to produce some altruistic tendencies. The story is too complicated (and necessarily speculative) to summarize here, but basically it has to do with how egalitarian moral communities neutralize the reproductive advantages of bullies and aggressive individuals and increase the force of “between group” selection pressures (favoring “altruistic” dispositions) against “within group” selection pressures (favoring “selfish” dispositions). For example, Boehm has some fascinating remarks about the “meat sharing” systems that almost all foragers develop. Hunting is an important source of protein in forager societies, but it is also irregular. Since some people are better hunters than others, these people could perhaps exploit their hunting skills to extract various advantages (including political domination and reproductive advantages), and indeed they sometimes try. But in all forager societies the group basically “randomizes” credit for kills (by giving credit to the owner of the arrow, for example, but swapping arrows incessantly!), so that the actual hunter cannot exploit the fact that he made a kill to dominate the group in any way. Such meat-sharing systems thus seem to reduce the “reproductive” advantage of selfish dispositions.

In general, this is an excellent book, despite some occasional repetition and somewhat pedestrian prose. But it is worth wondering whether it implies much of anything for politics in complex societies. Boehm is too good of an anthropologist to suggest that we simply have a “natural” tendency to create egalitarian societies (there are many human societies where the ethos of equality of forager bands does not exist, as he notes) but he does seem to think that democratic societies (including larger, more complex societies with formal checks and balances, from the Iroquois confederacy to modern representative democracies) are in far better accord with “human nature” than other forms of society. It is not entirely clear to me what this means. Partly, I suspect that he means that we are happier in more equal societies, or at least that we have a tendency to view justice through the lens of equality; if indeed in the vast sweep of human history over the past hundred millennia we have mostly lived in egalitarian societies, it should not be surprising that we have some deep preference for such societies (I was thinking of this when reading this interesting proposal for “income and wealth ceilings” through taxation – deciding collectively that no one should have more than, say, $100,000). But we would need a more robust moral psychology (I’m inclined to think that this moral psychology would follow “Rousseauan” lines about the interaction between self love and love of esteem) to think properly about this question; and it seems to me at any rate that Boehm underplays the ways in which our moral ethos interacts with material factors. It seems rather important that truly egalitarian societies only exist in circumstances where the division of labor is minimal and the possibilities for exit from the group relatively large, and that complex societies are all over the place in terms of the despotic/egalitarian continuum; much of what Boehm says suggests to me that egalitarianism is actually quite fragile once material conditions change. And if the story of forager societies for 100,000 years is basically a story of egalitarianism, the story of complex agricultural societies has been one of inegalitarianism for a good 5,000 years, which, though not as impressive, is still a pretty long time and has involved more people than the previous 100,000 years. Whether truly egalitarian complex societies are possible seems like an open question, and one that cannot be answered by simply pointing to modern democracies (which have many inegalitarian spaces and some egalitarian spaces).

Human nature, it seems to me, is best understood as capable of “moral coalition” formation (coalitions that are also moralized by a specific justificatory ethos). Under some conditions, these coalitions can be used to generate egalitarian societies, but in others they generate inegalitarian societies (every dominant dictator in a complex society needs a coalition to support him, and these coalitions tend to be moralized and justified in various ways). This seems consistent with what Boehm says, but is perhaps a more “pessimistic” about the possibilities for egalitarianism in complex societies. Anyway, I did not intend to write this much about the book, but it is really good; heard about it via Robin Hanson (thanks!), who also has many interesting things to say about how we might describe human nature.