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The Anti-Nomadic Bias of Political Theory

Ringmar, Erik

Published in:Nomad-State Relationships in International Relations: Before and After Borders

2017

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Citation for published version (APA):Ringmar, E. (2017). The Anti-Nomadic Bias of Political Theory. Unpublished. In Nomad-State Relationships inInternational Relations: Before and After Borders Palgrave Macmillan.

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THE ANTI-NOMADIC BIAS OF POLITICAL THEORY

ERIK RINGMAR, LUND UNIVERSITY1

Over the last couple of decades the conditions of the lives of nomadic peoples has been

radically rethought by anthropologists.2 Contrary to what we once were told, the lives of

hunters, gatherers and pastoralists are not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”3

Rather, barring environmental calamities, the lives of nomads are sociable, rich, pleasant,

sophisticated and long. Gatherers are not desperately digging for roots and hunters are

not chasing wild geese. Instead hunters and gatherers have traditionally lived in abundant

environments where looking for food is similar to looking for something to eat in a

refrigerator.4 The day can be spent in leisurely activities, focusing on domestic chores, and

when food is needed one simply goes and gets it. Hunters and gatherers eat better than

farmers since their diet is more varied; they live longer since they are not forced to live in

confned areas where diseases spread.5 Likewise, although pastoralists occasionally need

to move their herds to new pastures, their workday is nowhere near as long or as intense as

that of farmers. In addition, since the kinds of resources that prop up sharp inequalities

are difcult to move, nomadic societies are far more egalitarian than sedentary societies.

1 I am grateful to Jamie Levin, James C. Scott and Karl Widerquist for comments and suggestions. As always the resources available at Academia.edu proved invaluable.

2 The seminal contribution is Devore and Lee, Man the Hunter; For a summary of the literature, see Scott, Against the Grain.

3 Hobbes, Leviathan, bk. i:13:84.

4 Turnbull, The Forest People, 96–108.

5 Scott, Against the Grain, 96–113.

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There are, moreover, few diferences between the tasks allotted to women and to men.

Decision-making is consensual, it involves everyone, although the older and presumably

wiser members of the community typically have a larger say.6

This revisionist account is not uncontested to be sure; besides all groups of foragers

and pastoralists are obviously not the same.7 Although the fact of mobility imposes a

certain logic on all of them, each group is necessarily subject to conditions which are

uniquely its own. And yet, the very possibility that something like the revisionist account

might be the case forces us to read the European canon of political theory in a new light.8

Political theorists have always regarded the lives of nomadic peoples as an abomination

and as the condition from which they were rescued by the establishment of the state.

Although anthropologists may be overly enthusiastic and perhaps politically motivated —

there is an “anarcho-primitivist” manifesto lurking just under the surface of their texts —

the biases of that profession are surely nothing compared to the biases of the political

theorists themselves.9 If the lives of nomadic peoples were even half as attractive as some

anthropologists now claim, political theory as we know it has to radically rethought. If

there indeed is a nomadic alternative to the modern state, who in their right mind would

6 Ringmar, “Order in a Borderless World”; Ringmar, Politics without Borders:An Anarchist History of the State.

7 A more skeptical account is Hurtado and Hill, Ache Life History; On social differentiation among pastoralists, see Sneath, The Headless State; For a fact-check, see Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, 176–218.

8 See further Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy; Barnard, “Images of Hunters and Gatherers in European Social Thought,” 375–383.

9 Examples include Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; Zerzan, Running on Emptiness; Tucker, Against Civilization.

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prefer a sedentary life of incessant toil, political repression and inherited injustices? Why

pay taxes and die in the state's wars?10

Diferently put, a consideration of the lives of nomadic peoples allows us to expose

the rhetorical strategies on which political theory relies. It is by means of rhetoric, after all,

not physical coercion, that the state achieves consent, and political theory is one of the

ways to do it. Coercion is expensive and difcult to carry out and it is far better if people

somehow can be convinced to freely subjugate themselves to the authorities. In order to

convince someone, you employ what the ancient Greeks called theorein, a verb meaning “to

consider,” “speculate,” “look at,” with contemporary derivatives such as both “theater” and

“theory.”11 Theater and theory are both ways of showing something to be the case, and it

is often only once we are shown something that we come to see it. While watching a

theatrical performance you suspend disbelief; the performance makes a reality out of the

world with which you are presented. Theory, likewise, is a sort of mental seeing; it is a way

of identifying the categories, variables, relationships and causes which together make up a

certain world. Just as the theater, theory explains and thereby justifes and legitimizes

what is being shown.

The state, in its anti-nomadic quest for legitimacy, has relied both on political theater

and on political theory in order to enforce obedience and loyalty. There are at least three

junctures in human history when such a combination of the theatrical and the theoretical

has been called for: when city-states frst were established in classical Greece; when

sovereign states emerged in Europe in the late Renaissance; and fnally when European

states in the nineteenth-century came to colonize much of the rest of the world. On all

10 “[T]he average person,” Widerquist and McCall conclude, “is better off in most contemporary state societies,” but “significant numbers of people are worse off in capitalist state societies than they would be even in a small-scale stateless society.” Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, 177.

11 Puchner, The Drama of Ideas, 6–7.

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three occasions, political theater was combined with political theory in order to provide

the justifcations the state needed, and in each case it was the life of nomadic peoples

which provided the foil for the arguments. Common justifcations included references to

the imperatives of Nature, to the will of God, and to the requirements of History. In this

chapter it is the claims made on behalf of these capitalized abstractions that we will

examine. It is Nature which compels us to establish states, the political theorists of ancient

Greece argued; it is God himself who has placed our king on the throne, political theorists

insisted in the Renaissance; it is History which has made the expansion of the European

state necessary, they proclaimed in the nineteenth-century. Quod erat demonstrandum:

nomads and a nomadic way of life are against Nature, against God, and against History.

A POLITICAL ANIMAL

The frst empires in the eastern Mediterranean—the Minoan and the Phoenician—were

thalassocracies, empires not of the land but of the sea. It was the sea that provided people

with a living from fshing and from trade. The thalassocracies had little territorial

extension but great geographical scope. The Greeks at the time of Homer were a part of

this maritime world. Even if the islands in the enormous Greek archipelago were barren

and poor, they survived thanks to the links they established between each other.12 The

people of the sea were nomads, we might say; they belonged less to a particular place than

to the network of places which their trading links created. This is how Greek settlements

fanned out across the archipelago, establishing colonies as far away as in southern France.

Odysseus and Herodotus may have been unusually prolifc travelers, but many Greeks

traveled widely.13 At the same time and through the same networks, foreign, eastern,

12 See the contributions to Taylor and Vlassopoulos, Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World; Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 342–400.

13 Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 47–63.

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influences were brought into to the Greek world — Egyptian wisdom, religious cults,

architectural forms, assorted tools and techniques.14 The most common literary genre in

early Greece was the romance — the sung or recited tale of the extraordinary deeds of a

hero — of which Homer's work is the most famous.15

Late in the sixth century BCE this world was dramatically transformed. 16 This was

when the polis, the city-state, established itself as the preeminent political unit. The world

of city-states is the classical Greek world, the Greece we know from history books. The

predominant literary form of the polis was not romance but tragedy and tragedies were

not sung but staged and performed in amphitheaters where all citizens were required to

attend.17 The playwrights competed with each other in describing to the audience what

the polis was like and who they themselves were. This is how the polis became an object of

reflection; what the Romans later would refer to as a res, a “thing,” which was publica,

“public.” A play such as Sophocles's Antigone dramatizes the conflict between the moral

code of the Greek society which now was vanishing and the laws laid down by the new city-

state.18 As Antigone found out when she tried to bury her dead brother according to the

traditional rites, the laws of the city trumped the obligations of family ties.

If the theater was intended for people at large, political theory was intended for a

small elite of administrators and judges. Political theory was also a way of reflecting on

the nature of the polis. In The Laws, Plato told the story of the development of political

institutions, from an initial condition in which “there were a few herds of cattle, and

14 Vlassopoulos, “Between East and West,” 91–111.

15 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 121–30.

16 Euben, “The Battle of Salamis and the Origins of Political Theory,” 359–390.

17 Mendelsohn, “How Greek Drama Saved the City”; Goldhill, “The Audience of Athenian Tragedy,” 54–68.

18 Steiner, Antigones, 19–42.

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perhaps a surviving stock of goats,” to a time in which there was “a city, a constitution, a

legislation.”19 The ideal state, Plato explained in The Laws, should be located at least 80

stadia, or 15 kilometers, away from the sea lest the citizens be seduced by its temptations

— to travel, to enrich themselves, to build empires. The proximity of the sea “flls a city

with wholesale trafc and retail huckstering, breeds shifty and distrustful habits of soul,

and so makes a society distrustful and unfriendly within itself as well as towards mankind

at large.”20 To limit the impact of foreign ideas, travel should be restricted by the

authorities and no person under the age of forty should be allowed to go abroad. Selected

individuals over ffty could travel to learn about foreign ways, but if they, on their return,

showed any indication that they had been corrupted by the experience they should be put

to death.21 The blueprint for the ideal city-state which Plato presented in The Republic is

the very reverse of the thalassocracies of the past — sedentary, walled-in, inegalitarian

and repressive, with citizenship replacing commercial commitments and laws replacing

time-honored custom.22

Aristotle was no less insistent than Plato in his defense of the city. Human beings, he

explained, are by nature zoon politikon, political animals.23 “Nature,” to Aristotle, did not

refer to the wilderness which existed outside the city-walls but instead to the internal

process of change, phusis, integral to the development of all beings. It is in the nature of

something to reach its telos, its goal, and thereby eventually to fully become what it is

meant to be. The classical example is the acorn destined by nature to become an oak tree.

19 Plato, The Laws of Plato, 57.

20 Ibid., 88.

21 Ibid., 344, 346.

22 Plato, The Republic of Plato; See further, Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, 176–202.

23 Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, i:2. 1253a2.

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A zoon politikon is consequently a being who only can realize its telos under the political

arrangements that exist in a polis. There are several ways in which this end is achieved. In

the city we interact with other human beings and thereby educate and develop ourselves,

but politics also allows us to rule over others and others to rule over us; we learn to make

laws but also to follow them. In much the same way, Aristotle went on to explain, it is in

the nature of certain humans to be slaves and of women to be confned to the home.24 It is

the polis which allows them too to realize their not-fully-human, nature.

The implications for nomadic peoples are obvious enough. A peripatetic life lived

outside of the city-walls cannot be a human life properly speaking. In order to survive in

the wilderness, as Aristotle explained, you must either be a god or a beast; gods and beasts

do not need the city, but human beings do.25 Banishment was consequently the worst form

of punishment: to be banished was not only to be alienated from the city but from one's

nature; to be alive but no longer as a human being. The Greeks feared this state as a

question of “panic,” the sensation which suddenly overcomes you when you have followed

the flute-playing god Pan into the wilderness, when he suddenly vanishes and you realize

that you are lost and alone. To travel could be panic-inducing for the same reason.26 All

journeys require a home-coming since it only is by coming back home that you can

rearrange the impressions gathered during your travels in terms of your own life. By

returning home you reacquaint yourself with yourself. People who never return home —

the homeless, the perpetual wanderers, the nomads — can as a result never be fully

human.27

24 Ibid., i:2.

25 Ibid., bk. i:2 1253a27.

26 Jager, “Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling,” 38.

27 Cf. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” 79–92; Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 15–39.

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While the life of pastoralists was rejected, it became already in classical times an

object of elaborate rêveries. The daydreams focused on Arcadia, a region in the interior of

the Peloponnese peninsula, where shepherd tended their flocks and lived beyond the

reach of the state.28 To the Greeks themselves Arcadia was a rebarbative place, best

avoided, which contained peoples so primitive they engaged in human sacrifces and so

ignorant of agricultural practices that they ate acorns with their mutton.29 The Romans,

however, had read Virgil, who in his Eclogues had idealized the virtues of the pastoral life.30

The Arcadian literary genre was to have a remarkably long afterlife, developed by

Renaissance poets, Elizabethan dramatists, and French courtiers in the eighteenth-century,

and, in the twentieth-century, in various neo-pastoral forms.31 Arcadia, they all explained,

was a locus amoenus, an “agreeable place,” where their readers could imagine themselves

prancing around dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, milking goats and searching for

lost sheep. Yet these accounts of possible lives lived beyond the reach of the state were

vicarious dreams, not advocacies for a nomadic lifestyle. No one actually wanted to go to

Arcadia and live the lives of its inhabitants. And yet, the suggestion that a place like it

existed, helped, and still helps, to make life subject to the state halfway bearable.32 We

need the dream of the nomadic alternative, even as we go on destroying its real-world

instantiation.

28 Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 133–50.

29 Wills, “The Real Arcadia,” 16, 18.

30 Virgil, Eclogues of Virgil.

31 Jenkyns credits the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro with inventing the genre. Jenkyns, “Virgil and Arcadia,” 26–27; See Sannazaro, Arcadia del Sannazaro.

32 It was, as Hofstadter remarks, when the United States rapidly industrialized at the end of the nineteenth-century that the myth of pastoral life became popular. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 23–59; On"cowboys" in this context, see Moskowitz, “The Cultural Myth of the Cowboy, or, How the West Was Won.”

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A WOLF AMONG WOLVES

The states which were established in Europe in the course of the Renaissance made a

series of rather extraordinary claims. Calling themselves “sovereign,” they insisted that

they were self-governing and independent of all other authorities, and that they had the

right to collect taxes and war contributions from the people subject to them. These

sacrifces, moreover, were to be made obediently, in an orderly fashion, and out of a sense

of loyalty and even love. In order to make these demands seem legitimate, the early

modern European states too relied on the power of theorein — a combination of political

theater and political theory. Coronations, progressions, funerals, and royal occasions of all

kinds were turned into spectacles of pomp and circumstance through which the subjects

were to be bedazzled and over-awed. Kings had magical powers, the subjects were told;

they could heal the sick through a mere touch of their hands and kill and confound enemies

through the power of their oratory.33 The king, the theatrical performances made clear,

was anointed by God, ruling in God's name, and it was consequently with God himself that

critics of the king would have to tussle.34

When it came to convincing the intellectual elite the state relied mainly, much as in

Greece, on political theory, and it was once again the life of nomadic peoples which served

as a foil for the argument. A new generation of political theorists emerged, ready and

willing to provide the sovereign rulers with the arguments they needed. These writers

placed human beings in the very same wilderness where Aristotle had decided that human

life was impossible. This “state of nature,” they explained, was the original, nomadic,

condition in which human beings had lived before the establishment of the sovereign

state. The state of nature was envisioned as a large forest or a vast plain in which

33 Bloch, The Royal Touch, 177–213.

34 See, inter alia, Bertelli, The King’s Body, 39–61; Strong, Art and Power, 65–170; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 253–76.

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individuals and small groups of families roamed around with no fxed abode. Here, Samuel

Pufendorf explained, man was

a naked Creature no better than dumb, wanting all Things, satisfying his Hungerwith Roots and Herbs, slaking his Thirst with any Water he can fnd, avoiding theExtremities of the Weather, by creeping into Caves, or the like, exposed an easy Prey to the ravenous Beasts, and trembling at the Sight of any of them.35

It was not of course that people in the Middle Ages generally had lived the life of nomads.

Rather, what the political theorists alerted their readers to was the state of nature as a

potential condition to which mankind could revert in case the power of the state was

undermined. The harsher and more unacceptable the terms in which the state of nature

was described, the more necessary the state could be presented as, and the more justifed

the repressive measures undertaken to assure its sovereignty.

Thomas Hobbes's description of the state of nature was very harsh indeed. In the

state of nature, he explained, man was a homo homini lupus, “a wolf to other men,” ruthless

and entirely ruled by selfsh appetites. As a result, in the state of nature

there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commoditiesthat may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death.36

It was in order to escape this plight that foragers and pastoralists renounced their right to

self-protection and signed a contract which created a common authority powerful enough

to repress them and “keep them all in awe.”37 This is how the sovereign state, “the great

Leviathan,” that “mortall God,” was established: “For by this Authoritie, given him by every

35 Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, bk. ii:1:8; On the subsequent use of Hobbes’ thesis in political theory, see Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, 79–111.

36 Hobbes, Leviathan, bk. i:13:84.

37 Ibid., bk. ii:17:116.

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particular man in the Common-Wealth, he hath the use of so much Power and Strength

conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to forme the wills of them all, to

Peace at home, and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad.”38

Nature, Aristotle had argued, could be discovered within each person, but according to

the political theorists of the early modern era, it was instead the person who could be

discovered in nature. No longer in need of the state in order to become human, man was

fully formed already from the start. Finding man in nature, in the wilderness, we fnd him

as he really is; indeed, he is only too human — too selfsh, too aggressive, too mistrustful.

Thus while the Greeks needed politics in order to realize their nature and thereby their

highest ideals; man, according to the early modern political theorists, needed politics in

order to escape their natures and their basest instincts. “We call a man a truly political

animal,” Pufendorf explained, who is “a good citizen,” and he is a good citizen,

if he promptly obeys the commands of the rulers, if he strives with all his might for the public good, and willingly subordinates thereto his private good, or rather if he thinks nothing good for himself, unless it is likewise good for the state too; and fnally if he shows himself accommodating to the other citizens.39

A political animal is a wild animal domesticated, a wolf defanged. And the story we are

told regarding this transformation is not a tragedy of the Greek type but instead a comedy

of errors, something like the comédies de caractère of Molière, into which Leviathan enters,

deus ex machina-like, to set everything right. In the fnal scene of the story, the wolves

have become sheep who join together in celebrating their sheepishness.

But the state of nature was not only a thought experiment, it had real world

counterparts. This, at least, is what the Europeans concluded as a result of the far-flung

geographical explorations. If we think the state of nature implausible, Hobbes noted, we

38 Ibid., bk. ii:17:119.

39 Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, bk. ii:5:5.

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have only to consider the lives led by “the savage people in many places of America.”40

Savages, just as the imaginary inhabitants of the state of nature, were people who moved

around from place to place. They too lacked a government; they were miserable and poor.

These facts provided the Europeans with a rationale for occupying their land and

colonizing them.41 The land on which the nomads roamed was not fenced in, they pointed

out, and it consequently had no owner; land, to the nomads, was not a form of property

which could be bought and sold. As a result, it did not yielding nearly as much produce as it

could. Francisco de Vitoria, a theologian and jurist in Salamanca, quoted the Bible to the

efect that God has given human beings the world in common, but that we have an

obligation to take care of it to the best of our abilities.42 It was in this obligation which

foragers and pastoralists had failed. Land which is no one's property, Vitoria concluded,

belongs to the person who can make best use of it, at least as long as you leave enough

and as good for the use of others. It was God's will that the nomads should stop roaming,

settle down and become farmers. And if they were not prepared to do so by themselves,

the Europeans would help them. This is what the conquistadors did in Central and South

America and the English did in their North American colonies. John Winthrop, a Puritan

lawyer and one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was well versed in the

legal literature. “[T]he whole earth is the Lord's garden,” he explained in 1629, as he made

himself a new home in the New World,

and he hath give it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved by them. Why then should we stand starving here for places of habitation … and in the mean time sufer whole countries, as proftable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement?43

40 Moloney, “Hobbes, Savagery, and International Anarchy,” 189–204.

41 Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” 1–15.

42 Vitoria, De Indis De Jure Belli, 1557; See further Scott, The Spanish Originof International Law.

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According to the terra nullius, or “no man’s land”, argument land which belong to no one in

particular can simply be taken by the person who fnds it. According to the “agricultural”

argument, the land is yours as long as you can improve it.44 The terra nullius and the

agricultural arguments would continue to justify colonialism wherever the Europeans

encountered nomadic peoples — in Australia, South Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere.45

In the second of the Two Treaties on Government, 1689, John Locke made use of both

arguments in his discussion of the nature and origin of property.46 In the state of nature,

he explained, our property rights are inherently insecure, and even if we put a fence

around our land, there is no reason why others should respect it. Since this makes it

impossible to make a living from agriculture, we too are forced to forage for food. In this

we are no better of than the “wild Indian” who is both peripatetic and property-less and

infnitely poorer than even the poorest man in England. “[I]n the beginning,” Locke

concluded, “all the world was America.”47 This is how Locke justifed the state. The state

was not necessary to rescue us from anarchy, as in Hobbes, but instead as the only way in

which property rights could be made secure. And only if property rights were secure would

economic development be possible. Indeed “government has no other end but the

43 Winthrop, “General Considerations for the Plantation in New-England,” 272; See also Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

44 Flanagan, “The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation,” 589–602.

45 The concept of terra nullius has generated a particularly heated debate in Australia. See, inter alia, Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius; Fitzmaurice,“The Genealogy of Terra Nullius”; See also Lindqvist, Terra Nullius; On Palestine, see Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?; On South Africa, see Bennett and Powell, “Aboriginal Title in South Africa Revisited.”

46 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. v:208-30; Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, 65–78.

47 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. v:228–229; On Locke’s personal involvement in the colonization of North America, see Armitage, “John Locke,Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” 602.

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preservation of property.”48 Government, once again, is necessary in order to rescue us

from a nomadic way of life.

THE RUDE BECOMING POLISHED

The demands made by European states at the end of the nineteenth-century were the

most extravagant yet. At the height of the colonial era they demanded the right not only

to rule themselves and their subjects but to rule the whole world. No one anywhere was

going to escape their grasp. In order to put persuasive force behind this project, the

Europeans relied, much as before, on a combination of stagecraft and political theory. To

make them realize that all resistance was futile, the natives were to be shown convincing

evidence of the Europeans’ might. This included advances in science and technology.

Medical science — by now efective in treating several tropical diseases — was from this

point of view a form of stagecraft, and so were European-run schools and the Christian

religion.49 The most convincing demonstrations, however, were carried out in the theaters

of war. Since the colonies on the whole were too large and too far away to be dominated

by coercive means, the use of force was instead turned into a display.50 Since they could

not be defeated outright, the natives were instead to be terrorized and overawed. This is

why the French in Algeria in the 1840s not only killed the native males who rebelled against

them but their wives and children too, and why the British, after the uprising in India in

1857, not only executed the insurgents but shot them out of the mouths of cannons.51

Lessons were to be taught pour décourager les autres.

48 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. vii:279.

49 Quinine, against malaria, was for example first isolated in 1820, and givenprophylactically from the 1850s onward. See Manson, Manson’s Tropical Diseases, 1–126.

50 Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism, 148.

51 Ringmar, “How to Fight Savage Tribes,” 271–72.

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But political theory was needed too. The natives had to be told why they were

colonized and a rationale had to be given to critics back in Europe. As always political

theorists rose to the task. That nomadic peoples are savages — salvaticus, “of the woods “

— had long been established, but it was only in the course of the eighteenth-century that

“civilization” came to be identifed as the standard by which their lives were to be

measured.52 The term civilization was admittedly not easily defned, but typically it meant

the opposite of everything nomadic. Derived from civis, the “citizen” of a city-state,

“civilization” was more than anything a feature of the lives of city-dwellers. While “a

savage tribe consists of a handful of individuals wandering or thinly scattered over a vast

tract of country,” John Stuart Mill explained, civilization is a matter of “a dense population

… dwelling in fxed habitations, and largely collected together in towns and villages.”53

What savages lack more than anything is refnement and sophistication. City people have

time for leisure, conversations and reflection; they have good manners, soft hands and

clean clothes; they keep up with developments elsewhere, know the latest news and

fashions. They are, in the eighteenth-century parlance, “polished” whereas savages are

“rude.”54 Civilization is the process whereby the rude gradually becomes polished.

As the political theorists of the eighteenth-century went on to explain, life in a

polished and in a rude society have next to nothing in common. The best explanation for

these diferences, Adam Ferguson pointed out in his An Essay on the History of Civil Society,

1767, is to be found in the principles by which societies are organized. Consider for

example the division of labor.55 In a society with little division of labor — where few

52 Bowden, “The Ideal of Civilisation: Its Origins and Socio-Political Character,” 25–50; Gong, Standard of Civilization.

53 Mill, “Civilization,” 161.

54 On “rude” nations, see , inter alia, Ferguson, History of Civil Society, 131–80; on “polished” nations, ibid., 315–40.

55 Ferguson, History of Civil Society, 301–14.

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people specialize on particular tasks — everyone will be more or less alike, and so will their

lives, and there is consequently little reason for them to exchange goods and services with

each other. As a result, there will also be little by means of economic development. It is

only through specialization, Adam Smith famous explained in An Inquiry into the Nature and

Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776, that the full economic potential of society is

unleashed.56 By specializing on a singular task we become increasingly profcient in

performing it, and if we trade with others who have become increasingly profcient in

carrying out their allotted tasks, the result is a general gain in productivity. The more labor

is divided, and the more we exchange goods and services, the quicker economic

development will be and the more societies will change. It is “the prospect of being able to

exchange one commodity for another,” Ferguson explained, which “turns, by degrees, the

hunter and the warrior into a tradesman and a merchant.”57 It is this transformation which

eventually makes nomads into city-dwellers and members of “civil” — civilized and civilizing

— society.

It is difcult not to see this transformation as a matter of progress.58 The “polished”

was not only diferent from the “rude” but also an improvement on it. Economic

development takes us from a condition that is worse to one that is better. History, as

Smith, Ferguson, and their fellow Scottish philosophers explained, moves through stages

and since each stage is characterized by a higher degree of division of labor, each stage is

more civilized than the one before.59 Hunters and gatherers were at the lowest stage of

human development since they had next to no division of labor; above them were

56 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776, 2:5–26.

57 Ferguson, History of Civil Society, 301–2.

58 The classical study is Bury, The Idea of Progress.

59 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence; Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776, 1:122–47; For an overview, including the influence of the work of French physiocrats, see Meek, “Smith, Turgot, and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory,” 9–27.

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pastoralists who had some; then farmers who had more; but it was only in commercial

society, with its reliance on economic markets, that the division of labor was fully

developed. It was only in commercial society that people were properly civilized. This was

also of course the kind of society in which the Scottish philosophers themselves lived.

This series of stages which came to replace each other is what the philosophers of the

Enlightenment called “Universal History.” Universal histories had been written before but

they had been great encyclopedias of assorted facts concerning everything that possibly

could be said about strange people living in assorted far-away places.60 In the

Enlightenment, by contrast, universal history became “Universal History,” a philosophical

idea and a capitalized abstraction, which organized all the disparate facts of the past

according to a defnite scheme. Human life was not random, it turned out; it had a pattern

and a direction which could be discovered by those who studied it; and history, as a result,

was revelation and a touchstone of truth. Documenting this philosophical history was the

monumental task of a number of studies. In addition to the works by Ferguson and Smith,

universal histories were written by John Millar, William Robertson, Henry Home Kames,

Abbé Raynal, Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant, among others.61 The

apotheosis of the genre was reached with G.W.F. Hegel for whom Universal History was a

matter of the way the dialectical potential of the Weltgeist unfolded itself in time. As he

would have it, world history was all leading up to the establishment of the Prussian state.

The state is inevitable, it has to happen; der Gang Gottes in der Welt daß der Staat ist.62

60 One example is Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle.

61 Bury, The Idea of Progress, 168–69; Bury emphasizes the importance of the work of Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 1777. Much of Raynal’s text was in fact written by Denis Diderot.

62 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, para. 258; And Karl Marx of course picking up from Hegel. See Skinner, “A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?,” 79–114.

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It was this Universal History which at the end of the nineteenth-century gave the

European colonizers such self-confdence and provided an intellectual rationale to their

take-over of the world.63 If there really was a pattern to world history, and if everything

had to move in the direction in which Europe already had moved, then resistance by others

was futile. What History willed, History required. The sooner the native peoples gave in to

the Europeans, the quicker and more painless the process of transformation would be. The

only remaining question was whether it was within the powers of even the most savage of

nomads to make the transition. The philosophes of the Enlightenment had been quite

optimistic in this regard and many nineteenth-century liberals agreed. Diferences

between societies were only temporary aberrations which, given sufcient education and

patience, eventually could be overcome.64 Colonialism, from this perspective, was a form

of tutelage. Reading Herbert Spencer and misreading Charles Darwin, many Europeans

towards the end of the nineteenth-century disagreed. Nomadic peoples, in particular

hunters and gatherers such as those encountered in Tasmania, Southwest Africa and Tierra

del Fuego, were thought congenitally inferior to the Europeans and thereby unable to

make improvements. As such they would be annihilated by history, as helped along by the

Europeans themselves.65

And yet there were always critics. Or rather, even though few Europeans would have

preferred a rude life to a polished one, they still liked to contemplate the possibility. This

was, as we saw, the role of the dreams of Arcadia, but in the eighteenth-century it was also

a device employed to criticize the pretensions, foibles and injustices of civilized society.

63 Gong, Standard of Civilization; Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage; Ringmar, “Recognition and the Origins of International Society,” 446–58.

64 Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 1777, 2:350.

65 See, inter alia, Erichsen and Olusoga, The Kaiser’s Holocaust; Lemarchand, Forgotten Genocides.

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There was in fact an entire literary genre — of which Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, 1721,

was the frst and the most famous example — in which people from ostensibly savage

places were made to speak much-needed truths to Europeans representatives of

civilization.66 Voltaire contributed to the genre, and so did Denis Diderot in Supplément au

voyage de Bougainville, 1772, a series of conversations between European explorers and

Tahitian villagers.67

Just as the Romans, civilized Europeans liked to imitate the rustic pleasures of

nomadic life. Hunting and fshing, Adam Smith pointed out, are “the most important

employments of mankind in the rude state of society,” yet in civilized society the same

activities become our “most agreeable amusements,” and we “pursue for pleasure what

they once followed from necessity.”68 It was by imagining themselves in nomadic places,

and by mimicking nomadic lives, that the Europeans mustered the will to carry the yoke of

their civilization.

NATURE, GOD, HISTORY

It was more than anything the rejection of the lives lived by nomadic peoples by which

political theory made the state appear acceptable. The state is legitimate since it is

required by Nature, by God and by History. The state is thrice-born, thrice necessary. The

Nature which we fnd inside us demands it, but so does the Nature in which we fnd

ourselves. God gives blessings to the king from on high and makes devout believers out of

those who fail to be convinced by rational arguments. But the state is required by History

too and what History requires must sooner or later happen. Quod erat demonstrandum:

nomads and a nomadic way of life are against Nature, against God, against History.

66 Montesquieu, Lettres persanes.

67 Diderot, “Supplément Au Voyage de Bougainville.”

68 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776, 1:123.

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To conclude on a more tentative note — and to attempt to give the last word to the

nomads themselves — consider what foragers or pastoralists might make of these

arguments. Surely, to nomadic peoples there can be no such thing as “Nature” since the

natural requires the artifcial and man-made as contrasting terms. Nature can only come

into existence as juxtaposed with “convention,” “techne,” “city-life,” “civilization,” and so

on. To nomadic peoples nature is all there is; there is only one world, the world which

provides for and nourishes them. To move away from this world and to put one's trust in

human artifce is for that reason reckless. As a result, “progress” is necessarily alienating,

necessarily makes them homeless. This is not to say that nomadic societies do not change.

The diference is instead that nomads are never stuck in one place. When their life

changes, they simply decamp. They are never homeless since they take their homes with

them.

As far as “God” is concerned, nomadic peoples are likely to remain equally skeptical.

Anthropologists have often noticed how little interest nomadic peoples take in the notion

of an all-powerful, transcendental, being. This is true even of peoples, such as the

Bedouins of Arabia or Iran, who ostensibly are faithful Muslims.69 If you live in an

environment which constantly provides for you, you are not dependent on miracles; you

are not subject to the sky — waiting and hoping for rain — and there is no reason to obey

those who claim to represents its powers. What nomads need are gods who give them

enough responsibility to solve problems for themselves. More astonishingly still, many

nomadic peoples do not seem to be afraid of death. When you are dead, they might say,

you are no more, and that is that.70 We were here before our births and we will still be here

after our deaths, as a part of the memories of our communities and as a part of everything

that can be seen around us. It is only people who are separated from their communities

69 See, for example, Barth, Nomads of South Persia, 135.70 Alekseenko, “Time in the Traditional World-View of the Kets,” 456;

Turnbull, The Forest People, 27–51.

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and from their worlds who are fearful, and the more fearful you are the more you need an

all-powerful God to reassure you. The more powerful your God, the more you will come to

live a life of subjection.

This is also the reason why the idea of “History” makes no sense. Stateless societies

are “societies without history,” we are told, and the reason is that they often have little by

means of a recorded, written-down, history. Yet writing is more than anything a practice

required by the state.71 States need writing in order to lay down the law, to communicate

with ofcials and keep records. Besides kings like their achievements to be remembered

— how much land they conquered and enemies they slayed. By anchoring our lives in texts,

we no longer have to keep the knowledge in our heads. Yet to live subject to a text is to

live subject to an external object maintained by an external authority. Writing, from this

point of view, is a part of the state’s system of control and repression. For nomadic

peoples myths serve better than history.72 For nomadic peoples there is no need to lay

things out or to see the unfolding of events as parts of a progressive series. Myths,

moreover, are an oral tradition, taught by the elders and kept alive by the community itself.

To live subject to a myth is to live subject to a shared memory of which each member is the

custodian. Nomadic peoples have no use for political theory.

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