Morton Fried argued in 1967 that the question to ask of any society is not who gets respect but who can reach the land, the water and the herd without another person’s permission. Where everyone can, the society is egalitarian. Where valued positions are limited but resources are still open, it is a rank society. Where people of the same sex and age cannot reach basic resources equally, it is stratified — and stratification that deep needs something to hold it in place. That something is the state. Switch the six mechanisms on and watch the two bars come apart.
Egalitarian society
● figures — tiers of one society, sized by rank┄ dashed — influence: followers may walk away─ solid — authority: an office that bindsBars are schematic comparisons, not measurements.
Why states form at all is still argued. Karl Wittfogel credited the management of large irrigation works, a hydraulic hypothesis now rejected in its strong form because the canals usually came after the state, not before. Robert Carneiro proposed circumscription: where good farmland is hemmed in by desert, sea or mountain, the losers of a war cannot simply walk away, so they are absorbed instead. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus stress the opposite side of the ledger — that hierarchy was resisted at every step, and that the interesting question is how the resistance was overcome.
Egalitarian societyno restricted resources · no offices