Introduction: states, chiefdoms, and social evolution

The state is surely one of the great ciphers of intellectual history. Speculation as to its origins, function and legitimacy has most likely taken place in every place and every age in which human beings found themselves `caged' ([Mann 1986]) within these peculiar and bewildering social formations. Within the conventional genealogy of Western intellectualism, abstract thinking about the state dates at least as far back as Aristotle ([Weissleder 1978]) and can be traced through both the Christian and Islamic worlds to the present day ([Service 1975] Chapter 1, [Service 1978]). Anthropological theories of the state and its origins, however, may be traced to the writings of ``a group of speculative lawyers'' ([Kuper 1988]: 8) in the second half of the nineteenth century. First among these, chronologically, was Henry Maine whose Ancient Society was published in 1861. This book was soon joined by the works of Bachofen, McLennan, Tylor, Morgan, Lubbock and others. As a body, these works directly inspired the discipline of anthropology, primarily through the methodology of kinship analysis, and contributed significantly - through the later writings of Durkheim - to sociology as well. On a crude level, the theories of all these authors had in common:

1. a distinction between `primitive' (Morgan's `societas') and `civil' (Morgan's `civitas') societies, the former based on kinship (blood), the latter on contract (soil),
2. the notion that `civil' society had in some manner developed from `primitive' society, and
3. the conviction that contemporary `primitive' societies represented various stages in this evolutionary chain.

Primitive society thus became the privileged object of anthropological inquiry.

If this specific formulation of primitive society was to have a long and checkered history, the prospects for evolutionism itself seemed much less certain. By the turn of the century, the Boasian critique had essentially rendered evolutionism a dead issue in America. It lingered several decades longer in Britain, finally to be put to the sword by Malinowski. Social evolutionism would have remained a curiosity of anthropological history, then, had it not been for a revivalist movement in the United States in the 1940s and 50s led by Leslie White and Julian Steward. Social evolution in archaeology is generally considered to have stemmed from the work of these two authors, and from that of Elman Service, a student both of White and of Steward. This being the case, I consider it worth exploring in some detail the roots of their thought and the meaning they attributed to the term `evolution.'