Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation

by Peter Gelderloos

Overview

Where did the state come from? Where is it going? This study in politogenesis shakes up the status quo.

Worshiping Power cuts through inadequate theories of early state formation to offer a new analysis of the roles that kinship, religious practice, and commerce have played in stifling self-organization. Gelderloos’s partisan approach to human social complexity is highly innovative, yet comprehensible to the layperson. A formidable assault on a social institution whose contemporary ubiquity renders it almost invisible.

Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist writer originally from Virginia. He is author of How Nonviolence Protects the State, Consensus, and Anarchy Works .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849352659
Publisher:	AK Press
Publication date:	02/13/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	286
File size:	506 KB

About the Author

Peter Gelderloos: Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist writer originally from Virginia. He is author of How Nonviolence Protects the State, Consensus, and Anarchy Works.

Table of Contents

Introduction
I. Take Me to Your Leader: The Politics of Alien Invasion
II. Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology
III. Save Me from Yourself: the Statist Spread of Salvation Religions
IV. Sleeper States and Imperial Imaginaries: Authority's Afterlife and Reincarnation
V. The Modern State: A Revolutionary Hybrid
VI. Zomia: A Topography of Positionality
VII. Chiefdoms and Megacommunities: On the Stability of Non-State Hierarchies
VIII. They Ain't Got No Class: Surpluses and the State
IX. All in the Family: Kinship and Statehood
X. Building the Walls Higher: From Raiding to Warfare
XI. Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order
XII. A Forager's Mecca: Dreams of Power
XIII. Clastres and Cairo: Learning from States

Editorial Reviews

“An insightful, sweeping analysis of how and why states have arisen (or haven’t), delivered in sparklingly clear prose. It is everything that an anarchist history should be: heretical, tentative, and provocative, as well as deeply researched, persuasive, and above all, relevant.” —Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants Against the State

"A work of ethnographic theory that suggests stimulating new avenues of empirical research and theoretical inquiry. The book is also an excellent read!” —Andrej Grubacic, author of Living at the Edges of Capitalism

“Gelderloos dares to do what most contemporary thinkers blindly refuse. For far too long we’ve been gripped by an unshakable faith in statist politics.… Worshiping Power is not just a reclamation of our history, it offers a glimpse into the reconvening of our humanity.” —Simon Springer, author of The Anarchist Roots of Geography

“Contemporary radical state theory owes much to an anarchistic ethos. Gelderloos’s important little book surveys and reinterprets this literature, and then gives it a coherent anarchist politics.” —Alex Prichard, University of Exeter

“An insightful, sweeping analysis of how and why states have arisen (or haven’t), delivered in sparklingly clear prose. It is everything that an anarchist history should be: heretical, tentative, and provocative, as well as deeply researched, persuasive, and above all, relevant.” —Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants Against the State

"A work of ethnographic theory that suggests stimulating new avenues of empirical research and theoretical inquiry. The book is also an excellent read!” —Andrej Grubacic, author of Living at the Edges of Capitalism

“Gelderloos dares to do what most contemporary thinkers blindly refuse. For far too long we’ve been gripped by an unshakable faith in statist politics.… Worshiping Power is not just a reclamation of our history, it offers a glimpse into the reconvening of our humanity.” —Simon Springer, author of The Anarchist Roots of Geography

“Contemporary radical state theory owes much to an anarchistic ethos. Gelderloos’s important little book surveys and reinterprets this literature, and then gives it a coherent anarchist politics.” —Alex Prichard, University of Exeter

From the Publisher