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Think of tribes, or kinship groups. Even without the state formalities of written law, police function, civic bldgs, etc, people arrange themselves with unspok

Think of tribes, or kinship groups. Even without the state formalities of written law, police function, civic bldgs, etc, people arrange themselves with unspoken customs and traditional dominance hierarchies. The threat to such a tribe isn't anarchy. It is the better-organized foreigner that grinds his subjects into cogs for a well-oiled killing machine. Think Romans on Jews, or Germans on Eastern Europe... As for states, they certainly existed in various forms at the time. My original point, that I received from Quigley, is that certain stateless groups in the "dark ages" provided a counterexample to those who believe that you can't have civilization without a state. In modern terms, I guess this would be a sort of "localism".

lsc 9y ago
The threat to such a tribe is any other group that feels they can take what that tribe has at a reasonable cost. The problem is that figuring out who can take what from whom directly using force ends up with a lot of dead, and it ends up killing a lot of the farmers and artisans that ultimately are producing what you are fighting over. The argument for federation or centralization is that you formalize the systems of stealing based on measures of force that involve less death and destruction than just having a battle every time your clan thinks it's stronger than the clan down the way.