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Can I read La société contre l'État : recherches d'anthropologie politique on EtoBox?

La société contre l'État : recherches d'anthropologie politique by Pierre Clastres, Pierre Clastres is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is La société contre l'État : recherches d'anthropologie politique about?

In this seminal, founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres takes on some of the most abiding and essential questions of human What is power? What is society? How, among all the possible modes of political organization, did we come to choose the monolithic State model and its accompanying regimes of coercion? As Clastres shows, other and different regimes do indeed exist, and they existed long before ours regimes in which power, though it manifests itself everywhere, is nonetheless noncoercive. In such societies, political culture, and cultural practices generally, are not only not submissive to the State model, but they actively avert it, rendering impossible the very conditions in which coercive power and the State could arise. How then could our own societies of the State ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why? Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called primitive societies, and especially on the discourses with which civilized (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that

Who reads La société contre l'État : recherches d'anthropologie politique?

It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.

Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.

Author
Pierre Clastres, Pierre Clastres
Publisher
Zone Books ; Distributed by the MIT Press
Published
2013
Language
EN
ISBN
9780942299878
Category
philosophy
Subjects
Sociology, History, Anthropology
Rating
4.15 / 5 (251 ratings)
Updated
2026-03-14

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