Society Against the State

Society Against the State (French: La Société contre l'État) is a 1974 ethnography of power relations in South American rainforest native cultures written by anthropologist Pierre Clastres and best known for its thesis that tribal societies reject the centralization of coercive power. Clastres challenged the idea that all cultures evolve through Westernization to adopt coercive leadership as a popular, ethnocentric myth.

Society Against the State

Author	Pierre Clastres
Subject	Anthropology
Published	1974
Published in English	1977 (Urizen Books)

Further reading

• Arcand, Bernard (1977). "Review of La Société Contre l'État". Dialectical Anthropology. 2 (1–4): 173–174. doi:10.1007/BF00249483. ISSN 0304-4092. JSTOR 29789898. S2CID 141462781.
• Brown, Susan Love (1993). "Rev. of Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology". Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 16 (1): 41–43. doi:10.1525/pol.1993.16.1.41. ISSN 1081-6976. JSTOR 24498049.
• Ellard, George (June 1979). "Rev. of Society against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power Among the Indians of the Americas". American Political Science Review. 73 (2): 625–626. doi:10.2307/1954967. ISSN 0003-0554. JSTOR 1954967. S2CID 147762569.
• Hecht, Robert (1978). "Review of La Société Contre l'État". Cambridge Anthropology. 4 (2): 95–99. ISSN 0305-7674. JSTOR 23814103.
• Kurtz, Donald V. (1989). "Rev. of Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology". Anthropological Quarterly. 62 (1): 43–44. doi:10.2307/3317695. ISSN 0003-5491. JSTOR 3317695.
• "Rev. of Society against the State". Commonweal: 798. December 9, 1977. ISSN 0010-3330.
• "Rev. of Society against the State". Canadian Philosophical Reviews. 9: 139. April 1989. ISSN 0228-491X.
• "Rev. of Society against the State". The Journal of Politics: 1110. November 1978. ISSN 0022-3816.

External links

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