DESPOTISM AND DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION: A Darwinnian ...

a theory of individual motivation (e.g., Ehrlich, 1936), or, in the Durkheimian tradition, explicitly
rejecting the need of one (e.g., Black, 1976), have empirically determined that “law” is in fact related to
power. But, without such a theory, they have been unable to explain their generalizations, or, except as
a historical lesson, to offer predictions.
Many of the last generation of writers on the subject of early “law” have explicitly rejected an
eclipsing focus on social over individual interests. Starr and Yngvesson, for example, have complained
that “A Durkheimian emphasis on harmony of interests and shared goals has heavily influenced our
thinking and seems to have shaped the ways in which anthropologists have perceived the handling of
disputes. . . . A major problem of most anthropological dispute settlement studies is the failure to link
status, rank, and class orientations to an understanding of actors’ roles in, and outcomes of, the
disputing process” (1975:559, 563; see also Pospisil, 1967:6). As members of a team of researchers sent
into ten different cultures to address these problems, Starr and Yngvesson and several other students of
Laura Nader confirmed that kinship, wealth, and status are generally among the most important
determinants of conflict resolution (Nader and Todd, 1978). Introducing those findings, Nader and Todd
admonished that “it is perhaps obvious to note that power and control over scarce resources are
interconnected and relevant to disputing, and yet there has been little systematic discussion of law and
the distribution of power in either the sociological or the anthropological literature. . . . We need to
understand the processes whereby disputing mechanisms maintain and legitimize the distribution of
power, and the means by which the powerful control disputing mechanisms” (pp. 19-20). In the last few
years, a few prominent writers on law in preindustrial societies have begun in a tentative way to look at
the possibility that a theory of evolved human motivation might yield predictions about and
explanations of conflict resolution (e.g., Gruter and Bohannan, 1982, including Hoebel, 1982).
Marxism
On the subject of human society, the single most important alternative to Darwinism is probably
Marxism. It is especially relevant to the subject of despotism, as the explicit end of Marxist thought has
always been an end to exploitation.
Marxism and Darwinism have a great deal in common. It was in large part Darwin’s work on
organic evolution which inspired Marx’s, and many others’ including Morgan’s (see Terray, 1972),
attempts to come up with a parallel theory of social change. Social evolution, like biological evolution,
was to be explicable in terms of changing historical conditions (e.g., discussion in Bloch, 1983). And for
Marx, as for Darwin, the most important of those conditions were those which effected the ways in
which people solved the material problems of life: production and reproduction. These parallels are
fundamental. In order personally to acknowledge his debt, Marx originally proposed to dedicate
“Capital” to Darwin (ibid).
In other crucial respects, though, the theories are far apart. The Darwinian hypotheses put
forward here differ, first, from the Marxist insistence that the simplest human societies were without
exploitation, second, from the Marxist emphasis on production, rather than reproduction, and, last but
most importantly, from the Marxist prescription of a specific form of social evolution, socialist
revolution.
The first difference, essentially, the idea of “primitive communism,” derives from Marx and
Engels’ incorporation of the work of Lewis Henry Morgan into their scenario of world history. In his work
on “Ancient Society” (1877), Morgan delineated two broad plans of government: societas and civitas.