The Core

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Narrative

This section of the website offers a short summary of At the Origins of Politics, providing a brief description of the content of each part or chapter of the volume.

Use the menu on the left-hand sidebar to navigate to the parts or chapters of interest.

Hereafter, major summaries of the larger portions of the volume (“Parts”) will be briefly sketched, bolding the most relevant keywords/passages.

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I: The Great Transformations (50,000-3,500 BC)

Chapters 1-4.

«One of the most important transformations in the history of the world took place in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium: the moment when what we can call “history” began. It seems like an explosion ex nihilo. But it was really the point of arrival of a long, coherent process of development and evolution. It is necessary to understand some of the details of this process in order to understand in turn how the “urban revolution” was born – out of a coherent convergence of ways of perceiving reality that arose and were consolidated in the period of many millennia that preceded it.

The proposal made here is that the advent of the city was the result of a deep transformation of the human capacity of perception, in which an effectively “para-perceptual” attitude developed – something like a new, secondary perception that combined different primary perceptions in itself. This had the concomitant effect of developing an entirely new method of control that had a profound impact on social and political life. We should therefore find out what the stages of this journey were and how they reinforced one another. The study of prehistory will not only serve as a backdrop, but as an essential component for understanding how this led to “history.” […]

I will also show the profound impact that this transformation had on the human psyche, in ways that perhaps have never been repeated in history, up to our time. There is a surprising contemporaneity of events and sensibilities which gives an immediate significance to a historical search, attentive to the deepest dimensions of the human story».

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II: The Axle of Power (3,500-2,300 BC)

Chapters 5-8.

«The city emerges now as the visible sign of the first sovereign organism of power, where all the symptoms hitherto discovered converge and are add up to constitute a reality that enhances to the maximum the dynamics started in prehistory. This is the state understood as the concrete configuration of structures of power. In this way, society is identified in individual, cohesive groups, defined by a deep internal knowledge of solidarity and directionality.

Until now, the cohesion of human groups had been based on a face-to-face relationship extended through time: the associative link depended on the individual’s knowledge of every other member of the group. The transformation identified with the rise of the city is found in the emergence of new associative ties that go beyond personal knowledge among individuals. In other words, even individuals who do not know each other personally know that they belong to the same social group. While the cohesion of the group was first based on the senses and personal memory, from this point forward, sociability precedes personal knowledge […].

[…] we start to discern centrifugal forces that tend to expand horizons in a super-urban direction. […] ».

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III: The Explosion of Boundaries (2,300-2,100 BC)

Chapters 9-12.

« […] The perception of boundaries exploded according to the logic intrinsic to the notion of the sovereign state, for which there should not, in fact, have been boundaries.

This profound reconfiguration of the territorial base is shown in completely new ways of perceiving dimensions much larger than the landscape. And so a perceptual geography developed, embracing immense extensions and giving them a new sense. This humanization of the landscape occurred as a function of the socio-political development that aimed at subjecting the known inhabited world to a much fuller and open vision than that of the single perception. […]

And this is already the last act of this story: the constitution of a true empire […]». of the book covers the shortest period (less than two centuries).

But it is of fundamental importance to see how, if only briefly, this was not an ephemeral experiment. In the course of a couple generations, a massive reinstitutionalization of the entire political and administrative system was imposed with a knowledge of strategic ends that indicate how the directional center of the state had reached a capacity for control, adequate to reach pre-fixed goals on its own – even if, for other reasons, it would reveal itself to be premature in the end–>

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IV: The Restructuring on a Regional Basis (2,100-1,600 BC)

Chapters 13-16.

«The imperial experiment introduced a strong measure of disequilibrium into the relationship with the territory. New mechanisms were put into effect to realize political structures that corresponded to the new situation, but they proved to be inadequate, substantially imposed from above without a sufficient alignment of the base. What emerged was a resizing of the conception of the territory […] .

It is at this point that the construct of the ‘land of four banks’, ‘Mesopotamia’ is consolidated. Introduced by Naram-Sin, the concept was in a certain sense thwarted by the imperial extension beyond the limits of the original conception of the territory. […] : the sense of belonging to the state transcended the limit of perception even more radically.

The tribe is a contrast here which was consolidated in this period as a parallel way of the formation of the state. Almost mitigating the impact of the meta-perceptual system of the social organization of the territorial state, the tribe put a different form of aggregation into action. […] ».

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V: The World as a City (1,600-1,100 BC)

Chapters 17-20.

«Between 1600 and 1550 BC, there was a profound transformation in the whole area of the Near East, and even the political framework of Mesopotamia was completely transformed. The most apparent aspect was the profound division between south and north. In fact, at this point, two lands of the four banks emerged, Babylon [Babylonia] and Assyria. […]

Indicative of the change is the fact that it is no longer possible to speak of Syro-Mesopotamia except in the framework of a series of interregional encounters that include Anatolia and Egypt. It is the cosmopolitan period [also known as “International Period”; see e.g. Liverani 2014 History, p. 282], that of the world of the city: the system of relationships and powers that had developed in the great urban centers were now applied on a much greater scale that included great territorial, profoundly heterogenous blocks.

[…] two new types of state were established: the national and that of the steppe. […] ».

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VI: The Extreme Limits of Territoriality (1,100-500 BC)

Chapters 21-24.

« […] Aiming at this awareness [that of the power], the individuals capable of giving directionality to meta-perceptual tendencies would take the reins of power in hand, and soon come to provide an institutional consistency – the state.

We have now arrived, chronologically and typologically, to the apex of this trajectory – the empire in the full sense of the word. […]

From the institutional point of view, what attracts us is, in particular, the strategy of the disaggregation of the territory as it was shaped by tradition, and by its restructure as a unified mosaic in which every piece was studied on the basis of the needs of the center. And as the urban revolution had functionalized people, so the empire now functionalized territory.

The epigones of the great Assyrian experiment only confirmed the concepts of manifest destiny and Lebensraum (11.3), thus passing down to us the sense of a ‘need’ for a territorial expansion to validate the exercise of power in its most extreme form».

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Conclusion

Chapters 25-26.

«I have traced the course of the political institution of Syro-Mesopotamia as an idealized trajectory of the development of the state. […]

The reflection of the structures capable of explaining the origin of the state serve to shed light on the very nature of the phenomenon. These factors did not disappear once the process had been triggered. The origins of politics are still with us».