At the Dawn of Tyranny

by Eli Sagan

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394539222
• ISBN13: 9780394539225
• Release Date: May 1985
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 420 Pages
• Weight: 1.94 lbs.

Customer Reviews

fascinating, informative, unconvincing

Eli Sagan tries to explain the transition from primitive societies to states. He notes that there is not likely to be a purely economic explanation for this transition, forager society was remarkably economically efficient. In other words, "primitives" were not driven by hunger or disease to invent agriculture and the state. So why did they do it? Sagan appeals to the theories of Margaret Mahler, a psychoanalyst who theorized about psychological development in small children. Mahler never meant for her theories to be applied to society as a whole, but it is one of Sagan's assumptions that social structure and development will never be fully understood without looking into the psychic drives which humans either act upon or repress. Sagan speculates that there is a drive toward individuation and separation from the mother, a drive which is repressed in kinship societies with their emphasis on family connections over individuality. Early states attempted to satisfy this drive with a vengeance. Their method was the creation of the tyrant, a colorful, heroic individual who tries to defy death and the family as a way of symbolically separating from the mother. Sagan even notes that tyrants were expected to throw tantrums, something people do when they want to show their mothers that they are their own people. Sagan's empirical data are largely from what he calls "complex societies," i.e., pre-literate states, such as the Buganda of what is today Uganda, and pre-Europeanized Polynesian societies. This is the best aspect of the book. The glimpses into these cultures are vivid and fascinating. They also provide blood-chilling examples of early tyranny: human sacrifice, for example, marked virtually every major occasion of the monarch's life: birth, circumcision, and death. Sagan explains that this aggression, like all aggression, is an attempt to reduce anxiety -- in this case the separation anxiety of ending the kinship system and hence severing from the family. I can't say that I am much convinced by Sagan's case. He himself has to admit that he cannot explain why some primitive societies make the step into statehood while others don't. After all, all people have the same inner drive to individuate. Furthermore, he has not convincingly explained why forager society would be so hostile to innate human drives, given that forager society is the result of the same human brain that causes those drives in combination with the Stone Age environment for which that same brain is adapted. Also, I don't think that Sagan considers forager society in sufficient depth. When he talks about the "primitive" it is usually kinship systems that he has in mind, but most of human existence was in gatherer-hunter bands, not kinship systems. It is crucial to his case that he show that pre-state societies repressed individuality. In the case of foragers especially, I don't think he has really shown this at all. Finally, I can't agree with Sagan's claim that all aggression is m