“The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardization and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations. Essential to that standardization is the very invention of a standard nomenclature, through writing, of all the essential categories—receipts, work orders, labor dues, and so on” (Scott 2017, p. 144). “Claude Levi-Strauss wrote thus: Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself … Writing is a strange thing … The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals … into a hierarchy of castes and classes … It seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind” (ibid., p. vi).

Meanings, including writing, do not arise and grow for the enlightenment or exploitation of humanity. They increase insofar as is necessary or sufficient for the self-reproduction of cultures-societies. Economy emerges in relation to technology, policy—in relation to organization: economic action means choosing technology, political action means choosing organization. Politics is the selection of institutions in the competition between people, their needs and motives. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson say, “politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 79). The division and addition of technology goes hand in hand with the division and addition of order, with the emergence of new norms and the increasing complexity of order.

If technology is based on the use of effects, then organization is based on the regulation of relations between people, i.e. on command or disposal. Historically, the first form of economic organization was application or disposal in the process of use: if a thing is not used immediately, it can be taken by someone else. When the natives tried to take things from the ships of the Europeans in the Age of Discovery, they were thieves to the Europeans, although the natives themselves only wanted to use things that the Europeans were not using. Further division and addition of order lead to the second form—possession. Possession is the disposal of the user, not tied to the process of use. The possessor disposes of the thing on the basis that he uses it from time to time. Finally, the third form is property. The owner disposes of the thing, although he himself may not use it at all.

Political organization evolves hand in hand with economic organization. Command over people develops along with disposal over things. The first form of political organization (or polity) is a community in which activities are carried out more or less cooperatively. It is a common economy that grows in the context of application and administration based on experience. The second form of polity is chiefdom, in which application is complemented by possession, and the rule of the experienced is complemented by the domination of the strong. Mansur Olson’s concept of the “stationary bandit” can be applied to chiefdom. When a nomadic band becomes sedentary, it begins to take only a portion of the products of the population and provides protection from other bands, increasing production in the area it controls:

“In fact, if a roving bandit rationally settles down and takes his theft in the form of regular taxation and at the same time maintains a monopoly on theft in his domain, then those from whom he exacts taxes will have an incentive to produce. The rational stationary bandit will take only a part of income in taxes, because he will be able to exact a larger total amount of income from his subjects if he leaves them with an incentive to generate income that he can tax” (Olson 1993, p. 568).

The chiefdom is less dependent on experience and tradition than the community, and it allows people more opportunities to choose their institutions. It thus sets the stage for the third form of political organization—the state. In the state, application and possession are complemented by property, and power relations are built on tradition and violence as well as formal administration and religion. No state arose without a turn to the supernatural. Like chiefdoms, states did not arise as a result of one-off actions. “‘Stateness,’ in my view, is an institutional continuum, less an either/or proposition than a judgment of more or less” (Scott 2017, p. 23). James Scott notes that one of the main tasks that the first states had to solve was to prevent the flight of the population. The border, along with the administrative apparatus, is the distinguishing feature of the state as a political organization (cf. Scott 2017, p. 118). “Some have even argued that state formation was possible only in settings where the population was hemmed in by desert, mountains, or a hostile periphery” (Scott 2017, p. 23).

As the state developed into a comprehensive domain of abstract and social technologies, norms, and mechanisms for their implementation, the formal order became more homogeneous, pushing alternative patterns into the geographical and socio-cultural periphery of a culture-society. The periphery, in turn, refused to adopt complex technologies and organizations from the core of the state for fear of enslavement (cf. Scott 2017, pp. 148-9). States themselves, however, were islands in a sea of non-state populations and had to be wary of their peripheries:

“…The very first states to appear in the alluvial and wind-blown silt in southern Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Yellow River were minuscule affairs both demographically and geographically. They were a mere smudge on the map of the ancient world and not much more than a rounding error in a total global population estimated at roughly twenty-five million in the year 2,000 BCE. They were tiny nodes of power surrounded by a vast landscape inhabited by nonstate peoples—aka ‘barbarians’” (Scott 2017, p. 14).