Category: Perspectives And Theories On The Origin Of The State

It is possible that amongst the people related either by tribal or clan or later by territorial connections, wartime compulsions for security and protection might have given birth to a feeling for a central leader or authority. The common purpose behind this feeling might have been protection and security of life, personal resources and may…

Undeniably, force, at times in connivance with cunningness or otherwise, has the effect of ensuring domination of a few or a group or a person over others. Historically, force has been the weapon of slavery and colonialism, and has served as an institution of coercive means. Physical or economic power of social groups or individuals…

Primitive social groups may not have been conducive to the idea of personalized property. Means of livelihood and instruments for generating livelihood must have been rudimentary (food gathering, hunting, collecting fire woods for cooking, warmth and protection and animal skins for clothing). Given the scarcity of resources, foods and other material items, life could be…

Kinship-based social grouping with patriarchal authority may tend to follow ancestor worship. The initial reaction of awe, fear and incomprehension towards nature (sun, moon, stars, citing of undefined lights in sky at night and the universe itself) and its events (lightening, roaring and bursting of clouds, heavy rain, volcanoes, floods, tides, etc.) as well as…

Anthropological (related to humankind in all its aspects), ethnographical (related to ethnic groups) and sociological (related to social aspects of human life) studies suggest that social organization in the primitive societies was/is kinship-based. Kinship refers to blood and family relationships (such as father, mother brother, sister), unlike the marital relationships (wife, husband) or contractual relationships…

MacIver identified kinship/family, the institution of property, custom (including religion and magic)/customary law, power/conquest and citizenship as contributing to the historical evolution of the state. To these factors, some more contributing factors like political consciousness, urbanization, class division, race and nationality, development of science, etc., have been added. For our understanding, we may group these…

Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels, Sir Henry J. Sumner Maine, J. F. McLennan, Edward Jenks, R. M. MacIver are some of the jurists, historians, ethnographers and sociologists who have studied and commented on various aspects of primitive social relationships, authority and evolution of the state. While Morgan, Maine, and Jenks have analysed the way authority,…

The Historical-Evolutionary theory does not appreciate that origin of the State is due to some social contract or force or divine dispensation alone. Rather, it adopts a multi-causal approach and attributes the origin of the State to a variety of causes. These relate not only to force, war and power and religion but also to…

The social contract theory has been charged with lacking legal soundness. Tom Paine criticized it on the ground that it required an eternally binding contract on each generation. For Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, it is an irrevocable contract and consent once given is binding not for only those consenting but for all the coming generations…

The critics hold the social contract theory as philosophically untenable. The reason being, it: (i) treats State and society as a mechanical contrivance merely to fulfil selective needs; (ii) assumes a state of nature and also automatic endowment of political consciousness within it; (iii) assumes existence of rights and liberty independent of society and state.…