How the State Evolved: From Kinship to Tribal Society

If the state itself is made up of four fixed elements, the state system as a whole is anything but fixed – it is the product of a long evolutionary journey, not a single act of creation or a single moment of design. Most political thinkers who have studied how the state came to look the way it does now favor what is generally called the evolutionary, or historical, theory: the idea that the state grew, gradually and unevenly, out of the family, expanding over a long stretch of time through a mix of forces rather than springing fully formed from any one cause.

Five Forces Behind the State’s Growth

Five factors, working together in different combinations at different points in history, are generally credited with shaping the state’s evolution: kinship, the bonds of blood relation that held the earliest human groups together; religion, which gave early rulers and institutions a legitimacy that raw force alone could never supply; force and coercion, the blunt instrument that expanded and defended territory long before law existed to do the job; economic necessity, which pushed scattered groups toward the cooperation and organization that only a settled political structure could provide; and political consciousness, the slowly dawning recognition among people that organized government served their collective interest better than none at all. None of these forces worked alone, and none of them worked on a fixed timetable – different combinations dominated at different stages, which is exactly why the state took as long as it did, and looked as different as it did, across different parts of the world.

Tracing that journey in order, political history generally recognizes six broad stages the state passed through on its way to its modern form: ancient tribal society, the ancient kingdoms and empires of the East, the city-states of ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the feudal states of medieval Europe, and finally the modern national state.

Where It Began: Tribal Society

The earliest stretch of this journey is also the hardest to document with confidence, since it predates written history entirely. What is known comes largely from archaeology and anthropology – tools, weapons, and other physical remains that let researchers reconstruct, however incompletely, how prehistoric humans actually lived. The consensus that emerges from that evidence is that for roughly six thousand years before anything resembling organized society existed, small, scattered human groups lived a wandering existence in caves, valleys, and open plains, without fixed settlements, formal leadership, or anything a modern observer would recognize as government.

That began to change once humans learned to farm and to domesticate animals. The ability to grow food and raise livestock, rather than simply forage and move on, gave wandering tribes a reason to settle, and settlement is what gradually turned loose tribal groupings into something resembling organized political societies. Every tribe already had its own chief, and as tribal life became more settled and more structured, that chief’s role expanded almost naturally into something like a ruler’s – the tribal leader became the head of an emerging political organization, the earliest recognizable ancestor of the state. War played its own role in this transformation and never really left the picture afterward: a state’s central purpose, from the very start, was protecting its people’s collective life and property, which meant states organized for defense as readily as they organized for offense, and the two habits reinforced each other in a cycle that has never fully stopped. It is precisely because weaker political units keep dissolving while stronger ones keep absorbing what they can hold that history has produced a saying as old as the pattern itself: the big fish eats the small fish.