From Tribalism to Political Society

Abstract

The advance of freedom in the history of intersocietal relations is connected with two principal stages of social and political development. The first phase comprises the movement beyond relations of intersocietal estrangement between tribal societies towards the establishment of political community. A second stage involves overcoming estrangement and opposition between states, and entails their subsequent supersession by a universalistic community. The growth of freedom in relations between groups proceeds by virtue of three types of community: from a condition in which men have rights in their community as tribal members (and no rights outside it), to one in which they have rights in their states by virtue of their citizenship, to a final condition in which they have rights in a universal political association by virtue of their humanity. This chapter examines the first main stages in a scale of forms of intersocietal life, those which embrace the move from tribal organisation to the establishment of the state.

At a late moment in man’s emergence, he left behind the securities and intimacies and solidarities of tribal existence… At this point an audacious minority, in a handful of specially situated communities, made a daring thrust in a new direction: the experiment of civilisation … more far-reaching than man had ever established before, binding together with explicit rules and regulations dissimilar communities and varied local customs. (Mumford)