Political anthropology

While sociology in the early 20th century attempted to distinguish itself from psychology, it nevertheless flirted with fundamental questions regarding human nature and human essence. The historical, political, and philosophic contexts of authors affected how (and in some cases, if) they formulated a conception of human nature. While both psychology and sociology concern themselves with human behavior, sociology presumably examines the conditions that regulate behavior and personal values; as well as external contexts that influence the formation of personal motivations animating individual behavior. Because such research works with a basic characterization of human action, political sociology takes on an anthropological character (Kant 1798/2006). Insofar as there are un-generalizable differences in within and across cultures affecting the way each socio-political writer assumes a number of determinate or indeterminate parameters operating through complex human behavior, political sociology enters into a trans-disciplinary dialogue with anthropology and psychology.

Just as a particular branch of political philosophy reflects a particular political economic position, the political sociology of classes expresses a particular anthropological condition. To describe this particularity only in sociological terms of race, class and gender would resemble a snake trying to catch its own tail. In this work, we will explain formation and theory of social classes through anthropological lenses. The philosophical and political dynamism of 18th and 19th century Europe makes it impossible to totalize the thinking and political movements as departing from common assumptions. In fact, the very questioning of what’s basic to political communities fueled the political agitation of last two centuries. Simultaneous (yet not necessarily synchronous) processes of colonization and democracy, industrialization and proletarianization, and citizenship and racism make it impossible to describe linearly and one-dimensionally the political sociological history of modernity (Hall, 1990). In each of its episodes and at every juncture one witnesses both radical expansion of thinking and violent erasures of human experience.

Historical Materialism

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

Even though the concept of social class was eventually developed into a general theory applicable to many societies that undergo the processes of modernization, industrialization, and colonization; at its inception this conceptualization bore the marks of a particular socio-cultural environment. Traversing the critical and dialectical traditions of German philosophy,  the investigations of classical political economy, and aspirations of utopian socialism, Karl Marx developed his theory of historical materialism in collaboration with Friedrich Engels. While engaging with the work of political economists, they questioned the anthropological validity of latter’s basic assumptions regarding the concept of the individual underpinning their economic models (Defoe, 1719/2003; Marx & Engels, 1970). They specifically criticized the atomistic conception of individuals as the basic units that constitute economic activity. For Marx and Engels, the social precedes the individual. Society is not an aggregate of individuals but a working totality. While they theorized the primacy of society, this wasn’t a static and harmonious conception. Instead they argued that society is an epiphenomenon of the interactions between different classes. Hierarchically situated classes internally cohere through their economic conditions and shared interests, which then produce their sociopolitical position and force. Thus, on their account class is not conceived as a passive container but as a primary agent of social change.

The totality of economic activity—namely production, exchange, consumption and reproduction—differentiates its modality across historical periods. This historical differentiation is most visibly marked by the shifts in the instruments operative in each social configuration of work, e.g. agricultural, industrial, information societies. If political economists start out from the rational, self-interested individual, Marx and Engels conceptualized that their view-point is grounded in their sociological and anthropological condition, i.e., the philosophy of classical political economists merely expresses the particular material conditions of the thinkers —a class that already privately owns property and therefore is able to engage in relatively free individual activity of self-realization made possible by their wealth and free-time. Freedom is the realization of a possibility. And, this possibility cannot be taken as a given; it is always in need of explanation. For Marx and Engels, the political emancipatory project is the creation of the conditions of possibility of this freedom for all classes. For Marx and Engels, the social conditions of labor define the anthropological character of the human being.

It is to some extent anachronistic to call Marx a German philosopher—as the nationality defined either in terms of citizenship or cultural ethos was not a naturalized category of social classification but itself a political project (Gourgouris, 1996). Marx was in practice an internationalist and exhibited this philosophy in his practice of associating with workers transcending the nascent political borders of Europe and the world at large. Marx’s theoretical work not only formulated but also set the ground of major political and sociological phenomena including countless reform and revolutionary movements. Hence, his work/life has a transhistorical anthropological character whereby human essence is both defined and overcome in practice, thereby ‘freedom’ is not posited merely as an abstract possibility but manifests as concrete realization. His life of exile, his collaboration with Engels, and his leadership in workers’ movements demonstrate this conjunction between philosophy and history, anthropology and sociology.

In the theory of historical materialism, the labor of working-class is revealed as the precondition of the freedom enjoyed by the individual members of the industrial merchant class, namely, the bourgeoisie. Moreover, Marx and Engels argued that the norms regulating society (with the backing of law and armed-forces), the ideas discussed in public with legitimacy and seriousness, and revered aesthetic sensibilities reflect the interests of the dominant class. There can be no theoretically or empirically sound discussion of consciousness and human nature that’s blind to class dynamics. The dominant class of a capitalist economy does not facing the everyday limits with which others members of the society are struggling. The worldview emerging from a class position then crystallizes into the philosophy that grounds the reignning political economy.

Thus, by laying bare these hidden assumptions, Marx (1859/1970) offered a critique of political economy. Here, Marx builds on Kant’s critical project of exploring the prerequisites for what one takes for granted. Kant had asked: what are the necessary conditions for any possible experience? He philosophized that mere experience is not sufficient to account for subjective understanding. It is as though we are in possession of mental equipment that allows us to organize myriad sensory stimuli into meaningful perceptions of reality. Thus, Kant proposed a new synthetic account that addresses both empiricist (experience driven) and rationalist (mind driven) accounts of human experience and thinking.

If Kant posed the problem at the level of the individual, Marx the philosopher asks it at the level of society. The Individual presupposes society. Society presupposes work. Work presupposes organization and technology; therefore a history. Forms of organization and technology bears the traces a historical movement of coming into being and dissolving into history, they are not mere products of a self-contained age but reflections of transformative social conditions. As a result of his processual critical philosophy upon which historical materialist political sociology is raised, Marx argued that individualism is merely a consequence of a particular development of productive forces and cannot be seen as a natural category. In fact the very notion of nature is dissolved into a non-totalized concept of history where no overarching continuity is kept except life-itself.

While Descartes (1637/2008) found that the thinking subject is indubitable insofar as the act of doubting presupposes a thinking subject, Marx underlined that life and labor presuppose one another. Life is never given but always produced under specific conditions. Labor is never the mere expenditure of energy but is always performed in the context of struggle to live. Thus, labor is not a free individual choice. Moreover, labor always happens against the backdrop of a collectivity even when it is executed individually. This theory has become one of the pillars of the modern worldview as it became commonplace to categorize societies by their dominant mode of production such as hunter & gatherer, nomadic, agricultural, industrial/capitalist or financial/information economy.

The subsistence of life is not a mere struggle against environmental and material challenges, but also against one’s own species. Marx and Engels describe the formation of social classes as resulting from the accumulation of extra wealth (that’s not immediately necessary for survival) in the hands of one class —which uses it to consolidate its hold over all aspects of society. While developing a comprehensive theory accounting for the ways in which economical activity is thoroughly political, they also historicize the political character of productive activity. There is an immanent dynamism to history.

Thus, against a timeless view of economic motivation and the naturalization of the market as a given, Marx historicized these social forms. In order to lay bare the philosophic assumptions of political economy, he ventured towards philosophic inquiry into what constitutes human essence. Influenced by Hegel’s account of the restless activity of Reason (Hegel, 1977, pp. 206-230) that attempts to realize its freedom through negating its limits and becoming conscious of its own activity in this process, Marx conceptualized labor as the defining characteristic of the human essence which is at the risk of alienation through immersion in underdeveloped relations of production.

For Marx, reason resides embedded within sensuous and practical engagement with the world where labor produces its own future conditions of possibility. As opposed to more externalized and objectified views of reason, Marx situates reason in the political struggle between classes that clash over differing conceptions of the legitimate order of society. The forceful relations that ground particular organization of economical activity becomes the basic driving force of history.

With Marx, the notion of ‘the people’ is not an aggregate of individuals who are evenly represented in the political order as individuated political subjects with equal rights of participation through representative democracy. Instead, looking at the civil society where economic activity takes place and where conflicts over production, exchange and consumption unfold, Marx conceptualized the people as an unharmonized totality, essentially divided insofar as they are separated by their class positions. What defines class attribution is the socially afforded ability to accumulate wealth. For Marx, social mechanisms ensures the reproduction of class distinctions whereby the fruits of societal production—i.e. surplus value—flows into the hands of only a segment of the population (Marx, 1976).

Marx argues that labor adds use. The value produced by labor on what’s otherwise less useful becomes the central point of contention. If labor’s production of useful objects, services, institutions, and relations is the basic engine of society, what is the value of this labor? If labor is categorically social, how can society decide on the measure of the compensation for this labor? Marx not only points out the collaborative aspect of any productive activity but also on more general level the interdepedency between different laboring groups whose activities are predicated upon one another. Thus, the division of labor becomes one of the arguments for communal character of works, objects and relations that may seem isolated, self-contained, and privately owned.

Thus, moving from political economic questions of how to govern the population to ensure the best outcome for the state; Marx considers the possibility of reorganizing society along the lines that correspond to the discoveries made by this more fundamental inquiry into freedom, life, labor and struggle in the pursuit of political possibilities that are not yet materialized.

State or no-state?

The utilization of state-power is a central problematic of political sociology and political actors. To what extent one can instrumentalize the state’s capacities to one’s goals? Does the state as an apparatus provides a number of neutral devices such as armed forces, administration, and taxation; or are these political bodies and practices the very limitations against which one raises the question of the political?

Should organized workers resist the state or try to seize it? Is individual liberty mostly limited or protected by state? Does the state necessarily repress the emancipation of oppressed groups or can it become a historical agent of progress?

The very nature of the state is questioned in anthropological research that makes possible historical and cultural relativization modern governments and political regimes. In response to the growing bureaucratic apparatus of the state and the entrenchment of the hierarchical institutions of civil society, the very possibility of having social life without state is investigated.

Different from the political philosophic questioning of the basis of state legitimacy, and different from the political economic question of how to govern the economic activity of a population, and different from the historical materialist question of how to appropriate state-power in order to transform class society; the political anthropological question is: “Are there societies without a state?”

By relativizing the state’s existence, it then becomes possible to disassociate organization in general from the state as such. There are perhaps possibilities of social organization without centralized hierarchy. What modularly became the standard form that has been repeated across the earth has a particular Mediterranean/European/Western historicity (Gourgouris, 2021).

In the work of political anthropologist, Pierre Clastres, the state becomes an immanent possibility of social life. However, it is not what makes possible the existence of collaborative and regulated affairs of human communities; to the contrary, the state is an aberration from non-hierarchical organizations.  Drawing on the anarchist and anti-authoritarian political philosophies as well as ethnographic work, Clastres highlights how the development of a centralized power structure is warded off through continual efforts in certain African societies. The chiefs have only symbolic power without the actual means of enforcing their will. Thus, there is a dependency and disjunction between political authority and political mechanisms. By separating force from office, the emergence of state as a result of the monopolization of the means of violence is kept at bay. This ethos of decentralization inspired a number of social movements in the second half of the 20th century which drew inspiration not only from alternative political trajectories but also subterranean traditions of direct-action.

It is important to note that the emergence of the state depends on not only the centralization of violence in the institution of the state but also the development of a class society. In fact, the accumulation of surplus drives higher degrees of the division of labor—and, thereby; class society. From generation to generation, the surplus becomes the wealth that fuels the reproduction of hierarchies. Therefore, any response to this historicity does not operate on a symmetrical temporality but always as a series of discontinuous experiments. On the other hand, the historical depth generated by generations of accumulating excess wealth leads to the emergence of political offices marked by impersonal continuity of political office across time.

The state is the historical continuity of class society. It is the institution that ensures the transmission of wealth, culture and collective memory. As a result of the identification of the state with the temporal existence of society, cultural dimensions such as language and custom fall under the subordination of political power. For instance, the means of communication gets divided into official and private languages. Collective memory becomes official records. Political sociology examines the contested character of the subsumption of socio-cultural phenomenon by class structures and the state.

By regulating culture, the state performs its historical function of either maintaining class hierarchies or disrupting them in the name of ensuring the continuous existence of society. In this role, the state is idealized and acquires a trans-historical status. Different speeds of transformation across culture, economy and technology will come into conflict with the speed of development/adaptation of administrative bodies (Bloch, 1935/1991; Wallerstein, 1974). Social movements will be divided on this subject of the mediation of political agendas through state institutions (Buechler, 1995) (See part II, section 10). The category of power will prove to be a crucial analytical dimension to cut across the worn out opposition of state and civil society.

Michel Foucault proposes a nontotalized theory of power that overcomes the founding analytics of political sociology that are rooted in the binary division of state and civil society. Inspired by philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger—as well by the theorists that conducted the French inception of German philosophy, such as Kojève (1933-1939/1980), Hyppolite (1947/1974, 1997), Canguilhem (1943/1991), Bataille (1985), Althusser (1965/2005) and Lacan (1993)—the work of Foucault breaks new grounds, moving beyond investigations into economic activity and focusing attention on knowledge (discourses) and techniques (political technologies), which are analyzed as core political problematics. Through decentering of power from its exclusive seat in the state apparatus and thematization of the dispersed yet organized manifestations of power across networks throughout society, he challenges the traditional identification of populations under examination with state-defined populations. Indeed, economic and cultural transnationalism cutting across states will forth new intellectual frameworks such as the concept of networked power.

Analyzing the relationship between mode of production and might

Seven Samurai (dir.) Akira Kurosawa, 1954

In this film, the farmers in medieval Japan suffer from local bandits plundering their resources and oppressing their life. As a result, they seek the help of roving samurais. From Max Weber (1946) on, political sociologists found the control of violence as state’s most distinguishing characteristic. Thus, this film explores the complicated relations between the means of economic activity and the means of violence. Military specialization and laboring in productive processes emerge as irreducible yet interdependent dimensions of social life.

War-making with external sovereign powers, and policing/protecting the internal population, the state’s instrumentation of violence becomes one of the major components of its definition. In this chapter, we anthropologized the state as a contingent formation that is not applicable to all cultures. Yet, what we may term as a relationship between economy and politics, between production and violence, is a relevant axis of social relations in so many different societies —even in those where such a nexus does not lead to a formation of nation-state with its definite constitution, bureaucratic apparatuses and specific cultural parameters that legitimizes power structures.

Students are invited to take this film as an artistic exploration of the dependent relationship between the armed forces of the state and the productive forces of society.

– How can you conceptualize the “non-productive” role of armed forces in the constitution of society?

– How are typologies constructed through the differences among samurais?

– Analyzing the end of the film, is there a bond formed between soldiers/samurais and peasants/citizens? Or does the relationship based on rent dissolves leaving no surplus in the shape of a social bond?

– What commonalities do you observe between your culture and the culture described in the film in regards to the negotiations between samurais and peasants? Discuss the article entitled “Stray dogs” by Leo Robson (2025) where Akira Kurosawa’s influence on other directors such Darren Aronofsky and Spike Lee, is traced.

– Variably, national security threats or crime rates often serve as justifications of state violence. What are the ways in which these justifications are under- or over-estimated in culture?

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