WORSHIPING POWER by Peter Gelderloos
Where did the state come from? Where is it going? This study in politogenesis shakes up the status quo.
Worshiping Power cuts through inadequate theories of early state formation to offer a new analysis of the roles that kinship, religious practice, and commerce have played in stifling self-organization. Gelderloos’s partisan approach to human social complexity is highly innovative, yet comprehensible to the layperson. A formidable assault on a social institution whose contemporary ubiquity renders it almost invisible.
Worshiping Power cuts through inadequate theories of early state formation to offer a new analysis of the roles that kinship, religious practice, and commerce have played in stifling self-organization. Gelderloos’s partisan approach to human social complexity is highly innovative, yet comprehensible to the layperson. A formidable assault on a social institution whose contemporary ubiquity renders it almost invisible.