The Origins of Political Order

Indeed, some evolutionary psychologists have argued that the survival benefits conferred by enhanced social cohesion is the reason that a propensity for religious belief seems to be hardwired into the human brain.

From a cognitive point of view, any given religious belief can be described as a type of mental model of reality, in which causality is attributed to invisible forces that exist in a metaphysical realm beyond the phenomenal world of everyday experience.

Humans also have a proclivity for norm following that is grounded in the emotions rather than in reason, and consequently a tendency to invest mental models and the rules that flow from them with intrinsic worth.

Once states come into being, kinship becomes an obstacle to political development, since it threatens to return political relationships to the small-scale, personal ties of tribal societies.

The transition from band-level societies to tribal societies was made possible by the development of agriculture.

What are sometimes referred to as 'states' during the Xia and Shang dynasties are actually better characterized as chiefdoms or tribes with increasingly higher levels of stratification and centralized leadership.

Property needed to be private: strangers or the state could not be allowed to violate the resting place of one's ancestors.

Fear of incurring a blood-feud is, in fact, the most important legal sanction within a tribe and the main guarantee of an individual's life and property.

Tribal societies have weak centralized sources of authority... and therefore much less ability than states to coerce individuals.

Each segment is itself segmented and there is opposition between its parts.