The Question of Power: An interview with Pierre Clastres

by Pierre Clastres

L'Anti-Mythes, a journal published in Caen, France, by some ex-students, focused particularly on the history of the political group Socialisme ou Barbarie and organized a series of interviews with several members viewed as representative of different aspects of the group's activities: Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Daniel Mothé and Henri Simon. L'Anti-Mythes also published this long interview with Pierre Clastres, which has become a reference over the years. Simple in its exposition, uncompromising on the content, The Question of Power is a crucial introduction to the ethnologist's thinking.

This interview with Pierre Clastres reveals the thinking behind his work, such as Society Against the State, which has been highly influential among certain socialist traditions: anarchism, Marxism, and "anti-bureaucratic" communism. Clastres most famous assertion is that politics precedes economic stratification, and that stateless peoples actively resist state formation and hierarchy. This assertion has large scale ramifications for anti-capitalist theory. For his theories of power and state, Pierre Clastres is often called an anarchist anthropologist - influencing contemporary figures in anthropology and the social sciences like James C Scott and David Graeber.

Introduction by anti-authoritarian leftist philosopher Miguel Abensour.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

60 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2015

About the author

Pierre Clastres, (1934-1977), was a French anthropologist and ethnographer. He is best known for his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory on stateless societies. Some people regard him as giving scientific validity to certain anarchist perspectives.[1]

In his most famous work, Society Against the State (1974), Clastres indeed criticizes both the evolutionist notion that the state would be the ultimate destiny of all societies, and the Rousseauian notion of man's natural state of innocence (the myth of the noble savage). Knowledge of power is innate in any society, thus the natural state for humans wanting to preserve autonomy is a society structured by a complex set of customs which actively avert the rise of despotic power. The state is seen as but a specific constellation of hierarchical power peculiar only to societies who have failed to maintain these mechanisms which prevent separation from happening. Thus, in the Guayaki tribes, the leader has only a representational role, being his people's spokesperson towards other tribes ("international relations"). If he abuses his authority, he may be violently removed by his people, and the institution of "spokesperson" is never allowed to transform itself into a separate institution of authority. Pierre Clastres' theory thus was an explicit criticism of vulgar Marxist theories of economic determinism, in that he considered an autonomous sphere of politics, which existed in stateless societies as the active conjuration of authority. The essential question which Clastres sought to answer was: why would an individual in an egalitarian (eg foraging) society chose to subordinate himself to an authority? He considered the consequent rise of the state to be due to the power disparaties that arise when religion credits a prophet or other medium with a direct knowledge of divine power which is unattainable by the bulk of society. It is this upsetting of the balance of power that engendered the inequality to be found in more highly structured societies, and not an initial economic disparity as argued by the Marxist school of thought.