I've never "simply assumed" that top-down, centralized government instantly appeared as soon as people began farming & living together in large numbers. Early farmers must still have been profoundly marked by hundreds of thousands of years just spent as egalitarian hunter-gatherer.
The key point, in my view, is: "more participatory (then) than almost any urban government today". Yes, whatever may have pertained back in the mists of the earlier Holocene, the fact is that more recent civilization is very much top-down wherever one looks.
Indeed, top-down is so pervasive that there must be a fundamental cause for the transformation. In "Civilized to Death", Christopher Ryan compares modern humans to locusts, noting that no locust ever existed that had not once been a grasshopper. The two are the same species. But when conditions change sufficiently, the latter becomes the former, & the creature's behaviour changes radically.
The Holocene must have represented the new environment that would eventually trigger such a change in the way humans live together.
I think they are referring to the "Big History" authors they're primarily arguing against. They reference several quotes from Jared Diamond, Robin Dunbar and others in the text (which I excerpted above). I don't think they're accurately stating the arguments those people make, though. I think it's self-explanatory that the more "layers" there are to any given society, the more potential there is for hierarchy to form (which is all they're really saying; they're not stumping for despotism).
I see it as a refutation of the "managerial model" which says that hierarchy arose from the need to solve coordination problems. There are a number of scholars who disagree with that idea in any case.
I think they're right in the sense that cities didn't immediately lead to aristocracies or extreme power asymmetries. But I think they overstate the degree to which hierarchy was absent (which I'll talk about next time).
If I'm understanding the historical scenarios laid out correctly: social hierarchy arose either from:
1) The people of densely populated urban centers themselves
2) The people in outlying societies neighboring densely populated urban centers
Either way, social hierarchy seems to come as a reaction to densely populated urban centers; the outcome is the same, correct? It seems perfectly possible to have large urban populations of humans without the need of social hierarchy, but inevitably, it will arise either way.
I think their point is that despotic systems of absolute power did not begin with urbanism as used to be thought in the old days of V. Gordon Childe. Early archaeologists saw that kingship and cities emerged in the river valleys and lumped it together under the aegis of the "urban revolution," whereas the real story was more complex as we found out with more data. I don't think it's as simple as cities are hierarchical while people outside aren't, or vice-versa; I agree with them on that point. Most likely it was a cultural interaction sphere between different cultures over long periods of time which formed the culture of early cities, with much of it taking place before writing obscuring what really happened.
I've never "simply assumed" that top-down, centralized government instantly appeared as soon as people began farming & living together in large numbers. Early farmers must still have been profoundly marked by hundreds of thousands of years just spent as egalitarian hunter-gatherer.
The key point, in my view, is: "more participatory (then) than almost any urban government today". Yes, whatever may have pertained back in the mists of the earlier Holocene, the fact is that more recent civilization is very much top-down wherever one looks.
Indeed, top-down is so pervasive that there must be a fundamental cause for the transformation. In "Civilized to Death", Christopher Ryan compares modern humans to locusts, noting that no locust ever existed that had not once been a grasshopper. The two are the same species. But when conditions change sufficiently, the latter becomes the former, & the creature's behaviour changes radically.
The Holocene must have represented the new environment that would eventually trigger such a change in the way humans live together.
I think they are referring to the "Big History" authors they're primarily arguing against. They reference several quotes from Jared Diamond, Robin Dunbar and others in the text (which I excerpted above). I don't think they're accurately stating the arguments those people make, though. I think it's self-explanatory that the more "layers" there are to any given society, the more potential there is for hierarchy to form (which is all they're really saying; they're not stumping for despotism).
I see it as a refutation of the "managerial model" which says that hierarchy arose from the need to solve coordination problems. There are a number of scholars who disagree with that idea in any case.
I think they're right in the sense that cities didn't immediately lead to aristocracies or extreme power asymmetries. But I think they overstate the degree to which hierarchy was absent (which I'll talk about next time).
If I'm understanding the historical scenarios laid out correctly: social hierarchy arose either from:
1) The people of densely populated urban centers themselves
2) The people in outlying societies neighboring densely populated urban centers
Either way, social hierarchy seems to come as a reaction to densely populated urban centers; the outcome is the same, correct? It seems perfectly possible to have large urban populations of humans without the need of social hierarchy, but inevitably, it will arise either way.
I think their point is that despotic systems of absolute power did not begin with urbanism as used to be thought in the old days of V. Gordon Childe. Early archaeologists saw that kingship and cities emerged in the river valleys and lumped it together under the aegis of the "urban revolution," whereas the real story was more complex as we found out with more data. I don't think it's as simple as cities are hierarchical while people outside aren't, or vice-versa; I agree with them on that point. Most likely it was a cultural interaction sphere between different cultures over long periods of time which formed the culture of early cities, with much of it taking place before writing obscuring what really happened.