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. 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 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, and that he considered the state a result of a conjonctural, political, event, instead of being the effect of an economic process.
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