Warrior brotherhoods such as those that existed in Germanic society are egalitarian on the surface, especially as judged by democratic criteria of freedom. But they have proven themselves inclined and able to constitute politogens. Rome itself, which evolved inexorably from Kingdom to Republic to Empire—and was at every point in that process authoritarian and hierarchical, a fact obscured by the democratic criteria of freedom—started out as a warrior brotherhood similar in many ways to those of the Germanic tribes.
When the Romans founded their city in the eighth century BCE, they had a patriarchal social organization dominated by a king, thirty curiae, and gentes or clans. It was a democratic organization in the true militaristic, authoritarian, patriarchal sense of the word. (I understand that this assertion will rankle many readers. The arguments that back it up—and there are many—are material for an entire book. That is exactly, however, the topic of a future book that is already in preparation.)
The king was a symbolic leader who could also institute organizational reforms and push the whole society to accept ambitious new strategies or projects, provided he had the support of the other two groups.
The curiae were egalitarian groups of free men, probably composed of one hundred infantry warriors each. Etymologically, curia derived from co-viria, co-manhood. Each curia had a leader, the curio, and each elected two priests. “Curial hierurgies were often accompanied by joint dining […] which confirms the parallel with Spartan syssitiae […], egalitarian (brotherhoods) of messmate warriors.”43 All the men could vote, and they divided land won by conquest on an egalitarian basis. Related to the curiae was the populus, the people-host, which had an assembly in which free men could vote. Incidentally, extended kinship bonds were weak and communities of commoners were united by neighbor bonds, with each household led by a man. This may not seem rare to Western readers but in a broad historical perspective was quite uncommon and bears important ramifications for state formation that will be discussed in a later chapter. To summarize, though, such conditions of alienation and relative individualism were likely the result of displacement, slaving, and turmoil—basically, refugee crises—caused by expansive states and their continuous warfare throughout the Mediterranean in prior centuries. In other words, we are dealing with state effects. One of the most significant of these effects for subsequent developments was land alienation: given the atomized family structure, land was doled out as individual property.
Finally there were the gentes, the clans, whose leaders were patriarchal, noble families with legendary ancestors, private hierurgies (rituals led by a priest), and private places of worship. In the militarized schema of Roman social organization, these were the equestrians, the mounted warriors, who commanded retainers and enough economic resources to be able to maintain horses and the corresponding arms and armor. A clan might be able to field a thousand warriors, nobles and commoners bound by a common loyalty oath to the military chief of the gens. They also had clients who swore allegiance in exchange for protection. The clients had to perform some duties for the clan, needed the chief’s permission to marry, and were expected to support the clan chief in public office, but the chief also had responsibilities to them, for example having to support them and acquire them legal defense if they were put on trial. Legally and symbolically, they had the status of dependent children to the clan. Politically, the clan chiefs had the patres, their council. The assembly and the council existed in relative political equality; for example both had to legitimate a new king.44
The perceptive reader will have noticed here the prototype for the oldest existing democratic governments, those of the United Kingdom and the United States, along with that of numerous other states. Bicameral legislation, a House of Lords and a House of Commons, or Senate and House of Representatives; this is a structure that finds its root in the caste system of ancient Rome, in which a noble elite enjoyed many economic and symbolic privileges, and enjoyed a potent hegemony in the economic mode that was naturalized, based in individual, alienable property rather than communal or collective holdings (which constituted an obstacle to state formation in many other societies but which the Romans never had to deal with). The equality of this system, which is formal and meaningless in terms of quality of life, stems from a militaristic and patriarchal idea of organization, in which male commoners were motivated to fight by being promised a piece of the pie, and given symbolic status recognition (in lay terms, ego boosts). The huge, despotic empires of the Fertile Crescent had proven time and time again that armies composed largely of slaves could not stand up to smaller, democratic armies. We can’t know if the Romans were conscious of this lesson, but we can’t help but think that it filtered through to them at least indirectly, given that the Italic Peninsula had been a part of the Mediterranean world system for more than a millennium.
With a city, the Romans established their state. First they conquered and absorbed the other members of the Latin League, before expanding across the Italic Peninsula and then developing continental ambitions. In time, the office of king was deposed and the plebeians won more rights, establishing the patriarchal, militaristic, imperialistic, and slavery-based Republic that Western thinkers admire so much.
Militarization, in sum, is a culturally driven, non-inevitable process by which the exigencies of warfare—either socially manufactured or imposed by bellicose neighbors—are exploited by an endogenous proto-elite to create a pathway for increasing social discipline and hierarchy. Frequently, militarization functions as a process of communication, even of mutuality, between two adversaries, in which the more decentralized society adopts characteristics of the more centralized one, or both societies at war increase their relative centralization and hierarchy, to win a competitive advantage. This advantage may be illusory, or it may allow one polity to avoid subjugation, but in any case, the winner in any militaristic contest is the principle and model of militarism itself.
I have already argued that decentralized societies enjoy a military advantage in terms of self-defense, but one thing they are incapable of is effectively planning and administering the conquest of a neighboring society. This trend even pertains to anarchist militias in the twentieth century. The Makhnovists in the Russian Civil War and the volunteer anarchist columns in the Spanish Civil War were easily the most effective fighting units in each of those wars, relative to their size and resources, but every time they had to go on the offensive beyond their base territory, they fell into stalemates. The ability for conquest is one “competitive advantage” a militaristic centralization provides. Additionally, chronic warfare can allow a war-making proto-elite to erode or diminish the other social structures and centers of power that hold them in check.
It should be emphasized that militarization is not synonymous with a warlike disposition nor is it antonymous with pacifism. Nor are its military advantages uniformly real, as many societies that have availed themselves of a greater mobility have demonstrated tremendous effectiveness in fighting invading states while increasing, rather than limiting, their decentralization and egalitarianism. It should also be noted that it is not a principle restricted to processes of early state formation. The impact of the Popular Front strategy during the Spanish Civil War was to militarize both the anarchist movement and the social revolution, spelling disaster for both. Militarization in the Spanish Civil War reinstated state power where it had been overthrown. It is in fact from this episode that I draw the name for the phenomenon: militarization was the term batted back and forth in anarchist debates, regarding the demands from the republicans and Stalinists who controlled the government that the volunteer militias be disbanded and incorporated into the regular military.
The Spartans of ancient Greece are depicted as extremely warlike. This vision has come down to us, however, through a notably pro-Athenian historiography. Arthur Evans argues that this picture is the twofold result of the homophobia of modern-day historians (who wish to portray the Spartans as uncultured), and the contemporary Athenians’ fear of a relatively egalitarian Sparta in which women enjoyed higher status and the whole population was armed.
It is true that the early Dorians [whose capital was Sparta] were militaristic, but they were actually less militaristic than the previous Mycenaeans. For example, the Dorians were not dominated by a militaristic aristocracy, and they had no government bureaucracy devoted especially to war,