Kemp and the rise of the state as collective action failure
Notes reading the origin of the early state, via Luke Kemp and James C. Scott, as a collective action problem.
Kemp and the rise of the state as collective action failure
How the early state can be read as a collective action failure rather than a gain in cooperation: concentrated power and arms races emerged because each actor's best response to aggressive neighbors was to match them.
Kemp
- Kemp on early elites and arms races — a few aggressive rulers set the incentives for everyone nearby; the 'race to the bottom'
- Kemp on conflict and in-group cooperation — external threat raises cooperation inside the group and hostility outside it
- Bauer et al on war and cooperation — the empirical review Kemp relies on for the second note
Scott
- James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017). A companion account of early state formation. No note yet; an excerpt from the book is needed before one is written.
