Slop.

We are used to speaking of "the state" as a single entity but actually, I think, modern states are better seen as the confluence of three different elements, whose historical origins are quite distinct, have no intrinsic relation with one another, and may already be in the process of finally drifting apart.

I will call these sovereignty, administration, and politics.

Sovereignty is usually taken to be the defining feature of the state: a sovereign state is one whose ruler claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a given territory. Most governments in the ancient world, or for that matter the Middle Ages, never claimed sovereignty in this sense. Nor would it have occurred to them to do so: this was the logic of conquering empires, not of any sort of civilized community.

The second principle is administration, which can and often does exist without any single center of power to enforce its de­cisions. It could also, of course, simply be referred to as bureau­cracy. In fact, the most recent archeological evidence from Mesopotamia indicates that bureaucratic techniques emerged not just before sovereign states, but even before the existence of the first cities. They were not invented to manage scale, as ways of organizing societies that became too big for face-to­ face interaction. Rather, they seem to have been what encour­aged people to assemble in such large communities to begin with. At least, this is what the record seems to show. The stan­dardization of products, storage, certification, record-keeping, redistribution, and accounting all seem to have emerged in small towns along the Tigris and Euphrates and its tributaries in the fifth millennium BCE, a thousand years before the "urban revolution:'145 We don't really know how or why; we don't even know whether there were actual bureaucrats (in the sense of a distinct class of trained officeholders) or whether we are simply talking about the emergence of bureaucratic techniques. But by the time historical records do kick in there certainly are: we find vast temple and palace complexes with a hierarchy of trained scribes carefully registering and allocating resources of every sort.

We can refer to the third principle as "politics" if one takes that word in what might be termed its maximal sense. Obvi­ously, there is a minimal sense in which anything people do can be said to have a political aspect, insofar it involves jockeying for power. But there are only some social systems in which politics in this sense becomes a spectator sport in its own right: where powerful figures engage in constant public contests with one another as a way of rallying followers and gathering support. We now think of this as an aspect of democratic systems of govern­ment, but for most of human history, it was seen as more of an aristocratic phenomenon. One need only think of the heroes of Homeric, or for that matter Germanic or Celtic or Hindu epics, who are constantly engaged in boasting, dueling, vying to organize the most splendid feasts or most magnificent sacrifices, or to outdo one another with the giving of extravagant gifts.146 Such "heroic" social orders, as they've been called, represent the quintessence of the political. They recognize no principle of sovereignty, but create no system of administration either; sometimes there is a high king but usually he has very limited power, or is a pure figurehead; real power fluctuates continually as charismatic aristocrats assemble bands of followers, the most successful poaching off their rivals' retinues, while others crash magnificently, or decline into brooding obscurity.

Politics in this sense has always been an essentially aristo­cratic phenomenon. (There is a reason why the U.S. Senate, for example, is inhabited entirely by millionaires.) This is why for most of European history, elections were assumed to be not a democratic, but an aristocratic mode of selecting pub­lic officials. "Aristocracy" after all literally means "rule by the best," and· elections were seen as meaning that the only role of ordinary citizens was to decide which, among the "best" citizens, was to be considered best of all, in much the same way as a Homeric retainer, or for that matter, a Mongol horseman might switch allegiance to some new charismatic war-leader. (The democratic way of selecting officials, at least from Greek times onwards, was in contrast assumed to be sortition, whereby ordinary citizens were chosen for posts by random lottery.)

What does all this have to do with dragons and wizards? Quite a lot, actually. Because all evidence we have suggests that such heroic orders did not just emerge spontaneously, along­ side bureaucratic societies; they emerged in a kind of symbi­otic rivalry with them; and they were remembered long after because they embodied a rejection of everything bureaucracy was supposed to be about.

-- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, "The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All", p. 175-178