Pierre Clastres Series

Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist and ethnographer, renowned for his fieldwork among the Guayaki people of Paraguay and his theory on stateless societies. He critiques the evolutionary notion that the state is the ultimate destiny of all societies, as well as the Rousseauian myth of the noble savage. Clastres argued that the desire for autonomy is innate, leading societies to develop customs that actively avert the rise of despotic power. He viewed the state as a specific hierarchical power structure emerging in societies that have lost mechanisms preventing the separation of power from the community. His work offers a critique of Marxist economic determinism, positing politics as an autonomous sphere that actively counteracts authority in stateless societies.