On Kings Paperback – December 15, 2017 by Marshall Sahlins (Author), David Graeber (Author) (HAU Books)

Sahlins and Graeber start with the premise that even the most egalitarian societies are in fact ruled by gods--meaning, more of less, that there are forces that are out of their control but which are able to control them, a state of affairs which is true even in modern societies, with modern science--and that kings imitate gods rather than the other way around. And in this way, kingship is always bound up with the sacred, always bound up in ritual. Then they build on this with one example after another from ethnographic sources, and paint a picture of what sovereignty is made of. For example,

One important strand of reasoning is that kings are always, in an important sense, in a war with the people they rule. They can impose arbitrary violence on their subjects, and the subjects can (if pushed) repay the violence in kind. Another important lesson is that sovereignty is always made up of violence that can set the law aside: this is just as true where kings demonstrate their arbitrary power by shooting random strangers when first presented with a high-powered rifle, and the impunity of American police have when they kill citizens.

This book explains so much. There is the way ritual and labor are intertwined, to how kings with actual power are given to pathologies having to do with overcoming their dead predecessors, the way sovereign power is always in some way a ridiculous ritual, and so on. In other words, if you want to understand how people react to the displacement from what was thought to be meaningful labor, or the clown in the white house, or how ritual kings are more similar to modern states than you might realize, you should read this book.

The evolution of sovereignty in modern nation states is purposely excluded as outside the scope. As suggested in the closing pages, the topic may be the subject to a successor volume. I am looking forward to reading that book when it comes out.

It is a bit long, but never a drag. Any previous experience with college level qualitative social science (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmell, Agamben, etc.) is helpful, but not that necessary. The theory in this book follows from the examples, not the other way around. Highly recommended.