The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom
You have 68 highlighted passages
You have 55 notes
Last annotated on April 11, 2017
ONE INDIVIDUALISM’S PARADOXRead more at location 34
Note: Paradosso: l' individualismo moderno è possibile solo attraverso un forte Stato, nonostante tanta retorica libertaria esalti lo spontaneismo... In assenza di Stati il vuoto di potere è colmato da regole spontanee che opprimono ogni forma di di libertà immaginata dagli anarcocapitalisti... il clan è la forma naturale di organizzazione, il mezzo + idoneo a produrre quel bene fondamentale che è la fiducia... La regola del clan è ancora viva in Africa, Medio Oriente, Cina e India. Oltre che nelle mafie e nelle organizzazioni criminali. Spesso anche nelle grandi imprese... Nel clan il singolo vale poco: prima di essere un individuo è un membro del clan. I suoi obblighi nn sono quelli che si assume ma derivano dala posizione che si ha nella famiglia allargata: le donne "devono" riprodurrs. Se X commette un delitto lo si può punire punendo uno qualsiasi del clan. Nella società individualista nn esistono ruoli pre esistenti: ognuno sceglie la sua via liberamente Henry Maine (il Darwin della giurisprudenza): società dello status vs società del contratto. Scoprì che India moderna e Irlanda medievale condividono il medesimo ordinamento giuridico. Rintracciò poi le leggi dell'evoluzione creativa giungendo alla regola di cui sopra... HM riscontrò anche che la diffusione del contratto è resa possibile da un forte stato... Maine riteneva la soc. dei contratti il punto d'arrivo dell'ev. legislativa. Altri, paradossalmente, prevedevano (e auspicavano) uno stadio successivo che ripristinasse l'egalitarismo primitivo... Il principio di "uguaglianza" sostanziale sembra piuttosto confuso, addirittura un errore filosofico. Tuttavia lo si capisce meglio se visto come una nostalgia della società clanica. A volte è proprio qs che si nasconde dietro gli appelli comunitaristi e solidaristi... Il clanismo minaccia sempre di tornare fagocitando le libertà duramente concquistate: bisogna comprenderlo per respingerlo, altrimenti il futuro si presenterà come un clanismo postmoderno. I corpi intermedi diventeranno via via più importanti degli individui... Tocqueville: nelle società liberali il rischio è l'isolamento e i corpi intermedi la soluzione. Ebbene, qui il messaggio è radcalmente differente: sono le associazioni sempre sul punto di trasformarsi in clan... IMHO: il pericolo è quello di pensare che la condanna di certe imposizioni equivalga alla condanna di certe scelte, mentre spesso è vero il contrario: imporre certi doveri familiari può essere sbagliato ma scegliere di investire affettivamente sulla famiglia è quanto di più saggio si possa fare... IMHO: l'associazionismo è anche l'antidoto al problema centrale del liberalismo: l'invidia... 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Imagine that one fine morning you are strolling down the sidewalk on your way to work. Suddenly, a young jogger wearing headphones turns the corner, running swiftly, oblivious to the world around him. He crashes into you and as you hit the ground you feel a sharp pain in your arm, which quickly begins to swell. It’s broken. Soon after visiting your doctor, you contact your lawyer. He begins a civil suit against the jogger so that you can be compensated for your injury.Read more at location 35
This individualist focus is fundamental to the law of modern liberal societies. It lies at the core of nations that trace their democratic political heritage to the Enlightenment and their economic roots to the Industrial Revolution—and that hold individual self-fulfillment and personal development as a central moral value.Read more at location 51
In an election, you cast your vote for yourself alone, rather than for your household, village, or tribe. Doing so would seem absurd—it would contravene the axiomatic principle of “one person, one vote.”Read more at location 55
When you enter into a marriage, you alone incur its benefits and obligations.Read more at location 57
Such individualism extends as well to the legal issues of property and inheritance. In liberal societies, land need not be owned in common by tribal groupsRead more at location 63
All these facts may seem self-evident, perhaps even obvious. But if one looks beneath them, they point to an essential paradox about individual freedom, a paradox that’s illuminated by examining the subject of this book: the rule of the clan.Read more at location 71
It’s a common and understandable belief that liberty exists only when the state is absent or weak. Many people often imply that individual freedom flourishes in inverse proportion to the strength and scope of government.Read more at location 73
Note: IL PARADOSSO: L INDIVIDUO VA DIFESO DALLO STATO MA NN ESISTEREBBE SENZA LO STATO. ESISTEREBBE LA LEGGE DEI CLAN Edit
A deep antipathy to the modern state was a core principle of the United States’ longtime enemy Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, who sought, in the words of his manifesto The Green Book, “emancipation from the chains of all instruments of government.”Read more at location 77
Mohandas Gandhi advocated for a stateless society of local self-rule for postcolonial India,Read more at location 80
Yet, whatever form it takes, the belief that individual freedom exists only when the state is frail misunderstands the source of liberty.Read more at location 83
This is the paradox of individualism. The individual freedom that citizens of liberal societies rightly cherish, even our very concept of the individual, is impossible without a robust state.Read more at location 86
healthy government and robust individualism go hand in hand,Read more at location 100
By contrast, in the absence of the state, or when states are weak, the individual becomes engulfed within the collective groups on which people must rely to advance their goals and vindicate their interests. Without the authority of the state, a host of discrete communal associations rush to fill the vacuum of power.Read more at location 106
First, and most prominently, I mean the legal structures and cultural values of societies organized primarily on the basis of kinship—societies in which extended family membership is vitalRead more at location 122
Today these societies include many in which the United States and its allies have a major strategic interest, such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia,Read more at location 124
These societies possess the outward trappings of a modern state but are founded on informal patronage networks,Read more at location 130
Clannism is the historical echo of tribalism, existing even in the face of economic modernization. It often characterizes rentier societies struggling under the continuing legacy of colonial subordination, as in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, where the nuclear family, with its revolutionary, individuating power, has yet to replace the extended lineage group as the principle framework for kinship or household organization.Read more at location 133
A form of clannism likewise pervades mainland China and other nations whose political development was influenced by Confucianism,Read more at location 136
Third, and most broadly, by the rule of the clan I mean the antiliberal social and legal organizations that tend to grow in the absence of state authority or when the state is weak.Read more at location 138
These groups include petty criminal gangs, the Mafia, and international crime syndicates, which look a great deal like clans and in many respects act like them. Today corporate conglomerates and collectivist identity groups have the potential to transform into similar clanlike systems.Read more at location 139
under their legal principles people are valued less as individuals per se than as members of their extended families.Read more at location 144
The founding father of legal history and legal anthropology, Henry Sumner Maine, had an illuminating term for such communities. He called them societies of “Status,” which he contrasted with communities he called societies of “Contract.”Read more at location 150
modern India shared core legal ideas about marriage, property, and dispute resolution with medieval Ireland, as the two societies derived those rules from a common Aryan cultural ancestor.Read more at location 179
According to Maine, law has only three methods of development,Read more at location 186
The first method is legal fictions, ideas that alter the substance of law without changing its letter.Read more at location 188
The second method is equity, the harmonization of existing law to higher bodies of principles external to the law itself, especially transcendent morals.Read more at location 191
The third method is legislation, which changes law through the expressed willRead more at location 193
In Maine’s view, the legal development of “progressive societies” follows a path “from Status to Contract.”Read more at location 198
By societies of Status, Maine did not mean societies that simply possess a sense of social rank or hierarchy. Instead, he meant those communities in which family groups serve as the primary basis for social organizationRead more at location 203
the role of women in clan societies is to physically reproduce the clan itself and this role shapes all the legal rules affecting them,Read more at location 206
By societies of Contract, Maine meant societies in which law is oriented toward the individual rather than the group, and in which individual choice serves as the central value of the legal order. In such societies, individuals are no longer legally subordinated to their extended families. Instead, the legal order is directed toward fostering the ability of individuals to chart their own lifeRead more at location 208
Whereas Maine viewed a liberal society of Contract as an evolutionary endpoint, many of his contemporaries believed that Western nations had one more grand step to take—one that, ironically, would return society to its communal and egalitarian clan past.Read more at location 219
As outlined by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), the goal of a communist revolution was to re-create the principles and conditions of clan society in a higher historical form.Read more at location 222
another recent alternative to liberal society, political Islamism, makes an appeal to egalitarianism and social justice that is every bit as powerful as Marxism’s.Read more at location 224
the comfortable social and political conditions in which we live predispose liberals to neglect the rule of the clan’s most distinctive and important features.Read more at location 234
In the realm of government, economic growth required the intervention of energetic states dedicated not only to expanding economic liberty, most importantly by making it easy for entrepreneurs to charter limited liability corporations, but also to furthering collective social development, for instance by policing public safety, advancing public health, and promoting public works.Read more at location 248
In the realm of politics, similarly, the era witnessed the formal abolition of serfdom and slavery, while the gradual expansion of the franchise enlarged the influence of ordinary people in public life, making government more responsive to the common good.Read more at location 252
Finally, in the realm of culture, popular and elite values alike were reoriented toward the individualist ideals of personal growth and psychological and emotional self-fulfillment.Read more at location 254
I believe that if liberals fail to take to heart the lessons of the rule of the clan, particularly the lesson of individualism’s paradox, our future will be a deeply troubling, literally “postmodern” version of our own clan past.Read more at location 264
As various institutions rush to fill the power vacuum left by the state’s decline, we will be overtaken by a new form of the rule of the clan.Read more at location 269
individuals begin to cluster into groups to protect themselves and assert their interests. Over time, these groups consolidate their power, becoming more important to the social order than the individuals the liberal state once nurtured.Read more at location 272
In contemporary political discourse, one frequently encounters the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), that in the United States each person is “throw[n] … back forever upon himself alone” and that democracy may ultimately isolate the individual “entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”Read more at location 274
But from a legal and political perspective, rather than a cultural and moral one, the major threat to liberal societies is precisely the opposite.Read more at location 279
I begin in part II by describing the highly decentralized constitutional structure of the rule of the clan, in which legal and political power reside not in a public authority but rather in numerous kinship groups.Read more at location 292
understand the rule of the clan’s distinctive network of informal legal institutions: its values of group honor and shame, its jurisprudence of customary law, and the threat of blood feud. Group honor, custom, and feud provide the cultural connective tissue of the rule of the clan’s decentralized constitutional structure.Read more at location 301
I argue that reformers seeking to advance liberal values in clan societies can encourage the growth of a common, public life by looking to mechanisms that work both “from below” and “from above.” I suggest, in particular, that liberals should encourage the spread of information and social media technologies in clan societies, predicting that in time social media will lessen the practical and personal importance of kin identity in much the same way as monotheistic religion did in the European Middle Ages. I also suggest that liberals should promote the development of the middle-class professions, which are the modern parallel to the Germanic ruling class within which a public identity in Anglo-Saxon England first developed.Read more at location 311
Note: COME CONVERTORE O CLAMOSTO: INFPRMARE DELLE ALYERNATOVE. CREARE CLASSE MEDIA CHE PUÒ ARRICCHIRSI N SOC PIÙ APERTE Edit
I also argue that the valorization of the clan in cultural memory is often a sign not of an atavistic regression but instead of liberalism’s legal advent—aRead more at location 325
Note: LE NOSTALGIE SONO SPESSO VISSUTE ALLA.LUCE DEI VALORI.LIBERALI. PRENDI.L INDIVIDUALISMO DELL EROE DEI BEI TEMPI. MA NN CERA ALCUN ONDOV. Edit
I argue that the rule of the clan will always haunt modern liberal society as a postmodern threat: the threat of state erosion, constitutional decentralization,Read more at location 328
