Society Against the State

Society Against the State (French: La Société contre l'État) is a 1974 ethnography of power relations in South American rainforest native cultures written by French anthropologist Pierre Clastres and best known for its thesis that tribal societies reject the centralization of coercive power. It is considered Clastres' major work for introducing the concept of "Society against the State". In it, Clastres challenged the idea that all cultures evolve through Westernization to adopt coercive leadership, seeing this as a popular, ethnocentric myth.