Tuesday, Jan 30, 6-9pm
Northwood-High building, 2231 N. High St. room 100
Worshiping Power surveys a wide range of research responding to the question of where states came from, looking at the causes of politogenesis and tracing different pathways of state development. How did the State co-evolve with different models of the family, religion, warfare, commerce, and economic production?

Multiple theories of state formation are reviewed and contested in order to offer a multilineal framework in which emergent states may follow a variety of models depending on interpolity relations within regional systems, institutional "handles" that permit greater development of hierarchy within local religious and kinship systems, and the presence of interregional networks of material and spiritual commerce. 

The book also explores successive generations of state formation, as emergent states seek leverage over changing popular values that experience an "anti-authoritarian shift" in the course of rebellions against prior, despotic states, leading to the development of democratic or egalitarian states.

About the Author:
Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist writer originally from Virginia. He is the author of How Nonviolence Protects the State, Consensus, and Anarchy Works. Worshiping Power along with his other texts, can be found at https://www.akpress.org/worshipingpower.htm