The Early State, the Polis and State Formation in Early Greece

Abstract

The question that brought me to the study of the Early State is that of the origins and early development of the Greek polis as a state. At the time (1977), the emergence of the polis, implying inherent tendencies towards democratization and the restriction and eventual abolishment of monar-chical positions, was approached in the scholarly literature then as a proc-ess that was nearly natural and thus, within the context of the Greek cul-ture at least, self-evident. The essential, in my opinion, questions of the creation of power structures which implied the origin of the state or a state like society, were not asked. My main question was, and still is, how a power structure might originate, respectively be created, within a com-munity, consisting of formal institutions to which a community of free citizens subjected themselves out of free will, respectively were forced to subject themselves (or did not see to have another chance). Unlike ancient historians and other students of Classical Antiquity, (evolutionist) anthro-pologists and (prehistoric) archaeologists did explicitly pose the questions of the origin and development of political power. Thus, I joined the ‘Early State Society’