Perspectives in the World History of Government‐ a Prolegomenon

Extract

‘VERY DEEP IS THE WELL OF THE PAST’, WRITES THOMAS MANN, as he begins his Tales of Jacob, ‘Might one not even call it bottomless?’ And indeed so it is if we search out the origins of government down, down, through its many levels in time until we reach only a misty shadow of what might have been some primitive society whose very existence we can but infer from artifacts, from myth and legend – and from an interpolation, unhistorical to be sure for it is mere hypothesis – from what we know of stateless societies still extant in this, our own day.