Part I: Before the State

How humans governed themselves before anyone called it governance

The first governance systems were not designed. They emerged from the constraints of human cognition, kinship, and ecology. They worked because feedback was immediate: a bad decision was felt by the person who made it. Understanding these systems is not nostalgia — it is establishing the baseline against which all subsequent complexity is measured.

Chapter 1: The Circle

Somewhere near Lake Eyasi, in the rift-scarred country of northern Tanzania, a woman is making a decision. She doesn't call it governance. She has no word for it. She simply turns to the people around the fire and speaks.

The fire is small — enough for warmth, not spectacle. Around it sit perhaps twenty-five people, some related by blood, some by choice, all by proximity. They are Hadza, and they have lived in this landscape for something like fifty thousand years. The woman is explaining why the camp should move. The tubers are thinning. There's a honey tree two ridges south. Her sister's family is already there.

Nobody votes. Nobody vetoes. The conversation winds through the group like smoke — someone agrees, someone disagrees, someone tells a joke that makes the disagreement dissolve. By morning, the camp will have split: some families moving south, some staying. Nobody needs permission. Nobody is punished for choosing differently.

This is governance at its oldest and most intimate. A circle of faces. A conversation that runs until it resolves — or until people walk away, which is its own kind of resolution.

For most of human history — well over 90 percent of it — this was the only governance that existed. No states, no constitutions, no police, no courts. Just small groups of people, rarely more than a hundred and fifty, deciding together because the alternative was deciding alone, and alone was death.

We have a word for this now: "egalitarian." But the word misleads. It conjures an absence — no hierarchy, no power, no politics. The reality was more interesting than that, and considerably more demanding.

Christopher Boehm spent decades studying this question. Boehm, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California, analyzed forty-eight societies ranging from small nomadic bands to settled chiefdoms. His finding, published in 1993 and expanded in his book Hierarchy in the Forest, upended the comfortable assumption that early human societies were naturally cooperative.

They weren't. Or rather, they were — but only because they worked at it, constantly, deliberately, and sometimes ruthlessly.

Boehm called it the "reverse dominance hierarchy." In every primate species, including humans, dominant individuals emerge. The pattern is old and deep. The alpha claims more food, more mates, more attention. But in human hunter-gatherer bands, something remarkable happens: the group collectively dominates any individual who tries to dominate them.

The mechanisms are instantly recognizable. Gossip — portable, deniable, impossible to control — circulates reputation. Ridicule deflates the puffed-up. Deliberate sharing norms ensure that a successful hunter cannot hoard. Among the San peoples of southern Africa, an anthropological tradition documents a practice called "insulting the meat": when a hunter brings home a large kill, the group mocks it. This scrawny thing? You carried this all the way back? The hunter, if wise, plays along. He shrugs. He agrees the animal was nothing special. And the meat is shared equally.

This is not modesty. It is governance. The community is maintaining a norm — nobody gets to be bigger than the group — and it is doing so through a mechanism that requires no written law, no enforcement agency, no bureaucratic apparatus. It requires only proximity. Everyone can see everyone. Everyone depends on everyone. The feedback loop between decision and consequence is so short it barely exists at all.

The San of southern Africa — the Ju/'hoansi, the !Kung, and dozens of related groups — have attracted more anthropological attention than perhaps any other hunter-gatherer society. Richard Lee lived among the Ju/'hoansi in the 1960s and documented what he called a "fierce egalitarianism." Polly Wiessner followed up decades later with careful studies of how norms were actually enforced.

What Wiessner found was a cascade of social pressure. It began with gossip — low-cost, high-reach, remarkably effective. If gossip didn't correct the behavior, ridicule followed. Then ostracism: the offender found conversations drying up, invitations ceasing, alliances shifting. In extreme cases — persistent bullying, dangerous aggression, someone who simply refused to share — the community could resort to collective punishment. Banishment. Or, at the furthest extreme documented across multiple cultures, execution.

These were not lawless societies. They were societies where the law was enforced by everyone simultaneously. The question "who decides?" had a clear answer: we all do, together, right now. And the consequence of that answer was that decisions carried weight — not the abstract weight of a statute, but the immediate, personal weight of your neighbors' disapproval or your family's shame.

Women's authority in these societies is one of the most debated questions in anthropology. For decades, male researchers described these bands as "egalitarian" based on observations filtered through their own assumptions about what power looked like. Eleanor Leacock challenged this in 1978, arguing that the very concept of female subservience in egalitarian societies was a projection — researchers seeing what their own culture had taught them to see. Karen Sacks pushed further, demonstrating that in communal political economies, men and women had identical relationships to productive resources. There was no "breadwinner" because there was no bread to win; food belonged to everyone.

More recent evidence has complicated and enriched this picture. A 2024 study from Central European University found persistent gender equality in nutrition and social status across multiple hunter-gatherer groups. Excavations at ancient sites show men and women buried with similar grave goods. But counter-evidence exists too — studies have documented societies where women's influence was systematically constrained, where the label "egalitarian" flattered a reality that was more textured and more troubled.

The most honest answer is that "egalitarian" is a spectrum, not a switch. Many hunter-gatherer societies achieved levels of gender equality that would astonish their agricultural successors. None reached perfect equality, because perfect equality is not a condition human societies sustain. It is a tension they navigate. What distinguished these societies was not the absence of power dynamics but the presence of mechanisms to check them — mechanisms that worked because the circle was small enough to see.

How small? This turns out to be one of the most important questions in the entire story of governance.

In the 1990s, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar noticed a pattern. Across primate species, the size of the neocortex — the part of the brain that handles social processing — correlated tightly with the size of the social group the species could maintain. Extrapolating to humans, Dunbar proposed a number: approximately 150. That was the maximum number of stable social relationships a human brain could sustain — people you'd recognize, remember, sit down with uninvited.

The number appeared everywhere. Neolithic farming villages averaged about 150 people. Roman army centuries comprised 80 to 160 soldiers. Amish congregations split when they exceed roughly 150 members. The Hutterite colonies of North America follow the same pattern, dividing when they grow too large for everyone to know everyone.

A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirmed the pattern with mathematical precision: social network complexity undergoes a phase transition near 150 — the structure of social groups shifts from organic to institutional. Below that number, coordination is organic. Everyone can track everyone's reputation, contributions, and relationships. Above it, the social fabric frays. People become abstractions. And abstractions are much easier to exploit.

This is the scale trap — the first great constraint on governance, and in some ways the only one that truly matters. Below Dunbar's number, governance can be a circle of faces. Decisions happen through discussion. Accountability is immediate. The person who decides is the person who lives with the consequences. Above it, something else is needed. Institutions. Hierarchies. Rules written down instead of remembered. Enforcement by specialists instead of by everyone.

Everything that follows in this story — every empire, every constitution, every revolution — is an attempt to solve the problem created by exceeding this threshold. How do you govern people you cannot see?

Before we leave the circle, though, one more stop. The longest continuous governance tradition on earth is not in Athens or Rome or Beijing. It is in Australia.

Aboriginal Australians have inhabited their continent for at least 65,000 years — perhaps longer. In that time, they developed governance systems of extraordinary sophistication without any of the technologies we typically associate with governance: no writing, no permanent buildings, no standing armies, no centralized authority.

What they had instead were songlines.

A songline is a path across the landscape that traces the routes of creator-beings during the Dreaming — the time when the world was sung into existence. To a Western ear, this sounds like mythology. But songlines are not merely stories. They are, simultaneously, navigation systems, ecological management protocols, land use agreements, kinship maps, legal codes, and diplomatic treaties — all encoded in songs that can be transmitted across vast distances and countless generations.

A songline tells you which waterholes belong to which people. It tells you when certain plants fruit and when certain animals can be hunted. It tells you who you can marry and who you cannot. It tells you your obligations to the land and the land's obligations to you. And it tells you all of this in a form that can be memorized, performed, and passed from elder to initiate across millennia — a governance information architecture that predates writing by tens of thousands of years.

Elders are the custodians of this knowledge. Their authority is not inherited by blood or seized by force; it is earned through demonstrated wisdom and accumulated through decades of learning. The governance system makes no sharp distinction between law and culture, between religion and administration, between ecology and politics. These are Western separations. In the songline system, they are all one thing — different aspects of a single, coherent relationship between people, land, and time.

And it worked. For sixty-five thousand years, Aboriginal Australians governed a continent-spanning network of hundreds of language groups, managed one of the most ecologically challenging landscapes on earth, and maintained diplomatic relationships across distances that would take months to traverse on foot. They did it without police, without prisons, without parliaments.

They did it with a circle. A circle that stretched across a continent, held together not by force but by song.

There is a temptation, at this point, to turn nostalgic. To say: this was the golden age, before everything went wrong. But that would be dishonest, and the story demands honesty.

Life in the circle was not paradise. Infant mortality was brutal. Violence was not absent — homicide rates in some hunter-gatherer groups exceeded those of modern industrial nations, though systematic warfare was rare. Women's equality, as we've seen, was real but imperfect. And the circle had a hard limit: it could only govern the people within it. Strangers were often enemies. The warmth of the fire extended to those who sat around it, and not much further.

What the circle was, though — and this is the foundation on which everything else in this chronicle builds — was a governance system with intact feedback loops. A system where the governed and the governors were the same people. Where a bad decision was felt by the person who made it. Where power was checked not by institutions but by intimacy — by the simple, inescapable fact that you had to look into the faces of the people your decisions affected, every single day.

This was the baseline. This was what governance looked like when it was still small enough to be honest.

What happens next is what happens when the circle breaks — when humans discover something that changes the equation, stretches the feedback loop, and creates a question hunter-gatherers never had to answer.

What happens next is surplus.