We human beings are a suspicious lot. And with good reason: Some of the earliest surviving human remains, such as Kennewick Man and Ötzi, the Iceman of the Alps, seem to have died violent deaths at the hands of other humans, and many other ancient re­mains show signs of traumatic injury and death. In these earliest scenarios, human social organization was little more than that of the clan, or extended family, whose members lived in a manner barely distinguishable from that of a herd or a wolf pack. Membership was absolute but highly circumscribed; nonmembership, as Kennewick and Ötzi probably learned, was fatal.

And yet, there was an instinct at work even in the first glimmerings of human society that pointed away from the herd or the pack. There was already a division of labor, imposed by the complexities of human reproduction. Moreover, al­though human clans may have left abundant records of suspicion — a mistrust of outsiders — in the remains of their victims, they also left large-scale records of intermingling in their DNA. In the 1990s, geneticists were surprised to find traces of Neanderthal gene sequences in modern humans. And though Ötzi may have died in the Alps, his DNA shows that his closest relations were from Sardinia.

For the tribe to really work, however, it had to be on the move. In societies where food was supplied by hunting or gathering, and shelter by movement from one insecure place to another, the tribe gave protection to those who enjoyed face-to-face identity with it and who participated in its food-sourcing and its rituals. They either were born into it, and enjoyed membership first by physical identity and then by participation, or were captured and then assi­milated into it or subjugated to it (as slaves). But in time, tribes discovered that there was an easier and more productive way to feed and clothe themselves, and that was by agriculture. The earliest traces of farming are to be found in Mesopotamia, spreading rapidly from there westward to the Levant and Egypt and east and south to the Indus valley and east Africa.

Agriculture required stability; hence tribes became fixed to certain stretches of terrain. And as agriculture grew more specialized and yields more abundant, individuals with the tribe tied themselves to even more specific, more fixed tracts of land, or developed services, such as metalworking, stone-quarrying, and building, that served agriculture. These they had to define and defend, first against other tribes still wandering across the landscape, then against those with more violent intentions of dispossession in mind, and finally against fellow members of the tribe who might also attempt dispossession.

Rulership of the tribe lay with elders and headmen who understood the patterns of movement necessary for survival, or who could lead the tribe in hunting or in fighting. As agriculture fixed the tribe in place, this leadership also became less fluid and more hierarchical. The tribe acquired rulers, and the rulers became hereditary and acquired retainers; at the same time, however, the rulers also needed to rule in a fashion that ensured the cooperation of the tribe. That required the invention of systems of rules, which became codes of law, and the creation of epics that celebrated the beneficence of the rulers. Out of the move­ment to agriculture, the tribe be­came a nation, something identified by its connection to a fixed territory and a fixed religion and language, while the tribal ruler became its king and dwelt in a new social unit, the city (although in practice most ancient cities were smaller than the little Pennsylvania township in which I am writing this).

Kings and kingdoms acquired a taste for luxury, partly from indulgence and partly from the need to overawe their subjects, and paying for luxury required expansion. For this, kings went to war; to avoid becoming the prey of expansion, other kings fought back. Those kingdoms that were successful in their expansion became empires, most no­tably the Hellenistic empire of Alexander and his captains; the Persian Empire of Darius, Xerxes, and Cyrus; the Pharaonic empires of the Nile; the Indo-Aryan Empire of the Indus valley; and the Roman Empire of the Republic and the Caesars. What was noticeable about these empires, however, was that they absorbed the existing nations rather than transforming them into something new. The Roman Empire was, at least in its early stages, more like a federation of vassal nations than a single political system. The agricultural kingdom remained the basic unit; successful empires ruled by knitting together networks of sea or riverine trade over which they presided.

Over the course of 3,000 years, the kingdom acquired two interesting as­sets. One was a political philosophy. From the fourth century b.c. onward, the most powerful influences for understanding the social and political world were Greek — especially Plato and Aristotle. The Aristotelian understanding of the universe saw in it a basic orderliness, founded on the inherent (or occult) qualities to be found in objects. These qualities were then sorted into a universal hierarchy, which governed the physical, political, and social realms alike. Kings inhabited the apex of the hierarchy; in the next layer were nobles or local rulers, serving as enforcers or restrainers of kings; and the people formed the foundation. But sovereignty, decision-making, and command re­mained the king’s preserve.

Order is heaven’s first law; and this confest,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest . . .

In the economic realm, commerce was looked upon (as were merchants) as inferior by nature. Much as the most famous Greek political device was Athenian democracy, it was more an exception than an example, even in classical Greece. Even as particular empires and emperors came and went, hierarchy and kingdoms remained.

The other asset that kings acquired was an apparatus for governing. Kings demanded a monopoly on violence, but ensuring that monopoly required the combined force of custom, charisma, and, above all, administration. The king cannot be everywhere; but the king’s retainers can be, and must be. For long centuries, that task of representing the king’s authority was performed by the nobility. The problem was that the nobility had high-and-mighty tendencies that could be lethal to kings, and by the close of the Middle Ages, kings had begun to establish professional bureaucracies whose well-being and safety depended entirely on kingly goodwill.

And safety was as much the name of the game in the West after the collapse of the Roman Empire as it had been in the earliest days of clans and tribes. Hierarchy might appear rigid and confining; but it made a place for everyone by guaranteeing that everyone was born with a certain status — high or low, rich or poor, noble or common — and that, by occupying one’s place within the hierarchy, one could enjoy stability and reciprocity. It endured in Western Europe as such for over a thousand years.

What neither the kings nor the ap­paratus could anticipate was the radi­cal departure from the philosophy of hierarchy that emerged from the En­lightenment. What we call the En­lightenment began as a scientific, not a political, revolution against Aristotle. Galileo Galilei, an astronomer, and Isaac Newton, a mathematician, undermined the Aristotelian system of in­herent qualities by demonstrating that material objects possessed no such qualities but rather moved according to natural forces acting on the objects from outside, according to regular natural laws.

If the physical world no longer could be explained by occult qualities, then it ceased to have natural hierarchies; and it began to occur to European political thinkers that the political world no longer need be understood that way, either. Politics, as John Locke an­nounced, functioned not by hierarchy but by natural laws that operated in the same definable fashion as gravity, and by equipping people not with status, but with natural rights. Of course, if what people came into this world with were rights rather than status, then no one was born with any automatic right to rule, and no one was guaranteed any particular position in a stable world. And so for the first time, political and economic mobility became desirable rather than threatening. As soon as the inherent advantages of kings and rentier nobility fell away, the advantages of commerce (and of merchants, traders, shippers, and entrepreneurs) began to rise as examples of how the application of natural laws and forces to material objects produced beneficial results comparable to those of gravity in the physical world. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, argued for free economic exchange as a parallel to the operation of physical laws by making the urge to “truck, barter and exchange one thing for another” as natural as Newtonian gravity.

The Enlightenment worked the down­fall of kings, first in Britain’s American colonies in 1776, then in France in 1789. And even where it failed to eliminate kingly rule, it still undermined the legitimacy of such rule, leading over the ensuing century to the slow hollowing out of even the oldest European kingships. Even more, as Deirdre Nansen McCloskey observes in Why Liberalism Works, the dissolution of hierarchy turned loose a century of economic development and self-transformation by Europe’s commoners that led to a fabu­lous enrichment of Western Euro­pean society.

But it did not enrich everyone, nor did it enrich evenly; and no small part of the enrichment fed on shameless exploitations of Asian and African colonies, and even on slavery. The unevenness of the enrichment produced two hostile reactions that form a large part of our modern political tensions. One was socialism, which demanded a return to the security of a planned society without necessarily reviving traditional hierarchy. The other was the exfoliation of immense managerial bureaucracies, which converted what had once been nations, identifiable by language, religion, or history, into anodyne administrative states that increasingly looked like each other. The apparatus that had been invented to serve kings now became a vast, faceless collection of rules, and the natural rights so beloved of Enlighten­ment thinkers began to shrink backward, as James Burnham anticipated, toward mere privileges, determined by armies of clerks.

Socialism created several vast, and mostly unsuccessful, if not plainly toxic, experiments. And the revolution of officialdom has been countered in recent times by revivals of populist nationalism. Which will succeed, or whether they will all be succeeded by some new turn of Western political life, will be the great question of the next half century. In the end, it may be our suspicion — our mistrust of the meddling bureaucrats — that saves us.