We can thus distinguish two main phases in the development of civilization. The first contained a two-tier federal power structure: (1) Small city-states provided a merged form of economic and political authoritative power organization, that is, "circuits of (economic) praxis" with a pronounced degree of "territorial centredness" (the means of economic and political power, as defined in Chapter 1). But (2) these populations lived within a far more extensive, diffused, and "transcendent" ideological and geopolitical organization, generally coterminous with what we call a civilization, but loosely centered on one or more regional cult centers. In the second phase of the earliest civilizations, these two power networks tended to merge, primarily through the agency of further concentrated coer... (查看原文)
They originated because (1) out of the loose, overlapping social networks of prehistory emerged one network, alluvial agriculture, that was unusually caged, and (2) in its interactions with several peripheral networks, further caging mechanisms appeared that constrained them all toward greater involvement on two levels of power relations, those within the local state and those within the broader civilization. The history of power can now be carried outward from these few abnormal epicenters, as it was in reality. (查看原文)
