The state is often portrayed as a critical early step in humanity’s march of progress away from barbarism and toward civilization, right up there in importance with writing and agriculture. Some even treat all of civilization’s boons, including especially peace and material prosperity, as gifts of the state.

Proponents of this view cite statistics that show how state societies are, on balance, more peaceful and prosperous than pre-state societies. Steven Pinker, in his book A History of Violence, argues that even western society during the statist and blood-soaked 20th century was, per capita, more peaceful (and much more prosperous) than a typical tribal society.

If civilization and its boons correlate with the existence of the state, does that mean that the former was only possible thanks to the latter?

No, it is quite the opposite. It was civilization that made the state possible, and not vice versa. Indeed, it is necessarily true that civilization is, as Murray Rothbard put it, “anterior to the State,” since, “production must always precede predation.” More specifically, the massive, dead-weight millstone that is a state can only be borne by production levels that only a division-of-labor civilization is capable of. The parasitic state could never have come into existence without the prior existence of a civilized, productive host society to sustain it.

The state is not the only institution that can keep a people chronically impoverished and beset by violence. Helmut Schoeck, in his book Envy, discussed extensive anthropological research (excellently summarized by Rothbard in “Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor”) that shows how envy-based, egalitarian, anti-private-property customs can be just as debilitating as a totalitarian state. Such pernicious customs explain the arrested economic development of largely stateless primitive societies.

Such societies are not primitive because they do not have organized states. It is quite the opposite. They cannot sustain organized states because they are primitive. They are primitive, because they do not have a thoroughgoing tradition of private property. This necessarily results in economic autarky and extreme poverty. Autarky (“If goods do not cross borders, armies will”) and poverty (the ravenous are apt to ravage) in turn result in both constant inter-tribal warfare (what Ludwig von Mises referred to as “biological competition”) and the fact that there are not enough means of subsistence to sustain a parasitic state in addition to its productive host. It is the development of private property traditions and the resulting division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off of. That is why the two so often occur together.

The state owes its existence to civilization, not vice versa. And the wars and acts of plunder that interrupt the civilizing process have been made more common and more destructive by state encroachment into the market-and-civil society.