First the goat was probably the first domesticated animal - hence the symbolism of Pan, etc.
Second, Greece and certainly early Rome very much retained the notion of a confederation of clans, this carried through all the way to the Italian merchant city-states. Gentile constitutions among clans existed first and foremost to peacably fund cooperative wars and divide the spoils of those wars and hostile actions.
This goes back to Athens which encouraged cattle ruslting - on outsiders of course.
The question that societies always answer is how to unify competing interests and channel energies and tendencies that would otherwise become possibly destructive competition into positive cooperation.
On 1/9/06, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> Engels' definition of the state is developed in opposition to the form of
> organization of gentilic society, or Morgan's _societas_ in which the
> kinship category the _gens_ is central.
>
>
>
> CB
>
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm
> The three main forms in which the state arises on the ruins of the gentile
> constitution have been examined in detail above. Athens provides the purest,
> classic form; here the state springs directly and mainly out of the class
> oppositions which develop within gentile society itself. In Rome, gentile
> society becomes a closed aristocracy in the midst of the numerous plebs who
> stand outside it, and have duties but no rights; the victory of plebs breaks
> up the old constitution based on kinship, and erects on its ruins the state,
> into which both the gentile aristocracy and the plebs are soon completely
> absorbed. Lastly, in the case of the German conquerors of the Roman Empire,
> the state springs directly out of the conquest of large foreign territories,
> which the gentile constitution provides no means of governing. But because
> this conquest involves neither a serious struggle with the original
> population nor a more advanced division of labor; because conquerors and
> conquered are almost on the same level of economic development, and the
> economic basis of society remains therefore as before - for these reasons
> the gentile constitution is able to survive for many centuries in the
> altered, territorial form of the mark constitution and even for a time to
> rejuvenate itself in a feebler shape in the later noble and patrician
> families, and indeed in peasant families, as in Ditmarschen. [3]
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3>
>
> The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without;
> just as little is it "the reality of the moral idea," "the image and the
> reality of reason," as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society
> at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society
> has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into
> irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order
> that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall
> not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power,
> apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the
> conflict and keep it within the bounds of "order"; and this power, arisen
> out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating
> itself from it, is the state.
>
> In contrast to the old gentile organization, the state is distinguished
> firstly by the grouping of its members on a territorial basis. The old
> gentile bodies, formed and held together by ties of blood, had, as we have
> seen, become inadequate largely because they presupposed that the gentile
> members were bound to one particular locality, whereas this had long ago
> ceased to be the case. The territory was still there, but the people had
> become mobile. The territorial division was therefore taken as the starting
> point and the system introduced by which citizens exercised their public
> rights and duties where they took up residence, without regard to gens or
> tribe. This organization of the citizens of the state according to domicile
> is common to all states. To us, therefore, this organization seems natural;
> but, as we have seen, hard and protracted struggles were necessary before it
> was able in Athens and Rome to displace the old organization founded on
> kinship.
>
> The second distinguishing characteristic is the institution of a public
> force which is no longer immediately identical with the people's own
> organization of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is
> needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become
> impossible since their cleavage into classes. The slaves also belong to the
> population: as against the 365,000 slaves, the 90,000 Athenian citizens
> constitute only a privileged class. The people's army of the Athenian
> democracy confronted the slaves as an aristocratic public force, and kept
> them in check; but to keep the citizens in check as well, a police-force was
> needed, as described above. This public force exists in every state; it
> consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons
> and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which gentile society knew
> nothing. It may be very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies
> with still undeveloped class antagonisms and living in remote areas, as at
> times and in places in the United States of America. But it becomes stronger
> in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper and
> as adjoining states grow larger and more populous. It is enough to look at
> Europe today, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have brought the
> public power to a pitch that it threatens to devour the whole of society and
> even the state itself.
>
> In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the state
> citizens are necessary - taxes. These were completely unknown to gentile
> society. We know more than enough about them today. With advancing
> civilization, even taxes are not sufficient; the state draws drafts on the
> future, contracts loans, state debts. Our old Europe can tell a tale about
> these, too.
>
> In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials
> now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. The
> free, willing respect accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution is
> not enough for them, even if they could have it. Representatives of a power
> which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means
> of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and
> inviolability. The lowest police officer of the civilized state has more
> "authority" than all the organs of gentile society put together; but the
> mightiest prince and the greatest statesman or general of civilization might
> envy the humblest of the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned
> respect accorded to him. For the one stands in the midst of society; the
> other is forced to pose as something outside and above it.
>
> As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but
> also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the
> state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means
> becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of
> holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was,
> above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just
> as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the
> peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the
> instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. Exceptional periods,
> however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that
> the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain
> independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of
> the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and
> the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First and
> particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat
> against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The
> latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally
> comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the
> capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of
> them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage Junkers.
>
> Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are
> graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state
> is an organization for the protection of the possessing class against the
> non-possessing class. This is already the case in the Athenian and Roman
> property classes. Similarly in the medieval feudal state, in which the
> extent of political power was determined by the extent of landownership.
> Similarly, also, in the electoral qualifications in modern parliamentary
> states. This political recognition of property differences is, however, by
> no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development
> of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which
> in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable
> necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle
> between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out - the democratic
> republic no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth
> here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in
> two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic
> example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange,
> which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and
> the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only
> transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center
> in the stock exchange. In addition to America, the latest French republic
> illustrates this strikingly, and honest little Switzerland has also given a
> creditable performance in this field. But that a democratic republic is not
> essential to this brotherly bond between government and stock exchange is
> proved not only by England, but also by the new German Empire, where it is
> difficult to say who scored most by the introduction of universal suffrage,
> Bismarck or the Bleichroder bank. And lastly the possessing class rules
> directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class - in
> our case, therefore, the proletariat - is not yet ripe for its
> self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognize the existing
> order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tall of
> the capitalist class, its extreme left wing. But in the measure in which it
> matures towards its self-emancipation, in the same measure it constitutes
> itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of
> the capitalists. Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the
> working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern
> state; but that is enough. On the day when the thermometer of universal
> suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the
> capitalists will know where they stand.
>
> The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been
> societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or
> state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily
> involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity
> because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the
> development of production at which the existence of these classes has not
> only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to
> production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state
> inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on
> the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole
> state machinery where it will then belong - into the museum of antiquities,
> next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.
>
>
>
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