[R.J.S.P.,]

"Civilization" has long been a troubling concept for me. I actually agree that compulsion of various forms is absolutely essential to "civilized" life. As I understand it, civilization of the form we are familiar with appears to be a child of Roman culture and law. At it's core is the idea that communities ought to be organized around cities, which operate as focal points for economic, cultural and political life, with the cities surrounded by a predominantly agrarian outland. It is in some sense anti-pastoral, and it is firmly anti-nomadic. Medievalism simply removed the city as the center of the equation, but maintained the culture of landed rigidity intended to support urban life. As money declined in importance and utility, service (and in particular, military service) became the currency with which rent was paid.

It would be interesting to ask whether compulsion of the form with which we are familiar is a child of this transition, or if it was an inherent feature of the Roman model. I suspect it is inherent: for the pater familias certainly held unadulterated dominion over his family and his family's possessions, and by analogy to the prerogatives of the emperor (who was said to be the pater familias of the Roman state), this dominion was a kind of imperium. Cohen's point, however, runs deeper. The imperium of the pater familias does not extend merely to his spouse and children (and their spouses), but to all who must do his bidding in order to subsist upon his familial lands or in the city at his service. The slave is only the most extreme and obvious example (though, quite unlike the slaves of the American South, Roman slaves could always purchase their freedom if they had saved sufficient funds, and they had virtually equal standing in the courts to sue their owner as did the owner's spouse or adult children).

Civilization presupposes rigid property lines, in every sense. Such rigidity is distinctly unnatural (rivers change course, mountains rise and fall, coastlines jut and jab), and as a result, property norms must impose order by coordinated human intervention. The fiction of mine and thine is an essential part of this order. It is a fiction that cannot make reference to utility (except incidentally), because it constitutes the very grammar and vocabulary of civilized existence.

Pastoral peoples the world over have felt and suffered the imposition of "civil" property norms. They have seen well the compulsion we take for granted. Some have fought, others have surrendered, all have been consumed or destroyed by its imposition. Are the amazonian Indians the only "free" peoples left? There is certainly compulsion of various forms in any social order, whether it be agrarian, pastoral, urban or civilized, but I am aware of no compulsion so unbending or absolute as that residing at the core of "civilization".

Then again, I could be wrong. No?

David