Authoritarianism and American politics

[Warren Dew]

(01-20-2017, 02:02 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 10:48 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 10:02 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 09:44 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 09:00 AM)Odin Wrote: Bureaucracy is a necessary evil of civilization, you can't have one without the other. Anyone with any historical knowledge knows that the first bureaucracies emerged with the first civilizations. The oldest bits of writing we have from Sumeria are bureaucratic documents.

There were civilizations before Sumeria.  They just didn't write things down.  Possibly they weren't bureaucratic and didn't need to write things down.

Bronze age civilizations like Sumeria were particularly bureaucratic, because bronze technology promoted bureaucratic empires.  The level of bureaucracy actually fell during the iron age.

Huh? Sumeria WAS the first civilization.

I suppose it depends on what your definition of "civilization" is.  There is plenty of evidence of permanent settlements, stone buildings, and agriculture that predate Sumer by an extended period of time:  Jericho, Tel Qaramel, Chengtoushan, etc.  If you are looking for something more substantial the growth of Mesopotamia as a network of cities is largely contemporaneous with similar development in Egypt, Elam, the Indus River Valley, etc.

It's also not outside the realm of possibility that something older will eventually emerge.

This is all true, but it avoids the question: can larger, a more complex human society exist without a bureaucracy to organize and manage it?  If yes, can it manage that over an extended period of time?  A 'no' to either question answers the mail.

The bronze age to iron age transition I mentioned resulted in a decrease in bureaucracy despite increases in population level.  The largest iron age empires, such as the Roman Empire, had a more distributed governmental structure that relied less on bureaucracy than the bronze age empires despite being larger.  That reduced level of bureaucracy was sustained for over two millenia until the advent of Communism and partially socialist mixed states.