At least according to an anarchist like Graeber, the state is just a way to take power out of the hands of the people and put it into the hands of the few. It’s a way to ensure that only certain people have the right to speak, and that the state has the exclusive right to use violence. Calling the Athenian state the ‘origin’ of democracy is just a way to ignore the thousands of years humans spent successfully governing themselves without a specialized class of rulers.
No. We’re not supposed to believe that. Making group decisions isn’t the same as codifying the mechanisms into a well defined form of state.
People did that before Athens too. Read “the dawn of everything”
At least according to an anarchist like Graeber, the state is just a way to take power out of the hands of the people and put it into the hands of the few. It’s a way to ensure that only certain people have the right to speak, and that the state has the exclusive right to use violence. Calling the Athenian state the ‘origin’ of democracy is just a way to ignore the thousands of years humans spent successfully governing themselves without a specialized class of rulers.