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A revealing look at the role kin-based societies have played throughout history and around the world
A lively, wide-ranging meditation on human development that offers surprising lessons for the future of modern individualism, The Rule of the Clan examines the constitutional principles and cultural institutions of kin-based societies, from medieval Iceland to modern Pakistan.
Mark S. Weiner, an expert in constitutional law and legal history, shows us that true individual freedom depends on the existence of a robust state dedicated to the public interest. In the absence of a healthy state, he explains, humans naturally tend to create legal structures centered not on individuals but rather on extended family groups. The modern liberal state makes individualism possible by keeping this powerful drive in check—and we ignore the continuing threat to liberal values and institutions at our peril. At the same time, for modern individualism to survive, liberals must also acknowledge the profound social and psychological benefits the rule of the clan provides and recognize the loss humanity sustains in its transition to modernity.
Masterfully argued and filled with rich historical detail, Weiner's investigation speaks both to modern liberal societies and to developing nations riven by "clannism," including Muslim societies in the wake of the Arab Spring.
- Sales Rank: #215126 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-12
- Released on: 2013-03-12
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“It has been said that the past can be a reliable guide to the future. Mark Weiner's The Rule of the Clan is a fascinating case in point. He dissects modern society to reveal the ancient form of social order from which it emerged, then portrays convincingly how those earlier forms can reassert themselves under certain conditions. His book should be of great interest to scholars of history, government, and human behavior alike.” ―Rick Docksai, World Future Review
“Weiner doesn't simplify his argument by dismissing or condescending to the clan system; he engages with the very real benefits provided by one of the most durable political associations in human history . . . This erudite, quick-paced book demonstrates what the mix of modernity and clans can create.” ―Cara Parks, The New York Times Book Review
“The Rule of the Clan confronts an uncomfortable but important reality. In the process, it challenges the careless liberal assumption that national identity is an anachronism and a strong state a threat.” ―Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion
“A must read for anyone interested in understanding the complex relation between tribal identity, law, and custom; in seeking common ground between the Western and Islamic legal and political traditions; and in connecting the past to present in the service of legal reform.” ―Abdullah Saeed, Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia
“The Rule of the Clan gives a fascinating glimpse into a world that few Westerners today understand: a world of honor, shame, collective responsibility, and violent feuds. This book tells us what we need to know if we really want to modernize the clan societies of the Middle East and central Asia―and if we want to save our own liberal democracies from descending into clannish chaos.” ―an Morris, Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Stanford University, and author of Why the West Rules―For Now
“The Rule of the Clan is a delight to read--an engaging tour of societies in which kinship groups have been the primary form of social organization, from Anglo-Saxon England to medieval Iceland to southern Sudan, modern India, the Philippines, and much more. It is also an insightful meditation on what proponents of individual freedom must grasp if they are to realize their aspirations in societies made up not of rational abstractions, but of people like us.” ―Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
“Mark Weiner has raised the crucial yet neglected subject of tribal identity and loyalty in modern society. The sweep of his book and the depth of his analysis make it essential reading for anyone interested in connecting past to present in order to chart a felicitous path to the future.” ―Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University, and author of Journey into America: the Challenge of Islam
About the Author
Mark S. Weiner teaches constitutional law and legal history at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. He is the author of Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste, recipient of the Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association; and Americans without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship, recipient of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association. He lives with his wife in Connecticut.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
INDIVIDUALISM’S PARADOX
Imagine that one fine morning you are strolling down the sidewalk on your way to work. Suddenly, a young jogger wearing headphones turns the corner, running swiftly, oblivious to the world around him. He crashes into you and as you hit the ground you feel a sharp pain in your arm, which quickly begins to swell. It’s broken. Soon after visiting your doctor, you contact your lawyer. He begins a civil suit against the jogger so that you can be compensated for your injury. The case is open and shut. The jogger was clearly at fault and he will be held accountable for the harm he caused.
Next, imagine that you decide to open a small business, perhaps a bakery specializing in German-style breads. You rent the perfect building for the shop and visit your local bank for a loan. The loan officer reviews your excellent business plan and approves it. You sign your name to a stack of papers he slides across his desk and soon you have the capital you need to purchase ovens and other equipment. You are now responsible for repaying the loan. Nobody could seriously question your liability or the bank’s right to be repaid.
In both these cases, the law’s basic focus, what social scientists call its framework of analysis or its “jural unit,” is the individual rather than the family. In the case of the errant jogger, when your lawyer contacts the jogger’s lawyer, he will make a claim against the jogger and not against the jogger’s brother or sister, who are irrelevant to the suit. Likewise, your own brother or sister will have no claim to any settlement money you might receive.
In the case of your business venture, too, much as you might wish to do so, you can’t foist your financial obligations onto others without their consent. By taking out a loan, you don’t make your family members responsible for the success or failure of your bakery. At the same time, you needn’t obtain their permission to take out a loan in the first place. The law makes you responsible for meeting your financial obligations and it also enables you to contract for them yourself, with your own signature.
This individualist focus is fundamental to the law of modern liberal societies. It lies at the core of nations that trace their democratic political heritage to the Enlightenment and their economic roots to the Industrial Revolution—and that hold individual self-fulfillment and personal development as a central moral value. Indeed, legal individualism is so basic to the social fabric of liberal societies that most of us who live in them take it as a matter of course.1
In an election, you cast your vote for yourself alone, rather than for your household, village, or tribe. Doing so would seem absurd—it would contravene the axiomatic principle of “one person, one vote.” Nor does the head of your household, village, or tribe vote on your behalf.
When you enter into a marriage, you alone incur its benefits and obligations. A wedding may bind two families together in a metaphorical sense. But it doesn’t establish a relationship between them as a matter of law, for instance by requiring them to come to each other’s mutual aid or military defense.
If one evening you are watching a movie and a notorious thief, John “Quick Hands” Smith, steals your car, police will seek to capture and arrest John Smith. If instead the officers arrest his staid brother Jack, an accountant, explaining to a judge that after all Jack is related to John, the officers will be disciplined. Likewise, when you call the police station to report the incident, you will be asked for your street address rather than the name of your grandparents—your lineage is irrelevant to whether the state will protect you from crime.
Such individualism extends as well to the legal issues of property and inheritance. In liberal societies, land need not be owned in common by tribal groups or village associations, as it is in many parts of the world, with individuals having only a temporary and limited claim to its use, known as a usufruct interest. Instead, land can be held by individuals, who have a general right to do with it as they wish, including the right to exclude others from its benefits.
Similarly, in common law jurisdictions, people are free to will their estates to whomever they please (civil law jurisdictions impose some limits on this principle). Assuming they comply with technical rules for creating trusts, people may even decide that upon their death their assets will pass to their dogs or cats, as did the flamboyant real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley, who left twelve million dollars in trust for her Maltese dog, Trouble. Whether or not it results in wise or just decisions in any particular case—it often quite clearly does not—a person’s wealth is deemed to be his or her own.
All these facts may seem self-evident, perhaps even obvious. But if one looks beneath them, they point to an essential paradox about individual freedom, a paradox that’s illuminated by examining the subject of this book: the rule of the clan.
It’s a common and understandable belief that liberty exists only when the state is absent or weak. Many people often imply that individual freedom flourishes in inverse proportion to the strength and scope of government. The argument is a perennial feature of American political discourse (“freedom means the absence of government coercion,” asserts a prominent recent presidential candidate), though it is hardly limited to the United States.2 A deep antipathy to the modern state was a core principle of the United States’ longtime enemy Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, who sought, in the words of his manifesto The Green Book, “emancipation from the chains of all instruments of government.”3 Likewise, guided by a compelling spiritual vision, Mohandas Gandhi advocated for a stateless society of local self-rule for postcolonial India, in which power would be radically decentralized to ancient village communities—panchayati raj. He and his followers campaigned for “as minimal a ‘state’ as possible,” following the maxim “keep government to the minimum, and what you must have, decentralize.”4
Yet, whatever form it takes, the belief that individual freedom exists only when the state is frail misunderstands the source of liberty. The state can be more or less effective in the pursuit of its goals—it can be stupid or smart—and it can be used for illiberal, totalitarian ends. But ultimately a healthy state dedicated to the public interest makes individual freedom possible.
This is the paradox of individualism. The individual freedom that citizens of liberal societies rightly cherish, even our very concept of the individual, is impossible without a robust state. Modern individualism depends on the existence of vigorous and effective government dedicated to the public interest, to policies that a majority of citizens would support without regard to their particular position in society at any given moment. It depends as well on the willingness of individual citizens to imagine themselves as members of a common public whose interests the state regularly vindicates.
The state maintains a system of courts to ensure that people play by the rules, rather than resorting to trickery or force to advance their interests. It provides professionally trained police to safeguard people from crime; fire protection to prevent collective disaster; and military power to defend against threats from abroad. It constructs roads and bridges, builds or subsidizes utilities, and supports mass education to encourage economic growth and foster human capital. To mitigate major social and economic risk in advance of calamity, it operates a wide range of regulatory programs, such as those that safeguard the public health or oversee financial instruments, and it provides security for individuals through various forms of welfare.
Most important, the state stipulates the receipt of these benefits not on a person’s membership in an inescapable group but simply on his or her status as an individual.
Your ability to obtain redress for injury, to enter into contracts on your own terms, to use land and other property, to dispose of your wealth, to be protected from crime, and to access a range of goods and services all depend on the state treating the individual—you—as a member of a community of legal equals.
The legal status of the individual under a strong liberal state, in which healthy government and robust individualism go hand in hand, might be represented in simple visual form this way: [DIAGRAM]
In a modern liberal society the state, represented by the large circle, is vigorous and effective, clearly demarcating and defining the community it surrounds. The discrete individuals living under the authority of the state, the smaller circles, are in turn equally vital and independent. An essential aim of the liberal legal tradition, as important as its goal of limiting state power—though we are often unmindful of its centrality—has been to build state capacities to ensure such vitality and independe...
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Kinship is Not Enough
By Leif W. Haase
Recently the New York Times highlighted the results of studies showing that young people who develop explicit family narratives show greater resilience and security when difficulty strikes. Many pieces of similar evidence show that embracing solidarity and kinship can help blunt the slings and arrows of misfortune, and in particular the sense of rootlessness that modern individualism so often creates.
In this thoughtful and often brilliant book the legal scholar and cultural historian Mark Weiner pays a fitting tribute to the values of the "clan," with far-flung examples taken from the lives of the Nuer in Africa, the Scots, the Pashtuns, Icelanders, and more. He resurrects, for example, the great and much-neglected Saga of Burnt Njal, an Icelandic classic which got a brief moment in the sun during the Great Books movement of the past century, has languished since, and reads like a marriage between J.R.R. Tolkien and Jo Nesbo.
Weiner's book is more than worth its price simply as an armchair tour of interesting places and cultures and mores, deftly and briefly described. But he has a more serious and important point to make. While the social cohesion that the values of the clan promote is alluring, they are ultimately at odds with the values of individual autonomy that only the much-maligned modern liberal state can offer.
Even the state's modern defenders tend to view it, at best, as a necessary evil. It keeps the peace, upholds (somewhat) international order, and manages the complexity of modern life in ways that allow individuals to get on with their journeys of personal fulfillment.
Weiner shows (in too brief but nevertheless eloquent ways) that this reductive view of the state is insufficient to resist the seductive appeal of the clan, and that it will be for the worse if we can't find ways to combat this allure within the legal structures of modern liberalism. Read alongside James Ault's masterful participant study of fundamentalist Baptism, *Spirit and Flesh*, and draw your own conclusions.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Explains a lot about politics and government both today and throughout history
By Amy Perry
Often, nonfiction does not hold my attention, even if it is about a topic that I thought would interest me. This book is an exception. Drawing upon others' research as well as his own, Weiner shows convincingly (to me, at least) that family-based power will govern when few or no other structures exist in a society. He helped me understand the reasons for many actions and qualities of clan-like organizations. I now see patterns in many political and cultural struggles around the world today. The book flows along at just the right pace.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Extended Family Matters (a lot)
By L. King
Weiner's main thesis extends that of 19th century jurist Sir Henry Maine who's observations became the heart of British colonial policy but also Marx and Engels. Maine contended that societies in their early stages based power and governance on the status of individuals within a tradition of extended family groups. Status determined position, deference, role and expected behaviour which maintain the harmony of the community Even the outsider has their place. In contrast the liberal state creates a social contract with each member affording equality, protection, freedom and opportunity for individuals, and the formation of ad hoc group relationships. The technological extreme is reflected by a remark by LinkedIn's founder (and Weiner's college friend) Reid Hoffman: "In the future everyone will be able to choose their own family". Maine's key concept is that there is a natural progression "from status to contract".
The examples provided are informative, wide ranging and entertaining. The Asian case studies include Korea and the Philippines with brief glances at China and Japan. SE Asia covers India's castes, Punjabi courts and family law the pashtunawali (hospitality) ethos of Afghanistan and Pakistans. We are led to despair over the power vacuum of the `stans of the former Soviet Union slide to personality based variations of the parody Borat. Interesting parallels are raised between the evolution of Christianized Germanic and English law and the rise of Islamic law as a counter to the tribalism of the medieval Saudi peninsula. In Africa Weiner describes the early 1930s studies of the fiercely independent Nuer tribes of the Sudan. Another major example (Chapter 5) is the highly decentralized but very democratic case of Medieval Iceland. Briefly he touches on the Seneca and Mohawk of North America. And, not unsurprisingly, the same anthropological analysis gets applied to literature: Romeo and Juliet, Michener's Caravans, Sir Walter Scott's Waverly to name a few.
Both kinds of societies have their own checks and balances though Weiner feels that liberalism scales better. Where both liberal and Marxist colonialism failed however was in the rapid imposition of status on tribal societies. One example is in Africa where endorsement of particular tribal chiefs led to the rise of powerful dictators unchecked by traditional safeguards, and exacerbated by restrictions on tribal means of gathering wealth - the sale of ivory, slaves, tribute or raids on neighbouring villages. Another was also an unforeseen mismatch between English and Islamic law, according to Professor John Farmer (also Weiner's Dean at Rutgers School of Law) who was an adviser on dispute mechanisms to the Palestinian Authority. The common use of bail is to allow the accused to be released to the custody of family or friends. Under Sharia however the family of the victim of violence is allowed to set the punishment for a crime, either in kind or a monetary penalty. Farmer noted , in cases of violence, bail is sometimes paid by the victim's family, who exact their own justice.
Overall a worthwhile read and a powerful way to re-imagine the world. My biggest disappointment was that it needed to be longer. For example it would have been interesting to have examined "old boys" networks, family compacts like the Borgias and Medicis, 18th-20th century Europe, family networks in ancient Rome, or tribal factions in Syria and Lebanon, crime gangs in America. Similarly the author could have looked at the budding field of SNA (Social Network Analysis) to compare the patterns of liberal societies with those of traditional clans
Thought provoking and recommended!
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