Pierre Clastres’s La Société contre l’État, a Semi-centenary Estimate 
In 1974, French Anthropologist Pierre Clastres published La Société contre l’État. Recherches d’Anthropologie Politique. The book aimed to contribute to developing a new Political Anthropology, focusing on the issue of power and discussing the question of the political dimension in primitive societies. What is power? Different regimes of political organization do indeed exist, among them regimes in which power, though it manifests itself everywhere, is nonetheless noncoercive, not submissive to the State model. What matters most, Clastres explains, is that these regimes, characterizing primitive societies, actively avoid the State model: they are societies against the state. How could our modern societies, adopting the State model, ever have arisen from those “against the state”?
Addressing those crucial questions, Clastres made a revolutionary contribution that never stopped arousing controversies. The modernity and topicality of this classic work lie not only in his foundation of a new Political Anthropology but, more generally, in his contribution to human sciences from a philosophical and political point of view. Clastres thought that in dealing with those questions, “ethnology would have to be broad enough in scope to meet the requirements of a general theory … of society and history”.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary, the Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science will host an issue on Pierre Clastres, La Société contre l’État (“a Semi-centenary Estimate”), to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal.
Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:
- The genesis of La Société contre l’État
- Clastres and the masters who influenced his intellectual formation
- Clastres, Montaigne and Laboétie
- Clastres and the structuralism
- Clastres and his dialogue with philosophers
- Clastres’ fieldwork in South America
- Clastres’ legacy
- Clastres and the Anarchist anthropology
The special issue will include invited articles by leading scholars in anthropology and other human sciences and peer-reviewed works received through this call for papers. Therefore, we solitic papers across various disciplines – including anthropology, sociology, economics, philosophy, history and political science.
The editors of this special issue are Roberto Beneduce (Università di Torino) and Roberto Marchionatti (Università di Torino and editor of the Annals).
Submission procedure
We invite interested scholars to submit an abstract (300 words, 3 to 5 keywords) by 31 March 2023 (deadline extended) to:
editors@annalsfondazioneluigieinaudi.it
roberto.beneduce@unito.it
roberto.marchionatti@unito.it.
The issue’s editors will review the abstracts and send notifications of acceptance or rejection by 15 April 2023.
The special issue will include up to 9 contributions among those received through the call for papers. Final papers (about 8000 words) will be due on 30 November 2023.
Please note that acceptance of abstracts does not necessarily imply acceptance of the paper for the special issue.
For further information (including the aim and scope of the Journal), please refer to the Journal’s website.
Mario Cedrini