My Take on Perlman's Primitivist Magnum Opus

Last week I finally finished reading Against His-story, Against Leviathan months after being interrupted so rudely by winter break. I really liked it, it is a great attempt to capture the spirit of the history of resistance to Leviathan from the earliest known days of humanity (without once citing any dates, because the point is never when, but what, why, and how.) Now, this book is often degraded/hailed as an essential primitivist text, but I think it does not necessarily have to be read that way.

Perlman equates Leviathan with Civilization, but I believe the only reason he needs to do so is because the only civilizations that have ever existed are structured around the state political form. He is not necessarily rejecting civlization, only the fact that all civilization up until this point has been a monstrosity (he uses metaphors of great, out-of-control worms and octopi violently moving across the earth and destroying human community and nature.) He also rejects the historical ladder that worships this destruction as a form of progress and demeans primitive cultures. In this way, the book can be looked at as simply a grand history of resistance to the imposition of the state, and a rejection of the historical meaning of civilization, namely, the state. I get the sense that he would definitely accept liberatory technologies if he could find examples of it, and he doesn't really say that civilization is necessarily a lost cause.

But I also agree with the review in Aufheben (Civilization and its Latest Discontents) which questions Perlman's rejection of materialism. He scoffs at the materialist belief that material scarcity set the preconditions for the rise of the state, but his own view is that perhaps a drought forced the Sumerians to organize in a more authoritarian manner to deal with their emergency water issues, and that from here Leviathan grew out of control. If this is not a complete contradiction, I don't know what is.

In any case, I believe Toynbee was right when he suggested that all civilizations necessarily collapse of their own contradictions in the end. Maybe it is in these dark periods between the rise and fall of civilizations that radical hope lies...