Barbarians were not just primitive hunters and gatherers, they were the “dark twins” of the states that evolved alongside them. The barbarians formed sprawling chiefdoms, confederations of nomadic pastoralists who lived from raids on grain-growing centers, from mercenaries and from trade:
“The barbarians, broadly understood, were perhaps uniquely positioned to take advantage—and in many cases direct charge—of the explosion in trade. They were, after all, by virtue of their mobility and dispersion across several ecological zones, the connective tissue between the various sedentary cereal-intensive states” (Scott 2017, p. 248). “The early agrarian states and the barbarian polities had broadly similar aims; both sought to dominate the grain-and-manpower core with its surplus. The Mongols, among other raiding nomads, compared the agrarian population to ra’aya, ‘herds.’ Both sought to dominate the trade that was within reach. Both were slaving and raiding states in which the major booty of war and the major commodity in trade were human beings. In this respect they were competing protection rackets” (ibid., pp. 244-5).
The transition from community to chiefdom and state is closely linked to the growth of human population and its density, as well as to the clash of communities among themselves. For a member of an isolated community, the tribe is identical with all of humanity: there are no people outside it. In a community, trust and justice are based on blood ties and common destiny. “Pastoralists in particular have remarkably flexible kinship structures, allowing them to incorporate and shed group members depending on such things as available pasture, number of livestock, and the tasks at hand—including military tasks” (Scott 2017, p. 235). However, the kinship-based socio-cultural order has limits beyond which formal order begins. The transition from a family community to a society of strangers undermines the natural order as the basis of trust and justice and requires a human-made order based on administration and religion.
In contrast to a community, a society is not humanity, it is not the unity of all human beings. Society is a mechanical and abstract association of a few, not an organic and concrete association of all. Ferdinand Tönnies famously distinguished between community and society: