?
Models of the early state formation, the early state analogues, and the pathways of politogenesis.
This paper considers concrete manifestations of the multilinearity of politogenesis and the variation of its forms; it analyzes the main causes that determined the politogenetic pathway of a given society. The respective factors include the polity's size, its ecological and social environment. The politogenesis should be never reduced to the only evolutionary pathway leading to the statehood. The early state formation was only one of many versions of development of complex late archaic social systems. The author designates various complex non-state political systems as early state analogues.
The early state analogue posed a real alternative to the state for a rather long period of time, whereas in many ecologically marginal regions they could compete quite seriously with the state sometimes until recently. Thus, it was only in the final count that the state became the leading form of political organization of complex societies. The very pathways to statehood had a few versions. One may group them into two main types: ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’. Within the ‘vertical’ model the state formation took place in a direct way, i.e. directly from small pre-state polities to primitive statehood. Within the ‘horizontal’ model we first observe the formation of early state analogues that were quite comparable to the state as regards to their complexity, whereas later those analogues were transformed into states.