Scale Factor in Maintaining Reverse Dominance

Discussion

Christopher Boehm:

"Intentional leveling linked to an egalitarian ethos is an immediate and probably an extremely widespread cause of human societies' failing to develop authoritative or coercive leadership. This is a psychological interpretation. A "material" factor that seems to correlate universally with absence of such leadership is smallness of social scale. Rather than scale's being the more fundamental leveling mechanism, however, it would appear that, in the absence of other constraints such as environmental ones, it is intentionalleveling that limits scale. Locally autonomous groups in which authoritative leadership is suppressed are well known to subdivide at a certain basic size, often just a few hundred persons. This takes place not just where resources are sparse but even where they are relatively abundant and where sedentary life gives everyone a local subsistence investment (e.g., Chagnon 1991). I offer this as a hypothesis worthy of testing."

(https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf)