“Definition, please”

“Leviathan” refers to a kind of socio-economic formation that emerged about five thousand years ago in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution. The big issue about it is the fact that our civilization has tended to view the emergence of such as “advanced” and “progressive” (positive). A wholly different perspective, based on a critical re-thinking of the full trajectory of human history, is associated with the Green movement.

Prior to its emergence all people lived in localist, stateless, communitarian, mostly egalitarian bands, tribes, or villages. The new Leviathan-type formations were characterized by proto-urbanism and statism; development and employment of technology in service of production, growth, and expansionism; complex division of labor, wealth accumulation, power-elitism, patriarchy, and class division of society.

These characteristics and associated values were aberrant in relation to all preceding human experience. In Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Fredy Perlman discusses (in a mytho-poetic way) why, when, and how Leviathan-type formations arose. The most important thing to understand is that, after they did, they overran aboriginal communities in place after place and eventually came to dominate the human social landscape — leading, after two or three hundred generations, to the modern crisis.

Our task now is to deconstruct the monster.

But with a realistic perspective regarding its genesis and development — with an understanding of how ingrained by now are its lifeways and values; of how dependent we’ve all become on its systems, institutions, and technologies — we can appreciate that the process of “the greening of society” (re-greening) will figure to be incremental, tenuous, and of long duration. The hope is that we’ll be able to forge pathways toward our liberation . . . as we once were . . . dwellers in the land:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1354974.Dwellers_in_the_Land