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The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom Hardcover – March 12, 2013

4.1 out of 5 stars 17 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 12, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374252815
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374252816
  • Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.9 x 9.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,348,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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By Leif W. Haase on March 28, 2013
Format: Hardcover
Recently the New York Times highlighted the results of studies showing that young people who develop explicit family narratives show greater resilience and security when difficulty strikes. Many pieces of similar evidence show that embracing solidarity and kinship can help blunt the slings and arrows of misfortune, and in particular the sense of rootlessness that modern individualism so often creates.

In this thoughtful and often brilliant book the legal scholar and cultural historian Mark Weiner pays a fitting tribute to the values of the "clan," with far-flung examples taken from the lives of the Nuer in Africa, the Scots, the Pashtuns, Icelanders, and more. He resurrects, for example, the great and much-neglected Saga of Burnt Njal, an Icelandic classic which got a brief moment in the sun during the Great Books movement of the past century, has languished since, and reads like a marriage between J.R.R. Tolkien and Jo Nesbo.

Weiner's book is more than worth its price simply as an armchair tour of interesting places and cultures and mores, deftly and briefly described. But he has a more serious and important point to make. While the social cohesion that the values of the clan promote is alluring, they are ultimately at odds with the values of individual autonomy that only the much-maligned modern liberal state can offer.

Even the state's modern defenders tend to view it, at best, as a necessary evil. It keeps the peace, upholds (somewhat) international order, and manages the complexity of modern life in ways that allow individuals to get on with their journeys of personal fulfillment.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Often, nonfiction does not hold my attention, even if it is about a topic that I thought would interest me. This book is an exception. Drawing upon others' research as well as his own, Weiner shows convincingly (to me, at least) that family-based power will govern when few or no other structures exist in a society. He helped me understand the reasons for many actions and qualities of clan-like organizations. I now see patterns in many political and cultural struggles around the world today. The book flows along at just the right pace.
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Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
What is a clan? The name means Children in Gaelic. MacGregors are the children of a founder named Gregor. MacPhersons are similar. Similar nomenclature is found elsewhere as with the most famous clan of all, the Children of Israel. A clan is a kin-group. It is a political system based on familial organization, at one time common in the Western world and still well known elsewhere.

I must confess to my own bias in writing this. I have, at least since childhood, had a sentimental and intellectual interest in tribal societies; I have often even wanted to write a saga. And lately as well I have come to the political belief that the state has gone to far in suppressing middling institutions, that these provide concrete benefits that the author has left out and that we need balance of power. Or to put it another way we need clans to protect us from the state as much as we need the state to protect us from clans.

The author has a different approach. He emphasizes mostly the need of a strong state to protect individual freedom. A decent enough argument. But to much time is spent on it. However, to his credit, he does see the attraction of tribalism. He is fair enough to the clan system and notes it's advantage. He often gives the impression of a man trying to transcend his own prejudices, which is assuredly a praiseworthy activity. Where he stumbles is his proposed compromise. He claims that a liberal society must learn to work with clans. A fine enough suggestion, though at times the author seems to be saying that in essence people who have held power for generations should be persuaded to cooperate in their own marginalization. And the thesis that a state is better then no state seems tautological, though tautologies often need to be said.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
i read it while teaching the Leviathan. Weiner makes Maine's movement from status to contract reversible, so that contemporary anti-statist or anti-political movements are not atavistic but reasonable responses to crises. i like the way he shows that the rule of the clan is a default position, and that the state is a precarious achievement
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Format: Paperback
I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit from it, though not what I had expected to enjoy or to learn.

The author knows a huge amount about his subject, and I appreciated his descriptions and insights on such as honor killings (I get it now), how Walter Scott's Waverley describes the tension between the Scottish clans and the English government, how Karl Marx based his theory on the work of an american corporate attorney who retired to study Native American culture, the meltdown of an Icelandic central government for want of an executive function, and Ghadafi's goal of binding the clans in Libya into a new form of government (that was very enlightening for me, as I had wondered if just such a plan would work -- maybe in the hands of another leader it would).

Weiner frequently asserts that the breakdown of a central government is not followed by freedom for individuals, but by control by power groups. It was annoying to have the point repeated so often before it was finally fleshed out on page 188:

"For most citizens of liberal [by "liberal" the author seems to mean "having an effective state dedicated to public purposes" -- it took me a while to figure this out] democracies, individual liberty may seem like the default impulse of human communities, an impulse the state does little more than suppress. But this is a product of the liberal state's success, which has skewed our understanding of human nature." Paraphrasing the next part, in communities that lack "an effective government," humans seek to maintain and restore justice by forming into groups. This occurs in areas that have always lacked an effective central government and in areas of weak government such as inner cities, North Africa or South Asia.
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