the past may seem strange to some, but they are a large part of the
secret of early English history. . . .

So the ploughman ceased more and more to be a warrior, and the
warrior ceased to be a ploughman. Differentiation of function led away
from equality--away from liberty even. But it led to settled order, to
civilization, to wealth, and finally in the course of centuries to a much
fuller liberty for the individual than the freeman of a savage tribe can
possibly enjoy.

-- G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, vol. 1, 1953, pp. 73, 125

Conventional evolutionary anthropologists . . . tend to enumerate
progressive trends such as productivity of human labor power, variety
and quantity of goods available, and proliferation of occupational and
life-style choices. But instead of being counted as social gains, these
criteria should be looked at as gains for ruling classes and a small
proportion of unruling but affluent people. Such criteria, or analytic
centers, obscure evolutionary losses for the majority of humanity.
Workers, for example, do not own the results of their productivity, and
most of the world's population is denied even an adequate diet and has
little meaningful choice of occupation or life style. In nonclass socie-
ties, necessities were generally available and fairly equally distributed.
Although occupational or life-style choices were indeed limited, the
lack of specialization forced adults to command a wide range of
mental and manual occupations. From this perspective, then, the rise
of the ruling classes and state formations initiated a long and uneven
process of destroying kin corporations.

-- Karen Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual
Equality, 1979, pp. 194-195

As the three preceding quotes amply demonstrate, there is no clear
consensus concerning the benefits of civilization. In the first extract,
simple and complex societies are seen merely as alternatives, whereas in
the second and third extracts, complex society is seen as a "positive" and
as a "negative" development, respectively. For better or worse, however,
complex, that is, civilized societies, are almost universally characterized
by the police function, which supports "the whole enormous apparatus of
'law and order'" present in such societies. Why should this be so? What
aspects of complex society necessitate the modern police function? What
implications have these associations for the relationships between police
and people in the modern world?

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