The division between rulers and the ruled in five modes.
This book challenges the most persistent divide in politics: that a privileged few command while everyone else must obey. That divide is an eternal recurrence, from the conquering kings and plantation estates to colonial courts, statistical bureaus, and server farms. Today, the divide endures as a system of managed emergency that keeps us trapped in a perpetual present where the future is never ours to make.
The Archaeology of Power argues that government is a recurrent method of capture. Through the method of anarcheology, it rejects origin stories and natural orders to reveal how rule actually reproduces itself. Instead, it offers a well-documented alternative to the familiar just-so stories of the barter myth of economics, the band-to-state civilizational ladder, and the rational march of progress.
Moving backward from our perpetual present, the book maps five modes of power: cybernetic circuits, organic bodies, despotic machines, domestic enclosures, and predatory capture. Each revives a blueprint for political violence sedimented in archaeology and anthropology, the archives of empire and police, and the technical literature of factories, women’s hospitals, engineering labs, and digital code.
The argument unfolds as a concise series of theses, with explanations paced like a seminar. Its concepts build a shared vocabulary that prompts readers to consider where the line between rulers and ruled has been drawn—and how it might be undone.