capitalism, they in turn did not anticipate it without also warding it off. They do not cross
this new threshold. Thus it is necessary to expand the hypothesis of mechanisms both
anticipatory and inhibiting: these mechanisms are at play not only in primitive societies,
but also in the conflict of towns ‘against’ the State and ‘against’ capitalism. Finally, it
was through the State-form and not the town-form that capitalism triumphed: this
occurred when the Western States became models of realization for an axiomatic of
decoded flows, and in that way resubjugated the towns. As Braudel says, there were
‘always two runners, the state and the town’—two forms and two speeds of
deterritorialization—and ‘the state usually won...everywhere in Europe, it disciplined the
towns with instinctive relentlessness, whether or not it used violence...the states caught
up with the forward gallop of the towns.’^5 But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the
modern State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus realized is an
independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City, megalopolis or
‘megamachine’ of which the States are parts or neighbourhoods.
NOTES
1 On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle see Etienne Balazs,
Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy, H.M.Wright (trans.), New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1964, p. 410: ‘The social structures in both India and China automatically rejected the
town and offered, as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because society
was well and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous crystallization.’
2 From all of these standpoints, François Châtelet questions the classical notion of the city-state
and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State (‘La Grèce
classique, la Raison, L’Etat’ in Alberto Asor Rosa et al., En marge, l’Occident et ses autres,
Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978. Islam was to confront analogous problems, as would Italy,
Germany and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century: in these cases, political power does
not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns, which lacked
functionaries, an army and even legal status. The town is always inside a network of towns,
but the ‘network of towns’ does not coincide with the ‘mosaic of States’: on all of these
points, see the analyses of François Fourquet and Lion Murard, Généalogie des équipments
collectifs, Paris, 10/18, pp. 79–106.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schrept
(trans.), New York: Basic Books, 1963, pp. 150–1.
4 Louis Berthe analyses a specific example of the need for a ‘third village’ to prevent the
directional circuit from closing: ‘Aines et cadets, I’alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj’,
L’Homme, vol. 5, no. 3/4, July–December 1965, pp. 214–15.
5 Femand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 398,
405, 411; italics added. (On town-State relations in the West, see pp. 396–406.) As Braudel
notes, one of the reasons for the victory of the States over the towns starting in the beginning
of the fifteenth century was that the State alone had the ability fully to appropriate the war
machine: by means of the territorial recruitment of men, material investment, the
industrialization of war (it was more in the arms factories than in the pin factories that mass
production and mechanical division appeared). The commercial towns, on the other hand,
required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenaries and were only able to encast the war
machine.Gilles Deleuze 299