At the Dawn of Tyranny the Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State

London: Faber and Faber. Very Good/Very Good. 1985. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0571138225 Dust jacket unclipped.Jacket design by Pentagram. Green cloth with red titling on spine. No ownership marks. 421 pages clean and tight. At the Dawn of Tyranny is an original and provocative work of popular anthropology that explores one of the central problems of human existence: the origins of political tyranny. Eli Sagan uses the accounts of such nineteenth-century explorers as Stanley, Speke and Cook to analyse three cultures that these men found: Buganda, Hawaiian, and the Tahitian. In these societies he found authoritarian monarchs, an aristocratic social structure, a complete legal system, a permanent army, bards and priests. Sagan looks fbr ways to understand how the confining circle of the primitive kinship system was broken so that the course of civilization as we know it could begin, and what price was paid for this advance. He links what happened in those early cultures to current problems in our society. This is a book of many fascinations. It uses history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and literature to provide an illuminating new context from which to view both our past and present conditions. .