Politogenesis
Description
Leonid Grinin:
"During the very prolonged late archaic and early civilization periods ... there was outlined the separation of political sphere from society including the beginning of specialization in the field of political management which in fact can be considered as the origin of politogenesis. However, the process of such separation was long-lasting and incomplete; it was finished only during the period of more or less formed statehood. Thus, the politogenesis is much older than the statehood.
We define politogenesis as a process of formation of a distinct political aspect within the social system that leads to the emergence of partially and relatively autonomous political subsystem, a process of the formation of special power forms of societal organization; this is connected with the concentration of power and political activities (both internal and external) under the control of certain groups and strata. Nevertheless, it should not be supposed that politics emerges only with politogenesis.
Politics is much older. Politics as a realm of rela- tions concerning the distribution of power (Smelser 1988) seems to have appeared around the age of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Actually, certain elements of ‘quasi-political’ relationships may be already found among the non-human primates (see, e.g., Dol'nik 2007 on complex and dynamic hierarchical relationships among the baboons; see also, e.g., Butovskaya, Korotayev, and Kazankov 2000). However, among nomadic hunter-gatherers the power systems remained mostly very little differentiated and weakly integrated; on the other hand, the level of their differentiation and integration more or less correlated with their demographic indicators."
(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/macrohistory_and_globalization/083-135.pdf)
Source: Macrohistory and Globalization. Chapter 3: The Evolution of Statehood
Periodization
the state formation process proper is regarded as a constituent part of the general politogenetic process
Leonid Grinin:
"During the analyzed late archaic and early civilization periods two major shifts took place, i.e.:
a) the formation of more or less institutionalized political subsystem, starting from the complexity level of chiefdoms and their analogues;
b) the formation of archaic states and their analogues with further institutionalization of the political subsystem. We have denoted this whole epoch as the epoch of the initial (or primary) politogenesis (Grinin 2009h; Grinin and Korotayev 2009c).
We define it as ‘initial’ because the politogenesis had not stopped with the state formation, but continued further with the evolution from the early state to the developed one, and even from the developed state to the mature one (see Grinin 2008a, 2010a; Grinin and Korotayev 2006; 2009a: see ch. 5).
Respectively, the epoch of primary politogenesis may be subdivided into two epochs:
1) the one starting with the formation of chiefdoms and their analogues, which we denote as the period of middle-complex societies or the pre-state period (Grinin, Korotayev 2011);
2) the one covering the formation and development of the early states and their analogues, which we denote as the period of complex societies or early state period (Grinin 2011a)."
(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/macrohistory_and_globalization/083-135.pdf)