to Clastres. Scott commented on how Clastres influenced him: "The reason it was useful for me... is that he was the first person to understand that modes of subsistence are not just grades on some evolutionary scale--from hunting and gathering to swiddening, foraging, agriculture, and so on--but rather that the choice of a mode of subsistence is in part a political choice about how you want to relate to existing state systems". The influence of Clastres on the philosophers Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in their philosophical and political writings has been noted. Dwivedi and Mohan have interpreted the political thought of M. K. Gandhi through the works of Pierre Clastres in their book Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics. They propose that Gandhi's concept of non-violence requires the formation of the state as per Clastres, "We will need to make a detour through the great anarchist anthropologist himself – Pierre Clastres – in order to find the steps which will lead us unto the Gandhian temple of non-violence". Permanence of war in primitive societies holds off the formation of the state and the appearance of the concept of violence. Following Clastres they argue that it is the state that makes the distinction between good force and bad force. Dwivedi and Mohan also note that for Clastres the state is the recording apparatus of memories which does not allow any deviation from the state's version of the past. They say that new possibilities for politics are to be found behind the curtain of the state according to Clastres: "At the beginning, in the days spent without records of memory, lost behind the obscure curtain before which the state arrives, lies an epoch without functional isolations: the reign of pure polynomia which grants all possibilities with no realizations. All homologies here remain revealed as nature is pure voluptuousness without any spans to reach it." Selected works Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (Chronique des indiens Guayaki), 1972 Society Against the State (La Société contre l'État. Recherches d'anthropologie politique), 1974 Le Grand Parler. Mythes et chants sacrés des Indiens Guaraní, 1974 Archéologie de la violence. La guerre dans les sociétés primitives, 1977 Archeology of Violence (Recherches d'anthropologie politique), 1980 See also Endemic warfare References Notes Citations Sources Further reading External links Full text of Society Against the State An Excerpt from Society Against the State A page from the Librairie Libertaire, describing Clastres