ABSTRACT
A society has an anarchic polity to the extent that it lacks society-wide rule-making and rule-enforcing institutions. The view of the nation-state system as anarchic, or essentially anarchic, is widely recurrent in the literature on international relations—albeit with varying terminology and detail in its elaboration. The material reasons for the presence or absence of anarchy have primarily to do with the natural supply and human accessibility of essential and valued goods, and the capabilities of certain people to control access to what is generally needed and valued. These factors strongly affect both the internal structure of groups and the structure of intergroup relationships. Some of the reasons the nation-state system is anarchic have been shown to lie outside of the nation-state system itself. Anarchy is a generic phenomenon, appearing as a form of polity in societies of very different sizes and constituent units.
