There are many forms of human organization and their accompanying distribution and varying concentrations of power, which denote different scales, and which have varying connotations and meanings as well.
These forms arise appropriate to the geographies and environments that give rise to them, and they have unique histories of their own. And to further complicate things - at least as is apparent in the last couple of thousand years of the history of human civilization - these forms seem to evolve through cyclical processes of succession.
These processes themselves are subjects of contention, debate, and competing theory. One of the more memorable and long-running theories is Polybius' theory of anacyclosis, which posits that societies move cyclically through phases of ochlocracy (mob rule), monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and then back to ochlocracy again.
Implied in this succession is a gradual dispersion of power from points of concentration, a centrifugal process in which power is gradually pulled outward, seeking more broad and stable patterns, before settling into stable concentrations of their own, eventually corrupting further and dispersing further, until dispersal is so complete that it can be gathered up and concentrated more completely again, beginning the process anew.
As fascinating as all this is, the point I wanted to make for now is that complicated processes such as these, as well as their vast temporal and spatial distributions, and their relative position to varying interests looking to label and qualify them, make possible all kinds of terms for the varying concentrations of power we see in human societies: we have kings, monarchs, emperors, tyrants, dictators, presidents, prime ministers, chiefs, CEOs, lords, warlords, generals, parliaments, senates and bodies of representatives, boards, communities, and so on across all kinds of concentrations of power across time and space.
And to cut through what all of these terms mean, I think it is probably safe to say that what all of them have in common is that they are all ways of describing certain distinct patterns and concentrations of power, which are affected in order to organize groups of individuals on varying scales in order to achieve certain results collectively.
Even in smaller scale egalitarian tribes, you're likely to have certain individuals that emerge as "leaders," in that they have accumulated a certain body of experience and knowledge of their respective domains, who are deferred to if one is to properly achieve what one sets out to do. You have elders and chiefs and shamans, who have reached a certain level of achievement in medicine, spirituality, building, hunting, diplomacy and interpersonal relations, and what have you.
And there is power in a given title of designation, because it does suggest a certain level of attainment, though these things can certainly diverge, which is another matter entirely. Because anything worth doing can be done well or poorly. As Eric Hoffer put it, even switching from picking peas to string beans had in it an "element of fear" (he was a Depression-era migratory worker) because the two picking processes were different, and learning one didn't necessarily mean the mastery of the other, which you could still screw up, depending on how high the stakes were.
Which is to say that if you've been doing something well for a long time, you should probably be listened to and deferred to, because this experience and knowledge tends to produce correctly the results you want, that in turn produces wealth and lets you do further things, which thusly affords power. Now, the really interesting thing about this is when you start scaling this issue up and factoring in these longer cycles of power succession, as we see in the last couple thousand years of human history.
I mentioned that mismatch between title and attainment: at larger scales and under certain amounts of stress and pressure, you might need to concentrate more power in less individuals and have that concentration much more durable, as much more is at stake. In a dangerous environment for example, where the risk of ruin is high, you might want to follow the person who at least claims to know what they are doing, which if there are competing claims, tend to be demonstrated through violence anyway.
In regard to the king or warlord designation for example, there are accounts out there of societies that were relatively peaceful and egalitarian, getting by somewhere stable on perhaps farming or hunting and gathering, who had to migrate because of some sort of disaster like an erupting volcano, and who emerged transformed and much more warlike and hierarchical. For now I'm working off of memory and this should be treated as hearsay; I'll try to get more specific and nail this claim down when I come across more data.
But anyway taking this pattern for granted, this creates new internal problems. You want a durability in power concentration so as to guide the collective through a dangerous time, and that durability may outlast its usefulness or appropriateness. For example you might have a succession of kings that have lived off of their ancestors' legacies, who become progressively more inept and corrupt, whose ineptness and corruptness becomes the threat that that institution was built to stave off, giving rise to that historical cycle of power dispersion we briefly touched on earlier.
And over time, you have such a concentration and frequency of rising and falling powers that there is basically a constant social and political danger of relaxing that concentration of power, however destructive and self-defeating that concentration becomes. History is replete with broad and creative social movements, with their constituents seeking to keep power balanced and social trust high, only to have all of their creative energy siphoned off and cordoned off by concentrating king figures, and the kings end up winning again and again and again.
You have the mellow hippies stomped in the coalescing of the Roman Republic, and then again in the history of Christianity, in the centralization and concentration of the Viking kingdoms, in the Renaissance, in the Protestant Reformation, in the colonization of North America and the formation of the United States, within political and cultural and economic movements within the history of the United States, and so on.
As far back as classical antiquity, the Greeks viewed the processes of anacyclosis as largely destructive and undesirable, scheming up contrivances to get around the problem such as Plato's philosopher king and republic, among others, which in turn influenced founders of the US, who were largely in agreement, scheming to contrive their own mechanisms of republic to account for the problem.
We talk about free enterprise and unrestricted entrepreneurial endeavor and all the like, but really upon examination you find that the organizations of capital - the corporations and financial institutions - are broadly autocratic, full of unhappy and alienated people, which act on the broader public, also making them unhappy and alienated. Institutions, that left to themselves and freed, continuously produce bondage and coercion where they grow and prosper.
There is a broadly popular dislike and distrust of corporations, yet they continuously coalesce into the forms that they do in fairly reliable processes of succession, concentrating into monopolies that ever more intensely exploit their surroundings and then even themselves, oftentimes cannibalizing themselves in the process.
And this repetitive production of undesirable results, which continues apace outside of our collective stated intentions, can be analyzed, and certain deep historical influences and causes can be pointed to which accounts for these results. And due in part to these historical influences and ongoing forces in motion, we've collectively set up our institutions and organizations to work this way and to get things done this way, though it doesn't have to be so. We've explored some of this, and will continue to explore this in time.
