Abstract
Data coded from a worldwide sample of 30 premodern states demonstrate that collective action was an important social force in political regime building across civilizational traditions, regions, and time periods. Collectivity brought advantages, for example, overall increases in material standard of living, but also entailed the potential for cooperation problems such as free riding and agency. These problematic aspects of collectivity were addressed, in part, through cultural innovation aimed at developing new ways to understand the roots of moral capacity and the nature of the morally virtuous person. Here, I analyze one aspect of cultural innovation by investigating figural representation in the coded societies. From this comparative study, I propose that two artistic processes were concomitants of collective governance: the emergence of naturalism, including portraiture, and representation that highlights the commoner and the quotidian elements of commoner life ways.
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