Elite & Egalitarian Political Traditions

This article examines the coexistence of egalitarian and hierarchical models of social organisation within a single ethnic group and a single ethnic culture in the Western Caucasus, a phenomenon attested in the past not only among the Circassians but also among other peoples (in Dagestan, Chechnya, and South-East Asia). It considers the relationship between the feudal domains of Circassia and the democratic polities of the Western Caucasus, together with the principal factors and consequences of the democratic transformation of the socio-political order of the Western Caucasian Circassian societies from the first half of the seventeenth century to the 1860s.

The democratic societies of the Western Caucasus, like the "free societies of Dagestan", bore a typological resemblance to the communities of the Circumpontic region in the classical period. Communities of this type were self-governing micro-political formations that incorporated their military, legal, and political functions in their entirety, along with their social classes, including the communal nobility and, in some cases, the feudal estates, into a single communal organism with civic self-government.