Rutgers professor’s clan work earns Grawemeyer

For thousands of years before there were cities and nations, clans and tribes formed the basis for societies.

Mark Weiner, a law professor at Rutgers University, says we’ve got to understand those clans if we want to work with people in places where there aren’t strong governments and such clans exist.

His work in this area has led Weiner to be named the 2015 winner of the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Weiner, 47, wrote the book “The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom” as a result of work that began when he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Akureyi, Iceland, in 2009.

In an interview from his Connecticut home, Weiner said it’s important to understand how clan cultures work if the world is to succeed in helping them adopt modern ideas of self-governance.

“The reason it’s so broad is that the rule of the clan is a universal, human experience,” said Weiner, who teaches at the Rutgers-Newark School of Law in New Jersey.

The central idea in Weiner’s work is that members of clans have much less personal freedom than more modern societies because they must depend so much on their tribe or clan for survival.

Charles Ziegler, a political science professor at U of L and the director of the Grawemeyer world order prize, said Weiner’s work was chosen in part because it can help western cultures deal with more primitive clans and tribes but also because it helps us understand our own culture.

Ziegler said that Weiner studied both ancient and modern clans from a range of places — from Iceland to the Middle East — and established that “this is a phenomenon that is really important worldwide and, as he points out, we still see elements of the clan rule or at least elements of clans in modern liberal societies.”

Another important part of Weiner’s work is that he shows that for personal freedom to exist, societies need a strong central government, Ziegler said.

“At a certain point, if you undermine the state, if you take away too many of its powers, you’re ultimately going to infringe your individual liberties.”

The Grawemeyer Awards were established by Charles Grawemeyer in 1985 and are awarded each year for outstanding work in the areas of music composition, improving world order, psychology and education. U of L and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary also give an award in religion.

The awards are each $100,000. Weiner, who has taken unpaid leave from Rutgers and has been “living like a student,” said he will use the money to continue his work.

Reporter Joseph Gerth can be reached at (502) 582-4702. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Gerth.