A Three-Layer Analysis (TLA) of Livy, History of Rome, Book 1
1. Question
Why do violence and order formation proceed together in an undifferentiated way in a newly founded state?
2. Abstract
In a newly founded state, violence and order formation proceed together in an undifferentiated way because public order has not yet been fully established, and the institutions that restrain, replace, or legitimize violence are still undeveloped.
In a mature state, war, trials, punishment, taxation, succession, marriage, and approval are separated into different institutional channels. In the founding stage, however, the institutions that separate these functions do not yet exist. As a result, external fighting, internal integration, the acquisition of marriage ties, the establishment of kingship, and the securing of legitimacy proceed in the same process, often together with violence.
Book 1 of Livy shows that, in a founding state, violence is not merely destruction. It functions as a channel through which an unformed order is forcibly brought into being.
3. Method
This study follows the three-layer structure of TLA.
In Layer 1, the events in Livy, Book 1 are organized as facts, such as landing, plunder, war, city founding, killing, ritual, legal formation, the acquisition of marriage ties, and communal integration.
In Layer 2, these facts are connected to structural categories such as the Founding Phase, Founder / King / Hero, Divine Signs / Omens / Ritual Order, Kingship, Military Organization / Conscription / Centuries, and Urban Community and Civic Integration.
This study also uses OS Organizational Design Theory R1.28 and rereads the community as a system composed of an OS, which serves as the decision-making body, and an Execution Layer, which carries out action.
In R1.28, the OS is defined as a decision-making body that operates through A, IA, H, and V while connecting with infrastructure, applications, and the execution environment. Therefore, this article examines violence in a founding state not as a deviation opposed to order, but as an early operating mode through which the pre-institutional state OS secures space, population, and authority, and then translates them into institutions.
4. Layer1: Fact
Layer 1 shows that, in the early narrative of Book 1, violence and order formation do not appear as separate stages. They unfold within the same causal chain.
Chapter 1 presents the arrival of Aeneas. Chapter 2 presents the war between Aeneas and Turnus. Chapter 6 presents the founding of Rome. Chapter 8 presents Romulus’s institutional arrangements. Chapter 9 presents the abduction of the Sabine women. Migration, war, construction, institutional formation, and abduction/marriage appear as a continuous sequence in the early phase of state formation.
In Chapter 1, Aeneas and his people begin plundering farmland immediately after landing. Later, however, they obtain a place of settlement through treaty, marriage, and alliance with Latinus. Here, the possibility of violence for survival and the formation of political order are placed within the same process. What appears as intrusion from the local side becomes, through treaty and marriage, the legitimate starting point of city formation.
In Chapter 2, after the war with Turnus, Aeneas reorganizes the Aborigines and the Trojans as Latins. War does not end in destruction alone. It leads to the reorganization of communal name and loyalty. External violence becomes the occasion for communal integration.
From Chapters 4 to 5, the twins are nearly killed by the tyrant Amulius, later attack brigands, and finally overthrow Amulius. Here, private violence, revenge, and the recovery of kingship proceed in an undifferentiated chain. In a mature state, the removal and punishment of a usurper would be separated into judicial or military channels. In the pre-founding stage, such institutions are not yet established.
From Chapters 6 to 8, Romulus becomes sole ruler after conflict with Remus, builds walls, performs rites, arranges law, and establishes the Senate. What matters here is that the violent establishment of the center of rule and the organization of ritual, law, and deliberative institutions are not separated in time or structure. The space opened by violence is immediately translated into order.
The asylum in Chapter 8 and the abduction of the Sabine women in Chapter 9 show the same structure on the population side. Romulus gathers people without distinction between free persons and slaves, thereby building a population base. Unable to obtain marriage partners, he seizes women by force. Later, lawful marriage, shared civic status, and children as a future are presented. Here too, violent acquisition is directly connected to the reproductive order of the community.
5. Layer2: Order
In Layer 2, the Founding Phase is defined as the stage in which the community brings itself into existence. Its logic is described as a phase in which force, ritual, marriage, and asylum operate together in an undifferentiated way, and in which survival and population growth take priority over purity. This is the structural reason why violence and order formation are difficult to separate in a newly founded state. As long as institutional differentiation does not yet exist, war, marriage, command, asylum, and symbolic creation all move as different aspects of the same state-forming process.
The role of the Founder / King / Hero is to provide the activating force that converts disorder into order. The founder is not the manager of a completed order. Rather, the founder is the actor who initiates the first framework of the community through violence, war, ritual, naming, and legal formation. Violence remains undifferentiated in a founding state because the founder’s role itself acts directly upon a reality that exists before full order formation.
The Heavenly Layer of Divine Signs / Omens / Ritual Order is also important. In Layer 2, this structure is said to legitimize communal action and wrap violence in the form of “right order.” This means that the founding state does not simply affirm raw violence. Through ritual, augury, oath, and myth, it translates violence into communal order. Undifferentiation is not the abandonment of order. It is the state in which a pre-differentiated polity tries to connect violence directly to order.
The state-level structures of Kingship, Military Organization, and Urban Community Integration support the same understanding. Kingship carries out the creation, expansion, and maintenance of the state by the shortest route. Military organization, conscription, and centuries handle not only defense and expansion, but also the formation of civic order. Urban Community and Civic Integration realize population growth, military growth, and expansion of the sphere of rule through communal reorganization. All of these show that, in the founding stage, violence is not external to order, but placed within the same movement as state formation.
From the perspective of OS Organizational Design Theory R1.28, this can be understood as the problem of founding infrastructure and OS activation. In R1.28, founding infrastructure is defined as a high-output, high-load resource base necessary in the founding stage and survival-competition stage. It is needed to break through uncertainty, acquire resources, and secure OS survival. The OS, as the operating body with decision-making power, sets purposes, uses resources, and governs the execution environment. Violence in early Roman founding functions precisely in this phase as a high-load breakthrough that forcibly secures space, population, and authority.
6. Layer3: Insight
From this, it follows that violence and order formation proceed together in an undifferentiated way in a newly founded state because the minimum conditions of communal existence are still undeveloped, and the institutions that would replace violence do not yet exist. War, revenge, the acquisition of marriage ties, the establishment of kingship, and population integration therefore proceed within the same political process.
In a mature state, violence is pushed outside institutional order, while trials, taxation, succession, marriage, and approval are handled through differentiated channels. In a newly founded state, however, the institutions supporting such differentiation do not yet exist. In the Roman case, violence was not the opposite of order. It was used as a pre-stage of order formation. It functioned as a high-load breakthrough through which space, population, and authority were forcibly secured.
The plunder and treaty at Aeneas’s landing, the reorganization into Latins after the war with Turnus, the twins’ private violence and the overthrow of Amulius, the sole rule of Romulus followed immediately by law, Senate, and ritual, and the abduction of the Sabine women followed by lawful marriage and civic incorporation all point to the same structure.
Not every founding state uses violence as a high-load breakthrough. But in the early Roman case, force was first used to secure space, population, and authority, and only then were these translated into ritual, law, and institution. The undifferentiation of violence and order formation is therefore the very condition of a state that has not yet completed institutional differentiation. Whether order can be formed from that state determines whether a founding polity can move toward maturity.
7. Implications for the Present
This point also has implications for modern start-ups, newly created organizations, and states or organizations in periods of institutional transition.
Of course, violence itself cannot be affirmed in the modern world. Yet in founding or crisis situations, “undifferentiation” often appears in other forms. Strong top-down direction, exceptional judgment, non-routine decision-making, and highly personal resource mobilization may appear before formal institutions are fully arranged. This happens because survival and initial takeoff are prioritized even when institutional order is still incomplete.
That said, not every founding stage requires such high-load breakthroughs. The Roman case is distinctive because it exercised such breakthroughs while also forming order at the same time. In other words, if a high-load breakthrough is used, order must also be formed at the same time. Otherwise, the organization will never mature. In terms of OS Organizational Design Theory, it will not become an organization that has raised OS health.
What matters, therefore, is neither to condemn undifferentiation in the founding stage as mere barbarism nor to justify it permanently. The crucial issue is how quickly the space, population, and authority secured through breakthrough can be translated into law, institution, approval, and role order. Roman founding history shows that the force of founding may be necessary, but that becoming a state requires its conversion into differentiated order.
8. Conclusion
Violence and order formation proceed together in an undifferentiated way in a newly founded state because the minimum conditions of communal existence are still undeveloped, and war, revenge, the acquisition of marriage ties, the establishment of kingship, and population integration are carried out within the same political process rather than through differentiated institutions.
What Book 1 of Livy shows is that a founding state first secures space, population, and authority through force, and only then becomes a state by translating them into ritual, law, and institution. The undifferentiation of violence and order formation is therefore not simply chaos or barbarism. It is an early condition showing that the state still stands before full institutional differentiation. From that point, what is required of a founding organization is to translate the space, population, and authority secured by force into differentiated order.
9. Source Texts
Titus Livius, History of Rome, Book 1, translated by Satoshi Iwatani, Kyoto University Press, 2008
OS Organizational Design Theory R1.28