His signature work is the essay collection Society Against the State (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).

[10] In 1971 he became lecturer at the fifth section of the EPHE, and was promoted to director of studies of the religion and societies of South American Indigenous peoples in October 1975.

[4][11] In 1977 he took in part in the establishment of the journal Libre alongside the former members of Socialisme ou Barbarie Miguel Abensour, Cornelius Castoriadis, Marcel Gauchet, Claude Lefort, and Maurice Luciani.

[13] He was interested in Guayaki because there was little research on them since Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship forced them to live under territorial restriction and launched a pacifying campaign between 1959 and 1962.

[15][17] Anthropologist Clifford Geertz said Clastres had a "Rousseauian primitivism, the view that 'savages' are radically different from us, more authentic than us, morally superior to us, and need only to be protected, presumably by us, from our greed and cruelty.

"[15] Bartholomew Dean, writing for the journal Anthropology Today, declared, "Clastres' ahistoricism, rhetorical romanticism, and museumification sadly obscures the ongoing challenges facing indigenous peoples like the Guayaki.

"[17] In opposition to Geertz and Dean, David Rains Wallace said it was an "unsettling" work because it "is not quite the nostalgic view of primitive life that now prevails in literary circles.

[23] When it was first translated by Urizen Books in 1977 as Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Human Uses of Power Among the Indians of the Americas, however, it did not receive major attention.

[25] It is a collection of eleven essays: "Copernicus and the Savages", "Exchange and Power: Philosophy of the Indian Chieftainship", "Independence and Exogamy", "Elements of Amerindian Demography", "The Bow and the Basket", "What Makes Indians Laugh", "The Duty to Speak", "Prophets in the Jungle", "Of the One Without the Many", "Of Torture in Primitive Societies", and the title article "Society Against the State".

[9][20] Recherches d'anthropologie politique, posthumously published in France by Éditions du Seuil in 1980, was first translated into English by Semiotext(e) in 1994 as Archeology of Violence.

[28] "Freedom, Misfortune, the Unnameable" was written for a 1976 scholarly edition of Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.

[36][37] "Primitive Economy" was the title given to the preface Clastres wrote for the French edition of Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics.

"[10] Similarly, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro declared Society Against the State and Archeology of Violence can be considered "the chapters of a virtual book that could be named Neither Marxism nor Structuralism.

[45] On Clastres's perspective, according to Viveiros de Castro, "historical materialism was ethnocentric: it considered production the truth of society and labor the essence of the human condition.

[46] In opposition to Marxist's economic determinism, for Clastres, politics was not superstructure; instead it was sui generis, which enabled Amerindian societies to refuse power and statehood.

[52] Clastres, however, argued that power does not imply either coercion or violence, and proposed a "Copernican revolution"[52] in political anthropology: "In order to escape the attraction of its native earth and attain real freedom of thought, in order to pull itself away from the facts of natural history in which it continues to flounder, reflection on power must effect a 'heliocentric' conversion.

"[53] In another essay, Exchange and Power, he argued that South American Indigenous chieftains are powerless chiefs; they are chosen on the basis of their oratorical talent.

[56] Moyn said that Clastres "reinterpret[ed] the violence in primitive society as internal and essential to its self immunization against the rise of the state" and "compare[d] it favorably to the grandiose horrors of the statist, modern world.

"[29] To the first topic, he dedicated "Of Torture in Primitive Societies"; Clastres did not think on it as cruel practice and using Soviet Union penal tattoos on Anatoly Marchenko as example, Clastres affirmed: "It is proof of their admirable depth of mind that the Savages knew all that ahead of time, and took care, at the cost of a terrible cruelty, to prevent the advent of a more terrifying cruelty.

[55] Viveiros de Castro explained the meaning of "Society against the State" as "a modality of collective life based on the symbolic neutralization of political authority and the structural inhibition of ever-present tendencies to convert power, wealth and prestige into coercion, inequality and exploitation.

"[65] First, his arguments implied in "a kind of paralyzed mourning" because his "primitivist nostalgia" made people distant from reforms in the present.

"In this way, Clastres's anti- but not yet genuinely post-Marxist perception that the state in all its forms is corrupted by a 'neo-theology of history with its fanatic continuism' prevented him from presenting a viable stance for those who are unable to escape the circumstances of Western modernity—which is to say, in a globalized world, everyone.

Clastres was also a major influence for French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

[67][68] His view that totalitarianism was a constant danger in modern societies "makes the security of freedoms against the state the only realistic achievement in a politics without illusions."

[69] Differently, Warren Breckman concluded Clastres's view on State helped the antitotalitarian current of 1970s French thought.

[70] James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed proposes that Zomia inhabitants were intentionally "using their culture, farming practices, egalitarian political structures, prophet-led rebellions, and even their lack of writing systems to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them".