Social
Change:
World
Historical Social Transformations:
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Bruce Lerro
Copyright ©
Forthcoming from Allyn and Bacon
v. 1-2-02
[110967 words, 217 pages]
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I: The Framework.
Chapter 1: History and Social Evolution
Chapter 2: The comparative world-systems
approach.
Chapter 3: Building a Social Self: The
Macro-Micro
Link
Part
II: Stateless
Systems
Chapter 4: World-Systems of
Hunter-Gatherers
Chapter 5: The Gardeners
Chapter 6:
North American World-Systems Before the Chiefs
Chapter 7:
The Sacred Chiefs
Part
III: State-based Systems:
Chapter
8: The Temple and the Palace
Chapter
9: The Early Empires and the Capitalist
City-States
Chapter
10: The Central System
[not included in this version]
Part IV: The Long Rise of
Capitalism
Chapter 11:
The Rise of the West
Chapter 12:
The Modern World-System
Part V: The Present and the Future
Chapter 13:
Institutional Continuities and Change in the Contemporary
System
Chapter 14:
Globalization
Chapter
15: The Future of the Global System
Glossary: the
terms
Bibliography:
Index
Preface
The purpose of this book is to tell a story and to
provide a framework for understanding this story and its implications for our
human future. The story is about how the people of the Earth have gone from
living in small nomadic bands to the urbanized global political economy of the
present over the past twelve thousand years. The framework is the social
geography of human settlements and interaction networks. By tracing the growth
of settlement systems and interaction networks we can explain the processes of
the institutional transformation – the development of technology, information
systems, moral orders, markets, and political structures that have made it
possible for us to live in large and complex societies.
The story and the framework make it possible for us
to see the relevance of world history to our own everyday lives and to respond
intelligently to the challenges that are shaping the world in which we live.
The story we tell is based on the knowledge of the human past that has been
produced by historians and social scientists (sociologists, ethnographers,
archaeologists, political scientists, geographers, psychologists, and
economists). The theoretical framework is based on the comparative
world-systems perspective, a macrosociological approach to world history that
examines groups of interacting societies rather than individual societies as if
they were in isolation from other societies.
Social change is
usually understood to be mainly a matter of recent trends. New technologies and
less expensive transportation and communications make it possible for people to
interact easily and frequently with distant others. Migrants can easily stay in
contact with the communities they have left. Air transportation makes it
possible for people in the Northern Hemisphere to eat fresh fruit in the winter
that has been grown in the summer months of the Southern Hemisphere. And news
events are often portrayed as dramatizing the existence of social change. The
tragedies of September 11, 2001 are claimed by many commentators to have
“changed everything.” But trends and recent events need to be understood in
their world historical context if we are to know their implications for action.
Technology, transportation and communications costs have been changing for a
very long time, and angry young men have been attacking symbols of power for
thousands of years. The framework presented in this book allows us to see the
trends and events of the recent past in terms of the patterns of social change
that have been occurring for decades, centuries and millennia.
Globalization is a set of processes that have
affected everyone in the contemporary world. The processes of global integration and the
political ideologies that have been widely trumpeted as interpretations of this
integration have changed the lives of everyone in recent decades. But the rapid
increase of global economic integration since World War II is only the most
recent wave of the expansion of international trade and foreign investment. In
the last half of the nineteenth century there was a rapid and huge expansion of
international trade and investment that was similar in many respects to the
wave that occurred after World War II. The nineteenth century wave was followed
by a massive backlash against the kind of global integration that had occurred
– a backlash that involved the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War I, the
Great Depression of the 1930s, and World War II. The lessons we can learn from
studying the earlier waves of global integration and disintegration are
entirely relevant for understanding the problems of the twenty-first century.
The rapid technological change of recent decades has
contributed to an extreme “presentism” in which the past is seen as largely
irrelevant to the present because things seem to have changed so much. In
current American popular expression “its history” means that something is of no
importance and can be forgotten. We contend that this “presentism” is a kind of
fog that prevents people from seeing the important continuities from the past
that powerfully exist in the present. And another barrier to understanding is
the focus of much popular and expert culture on single societies, as opposed to
seeing national societies as subsystems in a larger world-system of societies.
Presentism and the focus on single societies prevent us from seeing the
cyclical patterns of world history that have huge implications for the human
future. It is only systematic comparisons with the past and a focus on the
whole world-system that allow us to know what is truly unique in the present.
The assumption that everything that is important has changed is a smokescreen
that must be cleared away.
This book combines our concern to provide students with
the conceptual tools they need to make intelligent decisions as world citizens
with an appreciation of the human past in its own terms and for its own sake.
The true understanding of the struggles of our ancestors is its own reward, as
well as the raw material that can make it possible for us to do good in the
future.
If we speed the camera up and use a perspective on time that comes
from studying rocks (a geological time perspective) then the changes in human
societies over the past twelve thousand years can be understood as constituting
a single complicated Earth-wide event of spiraling globalization. This complex event was unevenly distributed
in space and time. The rise of social complexity, the increases in the size of
politically organized groups (polities), the rises in degree of social
inequality (the height of hierarchy), and the growing spatial scale and intensity
of interaction networks were not smooth upward trends. But the overall process
of social evolution, though uneven in time and space, can be thought of as a
spiral of increasing complexity, hierarchy and size as local systems became
integrated into larger regional systems, which then were incorporated into a
single global system. This image of the bumpy and fuzzy spiral, a combination
of trends and cycles, is symbol that we have chosen to represent the main
outcomes of human social evolution (see cover).
Our very identities as well as our activities are shaped by the
actions and inventions of humans who have lived in the past. The patterns and
causal processes by which people have created institutions and societies
continue to operate in the present and will continue in the future. It is
important for each of us to understand how social change works so that we may
comprehend our own history and participate intelligently in the shaping of the
human future.
Our
perspective does not treat nation-states or societies as separate entities
whose fate is determined by what goes on within their national borders. We
start with the belief that the best way to understand what is going on in the
world is to start with the relationship between societies as its basic unit.
What evolves is the nexus of connections between societies not individual
societies. Today the whole world is present as a force impacting the policies
and collective activities of any single nation state. Intersocial connections
have always constrained what any society in history could or couldn’t do.
Lastly, we think that politics and economics are inseparable.
While we do not deny that politics is an important part of world affairs,
political processes are never separate from economic considerations. For
example we see the political struggle between the North and the South during
the U.S. civil war as primarily determined by the Southern plantation owner’s
need for cheap plantation workers as opposed to the Northern industrialists
need for cheap labor to work in the factories. The predominant economy in the
world, whether pre-capitalist, capitalist or socialist is more often the cause
that the consequences of political events.
Summarizing our assumptions:
1) the present is pregnant with history
2) inter-social relations of
world-systems is the basic unit of analysis
3) economics determines politics
more than the reverse.
Social change is the reorganization of relationships among
individuals and groups of people.
It is a process that shapes the
way we live. It influences who we are and the possibilities for what we do as
individuals and what we can accomplish when we work together with others.
For
instance let ‘s take an example of keeping a calendar and a date book. In the
1960’s and 1970’s most people in their teens and early twenties did not carry a
calendar or a date book. To the extent they were utilized administrators or
people used them in business, doctors, lawyers or psychologists. But by the
1980’s and 1990’s many more young people began to carry these books with them,
not just at work, but to organize there life. Why is this? If we interpreted
these changes psychologically or culturally we might say that teenagers today
are more organized and people in the sixties were more dreamers and less
capable of being practical. We think differently.
The standard of living in the United States has declined beginning
in the 1970’s to the present. In part in order to continue to derive a profit,
the pace of life has increased. People work at least ten hours longer than
thirty years ago while the cost of living has increased. Services that used to
be provided have been cut back making people have to do more during there
leisure time such as running errands. We think the reason young people carry
date books today is because they have to in order to keep up with a declining
economy and an increased pace of life. This is just one example of how a
comparative world-systems analysis can make sense the relationship between
world history and individual life.
Paradoxically, in order to understand why things change in the way
that they do we need also to see how existing relationships and social
structures are reproduced, how they are stabilized and how social order is
accomplished. Change cannot be studied
without also studying the sources of continuity. Social change is only partly
random or accidental. A great deal of
it is patterned and caused by powerful processes that structure the
relationships between people and the natural environment, biological, social
and cultural processes.
It is fashionable to notice that human societies are complex
systems that share certain features with other natural systems that are also
complex. The patterns of complex systems are the result of many small events
and processes that come together and are interconnected. But the main point of this book is to show
how the patterns of social change can be comprehended by focusing on a few
important processes -- the most powerful factors that structure human
institutions and populations.
We think that social change is neither random nor designed. It
would be foolhardy to deny the significant element of accident and randomness
in human social change, but it is likewise wrong to see human events as
completely unpatterned and accidental. It is also mistaken to portray human
history as the realization of some inherent purpose or intention or as the
outcome of rationality or intelligence that makes us continuously improve. It
idea of progress is often a glib assumption or a crude justification for the
exploitation and domination of some people by others. The main purpose of this book is to explain how social change
works. We will examine the ways in which social change has produced human
history and the contemporary social world. In the last chapter we will explain
our position on the notion of progress and take a stand in what we see as good
and what we see as bad.
This book describes and explains the patterns of social evolution
over the past twelve thousand years. It tells the story of how and why hundreds
of thousands of small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands became linked into the
single global political economy of today. It employs a social science approach
that combines sociology, political science, history, anthropology, geography
and economics. The theoretical approach that we will use is called the
comparative world-systems perspective.
Understanding social change in the past may also help us to create
a more humane and sustainable future world society -- one which is democratic,
peaceful, fair and ecologically sustainable. Many of the dynamics of the past
repeat themselves in the present. Secondly, comprehending the past of human
history exposes the relativity of our institutions, institutions we might
otherwise take as eternal. At the same time understanding world history gives
us a greater appreciation for the uniqueness of the communication,
transportation and medical systems which are truly specific to our historical
period. This gives us a sense that some processes are trans-generational and
transnational while others are novel and located primarily in a particular
pocket of the world.
Understanding all types of human societies is important because it
gives us a broad and deep perspective on our own society and ourselves. The
fact that people have lived in very different kinds of societies also shows how
adaptable humanity is and how human nature is capable of much more than we
commonly assume. Each society legitimates its institutions and tries to control
individuals by constructing a vision of human nature that emphasizes some
features and excludes others. Knowledge of very different kinds of societies
frees us by showing that human nature is able to take on a wide variety of
aspects and vastly different types of selves playing very different roles
depending upon the social situation and its demands.
Comprehending long-term processes of social evolution helps us to
see that many of the features of modern societies that we take for granted as
“natural” are in fact human inventions. Many of the justifications of existing
institutions are based on claims about naturalness, inevitability or necessity.
Thus it is useful to be able to evaluate these claims with true knowledge of
the human past and of the great variation that has existed in human societies.
The following are two examples.
The “Information Age” is not the sole product of the 20th
century. It goes all the way back. Technological change, such an important
aspect of our contemporary world, began (slowly) about 400,000 years ago when
hominids commenced to fashion stone tools. The information age began in earnest
when people started living inside their languages and using social abstractions
such as “ancestor” and “cousin” to order their lives. Human culture is a kind of virtual reality in which consciousness
is constructed out of language and socially produced images. Culture mediates
our relationship with nature and with one another, so that the world in which
we live is actually built out of symbols and socially created information.
(drawing of cave man with virtual reality gear on)
The original information age was one in which small groups of
people shared symbolic systems but language also made it possible for people to
pass information from group to group about the availability of game, and so
small bands of nomadic hunters formed networks with other such groups. Human consciousness became constructed
around socially shared language and each person lived in a virtual reality that
he or she also participated in shaping and in passing to the young. Story
telling and oral histories constructed the cocoon of meaning within which
individuals and groups lived their lives.
The costs of communication and transportation over greater distances
have decreased hugely, so that now we live in a global network of instantaneous
information flows. But the information
age, in the sense of humans constructing a world out of collectively defined
and shared words and images, is as old as language and kinship.
While we take the sedentary life as normal and see nomadic peoples
as unusual, until as recently as twelve thousand years ago all of the people of
the Earth were nomads. The invention of
village living – the precursor of city living – was first made by the
hunter-gatherers of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean whom archaeologists call
the Natufians. This occurred in about
10,000 B.C.E.[1] These first
sedentary peoples probably were the original inventors of fixed territorial
boundaries and collective property, institutions that are fundamental (in their
contemporary forms) for the operation of today’s global political economy.
The terms social change and social evolution are largely
synonymous, though there are some important differences. Both involve changes
in the behavior of people. Social change traditionally includes phenomena such
as fads, fashion cycles, architectural and literary styles, the diffusion of
cultural traits and innovations, social movements and revolutions. While these
phenomena are often involved, social evolution refers to the fundamental
reorganization of institutional structures such as the economy, the polity and
the ways in which resources are acquired, produced, distributed and
accumulated. Social change refers to any change in social processes or the
behavior of people, while social evolution refers to certain kinds of
directional changes in the structures of societies and intersocietal
systems. We will examine both social
change and social evolution.
But what about specific historical events and particular people?
How are they connected to social evolution?
In addition to telling the big story in structural terms we will peek
into the lives of particular people who contributed to social evolution, or
whose efforts show why some systems were not ready for structural change. These
“case studies” can help us to see how particular people, events and places are
related to the general patterns of
social change and evolution. Historians are fond of pointing to the fortuitous
or accidental complications of events.
The idea of conjuncture
refers to an unlikely coming together of factors that make social change
possible. Anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins (1985) has employed the notion
of the structure of the conjuncture
– how cultural institutions of different groups collide in historical events
and create new outcomes. The case studies presented here use the structure of
the conjuncture to show how particular events led (or in some cases did not
lead) to the reorganization of institutions.
Social
evolution is neither smooth, inevitable or housed in a single location. The
reorganization of institutions occurred in uneven bursts that were usually
followed by declines or collapses. They leap-frogged across wide spaces. The leading edge of the development of new
institutions moved, so that regions that were the most complex at one time,
were eclipsed at a later time by other regions .In many places there were
devolutions and evolutionary blind alleys that led back to smaller scale and
simpler social structures.
On
the other hand, parallel evolution, (the development of similar institutions in
different places) transpired in regions unconnected with one another, or only
very weakly connected. This shows that some parts of social evolution have a
deep structure that shows itself across social spaces. But seen as a whole the overall pattern was one of increasing
complexity, size, hierarchy and spatial scale.
This book examines these changes in more-or-less chronological order,
except that the New World societies attained state-formation much later than
the Old. Thus comparisons between
ancient Mexico (Mesoamerica) and ancient Western Asia (Mesopotamia) require a
chronological adjustment. This exception
aside, chronology and complexity proceeded in the same order as does this book.
Lastly,
we will examine the maco-micro links between large social structures and the
micro-processes of individuals. How is society imported into the psychology of
indivduals? How are the results of this importation fed back into the largest
social structures? While sociologists describe this process as “socialization”
they mostly discuss this process as it occurs within a single type of society
at a given point in time. We will discuss how socialization occurs over time.
For example we will examine how there is a basic movement in the concept of the
self from a collectivist self to an individualist self as a result of changes
in technology, economics and politics. We will also study how people’s
reasoning processes evolved over time also as a result of the invention of
coined money, the alphabet, the printing press and the computer.
Part I provides a conceptual framework for the rest of the story.
Chapter 1 explains how social evolution is different from biological evolution
and discusses the nature of institutional structures and the important
differences between normative, coercive and market-like forms of social
integration. It provides an overview of different theoretical approaches to
social evolution, its methods and types of evidence.
Chapter 2 introduces the
comparative world-systems perspective to be used in this book. This includes the nature of the
world-system, the definition of polities, and the different types of networks
that exist within systems and how systems expand and contract. In addition we
will examine the leading edges of change within world-systems and the forces
that drive societies to change.
At the microlevel you will be introduced to the basic ingredients
in building a social self, which include constructing a sense of subjectivity
and objectivity as well as an examination of the process of abstraction and its
social and historical nature.
Part II is about stateless
world-systems. States are institutional inventions. Many human societies and
many whole world-systems have existed in which there were no states. Indeed,
before about 5000 years ago there were no states on Earth. Chapter 3 describes the peopling of the
Earth and examines world-systems composed of solely of nomadic hunters. We discuss the emergence of language and culture,
the gender division of labor, adaptation to the disappearance of large game
animals (megafauna), and the emergence
of socially structured territoriality.
Chapter 4 examines the origins of sedentary living, the reduction of seasonal
migration patterns and the spending of more time in settled hamlets and
villages. These were small scale and very egalitarian societies of
hunter-gatherers (foragers). There were many different kinds of foraging
societies, but we will examine their attributes in the context of our knowledge
of larger scale societies. We consider the ways in which equality was
institutionally structured and how people resisted the emergence of hierarchy. We’ll make some educated guesses
about the nature of the “horizontal collectivist” self that went with these
social institutions as well as the nature of “concrete abstraction”.
Chapter 5 describes world-systems in which some of the societies
were engaged in simple farming – horticulture. It discusses the variable nature
of farmer-forager interactions and the emergence of big-man political
organization in which inequalities within societies were increasing. The relationship between aggressive
masculinity and warfare is discussed, as are the problems of population
pressure, depletion of natural resources, conflict and cannibalism. Chapter 6 focuses on systems of complex
chiefdoms, much larger and more hierarchical societies in which a class of
chiefs ruled over a class of commoners.
The problems of organizing hierarchy in the face of resistance are
discussed with a consideration of human sacrifice, sacred chiefs and elite
brother-sister marriage. The nature of intersocietal relations in
chiefdom-based world-systems is described, as are the processes of rise and
fall (centralization and decentralization) and the phenomenon of semiperipheral
marcher chiefdoms that attacked older core chiefdoms to construct larger
polities. We examine prestige goods
systems in which chiefs monopolized luxury imports in order to control the
labor of commoners. The rise of patriarchy and the control of marriage by
elites are also considered.
Part III examines world-systems that are far more similar to our
own in that states are the fundamental organizations that produce order. In
Chapter 7 explains the emergence of the first cities and states in systems in
which there were none, as well as the phenomenon of secondary state formation –
the formation of a state structure in a society that is already in interaction
with other states. The focus is on the
nature of early states and interstate systems,
as well as the role of theocracy in the original emergence of states.
The interaction between the temple and the palace (religious and
political/military leaders) provides an interesting window to examine the
nature of early state societies. We will have a close look at Mesopotamia, the
locus of the earliest cities and states, but will also consider other regions
in which parallel evolution led to the emergence of pristine states: Egypt,
Indus River Valley (Pakistan), China, Mesoamerica and Peru. These early states were the first to develop
irrigated agriculture, systems of writing, mass production industries and
codified law. The story is one of the
earliest instances of empire-formation– the Akkadian Empire of Sargon of Agade.
We will examine the nature of core/periphery relations in early state systems,
the spread of states and agriculture, the earliest forms of commercialization,
and the earliest semiperipheral capitalist city-states.
At
the micro-level we will discuss the emergence of a “vertical collectivist” self
and how this type of self was better suited to the caste and class
relationships of early states. Further, we’ll analyze how the impact of writing
systems, both picture writing and the alphabet affected people’s reasoning
processes. In addition the invention of coined money forced people to reason
more abstractly, at least the middle and upper classes.
Chapter 8 surveys the continuing spread of states and the
formation of larger conquest empires. Important topics are the expansion of
trade networks, the commercialization of production and trade, and the rise of
ever-larger empires by means of semiperipheral marcher state conquest. It was
the merger of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian world-systems that produced the
beginning of the Central System that eventually engulfed all others to form the
contemporary global political economy. Chapter 9 compares the Central System
with other large systems of empires, capitalist city-states and peripheral
peoples in Afroeurasia and the Americas and the emergence of a multicore
Afroeurasian system with synchronous processes of empire expansion and city
growth and decline. The important role of the steppe nomads of Central Asia in
the formation of the Central System is discussed.
Part IV is the story of the long rise of capitalism from the
beginnings of the invention of money and commodities to the contemporary global
capitalist political economy. Chapter
10 casts the rise of European hegemony in the context of the larger Afroeurasian
system. Europe had long been a peripheral area to the more developed
civilizations of the Near East (West Asia).
European hegemony and the transformation to a fully capitalist system
could not have occurred without the prior development of the institutions of
capitalism and the networks of commodified trade in the larger system. Indeed
Europe was another instance of semiperipheral upward mobility, but this time of
a whole region. We will consider the problem of European uniquenesses and similarities
and explanations of the “rise of the West” from a humanocentric perspective and
as an instance of continuing social evolution. The emergence of the hegemony of
the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century is considered in some detail as
the key development that led to the coming of a fully developed capitalism in
Europe. The Dutch Republic was not the first capitalist state, but it was the
first capitalist state that was not a city-state. It was the emergence of a
strongly capitalist political economy that allowed Europe to become hegemonic
over the other core and peripheral areas of the world-system, though Europe did
not outperform China until the late eighteenth century.
How
did the rise of capitalism effect people’s psychology? While the “vertical”
individualist self seems to have had its roots in the Axial Iron Age (600-500
BCE) this form of identity really came into its own with the development of
capitalism in Europe. At the same time the emergence of a completely secular
science, and the invention of the printing press paved the way for a still
higher level of abstract thinking for those classes who worked in the sciences
and were able to buy books and were taught how to read and write.
Chapter 11 focuses on the modern world-system in which we now
live. Its basic structures and processes are described and an overview of its
structural history is provided. The developmental trends and cyclical processes
of the modern system are explained. The hegemonies of the Dutch, the British
and the United States are compared and both the British and American stories
are told in more detail. The incorporation of the remaining regions of the
Earth by European expansion is described, as is the changing nature of
core/periphery relations in the modern world-system.
Part V discusses the institutional changes that have been
occurring recently in the modern system and applies the comparative
evolutionary world-systems approach to the question of probable and possible
futures. Chapter 12 describes important
institutional changes that have occurred in recent decades and places them in a
long run and comparative perspective.
For instance, technological styles have been radically transformed in a
series of industrial revolutions that have been produced by capitalist development. This is a speeded up continuation of the
technological evolution that has been happening in spurts of uneven development
for tens of thousands of years.
But the rate at which
capitalism revolutionizes technology is unique. We will discuss the pros and
cons of rapid technological change.
Similarly population growth is not a new phenomenon nor is it newly
important. But the rapid rate of recent demographic expansion and the global
limits of resources once again bring the problem of population pressure to the
fore. We will discuss the factors that
influence birth and death rates in the modern system in preparation for a
consideration of different possible solutions to future global overpopulation
in the following chapter. Chapter 12 discusses social movements and
revolutions, as well as waves of democratization that have occurred in the
modern world-system. It also examines the expansion of education, changes in
family structures and gender relations as well as problems of race relations,
nationalism and ethnic strife. Economic
and political globalization are also investigated and we consider the recent
victory of global capitalist ideology following the demise of the Soviet Union.
In
what ways have these rapid technological changes impacted the individualist
self and the forms of abstract reasoning? Is there a significant difference
between the individualist self during the industrial and the electronic ages?
How have the automobile and the development of cities after World War II
affected personal identity? How has the impact of the computer effected how we
reason? These topics are also a focus of Chapter 12.
Chapter 13 contemplates the future of the contemporary
world-system using the comparative and evolutionary approach. We discuss
contested nature of the idea of progress – the emergence of valued social
conditions -- and the question of whether or not there has been progress since
people began living in villages. We discuss the extent to which the structural
changes that have occurred in recent decades really represent fundamental
(evolutionary) change or are rather simply continuations of the cycles and
trends that have long operated in the modern world-system.
We consider how the normal
cycles and trends have produced hegemonic rivalry and wars among core powers in
the past and how recent changes may or may not have reduced the probability of
future world wars. We reckon the problem of the environmental limits to growth
and possible solutions, as well as the problem of increasing inequalities and
potential new struggles between the rich and the poor. And we consider the
possibility of transforming the existing world-system into a future global
commonwealth that is democratic and collectively rational.
What
kind of psychology is needed to build this global future commonwealth? What
changes in the evolution of the self and abstract reasoning would be necessary
to be capable of being part of this transformation? This is also the subject of
Chapter thirteen.
Nearly all the people of the Earth
have been involved in a single global system since the end of the nineteenth
century. This fact has become taken-for-granted consciousness with the latest
wave of global economic integration.
Everyone now either celebrates or derides the existence of a single
global political economy. This means
that citizenship, though it is now defined nationally, should be global because
the relevant political arena for
changing or resisting change is the global arena. The world polity is in
formation and all citizens will eventually be world citizens. Some already are.
This book is for world citizens.
C itizens of the world need to understand human history in order
to appreciate the glories and tribulations of the past and to intelligently
help to shape the future. The challenges that our species faces in the next
century are only unique in their dimensions.
Doom is not unique, for we are all individually doomed. There have been
many collective dooms as well. Many of the smaller world-systems that were
engulfed by the expanding Central system were annihilated. But for the first
time our whole species faces at least two rather probable dooms that are total
in the sense that human beings may not survive: a possible future war among
core states in which weapons of mass destruction are used; or a global
ecological catastrophe that makes human life on Earth impossible.
The array of possible solutions involves creative recombination of
the elements of past solutions that will be appropriate to the particular
nature of the coming problems. Dooms of the past and processes of social
evolution are the raw materials for creating solutions for the future. More
about this is the subject of the final chapter.
This book is addressed to the
general reader, and it is also an introduction to advanced studies for those
students who choose social science as a vocation. Social science is a calling that can help us get through the
sticky wicket of the twenty-first century and on to less stressful times. We do
not pretend to have all the answers. Rather the point is to provide a helpful
framework for finding good answers based on further theorizing, research and
political practice.
There is a glossary of terms that
are important for studying social change.
Terms in the glossary are underlined when they are first
introduced in the text.
Part I: The Framework
In order to understand the story of
human social change we will need a skeleton on which to hang the muscles,
sinews and organs of the narrative. The story is about structures and institutions,
and how they have changed. We will compare small, medium-sized and large
structures to one another, and in order to do this we need some abstractions –
concepts -- that will allow us to see the architecture of societies and
intersocietal systems.
The first chapter is about social
evolution in general and its relationship with human history. It is also about social science and its
relationship with humanism and values. The idea of institutions is introduced and the problems of free will and
determinism are visited. A spectrum of
different theoretical approaches to social change and evolution is reviewed and
the synthetic approach of institutional materialism is presented.
Chapter 2 introduces the concepts of
the comparative world-systems perspective – the spatial boundaries of
intersocietal systems, the idea of modes of accumulation, two basic dimensions
of core/periphery relations and some characteristic features of world-systems –
the rise and fall of intersocietal hierarchies and the pulsation (expansion and
contraction) of trade networks. The key
notion of semiperipheral development is also assembled. While these abstractions are illustrated
with examples, they still require grasping as analytical categories and
dimensions in order that we may use them to understand the processes of human
social evolution.
Chapter 3 introduces key ideas about
the social self as an institution, an invention that is produced by the world
historical action of individuals and the possibilities and constraints that
larger social structures provide. As social structures evolve so does the
institution of the social self, and the understanding of social psychology is
important for explaining social change.
Chapter 1: History and Social
Evolution
This chapter explains the philosophical and scientific principles
that will be the basis of our study of social change. It provides an overview of different theoretical approaches and
the basic concepts of institutional materialism, the sociological perspective
to social change that is employed in the rest of the book.
Science and Objectivity
The scientific study of social change
is not as straightforward as studying rocks or frogs. If we were extra-terrestrials sitting on the moon observing
Earthlings through a telescope it would not be hard to attain a high level of
objectivity. But each of us is a human
speaker of a particular language living in a specific place with a head full of
a particular cultural heritage and standing in a certain relationship with the
rest of the occupants of our planet. We are men or women, American or Chinese,
from New York or Bombay, Catholic or Moslem, Republicans or Greens, Hunt Club
or Bowling League. Objectivity is a key requirement of science, and yet we are
trying to be objective about our own history and ourselves.
Because absolute objectivity is impossible some people retreat to
what we would call “extreme relativism.” Some think that the enormity of this
problem means that social science is impossible, and so we should just surrender
to subjectivity and enjoy it. We
support another path, that is, relative objectivity. Relative objectivity does
not strive for absolute certainty, but probability. We try to attain a
sufficient degree of objectivity by becoming aware of the sources and strengths
of our prejudices for occasions when these prejudices might be getting in the way. To do this we need to understand how
science itself is a cultural product and how social processes influence
scientists. We need to place ourselves
in historical perspective and then to use that understanding as a basis for
examining our own biases. We need to be clear what the goals of social science
are, even if they are unreachable in any absolute sense.
It has been said that science should
be value-free in the sense that scientists should try to ascertain the
objective truth without allowing their beliefs about good and evil to influence
their judgments about what is true. We will maintain this distinction in what
follows. But science also has its own
values. It is a philosophical venture that has its own goals, which are
themselves taken on faith, or at least they are provisionally accepted. When we
play chess or basketball we agree to operate on the basis of the rules of the
game. When we do science it is
likewise. The philosophical presuppositions of science are not themselves
provable by means of science. Instead, they are values that we may choose to
affirm and defend.
The
main goals of the scientific study of social change are to understand the truth
about what happened in the human past and to build explanations of the patterns
of human behavior and social institutions. These explanations should be
objectively testable, meaning that empirical evidence must be relevant to
proving or disproving them. Ideally, our explanations should be as simple as
they can be while still accounting for the patterns of social change. Causal
propositions – assertions that A causes X --
can be evaluated using the comparative method (see below). Explanations will probably never be perfect,
but scientific progress means better and better approximations of the way
social change actually works.
Ideally this enterprise should approach social change from an
Earth-wide perspective rather than from the point of view of any particular
society or civilization. Modern science emerged from the European
Enlightenment’s encounter with the rest of the world during the rise of
European hegemony. This historical fact must be acknowledged and examined in
order for it to be transcended by a truly Earth-wide science of social change.
Social science should also
be objective with respect to the focus on human beings in relationship to other
forms of life. Humanism is a fine
ethical point of view, but social science should not presume that the human
species is superior to other life forms.
As social scientists we should focus on the human species without making
any presumptions about the value of that species for good or ill. Some scientists study amphibians and others
study humans.
Humanism And Values
But that is not all. In addition to
being scientists we are citizens, as well as members of families and
communities. The idea here is that each
of us plays more than one game, has more than one role, and we need to be clear
about which rules are which. A person
who is a social scientist during the day is a also parent and a citizen by
night – s/he wears more than one hat. But the operations of one game may have
implications for another. Good social science can be helpful for pursuing the goals
that are associated with these other roles as well.
The main focus of this book is to present the
best current practices of the science of social change, but in the final
chapter we will go beyond social science to suggest how what we know might be
used to bring about a more humane and sustainable world society. As citizens we are humanists, so we will
affirm that the survival of the human species is a desirable goal. This does not contradict what we have said
above about our scientific goals. Our
political and social values are choices and commitments that we have made, and
we recognize that these cannot be proven by science. But science may provide useful information for realizing
political and philosophical goals. Indeed, almost all modern political
philosophies make appeals to science for support of their views of human nature
and the possibilities for human society.
The important thing here is to not put the cart before the horse. In this text the science is first.
(insert drawing of person with two
hats: one says “scientist,” the other “humanist”)
Science need not claim to be the only
valid perspective on ultimate reality. In asserting the value of the scientific
approach against religious systems of thought early scientists often took an arrogant
stance that belittled other approaches to reality. Now that science itself is
the main religion of the emerging global culture a more agnostic and tolerant
philosophical stance is desirable, though this need not go to the extremes of
cultural relativism and subjectivism advocated by many of the
postmodernists. Science can be modest
and useful without the arrogance of scientism.
We
think the scientific method is best because it has the most self-correcting
devices for weeding out previous errors, and because it has the most built in
protective mechanisms against faulty reasoning and sloppy thinking. We think
that poetry, art and religion can also be used for inspiration and discovering
better ways to live. But we think science is the most reliable for discovering
relative truths and distinguishing our subjective states—our wishes, needs,
interests, fears and past experiences—from the way the world works.
The Comparative Method
All science is based on the
comparative method in the sense that causal connections are established by
comparing sequences of events. When it is possible to manipulate the processes
under study scientists do true experiments because isolating and simplifying
the operation of variables can test causality more reliably. If we want to know whether A causes X we
can experimentally manipulate A and see what happens to X and isolate X from
other influences to make sure that they are not falsely making it appear that A
influences X. If we wiggle A, X should wiggle if A really causes X. In most of
social science it is not feasible to carry out true experiments because we
cannot actually manipulate A, but we can still employ the logic of the
experimental method in order to examine causality. Thus we design our research as if we were manipulating variables
and we look for opportunities in nature in which processes seem to be
simplified and isolated. We measure
variables A and X and see if, in the course of events, a change in A seems to
regularly correspond with a change in X.
Or we observe a number of comparable cases and see if there is a
patterned relationship between A and X that might indicate causality. We can
also measure variation in other variables to try to infer how they may be
involved in the relationship between A and X.
So, for example, it is reasonable to posit that increasing
temperature causes ice to melt. This hypothesis can be tested experimentally by
putting some ice on the stove in a pot. But if we were unable to manipulate
temperature we could simply measure the temperature of the pot and also measure
the speed at which a cube of ice melts. We would then observe that ice melts
more rapidly on a warm days than it does on a cold days. By comparing the rate of ice melting on warm
and cold days we could establish that heat causes ice to melt more quickly even
without manipulating the causal variable. This is the quasi-experimental
comparative method.
The comparative method allows us to establish causality, albeit
less certainty that the experimental method.
We choose comparable cases or instances of the processes of social
change we care about, and then we measure the variables that we think are
causing the effect of interest, and we test causal propositions by studying
variation over space or time (or both).
Whether we study one case over time or several comparable cases at the
same time, we are employing a method that is fundamentally based on the logic
of experiments.
Figure 1.1: Does A
Cause X?
We use probabilistic logic rather than deterministic logic in our
models of social change. A
probabilistic statement says that A is likely to cause X a certain percentage
of the time. There is an explicit element of randomness or indeterminacy. A deterministic statement says that A always
causes X. We use probabilistic logic
for two reasons:
1.
because
there is usually error in our measurements of variables, and
2.
because
social action is itself probabilistic rather than deterministic.
Thus we do
not speak of “laws” of social change, but rather of causal tendencies.
Probabilistic logic is also used in
much of natural science, but it is even more important to use it in social
science because we are trying to predict and explain the behavior of
intelligent beings. The amount of indeterminacy
in the behavior of a billiard ball is considerably less than the amount of
indeterminacy in the behavior of a person.
If you tell a billiard ball your prediction of the path it will take
after bouncing off the side of the pool table, your statement cannot affect the
behavior of the ball. But if you tell a voter that she is likely to vote for
the Bullmouse Party, your prediction may influence her decision. Intelligent
beings are difficult subjects of scientific study. We need to take these
special problems into account in our efforts to explain and predict what humans
do. So we use probabilistic theories
and we try to understand the ways in which our subjects interpret their own
worlds.
Types of Evidence
The evidence that we use to study
social change over the long run is of several different kinds. For studying people who lived before the
invention of writing we use archaeological evidence – the remains of peoples’
lives as found in artifacts, evidence of what they ate, how they constructed
their habitations, the sizes of their settlements, etc. The accurate dating of
archaeological evidence is important for understanding sequences of development
and what was going on at the same time in different regions. We can often tell a great deal about patterns
of trade and interaction from the locations of artifacts made of raw material
for which we know the original site of procurement. For example, volcanic glass
(obsidian) can be chemically “finger-printed” so that it is possible to know
that a particular obsidian arrowhead originally came from a quarry far from
where the arrowhead was found. It is also possible to estimate the amount of
time that has passed since the arrowhead was made by measuring the thickness of
the “hydration rim,” which indicates how long a surface of obsidian has been exposed. By studying the composition of arrowheads
found at the site of an ancient village we can see how trade and procurement
patterns changed over time. And sometimes archaeologists find evidence of
proto-money, trade items that were used as media of exchange. Archaeological evidence cannot tell us
directly about what people thought or felt, but it does allow us to make
educated guesses about their social organization based on the remnants that
human occupation has left.
Ethnographic evidence is
that information that has been gathered by anthropologists who have studied
people who live in less complex societies that survived until the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The
ethnographers moved in with the remaining hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to study their languages, and their
material and ideological cultures. The
greatest use of this corpus of evidence for the study of social evolution is
the light that it sheds on the lives of people who lived thousands of years
ago, but it is important to realize that hunter-gatherers who managed to
survive until recently may not accurately represent of hunter-gatherers who
lived long ago. Obviously those who
have been long in contact with more complex societies are likely to have
adapted to these interactions in important ways that change the nature of their
institutions. Secondly even if these societies had no contact with more complex
societies they still have their own internal histories that are not identical with
other pre-state societies of the past (Kelly 19xx). The usage of ethnographic evidence to supplement archaeological
evidence needs to be cautious regarding this problem.
It is often possible to use the
written observations and records made by the first literate observers of
preliterate peoples (missionaries, etc), though the civilizational perspectives
of the observers usually bias these sources of information. Once societies have
developed writing we can decipher their own written records and documents as
sources of evidence about social institutions and practices. The first written
languages emerged along with the original invention of states in Mesopotamia
about 5000 years ago. Records and
documents were written on clay tablets that preserve rather well under dry
conditions. Ironically, the development of papers documents in later millennia
created a larger hole in the evidence because paper is more fragile than clay
tablets. Our documentary knowledge of the great Persian Empire of the Achaemenids
is largely confined to epigraphs -- inscriptions on stone monuments -- because
the paper (papyrus) documents have decayed.
We use documentary evidence in conjunction with archaeological evidence
to gain an understanding of the early civilizations. We also see the
development of formal systems of money and can infer much about ancient
economies and polities by studying coinage.
Ancient states began to gather
systematic evidence about their own finances and the populations under their
control. This evolved into the modern system of statistics, censuses and
national accounts that we use as evidence of social change. Sample surveys and
systematic studies of large populations allow us to be much more thorough and
precise about social changes that have occurred in the last half century. We can now use satellite data to study
large-scale social processes such as urbanization and global deforestation.
Social Evolution
Social evolution is most simply the
idea that social change is patterned and directional – that human societies
have evolved from small and simple affairs to large and complex ones. The idea
of social evolution has had a rough career in social science and it is still in
disrepute in some circles. Much of the problem has been that earlier formulations
of the idea embodied certain assumptions that are unscientific in nature. The
idea of progress means that some human societies are superior to others because
they are “more advanced.” The theory of progress has been used as a
justification by some people for dominating and exploiting others. The social
evolutionism of the British anthropologists of the nineteenth century presented
London (and Oxbridge) society as the highest form of human civilization and
depicted colonized peoples as savages and barbarians. Evolutionary ideas were
used to support a philosophy of social Darwinism in which the current winners
were depicted as better adapted and losers were portrayed as on the way to
extinction because of genetic and/or cultural deficiencies. More recently
Talcott Parsons’ (1966) version of structural/functional evolution presented
the United States in a similar light. We will consider to the theory of
progress in more detail below.
In reaction to these problems many
social scientists embraced a radical cultural relativism in which each society
was understood as a unique constellation of institutional practices. It was assumed that there were no inherently
superior social structures, but rather that all human cultures were equal,
though different from one another. The ethnographer Franz Boas was the greatest
proponent of this approach and modern anthropology was heavily influenced by
his stress on careful fieldwork that recorded the linguistic, spiritual and
material attributes of human societies.
The body of knowledge produced by following Boas’s approach is a vast resource for our
understanding of ways of life different from our own despite the cultural
biases and problems of objectivity of the ethnographers who have “tented with
the natives.”
Beginning in the 1940s there developed dissatisfaction with
cultural relativism and its lack of concern for developing a science of social
change and refusal to make comparisons between societies. Anthropologists like
Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service and Marvin Harris
began to develop a new evolutionary anthropology that corrected the problematic
aspects of earlier efforts, such as the confusion of evolution with progress.
Consequently, the rejection of social evolutionism has ebbed as the elements
that made it unscientific have been separated from the more basic notions of
patterned and directional change (Sanderson 1990).
There were three main problems with
social evolutionary thinking that needed to be rectified:
1.
Social
evolution is easily confused with biological evolution, and yet these are
largely distinct and different processes.
2.
Evolutionary
thinking has tended to involve teleological assumptions in which the purposes
of things have been asserted to be their cause.
3.
Evolution
has been confused with the idea of progress – the notion that things are
getting better.
Social
vs. Biological Evolution
Much confusion is generated by the failure to clearly distinguish
between social and biological evolution. Social (or cultural) evolution and biological evolution are different
processes, though they share some similar characteristics. Failure to recognize the important
differences often leads to theoretical reductionism in which social science is
subsumed as a sub-branch of biology and human behavior is seen as mainly
determined by genetic inheritance.
While biological evolution is based on the inheritance of genetic
material, social evolution is based on the development of cultural inventions. Both genes and cultural codes are information
storage devices by which the experiences and outcomes of one generation are
passed on to future generations. Social
evolution did not exist before the emergence of language. Animals that do not have the biological
ability to manipulate symbols and to communicate them do not experience the
process of social evolution. The human
animal is uniquely equipped to evolve socially because of the presence of the
relatively large unpreprogrammed cortex of the human brain. This unusual piece
of biological equipment makes possible the learning of complex linguistic codes
and their infinite recombination.
Humans have a lot of RAM
relative to ROM, whereas non-human animals have more ROM than RAM. In computers
RAM is RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY that can contain changeable software, whereas ROM
is READ-ONLY MEMORY that is permanently programmed at birth. This is another
way of saying that humans are less instinctual than non-humans. Ants live in large and complex societies,
but their behavior in these is largely instinctive. Their social structures are
hard-wired, and the architecture of their mounds is rigidly bound by the
instinctive behaviors of mound building. Humans learn the cultural software
that enables them to build large and complex societies and the plan is coded in
language and symbolic plans that may be modified without having to wait for the
evolution of new instinctive behaviors.
Language itself has an instinctive basis and this is why speakers of all
natural languages share a somewhat similar grammatical structure. But this
biological ability makes possible the great variation that we see in meaning
systems and social institutions.
When
early humans developed stone tools they did not need to genetically select for
carnivorous teeth in order to become hunters.
Thus cultural evolution allowed humans to occupy new niches and to adapt
in new ways without waiting for biological evolution. This slowed down the rate
of already-slow biological evolution of human genes.
There are other rather large and
important differences between biological and social evolution: In biological
evolution the source of innovations is the random process of genetic mutation,
while in social evolution recombinations and innovations occur both
accidentally and intentionally as people try to solve problems. This is not to say that social evolution is
entirely rational or even intentional, because many social changes occur as the
unintended consequences of the actions of many individuals and groups. But the
important point here is that, compared with genetic mutation, social innovation
contains an important element of intentionality.
Another big difference is in the rate of change. Biological
evolution takes a long time, while social evolution is much faster and is
accelerating. Biological evolution occurs slowly because it is dependent on
mating and reproduction and on those few unusual genetic mutations that are
adaptive. Social evolution is
accomplished by means of cultural inventions, and these can spread from group
to group. Societies can “mate” and
exchange cultural code, whereas species cannot naturally exchange genetic
information.
Another difference is in the relationship between simpler and more
complex forms. In biological evolution
simple one-celled forms of life co-evolve along with more complex multi-celled
organisms. Indeed, they seem to thrive.
Viruses and bacteria are doing just fine. In social evolution the situation is
vastly different. Larger and more complex societies wipe out small-scale
societies. There is not co-evolution of small and large. Rather states and
empires destroy stateless societies
(e.g. hunter-gatherer bands) by either killing off their members or by
assimilating them into state-based societies, or both. The plight of the indigenous Americans is an
obvious example. Anthropologists have
termed this the “law of cultural dominance.”
It is not a natural law in the sense that it is impossible for more
powerful cultures to allow less powerful ones to survive, but this has not
happened to any appreciable extent.
Despite these differences social evolution is not completely
different from biological evolution: both rely on information storage to pass
the experiences of one generation on to another; both are mechanisms whereby
individuals and groups adapt to changing environments or exploit new
environments; in both more adaptive changes drive out less adaptive
characteristics through competition.
And there is one more similarity. In both biological and social evolution
more complex systems develop out of simpler
systems.
Similarities
Information transfer across
generations
Adaptation to environments
Competition drives out less adapted forms
More complex forms develop out of simpler forms
Differences
Biological
Evolution Social
Evolution
Genetic Inheritance Cultural
inheritance
Change through genetic mutation Change
through cultural inventions
Propagation of innovations Propagation
of innovations by
by means of mating diffusion of information
Slower rate of change Faster
rate of change
Co-evolution of simple and complex Complex drives out simple
Table 1.1: Summary of Similarities and Differences
Between Social and Biological Evolution
So cultural and biological evolution are quite different processes,
and it is important to understand this distinction because the word “evolution”
is often used in ways that cause confusion.
Many of the claims of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are
exaggerations of the extent to which human actions are instinctive and based on
biological evolution. While there is undoubtedly a biological basis of human
behavior (as discussed above and in Chapter 3) the idea of human nature is itself a culturally constructed notion that
has powerful effects in legitimating social institutions. And yet, to argue
that human behavior is less instinctive than the behavior of other animals does
not require that we deny the biological basis of human actions. There are
clearly constraints, as well as possibilities, that emanate from our bowels and
our brain stems. But social and
cultural evolution has radically reconstructed these constraints.
Regarding the relationship between biological and social
evolution, it is obvious that there would have been no cultural evolution if
the human species had not evolved the ability to speak and a brain capable of
storing and reconfiguring complex codes and symbols. These were the key developments that allowed culture to emerge. Once culture emerged it acted back upon
biological evolution. Social structure
has taken over as the main determinant of humans and other life forms survive
and prevail. Domestication and selective breeding of animals and plants as well
as the cultural and social control of human reproduction have greatly affected
biological evolution, and now the emergence of biotechnology (genetic surgery,
cloning and genetic engineering by means of gene-splicing) will transform a
goodly portion of biological change into cultural evolution by adding intention
and by allowing the diffusion of genetic material across species for the first
time.
Teleology
and Unilinear Evolution
Teleology is a form of explanation in which the purpose of a thing
is alleged to be its cause. The most
famous teleological explanation is that order in the universe is a consequence
of the will of God. Aristotle contended that all of nature reflects the
purposes of an immanent final cause.
Regarding teleology and history, we think there is a structure to
history and there are definite trends, but we do not claim there is an
underlying purpose to history that is separate from the many purposes of the
historical actors. In the last chapter we argue that it is possible in the
future for the human species to take conscious control of its own collective
social evolution, but this is only a possibility.
The problem is that general purposes of the universe or of history
cannot be scientifically demonstrated to exist. Science is limited to knowledge
of proximate causation. The causes
of an effect must be demonstrably present or absent in conjunction with the
presence or absence of the thing to be causally explained. Proving causality requires temporal or
spatial variation. General statements about characteristics of the universe
that are invariably present cannot serve as scientifically knowable causes
precisely because they do not vary. A scientific approach to social evolution
cannot assert final causes or ultimate purposes. It proposes causal
explanations that are empirically testable and falsifiable with evidence about
human history and social change.
Another unscientific characterization of historical processes is
inevitabilism or the idea that history is the result of an unfolding process in
which stages follow one from another in a necessary order, like the pages of a
book. Another term for this kind of
theory is unilinear evolution. Much of
the rhetorical power of Marxism came from the stage theory of history that
alleged that socialism and communism would inevitably supersede capitalism.
Thus hard-working revolutionaries could claim to have history on their
side. Now, ironically, Marxism has
itself been thrown into the dustbin of history and the ideologues of capitalism
claim that socialism is an outdated ideology that was produced by the strains
of transition from traditional to modern society and global capitalism. All
stage theories need to be treated with skepticism, but this does not mean that
we should abandon the effort to see the patterns of social change.
The probabilistic approach to social change adopted above disputes
the scientific validity of inevitabilism. This is not the same as arguing that
there are no directional patterns of social change or that all outcomes are
equally probable. But it is important to know that scientific social change theory
is about probabilities, not inevitabilities.
Social evolution has not been a process in which a single society goes
through a set of stages to arrive at the most developed point. It has been
uneven in space and time.
For example when some hunter-gatherers (foragers)[2]
began to practice horticulture all foraging societies did not automatically
switch over to horticulture. Hunters and farmers existed side by side, changing
each other. So too, when agrarian
states emerged all hunter-gatherers and village horticulturists did not cease
to exist. Agrarian empires and nomadic societies continued to interact and to
mutually affect each other. Further, societies that were at the highest level
of complexity at one point often collapsed in a later period, and the emergence
of larger, more hierarchical and more complex societies occurred
elsewhere. This uneven pattern of
development is one of the most important aspects of the evolution of
world-systems.
In denying that social evolution is
inevitable we argue for relative, rather than absolute contingency. While contingency and unexpected events can
alter the course of human history fundamentally, they are not completely
unconstrained. For instance, the fact that Karl Marx and Fredrich Engles were
born in Europe at roughly the same time was an historical accident. But even if
these friends and co-workers in the critique of capitalism had never know one
another, the constraints of industrial capitalism on workers and the
possibilities that capitalism creates for working class opposition (e.g. being
able to meet at the same place at the same time in factories) would very likely
have generated a socialist movement.
The
fate of the dinosaurs, destroyed by the impact on Earth of a large asteroid,
powerfully reminds us of the potential importance of unexpected events. But what appears to us as a totally random
and exogenous event on a human scale may be more systemic on a larger scale. In
the case of asteroids, some astronomers claim that comets and their debris
(asteroids) periodically cross the path of the Earth causing catastrophes that
have repeatedly affected the evolution of life. Acknowledging contingency does
not prevent us from searching out the more likely patterns of development in
both the past and the future, or the trajectories that social change is likely
to take in the absence of catastrophic events.
Progress
and Social Evolution
The
“progress” theory of evolution that came out of the European Enlightenment
claimed that whichever society came later in time must be better. Also,
beginning in the 1960’s, there developed a kind of reverse theory of progress
that grew out of the Romantic Movement in Europe that we call “degeneration
theory.” This theory whose major advocates are Paul Radin and Stanley Diamond,
contends that earlier societies are superior to later societies. Many
ecologists, anarchists and Neo-pagan feminists are advocates of this
degeneration theory.
Progress is not a scientific idea in
itself because it involves evaluations of the human condition that are
necessarily matters of values and ethics.
The idea that a world populated by humans is better than a world in
which they are absent is an esthetic or ethical matter of choice. Even the idea that warm and well-fed humans
are better off than cold and hungry ones, or that long, healthy life is better
than short disease-ridden existence -- these too are value choices, albeit ones
that would be widely agreed upon by most people. When we turn to matters of
religion, family form, cuisine, or the ideal degree of social equality it is
more obvious that we have entered the world of value decisions. One of the biggest problems with many
theories of social evolution is that they have tended to be permeated with assumptions
about what is better and worse and many have simply assumed that evolution
itself is a movement from worse to better.
And with this powerful element embedded in them evolutionary theories
have served as potent justifications of conquest, domination and exploitation.
We have already pointed out that this problem was the main one that led the
second generation of anthropologists to reject social evolutionism in favor of
a strong dose of cultural relativism.
The collapse of an agricultural
state into a tribal village is seen as a catastrophe. According to Tainter
(1994:193) “A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler,
less stratified and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and
there is less social control. The flow of information drops, people trade and
interact less … population levels tend to drop.” But how catastrophic this is must be determined on a case-by-case
basis. Tainter argues that a popular version of this scenario is a war of all
against all: the weak are victimized; physical strength determines who will
rule; and survival is the only aim of those who are left. The notion that
collapse is catastrophic is prominent among archaeologists, classicists and
historians as well.
The collapse of complex societies,
Tainter claims, is often instigated by the lower classes. As a complex society
continually deteriorates some social sectors sense that the benefits of
withdrawal or passive resistance outweigh the benefits of continued support.
Collapse is more likely to be understood as catastrophic by those groups who
are not primary food producers and who extract land, labor and goods from the
lower classes.
Theories of progress are still important ideological elements in
the world of politics, and so ideas about social evolution are still susceptible
to being used badly. But so are other products of science and humanistic
endeavor. Physicists are painfully
aware of how the knowledge they have produced has been turned into the threat
of nuclear holocaust. Historians, even
those who studiously avoid making generalizations about the human predicament,
may find their interpretations of historical events turned to uses of which
they disapprove. Neither scientists nor
humanists can control the usage to which their works are put.
This said, if we agree on a list of
desirable ends that constitute our notion of human progress, then it can be a
scientific question as whether things have improved with respect to this list,
or which kind of society does better at producing the designated valuables. The list is one of preferences, not
scientifically determinable, but philosophically chosen. This list may be my
personal preferences, or some collectively agreed upon set of preferences. This
approach to the problem of progress will be considered near the end of this
book when we ask about the implications of our study of social change for world
citizens.
The notion that it is plausible to
formulate general theories of social evolution is given credence by the
observation that many instances of parallel evolution have occurred. Parallel
evolution means that similar developments have emerged under similar
circumstances, but largely independently of one another. If horticulture (planting) had only been
invented once, and then had diffused from its single place of invention, it
might be argued that this was merely a fortuitous accident. But horticulture
was invented independently several times in regions far from one another.
Similarly states and empires emerged in both the Eastern and Western
hemispheres with little interaction between the two despite that the emergence
of states in the Western hemisphere occurred some three millennia later than in
the Eastern. It is also quite likely that the emergence of states in East Asia,
near the bend of the Yellow River in what is now China, occurred largely
independently of the earlier emergence of states in West Asia, in the region
that we call Mesopotamia (now Iraq). The significance of important instances of
parallel social evolution is that they imply that general forces of social
change are operating. Our task is to determine with evidence which conditions
and tendencies were the most important causes of these developments.
Theories of Social Change
Theories of long-term social change
differ from one another in two basic ways. One is the extent to which they
posit qualitative as opposed to merely quantitative change. And the other is
the extent to which they emphasize a single master variable that is allegedly
the main cause of change.
Some theories posit a single logic
of social change that is thought to adequately describe the important processes
in all types of human societies and in all periods of time. Others argue that
the logic of social change has itself altered qualitatively, and so that a
model that explains, for example, the emergence of horticulture, is not
adequate for explaining the emergence of capitalism. Those who see long-run continuities of developmental logic are
called “continuationists,” while those who posit the existence of fundamental
reorganizations of the logic of social change are called
“transformationists.” Continuationists
contend that similar processes of social change have operated for millennia,
while transformationists see qualitative reorganizations of the processes of
change as having occurred. The content of the models within each of these
categories is quite variable depending on what sorts of social change are seen
as most central or powerful – the master variables. It is also possible to
combine these two alternatives, as we do below.
The master variables can be broadly
categorized as either cultural or material, but within each of these two boxes
there are several significant subtypes.
Culturalists often emphasize the importance of the ways in which values
are constructed in human societies, and so they focus on religion or the most
central institutions that indicate the consensual and most powerful value
commitments of a society. From this point of view the most important kind of
social change involves redefinition of what is alleged to exist (ontology[3]),
and changes in ideas about good and evil.
Culturalists understand social evolution as the reorganization of
socially institutionalized beliefs. For example, the important changes in
social evolution are understood to have been the transitions from the animistic
philosophy of the hunter-gatherer band to the radical separation of the natural
and supernatural realms in early states, and then the rise of the “world
religions,”[4] followed
by the emergence of formal rationality and science – the dominant “religion” of
the modern world. Culturalists see
other social changes as consequences that follow from these most fundamental
transformations of ideational culture.
Materialists focus primarily on the
tangible problems that all human societies face and the inventions that people
employ to solve these problems. They stress the fact that humans must eat and
that in order for human groups to survive they must provide enough food and
shelter to allow babies to be born and to grow up. Thus all human societies have demographic and economic needs, and
the ways in which these requirements are met are important determinants of
other aspects of social life.
Materialists assert that human societies need to adapt to the natural
environment and to the larger social environment in which they compete and
cooperate with other human societies. They stress the importance of local and
regional environmental and geographical factors in structuring human societies.
Materialists often differ as to which material problem is seen as
most crucial and determinant. Some emphasize demographic and ecological
constraints, while others focus on technologies of production or of power. Technologies of production are those techniques
and practices by which resources are acquired or produced from the natural
environment. Technologies of power are
those institutions that create and sustain hierarchies within human societies
and that allow some societies to conquer and dominate other societies.
Institutional Materialism
The theoretical approach that we
employ is termed “institutional materialism,” a synthetic combination of
culturalist and materialist approaches. Institutional materialism explains
human social evolution as an adaptive response to demographic, ecological and
economic forces in which people devise institutional inventions to solve
emergent problems and to overcome constraints.
Institutional inventions include ideological constructions such as
religion as well as technologies of production and power. Technologies of production are such things
as bows and arrows, the potter’s wheel and hydroelectric dams. Technologies of
power are such things as secret societies, special bodies of armed men, methods
of keeping records of who has paid taxes, tithes or tribute, as well as
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Solving problems at one level
usually leads to the emergence of new problems, and so the basic constraints of
societies are never permanently overcome, at least so far. Institutional materialism sees a
geographical widening of the scale of ecological and social problems created by
social evolution rather than a transcendence of material constraints. It also acknowledges the importance of
environmental and geographical factors in both constraining and facilitating
social change. This is what allows us to construct a single basic model (see
Chapter 2) that represents the major material forces that have shaped social
evolution over the last twelve millennia.
As
mentioned above, institutions are inventions that are made by people for
solving problems. Many of the taken-for-granted aspects of our world are social
institutions that have been constructed by people in the past. The most basic social institution of all is
language. We all learn a language when we are children, a particular language
with particular meanings and connotations.
Our “mother tongues” are social constructions invented by people who
spoke and made meaning in the past, including those who raised us and those who
taught them. Our particular languages are central institutions that heavily
influence our understanding of what exists, what is possible, what is good and
what is evil. Other basic institutions
that are historical inventions are money, the family (kinship) and productive
technology.
Institutions in the sociological sense are
more than just hospitals or schools. They include less tangible processes like
verbal language, the non-verbal codes such as gestures, styles of clothing, and
the customs that govern everyday life. Institutional materialism analyzes the interactions between the
material aspects and necessities of human life and the invention of culturally
constructed institutions.
It
is common to believe that whatever power social institutions have over us, they
stop at the doorstep of our psyche (the personality or the self). After all,
the psyche is our private business and ours to determine. At best most of us
will grant that our social institutions may interact with our psyche, but
basically we have “free will” to make up our own minds and to form whatever
identities we choose.
How
do we imagine the relationship between social institutions and our
psychological states---beliefs, memories, emotions, thinking processes,
perceptions? It is tempting to imagine that we wear a mask to fulfill our
social obligations. Our selves play the role of a good worker on the job, a
good parent (or child) at home, a good drummer in our band, but these are only
superficial outer layers that clothe our “real selves” which we are when we are
alone. We think this view is mistaken.
Human
societies contain many socializing influences. Some of these compliment each
other, but often they conflict. We import various combinations of these
institutional forces like mass media, school and sports inside us, and in the
early years of life they dominate how we form our identities and how we think.
As we grow older we do not transcend these influences to become a “real”
individual. We become more critical about which social institutions we allow to
influence our identity and our thinking but our psychology is never really a
private matter, nor is it mainly a product of our own action. The self is born
in the crossfire between society and biology. Society does not just interact
with our psyche; it forms and sustains it. This occurs in two ways:
socialization and certification.
Socialization involves a learning process in which the
individual acquires skills and attitudes appropriate to social action.
Certification is a process of socially sanctioned labeling in which the
linguistic categories are learned and social initiation rites are performed to
move the person from one socially defined position (status[5])
into another. Certification involves learning the socially prescribed
definitions of positions such as dad, mom, uncle, checkout clerk, etc. Then
social identity bestowal rituals such as passing a test, getting married,
graduation from college, are performed that locate persons in positions.
Identity is conferred in socially legitimated rituals in which both the
individual and important others agree that one has become a e.g. “doctor.” In simple societies initiation rituals make
a girl into a woman, and boy into a man. In rationalized societies this is
organized as a series of steps that we call grades in school, but both the
ritual certification and the socialization aspects are important elements of
producing the self.
The
process of socialization is learning skills, manipulating tools, learning how
to take on roles, how to understand and deal with status hierarchies, how to
properly respond to situations. Only then can we sensibly participate in
families, schools, hospitals and grocery stores. Socialization can be
understood as occurring in three stages. In the first stage we are dependent on
other people in a local face-to-face context. Our friends or parents hold the
bicycle as we try to ride. If we want to learn to bake cookies we may start out
helping our dad in the kitchen making them together and being assigned simple
tasks. As these skills accumulate there comes a point where the cooperative
social activity is mastered enough to be internalized. You can ride your bike
or make cookies by yourself. This is second stage involves internalization.
The
third stage again involves cooperative activity with others, but now in an
expanded way. You take the skills you have internalized and apply them to a
wider social context than the original place you learned them. In the case of
learning to bake cookies you might be asked to participate in a garage sale in
the neighborhood and be responsible for baking cookies for the sale. Now you
must stretch your skills beyond what you originally learned. You must bake more
cookies; consider making types of cookies that others may like even if you and
your dad do not like them. This is called the global interpersonal stage.
The
three stages of learning are a) local interpersonal b) internalization c)
global interpersonal. These stages originate in social institutions, are
imported into the psychology of an individual and hence return to larger social
institutions. In stages one and two individuals are the product of
institutions, in stage three, institutions are co-produced by the actions of
these individuals as we work in these institutions. As we shall see, the self,
in the sense of our idea of our individual identity and how we think—how we
take in information, explain, analyze and evaluate—is an institution too. Though individuals in our view do not have
free will, they do have autonomy and agency. Autonomy means we sometimes make
creative choices about how the three stages of learning occur. Agency means
that we have some degree of choice in how we engage the institutions that form
our being. Even dissent and counter-conformity are rooted in social
institutions, except that these institutions are against the dominant
institutions. Choice is a matter of which institutions you draw from and how
you combine these influences. Thus the self is self-constructed to some extent,
but the raw materials are mainly those provided by society.
One type of social institution, social structure, is the main
focus for the study of social change. Individuals are born and die and so all
societies are composed of structures in which individuals either reproduce
institutions in much the way that they have been in the past, or they alter
these institutions. The easiest way of conceptualizing social structure is as
an organizational chart in which the various positions that constitute the
organization are shown along with their relationships with one another.
Figure 1.3: Social Structure Depicted as the
Organization Chart of a Football Team
All formal organizations and bureaucracies are explicitly
conceptualized as constellations of social positions (statuses) in which
different individuals occupy the various positions. So a football team has a
quarterback, and a halfback and a center and etc. Specific duties are assigned
to these positions, and a particular player is evaluated in terms of how well
or poorly he or she carries out the duties associated with the position. Sociologists point out that informal as well
as formal groups may be viewed as having social structures. A group of friends having lunch may be
understood as performing certain scripts appropriate to equals who care about
one another, with a degree of improvisation thrown in to constitute genuineness
and agency. All social groups are
constituted in this way as organizations with rules and assumptions.
This structural view of human society focuses on the rules and
definitions that provide the boundaries within which individuals carry out and
reproduce social structures. But these
structures also change, and the study of social change is, in large part, the
effort to explain why structures change in the ways that they do.
Social structures are held together by three basic kinds of
institutional “glue.” Institutions that
make human behavior somewhat predictable produce social order. In order to compete, fight or cooperate with
others I need to be able to guess what they will do in reaction to what I
do. There are three basic institutional
inventions that facilitate relatively stable expectations about the behavior of
others:
1.
normative
regulation in which people agree about the proper kinds of behavior,
2.
coercive
regulation in which institutionalized sanctions are applied to discourage
behavior that is considered to be inappropriate;
3.
market
regulation in which individuals are expected to maximize their returns in
competitive buying and selling.
Normative regulation based on consensus about proper behavior is
the original institution of social order.
It requires a shared language and a good deal of consensus about basic
values and proper behavior. Individuals learn the rules and internalize them
and regulate themselves and others with appeals to the moral order. This works
well in small societies in which people interact with one another frequently
and on a relatively egalitarian basis.
It works less well (by itself)
in larger societies that require that culturally different and spatially
separated peoples cooperate with one another.
Coercive institutions (but not coercion) were invented with the
rise of social hierarchies.
Institutions such as the law do not require that each individual know or
agree with the law. Thus they work better for integrating communities that do
not share common cultures and moral orders.
Legal regulation is backed up by legitimate violence, the right of the
lord or the king to enforce the law by means of punishment and prisons. Special bodies of armed men are used to
enforce decisions made by states, as well as to engage in conflict with other
societies. Courts are part of the
institutionalization of coercion as an important form of social regulation.
Market regulation emerged even more recently with the invention of
money and commodities. Market regulation, like institutionalized coercion, does
have a basis in presumed norms, but these norms themselves only provide the
basic framework for interaction. They do not require agreement about much,
except that money is useful. Markets
articulate the actions of large numbers of buyers and sellers without requiring
these players to identify with one another or even to agree about the general
rules of legality. Markets are institutions
that allow for relatively peaceful cooperation and competition among peoples
that are spread over wide distances and who have rather different cultures.
Much of the sociology of
roles, statuses and social structures is based on the assumption that normative
regulation is operating, but many social structures operate in the absence of
much consensus because they are regulated by coercive or market
institutions. The invention of these
institutional forms of regulation have made organized social interaction
possible on a greater and greater spatial scale until now we have a single
global network in which all three kinds of regulation play important
parts. The story of how these
inventions came about is central focus of the study of social evolution.
The structuralist approach that is an important part of
institutional materialism is not, contrary to what some critics have alleged, a
necessarily deterministic approach to social life that eliminates the
possibility of human freedom. Institutional structuralism allows us to
understand the constraints that our own cultures have placed upon us so that,
to some degree, we can transcend these constraints. We see socially constructed institutions as human inventions that
both empower us and constrain us in certain ways. The fact that the U.S.
government has purchased, graded and maintained a piece of property that is
3000 miles long and 200 feet wide (I-70/I-80) makes it possible for me to drive
from Baltimore to San Francisco in less than three days, while my great-grandparents
took three months to make the same trip.
This is technological and institutional empowerment. But the same Interstate highway system means
that the U.S. has invested a huge amount of money, energy, property and human
labor into a particular kind of transportation network that might become
obsolete due to some future change in technology or in the cost of energy.
The canals of Venice or Amsterdam represent sunk costs that could
not easily be reconstructed when transportation technology changed. Our religions, the ways in which we have
defined male and femaleness, the huge psychic investments in nationalistic
sentiments, the expensive rituals by which we demonstrate our commitments to
some people and our enmities to others -- all these institutionalized aspects
of our society make it possible for us to do some things, and very difficult to
do others. This is both empowerment and
structural alienation. The analysis of
institutional structures makes it possible to understand how our history has
constructed us and what we may need to do to reconstruct the future.
Institutional materialism is a synthetic theoretical focus that
draws from several social science disciplines: history, anthropology,
sociology, political science, economics, demography and geography. This will be
combined with social geography as it has emerged from the comparative
world-systems perspective, the main topic of the next chapter. These tools will help us to see the broad
patterns as well as the unique aspects of different kinds of societies in the
processes of social change.