#37 Gellner’s Fundamental Structure of History
A Base Typology, 3 Stages, 3 Activities spanning 5 pages, all ages
Gellner wrote:
Mankind has passed through three principal stages: (i) hunting/gathering; (2) agrarian society; (3) industrial society. No law ordains that every society must pass through each of these stages. There is no obligatory developmental pattern. Societies can and do remain stuck in any one stage. What is the case, however, is that the transition to (3) is not conceivable directly from (1), and that regression from (3) to (2), or from (2) to (1), though conceivable, is improbable, and rare …
… These three kinds of society differ from each other so radically as to constitute fundamentally different species, notwithstanding the very great and important diversity which also prevails within each of these categories. It is as well to give a brief characterization of each of them.
Hunters/gatherers are defined by the fact that they possess little or no means for producing, accumulating and storing wealth. They are dependent on what they find or kill. Their societies are small, and are characterized by a low degree of division of labour.
Agrarian societies produce food, store it, and acquire other forms of storable wealth. The most important forms of such wealth, other than stored nourishment, are the means of producing further nourishment and other goods (tools), means of coercion (weapons), goods of "symbolic value", and various objects which assist or culturally enhance the quality of life. These societies are capable of growing to a great size. The need for a labour force and defence personnel inclines them to place high value on procreation, and consequently they display a tendency to push their population to a danger point, in which population presses against the limits of available resources, and is liable to suffer famine if those resources fail.
Agrarian societies tend to develop complex social differentiation, an elaborate division of labour … In the societies which make up what we shall call Agraria, innovation does occur, but not as part of some constant, cumulative and exponential process. Agraria values stability, and generally conceives the world and its own social order as basically stable. Some agrarian social forms at least seem to be deliberately organized so as to avoid the dangers of possibly disruptive innovations. Ancestors, or past institutional forms, perhaps in idealized versions, are held up as the moral norm, the prescriptive ideal.
An industrial society proper is one in which the production of food becomes a minority occupation, and where production is generally based on a powerful and above all continuously growing technology, such as is perfectly capable of outstripping population growth if necessary, and often does so. The notion of industrial society (sometimes, for brevity, Industria), is here used in a broad and generic sense, going far beyond nineteenth century …
… Agraria was based on one discovery, namely the possibility of food production. Other discoveries or innovations were contingent, and did not come, if indeed they came at all, in any sustained and continuous stream. They came at best as single spies and never as battalions. Industria, by contrast, is not based on any one discovery, but rather on the generic or second-order discovery that successful systematic investigation of Nature, and the application of the findings for the purpose of increased output, are feasible, and, once initiated, not too difficult. The nature of its technology ensures that Industria is characterized by the presence, though not necessarily the exclusive presence, of very large productive organizations. The need to innovate means that Industria is marked not merely by a complex division of labour, but also by a perpetually changing occupational structure.
Some measure of coercion and legitimation is inherent in human societies. It is a simple corollary of the fact that the structure of human societies is not dictated by the human genetic potential: the range of possibilities is so very wide for populations of identical or similar genetic composition. Hence a structure, no longer imposed by nature, must be imposed by some other mechanism. Coercion can be assumed to be one element in it, and legitimacy and conviction another.
The process of legitimation is very often a perfectly humdrum thing. We ought not to think only of great inspired seers and prophets or systematizers, who impose their vision or their code on their fellow men, by some magical charm attaching to their person or their doctrine or both. An equally valid specimen of legitimation is something as humdrum as a cinema usherette, who leads the ticket holder to his appointed place, and without whom audiences would be inconvenienced by chaos. The capacity to assign a place without being challenged is the paradigm off legitimacy. Coercers and legitimators are complementary. Legitimators are underwritten by a given power situation; but equally, the balance of power depends on the nature and size and position of groupings, which in turn are built up by the humble daily activities of the ushers and usherettes of each society, who lead men to their places. Owing to their size and complexity, agrarian societies inevitably possess coercion and legitimation systems of a kind more elaborate than was available to their preagrarian predecessors. Industrial society, on the other hand, is characterized, or perhaps indeed is defined, by a very distinctive form of coercion and a division of labour, in some ways simpler, in others more complex than those of the agrarian world …
…. The division of history into periods, like any kind of classification, is to be seen primarily as more or less useful, rather than straightforwardly true or false. It seems to me that the three-stage scheme offered here — hunting/gathering, agrarian production, and industrial production — is, in the light of modern knowledge, far more useful, and in that sense valid, than its rivals. In so far as our own schema deploys a definition of the three stages in terms of their productive base, should it be considered a form of economic determinism? Not so. The contention is that the economic or productive base does indeed determine our problems, but that it does not determine our solutions. The evidence seems to show that both hunting/gathering and agrarian societies come in a very wide, indeed bewilderingly wide, diversity of forms. The same seems to hold for the new species of industrial society.
So our position is "materialist" only in the sense that it assumes and claims that each of the three crucial productive bases — hunting/gathering, agriculture, scientific/industrial production — bestows on the societies which use it radically different sets of problems and constraints, and hence, that societies of these three different kinds can usefully be treated as three fundamentally different species. But the argument makes no preliminary assumptions as to which sphere of human activity — production, coercion, cognition — is crucial, either in the maintenance and continuity of societies or in bringing forth new forms.
The only thing that is perhaps obvious is that the two very great transitions — the neolithic and the industrial revolutions — cannot plausibly be attributed to conscious human design and plan. In each case, the new social order, due to be ushered in by history, was so radically discontinuous and different from its predecessor, within which its gestation had taken place, that it simply could not be properly anticipated or planned or willed. Those who sowed knew not what they would reap, nor did those who abandoned the plough and sword for trade, production and innovation. This point in no way applies, of course, to the subsequent diffusion of a new social order, once established and successful in one location. On the contrary: once a new and visibly more powerful order is in existence, it can be, and commonly is, consciously and deliberately emulated. Those who emulate may also end up with more than they intended and bargained for, but that is another story …
Production, Coercion, Cognition: The three great stages of human history provide one of the two dimensions for our approach. The other is given by the fundamental classification of human activities: production, coercion, cognition … Our concern will be with the transformation and interrelation of production, coercion and cognition. We shall follow them through the three stages, with all their internal varieties, and across the two great leaps.
The Source:
Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History, University of Chicago Press, 1988 [pp. 16-21]