Anthony Giddens, Evolution and History, in The Constitution of Society
Chapter Five:
Change, Evolution and Power
[section]
Evolution and History
Human history does not have an evolutionary 'shape', and positive harm can be done by attempting to compress it into one. Here I shall list three reasons why human history does not resemble an evolutionary model of the species and four dangers to which evolutionary thought in the social sciences is prone.
Most of the ground has been well-traversed by critics of evolutionism from the nineteenth-century onwards, but it is perhaps worth while spelling these items out. An evolutionary 'shape' — a trunk with branches, or a climbing vine, in which the elapsing of chronological time and the progression of the species are integrated — is an inappropriate metaphor by which to analyse human society.
Human beings make their history in cognizance of that history, that is, as reflexive beings cognitively appropriating time rather than merely 'living' it.
The point is a hackneyed enough one, but usually figures in the discussions of evolutionists only in relation to the question of whether or not there is a distinctive break between proto-humans and Homo sapiens. That is to say, they regard it simply as something new added to existing evolutionary processes — another factor complicating natural selection.
The nub of the matter, however, is that the reflexive nature of human social life subverts the explication of social change in terms of any simple and sovereign set of causal mechanisms. Getting to know what goes on 'in' history becomes not only an inherent part of what 'history' is but also a means of transforming 'history'.
Evolutionary theory in biology depends upon postulates of the independence of the origin of species and the unchangeability of species save through mutation.
These conditions do not apply in human history. 'Societies' simply do not have the degree of 'closure' that species do.
Biologists can fairly easily answer the question: what evolves? But there is no readily available 'unit of evolution' in the sphere of the social sciences.
I have already made this point, but it needs to be repeated here. Evolutionists usually speak of the evolution of either 'societies' or 'cultural systems', with the presumption that those which are most highly advanced are simply differentiated versions of the less advanced. But what constitutes a 'society' or 'culture' varies with the very traits upon which evolutionary thinkers tend to concentrate. The debate between evolutionists and 'diffusionists' helped only to conceal this problem because both tended to treat societies or cultures as discrete entities, differing primarily in respect of their divergent appraisals of the sources of change that affected them.
Human history is not, to use Gellner's term, a 'world-growth story'. As Gellner remarks, for two centuries it has been difficult for anyone from the West to
think about human affairs without the image... of an all-embracing upward growth. . . . It seemed a natural conclusion from the pattern of Western history, which was generally treated as the history of humanity. Western history seems to have a certain continuity and a certain persistent upward swing — or at any rate, so it seemed, and so it came to be taught. Emerging from the river valleys of the Middle East, the story of civilization seems one of continuous and in the main upward growth, only occasionally interrupted by plateaus or even retrogressions: history seemed to creep gently around the shores of the Mediterranean and then up the Atlantic coast, things getting better and better. Oriental empires, the Greeks, the Romans, Christianity, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, industrialization and struggle for social justice . . . the familiar story, with variants especially in the later details, stresses and anticipation; all this is extremely familiar and still forms the background image of history for most of us. . . . The picture of course dovetailed with biological evolutionism, and the victory of Darwinism seemed to clinch the matter. Two quite independent disciplines, history and biology, provided, it seemed, different parts of the same continuous curve. [Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964).
The voyage of the Beagle symbolized, as it were, the journeys that brought Europeans into contact with diverse and exotic cultures, subsumed and categorized within an embracing scheme in which the West naturally stood at the top. There is no sign that evolutionary schemes today are free from this sort of ethnocentrism.
Where can one find such a scheme in Western social science which holds that traditional India is at the head of the scale? Or ancient China? Or, for that matter, modern India or China?
However, there is no need to pose such questions — which are obviously not logically waterproof in terms of their damaging implications for evolutionary theories — to show that history is not a 'world-growth story'.
The history of Homo sapiens is more accurately portrayed as follows.
No one can be sure when Homo sapiens first appeared, but what is certain is that for the vast bulk of the period during which human beings have existed they have lived in small hunting-and-gathering societies. Over most of this period there is little discernible progression in respect of either social or technological change: a 'stable state' would be a more accurate description.
For reasons that remain highly controversial, at a certain point class-divided 'civilizations' come into being, first of all in Mesopotamia, then elsewhere. But the relatively short period of history since then is not one marked by the continuing ascent of civilization; it conforms more to Toynbee’s picture of the rise and fall of civilizations and their conflictual relations with tribal chiefdoms.
This pattern is ended by the rise to global preeminence of the West, a phenomenon which gives to 'history' quite a different stamp from anything that has gone before, truncated into a tiny period of some two or three centuries. Rather than seeing the modern world as a further accentuation of conditions that existed in class-divided societies, it is much more illuminating to see it as placing a caesura upon the traditional world, which it seems irretrievably to corrode and destroy.
The modern world is born out of discontinuity with what went before . It is the nature of this discontinuity — the specificity of the world ushered in by the advent of industrial capitalism, originally located and founded in the West — which it is the business of sociology to explain as best it can. …
… The 'warfare theory' has attracted many adherents because if there is one aspect of agrarian (and industrialized) states which is more or less chronic, it is participation in war. Spencer's version of evolutionism, of course, attributed great significance to warfare prior to the development of the industrial age.
War is definitely very commonly involved in the formation and the disintegration of states — which, as I have stressed, is often one and the same process. But it is one thing to say that states frequently engage in warlike activities; it is another to say that such activities play a dominant or determinant role in the origins of those states and yet another to say that they play this role in the formation (or decline) of all agrarian states. The first statement is unobjectionable. The second is at best only partially valid. The third is simply erroneous.
Demographic theories scarcely fare better. They usually suggest that population increase, the result of increasing birth rates in populations whose available living space is relatively confined, creates pressure leading to centralization of authority and differentiation of power. Certainly, state-based societies are larger, often very much larger, than tribal orders. Demographic theories are often associated with the idea that the 'neolithic revolution' stimulates population increase, leading to state formation. But this does not work on either a general or a more specific level. The beginning of the neolithic is distant from the development of any known state-based societies. In more specific terms, it does not turn out that those states which were formed in physically confined areas always follow a build-up of population pressure. There are some instances that seem to accord fairly well with the theory, but many do not. Thus, examining state formation in the Valley of Mexico and in Mesopotamia, Dumont reaches the conclusion that population growth cannot explain the development of state forms, although the former is associated with the latter.4 6 Other research indicates that population may decline in the period prior to state formation. …
… We can begin to unpack some of the problems involved by considering the distinction introduced by Fried, and widely adopted since then, between pristine and secondary states. Pristine or primal states are those which develop in areas where no state forms have previously existed; secondary states are those developing in areas where others have existed before them or are to be found nearby. The differences between these supply at least one main axis in 'world time' and bring intersocietal relations directly into play. I take it that my previous discussion has indicated that the empirical identification of primal states is exceedingly difficult. It is not possible to define primal states as those which have become formed in geographically isolated environments. For the influence of forms of political organization which are simply 'known about' are enough to make a scale a secondary state. Thus Egypt of the Old Kingdom is sometimes regarded as a primal state on the basis that it apparently developed in a geographically protected milieu (although the archaeological evidence on this is, in fact, very meagre). But all that this means is that no previous state form is known to have existed there. The impact of pre-existing Mesopotamian states certainly cannot be discounted.'
The implication I wish to draw is that the categories of primal and secondary states are highly imbalanced. Instances of primal states are hard to come by, and in the nature of the case we are never going to be able to be sure that cases which look to be plausible candidates for belonging in the category are any more than that. For it may be, of course, that traces of prior state influences have simply disappeared. It certainly follows that, while there is no bar to speculating about the modes of development of primal states, it may be quite misleading to treat what is known about them as a basis for theorizing about processes of state formation in general. It is likely to be very much more fruitful to regard 'secondary states' as prototypical — that is to say, states which develop in a world, or in regions of the world, where there are already either states or political formations having a considerable degree of centralization.
In a world of already existing states there is no difficulty in explaining the availability of the idea of the state, or of models of state formation, that could be followed by aspiring leaders and their followerships. We are all familiar with the fact that the leaders of Japan in recent times quite deliberately — although after a good deal of external pressure from the West — decided to adopt a certain model of industrial development derived from prior European and American experience. While this example is no doubt unusual in so far as the changes initiated were quite sudden and very far-reaching, it is hardly only in recent times that human beings in one context have been concerned to emulate, or borrow from, those in another in order to offset their power or influence. The steps involved in state formation, in other words, have probably hardly ever been unknown to those who have played leading parts in such a process. It is enough to surmise that state builders have almost always been aware of major aspects of the nature and basis of power of centralized political formations in order to explain a good deal about how states have come into being and declined. We do not have to imagine that it was ever common for individuals or groupings to have overall organizational plans in mind for social change and then to set about implementing them. That is very largely a phenomenon of the modern era.
What, then, might a theory of state formation look like, recast in these terms? First of all, we have to remember the point that the operation of generalized 'social forces' presumes specifiable motivation on the part of those influenced by them. To speak of, for example, 'population expansion' as a contributing cause of state formation implies certain motivational patterns prompting definite sorts of response to that expansion (and involved in bringing it about). Second, the influence of 'world time' means that there are likely to be considerable differences in respect of the major influences upon state formation; an overall account which will fit in some cases will not do so in others. This does not mean that generalizations about state formation as a type of episode are without value. However, they will probably apply to a more limited range of historical contexts and periods than the originators of most of the more prominent theories have had in mind. …
… I have already referred to the importance of storage of allocative resources as a medium of the expansion of domination, a theme familiar in the literature of evolutionary theory. Much less familiar, but of essential importance to the engendering of power, is the storage of authoritative resources. 'Storage' is a medium of 'binding' time-space involving, on the level of action, the knowledgeable management of a projected future and recall of an elapsed past. In oral cultures human memory is virtually the sole repository of information storage. However, as we have seen, memory (or recall) is to be understood not only in relation to the psychological qualities of individual agents but also as inhering in the recursiveness of institutional reproduction. Storage here already presumes modes of time-space control, as well as a phenomenal experience of 'lived time', and the 'container' that stores authoritative resources is the community itself.
The storage of authoritative and allocative resources may be understood as involving the retention and control of information or knowledge whereby social relations are perpetuated across time-space. Storage presumes media of information representation, modes of information retrieval or recall and, as with all power resources, modes of its dissemination. Notches on wood, written lists, books, files, films, tapes — all these are media of information storage of widely varying capacity and detail. All depend for their retrieval upon the recall capacities of the human memory but also upon skills of interpretation that may be possessed by only a minority within any given population. The dissemination of stored information is, of course, influenced by the technology available for its production. The existence of mechanized printing, for instance, conditions what forms of information are available and who can make use of it. Moreover, the character of the information medium — as McLuhan, that now forgotten prophet, consistently stressed — directly influences the nature of the social relations which it helps to organize.
It is the containers which store allocative and authoritative resources that generate the major types of structural principle in the constitution of societies indicated in the previous chapter. Information storage, I wish to claim, is a fundamental phenomenon permitting time-space distanciation and a thread that ties together the various sorts of allocative and authoritative resources in reproduced structures of domination.
The city, which only ever develops in conjunction with the elaboration of new forms of information storage, above all writing, is the container or 'crucible of power' upon which the formation of class-divided societies depends. Although I have quoted it before elsewhere, I cannot resist mentioning again here Mumford's observation, which summarizes this point in an exemplary way:
the first beginning of urban life, the first time the city proper becomes visible, was marked by a sudden increase in power in every department and by a magnification of the role of power itself in the affairs of men. A variety of institutions had hitherto existed separately, bringing their numbers together in a common meeting place, at seasonable intervals: the hunters' camp, the sacred monument or shrine, the palaeolithic ritual cave, the neolithic agricultural village — all of these coalesced in a bigger meeting place, the city. . . . The original form of this container lasted for some six thousand years; only a few centuries ago did it begin to break up. [Lewis Mumford, 'University City', in Carl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams, City Invisible (University of Chicago Press 1960]
It began to break up, one should say, under the impact of modern capitalism, which developed in societal contexts that helped to form, and were shaped by, a new type of power container: the nation-state. The disappearance of city walls is a process convergent with the consolidation of a highly elaborated type of administrative order operating within tightly defined territorial boundaries of its own. [End of chapter]
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Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Polity Press 1984
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