Can societies die?
by Michael G. Heller
Published in Social Science Files; March 16, 2025
A discussion of the destruction of society under empire is a useful if paradoxical introduction to the meaning of ‘society’. Empire gives us a practical notion of ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ a society. The loss of society reveals the meaning of society.
Empires may appear at first glance to absorb societies. Yet what can we really call a collection of individuals who once belonged in a society and were then forced into an empire? Must we call it a ‘subject society’ as distinct from the empire’s ‘society’? Or, do we find ourselves in a kind of conceptual no man’s land that defies categorisation?
Normally we define distinct types of society by their most characteristic internal dualistic differentiation. For the period between 4000 BCE and 1000 BCE we can detect the emergence a new type of society. I refer to it as the invention of administrative rulership. It took the dualistic form of a core-society or centre-society differentiation. Organised centres of administration with personal rulers governed society. However, in several notable cases these same societies became empires.
Theoretical perspectives ranging from marxism to systems seem to agree that the essential differentiation which characterises an empire is ‘core-periphery’. Some scholars suggest that core-periphery differentiation constitutes a new (spatial or system) form of society, distinct from the societies that preceded and followed it.1
I disagree. I will explain why my typology of societies cannot include empire or core-periphery as a special category. The argument will be that ancient empires eliminated rather than absorbed societies. The core-periphery differentiation that characterised empires was merely a perverse territorial extension of centre-society differentiation or administrative rule. I will show how one type of ‘differentiation’ constituted a society, while a political-economic form of extra-territorial differentiation destroyed societies. I will also criticise the use of the concept of ‘state’ in histories of ancient societies.
One
Governance is the vital element in any credible definition of society. Without governance and bordering alongside bonding and binding, there is no society. Empire deprives societies of their own governance and bordering. Therefore empires cannot contain societies. For the sake of conceptual clarity I will frame this observation as a hyperbolic argument against two representative historical approaches.
In the first example, John Haldon is right to emphasise modifications of governance occurring in early empires. However, Haldon wrongly assumes that it is possible for one society to govern over another society.
“Empire as a concept, as well as its embodiment in existing political systems, entails power and dominance, in which one society or segment of a society exercises power over others … One society was in effect benefiting from the transfer to it of surplus produced in the other [society] … The role of village elites and rank attributions can have a significant influence on the ways the state was or was not able to intervene in landlord-tenant relations, for example, just as the existence of centralised state apparatuses and their demands for revenue in turn affected the ways in which these local relationships worked, shaping the social space within which they could evolve. The point is that empires, by virtue of their very existence, are not simply impositions upon subject territories and societies; they can be seen also as promoting the evolution of new and sometimes alternative sets of economic and political relationships which must not necessarily threaten directly the state’s own institutional survival.” [John F. Haldon, ‘The Political Economy of Empire’ in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 1, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021: 182, 200, 214]
I have chosen this passage on ‘political economy’2 because it appears as the major theoretical overview for a prestigious ‘state of the art’ collection of writings about the history of empire, and because it draws attention to a problem commonly occasioned by the premature conjoining of ‘state and society’ in studies of ancient history. In addition, it assumes the possibility of one society existing within another society.
For many historians it has been convenient to use the concept of ‘state’ as a simplifying substitute for deeper social science, which—I am arguing—should have revealed a much more subtle and complex evolving relationship between society and governance.
In a full historical perspective I see the concept of ‘state’ as an impediment to accuracy and understanding. The concept of ‘state’ is completely unnecessary in the context of 3rd to 1st millennium BCE societies and empires, because whatever might pass for ‘state’ is much more interestingly and productively explained as ruler-centred administration.
Ancient societies lacked two essential components of ‘state’ — ‘rule of law’ and ‘representation’ in decision making. When historians claim ancient societies were governed by ‘states’ they usually rely on Max Weber’s most famous sentence: “An institutionally organised political enterprise will be called a state if, and to the extent that, its administrative staff can lay claim to a monopoly of legitimate physical force in the execution of its orders”.3
Several problems arise in the application of this definition to the ancient world. Firstly, physical force is only legitimate when supported by legal statute. Weber was not referring to archaic pseudo-legitimations appropriated by ancient kings, which typically were fantasy stories about gods and divine rule. Statute, furthermore, can be legitimate only when it is generated as legislation. And, legislation is only truly legitimate if it is created by representative bodies of governance. Historians who rely on Weber’s concept of ‘state’ usually do not acknowledge that — in the context where Weber defined it — legitimacy is given by the modern “belief” in governing powers based on legal powers of political representation. The contrasts between pre-state and real state action relate to the particular reasons Weber offers for the legitimacy of governing powers. At a minimum ‘state’ administration is legitimised by legal statute. At a maximum it is legitimised by political representation.4 These conditions did not exist in early ruler-based societies and empires. Therefore states did not exist either.
“Today, the most common form of legitimacy is a belief in legality … Since the complete development of the concept of the state is quite modern, it is best to define it in terms of the modern type”. [Max Weber, Economy and Society [Part 1], A New Translation, translated by Keith Tribe, Harvard University Press, 2019:135-136]
Taking ‘the state’ out of the picture makes no difference to the arguments I make here about ‘society’. The effects of empire on society can be explained with reference to any form of governance that entails ‘rulership’. Real states (‘legitimated’, per Weber) also created empires (notably the British Empire). Yet even were the ‘state’ really a valid category for ancient history, Haldon’s references to ‘society’ reveal the possibility—or rather the fact—that societies were destroyed by incorporation under new rulership in the modern British Empire, intermediate Roman Empire, and ancient Ur III empire.
In this respect, W. G. Runciman’s description of imperial rulership has been surprisingly influential, though it is quite wrong.
“To a comparative sociologist, empires have a twofold interest. They are, in the first place, a distinctive type of social formation. They are neither big societies on the one hand nor leagues of independent societies headed by a dominant partner on the other: they involve the exercise of domination by the rulers of a central society over the populations of peripheral societies without either absorbing them to the point that they become fellow-members of the central society or disengaging from them to the point that they become confederates rather than subjects.” [W. G. Runciman, ‘Empire as a Topic in Comparative Sociology, in Tributary Empires in Global History edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly, Palgrave Macmillan 2011:99]
We even find this quotation prominently endorsed in the ‘Concept and Definition’ section of the editorial introduction to the recent two-volume Oxford World History of Empire (where Haldon’s passage appears). What Runciman says is useful to us because it is all about society. But, like Haldon’s passage, it is misleading about society. It does not admit to the awkward reality that empires axiomatically banish occupied societies into oblivion.
The statements of Haldon and Runciman illustrate illogical or inconsistent usage of ‘society’. But they are also mistaken on theoretical and constitutional grounds. Both authors assume a ‘ruling society’ governs a ‘subject society’ without compromising the existence of the latter. In contrast, I find it impossible to sidestep the change in ownership that accompanies creations of empire. In a cosmopolitan quasi-legal and universally intuitive sense, society becomes the ‘property’ of those who inhabit and constitute it as a bordered, bonded and bound unit of individuals. As a society they ‘own’ their territory by virtue of recognised rights of sovereignty. Therefore, empire is the theft of another society.
Cicero, in discussing the notion of Roman property, includes a justification for acquiring property through war. He then contradicts himself by specifying a set of reasons why an attack on a foreign territory cannot be justified unless the explicit pretext is to prevent an attack upon one’s own territory, or to recover property that was stolen.5 This is the same kind of inconsistency that bedevils the analyses of society “within” empire.
Although I have singled out for criticism two authors who are well known for their histories and theoretical interpretations, the conceptual problem is fairly universal in the relevant literature. My framing of the problem in this context is not merely nitpicking about concept wording. I am, instead, suggesting a categorical statement about the nature of historical societies. The argument I propose is that the basic core-periphery differentiation that constitutes imperial governance cannot be a category of society in its own right. This leads to a further claim. Empires, if they are empires, eliminate societies.
By using the term ‘society’ to describe the subjects of empire ‘domination’ Runciman and Haldon exemplify a common category error. They reveal a longstanding weakness at the heart of social science — the chronic fuzziness of its conceptions of ‘society’. One of my principal aims is to sharpen-up the definition of society.
Two
Some people might say, in criticism of my argument, that many conquered peoples preserved their communities, languages, customs and conventions. Indeed, many of them did. They might have remained bonded to each other. Informally they might have maintained their binding rules of action and interaction. Achievements like these gave them a head start during any potential form of reemergence as a ‘new’ society following the eventual and usually inevitable demise of the empire.
A critic of my claim about the disappearance of ‘society’ under empire might also point out that empires themselves usually actively encouraged the subjects of empire to govern themselves in many if not most of the routine actions of subsistence and the administration of social order. Again, this is true.
However, under all circumstances of true empire, subject populations lost control of the two primary preconditions of existence as a society — borders and governance.
It is right to observe that empires usually delegated much responsibility for day to day governance to local and preexisting institutions. Distinctive features of Babylonian, Persian, Iraqi, Syrian, Anatolian, Egyptian, Greek, African and European polities did survive imperial rule by Mesopotamian and Roman empires. The successful empires adapted to the territories they occupied by fostering aspects of self-governance and by recruiting local elites and soldiers to staff the bureaucracies and the armies.
Moreover, when empire finally collapses the societies that had vanished might, in theory, remerge in more or less the same form as before. They could govern as before, recoup the original borders, the original bonds of identity, and the original binding rules. Indeed, after its imperial subjection a society might reemerge strengthened by the experience.
In reality, reemergence-as-before was usually not possible in practical terms. The costs of the disputes over lost parameters for bordering, bonding, and binding linger on even to the present day in many cases. On the other hand, the contact with empires could, in developmental terms, have been an enormous opportunity to emerge better-than-before. Empires tended to be modernising constructions undertaken by ‘fitter’ societies with then-optimal techniques and technologies of governing, transport and communications, and material subsistence. Knowledge gained by contact with the more advanced society gave former dependencies and subjugated peoples unique late-comer advantages when emerging into the post-imperial world that followed.
If today’s post-imperial societies in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa did not take advantage of their unique latecomer-to-capitalism developmental opportunities the reasons must lie primarily in the overwhelming scholarly and political influence exerted by postcolonial ideologies of marxism, socialism, and third-world nationalism, which even now remain vibrant in the statue-toppling wokery of modern universities.
Almost by definition the society that could create and sustain an empire was more dynamic and developed in material terms than the societies it defeated, incorporated and administered. Empires brought with them the latest knowledge. They introduced revolutionary methods of production, and superior rules and institutions for trade and exchange. They solved the difficulties of physical distance. They spread literacy. They motivated practical inventions. They institutionalised taxation, labour organisation, and laws.
Imperial powers also gained immeasurably from the two-way cross-fertilisation of knowledge. In spite of the literal imperial obliteration of societies on the peripheries, every sensible social scientist can recognise the ways in which imperial encounters and experiences hastened and furthered the progress of humanity without coming close to implying — or giving offensive suggestion of — a gratitude for servitude.
To observe that empires destroyed societies is not to apportion blame or pass judgement on the motivations. Rather it simply draws attention to the inescapable historical fact — the erasure of a preexisting society. The primary initial motives for expanding a society’s territorial control beyond its own borders were often rational and excusable. It was not necessarily the lust of individual kings for fame, fortune or religious proselytisation. The initial reason might well have been self-defence — the pacification of provenly dangerous societies that posed a perpetual threat to one’s own society, memorialised in Cicero’s above-mentioned justification that, in Rome, “the only excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed”.6
A stated or underlying justification for warfare was the neutralisation of foreign threats. In more general terms it may be that growing knowledge of other worlds, improvements in communications and transport, and increasing religiosity gave the most powerful rulers a direct interest in controlling the environments and behaviours of other regional rulers.
Other reasons, which were probably the most important in the majority of cases over long periods of time, were the need to secure vital trade routes against marauders, and to secure access to valuable commodities and raw materials, which could only be reliably obtained through conquest and a permanent presence in their place of origin.
And, last but not least, the imperial powers in their acquired territories, needed to operate in ways that would not entirely alienate the existing population. The creation of empire required an enormous investment of coordinated manpower and resources. The returns on these investments depended on flexibly-crafted sustainable governance, taxation, labour and a minimum of cooperation. It was essential that the imperial project remained stable over the long term. Such projects built reliable operational alliances and networks of patronage with local elites. Also, empires seem almost always to have relied on recruiting conquered warriors into imperial armies.
Three
When evaluating the destruction of societies through empire we must be careful to exclude conquests and military occupations that fall short of encompassing societies under a new umbrella of whole governance. Tribute or obeisance are not sufficient.
We should also recognise that in most cases actual and pervasive imperial control was diffused and focused on nodes of military and administrative presence. It is probable that a great many inhabitants of governed territories—imperial or domestic—had little or no direct contact with any authorities. If small and local governed settlements were unaware of any external territorial rulership, their societies could be preserved.
The creation of empires did nevertheless systematically interrupt, displace and constrict societies of the ancient Near East during the 3rd millennium BCE, when centralised cores of rulership and administration were undergoing institutional evolution. I leave aside the Roman Empire for now, because its origins and modes of legitimation correspond to a later type of transitional society. Rather, the empires I have most in mind are the earliest ones, whose trajectories reveal elemental motives and consequences, and whose origins lay in straightforward territorial extensions of rulership and administration. In these early iterations, imperial governance was a form of administered society with personal rulership by dynastic monarchs (kings, emperors, pharaohs, sultans). The prototypes appeared in Mesopotamia — Sargon of Akkade (2300–2200 BCE) and the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112– 2004 BCE).
Monarchial expansionism took the form of extra-territorial military impositions of bureaucracy and integrated networks of communication. The principal objective was to control commerce. Ideologically they could be legitimised by claims to divine rule.
The Ur III dynasty was most clearly imperial in the sense that the overseas economic resources became the ‘property’ of the king, and the king appointed the governors of the occupied lands. As in almost all other empires the eventual causes of Ur III’s collapse can be traced to the costs and complexities of maintaining centralised networks and public order in the ever-extending peripheries. One great difficulty, shared with the later Roman empire, was the integration of ‘foreigners’ who maintained their antecedent allegiances.7
To some extent Egypt’s Old to New Kingdoms (2686– 1069 BCE) may also be termed ‘imperial’, though, with the exception of its direct control over Nubian lands8, Egypt’s overseas conquests were for the most part economic and military, and not directly or pervasively political and administrative. In some cases, the justifications were relatively mundane, such as competitive control of grazing lands, infrastructure, harbours and merchants.
The Assyrian empire 1350 BCE to 609 BCE was more totalitarian in its ambitions and methods. It swept up almost the whole ancient Near East, including Egypt, into a multiethnic colossus of militarily integrated and yet decentralised administered governance. As the empire increased in size it became increasingly costly to maintain central control, while rulership became increasingly personalistic and absolutist.9
Transitions of society that were occasioned by imperial experiences will later be dealt with under the categories of premodern administered, participatory and stratified societies. In each of the cases just outlined, empire was the extension and evolution of what I have called the ‘administered society’. Ur III and the Assyrian imperial forms of governance continued the prior evolution of administered society.
Egypt is almost a perfect continual comparator vis-a-vis Mesopotamia in its pre-imperial and imperial periods. Rome will be covered separately as a transition from participatory to hyper-administered and decadent society, but also as the origin of features of complex rank-stratification that afterwards evolved as the foundation for autonomous quasi-state governance in the Middle Ages. The premodern perfection of imperial administration achieved by Rome in the first 400 years of the Common Era was, in its full historical perspective, a rather late transition to administered society, pressured, motivated, and shaped by the new needs of governing extra-territorially.
This brief overview of the central importance of empires from the 3rd millennium BCE onwards may be sufficient to sustain the theoretical proposition, which is its purpose. It serves to explain why the categorisation of historical societies, each of which is founded on a unique internal differentiation that illustrates their distinct mode of governance, cannot include a special type of ‘empire society’ based on core-periphery differentiation. There was no such society, ever.
The purpose of this discussion has been to remove an obstacle to the consistency of a conceptualisation of historical societies, namely the ‘empire’ itself. I have exaggerated the effect of empire on society by saying that empires caused the death of societies. Empires may have killed more societies over the entire course of human history than war, natural disaster or any other cause of extinction. The conceptual challenge behind this claim has been two-fold — explain why a core-periphery differentiation does not itself constitute a distinct ‘type’ of society, and then reconcile the empirical consequences of empire.
Four
I have introduced a description of society by considering what has been lost when empires destroy a society. I will now make the point that, were it not for empire, societies demonstrate very strong survivability. The complete wipeout of societies through natural disaster or war was rare or episodic over the whole course of history.
The instinct for survival is self-replicating within society. Self-destruction of society would have been unusual. The main decisions made by societies are their calculations for self-preservation. Yet, since the rational pursuit of means to ends can never be perfectly conceived, often the wrong decisions are made. A society might seem rapidly to fall apart because of severe polarisation and mobilisation of opinion about how the society should be governed, within its borders, and through consensus on rules.
Nevertheless, permanent breakdown in social order is actually extremely rare. Societies usually hold together even after catastrophic revolutions. New decisions will be made, and a new form of social order will be found to replace the preexisting order, which had so clearly proved unsustainable.
Another potential route to self-immolation would be the artificial injection of non-customary human identities. Identities are traits and beliefs that are individualised and socialised. They serve—functionally—to bond society. Suddenly or cumulatively, a large-scale introduction of new identities can easily dilute or destroy the identities that helped to hold society together as a single unit. In theory, a greater diversity of identities might be a source of enrichment for society. But this depends wholly on the qualities and motivations of the new identities. If they are not carefully controlled, new identities create uncertainty about basic borders and rules. Such pressures can generate breakdowns or debilitations with long run paralysis and incoherence.
Nevertheless, identity infusions that have produced the long term societal weakness are not inevitably fatal to society. Eventually the society will usually stabilise in a new equilibrium for the inter-functional coherence of identities.
In general, therefore, societies routinely resist any internal forces of destruction. In addition, we can expect that when societies are empirically and effectively destroyed by being absorbed in empires, the peoples who lost their sovereignty to govern, along with their laws and conventions, will still preserve some internalised identities and customs, which even the strongest imperial power cannot take away from them.
The inescapable truth is that empire cripples the definition of society. There can never be a society within a society. The integrity of the concept of ‘society’ depends on this insight. The point where conquest turns to empire is the point at which the society loses its definition as a bordered, bonded, and bound unit. Empires effectively wipe societies off the face of the earth. Empires take the people of the vanquished society into a borderless vacuum, or into their own society. The perversity of empire is that incorporated territorial units cease to be societies. The empire that incorporates the territories may itself remain a society. But it is a fraught and neurotic society, forced into continuous upheaval as it ceaselessly tries to integrate new disparate interests and identities, and as it responds to every new demand made on its attention. This generates a compulsion to expand ever further afield, because every new border or new hinterland presents additional margins of insecurity. That is a major reason why the possession of empire became the common cause of self-inflicted destruction among the dynamic historical societies. This was the case for Ur III, Assyria, and Rome.
The great tug by Fernand Leger, France 1923
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FOOTNOTES
Extreme examples that can follow from such approaches may be found in the writings of Niklas Luhmann. For example: “Consequently, it can no longer be claimed that society consists of people; for people are clearly to be accommodated in no subsystem of society, and hence nowhere in society.” Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 2, translated by Rhodes Barrett, Stanford University Press 2013:87 https://michaelgheller.substack.com/p/segmentary-societies
See similarly: “[Empires] thus tend to evolve institutional structures—fiscal systems, military organizations, and so forth—that establish their own sets of roles and discourses, divorced from the daily practices of “ordinary” society … Centuries of “state embedding” have occurred, so that the [imperial] state elite, its apparatuses, and its ideology are inextricably interwoven into the social fabric of society at large.” Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, ‘Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation: Problems and Perspectives’ in Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel editors, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium, Oxford University Press 2009
Max Weber, Economy and Society [Part 1], A New Translation, edited and translated by Keith Tribe, Harvard University Press, 2019:135-136
ibid: 116, 137; see also 129, 135, 137-138
See Jed W. Atkins, ‘The Political Theory of Cicero’s De officiis’ in Philipp Brüllmann andJörn Müller (editors), Cicero: De officiis, De Gruyter 2023:208; also Jed W. Atkins, Roman Political Thought, Cambridge University Press 2018:176-180
M. Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, with an English translation by Walter Miller, Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England, 1913; or ‘The only reason for waging war is so that we Romans may live in peace’, quoted in Christopher Kelly, The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press 2006:19
Piotr Steinkeller, ‘The Sargonic and Ur III Empires’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021. https://michaelgheller.substack.com/p/the-birth-of-expansionist-patrimonialism
Juan Carlos Moreno García, ‘Egypt, Old to New Kingdom (2686– 1069 BCE)’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021:21, 25, 29-30
Gojko Barjamovic, ‘The Empires of Western Asia and the Assyrian World Empire’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021. https://michaelgheller.substack.com/p/empires-in-western-asia-after-2000 ; https://michaelgheller.substack.com/p/organization-and-economic-power-of ; https://michaelgheller.substack.com/p/political-military-ideological-power ,