The Horrific Horde Misstep
Written by Michael Heller
Introduction and summary definitions
A society is a unified unit for human interactions. It has a spatial border, a social bond, and binding rules. Every society is a governed interaction zone whose existence can be verified by its social order. The ten types of societies I will examine are distinguished mainly by distinctive forms of differentiation in their mode of governing. In most of these types that unique differentiation is easily identified as a single duality of the governing and the governed. But I find ten distinct variations in how governing combines organisation and system.
A system is continuous, simultaneous, multiple-actor interaction in the absence of a control centre. System becomes regularised as interactional habituations that are not calculated piecemeal as means to ends and instead operate automatically. Few societies are ‘systems’, but all societies operate with systems in one form or another. A system is an invisible but perceivable and purposeful zone for organising human interactions without a centre. As a society grows in size the systems can help to multiply the social interactions.
In contrast, an organisation, though it can utilise system mechanisms internally, always has an organising and control centre. As a society grows in size its organisational control centre becomes regularised in the form of multiple layers of control through hierarchies of status and authority.
A system functions informally without a centre. An organisation has a centre and a set of formal rules.
The First Society
The first society is in a sense the most complex of all societies because its characteristic actions of governance are spread unevenly over at least five separate differentiations of age, sex, physique, cognition, and personality. The society of individual differentiation does not present a single duality. Instead, these five dualities impinge on the process of governance that produces the society. Each duality represents a microcosm of governance disaggregated across however many individuals populate the society. In their raw forms these dualities, i.e. differentiations, are: the biological condition of being male-female, the continual condition of being older-younger, and the more-less instrumentally variable conditions of being stronger-weaker, intelligent-unintelligent, charismatic-uncharismatic.
The first society, then, is organised by simultaneous overlapping interactions of people who are each continually distinguished from one another—and governed— based on five traits. The first society is the simplest society because it is the only society in history where the process of organisation lacks structures. Organisations are absent, and any organisational regularities that exist are impermanent and weakly articulated. The first society is also potentially the smallest society.
It cannot be controversial to call attention to these five basic differences between persons. They represent facts of life for many animals, and each of the differentiations have been extensively studied in its own right. Nor is it unusual in broad terms to characterise societies according to their principal differentiations of composition and governance. It has been commonplace in the past to talk of status or class societies, and democratic or authoritarian societies.
But as far as I am aware no-one before now has ever suggested the predominance of individual differentiations as a basic initial type of society.
I will be presenting the society of individual differentiation mainly as a theoretical exercise which I regard as an essential preliminary to the later category types.
But I also see the individual differentiation type as a sustainable category of small simple and well ordered society progressing in some environments. I do not intend it to be considered as a ‘leaderless’ ideal. But it is important and interesting in its own right for picturing a genuine and even necessary option for some prehistoric peoples.
My emphasis is on system dynamics that conceivably may arise when a small group undertakes divisions of labour and divisions of governance on the basis of multiple simultaneous interactional relations which are influenced by differences in age, biological sex, physical strength, mental charisma, and cognition or cleverness.
The Sociology
We must begin, however, by enquiring into the usefulness and indeed the viability of the terms being used here, most of all the conceptions of society. After that, for reasons that will become obvious, we must examine the meaning of ‘the horde’ and the inadequate justifications offered for the term’s usage.
One of the most important questions ever raised in sociology was: what is a small simple society?
It was important because it was the only conceivable starting point for constructing a viable definition of society. Any credible definition of society-in-general will necessarily be reduced to features that were present in the ‘original’ society and in all subsequent societies. Every future variation of society will have been one that added something onto the base model. Once the small simple ‘first’ society had been defined there would be a benchmark or pattern upon which all future efforts at definition could be embroidered.
Max Weber carefully avoided using the term ‘society’ even though he contributed more enduring and precise definitions to sociology and the social sciences generally than any other scholar before or since. Is ‘society’ too complicated to define? Is it at all useful as a concept? Weber believed that almost everything that is social or sociological should be regarded through the lens of the actions of individuals.
Most social scientists would probably say the term ‘society’ is essential. Yet none have been able to define it satisfactorily.
[My attempt at a definition is offered in the first 3 sentences of this post.]
Emile Durkheim had a resigned attitude to the sociological ‘definition’.
“Precisely because sociology deals with things which are constantly on our lips, such as the family, property, crime, etc., very often it appears useless to the sociologist initially to ascribe a rigorous definition to them. We are so accustomed to using these words, which recur constantly in the course of conversation, that it seems futile to delimit the meaning being given to them. We simply refer to the common notion of them, but this is very often ambiguous. This ambiguity causes us to classify under the same heading and with the same explanation things which are in reality very different. From this there arises endless confusion.” [The Rules of Sociological Method]
Durkheim, Spencer and the flattened Horde
The first society can be brought into focus for our present purpose by pointing out a great misstep sociology made at its inception.
The misstep consisted initially in not defining the meaning of ‘society’ while at the same time supposing there could exist a society that was not in any essential sense characterised by inherent differentiation. To cut to the chase, it was thought there had existed a society in which there was no differentiation.
In their day Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim were the foremost scholars of small simple societies as a category type. Both were immersed in synthesising emergent knowledge of sociology, archeology and anthropology. Spencer was interested in the sciences of biology and psychology, and he employed biological concepts to help in theorising society.
In the nineteenth century the life-ways of ‘primitive’ peoples were for the first time subjected to systematic empirical research. Spencer and Durkheim had a significant empirical advantage over contemporary scholars. Nineteenth century tribes in Africa, Asia, Eurasia, and the Americas were pristine by comparison with any found today. I will later refer to indispensable studies both scholars made of the differences between individuals in society, the impersonal interest of society as distinct from its individual interests, and the human requirement to invent non-human sentients as symbolic artificial supports for the processes of bordering, bonding, and binding societies.
For all these reasons the efforts of Spencer and Durkheim to explain the nature of the ‘small simple’ society should be examined and taken seriously.
In his Principles of Sociology, Spencer wrote:
“We cannot in all cases say with precision what constitutes a simple society … Our only course is to regard as a simple society, one which forms a single working whole unsubjected to any other end and of which the parts cooperate, with or without a regulating centre, for certain public ends … Of the groups without political organization, or with but vague traces of it, the lowest are those small wandering ones which live on the wild food sparsely distributed in forests, over barren tracts, or along sea-shores. Where small simple societies remain without chiefs though settled, it is where circumstances allow them to be habitually peaceful.” [The Principles of Sociology]
Durkheim objected to Spencer’s definition of a simple society on the grounds that it encompassed too many dissimilar societies across too vast a swathe of history. Instead, he proposed ‘the horde’ as the simplest society:
“The term ‘simplicity’ can only have a precise meaning when it signifies a complete absence of any component elements. A simple society must therefore be understood as one which does not include others simpler than itself, which at present not only contains merely one single segment, but which presents no trace of any previous segmentation. …The horde … corresponds exactly to this definition. It is a social aggregate which does not include—and never has included—within it any other more elementary aggregate, but which can be split up directly into individuals. These do not form within the main group special sub-groups different from it, but are juxtaposed like atoms. One realises that there can be no more simple society; it is the protoplasm of the social domain and consequently the natural basis for any classification. … We shall begin by classifying societies according to the degree of organization they manifest, taking as a base the perfectly simple society or the single-segment society. Within these classes different varieties will be distinguished, according to whether a complete coalescence of the initial segments takes place.” [The Rules of Sociological Method]
So Durkheim did, after all, define society in a partial sense and by omission. In the passage just quoted he said that a society need not be a differentiated unit.
There can be such a thing as a “single-segment society” (i.e. zero-segmentation) which is “split up directly into individuals” (but without separating the individuals into their distinctive segment types).
Furthermore, Spencer used the term ‘horde’ in much the same way himself.
“Primitive hordes are without established distinctions of parts. With growth of them into tribes habitually come some unlikenesses”. [Spencer source as above]
Spencer regarded the ‘hordes’ only as the ‘aggregates’ which can go on to become compound-differentiated hunter-gatherer societies led by chiefs. The latter, for Spencer, are the first really definable societies. They can come into being because (a) a number of hordes are conquered and brought together by a chiefdom, or (b) a number of hordes form unions in order to better cope with a variety of environmental conditions, and during this process there may arise political organisation, or (c) when faced with external aggressors the horde will create a leadership structure in order to organise their common defence (the latter is Spencer’s standard explanation for the original development of layered political organisation). For most of history the relevant process of horde segmentation is simply continual ‘dividing and subdividing’ of groups because the available sources of substance are not sufficient for all.
There can be no doubt that both Spencer and Durkheim were well aware of how individual difference affects the internal dynamics of simple and small societies.
Spencer drew on the reports submitted to him by ethnographers to meticulously document consequential individual differentiations in the most primitive societies between ‘domestic’ categories of persons with and without relative power to influence events—elders, males and females, the physically strong and the weak, and the effects of comparative intelligence. It was obvious to him that in simple small societies the life experience and wise judgement of the elders often predominated in decision making, or that men were by and large dominant over women, or that leadership tended to be a prerogative of the more physically formidable, clever, or charismatic man. He gave special emphasis to the individual characteristics of men who emerged as significant ‘chiefs’. They were strong, savvy men with big personalities and in possession of deep knowledge that comes of age and relevant experience.
Nevertheless, at this vital formative stage in sociology’s evolution both Spencer and Durkheim chose not to regard the internal segmentations of age, sex, physique, intelligence, and personality as simultaneously active sources of social order through which to define a type of society preceding the types of society that they (Spencer above all) confidently defined in terms of the means of organisation or leadership.
Neither could quite contemplate a society defined by individual differentiations, which thus would be characterised as a society of multiple differentiations. They called the ‘horde' a ‘society’. They lacked definitional consensus about the meaning of ‘society’ and so did not see their horde proposals as definitionally problematic.
The impression I have is that both Durkheim and Spencer really viewed the ‘horde’ as a pre-society, something for which there was (and is) no name.
Explanatory
The term ‘horde’ has been in use in English with original derivations from Turkish and Russian (via Spanish, French, and Polish), since the sixteenth century. Initially it denoted Asiatic nomads, but by the early seventeenth century it had come to mean (in English) an “uncivilised gang”.
Today the term horde can suggest a mob on the rampage. Sigmund Freud understandably theorised it as a bad dream. Interestingly he upgraded it to a segmented leadership category type. Rather than an unorganised leaderless group (as conceived by Durkheim and Spencer), in Freud's theory the ‘horde’ is the horrendous subconscious craving for pater chiefdoms.
“The uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formation, which are shown in the phenomena of suggestion that accompany them, may … be traced back to the fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority… it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal” [Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921]
Coming up …
In a series of future posts about the Type 1 Society of Individual Differentiation I will present the reasons I have for viewing the unsegmented flat ‘horde’ as an evolutionary impossibility. My focus will instead be on a small and simple segmented prehistoric society of pre-organisational, post-language, fired up, tooled up, and utility minded competent, considerate, communicative individuals as an evolutionary possibility. I will discuss the logical size parameters of such a society, the chimp continuum, the roles of people, the roles of rules, the roles of deities, and the utility imperatives. In this way we will improve the raw materials of a sociological definition of society.
The concepts and ideas in this post are original under copyright and must be attributed to ©2023 Michael G. Heller
Michael G. Heller
Author of Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development, Routledge 2011
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