Bacchanal Before a Statue of Pan, by Nicolas Poussin [Date: 1631-1633]
Introduction
There is no evidence for collective action in prehistory and little evidence for it in recorded history. Whether or not my opening statement is true depends initially on how one defines ‘collective action’. But a telltale sign that we should doubt the existence of collective action suggests itself when the researchers of a given region and period who have for years praised the concept’s explanatory powers still remain unable or unwilling to define the meaning of collective action or even to provide a single concrete historical example of a process of collective action. Such is the case of a sizeable and active band of Mesoamerica-focused archeologists whose works I have been reading. I will not go far as to say I feel I have wasted my time. Some of their ideas may be worth pursuing in other contexts. If I now outline a few reasons for treating their claims with great caution it will provide an opportunity for me to suggest a general disutility of ideas about collective action in social science.
I will outline in brief terms why all action in social settings should instead be viewed as individual action. I will quote some scholars—among whom two are winners of the Nobel Prize—who have used the term collective action to no great or lasting effect. And I take note of the possible validity of ideas about ‘collective consciousness’ based on collective knowledge or collective reverie which nevertheless can be formulated so as to avoid the epistemological traps of ‘collective action’ [to be discussed separately].
My priority is to throw the spotlight on the questionable mechanics of aggregated human actions in governance whereby actions are said to be organised among collections of people for collective purposes. It would be wise advice in any historical context that one should try not to infer the motives, mechanism, and constitutional expression of complex types of human actions and intentions relating specifically to the governance of societies merely from the presence of certain physical and built objects or population distributions.
The data sets upon which claims made for ‘collective action’ appear depend on dubious ‘proxies’ and ‘correlates’. One ‘proxy’ that straight away struck me as unreliable and illogical appears throughout the body and statistical appendix of a foundational text upon which later studies of ‘collective action’ rely. It is stated thus:
“These results are particularly strong when population size is correlated with public goods as a proxy for collective action”. [Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States, by Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher (2008)]
Giving the authors the benefit of the doubt I assumed the statement was additional to underlying observations or records of ‘collective action’. I assumed they must already have evidence in their main text for certain mechanisms for organising action, such as political consultation or participation. The correlation or proxy with public goods might have been justifiable alongside records of votes cast, or records of meetings held, or records of the process leading to a provisioning, financing, and construction of a particular public good (e.g. a road or irrigation channel or temple).
Yet it turns out that there is no such evidence.
My argument against the existing theory and history of premodern ‘collective action’ is not at all convoluted. I simply am of the strong opinion that knowledge of so-called ‘collective action’ (if such a thing exists) must involve knowledge about the actual mechanisms employed for making decisions, or evidence about patterns relating to the organisation of action. Without these underlying factual building blocks there is no case to be made for the existence of collective action. And even if such knowledge were available we should still question the validity of the concept ‘collective action’.
If someone is inferring ‘collective action’ from imaginative statistical correlates and proxies of collective action such as dimensions of plazas, roads, irrigation ditches, population movements and density, or the presence or absence of statues depicting leaders or rulers, then the findings can be neither credible nor useful as a departure point for future research. Do not revel in irrelevance … the statues are watching.
Basic social science
There are two intellectual propositions relating to collective action which should be referred to. The most recent well known works by Mancur Olson and Elinor Ostrom have been consulted but perhaps misunderstood by the collective action archeologists. I will begin earlier with the more elemental insights found in theoretical works by Max Weber, which the archeologists appear not to have taken into account at all.
Regular readers will already know I am a ‘disciple’ of Max Weber. As such, I adhere when possible to the doctrines of methodological individualism. With the partial exception of special circumstances unique to modern societies and in reference to particular methods of achieving organisational objectives, a true Weberian does not recognise ‘collective action’. The sources of human action in society can only ever be the actions of individual persons. I have previously amply exhibited some of Weber’s writings on this topic. Here I only highlight points of immediate relevance.
We do need ‘collective' concepts such as the people, the masses, the tribe, the governors, the governed, the city, and the state. Collective concepts are indispensable in a study of society. Society itself is the ultimate ‘collective’.
It is perfectly legitimate to speak of social, economic, and political actions, and mutually oriented actions. However these are always understood as the behaviour of the participating individuals, not as collective behaviours.
I would say the most important word in social science is “interaction”. People interact, and by interacting they may produce collective phenomena such as groups, organisations, systems. In contrast, claims that action is ‘collective’ could erroneously suggest—if not caveated by methodological individualism—a structure or movement of multiple more or less deactivated individuals with a single mind. Collective action could appear to subtract individual agency from action, whereas my objective is to see how collectives are, in fact, internally differentiated, and why the incentives, motives and behaviours of interacting individuals ensure the cohesion of the whole.
True enough, most individuals go about their lives only in semi-consciousness of the meanings of their actions. But when the archeologists discuss ‘collective action’ they obviously mean active, consciously perceived participation and cooperation in making decisions, as distinct from obedience to the commands of an all-powerful ‘despot’ or ‘autocrat’. In circumstances such as these, and especially in ‘primitive states’, it is all the more important not to allow the impression to be formed of an unthinking cellular mass performing actions without individual processual deliberation and calculation.
Max Weber in Economy & Society Vol 1
“Action, in the sense of the meaningful and comprehensible orientation of one’s own behaviour, is for us always the behaviour of one or more individual persons. … [T]he object of study is the contextual meaning of action … For cognitive purposes, such as legal knowledge, or for purely practical ends, it might be useful (and indeed unavoidable) to treat social constructs (e.g., the ‘state’, ‘association’ [etc.] … as if they were individual persons with rights and duties, or as the performers of legally relevant actions. By contrast, for … construal and understanding of action these entities remain merely processes and specific contexts for the action of individual people, since for us these are the sole understandable agents of meaningfully oriented action.”
“... We certainly need to know first of all what kind of action is functionally important for “survival” … together with its importance for a deliberate development of a type of social action. Only then can we pose the question: How does this action come about? What motives define it? One first has to know what a king, an official, a businessman, a pimp, or a magician does—the action that alone stamps them as of this category; hence, before we can move to any analysis, it is important to know with what typical “action” we are dealing ... Only this analytical perspective is capable [of] understanding individual human beings differentiated by type …”
“For sociology there is no such thing as the “action” of a collective personality. If it talks about the ‘state’, the ‘nation’ … a ‘family’, an ‘army corps’ or any other similar kind of construct, then this solely refers to a specific kind of actual, or conceivable, social action on the part of individuals … The interpretation of action has to acknowledge a fundamental and important fact: that collective constructs drawn from everyday thought, from the law or other discipline, are ideas in the heads of real people (not only judges and officials but also the wider ‘public’), ideas in part about what exists, in part about what should exist, and ideas to which they orient their action. As such, these ideas have a quite powerful, often even dominating, causal significance for the manner in which the action of real persons occurs. This is especially true of ideas about what should, or should not, exist. A modern ‘state’ therefore exists not inconsiderably in this way: as a complex of a specific mutual interaction between people—because particular men and women orient their action to the idea that the state exists in this form, or should exist in this form; they believe, in other words, that orders of this legally oriented kind have validity …”
“Even a socialist economy would have to be construed and understood individualistically, that is, on the basis of the action of individuals, the types of functionaries who arise in it, just as exchange transactions would be understood by marginal utility theory. For even there, the most significant empirical sociological work always begins with the question: Which motives determined … the individual functionaries and members of this ‘community’ to behave in such a way that this community was first created, and continues to exist? All functional concept formation that starts at the level of the “whole” is only a preliminary for such an investigation …”
Foundational statements about the nature of social science such as these are in the first place what motivates me to question the value of conceptualising so-called ‘collective action’ in any ancient societies, and especially in circumstances where the evidence of organisational decision making mechanisms is entirely lacking.
Before looking more closely at the practical consequences of the absence of science and shortage of evidence in the writings of collective action archeologists I will introduce the standard Western frameworks for measuring collectivity from which the Mesoamerica archeologists claim to derive their ‘collective action theory’. We will see that here too the Mesoamerica collective action theorists have missed a beat.
Modern collective action
Even in a contemporary society with all its formal collective security and the checks and balances provided by a unified longstanding structure of rule of law, with formal representational democracy, separation of powers and complex sets of highly evolved more or less effective organisations operating throughout all of the arenas of social action … it has proved extremely difficult both to theorise collective action and to discover meaningful concrete empirically verifiable applications of collective action.
It is noteworthy in the present context that in Mancur Olson’s influential book The Logic of Collective Action (1965) the phrase “collective action” appears only twice and then solely to demonstrate the near-impossibility of achieving meaningful collective action given the free-rider problems predicted by group theory and game theory.
Also noteworthy in Olson’s analysis is the ineluctable necessity, as he sees it, for individualistic incentives to motivate participation in the (elusive) conditions of collective action. We should keep in mind how much more unlikely the organisation of collective action would have been in a premodern society without writing or formal mechanisms for building trust, with fewer constraints on usurpation by individual leaders, in environments of permanent proximity to adversity and extinction threats.
Finally I would emphasise that Mancur Olson and others in his field would never have dreamt of discussing collective action outside the context of specifiable mechanisms and organisations upon which all ‘collective action’ depends.
Thus Olson wrote:
“… large or latent groups have no incentive to act to obtain a collective good because, however valuable the collective good might be to the group as a whole, it does not offer the individual any incentive to pay dues to any organisation working in the latent group's interest, or to bear in any other way any of the costs of the necessary collective action. Only a separate and selective incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way. In such circumstances group action can be obtained only through an incentive that operates, not indiscriminately, like the collective good, upon the group as a whole, but rather selectively toward the individuals in the group. The incentive must be “selective” so that those who do not join the organization working for the group's interest, or in other ways contribute to the attainment of the group's interest, can be treated differently from those who do.”
Similarly, in an earlier work, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) the public choice theorist James M. Buchanan, with Gordon Tullock, emphasised that the concept of “collective action” can only have theoretical validity and empirical utility in the context of advanced procedures for majority voting in a “democratic state” (such as the United States) with its long established formal empirical “processes through which group choices are organised” by means of a “rational choice of a set of rules”, i.e. “general rules, applicable to all individuals and groups in the social order”.
These preconditions are rather difficult to imagine in ancient Mesoamerica.
Buchanan and Tullock also began, as did Max Weber, with the vital methodological postulate that “collective action must be … composed of individual actions”.
Thus “individual motivation” in “social activity” is conceived as “political exchange … equivalent to economic exchange”.
Buchanan and Tullock conclude:
“Collective action is viewed as the action of individuals when they choose to accomplish purposes collectively rather than individually, and the government is seen as nothing more than the set of processes, the machine, which allows such collective action to take place. This approach makes the State into something that is constructed by men, an artefact. Therefore, it is, by nature, subject to change, perfectible.”
In the collective action theories of archaeologists we do find some simplified distinctions between ‘collective’ and ‘autocratic’ rule but no real recognition of the indispensability of governance as machinery (mechanisms and the organisation of political or administrative action) with working parts that must be identified before the observer can make any definitive categorisation of separate types. I argue that an ‘autocrat’ could rationally choose to design and implement ‘collective’ action goals.
A collective action guru
Finally we can turn to Elinor Ostrom’s famous book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) which the collective action theorists in archeology cite as their primary initial source of inspiration. What they seem not to recognise, or at least not concede and adjust to, is the fact that Ostrom’s book is really a constructivist proposal for future institutional design, i.e. a work in progress towards a potentially feasible ideal in societies that already have law firms and experience of property rights, regulatory agencies, court systems, and so on.
Ostrom does mention a few historical examples, but her goal is a future policy, one that will be relevant for the contemporary premodern societies which still lack the organisations and mechanisms for sustaining what she is calling ‘collective action’:
“I hope this inquiry will contribute to the development of an empirically supported theory of self-organizing and self-governing forms of collective action …”
As for the history:
“… [one observes] the ongoing, side-by-side existence of private property and communal property in settings in which the individuals involved have exercised considerable control over institutional arrangements and property rights. Generations of Swiss and Japanese villagers have learned the relative benefits and costs of private-property and communal-property institutions related to various types of land and uses of land. The villagers in both settings have chosen to retain the institution of communal property as the foundation for land use and similar important aspects of village economies. … One cannot view communal property in these settings as the primordial remains of earlier institutions evolved in a land of plenty. If the transactions costs involved in managing communal property had been excessive, compared with private-property institutions, the villagers would have had many opportunities to devise different land-tenure arrangements for the mountain commons … the same design principles are relevant for solving CPR [common-pool resource management] problems in Third World settings. …”
How does Ostrom define collective action? She does not. This could be regarded as a serious omission that weakens her argument. But she clearly considers that much of the conceptual spadework was done already by among many others Mancur Olson.
Ostrom wrote a subtle and complicated book steeped in advanced economic theory and institutional theory. I do not think her ideas and proposals for CPR will ever have widespread or lasting effects. But I do believe we should take careful note of the stringent institutional preconditions she envisages for effective collective action.
The CPR framework will not have had a role in ancient Mesoamerican development.
Ostrom expands at length on the tough realities of feasible collective action:
“What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit—and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization—is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts.
Examples of self-organised enterprise abound. Most law firms are obvious examples: A group of lawyers will pool their assets to purchase a library and pay for joint secretarial and research assistance. They will develop their own internal governance mechanisms and formulas for allocating costs and benefits to the partners. Most cooperatives are also examples. The cases of self-organised and self-governed CPRs that we consider are also examples. But until a theoretical explanation—based on human choice—for self-organised and self-governed enterprises is fully developed and accepted, major policy decisions will continue to be undertaken with a presumption that individuals cannot organise themselves and always need to be organised by external authorities.”
“Further, all organizational arrangements are subject to stress, weakness, and failure. Without an adequate theory of self-organised collective action, one cannot predict or explain when individuals will be unable to solve a common problem through self-organization alone, nor can one begin to ascertain which of many intervention strategies might be effective in helping to solve particular problems … there is a considerable difference between the presumption that a regulatory agency should be established and the presumption that a reliable court system is needed to monitor and enforce self-negotiated contracts. If the theories being used in a policy science do not include the possibility of self-organised collective action, then the importance of a court system that can be used by self-organising groups to monitor and enforce contracts will not be recognized.”
My impression is that the collective action theorists in archeology (who never at any stage feel the need to present their own definition of ‘collective action’ other than by reference to works such as Ostrom’s) do not really appreciate the implications.
Ostrom assumes that a raft of modern legal, political, and administrative precursors and imperatives will be needed before collective action can be put to effect.
Can the radical archeologists really be so naive as to believe that these precursors and imperatives were present in ancient Mesoamerica? It is no surprise that they have not yet found evidence of collective action in the archeological remains. What astonishes is that after years searching for a chimera they are still declaring their intent-to-find.
In the following passages we find Fargher & Blanton once again seamlessly merging un-believable premodern and partially-believable contemporary ‘collective action’ scenarios in a collection titled Power from Below in Premodern Societies: The Dynamics of Political Complexity in the Archaeological Record, Cambridge University Press in 2021 …
“Collective action appears to have been organised from the bottom up as households developed cooperative strategies at the local or neighbourhood scale to solve collective action problems independent of the state. Bottom-up strategies to solve cooperation problems at the local level in rural areas seem to have been important in cases based on wet-rice agriculture involving flow-management irrigation or floodwater collection irrigation strategies …”
“In collective states where social infrastructure at the intermediate sociospatial scale was limited or not conducive to collective action, the state undertook broad restructuring of the base to essentially create “communities” that could participate in the collective enterprise…”
“Comparative cross-cultural archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data suggest that we should expect major differences in the materialisation of rural infrastructure in the archaeological record depending on the degree to which a community and or a state pursued collective strategies. In rural communities, we would expect heavy investment in public spaces or public buildings as well as investment in infrastructure dedicated to the management of common-pool resources (e.g., irrigation systems) where collective action is high. As well, regional landscapes should also show evidence of large-scale public goods. Diachronic data from both regions and rural settlements coupled with studies of urban settings will provide data on when shifts toward collectivity occurred and the degree to which collective states invested in building rural institutional complexity … diachronic information from communities will provide key data for evaluating the degree to which these communities were able to maintain collective institutions. …”
“… historic information suggests that public meeting spaces that are open and accessible are important in common-pool resource management. … So, in these cases we would expect to see evidence for such spaces (e.g., plazas, temples, halls) in rural communities. Diachronic data at the regional scale is needed to document the degree to which rural communities organized collectively without state participation as well as to determine if institutions in rural settlements were developed to solve collective action problems independently of the state or if such rural communities were historical vestiges of previous phases of collective state building at the regional scale. Thus … we would expect to find clear rural communities with public and accessible architecture in the archaeological record.”
A lot of wishful thinking. And great faith in the evidential power of … the “plaza”.
The politics
I have so far been sidestepping the political motivations of the collective action archeologists. Their interest in collective action is not just a sociological mistake. Plainly it is motivated by politics. In order to get a look at the raw material and the pseudoscientific data sets we must read a stream of rallying cries and agendas for challenging the arrogant “Western” mindset of hierarchy and top-downism.
I limit myself to one I have easily to hand, which appeared in the 2008 book.
“… Are the Western democracies really so different from pre-modern states? … Collective action theory implies a universality of human agency, but the idea of autocracy implies something different, namely, that in the pre-modern condition, agency was more selectively parsed out to powerful rulers while commoners, as a subaltern, were unable to resist the regimes of power imposed on them. This conclusion is consistent with what most anthropologists assume, namely, that the idea of universal human agency is only an ethnocentric expression of Western individualism. … To find out if collective action was a general process in political evolution, and not just a singularity of Western history, we needed an objective [sic] research design that would allow us to transcend the orientalist claims of Western social science to approach both Classical and non-Classical civilisations with an objective comparative method. To accomplish our goal, we needed two things: (1) a robust method for systematically measuring the degree of collectivity in such a way as to allow for cross-polity comparison, and (2) a world-wide sample of societies that would permit us to address how collective action processes may have played out in a variety of cultural, historical, and geographical settings. …”
In fact, collective action is not a general process in Western history, never was, and probably never will be. The problem I face trying to obtain knowledge of governance mechanisms in ancient Mesoamerica is that collective action archeologists who seem to be monopolising this field of enquiry obviously DO NOT have a “robust method for systematically measuring the degree of collectivity”. They have the ruins of the plazas upon which they place great emphasis, but entirely lack any social scientific measure of collective organisation and process in their own speciality area of Mesoamerica.
Pleasure plazas
The empirical emphasis of collective action theorists is, when dispassionately examined, extremely narrow. The researchers usually assume the coexistence in premodern settings of many variables as proofs of collective action governance, including relative social equality, depersonalised ideologies, collective decision making, internal taxation mechanisms, and communal ownership of land.
[We can see these assumptions in the very helpful tables displayed below.]
Usually they lack evidence for these. So, instead, they focus on stationary physical evidence found (or not) in the ‘archeological dirt’: i.e. buildings, residential patterns, personalised statues, public squares, roads, irrigation structures. In the most recent writings of collective action archeologists the commonest oft-repeated indicator of collective action is “the open square”. The stress is on the plaza or open space, which these theorists consider the best or only available indicator of collective action.
Thus, for the vast majority of criteria listed in the two tables from 2018 articles which I have reproduced below the researchers do not offer evidence for any of the items or correlations, with the partial exception of … the plazas. They are assumptions derived from the assumptions, statistical correlations and proxies which were first proposed in Blanton and Fargher’s Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States (2008).
I scoured a later book by Blanton and Fargher How Humans Cooperate: Confronting the Challenge of Collective Action (2016) and could not find a single definition of collective action, let alone one that distinguishes between modern and premodern contexts.
My argument
These are my emphases:
If there were such a thing as collective action in antiquity it would have required organisation, decisions about organisation, mechanisms for making decisions. If these facts are not available, then it would better not to use the term. Big squares, little squares … tell us nothing about the human interactions within squares.
There is an irony. The invention and early use of writing in some of the world is empirically associated with centralised power and administration. When two regionally proximate administered societies are set side by side conceptually our knowledge of their governance may therefore be far greater for the society whose public projects were organised in more authoritarian top-down ways.
Whatever grain of truth might lie in the ‘autocracy-collective’ dichotomy, the fact is we do know about the autocratic governance and know almost nothing about so-called ‘collective governance’ because the latter left behind no trace of itself. That is why its contemporary devotees rely on pseudo proxies, correlates, plazas.
Probably the most important point to make is that all the governance features listed in the tables at the end of this post—including the ‘collective’ features—could potentially have been implemented by the ‘autocrats’. Clever leaders who epitomised individual action dynamics in ancient societies will have known that to maintain power they had to convince, consult, cooperate, cajole and command in order to produce collective goods to satisfy common interests that, in turn, would attract newcomers, enable production and transportation of goods and services, maintain the health and welfare of required reproductive and rigorous populations, and generate a taxable surplus. Why should not autocrats be smart enough not to over-aggrandise their image with statues and luxury tombs? Why should not autocrats dictate collective goals to legitimise their rulership? Leaders logically could have calculated that a big plaza would be the ideal infrastructure for acclaiming leaders, for issuing orders, for facilitating consultation, for propagating bonding and bivalent beliefs about relations with impersonal supernaturals, for discussing the locational economic functions and rules of markets, and for exchanging information needed for organising and planning the essential public goods such as irrigation, roads, markets, and military defence.
The autocratic-collective distinction used by collective action theorists is a false dichotomy. I treat relevant variables encompassed inside a single ‘administrative’ category of society applicable to all regions. What does matter to this history is the knowledge that a ‘public good’ was made and administered for a public good. The ‘public good’ could have been made by obedience to an authoritarian order. The same ‘public good’ might have resulted from voluntaristic consultation.
While we would like to know the variety in the forms by which public goods were made and administered, and the mixtures and fluctuations of governance through time within single states, such knowledge cannot be the product of an ideological intoxication with collective action. It is a tremendous shame that collective action archeologists seem to be crowding out sensible studies of ancient Mesoamerican governance. I will need to find more trustworthy material … or omit the region.
To sum up:
Even if evidence were available to sustain the claims of the collective action archeologists my counter argument would be that a leader with absolute personal power and top-down power structures may be equally likely to implement the so-called ‘bottom up’ variables of collective action. Secondly, the autocratic-collective distinction is a false dichotomy. Thirdly, the archeological Mesoamerica collective action paradigm is unsubstantiated and hopefully will soon be put to bed. Fourthly, the concept ‘collective action’ should carry a warning sign ‘use with caution’. [END]
Illustrations
As I say there is no evidential basis for a provable correlation between the alleged ‘collective’ variables in among Mesoamerican polities. Collective action archeologists emphasise the role of an open plaza. And nothing is known about collective action in the plaza. There is more certainty about ‘autocratic’ mechanisms of governance.
The Source: https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12098
Reproduced from: https://doi.org/10.21237/C7clio9239449
If my claims about the complete absence of conceptual definition and concrete evidence in the writings of Mesoamerica collective action archeologists fail to convince do please take the time to carefully read the following works which are in fact the very best that this active/activist group has to offer. I readily admit that the material is well written. Their hypotheses are by now thoroughly rehearsed and well organised. Doubts set in only when one realises that the claims produce no advance, no empirical clinchers, no factual punch lines, and lead only to echo chambers in a chain letter of reciprocal self-referencing, void spaces … and repeating plazas. As Leibniz taught, a hypothesis should at least be “probable”, never impossible.
List of links to Mesoamerica collective action works: [paid Subscribers, privacy]
The ideas and interpretations in this post are original under copyright and must be attributed to ©2023 Michael G. Heller
This post is a ‘peer reviewed’ publication
If you have a question or comment contact me at mgs.heller@gmail.com
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The un-collective mechanics of individual action in the plaza, a very old tradition..
Plaza Italia (Great Game), by Giorgio de Chirico (Date: 1971)