Rationalism in the Neolithic Interlude
Stationary foragers, communal buildings, proto-administration
Composition IX, by Wassily Kandinsky Date: 1936
Recap and introduction
Our story of society has been told in terms of differentiation — between persons as biological individuals, between the group and its members, between the dominant person and the obedient group. We turn now to a fourth differentiation emerging on the basis of administrative organisation — a material distinction between impersonal and personal, solidly earthed in worldly phenomena, and a separation between units of administration rather than between categories of persons.
In evolutionary terms the administered society was an essential first step in the depersonalisation of governance. It gave to humans a capacity to calculate and control their own destinies on a limitless scale.
This may justifiably be called the first ‘great transformation’ in human-societal history. The bundle of changes it encompasses — agriculture, architecture, manufacture, urbanisation, numbering, measuring, calculation, writing, and—depending o…