Social scientists over the years have conceptualised societal evolution in a number of ways. In the late 19th and into the 20th century many social scientists argued (and many ethnocentrically inclined amateurs still do) that all human societies evolved from hunter-gatherer societies to horticultural societies to agricultural societies and finally to modern industrial technological societies in succession. For polemicists wedded to this approach it was the last societal form, the industrial, that was the zenith and pinnacle of human and human societal evolution, a conclusion not surprising given that those who made such claims lived in “modern” societies and saw their own modern industrial societies, modern technological societies, and modern political societies as the best of all possible societal worlds (without any of the irony associated with such a statement). Those still engaged in hunting and gathering, horticulture, and agriculture were seen, in this linear conception of societal evolution, as remnants of societal worlds gone by and as possible guides as to what humans and human societies were like the the past before writing evolved (the ethnographic analogy, a metaphor or allegorical that still underlies a lot of bioanthropological studies of prehistoric humans past).
Given the criticism that the linear model of societal evolution was too ethnocentric, too imperial, and too unilinear many later social scientists ditched the unilinear model of societal evolution for others that were regarded as less unilinear and more, at least theoretically anyway, multilinear. One model of societal evolution that has become popular in historical sociological and historical circles is one that hypothesises that human societies have evolved from the hunter-gatherer society form to the agricultural society form (small scale and large scale), to the modern society form, and to the postmodern society form. In this model, it is argued, all of these societal forms and subforms within societal forms, which can still be found across the globe, were, in Darwinian fashion, adaptations to specific environments. So, it was maintained, no one societal form was or is any better or superior to any other. With this assumption the proponents of this view believed they had conquered human ethnocentrism (Icarian hubris).
Both the unilinear model of societal evolution and the multilinear model of societal evolution held that societal evolution was driven primarily by economic change. In both models the change from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to industry, and finally to a service and retail economy is conceptualised not only as driving societal change but also, as a consequence, the driving force behind demographic change (though it is often admitted that demographic change can and often does simultaneously drive economic change), political change, cultural change, and geographic or environmental change.
Though it still dominated societal evolution discourse the hunter-gatherer/agriculture/modernity/postmodernity model is not the only model of societal evolution, change, or development out there in social science land. There is another model of societal change that is less tied to changes in economic modes of production than the hunter-gatherer, agriculture/modernity/postmodernity paradigm. This alternative model of societal evolution, one that is particularly prevalent in anthropological circles, focuses on kinship structures and political forms and sees the latter, in particular, as the driving force of societal evolution or development. In this approach to societal development it is held that there have been four forms of human societies: band societies, tribal societies, and chieftain societies. Sociologists and political scientists might add monarchical societies, authoritarian societies, autocratic and totalitarian societies, and democratic societies into the mix since they, historically speaking, have been more interested in “modern" and "postmodern” “complex” societies than have anthropologists traditionally.
In this politics oriented model band societies are those societies which engage in hunting and gathering, which are demographically small consisting of 20 to 40 members, and which are largely egalitarian. Tribal societies, in this model, are seen as those societies which engage in horticulture, which farm often with ploughs but which do not engage in irrigation projects. Tribal societies in this model are seen as largely egalitarian but only for the in-group, the in-kin group which is defined on the basis of lineage or totemic identity, save when it comes to age and gender. Tribal societies, so the story goes, generally live in more permanent settlements and are characterised by Big Men who sponsor and create the conditions for those in the in-group to engage in rituals and feasts. Ritual specialist roles and craft specialist roles in tribal societies are generally part-time “positions”. Demographically, tribal societies are larger than band societies. Chieftain societies, in this theoretical model, are grounded in conceptions of kin identity as well but chieftain societies are characterised by hierarchical ranks and greater inequality compared to band or tribal societies. This is because, so the argument goes, they live in permanent communities and engage in agriculture which produces a surplus that can be expropriated from the peasants by the few elites who dominate ranked or hierarchical chieftain societies. Many chieftain societies, polemicists for this model claim, are also often characterised by slavery.
In their comparative anthropological history The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Picador, 2021) cultural anthropologist David Graeber and comparative archaeologist David Wengrow, argue that all of these models of societal evolution are problematic for a variety of reasons. They are all, Graeber and Wengrow argue, too ethnocentric, too teleological, too technologically reductive, and too lacking in empirical support. Though the proponents of the multilinear and anthropological models, argue Graeber and Wengrow, claim that they are not teleological and are multilinear rather than unilinear, they still, if more subtly perhaps than the proponents of the unilinear societal and human evolution, continue to assume that their society is the culmination of societal evolution, something that makes these models the kissing cousins kin of the unilinear models of economic (e.g., Rostow) and political (e.g., Fukuyama with his shades of Hegel) evolution that were prominent in Western intellectual culture in the 1950s and 1960s and in the immediate aftermath of the-Cold War in the “modern” West.
The problems with this approach should be obvious anyone with a college education but far too often is not. Empirically speaking, not every society is part of the core, the rich industrial and postindustrial “democratic" nations of the West, which are implicitly and sometimes explicitly regarded, by Western promoters of the models of societal evolution we have been discussing, the best of all possible economic, political, and technological worlds, a notion that is, of course, inherently ethnocentric and inherently teleological (“natural" landmarks on the road to the radiant future). Additionally, the models of societal evolution we have been discussing tend to either elide or forget the fact that Western imperialism, Western geographic imperialism, Western political imperialism, Western economic imperialism, and Western cultural imperialism, and the power and authority associated with all of those forms of imperialism and the globalisation of that power, have played in remaking large parts of the globe in the Western image via coercion or force and convincement, something that can take many forms including the use of loans and aid to promote Western political, Western economic, and Western cultural forms. Finally, these models of societal evolution forget or elide the fact that the archaeological record does not, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, show a straight line from foraging to agriculture to an increase in inequality to the rise of the city to the advent of the state and later nation-state, to the rise of private property and to the advent of writing. In fact, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, there is ample archaeological evidence for the intentional abandonment of states and the inequalities and abuses of power that have often characterised them.
While Graeber and Wengrow give readers an excellent summary of the current state of the art of the archaeological record, a summary that undermines all linear and teleological models of societal evolution, from the stone age to the bronze age, it is their conception of freedom and power and the relations between the two that is perhaps the most interesting, innovative, and enlightening aspects of their book. Graeber and Wengrow argue that there are and have been, historically speaking, three elementary or primal forms of freedom which have existed in human communities since the beginning, the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey. and the freedom to create new social realises, all of which humans have engaged in for millennia via migration and through schismogenesis, a concept they borrow from anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As Graeber and Wengrow note, early humans could and did create societies that were intentionally different from those of their neighbours. If, for example the neighbours of one cultural group were hierarchical and rent through by power imbalances and hierarchical authority structures, the other culture could and did, as they did in the culture regions of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, for instance, create societies that promoted greater equality and greater freedom of choice.
Over time, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these three elementary forms of freedoms could be and sometimes were curtailed by the three elementary forms of power they delineate: sovereignty, bureaucratic power, and charismatic power, all different forms of power that have different historical roots, a fact that problematises the social evolutionist claim that with large scale agriculture came larger numbers of people and, as a consequence big men who were often considered to have some relationship to the divine, who thus were able to dominate, control, and expropriate surpluses from those they ruled along with bureaucracies that helped big men dominate, control and expropriate the surpluses of their populations.
Needless to say, those of us who live in the core nations today with their vast inequalities, their vast expropriations, their vast and supposedly impersonal bureaucracies, their vast surveillance apparatuses, their vast militaries, their vast border patrol militaries, and their passports have lost the freedom to move with ease (something corporate driven globalisation policies do as well), much of our freedom to disagree, given the prominence and success of their socialisation for conformity, a socialisation for conformity aided and abetted by media bureaucracies and educational bureaucracies, and the police-surveillance apparatuses that almost all core nations now have in order to, at least in part, control their populations. In a message of hope Graeber and Wengrow argue that despite these powerful forms of social control we humans still have the freedom, the potential freedom, to be creative and to escape from the golden and gilded cages that trap us. But can we? Will we? I am not so sure. Stay tuned.
The Dawn of Everything is an important and impressive synthesis of anthropological, sociological, and archaeological evidence melded to social theory. It is, a book that is sure to be one of the classics of comparative history and wholistic anthropology. I can’t recommend this sure to be seminal book enough. It is a must read for anyone interested in history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, human evolution, political science, and social change, and represents, along with the works of Noah Yuval Harari, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker—all of whom Graeber and Wengrow critique for their teleologism—and others a much needed return to the grand historical and theoretical sociology, anthropology, and history of Karl Mark, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. Essential.
