Somewhere or other – maybe in a publication, or more likely a blog – I referred to what I called the pendulum paradox. I chose to illustrate this by comparing the sociologist with the historian. Sociologists like me look for patterns in events, and at least some of us then move on to search for the (generative) mechanisms that must exist for those particular patterns to have arisen. We are pattern-oriented. The historian on the other hand typically eschews, or is at least very wary of, patterns, preferring to research individuals and their decision-making. In extremis, Althusser versus E P Thompson. Ok, I know these are generalisations – ideal types if you will – but the point I want to make is that when the pendulum swings too far towards patterning, the historian wants to remind us of the sheer diverse complexity of human affairs; and when it swings too far towards ‘the sheer diverse complexity of human affairs’ the sociologists wants to remind us of the need to discern and account for compelling and telling patterns. I’m sure colleagues have encountered the pendulum paradox, possibly at multidisciplinary conferences or seminars. The obvious lesson for sociologists is that historians and others are always liable to query the patterns we discern, and sometimes we will be compelled to rethink.
A ready and topical example is provided by the recent bestseller – The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity – by the anthropologist/archeologist duo of Graeber/Wengrow, who the challenge orthodox historical periodization reproduced here:
From the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, occurring from 8,000 to 3,000 BC socio-political evolution encompassed four principal stages:
- Bands – small nomadic groups of up to a dozen hunter-gatherers; democratic and egalitarian (close to Marx’s ‘primitive communism’).
- Tribes – similar to bands except more committed to horticulture and pastoralism; ‘segmentary societies’ comprising autonomous villages.
- Chiefdoms – autonomous political units under permanent control of paramount chief, central government with hereditary, hierarchical status arrangements; ‘rank societies’.
- States – autonomous political units; centralized government supported by monopoly of violence; large dense populations characterized by stratification and inequality.
3,000 BC witnessed the birth of fully-fledged agrarian states, displaying a number of core characteristics and remaining the predominant form of social organization until around 1450 AD. These core characteristics can be summarized as follows:
- a division of labour between a small landowning (or controlling) nobility and a large peasantry; this was an exploitative division backed by military force.
- the noble-peasant relationship provided the principal axis in agrarian societies: it was a relationship based on production-for-use rather than production-for-exchange.
- differences of interest between nobles and peasants, but not overt ‘class struggle’.
- societies held together not by consensus but by military force.
- societies relatively static and unchanging: there was a 4,500-year incubation period prior to the advent of capitalist states.
The transition to capitalism took place in the ‘long sixteenth century’, that is, between 1450 and 1640. Marx saw this transition as of major significance, noting three vital characteristics of the new capitalist system:
- private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie.
- the existence of wage-labour as the basis of production.
- the profit motive and long-term accumulation of capital as the driving aim of production.
It is customary to discern reasonably distinct stages of capitalism. Thus a transition to ‘merchant capitalism’ is typically dates from 1450 to 1640, followed by a period of consolidation and solidification, characterized by slow, steady growth between 1640 and 1760. 1760 is often cited as a marker for a switch to ‘industrial capitalism’, which is itself often divided into stages:
- Early industrial, 1760-1830: textile manufacturing dominated by Britain.
- Liberal, 1830-1870: railroads and iron dominated by Britain and later the USA.
- Liberal/Early Fordist, 1870-WW1: steel and organic chemistry, with the emergence of new industries based on producing and using electrical machinery, dominated by the USA and Germany.
- Late Fordist/Welfare, WW1-1970: automobiles and petrochemicals, dominated by the USA.
- Financial, 1970 onwards: electronics, information and biotechnology, plus global finance, dominated by the USA, also Japan and Western Europe.
What Graeber and Wengrow do in a nutshell is explain in detail how so many academics have interpreted the past of the human species teleologically; that is, in terms of modern (masculine, white, western) thinking, concepts and theories. Although few pieces of the jigsaw of the earliest societies remain, we may well have put the pieces we do have in the wrong places.
Graeber and Wengrow represent a swing of the pendulum away from the orthodox ‘periodic’ representation of the evolution of societal gatherings culminating in the present towards the historians’ happier hunting ground of detail and variety. There is much to learn from what they claim, not least to accord proper respect to premodern peoples, philosophies and systems. We must, they insist, leave behind many of our current theoretical preoccupations:
‘Wee can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some ‘original’ form of human society; that its nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that ‘civilisation’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the priced of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state. We know now that we are in the presence of myths’ (pp525/6).
They do offer a framework of sorts. For instance, in relation to state formation, they write:
‘An origin for ‘the state’ has long been sought in such diverse places as ancient Egypt, Inca Peru and Shang China, but what we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections. There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart. As we noted, there are now planetary bureaucracies (public and private, ranging from the IMF and WTO to J.P.Morgan Chase and various credit-rating agencies) without anything that resembles a corresponding principle of global sovereignty or global field of competitive politics; and everything from cryptocurrencies to private security agencies, undermining the sovereignty of states’ (p.431).
I hope these two quotations alone will encourage people to read their fascinating book.
So, to reiterate, the point of this brief blog is to identity a pendulum paradox, and to record that it can be, maybe ought to be, a heuristic device to create better theory. While ideal types of the kind included in the periodization of societal history reproduced above – and subject to critique by Graeber and Wengrow – may retain some uses, the pendulum keeps swinging.
A final rider: as Weber maintained, the whole point of developing ideal types is as a means to understand and explain particular social phenomena.