The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology.Sahlins, M. D. 1960. The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87.Runciman, W.G. (ed.), The origin of social institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 235–54. While little is known for certain, debates since HobbesHobbes, T. (2010). Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. by Ian Shapiro. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. and RousseauRousseau, J.-J. 1973 . The social contract. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New edition. London & Melbourne: Dent, pp. 179–309. have returned again and again to the philosophical, moral and evolutionary questions posed.
Social origins in nature
Origin of social groups Thomas Hobbes
Arguably the most influential theory of human social origins is that of Thomas Hobbes, who in his LeviathanThomas Hobbes. Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. by Ian Shapiro (Yale University Press; 2010). argued that without strong government, society would collapse into Bellum omnium contra omnes — "the war of all against all": Hobbes' innovation was to attribute the establishment of society to a founding 'social contract', in which the Crown's subjects surrender some part of their freedom in return for security.
If Hobbes' idea is accepted, it follows that society could not have emerged prior to the state. This school of thought has remained influential to this day.W. G. Runciman (ed.), The Origin of Human Social Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press Prominent in this respect is British archaeologist Colin Renfrew (Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn), who points out that the state did not emerge until long after the evolution of Homo sapiens. The earliest representatives of our species, according to Renfrew, may well have been anatomically modern, but they were not yet cognitively or behaviourally modern. For example, they lacked political leadership, large-scale cooperation, food production, organised religion, law or symbolic artefacts. Humans were simply hunter-gatherers, who — much like extant apes — ate whatever food they could find in the vicinity. Renfrew controversially suggests that hunter-gatherers to this day think and socialise along lines not radically different from those of their nonhuman primate counterparts. In particular, he says that they do not "ascribe symbolic meaning to material objects" and for that reason "lack fully developed 'mind.'"
However, hunter-gatherer ethnographers emphasise that extant foraging peoples certainly do have social institutions — notably institutionalised rights and duties codified in formal systems of kinship.Lévi Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Elaborate rituals such as initiation ceremonies serve to cement contracts and commitments, quite independently of the state.Van Gennep, A. 1960 The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Other scholars would add that insofar as we can speak of "human revolutions" — "major transitions" in human evolutionMaynard Smith, J. and E. Szathmáry 1995. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford: W. H. Freeman. — the first was not the Neolithic Revolution but the rise of symbolic culture that occurred toward the end of the Middle Stone Age.Mellars, P. A., K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef and C. Stringer (eds), 2007. Rethinking the Human Revolution: new behavioural and biological perspectives on the origin and dispersal of modern humans. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.Knight, C., C. Power and I. Watts 1995. The human symbolic revolution: A Darwinian account. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 5(1): 75–114.
Arguing the exact opposite of Hobbes's position, anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres views the state and society as mutually incompatible: genuine society is always struggling to survive against the state.Clastres, P. 1977. Society Against the State. Trans. R. Hurley in collaboration with A. Stein. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Like Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that society was born in a social contract. In Rousseau's case, however, sovereignty is vested in the entire populace, who enter into the contract directly with one another. "The problem", he explained, "is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. The contract's clauses, Rousseau continued, may be reduced to one — "the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community. Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has".
In other words: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will.Rousseau, J.-J. 1973 . The social contract. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New edition. London & Melbourne: Dent. Book I, Ch. 6. By this means, each member of the community acquires not only the capacities of the whole but also, for the first time, rational mentality:
Sir Henry Sumner Maine In his influential book, Ancient Law (1861), Maine argued that in early times, the basic unit of human social organisation was the patriarchal family:
Hostile to French revolutionary and other radical social ideas, Maine's motives were partly political. He sought to undermine the legacy of Rousseau and other advocates of man's natural rights by asserting that originally, no one had any rights at all – ‘every man, living during the greater part of his life under the patriarchal despotism, was practically controlled in all his actions by a regimen not of law but of caprice’.Maine, H. S. 1861. Ancient Law. London: John Murray. p.8. Not only were the patriarch's children subject to what Maine calls his ‘despotism’: his wife and his slaves were equally affected. The very notion of kinship, according to Maine, was simply a way of categorizing those who were forcibly subjected to the despot's arbitrary rule. Maine later added a Darwinian strand to this argument. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin had cited reports that a wild-living male gorilla would monopolise for itself as large a harem of females as it could violently defend. Maine endorsed Darwin's speculation that ‘primeval man’ probably 'lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men’.Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. London: Murray. Vol. 2, p. 362. Under pressure to spell out exactly what he meant by the term 'patriarchy', Maine clarified that ‘sexual jealousy, indulged through power, might serve as a definition of the Patriarchal Family’.Maine, H. S. 1883. Early Law and Custom. London: John Murray, p. 209.
Lewis Henry Morgan
In his influential book, Ancient Society (1877), its title echoing Maine's Ancient Law, Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a very different theory. Morgan insisted that throughout the earlier periods of human history, neither the state nor the family existed.
In place of both family and state, according to Morgan, was the gens — nowadays termed the 'clan' — based initially on matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent This aspect of Morgan's theory, later endorsed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, is nowadays widely considered discredited (but for a critical survey of the current consensus, see Knight 2008, 'Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal'Knight, C. 2008. Early human kinship was matrilineal . In N. J. Allen, H. Callan, R. Dunbar and W. James (eds.), Early Human Kinship. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 61–82.).
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels built on Morgan's ideas in his 1884 essay, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in the light of the researches of Lewis Henry Morgan. His primary interest was the position of women in early society, and — in particular — Morgan's insistence that the matrilineal clan preceded the family as society's fundamental unit. 'The mother-right gens', wrote Engels in his survey of contemporary historical materialist scholarship, 'has become the pivot around which the entire science turns...' Engels argued that the matrilineal clan represented a principle of self-organization so vibrant and effective that it allowed no room for patriarchal dominance or the territorial state.
Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim considered that in order to exist, any human social system must counteract the natural tendency for the sexes to promiscuously conjoin. He argued that social order presupposes sexual morality, which is expressed in prohibitions against sex with certain people or during certain periods — in traditional societies particularly during menstruation.
The incest taboo, wrote Durkheim in 1898, is no more than a particular example of something more basic and universal - the ritualistic setting apart of 'the sacred' from 'the profane'. This begins as the segregation of the sexes, each of which - at least on important occasions - is 'sacred' or 'set apart' from the other. 'The two sexes', as Durkheim explains, 'must avoid each other with the same care as the profane flees from the sacred and the sacred from the profane.' Women as sisters act out the role of 'sacred' beings invested 'with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the masculine population at a distance.' Their menstrual blood in particular sets them in a category apart, exercising a 'type of repulsing action which keeps the other sex far from them'. In this way, the earliest ritual structure emerges — establishing morally regulated 'society' for the first time.Durkheim, E. 1963. La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines. L’Année Sociologique 1: 1–70. Reprinted as Incest. The nature and origin of the taboo, trans. E. Sagarin. New York: Stuart.
Sigmund Freud Charles Darwin pictured early human society as resembling that of apes, with one or more dominant males jealously guarding a harem of females.Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. London: Murray. Vol. 2, p. 362. In his myth of the 'Primal Horde', Sigmund Freud later took all this as his starting point but then postulated an insurrection mounted by the tyrant's own sons: Following this, the band of brothers were about to take sexual possession of their mothers and sisters when suddenly they were overcome with remorse. In their contradictory emotional state, their dead father now became stronger than the living one had been. In memory of him, the brothers revoked their deed by forbidding the killing and eating of the 'totem' (as their father had now become) and renouncing their claim to the women who had just been set free. In this way, the two fundamental taboos of primitive society – not to eat the totem and not to marry one's sisters – were established for the first time.
Marshall Sahlins