Power and rule, civilisations and the modern political dimension: parallelism, convergence and divergence in social evolution

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses power in world history and then in the political dimension of modernity, contrasting it with how power was exercised in other civilisations. It mobilises key texts on large-scale historical sociology and evolutionary theories. In order to articulate a discussion on systems of rule, hierarchy, network and market, the analytical categories of justification and legitimation are introduced. To organise and frame the historical record, avoiding the pitfalls of unilinear theories of evolution, it also resorts to the concepts of homology and homoplasy, divergence and convergence, which are common occurrences in history. This has to do with limited possibilities for social evolution. Yet modernity surged as a stunning historic-evolutionary divergence, in which a specific process of differentiation took place, including that of a particular, and hitherto unheard of, political dimension. Authoritarian collectivism tried to supersede it but failed, entailing a backtracking of social evolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Rule
• politics
• civilisations
• evolution
• hierarchy
• network and market

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Wolfgang Knöbl for his comments on the first version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that in Medieval times zoon politikon was rendered as ‘social being’, while in Greece it was actually related to the polis as a way of life (an ‘ethical’ whole, Hegel would later say), not to ‘politics’.

2 See, for an overall view of the discussion (Skocpol, 1984; Smith, 1992; Domingues, 2000, chap. 4; Knöbl, 2007). In particular Alexander and Colomy (1990) as well as Eder (1985) furnish examples of the attempt to articulate social evolutionary theory and historical sociology. Luhmann (1997) shows a more flexible treatment of evolutionary differentiation, but his systemic, ‘autopoietic’ approach and a clear evolutionary arrow limit his connection to history. I return to these issues below.

3 For a good though partial discussion, see Fowles (2013), chap. 1.

4 I, therefore, adopt a definition which is somewhat at odds with the widespread idea that power necessarily implies the possibility of forcing others do things even against their resistance: influence and argumentative communicative action in horizontal relations may be what corresponds to the transformative potential of human beings. This is by the way what democracy is or is supposed to be, although its liberal-representative version surely falls sort of its normative embodiment.

5 This would therefore imply the genesis of rule and underlying mechanisms, though not ‘politogenesis’ (as in Grinin, 2009, for the general reasons presented in this paper).

6 Curiously, Graeber moves in the opposite direction in his posthumous work with Wengrow. In any case, they are correct in stressing the diversity of power arrangements in human social history, and a stress on democracies or collective government, though calling them all ‘politics’ runs counter to the argument I develop here and despite an array of other, problematic assumptions and moves in their book, including an easy wholesale dismissal of evolutionary theory. See Graeber & Wengrow (2021). On the other hand, Graeber’s (2010) direct identification of cooperation and collaboration with (everyday) ‘communism’ confuses the network principle and its mechanism of coordination (voluntary) with a concrete type of social relation, while, curiously, dismissing ‘communism’ (which, I must add, should be seen as having network, voluntary collaboration and cooperation at its core) as an overall social formation or civilization, though keeping ‘capitalism’, which is a rather strange theoretical move.

7 In contrast to the Romans, for whom dominium referred to property and imperium to more general postestate and autorictas, in modernity a fusion eventually came about: Dominium or ‘domination’ assumed a political countenance, whereas imperium or ‘empire’ denoted a specific political form.

8 According to Mencius, who revised and made Confucianism hegemonic, the five relations were: between father and son, ruler and minister, husband and wife, old and young, friend and friend. Only the latter was in principle horizontal.

9 Similar issues turn up in Claessen’s (2011) reflections, but empirically and without further elaboration. Bondarenko (2011) also makes recourse to the idea of evolutionary ‘homologous series’ (inspired by Vavilov in biology), in addition conceptualizing hierarchical and non-hierarchical (horizontal) societies.

10 So-called ‘heterarchies’ (Crumley, 1995), horizontal ties which may be parallel to hierarchies in other dimensions, were thus found in this sort of civilisation.

11 So as to grasp the processes within these civilisations and the transitions from one to the other, including their genesis, I have articulated the concepts of gerative, reiterative and transformative mechanisms (Domingues, 2017/2018, chap. 5). Here and there I have referred in this paper to some of these processes, what will be empirically more explicit regarding modernity, though I cannot follow the issue here.

12 This what I have in fact been doing with the concept of collective subjectivity, for instance, in Domingues (2000, 2017). Civilisations, as concrete, interactive social systems, are collective subjectivities.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Annelise Maier Forschungpreis; as well as by the CNPq, from the Brazilian Ministry for Science and Technology, and Faperj.

Notes on contributors

José Maurício Domingues

José Maurício Domingues holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, is professor at Rio de Janeiro State University and received the Anneliese Maier Forschungpreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in 2018. His last books include Critical Theory and Political Modernity (Palgrave, 2019) and Authoritarian Collectivism and 'Real Socialism' (Anthem, 2022).