On the social evolution of power to/over

Abstract

The distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, and the conceptualisation of their relationship, is highly relevant to an understanding of social evolution. They are in fact causally and historically interdependent. I claim that major social transformations such as the neolithic and industrial ‘revolutions’ need to be understood in this light, as does the heightening of formalised competition in contemporary liberal society. I consider the current literature on social evolution critically, and make a case for applying some of its ideas to the long-term general history of human society. The entire argument is framed within a concern to develop a more pragmatic understanding of power, aware of problems arising from an Enlightenment-derived distrust of ‘power over’.

Keywords:

• power to/over
• social evolution
• historical sociology
• liberal society
• competition

Notes

1. A couple of general indications of this: (1) The tradition of theorizing elite power that runs from Pareto, Mosca and Michels up to figures such as Domhoff (1983) is often marginalised in the power theory literature. I think the blunt acceptance that there are such things as elites often makes us uneasy. (2) The work of Foucault (2000) often vaguely describes power as a pervasive, un-centred and relational, resisting grappling with its hierarchical patterns, but is accompanied by a notion of ‘local knowledges’ struggling to break free of ‘dominant discourses’ in ways that sentimentally echo Enlightenment ideas of emancipation.

2. From here on I will use the hyphen to distinguish these two sub-concepts, and the oblique to highlight when I want to indicate both senses in tandem. I want to avoid a proliferation of inverted commas.

3. Even personality types, in the Weberian sense of Menschentum might be considered social forms in this sense (see Darmon 2011).

4. Progress however, is not the same as a trend, or directionality (see Blute 2010, c. 8). Here, biological evolutionary theory is more ambivalent, and so must social evolutionary theory be. All evidence points to the fact that life began in simple environmentally constrained forms, and gradually increased in complexity and ability to spread across diverse environments. This suggests a macro-level directionality to biological evolution. But once the initial colonisation of the Earth by life had happened, the number of species has risen and fallen without a clear trend (although subject to other causal processes, e.g. those leading to mass extinctions). Similarly, complexity can be difficult to define, but the morphological-functional complexity of species is often known to reduce depending on conditions (e.g. eyes ‘atrophy’ in lightless cave environments). Within particular species and sets of species, sometimes particular sets of environmental conditions tend to promote morphological changes in one direction over a period of time (e.g. increase in body size), but this kind of directionality is specific to the species-environment relationships in question, not a general evolutionary rule. Very often variations within a given species accumulate over time randomly, without any clear trend. The example of biological evolution suggests caution is needed when proposing overall trends for social evolution. Nonetheless, there do appear to be some large if non-linear trends in human history: the increasing numbers of the global population; the expansion into more diverse environments; the growth in scale of social organisation and political cephalisation; the concentration of people in ever larger cities; the expansion and acceleration of communicative capacities; and the increased harnessing and exploitation of extra-somatic energy sources. As with directional change within species, there is a question at least posed here about whether certain conditions are driving these trends.

5. Blute (2010, c. 6) takes a pragmatic view of the meme concept: ‘memes if useful – but not necessarily memes’ (ibid., 20). Hodgson and Knudsen (2010, pp. 132–136), are much more critical, arguing that it relies on imprecise notions of ‘information’ and ‘ideas’.

6. Whether this is a sufficient definition of culture is debatable (see Hearn 2011, p. 203).

7. For a somewhat similar critical response to Randall Collins’s rejection of evolutionism, see Sanderson’s comments in Collins (2009, pp. 269–272).

8. For instance, the burning and destruction of temples and elite residences in Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico around 650 AD, followed by the dispersion of much of the population back into rural areas (Cowgill 1997, pp. 156–157).

9. Competition is the theme of my current mid-career fellowship funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation, entitled ‘The Transformation of Competition: A Study in the Formation of Modernity and Liberal Societies’ (see Hearn 2012, pp. 147–150).