Origins of society

The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology. While little is known for certain, debates since Hobbes and Rousseau have returned again and again to the philosophical, moral and evolutionary questions posed.

Thomas Hobbes
Arguably the most influential theory of human social origins is that of Thomas Hobbes, who in his Leviathan 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. 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. Elaborate rituals such as initiation ceremonies serve to cement contracts and commitments, quite independently of the state. Other scholars would add that insofar as we can speak of "human revolutions" — "major transitions" in human evolution — the first was not the Neolithic Revolution but the rise of symbolic culture that occurred toward the end of the Middle Stone Age.

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.

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. 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’. 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’. 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’.

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' ).

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.

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. 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
A related but less dramatic version of Freud's 'sexual revolution' idea was proposed in 1960 by American social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Somehow, he writes, the world of primate brute competition and sexual dominance was turned upside-down:

Christopher Boehm
If we accept Rousseau's line of reasoning, no single dominant individual is needed to embody society, to guarantee security, or to enforce social contracts. The people themselves can do these things, combining to enforce the general will. A modern origins theory along these lines is that of evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Boehm argues that ape social organisation tends to be despotic, typically with one or more dominant males monopolising access to the locally available females. But wherever there is dominance, we can also expect resistance. In the human case, resistance to being personally dominated intensified as humans used their social intelligence to form coalitions. Eventually, a point was reached when the costs of attempting to impose dominance became so high that the strategy was no longer evolutionarily stable, whereupon social life tipped over into 'reverse dominance' — defined as a situation in which only the entire community, on guard against primate-style individual dominance, is permitted to use force to suppress deviant behaviour.

Ernest Gellner
Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the world. Yet in any given society, the range of permitted behaviours is quite narrowly constrained. This is not owing to the existence of any externally imposed system of rewards and punishments. The constraints come from within — from certain compulsive moral concepts which members of the social order have internalised. The society installs these concepts in each individual's psyche in the manner first identified by Emile Durkheim, namely, by means of collective rituals such as initiation rites. Therefore, the problem of the origins of society boils down to the problem of the origins of collective ritual.

Gender and origins
Feminist scholars — among them palaeoanthropologists Leslie Aiello and Camilla Power — take similar arguments a step further, arguing that any reform or revolution which overthrew male dominance must have been led by women. Evolving human females, Power and Aiello suggest, actively separated themselves from males on a periodic basis, using their own blood (and/or pigments such as red ochre) to mark themselves as fertile and defiant: In similar vein, anthropologist Chris Knight argues that Boehm's idea of a 'coalition of everyone' is hard to envisage, unless — along the lines of a modern industrial picket line — it was formed to co-ordinate 'sex-strike' action against badly behaving males:  In virtually all hunter-gatherer ethnographies, according to Knight, a persistent theme is that 'women like meat', and that they determinedly use their collective bargaining power to motivate men to hunt for them and bring home their kills — on pain of exclusion from sex. Arguments about women's crucial role in domesticating males — motivating them to cooperate — have also been advanced by anthropologists Kristen Hawkes, Sarah Hrdy and Bruce Knauft among others. Meanwhile, other evolutionary scientists continue to envisage uninterrupted male dominance, continuity with primate social systems and the emergence of society on a gradualist basis without revolutionary leaps.

Robert Trivers
In his 1985 book, Social Evolution, Robert Trivers outlines the theoretical framework used today by most evolutionary biologists to understand how and why societies are established. Trivers sets out from the fundamental fact that genes survive beyond the death of the bodies they inhabit, because copies of the same gene may be replicated in multiple different bodies. From this, it follows that a creature should behave altruistically to the extent that those benefiting carry the same genes — 'inclusive fitness', as this source of cooperation in nature is termed. Where animals are unrelated, cooperation should be limited to 'reciprocal altruism' or 'tit-for-tat'. Where previously, biologists took parent-offspring cooperation for granted, Trivers predicted on theoretical grounds both cooperation and conflict — as when a mother needs to wean an existing baby (even against its will) in order to make way for another. Previously, biologists had interpreted male infanticidal behaviour as aberrant and inexplicable or, alternatively, as a necessary strategy for culling excess population. Trivers was able to show that such behaviour was a logical strategy by males to enhance their own reproductive success at the expense of conspecifics including rival males. Ape or monkey females whose babies are threatened have directly opposed interests, often forming coalitions to defend themselves and their offspring against infanticidal males. Human society, according to Trivers, is unusual in that it involves the male of the species investing parental care in his own offspring — a rare pattern for a primate. Where such cooperation occurs, it's not enough to take it for granted: in Trivers' view we need to explain it using an overarching theoretical framework applicable to humans and nonhumans alike.

Robin Dunbar
Robin Dunbar originally studied gelada baboons in the wild in Ethiopia, and has done much to synthesise modern primatological knowledge with Darwinian theory into a comprehensive overall picture. The components of primate social systems 'are essentially alliances of a political nature aimed at enabling the animals concerned to achieve more effective solutions to particular problems of survival and reproduction'. Primate societies are in essence 'multi-layered sets of coalitions'. Although physical fights are ultimately decisive, the social mobilisation of allies usually decides matters and requires skills that go beyond mere fighting ability. The manipulation and use of coalitions demands sophisticated social — more precisely political — intelligence. Usually but not always, males exercise dominance over females. Even where male despotism prevails, females typically gang up with one another to pursue agendas of their own. When a male gelada baboon attacks a previously dominant rival so as to take over his harem, the females concerned may insist on their own say in the outcome. At various stages during the fighting, the females may 'vote' among themselves on whether to accept the provisional outcome. Rejection is signalled by refusing to groom the challenger; acceptance is signalled by going up to him and grooming him. According to Dunbar, the ultimate outcome of an inter-male 'sexual fight' always depends on the female 'vote'. Dunbar points out that in a primate social system, lower-ranking females will typically suffer the most intense harassment. Consequently, they will be the first to form coalitions in self-defence. But maintaining commitment from coalition allies involves much time-consuming manual grooming, putting pressure on time-budgets. In the case of evolving humans, who were living in increasingly large groups, the costs would soon have outweighed the benefits — unless some more efficient way of maintaining relationships could be found. Dunbar argues that 'vocal grooming' — using the voice to signal commitment — was the time-saving solution adopted, and that this led eventually to speech. Dunbar goes on to suggest (citing evolutionary anthropologist Chris Knight ) that distinctively human society may have been evolved under pressure from female ritual and 'gossiping' coalitions established to dissuade males from fighting one another and instead cooperate in hunting for the benefit of the whole camp:  Dunbar stresses that this is currently a minority theory among specialists in human origins — most still support the 'bison-down-at-the-lake' theory attributing early language and cooperation to the imperatives of men's activities such as hunting. Despite this, he argues that 'female bonding may have been a more powerful force in human evolution than is sometimes supposed'. Although still controversial, the idea that female coalitions may have played a decisive role has subsequently received strong support from a number of anthropologists including Sarah Hrdy, Camilla Power, Ian Watts. and Jerome Lewis. It is also consistent with recent studies by population geneticists (see Verdu et al. 2013 for Central African Pygmies; Schlebusch 2010 for Khoisan) showing a deep-time tendency to matrilocality among African hunter-gatherers.