THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
W. G. Runciman

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Preface

I: A Very Social Animal

II: What Exactly Do You Want to Know?

III: A Catalogue of Errors

IV: Power

V: Matters of Chance

VI: Structures and Cultures

VII: History

VIII: Ups and Downs

IX: Possible and Impossible Worlds

X: Uses and Abuses

Notes

Index

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

The Social Animal is intended as a short and necessarily selective introduction to sociology for readers who either, on the one hand, are unsure quite what sociology is all about or, on the other, think of sociologists as a bunch of self-appointed arbiters of the existing social order who are neither clever enough to be philosophers nor knowledgeable enough to be historians. I have tried not to exaggerate our achievements or gloss over the controversies that divide us. But my principal hope is that I have managed to convey what a fascinating subject sociology is to work in. This is not only because it’s all about us – human beings, that is – ourselves. It’s also because so much more is now known than even a few decades ago about the remarkable differences and no less remarkable similarities in human institutions and behaviour down the ages and across the globe.

This is, moreover, a particularly exciting time in which to be engaged in sociological research on account of the many advances which are currently being made throughout the behavioural sciences, whether in demography, linguistics, and economics, or in genetics, biological anthropology, and developmental and cognitive psychology. The more dogmatic oversimplifications of Marxism, Social Darwinism, Behaviorism, Structuralism, and Durkheimian cultural anthropology are being left behind; ‘postmodernism’ has come and largely gone, taking with it those aspects of the study of human social behaviour which properly belong with literature rather than science; and a new evolutionary paradigm is beginning to emerge within which historical and cross-cultural hypotheses can be formulated and tested in accordance with standards shared among all the various disciplines involved in explaining why human beings are what they are and do what they do. So to any reader of this Preface who may be hesitating whether to take up a career in academic sociology, my advice is: go for it – there’s everything to play for.

My thanks are due to Patricia Williams for her practical advice and to Stuart Proffitt and HarperCollins for accepting the book, as well as to Geoffrey Hawthorn, Toby Mundy, and David Runciman for valuable comments on the initial draft and to Hilary Edwards for preparing the manuscript for publication. I am also grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to quote from Syme’s The Roman Revolution in Chapter VII.

Trinity College, Cambridge September 1997

I A Very Social Animal

IT IS MORE THAN two thousand years since Aristotle said that a human being capable of living outside society is either a wild beast or a god.¹ But what does that mean? What kind of social animal are we?

You, like myself and every other human being in the world, are at the same time three things. First, you are an organism – that is, a living creature born (which not all organisms are) of one male and one female parent from both of whom you have inherited your genes. Second, you are an organism with a brain, and therefore a mind; and although other species have minds too, yours is altogether more complex and sophisticated than the minds of even the cleverest of our close genetic relatives, the chimpanzees. Third, you are an organism with a complex mind living in regular contact with other organisms with complex minds, and therefore you have a social life in which you have relationships with other people to which you and they attach a meaning.

Sociology is the scientific study of human behaviour under the third of these headings. It takes due account of those aspects of human behaviour which are studied by biologists and psychologists. But sociologists are concerned specifically with the groups, communities, institutions and societies in which human beings act out their relationships with each other in accordance with the rules which make them what they are. (Not that all their members follow their rules; of course they don’t. But for the nonconformists to break the rules, the rules have to be there to be broken.) Beneath that omnibus definition, there is obviously room for a large variety of more or less specialized disciplines – sociology of law, politics, education, religion, etc. But if there is a single question in which the subject-matter of sociology can be summarized, it is why the various human groups, communities, institutions and societies which there are and have been in the world are and have been as we find them.

There is no implication in this that the ‘scientific’ is the only way to look at human social behaviour. But it is categorically different from non-scientific ways. Unlike them, it presupposes that the behaviour of groups, communities, institutions and societies can be observed, and the differences between them explained, in terms which can be agreed to the extent that evidence which is there for anyone to see supports the observations and explanations which one or another sociologist has put forward. If you think that this can’t be done, I can assure you that it’s happening every day and ask you to read on. If, on the other hand, you think it puts out of court what philosophers, preachers, and poets have to say about human social behaviour, I can assure you that it doesn’t. The difference is between reports and explanations that you have no choice but to accept, to the extent that the evidence rules out any plausible alternatives, and conclusions of other kinds that you remain free to share on other grounds with your favourite philosopher, preacher or poet.

There are many kinds of human collectivities which sociologists study, some of which we shall meet again: households, families, clans, tribes, sects, classes, castes, armies, schools, clubs, political parties, monastic orders, patron – client networks, voluntary associations, business enterprises, professions, secret societies, trade unions, criminal gangs, pressure-groups and so on and so forth. But common to them all is that their members belong to them in a defined capacity for which the generally accepted term is role. Roles are, so to speak, what they are made of; and to the question ‘what are roles themselves made of?’ the answer is practices – that is, units of reciprocal behaviour informed by mutual recognition of shared intentions and beliefs. Precise definitions of important concepts are not, luckily, a prerequisite of successful explanation in either the natural or the human sciences; the findings quite often come first and the conceptual refinements later. But misunderstandings which are only about words should be avoided if possible; the important point about roles is that they are at the same time performed and occupied, however confusing a mixture of metaphors that may seem at first sight.

In its most familiar sense a role is, as you will hardly need reminding, a part played by an actor: ‘All the world’s a stage,’ says Jacques in As You Like It, ‘And all the men and women merely players.’ So we can all stand back from our various roles and see ourselves performing as sales executives, lieutenant-colonels, godparents, voters, housewives, mafiosi, university students, or whatever. But there is another aspect to it. If we really were ‘merely’ players, we could sign up for our parts as we pleased, and if we didn’t like the script we could turn it down. But we aren’t and we can’t. Take what is for many people their most important role: as wage- or salary-earners, we are paid for the work we do in accordance with rules which are not of our own making. We may be able to change from one employer to another, and some of us may not need to work for our living at all. But we don’t decide the legal and customary framework within which we and our employers operate any more than churchgoers decide the rituals and doctrines of the religion to which they belong or electors decide the constitution under which they vote their politicians into office. Real-life roles, in other words, are governed by rules which the people who occupy and perform them have no choice but to take as given – even if they would like, and accordingly sometimes try, to change them.

What’s more, these rules are of a special kind. They determine who is in a position to influence who else’s social behaviour because of the roles which they respectively occupy. As organisms with minds belonging to a common culture, we can take from each other whatever ideas, tastes, manners or fashions attract us through a process of individual transmission from mind to mind, and although we may be more strongly disposed to do so if the person learned from or imitated – the ‘role-model’ – is of high prestige or manifest authority, it is still a matter of individual choice. You don’t, unless you’re in a uniform of some kind, have to wear the clothes you’re wearing any more than you have to whistle your favourite tune or read your favourite book. As incumbents and performers of roles belonging to a common society, however, we relate to each other in accordance with institutional rules which place us relative to each other in a social space defined by the boundaries within which the rules apply. Since people can have several different roles, and since boundaries in social space are neither fixed nor impenetrable, the head of the CIA may be a Soviet agent, the President of Pepsi-Cola (Europe) may be an American citizen, and the King of Naples may be a Frenchman appointed by the Emperor in Paris. But within their common groups, communities, institutions and societies, employers and workers, landlords and tenants, officers and soldiers, ministers and officials, chiefs and commoners, lords and vassals, priests and parishioners, professors and students, all behave towards each other in ways which depend on the practices which the rules prescribe for both parties to the relationship. That is what is involved in saying that roles are places to be occupied within a rule-governed system (which all institutions are, or they would fall apart) as well as parts to be played (which can, as on the stage, be interpreted by different actors in different ways).

But we must be careful not to flatter ourselves. Social behaviour isn’t unique to human societies. Patterned interaction between individuals over extended periods of time is a characteristic of anthropoid primates going back millions of years. Admittedly, that’s not the same as what goes on at the golf club or the opera house or the family funeral or the school board meeting. But there are other social animals besides ourselves well able to perceive each other as acquaintance or stranger, friend or foe, owner or intruder, and behave accordingly. And when the smart chimps in the Gombe rainforest start to learn from each other how to make, use and reuse tools and, what’s more, to do so within different and distinguishable stylistic traditions, it doesn’t sound very convincing to talk about the meaningfulness of interaction between mothers and children, or teachers and pupils, as something uniquely human. Yes, we all have our fully-formed languages and they don’t: the linguistic ability of any normal three-year-old human infant is enormously greater than that of even the most carefully trained full-grown chimpanzee. But you don’t have to have language to have culture. Language makes us more social in many ways – more actively social, more self-consciously social, more intensively social, and more effectively social. But we were social already.

Then is our sociability all in our genes? That depends on how you interpret the ‘all’. Many hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection have brought it about that all human beings are born with a set of shared inborn propensities, instincts and capacities of which sociability is one. But along with sociability comes aggression, too, and the ability to bully, cheat and deceive. Hatred as well as affection, betrayal as well as loyalty, and shame as well as gratitude all go back long before the evolution of language. Altruistic and selfish behaviour are everywhere found together and the existence of both is fully explicable, thanks to Darwin and his twentieth-century successors, from within the theory of natural selection. The difference is the enormously greater variation in patterns of social behaviour among human beings – much greater than can plausibly be accounted for in terms of natural selection alone. Take relations between men and women. It is through natural selection that we procreate sexually, with all the consequences for our behaviour which follow. It is also through natural selection that men differ from women in some aspects of psychology as well as physique. But how much that still leaves to be explained! The different forms and degrees of subordination of women to men (or sometimes vice versa), the conditions under which women come to occupy and perform political roles, the success of some and failure of other movements for female emancipation, the range of rules of marriage, descent and co-residence, and the diversity of manners, mores, and attitudes surrounding both heterosexual and homosexual relationships are impossible to account for entirely in biological terms. Yet they are equally impossible to account for on the assumption that biology can tell us nothing about them. In this as in every aspect of our social relationships we are the people we are, behaving towards one another as we do, as the outcome of a continuous interaction between heredity and environment. Some patterns of behaviour are universal: all human societies have gossip and play, punishment and retaliation, exchange and the division of labour.² But out of that common inheritance from the long millennia of the Pleistocene, there continue to evolve new and different patterns of social behaviour that succeed each other in an open-ended sequence which is impossible to predict. All we can do is wait for them to happen and then, with the benefit of hindsight, explain them as best we can.

The best way to summarize the process by which it all comes about is the phrase in which Darwin summarized his fundamental insight about evolution: ‘descent with modification’. Because, through no fault of Darwin’s own, a lot of fallacious racist nonsense was for a time preached in the name of ‘Social Darwinism’, many sociologists feel uncomfortable about referring to him in a sociological as opposed to a strictly biological context. But there is nothing for them or anyone else to be alarmed at in the notion of ‘descent with modification’. At first glance, indeed, it might be said to look like just another way of putting what we already know. It’s hardly new to point out that since the proverbial Dawn of Mankind human beings and their cultures and societies have been reproducing themselves in forms not identical with their predecessors. But what Darwin saw was that changes of this kind, including the evolution of social behaviour itself, can be explained without reference to an antecedent grand design in the mind of God or anybody else. As he put it in one of his notebooks, ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.’³ Darwin himself couldn’t know just how right he was, because he couldn’t know what molecular biologists now know about the genetic code and the way in which DNA passes down the generations from parents to children. But he was the first person fully to grasp that for the process of ‘descent with modification’ to come about, two and only two independent conditions need to be fulfilled. First, the basic ingredients of the object of study must be capable of acting as replicators – that is, of reproducing themselves, but with the possibility of small but significant differences for which the conventional term is mutations. Second, these mutations must have the property of being capable of influencing their chances of reproducing themselves in turn – with, of course, the inherent possibility of yet further mutations. Whether mutations do in fact survive, spread and replicate then depends on how far the environment in which they emerge is favourable to their likelihood of doing so.

This, let me emphasize as strongly as I can, is not the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the vacuous sense that the evidence for fitness is survival and survival the evidence of fitness. It’s a question to be settled by empirical research what mutations, whether in organisms, cultures or societies, have had their probability of replication and diffusion enhanced (or not) by what features of their environment. There is still room for argument about the value of the concept of evolution in the study of human societies – some of it prompted by the irrelevant fear that it will have implications which could be held to be ‘politically incorrect’, and some by the misguided suspicion that it implies that sociology is nothing more than applied biology. Anthony Giddens, who was for some years the professor of sociology in my own university of Cambridge, used to insist that there is no place at all in social theory for the concept of evolution, which to my mind is about as sensible as insisting that there is no place in physical theory for the concept of gravity. Nobody can deny that human groups, communities, institutions and societies are of many different kinds and that they all change sooner or later from one kind to another. So no sociologist, even those who start frothing at the mouth at the mention of Darwin’s name, can seriously dispute the proposition that something has to have happened to cause them to do so.

The history of human social behaviour, accordingly, is inescapably ‘evolutionary’ in the sense that all new forms of it have evolved out of previous ones, but not – emphatically not – in the sense that change from one form to another is in the direction of some final state of affairs which can be specified in advance: that is precisely the mistake which rightly discredited nineteenth-century ideas about social evolution in twentieth-century eyes. The story goes all the way back to the emergence of organic matter out of the basic chemical ingredients of the universe as found on planet Earth, and forward all the way to the human mind and its ability to build and program computing machines which themselves have ‘mental’ capabilities. This doesn’t mean that the things which have emerged in the course of it are all things of the same kind whose workings can all be explained in the same terms. Our thoughts can’t be explained directly in terms of physics, even though our minds consist of nothing other than exceptionally complex molecular machinery. Nor can our institutions be explained directly in terms of biology, even though social behaviour consists only of what is done by individual organisms with minds in interaction with one another. Although evolution is, so to speak, seamless – God did not, one Sunday morning, decide suddenly to implant life into matter, and another Sunday morning decide suddenly to implant minds into living things – the changes which result from ‘descent with modification’ are of kind as well as degree. The important consequence, so far as sociology is concerned, is that what human beings do has to be analysed at three different levels which correspond to three different kinds of behaviour for which I shall from now on use the terms evoked, acquired and imposed.

Suppose you are watching a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium. Provided you know the rules of baseball, you are in no doubt what is going on: the batter goes back to the dugout because the outfielder has caught the ball which the batter hit before it reached the ground, etc. But there are still three different ways in which you can look at it. From a biological (or ‘sociobiological’) standpoint, it’s an instance of human beings’ inborn propensity to enjoy sports and games in which the participants try to outrun each other, or throw or catch a ball of some kind, or wield an implement with which a ball can be hit. But from a cultural standpoint, it’s an instance of how psychologically gratifying leisure pastimes and the idioms, styles and fashions that go with them are popularized through imitation and learning among adjacent and successive populations. And from a sociological standpoint, it’s an instance of the workings of a capitalist economy in which professional sportsmen are hired by the proprietors of rival teams out of the proceeds of what the fans will pay to watch them (and the sponsors to advertise on the TV channels which show them).

The direct response of players and spectators to the hitting of a moving ball is evoked behaviour: it is elicited by a stimulus to which we react as a result of those hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection during which those of our ancestors who had reactions like these were more likely to live long enough to replicate their genes than those who didn’t. The idioms, styles and fashions which attach to this particular sport, however, are acquired behaviour: they have been adopted by those who chose to do so from other people, whether known face-to-face or indirectly. And the hiring of salaried players by rival proprietors is imposed behaviour: although the contracts of employment are freely entered into, the transaction is conducted in accordance with institutional rules which, like all institutional rules except those framed at a time of constitutional choice, are not of the parties’ own making. To be sure, we can’t occupy and perform our roles without having learned the rules which govern the practices which constitute them. But although imposed behaviour presupposes acquired behaviour, just as acquired behaviour presupposes evoked behaviour, it is not merely an instance of it. A strike of professional baseball players is more than a matter of taste, just as their jargon and style are more than a matter of instinct.

Although I’ve chosen a game as an example, I could just as well have asked you to suppose that you’re observing a religious festival, a court case, a stock market crash (or boom), an election, a battle, a strike, a revolution, or an office party. Whatever form of social behaviour it is, you will start by asking yourself what these people are doing – which means ascertaining what roles they are occupying and performing. But all three aspects of their behaviour will have to be covered before you can satisfy yourself why they are doing what they are doing – i.e., manifesting evoked, acquired and imposed behaviour of a specified kind. In practice, sociologists seldom observe directly the patterns of behaviour they are studying. But whether they are dealing with documents, eyewitness reports, tables of statistics, answers to questionnaires, or even monumental inscriptions or archaeological objects, the nature of their task is the same; and if they succeed in it, they and their readers will be left with a validated account of how the particular group, institution, community or society functions and how it has come to be what it is.

Since all new forms of human social behaviour have evolved in one way or another out of old ones, the process which has brought about any particular form of it is by definition a selective process: to a sociologist, history is not just one damn thing after another, but one damn thing instead of another. But this immediately leads to the question of what it is, at each different level, that the ongoing process of selection selects. At the biological level, the objects of selection are genes. This has, as it happens, been disputed until very recently by biologists who have held that natural selection selects either the individual organism or the group; but neither organisms nor groups fulfil the conditions necessary for them to act as replicators in the way that genes do. At the cultural level, however, when instinct is supplemented by imitation and learning, the objects of selection are the units, or bundles of units, of information or instructions affecting behaviour which are passed from mind to mind. Some sociologists and anthropologists use for them the term ‘meme’ which was coined in the 1970s by the biologist Richard Dawkins,⁴ whereas others prefer to use the term ‘trait’ in order to allow for the replication not merely of units of information but of whole complexes of representation such as works of art, scientific theories, systems of myth and ritual, and so on. But it doesn’t much matter which term you use. The point is that to explain cultural evolution – i.e. changes in patterns of acquired social behaviour – you have to have a hypothesis about the features of the environment where the behaviour occurs which have helped the mutant ‘memes’ (or traits or bundles of instructions) to spread and replicate.

At the social level, by contrast, the objects of selection are, as I’ve pointed out already, units of reciprocal action, since the rules which define the roles we occupy and perform are prescriptive for both parties to the relationship to which they attach a common meaning. The objects of social selection, therefore, are and can only be the practices which define of their respective roles. Practices, no less than bundles of information and instructions passed from mind to mind, fulfil the two necessary conditions for them to act as replicators. So it can accordingly be said – to go back to the threefold distinction as I put it at the very beginning of this chapter – that as organisms we are machines for replicating the genes in our bodies, as organisms with minds we are machines for replicating the traits in our cultures, and as organisms with minds occupying and performing roles we are machines for replicating the practices which define those roles and the groups, communities, institutions and societies constituted by them.

Since evolution, whether natural, cultural or social, is not proceeding towards any predetermined final state but only away from what may, for the moment, be a more or less stable equilibrium, it will never be any more possible for sociologists to predict the future of institutions and societies than for anthropologists to predict the future of cultures or biologists to predict the future of species. In the words of the American demographer Joel E. Cohen’s only half-joking Law of Prediction, ‘The more confidence someone places in an unconditional prediction of what will happen in human affairs, the less confidence we should place in that prediction.’⁵ The problem is not just the incalculability of the consequences of the interaction of an enormous multiplicity of separate events. It’s also that, as the philosopher Karl Popper has argued to particular effect, to predict the future state of human societies would involve, among other things, predicting the future of sociological knowledge itself, and there is no way in which we can claim already to know what we have yet to discover. Critics of sociology sometimes argue that because sociologists can’t predict how future societies will evolve it isn’t really a science at all. But then they will have to say the same about biology and its inability to predict the future evolution of species. If what distinguishes science from non-science is that its conclusions are prescriptive for all observers in accordance with the strength of evidence which they can all go and check for themselves, there is no argument whatever for dismissing explanations which can be tested only with hindsight as ‘unscientific’. Sherlock Holmes can’t predict the clues which will enable him to solve the crime; but when he follows up the clues which do indeed solve it, his solution is no less ‘scientific’ than if he had conducted a laboratory experiment whose outcome he had specified in advance.

On the other hand, it would obviously be a mistake to argue that human social behaviour isn’t predictable at all. How else, for a start, do advertisers grow rich? We are successfully predicting each other’s social behaviour every day of the week, and the continuance of the cultures and societies to which we belong depends on our ability to do so. If you and I are introduced to each other on a social occasion, I am at least as sure that if I hold out my hand you will shake it as I am that if I depress the accelerator pedal of my car it will start to go faster. We wouldn’t be the very social animal that we are unless we could rely on each other’s responses to each other’s behaviour for most of the time. When somebody’s social behaviour is totally and consistently unpredictable, we can tell at once that we are confronted with one of Aristotle’s wild beasts or gods. A society in which nobody’s behaviour was predictable wouldn’t be a society at all.

But wait a minute. Suppose that in order to justify what I’ve said in the preceding paragraph I am rash enough to bet you $100 that if I hold out my hand to Joe Soap, whom I’ve never previously met, he will shake it as our respective roles and the conventions of our common culture dictate. Your ploy is obvious. All you have to do is take Joe on one side and offer him $50 (or, if he is the kind of organism with a complex mind who turns out to be a really tough bargainer, $99) to keep his hands to his sides. This isn’t as stupid an example as it looks. It brings out just as clearly as a more serious-looking example would do the implications for the scientific study of human social behaviour of the familiar fact that most of it is a matter of purposes and goals and self-conscious decisions to pursue them. From this, some sociologists have concluded not merely that predictions about human behaviour can be overturned in ways that predictions about inanimate objects can’t, but also that the only way to explain human behaviour is for the observer to reproduce in his or her own mind what is going on in the minds of the people whose purposes and goals are dictating their behaviour. This second conclusion, however, is right in one sense but wrong in another. It’s right in the sense that for me to explain what you’re doing, I do have to know what you are doing. If I think you’re really trying to throttle your little schoolfellow when it’s only a game you’re playing, my research project about the social behaviour of young adolescents in educational institutions isn’t going to get very far, just as if I think you really believe that the spirits of your ancestors can somehow influence what happens in your own life when you’re only performing what you know to be a purely symbolic ritual at their gravesides, I shan’t be a very good sociologist of religion. But it’s wrong in the sense that it mustn’t be supposed that this makes the explanation of behaviour into an exercise of a quite different kind. It doesn’t. The question ‘what made you decide to pursue your chosen objective and act accordingly?’ can be addressed by the same methods, and the answer assessed by the same criteria, as the question ‘what made you respond instinctively to what you heard and saw in the way that you did?’ The fact of our self-awareness of our acquired and imposed behaviour doesn’t affect one way or the other the validity of the explanation of the behaviour of which our behaving selves are aware. What matters is that the researcher who is doing the explaining should know what’s going on – that is, should have identified the intention which makes the action what it is before going on to identify the motive which lies behind it and the environmental conditions which have brought that rather than another motive into play. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are as aware as are the professors and graduate students who study them of the function of meat-sharing in reinforcing their social ties. But the function would be the same even if they weren’t.

Many people find this way of looking at human behaviour counter-intuitive because it seems more natural to look for the reasons which we have for our decisions than for external influences which we are able, if we so choose, to resist or ignore. But the antithesis is a false one. The concepts of social selection and environmental pressure are not in contradiction with the concepts of individual decision and rational choice. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that the human mind has been programmed by natural selection to calculate the trade-off between the costs and the benefits of one course of action rather than another. But although our imposed as well as our acquired behaviour is therefore a ‘matter of choice’ – the only thing we all have to do is die, and as Wittgenstein said, death isn’t an event in life – to say so explains neither the cause of the choice (and thereby the behaviour) nor its consequences. The question ‘with what conscious purpose in mind was this mutation in social behaviour introduced?’ is quite compatible with, but leaves still to be answered, the question ‘how did this mutation affect the subsequent evolution of the society in which it occurred?’ Let me give an example from military history. The rulers and generals of seventeenth-century Europe who first introduced infantry drill into the training of their previously undisciplined recruits had a clear idea of what they wished it to achieve and of how it would serve their interests, both personal and patriotic, if it did. What’s more, they had an evident inkling of the biological as well as sociological reasons for why they were right: as the famous Maréchal de Saxe, among others, was aware, men marching in step in close formation to the sound of music respond instinctively in a way which makes them more effective on the field of battle. But although the innovators succeeded in their aim – which is more than most innovators do – it’s not their desire to win wars and battles which explains their success. To explain that, and the consequent changes in how European wars were fought, it has to be shown why they were right – which means showing what competitive advantage was conferred by the adoption of this novel set of practices on the soldiers trained in it, the armies manned by those soldiers, and the states whose armies they were.⁶

‘Then if sociology can explain why people choose between alternative patterns of social behaviour in the way that they do, does this not amount to a claim that sociology is a predictive science after all?’ No, not truly predictive. A prediction, to deserve the name, has to be more than a guess which turns out to be right. There may be any number of twentieth-century sociologists who can claim to have said in advance that, say, the economy of the Soviet Union would collapse sooner or later, or the British Labour Party would be out of power for several general elections after 1979, or a resurgent Islam would pose an increasing threat to the political stability of the Arab states. But for a guess to be turned into a prediction, the conditions which, if they hold good, will produce the predicted outcome at the predicted time and place have to be specified. And if you think that’s easy to do, just give it a try. An article in the journal Contention in the issue for the winter of 1993 by Jack B. Goldstone is called ‘Predicting Revolutions: why we could (and should) have foreseen the Revolutions of 1989–91 in the USSR and Eastern Europe’.⁷ So maybe you could, Jack. And if you could, you should. But you didn’t.

Nobody is going to pretend that the most brilliant economist who ever lived could predict what the prices are going to be on the New York Stock Exchange a year ahead. Just imagine what would be happening on the traders’ screens if a consortium of investors somewhere had a software package that could do that for them! But economists may be able to predict the conditions under which commodity prices will rise or the marginal cost of a product’s entry into a new market will fall, and even (maybe) the conditions under which the stock market will move up or down in the short term. Similarly, not even the most brilliant political scientist who ever lived could predict what the distribution of seats will be in the British House of Commons or the American Congress in fifty years’ time. But political scientists armed with the results of sample surveys are quite good at predicting the outcome of a general election to within one or two per cent of the popular vote at the start of the campaign. Even sociologists may succeed in making some predictions which aren’t just guesses. But could any sociologist have predicted when and how the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam, the Spanish conquest of what thereby came to be known as ‘Hispanic’ America, or the evolution of industrial capitalism out of agricultural feudalism were going to happen? Of course not – no more than a biologist surveying the world five million years ago, when our ancestors were first diverging, genetically speaking, from the chimps, could have predicted when and how it would one day come to be dominated by Homo sapiens, i.e. us.

This may seem to imply that the more specialized social sciences gain their apparent ability to frame more accurate predictions at the price of increasing remoteness from the recalcitrant facts of actual social behaviour. What, for example, do economists have to say about buyers of luxury goods who knowingly pay more for less? What do political scientists have to say about voters who are motivated entirely by the candidate’s looks? But there is nothing inherently inexplicable about decisions like these, and nothing in the explanations of the resulting behaviour put forward by economists and political scientists which is incompatible with anything said in this chapter. This book will touch on the specialized social sciences only in passing. But that doesn’t mean that they have less interesting things to say about human social behaviour than sociology itself. What is ‘interesting’ is, to be sure, a subjective matter which we all have to settle for ourselves. But many practitioners of many different social sciences have produced explanations of patterns of human social behaviour which are much more than abstract constructions about idealized human beings and which have withstood attempted refutation just as well as anything sociologists have found out about groups, communities, institutions and societies as such. Besides, we sociologists need all the help we can get, from biologists, psychologists, historians and even philosophers no less than from practitioners of the specialized social sciences whose concerns overlap with our own.

One last preliminary point. I hope that no reader of this paragraph will dispute that explanations of why the world is as it is are logically independent of value-judgements about whether the state of the world is good or bad. If it’s true that the Normans conquered England in 1066 because King Harold was killed by an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings, the conclusion stands whether or not you or anybody else thinks that the Norman Conquest was a good (or bad) thing. But readers of sociology books often find that they are being treated to both. Nor should this come as a surprise. Sociologists, like everybody else, have and can’t help having views of their own about the kinds of institutions, forms of social behaviour, and performances of individual roles which are to be admired or deplored, and their approaches to the study of them may well be influenced by those views. But that makes no difference to the validity of their competing explanations of why human groups, communities, institutions and societies are as they are, any more than the moral, political or aesthetic values of geologists make a difference to the validity (or not) of their competing explanations of why the continents and oceans of the earth are as they are. True, nineteenth-century geologists were influenced, among other things, by their different interpretations of the Book of Genesis. True, too, you can and probably do have a view about the morality of capitalism which you can hardly have about the morality of continental drift. But whether the causes and consequences of capitalism are what, according to your moral, political or religious views, you would wish them to be is something you must decide for yourself on other grounds. And if somebody says, ‘But look at how much sociological writing is blatantly biased against (or in favour of) capitalism (or socialism)!’, the answer is: ‘No doubt; but the fact that bias of this kind can be detected is itself a conclusive demonstration that the author’s values are logically distinct from the hypotheses of cause and effect of whose validity the same author is trying to persuade you as well.’

That being so, it comes as something of a surprise (at least to me) to find a distinguished British historian of medicine, Professor Roy Porter, quoted by the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1995 as saying that he can’t help feeling that the increasing recent success of evolutionary theory is ‘a political project’. But on reflection, I think I know what he means. It is undeniably true of science, both natural and social, that it can have political consequences and that its practitioners may themselves have political motives. Darwinian theory has been used, or rather misused, for political purposes, and if you are worried that the discoveries of either natural or social science may be invoked in furtherance of ends which you deplore you are fully entitled to wish that scientists would stop trying to make them. But that does nothing to undermine their claims to be doing science. On the contrary: it is when their findings do succeed in withstanding attempted refutation that their possible political uses become a threat to those with whose interests and purposes they conflict. When in the early seventeenth century the Vatican was getting uptight about Galileo and his telescope, the Pope’s advisers might very well have said to him: ‘Watch out, Your Holiness! This newfangled astronomy is a political project which could seriously damage the reputation of the Church!’ From his and their point of view, they would have been right to warn him. The Church’s traditional monopoly of the secrets of the universe was indeed under attack. But Jupiter’s moons were there to be seen through Galileo’s telescope whether the Vatican liked it or not. That was the trouble.

II What Exactly Do You Want to Know?

EVEN BEFORE OUR remote ancestors were in contact with the extinct people whom we now call ‘Neanderthals’, people of one kind, or in one group, or from one territory, have been curious about the behaviour of people other than themselves. Much of the curiosity is about their acquired behaviour: why do they wear such funny hats? how can they bear to eat that meat raw? what on earth are those pictures they’re painting all about? But questions about their imposed behaviour will occur no less readily to trained and untrained observers alike: how do they choose their leaders? what is the distribution of property among them? what are they either required or forbidden to do by the incumbents of roles with the power to see to it that they do?

Herodotus, the so-called ‘father of history’, can at least as plausibly be called the father of sociology. His famous book, written in the mid-fifth century BC, is primarily concerned to narrate the victory of the mainland Greeks over the invading Persians. But it is also a rich and fascinating repository of observations about other peoples, obtained by extensive travel and systematic analysis of oral traditions, eyewitness accounts and physical records. Although he does appear to have believed some things which he shouldn’t, such as that the walls of Babylon were 200 ‘royal cubits’ (300 feet!) high, it’s remarkable how often his account has been subsequently confirmed – in the most spectacular instance, by archaeological evidence about Scythian burial customs discovered less than half a century ago. What’s more, he articulates precisely the two fundamental aspects of all sociological enquiry: the recognition that every society is different from every other, but that all are at the same time variants of a universal human nature. Although, as Herodotus explicitly remarks, the members of all societies are inclined to take their own as the paradigm, none are any more entitled to do so than any others, however strongly they believe, now as then, that they are.¹

It follows from Herodotus’s approach that there are two different but equally valid responses which the members of one society will have to what they find out about another: ‘how unlike us they are!’ – yes, but at the same time: ‘how recognizable!’ Admittedly, all such comparisons have to start from somewhere – in the case of Herodotus, from the viewpoint of a Greek looking at non-Greeks – and different observers will always be interested in, and surprised by, different things. Thus: ‘They not only kill their prisoners of war but eat them!’, or ‘Black people are treated differently from white people over there!’, or ‘The state owns all the factories as well as the land!’, or ‘Would you believe it – in ancient Mesopotamia a nun could be a businesswoman, and in Anglo-Saxon England a priest could be a slave!’ But equally: ‘They admire successful athletes just like we do!’, or ‘Look how those late Roman bureaucrats behaved – no differently from ours!’²

Whatever the contrast being drawn between ‘our’ roles and ‘theirs’, sociologists owe it both to their readers and to themselves to get their basic observations right. This isn’t always as easy as it may seem. For a start, there is the language problem: if an English-speaking sociologist asks a French-speaking informant about the role of the informant’s boss, the English-speaking sociologist must beware of equating ‘patron’, which is what English speakers mean by ‘boss’, with ‘patron’, which isn’t. But even when both the sociologist and the native informant understand correctly what the other is saying, the sociologist may be misled by having failed to ask the right question. When Captain R. S. Rattray, a British colonial officer who had spent many years among the Ashanti of what was then, in the 1910s and ’20s, called the Gold Coast, asked his native informants why he had never been told that the Queen Mother used to outrank the King, they replied: ‘The white man never asked us this; you have dealings with and recognize only the men; we supposed the Europeans considered women of no account and we know you do not recognize them as we have always done.’³

This sort of experience is disconcerting enough. But even if the sociologist has asked all the right questions, the questions may not have been asked of the right people. Or the right people may, for reasons of their own, have given the wrong answers. A classic example is the account of female adolescence in Samoa by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Her account, which was uncritically accepted by an enormous readership for several decades after its publication in 1928, depicted a guilt-free world of permissive sexuality. But Mead had no detailed knowledge of Samoan society and language, she didn’t check what she was told by her 25 young informants against either direct observations of her own or alternative accounts by other, adult Samoans, and it never seems to have occurred to her that she might be being deliberately misled. It is, accordingly, no surprise that she should turn out to have got it quite badly wrong. The surprise is that it took so long for her mistakes to be diagnosed by other observers.⁴ But there are many other instances where researchers whose intellectual honesty (as opposed to their judgement) is not in doubt have applied themselves to explaining something which was never there to be explained – for example, explaining the emergence of ‘nuclear’ households of parents and children by contrast with a purely presumptive ‘extended family’ pattern attributed to the pre-industrial past, or explaining ‘new’ working-class lifestyles by contrast with a purely presumptive ‘proletarian’ culture attributed to nineteenth-century industrialization. Or take Captain Archibald Blair, who reported on the basis of an exploration carried out in 1789 that chiefs in the Andaman Islands were ‘generally painted red’. Nice try, Captain. But as the British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown discovered a little over a century later, the Andaman Islanders don’t have any chiefs.⁵

The difficult cases can be very difficult indeed. A notoriously intriguing one is the reception of yet another Captain (Cook this time) by the Hawaiian Islanders when he arrived there on board HMS Resolution in 1778. Did they or didn’t they regard him as a god? The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is sure that they did, given that Cook’s appearance was entirely consistent with their beliefs and expectations and that they had no previous direct acquaintance with Europeans. But the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere is sure that they didn’t; what they did (or so Obeyesekere believes) is deify him for their own political purposes after he had been killed in a scuffle which broke out during his third and unexpected visit. It’s a particularly difficult case for two reasons. First, the evidence, both historical and anthropological, is ambiguous and incomplete. But second, the question is such as to stir up just the kind of accusations of intellectual bad faith as in fact it has. For Obeyesekere, Sahlins is imposing on the natives of eighteenth-century Hawaii a white imperialist myth about their propensity to see visiting Europeans as gods. For Sahlins, Obeyesekere is imposing on them a myth of universal (but really only bourgeois European) rationalism which denies them their own coherent and distinctive culture. So far, at least, Sahlins seems to have had the better of the argument.⁶ But that’s not the point. The point is that if we could go back in time, check out the evidence as it has come down to us, interview the people involved, and observe how they actually behaved, we’d know for sure. The conclusion to be drawn isn’t that arguments of this sort are difficult to settle conclusively (they are), or that they can be used to fight ideological battles of the here and now (they can), or that they touch on deep philosophical issues about the nature of religious belief (they do). It’s that for all that, they are amenable in principle to empirical research.

Nor is it as if the issue is so difficult to resolve because of the distance in time and space between twentieth-century professors of anthropology and eighteenth-century Hawaiians or Englishmen. So it can be in any sociological enquiry, as much within a single society as between one society and another, or between the same society then and now. Sociologists can and do make mistakes about the roles of fellow-members of their own society no less than about those remote from them. Sometimes, indeed, an observer from a different society will do a better job than a native one. No American sociologist has ever written as perceptively about American society as did the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, published in 1835, remains to this day an inexhaustibly valuable source of insights into American modes of behaviour and thought. No better account of the state of English society at the end of the Napoleonic wars has been written than by the French historian Elie Halévy, whose England in 1815 was published in 1912. For a sociologist to be a fellow-member of the same group, community, institution or society as he or she has chosen to study is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of getting it right. What matters is, as in all branches of science, whether the conclusions which the reader is invited to accept can be checked by, and with, other observers of evidence which is there for all to see.

Besides, there’s no point in exaggerating the difficulties. There is no society anywhere in the world whose members’ behaviour is literally incomprehensible to the members of another. You can read writings by philosophers, including Wittgenstein himself, in which they devise imaginary examples of peculiar people who appear to attribute meaning to propositions which violate any rules of meaning known to ‘us’. In an article by the British philosopher John Skorupski, the reader is asked to imagine a society whose members believe that the drawing-pins which they carry about with them in matchboxes are identical with the Empire State Building.⁷ But no anthropologist has ever come back from anywhere in the world having found people who believe any such thing, any more than any anthropologist has ever found a people whose language proved impossible to learn. It may be difficult to establish exactly what meaning they attach to certain of their beliefs and the concepts in which they are expressed. But so it is back home. I have never read about an alien society whose religion struck me as any more bizarre than the Christian religion I was ostensibly reared in myself (Genesis, Incarnation, Resurrection, a God who is both Three and One, both Omnipotent and Benevolent, etc.). But I have no more difficulty in conducting meaningful social relationships with fellow-members of my own society who are serious, paid-up Christians than did the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard with the Azande of the Northern Sudan, whose beliefs about magic, oracles and witchcraft were totally alien to him. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard is on record as saying that ‘I found it strange at first to live among Azande and listen to native explanations of misfortunes which, to our minds, have apparent causes, but after a while I learned the idiom of their thought and applied notions of witchcraft as spontaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant’; and what is more, ‘I always kept a supply of poison for the use of my household and neighbours and we regulated our affairs in accordance with the oracles’ decisions. I may remark that I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of.’⁸

So: however difficult it may be to establish what a fellow human being is ‘really’ thinking and therefore doing, it is always possible to identify not only the traits characteristic of an alien culture but the practices defining the roles by which institutions and societies remote in both time and place are constituted. There is, for example, no problem in equating the ‘brothers-in-arms’ whom we find swearing allegiance to each other in late medieval England⁹ with the male hetairoi (‘companions’) who associated together with the same common objective of martial glory and lucrative plunder in archaic Greece many centuries earlier and miles away: in status-conscious, warlike, agrarian societies, young men without land of their own or a powerful patron have an evident incentive to join together in this way, whatever may be the other differences in both their cultural and their social environment. Likewise, when the French historian Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial study of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, reports the way in which the Spaniards treated the fellow-members of their society who were of Muslim descent, he himself equates it with the treatment of blacks by poor whites in the southern states of America; and there is no difficulty in identifying cases from a wide range of places and times where a dominant ethnic or religious group discriminates against a subordinate one in the same immediately recognizable way.¹⁰

No less easy to find are cases where the same pattern of social behaviour can be observed in two different societies but with a difference in the function which it performs in each. If you look at ancient Roman society during its expansion by conquest in the first and second centuries BC, you will find free men fighting in the legions and slaves cultivating the large agricultural estates; but if you look at some no less warlike Islamic societies of the Middle East a few centuries later, you will find free men cultivating the land and armies made up of slaves. This, admittedly, gives scope for some unproductive argument over the precise definition of ‘slavery’. Is the role of a slave soldier in an Islamic infantry regiment ‘really’ to be equated with that of a purchased chattel-slave in a Roman chain-gang? But, as always with such comparisons, the answer is not to quibble about the terms but to look at the practices which define the role. When you do – and the evidence is, in this instance, both abundant and reliable enough for the purpose – you will find that the institutional rules are such as in both cases to deny unequivocally to the ‘slave’ the power over his own person which attaches to the roles of the men who are institutionally defined as ‘free’. And from comparisons like these there emerges the distinction, as important in sociology as in biology, between homologues (similarities of form) and analogues (similarities of function). The Roman slave is the homologue of the Islamic soldier and the analogue of the Islamic cultivator; the Islamic slave is the homologue of the Roman cultivator and the analogue of the Roman soldier. If this prompts you to ask: but what about combining the functions in a single role?, the answer is: yes, there are some of those too. In societies as far apart in time and place as seventh-century T’ang China, medieval Saxony, fourteenth-century Prussia under the ‘Teutonic Knights’, seventeenth-century Sweden, and eighteenth-century Russia you will find ‘farmer-soldier’ roles, in which the practices of smallholding and militia service were combined. And this illustrates another point common to biological and sociological theory: evolution can come about through recombination, as well as mutation, of the units of selection.

Anyone observing a human society, including the observer’s own, will not only be curious about some more than other aspects of the social behaviour of its members, but curious about one level of social behaviour rather than another. If you have chosen to study work-groups in a factory, or schoolchildren in a classroom, or doctors and their patients in a hospital you will be engaging in a different sort of project from what you will be doing if you want to study a society’s institutions as such – its economy, or its type of government, or its form of organized religion. But not totally different. You can’t study groups, however small, without taking account of the institutional context of the behaviour you are studying, and you can’t study institutions, however large, without taking account of the behaviour of individual incumbents of specific roles. The leading British sociologist David Lockwood pointed out in an influential article published in 1964 that ‘system’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between institutions – is quite different from ‘social’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between groups.¹¹ You may very well find that in the society you are studying there is much more of one than of the other: in societies as far apart as, for example, nineteenth-century Haiti and Egypt under the Mamluks, consistently high levels of inter-group hostility and violence were maintained within a largely unchanged set of economic, ideological and political institutions.¹² But you can’t prise the two apart. You are always looking at the behaviour of people in roles; and there is not, and never will be, a society in which it is impossible to identify those roles or to trace their relations to each other at both the group and the institutional level.

Once, however, you have identified the society’s constituent roles, you may want to proceed in either of two very different directions. You may, on the one hand, want to go on to ask ‘why are these roles as they are?’ (a question which itself, as we shall see in a moment, can be interpreted in several different ways). Or you may, on the other hand, want to ask ‘what is it like to be one of the people occupying and performing one of these roles?’ This second question, obviously, is one which doesn’t arise at all in physics or chemistry. Not that it only arises in the study of the behaviour of human beings: some of the most remarkable recent research into the social behaviour of primates is directed precisely to establishing how far they do or don’t attribute to each other minds like their own.¹³ But this book is about the social behaviour of humans, and therefore organisms with minds which have the inborn capacity for all the richness and subtlety of language as spoken only by us. And it is this which gives the question ‘what is it like to be a whatever-you-are?’ not only its perennial interest but also its peculiar difficulties.

Unconvinced readers, fresh perhaps from ‘postmodernist’ texts, may protest that since I have already conceded the difficulty of establishing beyond argument what somebody else is ‘really’ thinking, I am hardly entitled to claim that even the most experienced sociologist can ever test an account of what is going on inside other people’s heads in the way that an explanatory hypothesis about the externally visible influences on other people’s externally visible behaviour can be tested if the requisite evidence is there. But there are two answers to this. First, the way to test a description of someone else’s subjective experience is to try it out on that person; unless that person is deliberately seeking to mislead, as one or more of those teenage Samoan girls appear to have deliberately deceived the gullible Margaret Mead, the observer’s description can be progressively expanded and refined to accord with what the person is willing to confirm as authentic. Second, in explanation just as much as in description, there comes a point at which, to borrow a metaphor from Wittgenstein, the spade is turned; children quickly discover that if they respond to every answer to a question ‘why?’ with another ‘why?’, the adult interlocutor is soon helpless. No sociologist – or psychologist – claims to be able literally to recreate the mental state of one person inside the mind of another. No heterosexual lover who has ever interrogated a partner about exactly what it feels like at the moment of orgasm will need to be told that empathy has a limit. But it would be absurd to conclude that different people can convey nothing to each other about the nature of their different subjective experiences. Indeed, it is sometimes the very incommensurability of subjective experience which can be deployed to good rhetorical effect. If a friend who has recently been bereaved says to you, ‘My sense of desolation was more all-consumingly painful than you can possibly imagine’, this may help you to understand the experience – understand it, that is, in the empathic, descriptive sense – better than any other words your friend might have chosen instead.

But however conducted, the exercise is a quite different one from the formulation of an explanatory hypothesis with which to account for the behaviour in question. It not only employs different techniques, but appeals to different standards, is open to different criticisms, and follows different rules. What’s more, the description of a pattern of social behaviour as experienced by those whose behaviour it is may be not only at variance from, but in flat contradiction with, the hypothesis which turns out to explain it correctly. Nor is there anything to be surprised at in this, since, as any psychologist will tell you, all of us are likely to be mistaken about the causes of our own behaviour. Not totally, perhaps, and not always. But often enough for the disjunction between why we do what we do and what it is like for us to do it to be as important a feature of our social lives as any of the large-scale crises and upheavals for which sociologists studying our behaviour may be lying in wait at the institutional or societal level.

Descriptions of subjective experience, particularly at the cultural level, have traditionally been the domain of anthropologists rather than sociologists. But the division of labour between the two is largely conventional. Anthropologists tend to study alien cultures by living in them for a year or two and then reporting to their uninitiated compatriots on the curious habits and customs of the Azande, !Kung San, Eskimos, Hopi Indians, or whoever it may be. Nothing prevents them from doing the same back home. You can do fieldwork in Totnes as well as Tahiti. But as the range of such studies has broadened and their methods been refined, so has there increased the volume of debate on the same dilemma as arises from the travels of Herodotus or the arrival in Hawaii of Captain Cook. ‘They’ see the world very differently from the way in which ‘we’ do, and believe very different things about it. So what are the right terms for ‘us’ to use in describing ‘them’? Ours or theirs?

If the question is put that way, the answer has to be ‘theirs’. But it’s a mistake to put it that way. It’s true that anyone studying a society remote in either place or time from their own is likely to have to grasp ideas and beliefs very different from the culture in which they themselves were reared. But the measure of their success is precisely their ability to translate them back, as Evans-Pritchard and many other anthropologists have done, into terms comprehensible to ‘us’; and the fact that it can be done is a conclusive demonstration that ‘we’ and ‘they’ are both variants of that same universal human nature acknowledged by Herodotus within which we and they are neither more nor less peculiar than each other. When, therefore, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz enjoins his fellow-anthropologists in a much-quoted article to ‘hawk the anomalous’ and ‘peddle the strange’,¹⁴ he is denying the very presupposition which legitimates his own professional practice. Who’s more exotic, Professor? You or them? What makes those Balinese cockfights you’re telling us about¹⁵ any more anomalous or strange than those baseball games at the Yankee Stadium? And while you’re about it, perhaps you can help us to understand an anomalous society like yours in which the topmost political role can be occupied by a former Grade B movie actor of limited intelligence called ‘Ron’ whose schedule is arranged for him by his wife under the guidance of an astrologer, and a strange culture like yours whose inherited complex of myths and symbols includes a pervasive totemic cult of an anthropomorphized duck called ‘Donald’ and an anthropomorphized mouse called ‘Mickey’.

Geertz’s article is called ‘Anti-anti-relativism’ because his perfectly legitimate concern is to emphasize how very different from one another different cultures and societies are. But the title is a pity all the same since relativism is a problem in philosophy – or, more strictly, in epistemology – rather than anthropology and sociology. The reason is simple. Any practising anthropologist or sociologist who takes epistemological relativism seriously has no option but to quit work. It’s one thing to recognize that ‘our’ beliefs and values are not inherently privileged over ‘theirs’, but quite another to conclude that ‘we’ can therefore never make meaningful judgements of any kind about ‘them’. What’s the point of going out to do fieldwork among either the Balinese or the North Americans if all you’re going to be able to come back with is an arbitrary description in untranslatable terms of their unreachable ideas about their illusory culture? If there is any pay-off from ‘anti-anti-relativism’, it is that it re-emphasizes the precept that since the results of anthropological, as of any other, research are a function not only of the evidence but of the assumptions with which the researcher approaches it, you had better be careful not to take your assumptions for granted. The dictum that ‘the point of view creates the object’ – which it does in natural and social science alike – may not have much immediate impact on the research of, say, a demographer who just wants to know by how much the Chinese birth-rate is going up or down or a political scientist who just wants to know how many female American voters have voted for one presidential candidate rather than another. It’s obviously more relevant where the research is of the kind which can be vitiated by the unexamined assumptions of observers like those white men who didn’t think to ask the Ashanti about the role of their Queen Mother. But to point that out is not to undermine the status of anthropology as a serious academic discipline. On the contrary: it’s all part of encouraging the next generation of anthropologists to get the cultures they choose to study more nearly right.

What, then, is the difference between getting it right in the explanatory (‘why?’) and the descriptive (‘what is it like?’) sense? Imagine yourself first to be a sociologist or anthropologist, whether in Totnes or Tahiti, trying to clinch the validity of a powerful-seeming explanatory hypothesis about ‘their’ behaviour which has dawned on you, and then to be the same sociologist or anthropologist trying to make sure that a convincing-looking description of it which you have put together from your field-notes is truly authentic. As the first, you will be looking, ideally, for a decisive piece of evidence – an artefact, a document, a set of statistics, an observed pattern or sequence of behaviour – which will rule out alternative explanations but accord with your own. But as the second, you will be collecting a whole range of ancillary observations which will cumulatively reinforce the impression of ‘what it was like’ which you want to convey to your readers. If one of Professor Geertz’s students were to say to him, ‘I’ve read your article, but I still can’t imagine taking cockfights as seriously as the Balinese do’, Geertz’s best tactic would be to load the student up with further details, other firsthand accounts, apposite metaphors or similies, and parallels from the student’s own culture – including, perhaps, a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium – until the message finally gets home.

There’s another revealing symptom of the difference, too. Explanation typically involves spotting a presumptively causal connection – without agriculture no feudalism, or whenever capitalism then democracy, or the Second World War because previously the First World War. But description typically involves what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing as’.¹⁶ I cited Wittgenstein earlier as a philosopher whose fanciful examples of social behaviour, useful as they may be to philosophers concerned with the meaning of meaning, are useless if not positively misleading for practising sociologists or anthropologists. But on the mental process of ‘seeing as’, as he expounds it in his Philosophical Investigations, what he has to say is directly to the point. As an example (mine, not his), imagine yourself looking at a bulky, upright Remington typewriter of about the year 1900, and trying to see it as it would have been seen in the year in which it was made – as, that is, a piece of exciting, novel, up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art technology. Can you do it? Try as I may, I’m not sure that I can. But the imaginative exercise required is the same as when an anthropologist tries to see a totem pole or a rain dance or an animal sacrifice or a Disney cartoon as ‘they’ see them. You don’t do it by tracing the sequence of causes and effects which has made the objects of your curiosity what they are. You do it by bringing to bear your knowledge of the cultural context in which they occur and the language employed by the native informants whom you have interrogated about their significance to ‘them’. And, once again, it’s no different for a Balinese anthropologist trying to understand (in the emphatic, descriptive, ‘what-is-it-like?’ sense) a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium than for Professor Geertz trying to understand a Balinese cockfight.

Suppose, however, that seeing things as ‘they’ see them entails acceptance of beliefs which ‘we’ know to be false (or at any rate think we know to be false – the point stands even if we later decide that we were wrong). Let’s go back to Evans-Pritchard among the Azande. He finds it quite easy to behave as if he shared their beliefs. But he can’t and therefore doesn’t actually share them, and he therefore can’t, whatever further enquiries he makes, see the poison oracle as they do, any more than I can see the wafer in the hand of the Catholic priest as the body of Christ. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t – not for the purposes of sociology. We don’t have to share their beliefs in order to grasp their meaning to them and convey it to you, our readers. You don’t, I assume, share any more than Herodotus did the belief of his Scythian informants that every member of the Neurian tribe is a once-a-year werewolf. But you can still grasp the concept (and enjoy the movie, too, if you don’t find it too scary). Indeed, think what would happen if sociologists and anthropologists did all come to share the beliefs of the people whose patterns of behaviour they had been studying. They could only explain the behaviour correctly if the correct explanation had already been arrived at by those whose behaviour it was. And how often would that be?

What’s more, this applies as much if not more when the beliefs in question are those of rulers, activists and decision-makers as when they are those of sociology professors. Rulers, activists and decision-makers all have explanations of their own of why the societies to which they belong are as they are as well as prescriptions of their own about how their societies ought to be changed for what they consider to be the better. But their memoirs are notorious for their unreliability. Only the most unsophisticated reader will be any more disposed to take them at face value than Evans-Pritchard to agree with his Zande informants that their misfortunes are due to the fact that one or more of their neighbours is a witch. But as you read the selective and tendentious reminiscences of important people, from Julius Caesar and before to Winston Churchill and since, and contrast them in your mind with the accounts of the same events given by uninvolved observers who have sought to test alternative possible explanations against one another, don’t you at the same time find the disjunction between the two entirely comprehensible? As a species, we are not only a compulsively social but a compulsively self-justifying animal, and the autobiographies of politicians need to be checked for their veracity and lack of misleading insinuations and omissions no less carefully than those of philosophers do (Bertrand Russell’s is a classic in this regard).¹⁷ But the disjunction between what it felt like to the autobiographer at the time, and how it is going to be explained by revisionist professors fifty years after the autobiographer’s death, is not a reason to question that that was what it felt like. The sociologist studying the societies in which the Great and Good (or Bad) occupied and performed their political roles may be as curious about the one as about the other, and increasingly struck by the irony inherent in the discrepancy between the two. But the discrepancy doesn’t of itself make it any more difficult to arrive at an authentic description or a valid explanation – or both. On the contrary, understanding the delusions of grandeur that led to the downfall of Croesus or Louis Napoleon or Margaret Thatcher may make the causes of it all the easier to see.

But explanation, in sociology or elsewhere, can mean several different things. Why, to go back to my earlier example, do I shake hands with you when I’m introduced to you? Because I don’t wish to seem impolite, because that’s how I was brought up, because it strengthens social ties within our community, because a mutual friend decided that we should meet, because in our culture that’s what we do instead of rubbing noses, or because in ruder and more violent times the symbolic meaning of a handshake was that neither of us held weapons in our hands?

That isn’t even an exhaustive list. But for the practising sociologist the important distinction is the threefold one between genetic, motivational and functional explanations. This difference does not, let me emphasize, correspond to the difference between evoked, acquired and imposed behaviour: explanations of each kind can be sought for all three. But sociologists are, typically, more likely both to be studying imposed behaviour and to be looking for functional explanations. Let me go back once more to the example of infantry drill in seventeenth-century Europe. If you want to know where it came from, the answer lies in a narrative account of the development by Maurice of Nassau, captain-general of Holland and Zeeland for forty years from 1585, of systematic routines for marching and countermarching, loading and discharging matchlock guns, and transmitting words of command down through co-ordinated tactical units. If you want to know what influenced the people involved, the answer lies in the careers and ambitions of the leaders of early modern European armies on the one side and the dispositions and responses of volunteer or conscripted foot-soldiers on the other – responses which may, as I’ve pointed out already, be explained as much by an unconscious bonding effect of co-ordinated movement to the sound of drums or music as by a cultural process of deliberate imitation or learning. But if you want to know why it came to transform the way in which wars were fought, the answer lies in the competitive advantage which armies so drilled enjoyed over their opponents and the function which drill performed in promoting discipline during training and garrison duty as well as on the field of battle.

The same distinction can be made on topics which fall more nearly within the domain of one of the specialized social sciences. If, for example, you are an economist studying the automobile industry, you may want to know about the initial commercial exploitation of the internal combustion engine, in which case you will need to find out about the cost – benefit calculations which showed it to be worthwhile. Or you may want to know about the appeal of the product to its potential purchasers, in which case you will need to find out about not only its utility as a mode of transport but also the effect of advertising in expanding consumer demand for it and the part played by peer-group imitation or rivalry in raising its priority as an item of household expenditure. Or you may want to know why some manufacturers have been more successful than others, in which case you will need to find out about production techniques, marketing strategies, tariff barriers, and rates of technological innovation and obsolescence. Indeed, you may well want to draw directly on models derived from the theory of natural selection, as a number of economists have done, in order to explain why some particular firms and their particular products win out over others in competition for market share.¹⁸

These examples can also be used (as the handshake example can) to illustrate the difference between the approaches of sociologists or anthropologists on the one hand and historians on the other. There is a familiar contrast, much discussed by philosophers of social science, between narrative explanations (‘because he couldn’t find a horse, the King of Ruritania lost the battle and therefore his kingdom’) and lawlike explanations (‘all monarchies, including the Ruritanian, depend on some kind of religious legitimation’). But the contrast mustn’t be overdrawn. Narrative explanations presuppose underlying regularities of certain kinds which must be true if the particular chain of causal connections is to hold; lawlike explanations are valid across the range of instances to which they are applied only if specific historical conditions are presupposed too. Lack of a horse only leads to the loss of a kingdom in a context to which implicit generalizations about certain forms of warfare apply, just as religious legitimation of a monarchy can only come about after a series of events which were contingently sufficient for it to do so. Sociologists, it could accordingly be said, are all closet historians (and historians closet sociologists).

For example: Madagascar is an exceptionally interesting area to study, not only because it is an island but because, over the course of the past 200 years, a network of small, scattered kingdoms has been replaced, first, by a central bureaucratic state employing slave labour, second, by a colonial regime which abolished slavery at the same time as imposing its own political institutions, and third, by a post-colonial government serviced by a professional, administrative and commercial bourgeoisie. This intriguing evolutionary pattern, convincingly analysed in the work of the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, presents a wide range of different contrasts which call for a correspondingly wide range of explanatory hypotheses. But if your interest is in the first of the three transitions, you will find yourself drawn to the particular sequence of events whereby a particular nineteenth-century king, having captured a sufficient number of slaves to exploit to the full the rice-growing potential of a particular territory, was able to exchange the surplus for European weapons which had by then become available and with them to capture yet more slaves and thereby build up a momentum of conquest which put his kingdom in control of the whole of Madagascar.¹⁹ This is not only a textbook example of a narrative explanation; it also tells specifically against a would-be lawlike one since any generalization of the form of ‘whenever one of a number of competing states gains priority of access to more advanced military technology it will establish a momentum of conquest sufficient to guarantee victory’ can be demolished by counter-examples from other times and places where the other conditions which were necessary in the case of Madagascar failed to obtain.

But suppose that your interest is not in the political history of Madagascar, but on the contrary in the patterns of traditional social behaviour which have persisted throughout the successive changes of regime. Bloch draws attention to the persistence of a ritual of circumcision in which the ceremony is performed and the traditional blessing given by a chosen ‘elder’.²⁰ He holds that in Madagascar, as elsewhere, such rituals are a function of institutionalized inequality, and is therefore unsurprised that the role of the persons chosen as ‘elders’ under each successive regime should turn out to be constant not in its defining practices but in its rank: in the first period, the ceremony is performed by local kinship group elders; in the second, by royal administrators; in the third, by French colonial officials; and in the fourth, by prominent local capitalists. QED. Notice, however, that he is explicitly not processing a lawlike generalization of the form of ‘the amount of ritual communication in a society varies with the social distance between its constituent roles’. What he says is that institutionalized inequality is what rituals like this one are about. To explain them, accordingly, involves an analysis of both the meaning of the ritual to the participants and the features of the history and culture of Madagascar which account for the successive replacement of one kind of ‘elder’ by another. And yes, there is a valid generalization which can be framed, if you want it, to the effect that people prefer their domestic ceremonies presided over by persons of higher rather than lower rank. Would any professor of anthropology be flattered to have his or her inaugural lecture chaired not, as advertised, by the university vice-chancellor in academic robes, but by a bare-footed freshman in an unwashed T-shirt?

All this, however, brings us back to the need for genetic, motivational and functional explanation in the study of human social behaviour. For example: in many different societies, there are communities and subcultures where the advantages of behaviour which the dominant ideology defines as ‘criminal’ outweigh the disadvantages. Parts of London and Newcastle, as of Chicago and Los Angeles, are obvious examples. Able-bodied young males are likely to be at least part-time occupants and performers of the role of ‘thief’: the chances of being caught are small, there is no alternative employment on offer which is both legitimate and gainful, there are easy pickings in the more affluent community down the road, and so on. Yes, but why exactly do they do it? Is it through rational choice, unthinking conformity to the peer-group, class or ethnic hatred, innate predisposition, an urge to escape from boredom, pathological greed, or what? However obvious the function, we still want to know why those who do it do and those who don’t don’t, and which of the relevant features of the environment would need to be changed for those who do not to want to any longer. It still isn’t a question to be answered by taking their own account of why they do it at face value: if, for example, they say that they do it because they are driven to it by poverty, the street-wise sociologist will wait for evidence of their changing their thieving behaviour when they cease to be poor. But don’t we still want to know what motivates them to do it as well as how they started and what they get out of it? Of course we do.

Ideally, therefore, the explanation of an observed pattern of human social behaviour will not only link a motivational to both a genetic and a functional hypothesis but provide a theoretical underpinning for all three. You don’t need a sociology degree before you notice that young men are more aggressive than elderly women. But maybe you do need a sociology degree (with some biology and psychology courses thrown in) before you can produce an adequate answer to the question: why does what looks like a causal connection between young maleness and a propensity to violence hold good? We need not just the evidence which might, but doesn’t, invalidate the claim that the connection is causal. We also need an explanation for the explanation. To take a textbook example from physical science, the discovery of a causal connection between altitude above sea level and the boiling point of water was made long before the notion of atmospheric pressure provided the theoretical grounding for it. In sociology, we are still a long way from the sort of grounding of wide-ranging causal hypotheses in deep and powerful theories which has been achieved in both physical and biological science. But that’s part of what makes it such a fascinating subject to pursue. Whatever (exactly) it is that you want to know, there is plenty left to find out about how we all behave as social animals, and there are plenty of alternative hypotheses available to explain it when you do.

Then what, in all this, about the philosophers, preachers and poets? Don’t they offer both explanations and descriptions of patterns of human social behaviour as valid and authentic as those put forward by academic social scientists? Well – nothing stops them. Nietzsche’s writings, to take a celebrated example, contain a number of sociological conjectures about the evolution of human nature for which he himself claimed ‘scientific’ status, including his view of systems morality as expressions of sublimated feelings of resentment towards those with power on the part of those without it. But Nietzsche wasn’t setting out systematically to test a set of explanatory hypotheses against the evidence most likely to conflict with them. He was, for his own very different purposes, constructing a just-so story about the ‘genealogy of morals’ and using it to subvert the conventional view of what human beings are doing in passing judgement on each other’s behaviour at all. The writings of philosophers, preachers and poets are sociology to the extent that the authors make them so. Some of the most potent intellectual cocktails yet mixed, like Freud’s, derive their potency precisely from the cunning, not to say dangerous, way in which they combine the two: would-be therapeutic regimes derived from a psychoanalytic theory which fails the standard tests to which new therapeutic drugs are routinely subjected may turn out to do more harm than good. But the difference between the kinds of conclusions to which the reader is asked to assent is still the same. It isn’t up to you or me whether Sahlins or Obeyesekere is right about the Hawaiians’ reception of Captain Cook, even though our respective ideological presuppositions may lead us to hope and expect that it’s the one rather than the other. But we do have, and will continue to have, a further element of discretion in deciding whether or not we share Nietzsche’s unflattering view of the Christian conception of morality, even after every item of relevant evidence is in.

To emphasize the difference as firmly as I have been doing is not – repeat not – to question that to analyse it is a philosophical rather than a scientific exercise: the philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy, not of science. So when the French philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida, in his book On Grammatology, announces to his readers that the nature of the difference between a philosophical and an empirical question isn’t simply an empirical question, the (or at least, my) surprise is that he feels the need to italicize it.²¹ Who is he contradicting? There is always scope for argument over the borderline. But no contemporary sociologist or philosopher holds that the conceptual distinction between conceptual and empirical questions is ‘simply empirical’. Likewise, when textbooks on the philosophy of social science correctly insist that social scientists themselves are both its subjects and its objects, who wants to say otherwise? The question is: what follows? And the answer is that although social scientists are on that account exposed to the risk of making mistakes of a kind which doesn’t arise at all in the study of inanimate nature, it doesn’t prevent them from formulating explanatory hypotheses about their own and other people’s behaviour which can be tested by the same criteria of validity. Empirical sociologists talking about facts and their causes are apt to be denounced by their more philosophically minded colleagues as ‘positivists’. By this, the anti-positivists usually mean to imply a nefarious commitment to an ideology of science which denies the truism that the practice of science raises some genuinely philosophical issues. But when they come to attack the empiricists’ specific conclusions, you can bet that they will tacitly acknowledge the existence of empirical criteria by which observations of, and hypotheses about, patterns of human social behaviour stand and fall. Or if they persist in maintaining that all ‘social facts’ are ‘ideological constructions’, you need merely ask them whether, if charged by a court of law with a murder committed by somebody else, they would accept that their innocence was only an ideological construction (which the concept of ‘murder’ as an act of intentional, wrongful killing self-evidently is), and not in any sense a ‘fact’.

There is, to be sure, nothing self-contradictory in doing both. All students of human social behaviour, whatever label they attach to themselves, are free to draw on whatever empirical observations they like in order to persuade their readers to share their personal convictions about the human condition, the meaning of history, the phenomenology of the life-world, the postmodern experience, the contradictions of rationality, the dualism of knowledge and action, the existential dilemma, the ontology of social life, the paradox of reflexive subjectivity, and so on and so forth. The sociologists of the kind whom their opponents denounce as ‘positivists’ are apt to be no less contemptuous of those whom they in their turn denounce as practitioners of ‘substitute religion’. But each is as legitimate an intellectual activity as the other. The two are not in competition except in the trivial sense that professors giving lectures of the one kind may be competing for student audiences with professors giving lectures of the other. One of the most influential contemporary practitioners of ‘substitute religion’ is the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose ambition (if I understand him correctly) is to formulate the ideal conditions under which rational human beings could communicate with each other free of the constraints imposed by ‘positivist’ social theory and the social institutions which it reflects. It is, in my judgement, a heroic but ultimately self-defeating intellectual enterprise. But whether my judgement is right or wrong, it’s an enterprise as fundamentally different as Nietzsche’s is from seeking first to distinguish and then to explain the different patterns of human social behaviour to be found in the historical and ethnographic record and then, if the researcher is so minded, to describe what they have been like, subjectively speaking, for the people whose patterns of behaviour they are. The only kind of philosophical argument to which this book stands categorically opposed is one which seeks to deny that empirical sociology is possible at all. But that sort of argument is best countered simply by doing what the sceptic says can’t be done; and, as I’ve hinted already, you will find even the most anti-positivist practitioners of substitute religion doing it too, where and when it bolsters their arguments of the other kind.

III A Catalogue of Errors

IF SOCIOLOGY IS AS OLD as Herodotus and Aristotle – to say nothing of Herodotus’s Chinese contemporary K’ung Fu Tzu, otherwise known as Confucius – you may well wonder why it has taken so long to get as far as it has. But the same could be said about many other branches of science. Although mankind’s attempts to make sense of both the natural and the social world go back for many thousands of years, it’s remarkable how recent is the dramatic increase in knowledge which has transformed the world and the way we live in it. How and why it has happened is itself a controversial question. But the fact remains that physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology as they are now understood and practised are all a product of the past couple of centuries or less.

This isn’t to say that earlier ideas about the workings of the social as well as the natural world were all mistaken. Aristotle had some good ones, not least about the relationship within a society between political stability and the relative size of its middle class – a hypothesis lent additional support as recently as 1996 by evidence set out in an article published in the Journal of Economic Growth.¹ So did the fourteenth-century Islamic political theorist Ibn Kaldun, who detected in the societies which he studied a recurrent tendency for them to oscillate between government by egalitarian warriors from the desert and hierarchical bureaucrats in the towns. So did Machiavelli, whose insights into the pursuit of power and the means of its retention by the rulers of the city-states of late Renaissance Italy have made his name a part of our everyday vocabulary. But all such ideas were, and were bound to be, relatively parochial in their scope and imprecise in their formulation by the standards of late twentieth-century sociology. The term ‘sociology’ was itself only coined in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, who to that extent has to be acknowledged as its founder. But Comte’s writings, for all that he was remarkably prescient about the global impact of industrialization, are nowadays studied closely only by those whose interests lie on the wilder shores of defunct ideas. The sociologists who did most to make the subject into what it still, for the time being, is are Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. It would, I think, be fair to say that there is no serious sociologist now writing who has been untouched by any trace of their influence. But there is something rather odd here. In all sciences the advances made in one generation are likely to be superseded in the next, usually through their absorption into a deeper or more wide-ranging theory. What is striking about these three founding fathers of sociology is how far they all went astray in their quest for the Big Idea.

With Marx, much of the difficulty (but at the same time, much of the reason for his influence) is his fusion of sociological with philosophical argument in precisely the way I had in mind in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter II. Literally thousands of books and articles have been written about the relationship between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘humanistic’ Marx. Nor is that surprising, given the enormous appeal of a doctrine combining a messianic prophecy of a better world with a hypothesis both supporting the prophecy and at the same time endorsing a revolutionary programme to make it come true. But he didn’t get it right. Marx’s belief that the course of human history is determined by conflict between a dominant class and a subordinate class which in due course replaces it led him to predict that the ‘proletariat’ would shortly displace the ‘bourgeoisie’ and usher in a utopian social order about whose details he was notoriously vague. But as a Polish joke was later to put it, ‘Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it’s the other way round.’ Marx’s sociology was mistaken in three ways. First, he was wrong in supposing that in capitalist industrial societies the progressive immiseration of an expanding proletariat would lead to a revolutionary transfer of power. Second, he was wrong in supposing that where socialist revolutions did come about, they would do so in industrial rather than still predominantly agricultural societies. Third, he was wrong in supposing that in socialist societies class conflict would come to an end. So why, you may well ask, is he still taken so seriously? The short answer is that he has made it impossible for any subsequent sociologist to look at the world and the human societies in it without conceding a more prominent part to class conflict and what he called the ‘social relations of production’ than had been admitted in pre-Marxist sociology. In that sense, and to that extent, ‘we are all Marxists now’.

Max Weber, who was born nearly half a century after Marx, disagreed with the Marxists not because he didn’t recognize the importance of class conflict in human history but because he denied that all other forms of conflict could be reduced to it. Not only did he see political as opposed to economic interests as having their own independent part to play, but he also gave to ideas, and particularly religious ideas, an importance which the Marxists denied them. Ideas, as he put it in a memorable phrase, are like switchmen diverting the course of history down one railway track rather than another.² His own view of history was as a process of inexorable ‘rationalization’ originating in the societies of early modern Europe. But, like Marx, he turns out not to have got it right. Whatever he meant by ‘rationalization’, it is not the inexorable process which he supposed – even though he saw it as being interrupted by the occasional emergence of a ‘charismatic’ religious or political leader – and it is not to Europe alone that the modern advance of science and technology is due. Yet Weber, too, has permanently influenced his successors. The best way for me to convey this is not to try and summarize his most enduring contributions, but simply to point out how often I mention him in this book. The eminent French sociologist Raymond Aron once said that Weber is not merely the greatest sociologist but the sociologist,³ and it is hard to think of any other for whom the claim could plausibly be made.

And Durkheim? Durkheim was a near-contemporary of Weber’s (although, to the puzzlement of later historians of ideas, they never took any account of each other’s work). Unlike Weber, however, Durkheim sought to establish sociology as an autonomous subject by postulating a conceptual realm of the ‘social’ in which human institutions were all to be explained by reference to other ‘social facts’, these being defined as such by the ‘collective consciousness’ of the society in question. This extrapolation from the unquestionably valid observation that social behaviour is not simply a matter of individual choice has proved seductive to more anthropologists than sociologists, perhaps because of their stronger sense of the importance in human societies of custom and ritual. But it is flawed for a reason which Durkheim seems never to have grasped. If human social behaviour is explicable entirely by the social environment within which the persons whose behaviour it is have been brought up, then this must include the way they conceptualize their behaviour to themselves – an inference which Durkheim was, in fact, explicitly willing to draw. But the inference rests on a fallacy. For if, as Durkheim believed, even the concept of duality derives from a perception of dualities in the social organization of society, how can they be perceived to be dualities without some innate prior capacity for doing so? Quite apart from the findings of evolutionary psychology and biological anthropology, which have undermined the conception of the human mind as a blank slate on which society imprints what it may, there is a logical error here reminiscent of the old chestnut about the painter El Greco being astigmatic (work it out for yourself if you don’t know the answer already). In Durkheim’s last book, he went so far as to argue, by a sort of reverse-evolutionary study of the Australian Arunta, that all religion is essentially the worship of society by itself – as if much religious doctrine and practice weren’t explicitly hostile to the established institutions of the societies in which they have arisen on that very account. As Evans-Pritchard later remarked, it was Durkheim, not the ‘savage’, who turned Society into a God.⁴

And yet, and yet. We are all to some degree Durkheimians now, just as we are all to some degree Weberians and Marxists. It’s not just that so many of Durkheim’s preoccupations are ours too: the division of labour in complex industrial societies, the psychological stress produced by social disequilibrium, the importance of associations intermediate between the individual and the state, or the relation between public education and private morality. It’s also that there is a sense in which societies and cultures are more than the sum of their members’ behaviour, and their members do tacitly acknowledge this in much of what they say and do. Look at how people participate in rituals of various kinds even when they are indifferent to the ideology purporting to legitimate them, or how they respond collectively and seemingly unthinkingly to patriotic symbols, or how they conform to social changes which are not of their own making. The correct explanation of these patterns of behaviour may be different from what Durkheim supposed. But he was right to see them as incompatible with the dogmatically individualist assumptions which he attributed to earlier economic and political theorists, the British ‘Utilitarians’ included. If, like Comte before him, he was to prove mistaken in undervaluing individual psychology, it doesn’t follow that he was wrong to deny that sociology is nothing more than individual psychology writ large.

Ironically, neither Marx nor Weber nor Durkheim were as influential in their lifetimes as the self-educated Victorian railway engineer Herbert Spencer; and since it was Spencer who actually coined the unfortunate phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, you may well wonder why I have left him off my list. But Spencer’s sociology was more irreparably flawed than Marx’s, Weber’s or Durkheim’s by his conception of evolution as a cosmic process of mechanistic advance towards a harmonious equilibrium and his simultaneous conviction that a scientific ethics could be derived from the laws of a uniform Nature. To be sure, for Marx class conflict was to lead to an eventual state of universal harmony, just as for Spencer individual competition was to do so. But Spencer’s appeal to his contemporaries, particularly in the United States,⁵ derived less from the conviction carried by his account of universal human history than from the ostensibly scientific legitimation which he gave to unfettered competition in pursuit of personal gain. He was, of course, perfectly right to point out how strenuously individuals do compete with one another for personal gain (and not by any means only in the United States). But he failed to see how little that actually explains about why a given society’s economic, ideological and political institutions come to be what they are.

With hindsight, it’s unsurprising that the nineteenth-century conception of social evolution survived into the twentieth century in its Marxian rather than its Spencerian form. It did so not only because of the increasing attraction of Marxism as a reasoned prophecy of the overthrow of capitalism, but also because of the steadily diminishing attraction of Spencer’s refusal to countenance the involvement of the state in matters of social welfare. Not that Spencer fell out of favour entirely. He even enjoyed something of a revival in the 1960s, and the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who in 1937 had opened his first book, The Structure of Social Action, by quoting from the historian Crane Brinton the rhetorical question ‘Who now reads Spencer?’, can be found in 1966 publishing a little book called Societies in which he explicitly readmits into sociology the notion of evolution in terms which could have been written by Spencer himself (complete with the mistake of equating evolution with progress).⁶ But Marxism aside, the dominant ideas in twentieth-century sociology have been explicitly anti-evolutionary. There are three of them: Functionalism, Structuralism and Behaviorism (deliberately spelled without the ‘u’ – it’s very much an American doctrine).

Functionalism was most influentially expounded in the 1920s by the anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowksi and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown – the latter explicitly influenced by Durkheim. Its basic tenet was that the distinctive patterns of behaviour observable in different human societies are to be explained not in terms of their history but in terms of the contribution which the behaviour makes to the workings of the society as a whole. As a reaction against the purely conjectural histories to which many nineteenth-century evolutionists had committed themselves, this was salutary. But it invited the obvious rejoinder that change has still to be explained. After all, even the stablest-looking societies were different at some time in the past and will be different again at some time in the future. To this, the functionalist reply is that when a society does change, the explanation of what it changes into will still depend on an analysis of the function of the new institutions which have emerged in place of the old. But the flaw which remains is the implicit presupposition that the normal state of human societies is an equilibrium between their component parts. No theory which purports to be able to explain why human societies are as we find them can possibly dispense with the notion of function. But nor can it achieve its intended purpose if it fails to acknowledge that conflict and change are as ‘normal’ a feature of human societies as cohesion and stability. It’s not just that the explanation of change requires an analysis of the functions of the practices by which the society’s roles are defined rather than of the connections between the institutions constituted by them. It’s also that those mutant practices which turn out to be the critical ones may do so precisely because the advantage which they confer on the roles that carry them is maladaptive for the society’s institutions and thereby for the society itself in its relations with other societies.

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