Have human societies evolved? Evidence from history and pre-history

Abstract

I ask whether social evolutionary theories found in sociology, archaeology, and anthropology are useful in explaining human development from the Stone Age to the present-day. My data are partly derived from the four volumes of The Sources of Social Power, but I add statistical data on the growth of complexity and power in human groups. I distinguish three levels of evolutionary theory. The first level offers a minimalist definition of evolution in terms of social groups responding and adapting to changes in their social and natural environment. This is acceptable but trivial. The hard part is to elucidate what kinds of response are drawn from what changes, and all sociology shares in this difficulty. This model also tends to over-emphasize external pressures and neglect human inventiveness. The second level of theory is “multilineal” evolution in which various paths of endogenous development, aided by diffusion of practices between societies, dominate the historical and pre-historical record. This is acceptable as a model applied to some times, places, and practices, but when applied more generally it slides into a multi-causal analysis that is also conventional in the social sciences. The third level is a theory of general evolution for the entire human experience. Here materialist theories are dominant but they are stymied by their neglect of ideological, military, and political power relations. There is no acceptable theory of general social evolution. Thus the contribution of social evolutionary theory to the social sciences has been limited.

Introduction: varieties of evolutionary theory

I recently finished a four-volume history of power in human groups from prehistoric times to the present-day (Mann 1986, 1993, 2012, 2013). One important issue on which I only touched lightly was whether the development of human societies followed an evolutionary trajectory. I tossed off a few generalizations about evolution of which the most important was that evolutionary theory might be applied to the Neolithic Revolution and might have more limited force among later pre-state groups, but then “general evolution ceased” (vol. 1, p. 39). This understandably earned the ire of Gerhard Lenski (1988, p. 91) and Stephen Sanderson (1997), both leading evolutionary theorists. Mine was a superficial view to which I no longer adhere. But this is certainly an issue worth addressing in greater depth, which I attempt here armed with evidence from my four volumes and some further evidence, including some quantitative trend data. Let me make clear that I do not assert that each time and place is sufficiently unique as to defeat any attempt at broad generalizations. My volumes discern considerable patterning of human history. Whether this is evolutionary is another matter.

I first review evolutionary theories, distinguishing three levels of ambition. Then I turn to prehistoric, historic, and contemporary evidence. Since change has varied between different aspects of the human experience, I discuss whether each of the four sources of social power—ideological, economic, military, and political—have contained evolutionary tendencies, and then whether all four can be combined into a general theory of evolution. My conclusion will not be the one I came to in 1986, but it will probably again disquiet Lenski and Sanderson since I conclude that evolutionary theory has very limited application to human development.

That might not be true of the first emergence of humans on the planet. Homo sapiens, the first anatomically human creature, capable of language and cultural symbols, appeared in the Late Paleolithic Period, somewhere between 200,000 and 150,000 BCE. Before that time a socio-biological evolutionary story with obvious roots in Darwinism can be plausibly told of the emergence of humans from prior species, and of the development of language, primate solidarity, extended kinship groups, and other basic human characteristics (Turner and Maryanski 2008, chaps. 1–5), although theory has to be used to fill in the enormous gaps in the archaeological record. I lack the expertise to comment on this period. But for later development, it is generally acknowledged that there are major differences between biological/Darwinian evolution and social evolution.

• 1. There have been no genetic (species) changes among humans since about 150,000 years ago. Our genetic make-up does limit our capacities, while genetic variations among individuals may affect their behavior. Yet the differences are not on a scale sufficient to affect overall social development or to distinguish different social groups from each other biologically.

• 2. Human development has occurred over a tiny space of time when compared to biological and species change. If this is evolutionary, it is extremely rapid and must be of a very different type to Darwin’s.

• 3. Human beings produce change intentionally and sometimes unintentionally in accordance with their cultures, practices, and aspirations, and so the dynamics of change are not random, as genetic mutations are in Darwinian evolution.

• 4. Change does not occur through mutations of inherited characteristics. The equivalent mechanism perhaps is social learning, so that successful innovations can be taught to the next generation.

• 5. Biological evolution is a system of divergence. Once a species separates, it cannot recombine. In contrast, in social change transmission of power back and forth across and between human groups is one of the main mechanisms of change.

• 6. The notion of the “survival of the fittest” among human groups includes the Darwinian sense of better adaptation to environmental changes. But it also involves direct competition and diffusion of practices among human groups, and these have no counterparts in biological evolution. In any case, the Darwinian model posits species adapting to their environment. But for most of their history human societies have not merely adapted to their environment, they have also changed it.

• 7. The causal factors producing a given social evolution must be explained. For Darwin they were random.

None of this precludes the possibility of an evolutionary account of social development but it does indicate that any social evolutionism would be very different from Darwin’s biological evolution.

In the nineteenth century a vision of unilinear evolution dominated. It saw a single axis of development whereby all human groups could be placed on a single scale of rising complexity and power. Herbert Spencer epitomized this view. Today’s evolutionists reject this and they especially reject the normative idea of progression from “lower” to “higher” forms. Indeed they try to avoid any normative judgments.

Social evolution must be distinguished from development. Development means simply growth in some form of human action. It does not carry any sense of being part of a much broader cumulative process. The first and most modest level of modern theory gives a minimal definition of social evolution. It is a process of variation followed by selection and diffusion—at any level and in any context. The human groups whose practices are best adapted to a changing social and natural environment are “selected,” that is, they survive better, and then other societies imitate or adapt their practices. Few would argue with that although it overstates the pressures acting on human groups and underestimates their ability to innovate without pressures. It is also hard to stay away from tautology at this level of generality: whatever survives better must have been better adapted. In any case we still have the hard part to do, which is to establish through causal analysis what practices are the important ones in what types of environment. These might be so different in different contexts that no overall process of evolution might be observed.

So today’s evolutionists prefer a more precise definition: social evolution is long-run change in collective behavior that is neither random nor cyclical but is persistently, sequentially, and cumulatively directional. Two main directional processes have been identified.

• a) Toward increasing complexity: a move from “simple” to “complex” societies is the almost invariable starting-point for evolutionists from the late nineteenth century to today. Human groups are said to have devised greater and greater differentiation of social roles, institutions, and occupations, along with more levels of social hierarchy. Combined, these generate more adaptability and more complex organizational forms, including a degree of centralized integration giving social order in what might otherwise be chaotic decentralization (Flannery 1972). In sociological theory there has been a direct line from Spencer to Durkheim, and to Parsons (1964) and Luhmann (1986) emphasizing the growth of differentiation and integration. “Evolutionary universals,” as identified by Parsons, and “evolutionary advances,” as identified by Luhmann, are typical recent examples.

• b) Toward increasing power: As in my previous work I distinguish distributive power (the power of some over others), from collective power (cooperation within a group that enhances power over nature or other social groups). I also distinguish intensive from extensive power. It is very commonly suggested within sociology that humans’ collective power over nature and humans’ ability to mobilize both collective and distributive power over other humans have grown, leading to an increased intensity of social cooperation or exploitation among more people spread over a more extensive geographical area.

Most current theorists say they embrace a second level of ambition, of multilinear evolution, which identifies different trajectories of development for different human groups and activities. Each might contain distinctive institutions and time-frames that they say might be unrelated to each other, conceptually or in time and space. For example, evolutionary tendencies in economic power relations may differ from those in political power. This may lead to problems. If the notion of the evolution of societies in general is abandoned, limiting it to single human groups would tend to reify their boundedness. Alternatively, if evolution is limited to different spheres of human activity, this might lack any general notion of evolution. For example, the development of writing scripts from cuneiform to the alphabet might not be related to the development of bronze and iron technology.

Multilineal theory has been important in archaeology and anthropology, but has received much less attention in political science and sociology, while economists’ endogenous growth theory is in effect making evolutionary arguments without their realizing it. Sociological grand theory has often discussed evolution but most recent sociologists have not so much accepted or rejected evolutionism as ignored it. Archaeologists and anthropologists have focused on evolution in prehistory and very early history, but evolutionary sociologists like Sanderson (2007), Lenski (2005), Turner and Maryansky (2008), and Runciman (1989) have attempted to cover the whole of the human experience. So this is the third and highest level of ambition, which accepts that there are different paths but sees them as contributing to a much broader long-term process of evolution.

Common to all three models are individual or collective actors responding to changing natural and social environment by innovating action, storing its results through selection mechanisms, and transmitting innovations to the next generation. Endogeneity is emphasized in the sense that earlier social practices contain the seeds of later ones (the Latin term evolutio means an “unfolding” or “unrolling”). Evolutionary history thus consists of “a causal process in which each new mode of evolutionary change has laid a foundation for the next mode of such change” (Lenski 2005, p. 6). However, evolutionists are aware of the dangers of pushing endogeneity too far, and they add the diffusion of practices from elsewhere, peacefully or by force. There is both “parallel evolution” involving the persistent movement of different groups along similar paths, and “convergent evolution” involving the movement of dissimilar groups towards similar social structures (Sanderson 2007, p. 173).

All evolutionists, even Herbert Spencer, have accepted that some societies may be stagnant or that they may collapse or experience merely cyclical change or that development may occur through sudden revolutions or through historical accidents. Indeed, this may be the case in most human groups. But those that do experience adaptive upgrading will win out in the competition between groups. Grinin (2009, p. 94) cautions us that “macroevolution should not be compared with a wide staircase along which all the societies move in the same direction. It should rather be compared with an extremely complex labyrinth, whereas only a few are able to find their way out of it without borrowing from the others.” Likewise Runciman (1989, p. 297) says modern societies “stand at the end of a sequence from less to more heterogeneity and complexity, which, even if randomly initiated and sporadically interrupted, proceeds nonetheless from identifiable causes to demonstrable effects.”

Yet all these qualifications make multilineal evolution a slippery target. It raises the suspicion that some evolutionists have retreated to ex-post facto explanations of each burst of greater power or complexity. For the theory to have much utility it can accept a certain amount of multi-causality, regression, stasis, contingency, and accident, but in the long-run these must not obstruct a dominant process of evolutionary development in crucial transitions to a greater level of complexity and power. This requires a two-pronged research strategy (a) identifying a series of connected stages embodying greater complexity and power; and (b) identifying causal mechanisms through which the development of greater complexity or power emerge.

Evolutionists must demonstrate a continuity whereby each major developmental step, each major adaptation to changed circumstances, emerges logically from its predecessor, either endogenously or through diffusion.

The underlying mechanism is the capacity of humans to adapt to changes in the natural or social environment. Most evolutionists have emphasized materialist pressures like population growth and changes in the natural environment. Their emergence prevents traditional social practices from working well and at least some human groups will adapt new practices more appropriate to the new constraints. The directional element here is the development of greater efficiency and control over the environment—that is, collective power over nature (Flannery 1972). Anthropologists Johnson and Earle (1987, p. 17) identify “the primary motor” of evolution as “population growth under economic constraints.” Sociologist Sanderson explains prehistory and history in terms of “evolutionary materialism” proceeding through three stages (2007, p. 281). First, for prehistory and early history this involved interaction between demography and ecology, with population pressure the main evolutionary mechanism. Note the importance of outside pressure in these models and an absence of the possibility that human beings might have the capacity to innovate without being under pressure.

But in his second period, subsequent history up to about 1500 CE, Sanderson’s mechanism shifts to the mode of production and technology. Third, after 1500 the driving-mechanism is narrowed to capitalism’s ceaseless accumulation of profit (1999, pp. 361–366). Notice that this sequence moves the main focus away from nature to society. Lenski (2005) privileges three somewhat different mechanisms 1) the human genetic heritage; 2) the biological, physical, and social environment; and 3) the influence of prior social and cultural characteristics of a society. His core argument is that evolution is made possible by ecological pressures and human technological invention, the latter of which involves human ingenuity and collective information-sharing that generates and diffuses adaptations to pressures. So his model stresses both pressures and innovations. But these sociologists have no major role for political, military, or ideological power, which are seen as being largely the product of material forces.

Lenski distinguishes the evolution of individual human groups from the evolution of global humanity. Very few groups developed, he says, but their innovations swept the world so that in the long-run human groups became more complex and powerful. The existence somewhere at any one time of a few innovating groups is likely but evolutionists must show continuity between the various innovators. World systems theorists Wilkinson (1991) and Anderson and Chase-Dunn (2005) attempt this geographically by locating the principal line of evolution within what Wilkinson calls the “Central Civilization” of the planet, by which he essentially means Eurasia. Although individual human groups within this Civilization often declined or collapsed, it continued to exist as a cultural reality sparking in each period one or more torch-bearing communities carrying greater power and complexity. This is an attempt to rescue the third and most ambitious level of evolutionism, a general theory rooted geographically.

Sociologist Gary Runciman (1989) offers a different model. He is not a materialist in an economic sense, although he is in a socio-biological sense. He accepts multi-causality, seeing societies as constituted by three main forms of power relations (following Max Weber, he does not separate political from military power). In his view evolution ensues from power struggles between groups with differential power over the means of production (economic), persuasion (ideological), and coercion (military), steered by selection pressures emanating from the natural and social environment. The groups best adapted to changed conditions will triumph, a version of “the survival of the fittest,” his general mechanism of evolution. The sequence that results is “natural selection, both random in its origin and indeterminate in its outcome”—like Darwin (1989, p. 449). The nature of the power struggles (and who wins) differs from situation to situation and must be analyzed empirically. He gives many empirical vignettes of social change using this broad model but does not fit them into an overall narrative of evolution, unlike the materialists.

Although Runciman notes that these power sources generate both cooperation and domination (in my terms, collective and distributive power), in practice he emphasizes domination. Thus ideologies are seen largely as enabling domination and imposing stratification based on status differentials (1989, pp. 12–13, 59). He does not discuss religions as genuine collective explorations of meaning or as the expression of social solidarity. This is a limitation. I myself distinguish four, not three, sources of power, I see ideological power as more important than he does, and I see distributive and collective power as of equal importance (and entwined). Yet mine and his model are clearly of the same family. Social development occurs as a result of humans using power resources to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve amid changing natural and social environments. But is there an evolutionary logic in this?

I start with the stages that evolutionists identify. Stages are a necessary but not sufficient precondition for an evolutionary theory. Few evolutionists have presented a general theory of stages, for they have tended to treat separately economic, political, and ideological power relations. This fits nicely in my framework of the four sources of social except that no one follows Spencer’s model of stages in military power. I now discuss their triad of stages. Later I present data on the development of military power.

Stages of development: economic

There are three main models of economic stages. The first derives from the technology involved in working on successive materials, each one of which offered greater productivity. Generally these stages are seen as: Neolithic tools appearing around 50,000 BCE and this Stone Age lasted to about 5,000 BCE, followed by the Chalcolithic (or Copper Age) 5,000 to 3,300 BCE, the Bronze Age (3,300 to 1,300 BCE), and the Iron Age (from 1,300 BCE) (e.g., Childe 1951, White 1959). Most of these stages appeared in several major regions of the world, sometimes through diffusion, sometimes independently. This represented persistent, directional increase in the toughness of tools and weapons. Each technique gave human communities greater power over nature and over other communities that did not adopt them. This is both convincing and consistent with evolutionism. Note that these stages got shorter. It took humans 100,000 years to develop specialized stone tools, another 45,000 years to develop copper objects, and almost no time at all to take the remaining steps. Evolutionists see a speeding up of evolution.

The second model is a Marx-derived concern with “modes of production.” Marx’s own list was of evolution from primitive communism to tribal, to ancient, to feudal, and to capitalist modes, although he added an Asiatic mode as an alternative to the ancient mode. Other materialists identify a move from a hunter-gatherer mode of production to horticulture (gardening without the plough), to pastoral, and to agrarian (gardening with the plough), and then to industrial. Some add a present post-industrial or information-scientific stage.

We guess that hunter-gatherers emerged around 150,000 BCE and dominated for perhaps 140,000 years—the overwhelming experience of human beings. Lenski (2005, p. 75) accepts that its duration meant that “stasis, not change, has been the usual state of affairs among human societies throughout most of history” [and prehistory]. Pastoralism and horticulture then developed alongside each other from about 10,000 BCE. Some horticultural groups turned toward agricultural ploughing in settled locations from around 8,000 BCE, and pastoral and agricultural modes of production then lasted alongside each other for almost two millennia. Finally there came the industrial or capitalist mode of production.

The third economic model emphasizes the prime energy source of a period—from human power to animal power, to wind and water power, and thence to fossil fuels, each more productive and with more power over nature than the last. Once again, the period of each stage got shorter.

These three economic sequences are often blended together to produce an overall series of economic stages. Sanderson (1995), for example, believes his “evolutionary materialism” can identify what he calls the three great transformations of world history. First, he sees the Neolithic Revolution emerging in six to eight different parts of the world with “strikingly similar” outcomes. Second, between 3000 BC and AD 1500 came directional trends in population growth, technological change, increasing commercialization, increases in the size and scope of political empires, and even ideological changes. This is an obviously less coherent, less materialist period, and a vaguer account, though he seems not to notice that. But this period “set the stage’ for the third stage beginning in 1500 AD, the modern capitalist world. Here he believes that Wallerstein’s world systems theory can be used to reveal an evolutionary trend toward the global expansion of capitalism. Although political and ideological power does get a look here in the second period, military power does not, and the revolutions he identifies are overwhelmingly economic. This is inadequate. Economic power relations are, of course, very important in human groups, and we can perceive evolutionary trends within them. But that does not yield a general theory of evolution.

Stages of development: political

Archaeologists and anthropologists figure largely here. Again the earliest period, containing little or no political development was easily the longest one. As I argued in Chapter 2 of Volume 1, prehistory saw resistance to any increase in political centralization and social stratification. This lasted for almost the whole of the hunter-gatherer period and much of the succeeding horticultural period. It took eons before tentative moves toward the emergence of “bigmen,” chiefs, or class differences were sustained. Until then, popular reaction against power differentials resulted across the world in cycles of devolution, with the power of a polity first increasing and then moving back again to the people. This was cyclical, not evolutionary, and it endured for over 95 % of human experience on earth. Political evolutionism might apply to under 5 % of human experience.

The following period of very late prehistory and early history is traditionally viewed by archaeologists and anthropologists as a coherent evolutionary sequence, moving from stateless, egalitarian hunter-gather bands, to village communities, to big-men, tribes, and chiefdoms (of increasing complexity), to agrarian states, and then to agrarian empires (Fried 1967; Service 1975). Each of these political shifts is said to have increased the scale and complexity of political organization, increased the number of distinct roles and distinct hierarchical levels, and increased the number of persons who could be so mobilized. Differentiation of ranks and then class stratification, class exploitation, and despotic states also developed (Johnson and Earle, 1987). No one attempts to date this sequence, since these processes occurred with very different time-frames in different regions.

More recent writers have argued that this is only a rough ordering, with many exceptions and multiple classification problems. Many hunter-gather communities were not egalitarian, for they contained age and gender status rankings. Some tribes were alternatives to chiefdoms, and some chiefdoms were more complex than some states. There were many hybrids. Indeed, there was so much variation by time and place, so much diversity within communities, and so much overlap between them that some archaeologists say these stages obscure a more complex and contingent reality. There were also many “retreats” back to simpler forms of political rule. But after all these exceptions have been taken into account, we can nonetheless discern something of an evolutionary political process in early historic human groups. And since polities always existed amid broader civilizational complexes, like the Sumerian, or the Celtic, or the Mississippian, this aided the diffusion of adaptations among different groups within a single civilization (Yoffee 2005).

However, political evolutionism has more problems in the succeeding period, dominated by a cyclical process whereby empires collapse into more tribal and feudal societies, one of which may rise toward an empire. That then collapses … etc. etc. Nor does political evolutionism fit well in the modern period. Although there was some tendency in the last few centuries toward greater bureaucratic density in states, this has now stopped in the most advanced countries. And although some evolutionists are tempted to identify democracy as the highest form of state—and Talcott Parsons (1964) was not shy of saying so—they do not want to follow the example of nineteenth-century evolutionists like Spencer who argued that evolution ended with their own society. In any case Blanton and Fargher demonstrate that movement between relatively democratic and relatively autocratic tendencies both characterized early states. Political evolutionism works quite well only for early societies after the hunter-gatherer period.

Stages of development: ideological

Since most evolutionists are materialists, they either ignore ideology (Sanderson 2007), or they reduce it to economic forces (Lenski 2005, pp. 131–132) or to status stratification (Runciman 1989). However, Parsons (1964) offered a value-centered theory of universal evolution. While conceding that material forces provided what he called the “energy” of societies, he argued that the “direction” of change was given by ideas, norms, and values. He proclaimed “I am a cultural determinist, rather than a social determinist” (1966, p. 113). But his distinction between energy and direction seems dubious for both are equally necessary, while his history is very sketchy. He identifies three stages, the primitive, the intermediate, and the modern, though his empirical evidence is rudimentary, and the features of the modern are suspiciously like those of the United States. This is not a theory we can accept.

The sociologist Robert Bellah (2011) has offered a more detailed theory of religious evolution. He sees three main religious stages: mimetic culture, which searched for meaning through enactment and gestures, i.e., through ritual; mythic culture, which provided complex narratives of gods and origins; and theoretic culture, formal theologies based on logical thought and critical reflection. Bellah locates each in its own era, respectively tribal, archaic (early imperial), and axial, the period of the great world religions (late imperial).

Anthropologists have stressed the role of sacred rituals in solidifying village and tribal communities, while archaeologists have stressed the religious myths of gods and origins that enabled temples to act as incipient states, storing and redistributing food and adjudicating disputes in early Mesopotamia, China, and elsewhere—the beginning of Bellah’s archaic age. They say that religious institutions and ideologies then became subordinated to secular rulers and so religion came to legitimate primarily traditional hierarchies. But then the autonomous power of religion reappeared in the crises of late imperial times occurring between 800 and 200BCE in the “Axial Age” first identified by Jaspers and revised by Eisenstadt and others (see various essays in Bellah and Joas 2012). Religion turned away from legitimating inequalities of power toward offering a more universal ethical theology available to all in the Axial Age, characterized by Jewish prophets, Buddha, Confucius, Greek philosophy, and early Indian religious texts. These religions initially undercut other forms of power, and although material crises led to ideological innovation, this then had emergent power of its own.

I agree. As I showed in Sources, emergence has been a persistent feature of history right into the 21st century. Indeed I showed (in 1986, chaps. 10–11) that religion in the late imperial period actually had the capacity to create large-scale human communities, like the Christian, Islamic, or Hindu ecumenes. Bellah believes his sequence is evolutionary since each stage involves greater ideological complexity and more universal identities. I am skeptical about this, since the way that Australian aborigines viewed their gods, totems, and kinship relations was in a different way as complex as modern abstract theology--as Lévi-Strauss observed, with his model of primitive man as the jack-of-all-trades, le bricoleur. Nor does abstract theology bring human beings nearer to the meaning of life than did rain dances. Religion fails to answer the main questions it poses. It brings consolation, but not a directional shift to greater understanding. Bellah’s stages make sense but they are not evolutionary, for they do not embody greater power or complexity. They are different ways of explaining different realities.

Bellah ends his narrative in 200 BCE but suggests that the rational universalism of the Axial Age provided a new understanding of the natural world that eventually led to modern science (2012, p. xix). We can chart the main steps on the way. In ancient societies, in the Middle East from Babylon to Greece to North Africa, and in Asia in China and India, came what we know of as the scientific method along with abstract knowledge of mathematics, geometry, and physics. These had a few technological pay-offs, enabling more complex land surveying and architecture, with the harnessing of water power, but while astronomy, a greatly prized science, advanced understanding of the universe, it lacked technological pay-off. Then came a great expansion first in Sung China around 1000 CE and then in Western Europe’s “scientific revolution” beginning after 1600 CE. Schroeder (2007) identifies this as the origin of what they call “high consensus, rapid discovery science,” technologically-led and producing endless refinements and re-combinations of techniques to solve practical problems. The stress here is not on abstract scientific theory, but on the ability to interfere and manipulate nature. These do seem like evolutionary stages, though the last one is out of all proportion to the others—a sudden revolution rather than steady evolution. But there is a sting in the tail here, as we see later.

Habermas (1962, 1984) has tried to extend analysis from religion and science to cognitive and moral structures in general, but only for recent centuries. He sees societies as essentially networks of communication and perceives in modern history an evolution toward the possibility of truly egalitarian “communicative action.” He says that monarchical and feudal societies had not separated the public from the private and they used a “representational” form of communication in which the regime dominated the subjects through representational symbols of power, like the Palace of Versailles which displayed visually the power of the king. But then came a bourgeois liberal constitutional order distinguishing between the public and private. The “public sphere” was where private individuals were free to meet face-to-face and have critical debates about common concerns. In early eighteenth century in England this was happening in coffee shops, cafes, and public squares, buttressed by the development of the printed media—letters, newspapers, books, drama, and art. This bourgeois, pre-industrial but capitalist public sphere flourished until the late nineteenth century. It seemed it might deepen with the advent of mass democracy, giving the possibility of truly egalitarian communication where all participants have the same capacities for rational discourse and equality, without the presence of ideologies. This would be an “ideal speech situation.” Yet, he notes, the public sphere is now decaying, as commercial mass media turn an active critical public into passive consumers, while the public sphere has become a site of self-interested struggle over state resources rather than a space for the development of an ideal speech situation from whose debates would come consensus and truth. He ends by suggesting ways in an ideal speech situation might appear.

This is a traditional theory. Like many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers Habermas only discusses Western Europe and deploys a single historical dichotomy, in his case a Marxian one between feudalism and capitalism. If his analysis is correct, then this single trend in one continent might be considered evolutionary—ending however in regression, but with hopes for a further phase of evolution..

However, Habermas (1984, chapter 1) then broadened his analysis into an evolutionary history of the globe, somewhat resembling Bellah’s. Taking as his template the stages of the moral evolution of children, as perceived by Piaget, he identifies stages of communication in human groups: the “deficient differentiation” of neolithic groups gave them only non-rational myths; early civilizations turned myths toward legitimating social authority; developed civilizations developed rationalized ideologies and learning processes bringing true enlightenment; and modern societies grounded in post-conventional, universalist, and “argumentative” principles providing the possibility of true and endless change. Building on Weber’s rationalization process, he argues that this is evolutionary because each successive ideology is more rational, better at integrating society and solving its adaptive problems in relation to the environment. That is repeating Parsons’s theory.

The main problems are that he sees ever-expanding rationality as making myth and ritual redundant, identifying a Hegelian-type “spirit of the age.” Underlying this is an ethnocentrism coupled with a tendency to disparage the rationality of earlier peoples as quasi-childlike (his use of Piaget), and an almost complete absence of empirical data. Habermas gives not a single example of an actual myth and so cannot really convince us of his argument. In any case, archaeologists dispute the notion that neolithic groups were dominated by myths as Habermas sees them. We know from ancient Greece that myths were open to different interpretations and people debated them from their own stance to the world. Myths resulted from people reasonably trying to understand and to change their world.

It is also difficult to square the suggestion that early human groups were dominated by memes and myths with their scientific achievements. The first major technological interventions in nature were in Neolithic times with plant and animal breeding to create new species—for example, the selective breeding of grains to produce higher yields or of wolves to create dogs. There must have been Neolithic scientists perfecting these discoveries, just as there was a great diversity of bricoleurs—technologists And only some early civilizations were dominated by legitimacy—not ancient Greece and not the many democratic polities identified by the archaeological/anthropological duo of Blanton and Fargher (2010), which I discuss later.

Moreover, myths and rituals survive. Bellah notes that each culture survives into following eras. “Nothing is ever lost,” he declares, so that today’s religions still have ritual and mythic practices, though their theology is more theoretic. This is different from other sequences. We do not find stone-age tools or chiefdoms in Europe or America today but we do find astrology charts and the Eucharist. Contra Bellah, Hall (2009) has shown that the apocalyptic and utopian qualities that permeated religion in the Axial Age also permeate modern ideologies such as communism and Islamism. Indeed, religious rituals and myths are nowadays joined by nationalist rituals and foundation myths.

So ideology is a mixed bag, containing both evolutionary and non-evolutionary elements. Modern science has generated a technology that now has the objective ability to interfere with nature to an extent out of all proportion to anything that preceded it (Schroeder 2007). That is certainly a revolution in human powers. But other aspects of ideology, like religious and artistic sensibility, morality, and reason more broadly, have had very little evolution. As we have seen in the three sources considered so far, trends within specific practices and periods can be described as evolutionary, but not human groups more generally.

Quantitative data on complexity

We can delve with a little more precision into the prehistoric and historic record with the aid of some statistics, for the two evolutionary criteria of complexity and power can be quantified. Complexity is problematic in ideology (as I noted above), and also in political power. However, increasing role differentiation has been a bedrock of sociological theory from Adam Smith, to Spencer, to Durkheim, and to Parsons, Luhmann, and Habermas. None of them tried to measure differentiation. But others have done so regarding early societies using archaeological and anthropological data.

The archaeologist Robert Carneiro (1962, 1963) assembled data for one-hundred human groups drawn from the archaeological and anthropological record. He focused on the emergence of specialized roles and activities, such as priesthoods, craftsmen, soldiers, scribes, calendars, codes of law, merchants, and political leadership. Lacking historical data, he could not establish which came first, but using Guttman scales he ranked the traits by their frequency and clustering. If a rare trait like the presence of calendars was correlated with a near-universal trait like inter-community trade, but conversely very few cases of trading communities had calendars, we could assume that calendars indicated a more complex community. Higher-level differentiations depended on lower-level ones. A community with any given trait tended to have the traits below it. If a community had any given trait, then there was a 90 % chance it would have any randomly selected lower trait. Carneiro. (1969) and Naroll (1956) have added that complexity was strongly correlated with the population size of a community, that is, to extensive power.

Carneiro (1969) then applied his model with time-series data to Anglo-Saxon England. He found that roles and activities in 86 % of the 528 relationships for which he had data were correlated in the order he had predicted. Peregrine et al. (2004) confirmed this on broader time-series data, though also finding evidence for “punctuated equilibrium” in which new traits tended to appear together in groups. Once social stratification emerged, so too did government and craft specialists. Once metals appeared, so did towns, states, and classes. They suggest that these clusters support the model of stages of development from band to tribe to chiefdom and to state, a sequence toward more levels of political hierarchy. A complex chiefdom had one or two political levels more than a village community, and a state had three or more. But of course the case here is of a society recovering some of the powers that its Roman predecessor had possessed.

Russian scholars have added data. Kradin (2013) also found a strong correlation between political integration and social stratification. This evidence reveals a persistent, directional flow toward greater differentiation of roles and levels of stratification in the early history and late pre-history of humanity. Only a few human groups pioneered development, but those that did survived better, often conquering or otherwise incorporating those that did not. Nonetheless, as we see later, Blanton and Fargher (2010) show that this is too simple a story. Nor do pastoralists fit—their political transformations tended to be cyclical and did not correlate with other criteria of complexity (Kradin 2004, p. 502).

This body of research only takes us into period of archaic civilizations. But modern civilization has obviously become the most differentiated of all. Consider Adam Smith’s famous example of the pin factory he visited (which was actually located in France, not Britain):

One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations: to put it on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is another … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometime perform two or three of them.

He calculated that this resulted in the same number of workers, each with a differentiated task, making at least 240 times as many pins as before (Smith 1776, 1904, I.i.3). The division of labor has continued expanding since his day. The US Department of Labor identifies over 20,000 full-time occupational specialisms, although we should not take that number literally. Parsons (1964) placed great emphasis on the modern surge in role specialization and institutional sub-sectors, alongside a qualitative shift in values (his famous pattern variables). That is why he only distinguished modern from primitive societies, but this means that he is describing a relatively swift revolution rather than a long-run evolution. Of course, we academics know specialization well. Physics is no longer merged with theology, as it was for Newton—they are separate “disciplines” in distinct faculties. In sociology as in other disciplines, many “sub-disciplines” proliferate, with their own highly recondite journals. There is the International Journal of Transgenderism, the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, and the Journal of Mundane Behavior. Durkheim thought that specialization might break societies apart. But academics flourish. Complexity in the sense of greater differentiation has been important in the historical process. There has been some evolution involved, but also a major revolution.

Quantitative data on economic power

The most important consequence of economic power is the power to live long and healthily. The best indicator of human well-being is life expectancy, for we can go back as far as prehistory to estimate the age at death of excavated human skeletons. These data are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Health & longevity thru time

These are only ballpark estimates since the excavation of skeletons from earlier times is necessarily haphazard. King Richard III of England (Shakespeare’s villain) was found when a developer excavated a parking lot in the city of Leicester. But the data on periods before the nineteenth century consistently show little change in mortality. Life expectancy from birth mostly fluctuated only between 30 and 40 years. Male life expectancy was almost unchanged through the millennia up to the nineteenth century; female life expectancy fell somewhat before later recovering. Over a shorter span of time, with more reliable data, Western European and Chinese life expectancy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century also reveal little change (Lavely and Bin Wong 1998). Longevity is the product of a combination of very high infant mortality and the likelihood that if a person survived until the age of 15 he or she might live beyond the age of 50. The table also shows human height through the ages. This also changed little. Although average height in the contemporary United States is about 3–6 inches higher than in preceding centuries, it is actually lower than the very first measure, average height in the late Paleolithic period (though Dutch men and women are taller, at 1.86 and 1.78 meters respectively). I find the Paleolithic data hard to believe, but scholars do seem to believe it. Pelvic inlet depth is an alternative measure of health. It measures the size of the pelvic canal through which a baby passes during birth. These data show the same astonishing pattern: hunter-gathering women were healthier in that they were better adapted for child-birth.

The first major change after their era was that health deteriorated with the transition to agriculture and cities (Angel in Cohen and Armelagos 1984). Early agriculturalists had more nutritional deficiencies and dental diseases than hunter-gatherers because they depended on a narrower range of food crops, while greater population density produced more infectious disease, worsened by their proximity to the diseases of domesticated animals. Growing inequality also contributed to the worsening of the people’s health. Early civilizations were much better for the rulers than the ruled—an increase in distributive not collective power. Eventually, the trend towards lower life expectancy, slightly shorter stature, and childbirth difficulty reversed. But significant growth in longevity came only after 1880 CE, during 0.1 % of human life on earth. These data show a historic devolution, followed eventually by a modernist revolution—not evolution. Incidentally here it seems impossible to exclude normative aspects of progress. Who would think that a less healthy, shorter life would be better?

We can also make quantitative estimates of energy produced and energy consumed by human groups through the ages and these can be used as measures of the extent of human collective power over nature. The kilowatt or gigajoule energy produced by successive prime movers through history, and the per capita energy consumption, are displayed in Table 2 and Fig 1.

Table 2 Sustained power of stationary prime movers

Fig. 1

Per Capita energy consumption

Table 2 details the typical KW output of human, animal, water/wind, and fossil fuel based technology. For before the twentieth century, these are historians’ rough estimates, not the actual level of energy output. These tables do reveal several stages of growth. Yet once again these increases are dwarfed by the last step upward in energy output and consumption occurring since the industrial revolution.

Finally, from the birth of Christ until the year 2010, we can use the economist Angus Maddison’s (2007) estimates, updated by Bolt and van Zanden (2013), of GDP per capita for various countries and regions. These are presented in Table 3.

Table 3 GDP (PPP) per capita in 1990 international dollars

Note firstly that the figure for Italy at the time of Christ’s birth was much the highest at that date, which means that the Roman Empire was more productive than any other area was at this time. Empires (and city-states) probably had higher per capita GDPs than earlier and other communities, though this did not necessarily convert into higher living standards for the masses since power elites appropriated much of the surplus. Extreme inequality is visible to us in the castles, palaces, cathedrals, pyramids, and temples beloved of tourists—upper-class monuments whose construction and maintenance ate up much of the surplus and required much labor exploitation. Nonetheless, after the Roman Empire collapsed, historians agree that living standards in Europe declined, as they did in the aftermath of barbarian conquests of China--and probably after the fall of most empires.

Table 3 also reveals that the decline lasted beyond 1000 CE, except for England whose growth trajectory seems to have begun early. Italian GDP per capita then recovered and by 1500 CE had easily surpassed the Roman level, as had England. The Italian figures at this time refer only to North and Central Italy, while the United Kingdom in this period was only England, which continued surging, alongside its American colonies. These were the most developed economies. Other countries saw only modest growth until after 1700. By 1800 the beginnings of industrialization saw much stronger GDP growth, especially in the United Kingdom and then the United States. The rise of Asia can be glimpsed first in Japan and then more spectacularly in India and especially China since the 1970s.

Once again, this is an uneven historical record. Over a period of 1800 years, world GDP grew by 46 %, an average annual growth rate of only 0.025 %, although the consistency of the tiny rises might offer some support to evolutionists. Yet between 1870 and 2010 it grew by almost 800 %, or 2.7 % per annum. It seems likely that growth rates in even earlier times would be closer to 0.025 % per annum than to 2.7 %. Economist Bradford DeLong (1998) presents global longer-term GDP per capita figures showing an overall growth rate of 3.5 % between 5,000 BCE and the birth of Christ, an infinitesimal per annum growth, although his estimates are purely speculative. Again we see historical discontinuity in the modern period—less evolution than revolution.

Quantitative data on military power

Here the goal is to kill people, and we can quantify some aspects of killing. First we have data on the lethality of weapons through the ages. Dupuy (1980) gives the measures of lethality found in Table 4

Table 4 Weapon Lethality index Thru Time*

and Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

Increase of weapon lethality and dispersion over history

First, there was a major increase in weapon lethality before the period covered by this table, from stone and bone weapons to bronze and then to iron. Iron was initially more important in warfare than in agriculture. Some army sizes increased ten-fold as a result, which changed the role of military power in social development. This may be called a revolution. But from then on we see little change in weapon lethality from the Iron Age to the medieval world—almost no evolution over two millennia. Then comes more lethal weaponry in the later part of what Dupuy calls the “Gunpowder Age,” from about 1550 to the late nineteenth century. The improved weapons in this period were mostly European, and this assisted the global triumph of Europe—a persistent directional increase in military power but mainly in one region of the world. The third trend is the phenomenal increase in lethality during the twentieth century. Again the modern period yields more revolution than evolution.

Weapon technology is not all that counts in battle. Organization, morale, and tactics are also important, and they have differed considerably between different human groups in any one period. Pastoralists developed chariots and cavalry, settled agriculturalists developed infantry (and landlord cavalrymen), “marcher lords” occupying territory between them generated more mixed forces. None was inherently superior to the others, though each was favored in some environments. A military only needs to be superior to its enemies in the particular environment in which they fight. Since each is aware of that, they try to adapt to any perceived enemy superiority, clearly a process of adaptation, though it might be cyclical rather than evolutionary. It is true that complex states and empires usually had superior militaries for they could better coordinate infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Nevertheless, they were repeatedly challenged and defeated by warriors from societies with simpler economies and polities. These destroyed most of the city-based civilizations of the ancient Middle East through the greater hardiness of their warriors and the mobility of their chariots. China fell three times to nomadic cavalry and Rome fell finally to barbarians. But once the industrial revolution diffused to the world, the chariot and cavalry era came to an end. In open terrain fighting, hitherto their forte, they could not cope with the armaments ranged against them—perhaps a sudden, belated evolutionary catch-up.

Military power also contains “fortunes of war.” Battles which proved decisive might have had a different outcome. If the Persians had defeated the Greeks, or the Carthaginians the Romans, what then? What if the parties had decided not to go to war at all? In my Volume 3, I argued that if World War I, and therefore World War II, had not occurred, there would have been no communist or fascist regimes, and the United States would not have become the world hegemon. I could argue this with some confidence because of the ample data we have on the twentieth century. But it is highly likely that the contingencies of war and peace changed the patterns of social change in most eras. Military power is a wild card, persistently cross-cutting and disrupting the development of economic and political power. Even in recent years, armed with far superior weapons and organization, the mighty US has been unable to defeat guerillas armed with Kalashnikovs, pick-up trucks, and IEDs. Although there are evolutionary elements in military confrontations, these co-exist with levelling effects. There are also persistent cycles in superiority between offense or defense, élan or discipline, and mobility or solidity, and there are also enduring military verities through the ages. American military cadets at West Point today are required to read Sun Tzu, a Chinese general of the fifth century BCE. This is not evolution.

But perhaps military evolution has taken a different tack. Steven Pinker (2011) and Azar Gat (2006) see a steady decline in violence and the lethality of actual war through the ages, accelerating from the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. They say that violence within human groups has steadily declined and present extensive data on homicide rates in Europe since the fourteenth century that clearly support this, although it is true of much of the world. I will focus on their data on wars, which chart the lethality of war from prehistory to the present day. Since I have criticized these at length elsewhere (Mann forthcoming), I will here confine myself to a few points.

• 1) Pinker uses Keeley’s (1996) archaeological and anthropological evidence to claim that the first mode of production, hunter-gatherer communities, was especially warlike. But Ferguson (2000, 2003) has gone through Keeley’s cases one by one, showing that only a small minority of them can be shown to have been warlike. Ferguson’s evidence supports the tradition wisdom among anthropologists that war increased with the rise of the state.

• 2) Pinker accepts as truth the boasts of the rulers of ancient empires that they had wiped out entire populations with millions killed. Yet these were strategic boasts, designed to terrify other communities into submission. Faced with a city refusing to surrender, they might indeed massacre the inhabitants, but this was to encourage other cities to submit—and they usually did so. The Assyrians wanted to rule over other peoples, not exterminate them. So did the Mongols, whose killings Pinker greatly exaggerates—an 11–15 million, not a 40 million death-toll is more likely.

• 3) Pinker (p. 195) gives a list of the 21 historical cases with the highest absolute death toll. This includes deaths resulting from war-induced diseases and famines. They are drawn from all ages of human history, though no less than six of them occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. That would not seem to support his argument. But Pinker prefers to use relative death-rates—deaths as a proportion of the total world population at the time. This changes the picture since most of the highest relative death-rates were in the distant past, when global population was much lower..

• 4) Yet Pinker ignores the length of time of each case. Relative to the global population at the time, World War II inflicted fewer deaths than the Mongol Conquests, the Atlantic slave trade, and the annihilation of the American Indians. Yet World War II lasted only 8 years (including the Japan/China war), whereas the Mongol conquests lasted 125 years, and the slaughter of the Atlantic slave trade and the American Indians took several centuries. The annual killing rate during World War II was much higher than that of any other case.

• 5) The reduction in relative death-rates in the twentieth century was produced not by any war-related changes but by a sudden explosion in global population.

• 6) Pinker separates as six distinct cases the two world wars, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, and the Stalinist and Maoist famines. But they occurred within a 50-year period and they were all connected. Combine them and you have easily the bloodiest half-century in human history, in either absolute or relative terms.

• 7) Pinker notes that there has been a large decline in inter-state wars since 1950, but civil wars have replaced them. They increased up to the 1990s and then began to decline slightly. This trend was reversed from about 2010 on as they increased again. These civil wars have become internationalized. Western states (especially the US) have intervened in them, sent “advisors” to them, and sold an enormous quantity of arms to them. Right now, the world seems very dangerous. Moreover, one nuclear war would change everything.

These criticisms point toward a different view of the history of war. War grew with the emergence of states and grew again as some of them turned into empires. Thereafter war remained persistent but erratic, varying by time and place. As I showed in my third volume (2012), medieval Europe was an unusually warlike region and its military virtues allowed it to conquer much of the world and annihilate many of its peoples. Yet back home the Europeans finally precipitated world wars that destroyed their own military power. Their exhaustion, along with fear of nuclear weapons, led to a relatively short 70-year period of peace in Europe, but not in large swathes of the world. We hope for the evolution of peace, but we cannot find it in the past.

Quantitative data on ideological power

For ideological power, only literacy can be quantified. It has grown greatly since writing first appeared, around 3400–3200 BCE in Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian glyphs. The earliest coherent texts (rather than just lists or accounts) date to a millennium later. Writing developed separately in China and Meso-America. In almost all ancient societies literacy was confined to elites plus scribes—somewhere below 5 % of the population—and this lasted for two millennia. Yet at least two civilizations had higher rates. In the Graeco-Roman world probably all Athenian citizens were literate, about 20 % of the total population. In the Roman Empire, the prevalence of documents, laws, public notices, and literary works is assumed to indicate literacy of about 20 % in the cities, 10 % in the empire as a whole. It may have been higher in the army, which used written manuals. This level of literacy dropped when the empire fell. Only clerics carried literacy through the Dark Ages. India is said to have had comparable levels of literacy in the core areas of the ancient Mauryan and Gupta empires, where it reached up to perhaps half of men and a fifth or sixth of women, although across the sub-continent as a whole it would have been much lower (Gough 1968, pp. 44–45).

In China, literacy was restricted to only 1–5 % of the population right up to the eighteenth century CE, confined to scholar bureaucrats who used a classical Chinese far removed from vernacular speech. Japan was similar, in that only those of a small elite were literate until the late seventeenth century. In Europe literacy dropped to under 5 % in the medieval period, but then came sustained rise in some countries. It was 10–20 % in sixteenth-century England, higher among men than women. By the late eighteenth century, it was around 50–60 %, though reading (but not writing) ability among both and women was much higher in the Swedish Empire, encouraged by state Lutheranism. By 1871, 81 % of Englishmen and 73 % of Englishwomen were classified as literate, similar to American rates. By 1900 these rates were around 90 %, with little remaining room for improvement. In the late nineteenth century, literacy in vernacular Chinese had risen to around 30–45 % of men and 2–10 % of women, but it was not shared by most Chinese until the communist period.

These figures indicate the emergence of literacy in early ancient societies, without much subsequent development over several millennia, except for a Graeco-Roman surge. Then there came a bigger and so far sustained surge in early modern Europe that then spread across the world. The global rate of literacy is now estimated to be over 80 % and in many countries further growth in vernacular literacy is impossible. This might seem to fit nicely within a teleological evolutionism wherein growth ends in us today. But of course literacy might now deepen until everyone can read and write sociology or soil science. That would be evolutionary provided it was an endogenous.

Five phases

Phase 1. Early prehistory

So far I have been analyzing developmental tendencies in four separate spheres of human activity, ideology, economy, military, and political. Yet can we identify combined developments between them in power and complexity that might permit more general evolution? I distinguish phases rather than periods here, since the timing of all developments varied considerably between regions. If regions and times are dispersed, then this is not uni-lineal evolution, though it could be multi-lineal. I have described four distinct past phases and I will add the future as a fifth. The earliest is the simplest to summarize. It constituted by far the biggest time-span--over 95 % of all human experience on earth—and contained little discernible evolution. Stasis and cyclical models apply better to hunter-gatherers and early horticulturalists. Evolutionary theory could only apply to later human experience.

Phase 2. Late pre-history and early history

This phase has been traditionally thought by archaeologists and anthropologists to offer the strongest support for social evolution. The complexity of communities persistently increased. This was sometimes through divergent evolution, the spread of a technology or a practice from one place to others, as with some of the advances in metal technology. Sometimes it was parallel evolution where the same processes occurred independently across the continents. That some developments occurred in the Americas as well as in Eurasia suggests that early horticultural and agricultural communities carried inside them the seeds of unfolding complexity and power. Only a few communities did sow the seeds, but those that did not evolve were absorbed into those that did, or were of no interest to more advanced communities. Thus most hunter-gatherers were absorbed, though some survived outside state and imperial realms.

Nonetheless, despite development there were great exceptions. First, complexity could exist with or without a state as we can see in Neolithic construction achievements in northwest Europe like Stonehenge and Carnac. This required coordination of large labor forces and long distance logistics. This seems to have been accomplished without a state and by a classless community (judging from the relative equality of their grave possessions). Second, the Inca practiced horticulture, not agriculture. Yet this “primitive” economy underlay an empire of great size, a powerful centralized state, with roads rivalling Roman roads, unsurpassed masonry without cement, and the quipu form of mathematics. Third, two sets of Pacific islands, Melanesia and Micronesia, with essentially the same modes of production, developed very different political structures, one with chiefs and incipient states, the other quite without them. The Greek polis and the early Roman Republic fit uneasily into the standard sequence model since they were neither tribal nor did they have a state in the conventional sense, since the citizens, not a central polity, controlled the community. Yet these were complex civilizations. Fourth, many mountain peoples through the ages combined civilization with direct democracy by the people, with no permanent state (Kradin 2009; Grinin et al. 2004). One cannot simply read off one form of power from another and different routes toward increased power were available at any given time.

Blanton and Fargher (2010, especially pp. 88–111) take this argument further. Using 30 case-studies of the best documented pre-modern states drawn from across the millennia and the continents, and systematically coding them on numerous characteristics, they find two main types of regime: centralized, despotic states and more egalitarian, collectivist, and quasi-democratic polities. They see both types present in most periods across China, South and South-East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In fact, the Stonehenge paradox was common: some communities built great monuments without a state or social stratification. They note the persistence of heterarchy, that is, a community with substantial differentiation but little stratification, even of rank, and they also identify “corporate” (collectivist) economies that pioneered economic growth alongside some of the despotic regimes.

Thus Eurocentric notions that democracy was simply a product of the West or of modernity are false. Blanton and Fargher also contest the Axial Age theory presented above, for they see no overall tendency for the emergence of the world religions to encourage proto-democracy (pp. 291–294). They add the surprising finding that proto-democratic communities also tended to have more hierarchy in the sense of being more bureaucratized, having more control over local principals, and providing more public goods (p. 277). They developed greater infrastructural power in a quest for community control over central and local officials. By contrast despotism was autocratic, unaccountable, and with less infrastructural power, which is a new historical twist on my old distinction between despotic and infrastructural power. Taxation was the main cause, they say. Where rulers had their own sources of revenue, from their own estates or from levying port taxes, they could achieve autonomy and despotism. But where revenue came from some form of levy on the people, communal control of political power usually developed. “No taxation without representation” was apparently a very ancient principle.

Blanton and Fargher have shown that in early history cycles between their two paths of development were far commoner than were dialectical progressions to a higher synthesis. Empires always fell either of their internal contradictions or to foreigners, while city-states were vulnerable to imperial conquest. The core areas of both established empires and city-states were wealthier than their neighbors, but this made them a tempting target. The conquerors were often incapable of maintaining the prior level of civilization of those conquered, hence development was more cyclical than evolutionary..

Pastoral nomads were distinct. They saw initial development but then in conventional terms, they stalled. They early on perfected a mode of production that gave them a surplus sufficient to trade with agricultural communities. Their lands were not fertile so they lacked incentive to develop agriculture. Politically, they had cycles of chiefdoms, complex chiefdoms, and even short-lived states, although these were largely centralized in military affairs (like the Mongol Empire). Yet nomad groups were the military equals and sometimes the military superiors of agrarian states right up to modern times (Grinin et al. 2004). They could successfully raid and occasionally conquer agriculturalists. Military power undermined superior economic and political power, ensuring no overall evolution in these interactions. Here once again there were cycles, not evolution. The last case of this was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, which saw over half its territories replaced by Arabic tribes. Pastoralists were analogous in evolutionary terms to Neanderthals—a flourishing species that eventually disappeared.

The causal mechanisms for state development are much debated. The theory of “environmental circumscription” first proposed by Carneiro (1970) emphasized ecological-demographic pressures. He suggested that a constrained environment gave rise to population pressures that then produced recurrent warfare culminating in some places in the rise of the state and stratification. I myself regarded this as a plausible explanation of the early civilizations arising in river valleys (1986, chap. 2). Carneiro identified two main causal mechanisms, an ecological trap and a consequent military trap in which settled agriculturalists became inviting targets for raiders and perforce yielded up power to their military leaders. But Carneiro (2012) has now shifted to viewing military power as the primary mechanism, with the role of environmental and population pressures relegated merely to increasing the probability of war.

Evolutionist sociologists continue to emphasize population pressure. Sanderson (1999, pp. 34–49), and Turner and Maryanski (2008, pp. 170–174) argue that the depletion of game reserves and the exhaustion of the soil by primitive horticulturists forced populations into more fertile but crowded river valleys. Some anthropologists, studying recent simpler societies existing on marginal land, also stressed population pressures (e.g., Johnson and Earle 1987). But this view is not today shared by most archaeologists (Weisdorf 2005). Blanton et al. (1993) say that in ancient Mesoamerica growing state complexity was correlated with population decline, not increase. Hayden (2001, pp. 251–254) says likewise in lower Mesopotamia. Marcus (2012, p. 75) believes that we should substitute a more general mechanism of “competitive interaction” for population pressure, by which she mostly means war. Given the paucity of hunter-gatherers scattered over a large planet it is difficult to believe that they experienced Malthusian pressures. Nor have we found skeletons of malnourished hunter-gatherers or any other evidence of hunter-gatherers under great pressure. More probably some hunter-gatherers eventually discovered animals they could domesticate and plants they could harvest and sow. Invention not necessity was probably the mother of invention.

Explanations in terms of necessity do better once agriculture was institutionalized, but the pressures were more social than natural. Then peasants needed more economic coordination and more defense against predators and they lacked the hunter-gatherer escape route of simply moving elsewhere. Economic and military collective power then led them into the grip of the state, domination by military elites, class exploitation, and lower living standards. Collective power needs were what lured you in; then distributive power exploited you (Mann 1986, chap. 2). Anthropologists have long argued over this. Service (1975) emphasized the role of collective power in the creation of the state. Chiefs arose as guardians of the group’s stores. Then the peasant paid taxes to the state, but in return for management of economic cooperation and defense. Hence the relative absence of revolts in early states he said. Fried (1967) in contrast emphasized exploitation, class struggle, and ethnic domination. But the two mechanisms were clearly entwined, as I argued in Sources, Volume 1, Chapter 2. Collective needs might have initially produced centralized power, which then had the emergent capacity to enforce distributive power on the community—but only sometimes, as Blanton and Fargher note.

This duality also pervaded ideology. On the one hand, religions usually spread over several communities, encouraging more extensive links between early village communities, which increased trade and role differentiation, while later religion provided a meaning system in situations of uncertainty that increased the integration and adaptability of groups – a Durkheimian argument (Spier 2012). On the other hand, religion was used to legitimate the distributive power of elites (Runciman 1989). A large proportion of the economic surplus was extracted from the peasants in order to build the magnificent temples and pyramids we can still see today. Ideological power was important but dual.

So there is a prima facie case for evolutionary tendencies in this period, yet there is a broad spectrum of possible developmental mechanisms deriving from struggles over all four sources of power. Archaeologists live in hope that they will find decisive evidence about which exact mechanisms were involved in which transitions, but this will probably remain the triumph of ambition over evidence. However, it does seem clear that multiple mechanisms were involved and so multi-causal analysis is necessary.

Phase 3. Empires, tribes, and feudal lords

The end of ancient empires also constitutes a problem for evolutionary theory. Although the Roman Empire had more power than earlier empires around the Mediterranean, and the Chinese Empire was probably the most developed of all, they both declined and fell, replaced by feudal or tribal polities with less power. A few grew again into centralized states and even empires, and then they fell in turn. Regress, not dialectic, often ensued in this cyclical process. In this third phase, empires rose and fell in a process that again seems more cyclical than evolutionary. This happened at different times in different parts of the world between the early second millennium BCE and the twentieth century CE. Most fallen empires were replaced—as Rome was—by smaller communities with less complexity and power, although sometimes city-states appeared, exhibiting a different form of complexity. The successors sometimes inherited and then adapted the ideologies and technical knowledge of the earlier age, and this is a key evolutionist argument. Yet they usually lacked the social organization to operate it on the same scale as before.

The Ostrogoths and Visigoths who eventually conquered the Western Roman Empire exemplify this. Having served in large numbers in Roman armies, they had learned Roman military ways and were able to improve their own. They were also Christianized and their elites inter-married with Romans. Much knowledge was thus passed on. Whereas the core of the Roman army was the infantry legion, the Gothic core was cavalry derived from their more mobile, often pastoralist way of life. When supported by archers and projectile-throwing infantry, Gothic cavalry was able on occasion to break up Roman legions, as in the complete destruction of Roman forces outside the city of Adrianople in 378 CE. But Gothic military strength was also their economic and political weakness for they remained too mobile to be able to occupy and develop Roman cities and trade. There followed economic regress lasting for several centuries, as we saw in Table 4. Indeed, Sanderson concedes that “During the long era between the rise of the earliest states and the emergence of modern capitalism, little that can properly be called social evolution occurred” (2007: 305). Curiously, he does not regard such a long-lived exception as a problem for his theory.

What would have seemed likely to an evolutionist living in earlier times was that one of the great empires—the highest level of civilization at the time—would make a breakthrough, or that a marcher lord would seize control of a neighboring empire and pioneer that breakthrough. But neither of these happened. The Western Roman Empire collapsed. The Eastern Empire held on but was gradually reduced in scale by Islam. The Islamic Caliphates had been founded by marcher lords and they did flourish for several centuries, but then they stagnated too, in the cycles first identified in the fourteenth century by the sociologist Ibn Khaldun. The Mughals in India and the Safayids in Persia were also in decline by the time of the arrival of the Europeans.

Empires seem to have had limits to growth. Rome (Mann 1986, chap. 9) had developed what I called a “legionary economy,” using the engineering skills of its legions to expand road, sewage, and water infrastructures, while also increasing a form of commerce dependent on provisioning the state, the elite, and the army. Empires could increase elite literacy and make tinkering technological improvements. Yet they lacked real breakthroughs in technology. They seem to have remained satisfied within a “high-equilibrium trap,” an agricultural and commercial economy that provided riches for the few and basic subsistence for the many, although subsistence was vulnerable to Malthusian cycles. Increased prosperity produced increased population growth, which reduced living standards and life expectancy.

There was a partially deviant case, however. In China, dynasties fell either to internal revolt or external barbarian pressure but this led to a new dynasty that recovered much of the former complexity and power. This was largely cyclical. But one dynasty saw an economic breakthrough. Under the Northern Sung (960–1279 CE) this agrarian empire saw improvements in agriculture, transportation technology, and craft production. Technological innovations came thick and fast: the horizontal axis windmill and the stern post rudder were invented by the twelfth century; reading glasses by the fourteenth century; mechanical clocks, mariner's magnetic compasses and printing presses by the fourteenth century. Bituminous coke was found to be much more efficient than charcoal in powering iron smelting, and this had the added benefit of slowing the deforestation of north China. By 1200 CE, Chinese iron output was 5–6 times that of the whole of Europe. These breakthroughs came 500 years before the “European Miracle.” In the thirteenth century Marco Polo, from Venice, one of the richest cities in Europe, was dazzled by the riches and the modernity of what he believed to be the leading civilization in the world.

But economic decline followed. GDP per capita under the Northern Sung is estimated to have been about 1.5 times higher than in the succeeding Ming period, and almost twice as high as in the following Qing period. Incomes may not have recovered to their Sung levels before the twentieth century. The decline was not universal. The new technologies were not lost. Iron production recovered, the Chinese remained the major players in trans-Asian trade until the eighteenth century, and population growth meant that total GDP only declined for a short period. This was not imperial devolution, but it was near-stasis. The history of one invention is telling. The Chinese discovered the principle of atmospheric pressure in box-bellows, first recorded in 5BCE. Successive refinements meant that by the time of the Northern Sung it was an efficient way to turn a wheel to power a piston. But in the next half-millennium the Chinese did not think of reversing the process, to use the piston to power the wheel, which was the basis of Newcomen’s English steam engine of 1712--the world’s first steam engine.

An industrial capitalist economy has many prerequisites. It is hard to imagine capitalism developing without prior states with laws, cities, money and credit, bankers, merchants, labor and capital markets, mines, proto-industrial enterprises etc. Yet industrial capitalism did not develop from the empires, which had these in greatest abundance. Why their stasis? Competing explanations abound: a centralized imperial state stifled entrepreneurship, which might threaten its own power; it favored agriculture, not industry, and there was a rural bias in manufacturing; the Mongol invasions devastated much of northern China, forcing the Sung to flee further south, where their industries were further away from China’s coal; the innovations had all come from peasants and artisans whose technology was separated from science (which was declining anyway), so that innovations were experience-based not science-cum-experiments based; and the meritocratic examinations system sucked creative minds into the bureaucracy. The consequence of all this was the high-equilibrium trap—a commercialized agrarian economy that worked efficiently, satisfying elites who saw no need for organizational or technological innovations, and who indeed might fear these.

Empires were predatory but susceptible to barbarian predation, prone to extreme inequality and to elite complacency. Empires institutionalized what had made them powerful in the first place and they had little incentive to go further. The Northern Sung almost did so, but no other empire got near this level. Empires had limited potential for endogenous growth. Further development did not come from empires, the highest level of the preceding evolutionary period. This track ended and further development came from elsewhere.

Phase 4. The European/English miracle

My quantitative data show the extraordinary surge in power and complexity after the eighteenth century in Europe, and particularly in England. This dwarfed all other historical development. GDP, energy production and use, and weapon lethality now surged beyond any historical precedent. Evolutionists recognize this. Sanderson (2007, p. 305), for example, says “Social evolution is itself an evolving process whose pace has accelerated through time.” Yet can this leap be seen as the consequence of earlier evolutionary processes? Since this is easily the best-evidenced of all the historical cases, we can know much more about the processes of development than in earlier cases.

My discussion of this breakthrough in Sources Volume 1 has been criticized for being Eurocentric. I did neglect the influences on Europe coming from elsewhere (as I conceded in Mann 2006), but I make no apologies for being Eurocentric—in fact, Anglocentric—about the consequence: the diffusion of the Miracle to the world. Nor therefore do I apologize for focusing so much in the first volume of Sources on prior European and British history. It matters little that European/British dominance lasted only 200 years, for that period changed the world. Historians are fond of reminding us that the Industrial Revolution was not a moment but a slow process. But if we think of the enormous stretches of time involved in the emergence of previous stages, then it was a mere moment. It took another century for the benefits to begin to spread among the masses in the form of life expectancy, income levels, and literacy. But during the twentieth century more and more of the world began to share in the new affluent society. These two centuries constitute by far the biggest leap in the entire human experience.

This breakthrough occurred only in a single place and then diffused to the world. That means we cannot do comparative analysis of independent cases of breakthrough, as in my second period. We must try to explain a single case, a more difficult task made worse by the fact that it came from a concatenation of many causes. I now list the main ones:

• (1) The proliferation of autonomous power actors—small, feuding states of diverse types, autonomous towns, religious communities, intertwined peasant villages and feudal domains, merchant and artisan guilds. All this amounted to a multi- power actor civilization, embodying considerable competition among organizations drawing on all sources of social power. This did not represent continuity but contrast from Rome, which was an empire of domination.

• (2) However, this competition existed amid a normative community, an ecumene, which (Western) Christianity provided. Thus competition was minimally regulated, which was important for a viable capitalist market to emerge. Christianity had originated in the Roman Empire and its survival after the Empire’s fall carried some Roman legacy. Yet Roman-Christian culture had been thoroughly blended with the practices of Germanic barbarians, who were not part of Wilkinson’s Central Civilization. Germanic conceptions of freedom were important for the development of capitalism, while England in the twelfth century was one of the least complex societies in Blanton and Fargher’s sample.

• (3) Those who have attacked what they call Eurocentricism have shown that some of the technology of the early industrial revolution was based on the diffusion of Asian, especially Chinese, models then improved upon in Europe. There were also lesser diffusions of Islamic science (Pomeranz 2000; Hobson 2004). This can be seen as evolutionary diffusion.

• (4) But Islamic states blocked the Eastern Mediterranean and this stimulated open seas navigation by Europeans in order to sail around Africa to reach the profitable markets of Asia. It helped stimulate a long-term shift of power in Europe away from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic states, which also benefitted from richer soils once ploughs had emerged that could turn over such heavy soils.

• (5) The impact of Protestantism in northwestern Europe encouraged individualistic and rationalistic ideologies. The seventeenth-century scientific revolution, disproportionately Protestant and British, led toward the technological revolution of the eighteenth century. This was undoubtedly a short-term evolutionary process.

• (6) British eighteenth-century societies, reading rooms, and coffee shops were places where scientists, mechanics, and entrepreneurs met and exchanged philosophical, scientific, and technical ideas for profit—the harnessing of science to technology and profit.

• (7) The eighteenth-century British agricultural revolution increased farm productivity, released labor into the towns, and generated a mass of middling owners and tenants whose enhanced consumption fueled the economy.

• (8) A long-lived high-wage economy in British towns led manufacturers to seek labor-saving machinery. In fact, as we glimpsed, in Table 4, England had long had relatively high per capita GDP, which translated into higher wages than everywhere else in Europe except for the Netherlands when it was at its brief peak.

• (9) The long history of multi-state rivalry led rulers to subsidize science and technology, especially in their militaries, the main consumers of iron and textiles. It also spurred on the development of cohesive, fiscally-competent, states encouraging capitalist enterprise since this would increase their tax base.

• (10) The military-led expansion of Europe into the world, in which the Netherlands and then Britain were later free-riders enabled British domination of the terms of global trade and the acquisition of colonies with their raw materials. Europe’s military superiority over the world had been honed over centuries of intensive warfare within the continent.

• (11) A plentiful supply of coal in British deep mines near industrial areas amid a climate that often flooded the mines stimulated the invention of the Newcomen engine, which pumped out the water and produced cheap energy that when combined with high wages produced incentives for improved machinery that did not exist elsewhere.

This is not an exhaustive list but it is a long one. It includes causal mechanisms emanating from all four sources of social power. Some involved long-term trends—of wages, trade, fiscal resources, theological development, and military organization. Some of these can be seen as evolutionary but most cannot. Each might be given a coherent causal explanation, but they all interacted orthogonally. Interaction between different causal processes produces contingency. Other processes involved contingencies of a more accidental nature—Islamic blocking, navigational bonanzas, the genius of scientists and technologists, the result of hard-fought battles, coal deposits appropriate for a certain economic moment in time, etc. Had not English weather destroyed the Armada, England might have been Spanish and Catholic. This breakthrough contained contingent interactions and accidents, and it also depended on fallible and emotional human beings. The combination re-tracked the course of history. Those attacking what they call Eurocentrism also stress accidents. Pomeranz (2000) says that Britain surged past China due only to two accidents: the presence of coal (an accident of nature) and colonies (contingent, since China might have established colonies in the fifteenth century but chose not to). Both were important factors but so were others.

One can make the argument that Western Europe developed through the blending of Roman, Christian, and Germanic influences together with Arab mathematics and Chinese technology. This involved combined unfolding and diffusing tendencies. But there are only two ways in which these developments could be viewed as evolutionary. First, from a teleological perspective—that is, these processes did eventually lead to massive increases in power and complexity, But a teleological theory in which the future determined the past is unacceptable. Second, we might posit a hidden Hegelian world spirit lurking behind and beneath all this, giving unity to what seem like very disparate processes. Only God could play this role and she does not. Instead there were merely causes coming together conjuncturally.

Even so, from there to the British breakthrough requires several additional levels of explanation. One can add other long-term arguments, as I did in stressing the “rational restlessness” of Western European society, unhindered by highly institutionalized constraints on further development. One can stretch metaphors by claiming that England was one more triumph by an outsider “marcher lord,” but one must also explain why this particular marcher lord succeeded. It took many twists and turns before this eventuated in industrial capitalism. I strongly suspect that twists and turns might have also loomed large in previous, poorly-documented transitions.

However this has raised a counter-factual riposte from evolutionists: if it had not been England, it would have been somewhere else, Sanderson repeatedly says (1995, pp. 102ff, 174). There had already been one false start in Europe. The Netherlands had developed a profitable empire, an advanced financial sector, high wages, and some proto-industrialization in the seventeenth century. But this had stalled. The next area to industrialize after England was the region of Flanders, Northern France, and Southwestern Germany but that region lacked a single state or a single religion, and we can see from Table 4 how far back of England they were. If colonies mattered, only the French had many but they were not profitable, unlike British ones. It is possible that another European country might have made the breakthrough. But why not further Malthusian cycles together with a high equilibrium trap in Europe? We cannot say which outcome was more likely.

Might it have been another country or region beyond Europe? This seems less likely. Japan is the only serious possibility. Japanese feudalism had similarities to European feudalism and by the nineteenth century its economy had become commercialized. But it was the humiliation imposed by European and American imperialism that galvanized the Meiji Restoration, which adapted many European practices in order to industrialize and to militarize. Without this stimulus, Malthus might have ruled. Korea and areas of Southeast Asia also had feudalism, weak monarchies, and some commercialism, but commerce was mostly in the hands of the overseas Chinese and was not leading toward indigenous growth. In South Asia, says Mielants (2005), cities and merchants were subordinated to regional empires dominated by landlords. When the Europeans arrived, the merchants lacked a state interested in protecting them, unlike the European states, and so they could not compete with them. Would any of these regions have made a breakthrough? It does not seem likely. The United States had depended on British colonialism, and it continued to depend on British trade and investment. It is not easy to see from where an alternative breakthrough might have come. Another breakthrough might have happened in Europe or somewhere else, but further Malthusian cycles and equilibrium traps were equally or more likely. But we shall never know because this British breakthrough rapidly diffused globally and there was no longer room in the world for further independent evolutions.

Phase 5. The future

Is evolution likely in the future? Not in the senses yet discussed. Global GDP and the production and consumption of energy are likely to continue growing, indicating further endogenous growth in human powers. The lethality of weapons will probably also develop further, with battlefield nuclear weapons or chemical or biological bombs that could destroy an entire population without harming its buildings. Normative concerns might make us balk at calling these trends evolutionary, since they would be a disaster for humanity, generating insupportable climate change or nuclear (or biological) war. They would be “boomerangs”—forces sent outward by human agency, hitting up against the limits of the earth, and then rebounding back to destroy us. This would be a massive human failure to adapt to environmental and weaponry change, a reversal of a Darwinian process of species adaptation to Nature. It would be the end of any human social evolution and the beginning of a long period of severe regression.

If, however, humans can neutralize these threats by developing cheap zero-emissions technology and heightened international cooperation, this would be a successful adaptation to a human-created environment. Since both problems are global, the historical pattern of just a few communities adapting to changes in the environment would not work. All the large states would have to do it. For the survival of the human race another revolution is necessary. This one has to be global and it would be a revolution in reverse gear, reversing the growth patterns of history. There is no way of knowing whether this will happen, yet the optimism of evolutionism, like religion, offers us consolation.

Conclusion

In the long-run human beings have developed communities of greater complexity and power. That is the indisputable fact upon which evolutionists can seize. Yet the earliest and by far the longest phase of human social experience involved very little evolution. Hunter-gatherers were content to have conquered subsistence in communities that combined strong social bonds with considerable freedom. They resisted attempts to increase power or complexity during many millennia. This phase was predominantly stasis punctuated by rather shallow cycles.

Eventually came a second phase in late prehistory and early history of cumulative adaptations in economic, political, and military power led by elites fulfilling functional roles while increasing their own distributive power. This might be seen as broadly evolutionary though with many exceptions. Moreover there were popular reactions against stratification and the state that generated more egalitarian complex communities, which amounted to a second simultaneous line of development. Alternation between the two forms tended to be cyclical. Pastoralists developed a third line of simultaneous development that initially pioneered considerable change especially in military power, but then experienced stagnation, cycles, and eventual collapse. So the second phase was mixed, with both evolutionary and non-evolutionary elements.

This second phase culminated in a change of direction. The crises of late archaic empires generated “world religions,” forms of ideological power providing more universal theologies. These helped weaken the empires and intensify rival ideological networks. Religions also cushioned the fall of empires, helping transmit some of their cultural legacy to the successor communities—a weak form of evolution. But there followed a third phase of prolonged cyclical shifts between empires and feudal or tribal groups. China was the great exception since Chinese history might be seen as having strong evolutionary tendencies—until the tenth century BCE after which regression occurred.

Then came the fourth phase, a one-off, off-scale leap upward in power and complexity engineered by a European/English Miracle whose scale can judged from my tables. The overall growth in social complexity and power in human groups through the ages has depended heavily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century development that began in only one small place in the world. It is absolutely essential for evolutionists to be able to explain it in their terms. Yet they cannot, for it involved too many causes across all four sources of social power. True, I have pointed to some long-term quasi-evolutionary mechanisms—the blending of Roman, Germanic, and Christian cultures, and the borrowings from China, yet most of the causes I listed were not evolutionary, while their interactions were often contingent. I suspect that there might have been comparable blendings of endogenous growth, diffusion of techniques, peculiarities of each local situation, and contingencies in earlier stages and phases of human development.

Finally, in the fifth phase that we are now beginning to face, we can only hope that human societies will generate radically new evolutionary adaptations to avert military or economic disasters for humanity potentially much greater than any prior social collapse.

I distinguished three levels of evolutionary theory. It is self-evident that human development is the consequence of adaptation to the social and natural environment, which is the first, minimal level of evolutionary theory. But what characteristics make that possible? There is no general and convincing answer available from evolutionists (or anyone else). We can perceive long-term directionality of greater power and complexity and in some periods and places this was fairly persistent and cumulative—but not in others. I do not reject the second multi-linear level of evolutionary theory where evolution is limited to particular places, periods, and power sources. The development of steam engines in Britain involved countless small improvements to existing machines that can obviously viewed as evolutionary—but not British or European development as a whole. The way forward for evolutionists to defend their model would be to establish the causes governing where and when evolutionary adaptation occurs, and where and when it does not.

Stasis, cycles, and declines dominated too often and too long to support the third level, general evolutionary theory. Can evolution be as erratic, uneven, and episodic as we have seen here? There is another problem. My account in Sources identified in each period what I called the “leading edge of power”, but this flitted across the world, from African beginnings, to the emergence of cave paintings in Europe, China, and Australia, to the first civilizations emerging in river valleys mainly in Eurasia, to the Graeco-Roman world and the Chinese Empire, to the European miracle that involved power resources shifting from Mediterranean to Atlantic Europe, coming to center on Britain, and thence on to globalizations. So an explanation in terms of evolution would be geographically promiscuous as well as temporally intermittent. Some of the geographical shifts can be explained by diffusion, but others cannot. We saw continuity sometimes, but sometimes not. Long-run processes interacted with each other in contingent ways, and were sometimes thrown off course by accidents. Sometimes the processes were decisive, sometimes the contingencies and accidents. Given the rich panoply of human communities, one can tell a story of evolution by focusing on cases that did see development in power and complexity. But this is more an abstract vector of development than an actual endogenous/diffused historical process.

I have not focused much on the causal mechanisms of stages, though where we have good data, as in the modern period, mechanisms are profoundly multi-causal. In contrast most evolutionists have gone for a simpler explanation focused on ecological and economic concerns. Evolutionary materialism is too narrow, and so is a focus on internal or external pressures. Runciman offers a broader set of causal mechanisms, quite close to my own. Like him, I analyze, in Sources, each case of social change in terms of diverse power struggles, though I add include more collective and more ideological and military power than he does. He says that the group that won out had power resources that in one way or another were best adapted to the environment of the time. He also argues that cases of regression, decline, and collapse are to be explained in the same manner—these were cases without a competitive advantage (2007, p. 310; cf. Sanderson 2007, p. 284). Well yes, but this verges on tautology. We know who won and who lost and with hindsight we find reasons. Yet these are multiple, often ad hoc, specific to each situation, and lacking continuity with the past. This was so in the best evidenced case, the European/English Miracle.

Runciman has not produced the grand theory that he claims is the equal of Darwin’s (1989, p. 449). Like me, he proffers a loose orienting model, telling us to look for the causes of development and non-development in his power sources. That is fine, but both Runciman and I are reduced to complex, multi-causal analyses of cases. So neither he nor I have produced a general theory of these causes. It is easy to outline a series of abstract stages in which power and complexity increase—for they have increased. But evolutionists must show that these have continuously flowed out of each other, and this they have not systematically done. Such an explanation may be an unattainable goal since the sources of social power are orthogonal to one another and so contingency, accidents, and human willfulness intervene. Social evolutionism is not an adequate theory of long-run social change—but nor is any other theory. Sociology is not that simple.