DESPOTISM AND DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION: A Darwinnian ...

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Theories of Conflict Resolution In 1895, Emile Durkheim wrote that understanding individual behavior is irrelevant to understanding society. In the preface to the second edition of “The Rules of Sociological Method,” he insisted to his critics that a man’s control over his social order is less than obvious. “In vain have repeated experiences taught him that this omnipotence, the illusion of which he complacently entertains, has always been a cause of weakness in him; that his power over things really began only when he recognized that they have a nature of their own, and resigned himself to learning this nature from them” [1895 (1966):lviii; contrast Alexander, 1979:82-86]. A raison d’etre for the science of society was to be that understanding individual motivation would be inadequate, if not irrelevant, to account for social phenomena, including law. According to Durkheim, in “mechanically integrated,” essentially, preindustrial societies, “it is the assembly of the people which renders justice” [1893 (1933):76], not to an acting individual’s advantage (p. 86), but to penalize offenses against the collective consciousness (p. 80). In this case, “Despotism, at least when it is not a pathological, decadent phenomenon, is nothing else than transformed communism” (p. 196). Many subsequent theorists have similarly stressed the social function of conflict resolution. For instance, Malinowski, whose ethno-graphic interest in “law” was pioneering, suggested that its essential objective in Trobriand Island society was “to ensure a type of cooperation which is based on mutual concessions and sacrifices for a common end” [1926 (1982):64, cf. pp. 92-93]. More recently, in a comparative review of “primitive” law, Hoebel, although he acknowledged the existence of societies with “invidious law systems,” defined law “not as an instrument of exploitation” (1954:327), but as “the creative consequence of a people’s efforts to achieve and maintain a self-limiting order” (p. 326). It is, of course, the democratic ideal that the “law” should be constituted by men of equal strength in greater numbers. For Roscoe Pound, for example, law is that ideal. “Many today say that law is power, where we used to think of it as a restraint upon power. . . . The legal order as a highly specialized form of social control rests upon the power or force of politically organized society. But so far from the law being power, it is something that organizes and systematizes the exercise of power and makes power effective toward the maintaining and furthering of civilization” (1942:49). In fact, though, the “law” has been historically laid down by men of greater force. This is consistent with the Darwinian prediction: any sanction for or against an action is likely to reflect the interests of those able to administer it. It is, of course, possible that strength in numbers might come to exceed the strength of any one individual and that the distribution of power might grow so equitable that the interests of a majority would generally overrule those of a minority. But historically, power has often been distributed quite inequitably; accordingly, “society,” as a utilitarian majority, has not usually been the “law’s” beneficiary. This conclusion is increasingly in evidence in the cross-cultural literature on conflict resolution. It might be argued that it was anticipated in Maine’s (1864) decision that in early “law,” offenses, including murder and theft, were more often considered to have been committed against individuals, rather than against society. “If therefore the criterion of a delict, wrong, or tort be that the person who suffers it, and not the State, is considered to be wronged, it may be asserted that in the infancy of jurisprudence the citizen depends for protection against violence or fraud not on the Law of Crime but the Law of Tort” (p. 359). This is especially true as in preindustrial groups trespass against the social welfare and the ruler’s welfare were generally considered to be one and the same. Other writers, either reluctant to lack
a theory of individual motivation (e.g., Ehrlich, 1936), or, in the Durkheimian tradition, explicitly rejecting the need of one (e.g., Black, 1976), have empirically determined that “law” is in fact related to power. But, without such a theory, they have been unable to explain their generalizations, or, except as a historical lesson, to offer predictions. Many of the last generation of writers on the subject of early “law” have explicitly rejected an eclipsing focus on social over individual interests. Starr and Yngvesson, for example, have complained that “A Durkheimian emphasis on harmony of interests and shared goals has heavily influenced our thinking and seems to have shaped the ways in which anthropologists have perceived the handling of disputes. . . . A major problem of most anthropological dispute settlement studies is the failure to link status, rank, and class orientations to an understanding of actors’ roles in, and outcomes of, the disputing process” (1975:559, 563; see also Pospisil, 1967:6). As members of a team of researchers sent into ten different cultures to address these problems, Starr and Yngvesson and several other students of Laura Nader confirmed that kinship, wealth, and status are generally among the most important determinants of conflict resolution (Nader and Todd, 1978). Introducing those findings, Nader and Todd admonished that “it is perhaps obvious to note that power and control over scarce resources are interconnected and relevant to disputing, and yet there has been little systematic discussion of law and the distribution of power in either the sociological or the anthropological literature. . . . We need to understand the processes whereby disputing mechanisms maintain and legitimize the distribution of power, and the means by which the powerful control disputing mechanisms” (pp. 19-20). In the last few years, a few prominent writers on law in preindustrial societies have begun in a tentative way to look at the possibility that a theory of evolved human motivation might yield predictions about and explanations of conflict resolution (e.g., Gruter and Bohannan, 1982, including Hoebel, 1982). Marxism On the subject of human society, the single most important alternative to Darwinism is probably Marxism. It is especially relevant to the subject of despotism, as the explicit end of Marxist thought has always been an end to exploitation. Marxism and Darwinism have a great deal in common. It was in large part Darwin’s work on organic evolution which inspired Marx’s, and many others’ including Morgan’s (see Terray, 1972), attempts to come up with a parallel theory of social change. Social evolution, like biological evolution, was to be explicable in terms of changing historical conditions (e.g., discussion in Bloch, 1983). And for Marx, as for Darwin, the most important of those conditions were those which effected the ways in which people solved the material problems of life: production and reproduction. These parallels are fundamental. In order personally to acknowledge his debt, Marx originally proposed to dedicate “Capital” to Darwin (ibid). In other crucial respects, though, the theories are far apart. The Darwinian hypotheses put forward here differ, first, from the Marxist insistence that the simplest human societies were without exploitation, second, from the Marxist emphasis on production, rather than reproduction, and, last but most importantly, from the Marxist prescription of a specific form of social evolution, socialist revolution. The first difference, essentially, the idea of “primitive communism,” derives from Marx and Engels’ incorporation of the work of Lewis Henry Morgan into their scenario of world history. In his work on “Ancient Society” (1877), Morgan delineated two broad plans of government: societas and civitas.
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