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Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition  We continue today (May 9, 2000) our book review feature with Charles Tilly's reviews  Stephen Sanderson's "Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition." Stephen Sanderson writes a response clarifying his position.  Share your thoughts on the book or the reviews by posting a message in the discussion forum.  This review will be published in paper form in the Canadian Journal of History.

Reviewed by Charles Tilly (ct135@columbia.edu)

Requisites for a visibly viable evolutionary explanation of anything include three elements: 1) a unit or set of units that produces innovations and stores their results; 2) a variable and changing environment to which the unit or set of units responds; 3) one or more selection mechanisms both a) relating unit to environment and b) transmitting traces to the unit's successors. Explanations of biological evolution, strictly conceived, currently differ in their relative emphases on genes, individuals, and populations as the units crucially at risk to change, in features of the environment (e.g. slow climatic changes vs. quick collisions with asteroids) affecting selection, and in the impact of various selection mechanisms (e.g. selection through mating behavior vs. selection through survival). Revising his compendious 1995 application of evolutionary ideas to social processes, Stephen Sanderson has now hitched his hopes to the uncertain horse of sociobiology. The 1995 version still constitutes the bulk of his book, with a half-page preface and a 23-page afterword linking the older presentation of his "evolutionary materialism" to more strictly biological explanations. As Sanderson says clearly, he has adapted ideas from Gerhard Lenski, Marvin Harris, and Immanuel Wallerstein to world history. He has not, alas, modeled his expository style on Jared Diamond or Dan Sperber, but instead chosen as templates his mentors' more academic treatises. That means few compelling puzzles, fewer stories, and many, many citations.

Sanderson's main argument treats the individual (not the gene or the population) as the unit undergoing evolution, assigns the behavior of other humans far more prominence in the individual's environment than is the case in most biological accounts, and allows a wide variety of selection mechanisms. Seen as a relation among environments, human consumption patterns, and numbers of persons, for example, population pressure figures repeatedly in his account as a cause of human innovations, most of them involving new forms of production. Sanderson insistently calls attention to independently initiated parallel developments such as the emergence of states and the creation of trading networks; those parallels, he argues, confirm the importance of widely operating evolutionary mechanisms. He sets his face firmly against functional accounts, by which he means explanations by reference to the general welfare of a society or of all humanity. In opposition to society-level explanations, Sanderson introduces the portmanteau notion of individual-level "human needs." That allows him to argue that social evolution selects for individual adaptations better serving such needs.

In practice, Sanderson divides his work into two different tasks: first, identification of broad periods and regions in which certain momentous long-term transformations (for example, the development of agriculture) occurred; second, interpretations of those transformations as aggregated consequences of adaptations at the individual level. On such a basis, he provides quick takes on humanity's entire history: the Neolithic Revolution, the emergence of civilization and states, transformations of agrarian states, the rise of capitalist economies and their evolution into a world-system, the institutions of modernity, the question of progress, and the future. After a dense theoretical introduction, Sanderson takes up his topics in roughly chronological order, generally following compact summaries of what happened in the Neolithic Revolution or the rise of capitalist economies with extensive discussions of competing explanations for what happened. That procedure leads inevitably to a good deal of pontificating in the style "X says this, Y says that, I prefer Y for the following reasons, but we must modify Y's argument by introducing element Z," complete with extensive quotes from X and Y plus citations of Sanderson’s previous publications. Nevertheless, the book usually provides even-handed, comprehensible accounts of the questions under dispute and of the contributions made by various synthesizers to resolution of those questions. Later in the book, furthermore, pages begin to fill with useful compilations of data on such matters as state expenditure and class composition of industrial countries. As a historiographic and synthetic complement to a conventional world history, Social Transformations would serve teachers quite well.

Covering all of human experience in 400-odd pages, Sanderson takes some dubious positions. He defines the state, for example, as "a form of sociopolitical organization that has achieved a monopoly of the means of violence within a specified territory" (56). Despite the Weberian pedigree of his definition, it describes an empty set. As a resident of the United States, Sanderson should be well aware of limits to any state's control over violent means; in fact, no government of any size has ever monopolized means of violence within its territory. Again, Sanderson turns to the sort of functional reasoning he has earlier castigated when arguing that the contemporary competitive interstate system came into being because "only an interstate system is capable of maintaining the vigorous economic rivalry and competition that is necessary for capitalism" (235). Sanderson has not yet woven a seamless web from his evolutionary threads.

Sociobiology, in any case, forms an odd base for any such world history. Sociobiology shifts the crucial unit from the individual to the gene, represents the environment as consisting of other genes and their embodiments in organisms, then proposes genetic mutation plus sexual selection as its crucial mechanisms. Sanderson's summary of the "synthetic materialism" he proposes to merge social evolution with sociobiology actually sticks to individuals as its units. It also interprets such collective arrangements as authoritarian regimes and unequally distributed private property as consequences of biologically-driven individual mechanisms without in the least either specifying those mechanisms or suggesting how they aggregate into complex systems of power. The gap between ambition and accomplishment looms large.