The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology. While little is known for certain, debates since Hobbes and Rousseau have returned again and again to the philosophical, moral and evolutionary questions posed.
Social origins in nature
Origin of social groups
Thomas Hobbes
Arguably the most influential theory of human social origins is that of Thomas Hobbes, who in his Leviathan argued that without strong government, society would collapse into Bellum omnium contra omnes — "the war of all against all":
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes' innovation was to attribute the establishment of society to a founding 'social contract', in which the Crown's subjects surrender some part of their freedom in return for security. If Hobbes' idea is accepted, it follows that society could not have emerged prior to the state. This school of thought has remained influential to this day. Prominent in this respect is British archaeologist Colin Renfrew (Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn), who points out that the state did not emerge until long after the evolution of Homo sapiens. The earliest representatives of our species, according to Renfrew, may well have been anatomically modern, but they were not yet cognitively or behaviourally modern. For example, they lacked political leadership, large-scale cooperation, food production, organised religion, law or symbolic artefacts. Humans were simply hunter-gatherers, who — much like extant apes — ate whatever food they could find in the vicinity. Renfrew controversially suggests that hunter-gatherers to this day think and socialise along lines not radically different from those of their nonhuman primate counterparts. In particular, he says that they do not "ascribe symbolic meaning to material objects" and for that reason "lack fully developed 'mind.'" However, hunter-gatherer ethnographers emphasise that extant foraging peoples certainly do have social institutions — notably institutionalised rights and duties codified in formal systems of kinship. Elaborate rituals such as initiation ceremonies serve to cement contracts and commitments, quite independently of the state. Other scholars would add that insofar as we can speak of "human revolutions" — "major transitions" in human evolution — the first was not the Neolithic Revolution but the rise of symbolic culture that occurred toward the end of the Middle Stone Age. Arguing the exact opposite of Hobbes's position, anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres views the state and society as mutually incompatible: genuine society is always struggling to survive against the state.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Like Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that society was born in a social contract. In Rousseau's case, however, sovereignty is vested in the entire populace, who enter into the contract directly with one another. "The problem", he explained, "is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. The contract's clauses, Rousseau continued, may be reduced to one — "the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community. Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has". In other words: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. By this means, each member of the community acquires not only the capacities of the whole but also, for the first time, rational mentality:
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.
Sir Henry Sumner Maine In his influential book, Ancient Law (1861), Maine argued that in early times, the basic unit of human social organisation was the patriarchal family:
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