Chapter 4. Society and Modern Life
4.1. Types of Societies
Haida, Maasai, modern Canadians — each is a society. But what does this mean? Exactly what is a society? In sociological terms, a society refers to a group of people who interact within a definable territory and share the same culture. In practical, everyday terms, societies consist of various types of institutional constraint and coordination exercised over our choices and actions. The type of society we live in determines the nature of these types of constraint and coordination. The nature of our social institutions, the type of work we do, the way we think about ourselves, and the structures of power and social inequality that order our life chances are all products of the type of society we live in, and thus vary globally and historically.
The founder of sociology, August Comte (1798–1857), provided the first sociological theory of the evolution of human societies. His best known sociological theory was the law of three stages, which held that all human societies and all forms of human knowledge evolve through three distinct stages from primitive to advanced: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. The key variable in defining these stages was the way a people conceptualized causation or how they understood their place in the world.
In the theological stage, humans explain causes in terms of the will of anthropocentric gods (i.e., the gods cause things to happen). In the metaphysical stage, humans explain causes in terms of abstract, “speculative” ideas like nature, natural rights, social contracts, or “self-evident” truths (human nature causes society to take specific forms). This was the basis of Comte’s critique of the Enlightenment philosophers, whose ideas about natural rights and freedoms had led to the French Revolution, but also, in his opinion, to the chaos of its aftermath. In his view, the “negative” or metaphysical knowledge of the philosophers was based on dogmatic ideas that could not be proven empirically, nor reconciled when they were in contradiction. This lead to inevitable conflict and moral anarchy. Finally, in the positive stage, humans explain causes in terms of positivist, scientific observations and laws. That is, law-like relationships between empirically observable variables predict empirically observable outcomes (e.g., if this, then that). Comte believed this would be the final stage of human social evolution, because positivist science could empirically determine how society should be best organized. Science could reconcile the division between political factions of order and progress by eliminating the basis for moral and intellectual anarchy. The application of positive philosophy would lead to the unification of society and of the sciences (Comte, 1830/1975).
Karl Marx offered an alternate model for understanding the evolution of types of society. Marx argued that the evolution of societies from primitive to advanced was not a product of th