Inventing Traditional Society

Karuna Mantena spends a chapter of his Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism explaining the 19th-century origins of social theory. He begins by pointing to what he calls “one of the characteristic features of nineteenth century social theory,” namely, “its tendency to view the historical trajectory of society in binary terms, the modern/tradition dichotomy encapsulating the essence of a number of other prominent distinctions such as status/contract (Maine), Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (Tonnies), mechanical/organic (Durkheim), militant/industrial (Spencer), and societas/civitas (Gierke). In some formulations this model functioned as an ideal-typical contrast between two types of sociality, while in others it was a contrast that was embedded in a larger narrative of transition from one historical form of society to the other” (p. 58).

This “austere mode of classification” was an innovation of the 19th century, and “differed markedly from the most prominent, early-modern conceptual schemas for understanding the growth of human societies. Ever since Europe’s dramatic encounter with the Americas, the tendency in modern comparative ethnologies and historical theories had been toward multiplying and diversifying the stages of social development,” culminating in fourfold classifications of social development in the 18th century. Mantena summarizes this “stadial” model:

“The stadial theory posited a distinct relationship among modes of subsistence, types of property, and forms of government that defined particular stages of societal development. These stages were often understood to stand as a series of successive epochs from a savage stage linked to hunting-gathering societies, barbarian society of pastoral and shepherding peoples, to agricultural society, finally culminating in modern commercial society. These theories were put to a variety of uses, from analyzing the dynamics of socioeconomic development, to complex historical accounts of the demise of the Roman Empire, the origins of feudalism, the development of modern constitutional government, and the rise of commercial society. The four-stage theory would also serve as a prime referent with which to comprehend the unprecedented dynamics of contact, settlement, and colonization as they were unfolding with the global expansion of European empires” (p. 59).

In the nineteenth century, though, even thinkers who were heirs of this model collapsed different categories together and simplified the theory into a simple two-stage model, modern v. traditional. This simplification has its source, Mantena says, in debates about ancient politics that took place after the French Revolution: “These debates initiated a fundamental reevaluation of ancient society that was now argued to be so different from modern society that any attempt to revive ‘ancient politics’ could only lead to the kind of calamities witnessed in the decades after 1789. Moreover, in treating the foundations of Greco-Roman societies as radically opposed to those of modern society, this debate was decisive for the development of holistic conceptions of kinship, culture, and society. For it was on the terrain of ancient history, and through the influence of new critical approaches to the study of ancient society, that the anthropological theory of kinship was first formulated. In other words, the legacy of the French Revolution was to inaugurate a new kind of quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which was a central factor in the origins of modern social theory” (p. 60).

In the work of theorists like Maine, Fustel, Morgan, and Rukheim, kinship took on a particular prominence, becoming a “key structural and comparative concept, a holistic marker signifying the unity and interdependence of social, political, legal and domestic realtions.” The role of kinship underscored differences in “the internal rhythms of society,” which eventually “dissolved into a dichotomous schmea of radical opposites, the ancient versus the modern” (p. 67).