Images of "God," Images of Man, and the Organization of Social Life

Abstract

Since the world began, man has contrived a great variety of forms of social organization. There have been hunting and fishing societies, caste and feudal societies, capitalist and socialist societies, communal societies and communistic ones. Some forms of social organization have flowered briefly only to die. Others have survived over extensive periods of time, sometimes in substantially their original form and other times in drastically modified form. No form of social organization of the past has proven immortal and no present form, it is suspected, will prove so either. The origin and evolution of forms of social organization has been given, in one way and another, a lot of attention by sociologists. It was a major theme in the now classic literature of sociology and almost every major figure of the past-Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Sombart, Comte-touched on it to a large degree. And, of course, questions pertaining to social organization are perhaps the major ones being addressed by contemporary social theorists. But despite all of the work which has been done, we seem to be still missing at the conceptual level an agreed upon way to order forms of social organization, and at the theoretical level an agreed upon accounting of the conditions governing the life cycle of old and giving rise to new forms of social organization. Indeed, not only are we missing a satisfactory general theory but we experience considerable difficulty in gaining consensus around explanations of the origin of particular forms of social organization; witness e.g. the continuing debate about the sources of Western capitalism. This paper has no pretensions of trying to provide any comprehensive answer to major outstanding questions about the birth and life cycle of social organizations. It is concerned, however, to advance a perspective from which such questions might be freshly addressed. At this juncture, the perspective is presented on highly speculative grounds. The intent is to see whether these speculations strike a sufficiently responsive chord to warrant further effort to build upon, to extend, and eventually to subject them to empirical test.