Presidential Address: The Place of Force in Human Society

Abstract

H UMAN beings learn early that almost everything they want can be obtained only through each other's cooperation, whether their need or goal is a mother's breast or a love potion, a slave uprising or a new colony, a Nobel Prize or protection against a bullying policeman. Everyone learns, consciously or not, accurately or not, various ways of controlling others for one's own ends. Few people spend much time calculating how to control others, but everyone does so part of the time. Whatever people do, for whatever goals, will be evaluated by others, who will become thereby more or less willing to cooperate, more or less likely to resist, more or less likely to continue in the relationship. We all interact with others, engage in a flow of transactions with others; and whatever we do has some effect on others, to our advantage or not, in conformity with our wishes or not, and whether or not we will it so. Consequently, however else we might classify the wide range of human acts, we can also view them as samples of social control processes, i.e., the ways by which people shape the flow of each other's behavior. Almost all can be grouped into a small number of tvyes of social control forces. One of these is force and forcethreat, which I shall henceforth simply call force; when I mean only I shall so label it.' The use of force-and I repeat, I mean by this term both force-threat and overt force-is as ubiquitous as the preachments against it. Whatever else social systems are, they are also force systems. Force constitutes one of the major foundations of all social structures. The processes by which the command of force is expended, exchanged, accumulated, or lost, are universal in social interaction, because force is one of the fundamental resources people and groups need to elicit cooperation, help, and conformity from one another. Force constitutes one of the four great social control systems in all societies. For two millennia, social analysts have given much attention to three of these-which they have variously termed force, prestige, and wealth-because these underlie all stratification systems.2 The fourth, which