Page 177 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

154 Communication and Evolution of Society

belongs. A postulate of this sort is easier to put forward than to
satisfy. I can only try to elucidate the research program and to
make it plausible.
Organizational principles of society can be characterized, in a
first approximation, through the institutional core that determines
the dominant form of social integration. These institutional cores
—kinship as a total institution, the state as a general political
order, the complementary relation between a functionally specified
state and a differentiated economic system—have not yet been
thoroughly analyzed into their formal components. But I shall
not follow this path of analysis here, since the formal compo-
nents of these basic institutions lie in so many different dimen-
sions that they can hardly be brought into a developmental-logical
sequence. A more promising attempt can be made directly to
classify, according to evolutionary features, the forms of social
integration determined by principles of social organization.
Developmental-logical connections for the ontogenesis of ac-
tion competence, particularly of moral consciousness, have already
been rendered plausible. Of course, we ought not draw from
ontogenesis over-hasty conclusions about the developmental levels
of societies. It is the personality system that is the bearer of the
ontogenetic learning process; and in a certain way, only social
subjects can learn. But social systems, by drawing on the learning
capacities of social subjects, can form new structures in order to
solve steering problems that threaten their continued existence.
To this extent the evolutionary learning process of societies is
dependent on the competences of the individuals that belong to
them. The latter in turn acquire their competences not as isolated
monads but by growing into the symbolic structures of their life-
worlds. This development passes through three stages of com-
munication, which I would like to characterize now in a very
rough way.
At the stage of symbolically mediated interaction, speaking
and acting are still emeshed in the framework of a single, im-
perativist mode of communication. With the help of a communi-
cative symbol, A expresses a behavioral expectation, to which B
reacts with an action, in the intention of fulfilling A’s expecta-
tion. The meaning of the communicative symbol and of the action