Page 185 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

162 Communication and Evolution of Society

They had already institutionalized temporally limited political roles.
The chieftains, kings, or leaders were judged by their concrete actions;
their actions were not legitimate per se. Such roles were only tempor-
atily institutionalized (e.g., for warfare) or limited to special tasks
(e.g., to provide for rain and a good harvest). Viewed sociostructur-
ally, these roles had not yet moved to the center of social organiza-
tion.64
e. Particular system problems In the evolutionarily promising neo-
lithic societies system problems arose which could not be managed
with an adaptive capacity limited by the kinship principle of organiza-
tion. These might have been, for example, ecologically conditioned
problems of land scarcity and population density or problems having
to do with an unequal distribution of social wealth. These problems,
irresolvable within the given framework, became more and more vis-
ible the more frequently they led to conflicts that overloaded the archaic
legal institutions (courts of arbitration, feuding law).
f. The testing of new structures A few societies under the pressure
of evolutionary challenges from such problems made use of the cogni-
tive potential in their world views and institutionalized—at first on a
trial basis—an administration of justice at a conventional level. Thus,
for example, the war chief was empowered to adjudicate cases of con-
flict, no longer only according to the concrete distribution of power,
but according to socially recognized norms grounded in tradition. Law
was no longer only that on which the parties could agree.
g. Stabilization through the formation of systems These judicial po-
sitions could become the pacemakers of social evolution. However, as
the example of the African Barotse empire shows, not all promising
experiments led via such judicial functions to the permanent institu-
tionalization of a ruling position, that is, to evolutionary success. Only
under suitable conditions—such as, for example, the military victory of
a tribe or construction of an irrigation project—could such roles be
permanently differentiated, that is, stabilized in such a way that they
became the core of a political subsystem. This marked off the evolu-
tionarily successful from the merely promising social systems.
h. The emergence of class structures ‘‘On the basis of political
domination the material production process could then be uncoupled
from the limiting conditions of the kinship system and reorganized via
relations of domination.” 6° The ruler secured the loyalty of his offi-
cials, of the priest and warrior families by assuring them privileged
access to the means of production (palace and temple economy).
i. Development of productive forces ‘“The forces of production