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Volume 3, Number 2 (Spring 1997) Book Review
Graeme Donald Snooks. THE DYNAMIC SOCIETY: EXPLORING THE
SOURCES OF GLOBAL CHANGE. London: Routledge, 1996. xvii
+ 491 pp. ISBN 0-415-13731-4, $24.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Stephen K. Sanderson, Department of Sociology,
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania,
USA
In this extraordinary book, the Australian economic
historian Graeme Donald Snooks seeks to do not only the
impossible, but the unthinkable: construct a single
theoretical model that is capable not only of explaining
all of human history and prehistory, but all of the most
important transformations that have occurred on earth over
the past four billion years! And he nearly pulls it off.
Snooks formulates a model that he variously calls
MATERIALIST MAN or DYNAMIC MATERIALISM. This model assumes
that both genetic and social change are driven by a similar
mechanism, which is the desire to gain control over
resources so as to maximize the probability of survival and
material prosperity. Applied specifically to humans,
Snooksís model holds that humans have an innate
desire to increase their wealth and power. Indeed, he
claims that they have an insatiable desire to accumulate
material possessions. The history and prehistory of human
societies is therefore a complex tale in which humans have
adopted one or another of four basic strategies in order to
achieve their objectives: family multiplication,
technological advance, conquest, and commerce. Societies
may use more than one of these, but one is usually
dominant, especially in the most successful societies.
Strategies are chosen for their effectiveness, within the
total context of social, cultural, and historical
circumstances, in promoting economic well-being and
growth. However, any given strategy will eventually
exhaust its potentialities, and a new one must then be
taken up.
The strategy of FAMILY MULTIPLICATION was the
dominant strategy of achieving economic well-being
throughout all of human prehistory. It involved producing
offspring who would eventually migrate and fill up
surrounding territories. According to Snooks, this gave
humans greater control over natural resources through the
extended family. The big problem with this strategy was
that, although it permitted a certain level of material
well-being, it was unable to generate any real economic
growth or raise living standards. As a result, other
strategies came into the picture.
One of these was the TECHNOLOGY strategy, which
involves the invention and deployment of new or better
tools and techniques. It was often used throughout human
history, but usually only as a subsidiary strategy. As a
primary strategy, it has been most notably employed in
Europe between about AD 1000 and 1500, and then again in
Europe beginning with the Industrial Revolution of the late
eighteenth century. Why has it been so little employed?
Snooksís answer is that it was generally too
expensive in comparison to other strategies. Snooks is
highly critical of the conventional assumption made by
historians that the agrarian civilizations of the ancient
world gave little emphasis to technological advance because
they were essentially uninterested in economic growth. They
were keenly interested in such growth, he says, but had
more cost-effective ways of achieving it.
[Page 351]
The most important of these other growth-inducing
strategies was CONQUEST. This involved the military
invasion of other societies and their incorporation into
the political structure of the conquering state. The
economic benefits of this strategy were many, including
ìadditional agricultural land; additional labour in
the form of slaves and soldiers; additional fixed capital
in the form of captured military equipment, irrigation
systems, buildings, transport facilities, etc.; treasure;
and additional tax revenueî (p. 276). This strategy
was preferred to all others because it was the most
cost-efficient and produced the greatest return on
investment. In order to achieve this return, ancient
civilizations had to give emphasis to one form of
technological advance, that involving military
technology. The advance of military technology in the
ancient world occurred, Snooks says, because war was not a
game but a business, and in fact a very big business.
In his explication of the conquest strategy, Snooks
discusses at length the Assyrians, the Macedonians, and the
Romans as leading examples. But China, he argues, did not
really follow this strategy, and in fact could not follow
it, because of a lack of suitable surrounding societies
that were worth conquering. China instead relied mainly on
the family multiplication and technological strategies at
various points in its history.
Conquest produced great material gain for its
conquerers, but on a global scale it was a zero-sum game.
The remaining strategy, though, that of COMMERCE, was
capable of allowing societies to break out of this zero-sum
straightjacket. The commerce strategy is, for Snooks,
essentially one of trade. It could only be effectively
employed by societies that had a favorable geographical
location, such as on a major body of water, or along the
path of a land trading route. Societies in highly
geographically and economically differentiated regions
might also benefit from trade. Snooksís leading
examples are ancient Mesopotamia, Minoan society, the
Phoenicians, classical Athens, the Italian city-states of
Venice and Genoa at the time of the Renaissance, and Europe
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
I found THE DYNAMIC SOCIETY to be an extremely
provocative read and compelling in many ways. In my view
one of the most compelling features of the book is its
resolute materialism. Snooks not only defends his
MATERIALIST MAN against what he regards as the conventional
view of social scientists and historians, MORAL/POLITICAL
MAN, but he grounds his economic materialism in a deeper
Darwinian materialism. Humans, for Snooks, are Darwinian
organisms, which is to say that they have been built for a
struggle for survival and a maximization of material
advantage. It seems to me that this grounding assumption
is not only fundamentally correct, but absolutely necessary
to a proper understanding of the nature of human society,
its historical evolution, and its future possibilities.
[Page 352]
Snooksís model of MATERIALIST MAN leads him
to many crucial insights. One of the most important is his
argument that people usually do not struggle for power for
its own sake, but rather seek it because it will promote
the realization of material advantage. Power, he says, is
largely about economics. Perhaps the best example of this
is war. Snooks has exactly the right response to Weberian
theorists like Michael Mann who assert that the military
objectives of agrarian civilizations were essentially
independent of economic objectives. War in the agrarian
world, Snooks tells us, was all about economics, because
conquest was the most cost-efficient strategy of material
gain.
But although I have found Snooksís broad
outline of the flow of human history quite compelling, I
have some serious reservations regarding a number of
details. I would question, for example, his notion of
family multiplication as a general economic strategy
followed in Paleolithic societies. What Snooks seems to
mean by this is population increase in order to provide an
adequate labor force. Such a strategy certainly makes
sense in situations where labor is scarce, but the real
problem for Paleolithic and early Neolithic societies is
too many people, not too few. A great deal of
anthropological and archaeological evidence suggests that
societies at these evolutionary levels are far more
preoccupied with controlling numbers than with expanding
them. And how, exactly, would family multiplication work
in such societies? Among hunter-gatherers and
horticulturalists, for example, when a camp or village
begins to press too severely against resources a new camp
or village will be hived off and go its own separate way,
thus having little interaction with the original
settlement. Later in the book (p. 227) Snooks does
acknowledge the existence of family planning as an
alternative to family multiplication, but this appears
suddenly out of nowhere and is never systematically
theorized.
Moreover, Snooks is not very clear about just why
humans abandoned the family multiplication strategy in
favor of one of the others. Part of his answer seems to be
the inability of technologically primitive societies to
raise living standards beyond a minimal level. But this is
extremely questionable. Evidence marshalled by
anthropologists and archaeologists in recent years suggests
that living standards were actually higher, as measured by
nutrition and health, among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers
than among Neolithic horticulturalists and later
agriculturalists. And why? Because of growing population
pressure, which itself was very likely the cause of the
shift to cultivation in the first place. In fact, Snooks
seems to have a general misunderstanding of the
relationship between technological development and the
standard of living. He insists, for example, that the
successful employment of the conquest strategy in ancient
civilizations raised the standard of living for everyone.
But this is very difficult to accept. Most peasant farmers
in agrarian civilizations were worse off, sometimes much
worse off, than both early Neolithic cultivators and
Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. The standard of living has
generally DECLINED throughout human history and prehistory,
at least for the average individual, and it was only with
the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution that
living standards began to rise dramatically for the mass of
the population.
[Page 353]
I also have some questions regarding Snookís
specific employment of his four economic strategies. To
take just one of the more prominent examples, consider
Snooksís claim that Europe between AD 1000 and 1500
relied heavily on the technology strategy. To support his
claim he is able to cite numerous examples of technological
development during this time, but isnít it just as
logical, if not more logical, to regard European societies
at this time as employing the commerce strategy. William
McNeill has argued that the world as a whole experienced a
tremendous jump in the level of commerce after AD 1000, and
certainly Europe, in particular the Italian city-states of
Venice and Genoa, was a huge part of this commercial
thrust. In fact, why separate the technology and commerce
strategies in this case. Could it not be persuasively
argued that Europe was using technological advance to
promote a commerce strategy, just as the ancient
civilizations promoted the development of military
technology to support their conquest strategies? And what
about the period since the Industrial Revolution? Once
again Snooks refers to this period as one characterized by
the use of the technology strategy, but could we not argue
that it was really the commerce strategy -- perhaps better
labeled the CAPITALIST strategy, since it was world
production as well as world trade that was involved -- that
was dominant and being served by technological advance?
Snooks is an economic historian, and THE DYNAMIC
SOCIETY reads like it was written by one. There is
certainly nothing wrong with that, but Snooks gets himself
into trouble by seldom if ever looking at world history as
a sociologist would. As already indicated, I agree with
the rational choice grounding assumptions of this book, but
one cannot simply stop there. This book seems to contain
ONLY individuals, there being little if any recognition of
the importance of social classes and economic inequalities
as strongly implicated in world historical development. A
glaring example of this absence involves Snookís
analysis of Roman conquest. As he puts it,
ìConquest was a business pursued to achieve the
materialistic ends of ALL ROMAN CITIZENSî (p. 293;
emphasis added). ALL ROMAN CITIZENS?! Does Snooks really
believe that the needs and concerns of all Roman citizens,
rather than those of Roman elites, were being considered by
the Roman polity in its mapping out of its objectives?
Indeed he does, for he says at the beginning of the book
that ìthe dynamics of human society arises from the
decision making not just of small elites but of all members
of society both male and female throughout the worldî
(p. xiv). Although elites may capture a disproportionate
share of the economic surplus, he says, they merely express
the general desires of humanity. If we shift our focus from
the ancient world to modern times, we run into a similar
problem. The modern world, many would say, is
quintessentially a capitalist world, but capitalists are
strangely absent from Snookís view of this world.
There are just individuals pursuing their economic
objectives, all of which are the same. Having said this,
it will come as no surprise to readers of this review that
Snooks makes no mention of world-system theory or any of
its formulators, a glaring omission it seems to me.
[Page 354]
Since I am running out of space, let me make just
two more critical points. I find highly persuasive
Snookís claim that societies select economic
strategies on the basis of what will produce, under
particular historical and social circumstances, the best
material results for the lowest costs. I think he is right
that the conquest strategy was the principal strategy of the
ancient world because it was economically superior to the
commerce and technology strategies. However, Snooks
provides precious little, if any, empirical evidence to
support this view, or for his view of the superiority of
the other strategies under different circumstances. Snooks
argues his case well, but hardheaded empiricists will be put
off by the lack of any convincing hard data to back up his
argument.
Finally, it should be noted that Snooks comes off
as a radical antienvironmentalist. He is openly hostile to
the view of scientists like Meadows, Meadows, and Randers in
their book BEYOND THE LIMITS that we need to be slowing
economic growth and reducing environmental depletion or
face possible catastrophe in the next century. For Snooks,
this is the worst possible prescription, for it would reduce
the intense competitive pressures that have been responsible
for economic growth throughout world history. And he is
certain that humans will be able to respond to the current
challenge with the technological means to make continued
economic growth possible. He could be right, of course,
but much more caution seems to be called for. Never before
has human society been confronted with the kind of
ecological impact that the current economic system is
generating, and never before has the time period within
which massive technological change is required been so
short. The current situation is, therefore, unlike all its
predecessors, and that should not be taken lightly.
My grand conclusions on Snooks are therefore mixed,
but I have to admit that I found this book tremendously
exciting. Who should read it? Quite simply, all scholars
who are concerned with BIG HISTORY, whatever their
theoretical orientation or political stripe. It should
have a wide audience, and will be both vigorously defended
by some and bitterly attacked by others. I am well aware
that its Darwinian and rational choice foundations will be
strongly resisted by world-system theorists, but I have
long believed that these are exactly the right assumptions
for world-system theorists to adopt. Indeed, for me
world-system theory only makes sense in light of such
assumptions. And this should be especially the case for
those, such as Frank, Chase-Dunn, and Hall, who wish to
posit world-system-like activities thousands of years
earlier than AD 1500. Letís face it, this is what
humans are like whether we like it or not.
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