How Societies Change

I've looked far and wide for a boad brush description of cultures that among other things would explain why the west is currently ascendant, something much more detailed than just saying "Industrial Revolution," yet still accessible to a generalist. I finally found it in this slim volume. Apparently targeted at college sociology course reading lists, it also serves the curious general reader quite well. It's pleasing and intellectually satisfying to have such a broad sweep laid out so succinctly. This book avoids the pole of too much depth and erudition--hundreds and hundreds of pages of rather obscure analysis, parts of which are outdated or irrelevant. One need only browse the references in this book to see the difference between its sources and itself. Materials written by Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Karl Marx and many many others tend to be decades old and to mix insights with errors and irrelevancies so that grasping them is difficult without a fairly thorough academic background. This book also avoids the other pole of being too superficial to be useful--simply saying Industrial Revolution as if that answered all questions. A brief description of how very early human societies (hunter gatherer) were organized opens the book. Next it discusses agrarian societies in some depth: how did they come about? how widespread were they? how did various people live in them? what problems did they bring? Then it covers the question of why the west grew to dominate, including the historical roots of how it happened, relationship to enlightenment ideas, the economic transformation at the base of the dominance, and its consequences (empires, nationalism, the importance of commerce, etc.). Next the modern era is analyzed in some detail: industrial cycles and their effect on various states, other political movements such as Marxism and facism, and a short discussion of ecological pressures. The conclusion is a combination of an explicit description of the underlying theory, listing of a few problems that may be faced in the future, and a summing up of the approach to social change illustrated throughout the book. Of course many of the points the book makes in its context also touch peripherally on other fields ...but the book doesn't lose its focus by chasing these other threads. Here are just three examples: i) Agricultural peasants are so conservative because they instinctively understand that a single negative experiment may mean the end of their existence. ii) Marxism ruled so much of the earth then fell apart so rapidly because it over-generalized the problems of the first industrial cycle (based on textiles) to suggest solutions that were increasingly mismatched to the problems of later industrial cycles. And iii) warfare was the only realistic way to compare the strength of different agrarian cultures.