THE GROWTH OF STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION IN SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Thus, it is an historical law that mechanical solidarity, which first stands alone, or nearly so, progressively loses ground, and that organic solidarity gradually becomes preponderant. But when the mode of solidarity becomes changed, the structure of societies cannot but change. The form of a body is necessarily transformed when the molecular relationships are no longer the same. Consequently, if the preceding proposition is correct, there must be two social types which correspond to these two types of solidarity.

If we try to construct hypothetically the ideal type of a society whose cohesion were exclusively the result of resemblance, we should have to conceive it as an absolutely homogeneous mass whose parts were not distinguished from one another, and which consequently had no structure. In short, it would be devoid of all definite form and all organisation. It would be the actual social protoplasm, the germ out of which all social types would develop. We propose to call the aggregate thus characterised, a horde.

It is true that we have not yet, in any completely authenticated fashion, observed societies which complied in all respects with this definition. What gives us the right to postulate their existence, however, is that the lower societies, those which are closest to this primitive stage, are formed by a simple repetition of aggregates of this kind. We find an almost perfectly pure example of this social organisation among the Indians of North America. Each Iroquois tribe, for example, is composed of a certain number of partial societies (the largest ones comprise eight) which present all the characteristics we have just mentioned.