Power and rule, civilisations and the modern political dimension: parallelism, convergence and divergence in social evolution

ABSTRACT This paper discusses power in world history and then in the political dimension of modernity, contrasting it with how power was exercised in other civilisations. It mobilises key texts on large-scale historical sociology and evolutionary theories. In order to articulate a discussion on systems of rule, hierarchy, network and market, the analytical categories of justification and legitimation are introduced. To organise and frame the historical record, avoiding the pitfalls of unilinear theories of evolution, it also resorts to the concepts of homology and homoplasy, divergence and convergence, which are common occurrences in history. This has to do with limited possibilities for social evolution. Yet modernity surged as a stunning historic-evolutionary divergence, in which a specific process of differentiation took place, including that of a particular, and hitherto unheard of, political dimension. Authoritarian collectivism tried to supersede it but failed, entailing a backtracking of social evolution.