Since the days of the Greeks, scholars have recognized that individual societies share many of their characteristics with other societies and that these shared sets of characteristics can serve as a useful basis for defining sets of societies for pur- poses of analysis. Thus, Hippocrates, writing several centuries before the Chris- tian era, argued that societies could be usefully differentiated on the basis of cli- matic conditions. The members of societies in warm climates, he argued, tended to be clever, but they were also weak and wicked, while the members of societies in cold climates tended to be strong and stupid. Somewhat immodestly he argued that the members of societies in temperate climates—such as his fellow Greeks—
combined the good qualities of both the others, but not their weaknesses. In later centuries, others from ibn-Khaldun to Ellsworth Huntington carried on and ex- tended this tradition of analyzing sets of societies classified on the basis of geo- graphic characteristics.
Not long after Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle thought it important to differentiate between sets of societies defined on the basis of political or constitu- tional characteristics. Thus, Aristotle, in Politics, distinguished among monarchi- cal, aristocratic, and democratic societies, and subdivided each of these on the basis of whether the polity served the common good or merely the special inter- ests of the dominant faction or individual. This mode of classification, too, with various modifications and refinements continued to be popular until recent times, especially in political science.
Religion is another criterion that has often been used to define sets of soci- eties for scholarly analysis. For centuries, western scholars have speculated about the differences between Christian and non-Christian societies, and this line of thought has often been extended to discussions of differences between more spe- cific religious traditions. Thus, Protestant societies have been compared with Catho- lic, and Confucian with Puritan, as in the Weberian tradition.
Another widely used taxonomy of societies since the eighteenth century has been the one developed initially by Montesquieu, Turgot, and others, a system of classification that, as noted earlier, is based on societal modes of subsistence. While this method of classifying societies has undergone considerable modification and refinement since Montesquieu and Turgot, the basic underlying concept remains the same and the taxonomy continues to have great utility.
Working with different kinds of data, archaeologists of the nineteenth cen- tury developed a classification of societies based on the kinds of materials used in the manufacture of tools and weapons. The pioneer in this tradition, Christian Jurgenson Thomsen, a Danish museum curator, differentiated among Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age societies. Later, each of these categories was further subdivided, and this mode of classification remains in use today. Following the lead of V. Gordon Childe, however, a growing number of archaeologists have sought to link their discipline’s traditional taxonomy with that derived from the work of Montesquieu and Turgot, with the result that now one often encounters taxonomies that are based on a combination of criteria involving both subsistence technology and materials technology.
Linked to these last two types of taxonomies, but distinct from both, is that developed in the nineteenth century by Marx. Marx classified societies on the basis of technology (the “forces of production”) and social organization (the “rela- tions of production”). Thus, the Marxian taxonomy divided societies into ones practicing primitive communism, the domestic mode of production, the Asiatic mode, the Germanic mode, the Slavonic mode, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and advanced or modern communism (Marx, 1964, 1970). In recent years, neo- Marxists have proposed a number of additional categories to remedy deficiencies in the classical scheme. Accordingly, efforts to explain the failures of Soviet and
Problem and Method 25 other socialist societies led to discussions of developed socialist societies, bureau- cratic state socialist societies, deformed workers’ societies, and others (cf., e.g., Evans, 1977). In addition, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) has introduced the con- cepts of core societies, semiperipheral societies, and peripheral societies.
During the nineteenth century, many social scientists sought to establish a taxonomy based on the dominant mode of social organization in societies. Thus, Sir Henry Maine contrasted societies organized on the basis of status with those organized on the basis of contract; Ferdinand Toennies contrasted Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft; and Emile Durkheim (1893) contrasted societies based on mechanical solidarity with those based on organic solidarity. In recent decades, Morton Fried and Elman Service refined and extended these earlier, simplistic formulations. Specifi- cally, Service (1962) proposed the following taxa: egalitarian clan societies (i.e., all clans equal), hierarchical clan or gens societies (i.e., one clan or gens superior to the others), chiefdoms, paramount chiefdoms, minimal states, and states.
One of the more obvious tasks for theorists is to explain and predict how these different systems of classification, and the various sets of societies they have generated, are related to one another. How strongly are they correlated? Can the sets generated by one system of classification be regarded as by-products of the sets generated by another? If we are ever to have a science of human societies, it is essential that we come to understand the relationships among the various taxono- mies and, more especially, the variables on which they are based.
One possibility that needs to be considered is that some of the sets em- ployed today are actually subsets of another more inclusive set. Thus, it is possible, for example, to consider socialist and capitalist societies as subsets of industrial