Three dimensions of society
When characterising eigenmodes below, I described the typical behaviours of each society under three headings: political, economic and social. These may be defined as follows:
- Political: power relations, or the ability of some parties to control the activity of others.
- Economic: mechanisms for distributing scarce resources through exchange of goods and services.
- Social: perceptions of unity, mutuality and membership of groups with definite identities.
Some people talk about the dimensions using different terminology, perhaps of their own invention. For example:
| Political | Economic | Social | |
| Rudolf Steiner (philosopher) | Political | Economic | Spiritual-cultural |
| Arnold Toynbee (historian) | Political | Economic | Cultural |
| Pitirim Sorokin (sociologist) | Compulsory | Contractual | Familistic |
| Kenneth Boulding (economist) | Threat (do this or else) | Exchange | Integrative |
| Peter Cruttwell (independent theorist) | Power | Subsistence | Metaphysics |
| Guy Siebold (defence scientist) | Vertical | Horizontal | Organisational or social |
It does not really matter what we call them. The important thing is to recognise that collective human behaviour has these three distinctive aspects.
The reason why some writers prefer 'cultural' instead of 'social' is perhaps that 'social' can be used in a general sense to describe all collective behaviour, including the political and economic. However, the phrase 'political, economic, social' is well established and, so long as we are aware of the issue, it should not cause any problems. Context is enough to indicate which sense is meant in a particular case.
Note also that, as Steiner's and Cruttwell's terminology implies, 'social' or 'cultural' implies ideological aspects. To be part of a social group means to subscribe to values and beliefs that characterise that group, including religious, spiritual or metaphysical ideas.
It is worth remembering the ancient Greek and Latin origins of these terms:
| Term | Origin | Meaning | Comment |
| Political | πόλις (polis) | city | The city is the focus of power relations, where elites have their governmental bureaucracies or where people come together to argue, debate and seek office. |
| Economic | οίκος (oikos) | household | The household has to feed and provide for itself, through its own production and through exchange in the market. |
| Social | socius | friend | Friends share their outlook on life and feel themselves bound together with a common interest and obligations of mutual support. |
Some theorists have denied the three-dimensional model.
- The sociologist Talcott Parsons supplemented the model with 'military' and 'religious' dimensions. However, military affairs could be seen as an aspect of the political dimension, in its widest sense of power relations, while religion could be seen as an aspect of the social dimension, in its widest sense of common identity and group membership.
- 'Rational choice theory' contends that all behaviour can be reduced to just one dimension: the economic. According to this, people obey the law or help out loved ones because of what they get out of it, i.e. the benefit of not being punished or the sheer pleasure of being kind and loving. However, this fails to deal with the common-sense perception that a motorist stopping at a traffic light or a mother feeding her baby is engaging in a different kind of activity from buying and selling in the market. With rational choice theory everything interesting is treated as a trivial background assumption about what people would prefer, whereas the behaviours giving some people power over others or giving others a sense of shared interest are really what we need to model and explain.
In science, a theory or model cannot be judged by its correspondence to some intrinsic or absolute truth. Even if such absolute truth exists we do not have access to it. Instead, we must judge theories by how useful they are. It is therefore not a case of Parsons or rational choice theory being 'wrong' and the three-dimensional model being 'right', but of which is richer and more satisfying in describing human sociality. The three-dimensional model is consistently popular in this respect, while that of Parsons has not been taken up and rational choice theory is less in vogue than it was. Nevertheless, the model's merits will not be found in a priori arguments, but depend on its ability to deliver worthwhile results.
Important. Although these three dimensions can be distinguished from each other theoretically, they are mixed together in actual human behaviour. For example, tax-paying is compulsory and therefore belongs to the political dimension, but there is an element of exchange, in that taxpayers receive benefits in return for their taxes, and they are perhaps motivated too by a sense of community responsibility, so that the economic and social dimensions are also involved. It is rare, if not impossible, for an activity to be classifiable as purely political, purely economic or purely social.
