Freedom and Necessity

An Introduction to the Study of Society

Joan Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315439020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Comparative Economics
• Index: Economics

Originally published in 1970, this book examines the origins of social organizations, the development of Robinson Crusoe economies and the conception of property or rightful ownership, as well as the origins of agriculture, race and class. Discussing commerce and the nation state, capitalist expansion and war between industrial power, the book is a concise yet comprehensive survey of the evolution of the structures of the world's economies and of the ideas which underlie them.

I
THE ORIGIN OF SOCIETY

CONSIDER the profiles of a dolphin and a herring. The resemblance between them consists in each being well suited to swimming. The evolutionary relationship between them is extremely remote. Presumably the lineage of the dolphin branched off from that of the fish in the palaeozoic age and in due course took to warm-blooded life on land. Returning to the water, the limbs of the dolphin’s ancestors became fins and the chunky profile of a quadruped became streamlined. In the fish and the dolphin, the same technical situation – the requirements of aquatic life – produced similar results, though working upon very different material.

There are many examples of this process in the similarities between animals in Australia and in other continents. Isolated in Australia, the marsupials evolved a highly diversified set of species including mice, rats, anteaters, wolves and many more, each closely resembling the creature that goes by the same name among placental animals and adapted to profit by similar food supplies. (Australia, however, produced also a type of its own, presumably because in arid land the only large animal that could survive had to have a wide range and capacity to travel fast.)

The plasticity which makes adaption possible does not depend mainly upon mutations in the genes which control heredity. (These are more often harmful than helpful to the species.) With sexual reproduction, the same stock of genes is passed on with continual permutations and combinations which produce minor variations in each brood or litter of young. Most species produce a number of young every year, while for a stable population (where the sex ratio is one to one) each female must be survived by two over a lifetime. The survivors of each generation are those whose genetic make-up is propitious to survival, that is, well suited to finding nourishment and avoiding enemies in the particular environment in which they grow up. Thus the pressure of technical conditions has carved out the multiplicity of creatures who appear to us to be so marvellously ‘designed’ for the life that they lead.¹

For a species, variability itself is propitious, within limits, to survival. The species capable of adaptation are, for the most part, the ones that have survived till today, though there are some which have proved successful with remarkably little variation.

The habits of a species are just as much subject to the pressure of evolution as its physical form. A great variety of types of family life exist in nature – monogamy, polygamy, and group marriage; continuous association, pairing during a limited breeding season or casual mating. The style of life of a species must be consonant with its way of getting a living. Thus, where the food supply is dispersed and requires skill to find or catch, the family unit consists of a pair looking after the young until they disperse to fend for themselves. The robin redbreast and the lion provide familiar examples. Where the food supply is more or less evenly spread over large areas, a gregarious style of life is possible; the herbivores of the prairies generally live in herds; feeding upon plankton permits group life for whales.

The problem of survival is not only to eat but also to avoid being eaten. Animals whose defence against predators is in hiding, nocturnal habits, or protective colouring are generally solitary. Birds that flock in winter, when they can rely upon flight, disperse to settle for nesting. The herds upon the plains cannot conceal themselves and rely upon group precautions or group defence. The great colonies of sea-birds of many kinds illustrate both principles at once, for they have a plentiful food supply and safe cliffs or islands on which to breed.²

For a species to be viable, its habits of life must fit its habitat, but there is an element in the mechanism of evolution which to some extent cuts across purely economic pressure; that is, sexual selection. In some species, particularly those which are polygamous, there is competition between males to get the most mates and to stimulate them most effectively. This gives survival value to gorgeous plumage which, however, is dangerously conspicuous, or an elaborate apparatus for ritual fights, such as the antlers of stags, which are useless for defence and put an extra burden on the needs of the individual for nourishment. Economic necessity, so to say, contains such extravagances and keeps them within bounds, for a species that went further in this direction than its environment permits would wipe itself out.

The most striking example of the principle that resemblances between species result from the pressure of circumstances rather than heredity is the fact that some of the closest analogies with human society are found amongst ants.³ They have specialized professions; some keep domestic animals to supply food; some capture the young of allied species and bring them up as slaves to work for them; amongst these, some of the master races have become degenerate and entirely dependent for life upon their slaves; in some, wars break out between settlements of the same species when they find themselves in each other’s way, a phenomenon which is unknown amongst other animals except rats and men. Clearly this has nothing to do with inheritance. The evolutionary relationship between ants and men is even more remote than that between fishes and dolphins.

Still less is there any reason to suppose that ants have subjective experiences that resemble those of which we are conscious in ourselves. But amongst warm-blooded animals and perhaps even among some fishes, it seems that the habits which survival requires are controlled by an apparatus of emotions. It is hardly likely that there will ever be any possibility of finding direct evidence of the subjective consciousness of another being, but even the strictest philosophical solipsist in daily life goes upon the assumption that other people have feelings. At one time, to attribute feelings to animals was considered sentimental and unscientific, but now the tide has turned and it is considered more sentimental to suppose that man is in every way totally different from his fellow mortals.⁴

To regard our own feelings as rooted in a biologically determined apparatus requires a certain degree of detachment. Take the example of hunger. We think that we desire to eat because food is necessary to life, but it is by no means so simple. We desire to eat because we are endowed with an apparatus that makes us feel hungry, and we are endowed with that apparatus because a species that lacked it would not have survived. In some illnesses the patient suffers a total absence of appetite; then to push external substances inside oneself seems not merely boring but actually abhorrent. An intellectual perception that food is necessary for life is not enough to get it down.

The connection of the survival of a species with sexual attraction and maternal devotion is perhaps more obvious. Even in this respect the similarities between humans and other species have been, so to say, moulded afresh by the requirements of survival, not directly inherited. Thus, in many human societies family life is organized around possessiveness and male jealousy. This can be observed amongst the birds in any garden. It has been fully described by Lorenz among grey-lag geese.⁵ But our cousins the chimpanzees are apparently immune from it.⁶

In the matter of habits, pressure upon the individual to conform to specifications is less strict than in the matter of physique. For Lorenz’s geese the standard pattern is lifelong monogamy, but few couples were found to conform to it – which led to the remark: After all, geese are only human!⁷ Sometimes, apparently by accident, a couple of two ganders was formed. Being stronger and more impressive than a normal pair of goose and gander, these couples flourished. From the point of view of their individual life they were a success, but a species in which this happened too often would die out.

Some degree of variation amongst individuals is not merely tolerable but actually advantageous for the species, for useful habits can be pioneered by nonconformist individuals.

In each group, some are more adventurous than others, bolder, more curious. Trying this and that, some particular genius finds out, say, a new source of nourishment and the discovery is disseminated by imitation. This must often have happened within historic times, as when sea-gulls first learned to follow the plough for worms or to look out for promising donors of bread in London parks. One example of it has occured very recently. Since milk bottles capped with tin foil or cardboard began to be left on doorsteps, tits have found out how to drink cream. (The first recorded observation in England was in 1921; in Holland the habit died out during the war for lack of milk bottles and sprang up again after 1948.) It seems that, in a number of separate localities, particular individuals discovered the milk bottles as a source of an agreeable article of diet, sometimes a few years after they first began to be available. From a number of independent centres the habit spread out in widening circles, presumably by the broad masses imitating the pioneers in each neighbourhood, and passing on the new lore from one generation to the next.⁸

The spread of a kind of drug addiction is seen in the case of English greenfinches. They feed upon the berries of an ornamental garden shrub which have an intoxicating effect. The habit is believed to have been started by a single pioneer in the Midlands. It has been spreading north and south, at the rate of a few kilometres a year, for more than a century.⁹

Though birds seem to have an apparatus of emotions which resemble our own, and although episodes such as learning to rob milk bottles might appear at first glance to imply insight into the nature of a problem, the conceptual apparatus of birds is very different from ours. They are equipped to respond to particular stimuli, not to analyse a situation. Thus, a bunch of red feathers on a stick will call out from a robin all the hostility appropriate to a rival male. When milk bottles with different-coloured caps were in use, tits in various suburbs specialized on one or other particular colour (the one, presumably, that the pioneer in each district first happened upon) and ignored bottles with caps of other colours that were standing on the same doorsteps. This seems to rule out insight as an element in this type of discovery. Rather the process consists in trial and error, the propensity to make new trials being strong in a small proportion of the population and the capacity to imitate successful trials being general.

Originality and individualism are useful to the species provided there is not too much of them. For the most part, conformity with the pattern of habits that has been proved viable must be imposed upon all. For this reason, a long helpless infancy, which in itself makes a species vulnerable, indirectly led to social life and a system for learning correct behaviour, which made a great leap forward in the process of evolution. The marsupials had much less need for it than the placentals. For them, mother and child are an independent unit; until a great age, joey can climb back into the pouch for safety. Moreover, Australia did not produce any large carnivore till man came on the scene, so that the struggle for survival was weaker than in other continents.

With placental birth and several years of growth to maturity, group life became necessary. In some species the group is a ‘nuclear family’ of a pair with their young, in others a large herd or troupe of many families.

‘Why does the group exist? Why does the animal not live alone, if not all year at least for much of it? There are many reasons but the principal one is learning. The group is the locus of knowledge and experience far exceeding that of the individual member. It is in the group that experience is pooled and the generations linked. The adaptive function of prolonged biological youth is that it gives the animal time to learn. During this period, while the animal learns from other members of the group, it is protected by them. Slow development in isolation would simply mean disaster for the individual and extinction for the species.

* * *

‘To emphasize the importance of learned behaviour in no way minimizes the importance of biology. Indeed, learning can profitably be viewed in the adaptive context of evolutionary biology. The biology of a species expresses itself through behaviour, and limits what can be learned. Evolution, through selection, ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Origin of Society
• 2 Isolated Economies
• 3 Land and Labour
• 4 Rage and Class
• 5 Commerce and Nationality
• 6 Capitalist Expansion
• 7 Interlude of Confusion
• 8 Industry and State
• 9 The New Mercantilism
• 10 Socialist Affluence
• 11 Another Way
• 12 The Third World
• 13 False Prophets
• 14 Science and Morality
• Index of Sources