Extracts from reviews:
Peter Burn, Australian Economic History Review (September 1996)
Graeme Snooks' latest book addresses itself to and raises questions of fundamental significance. The Dynamic Society seeks to unmask the forces of change not only in human society but of life in general. Moreover, since the author identifies the essential character of human society (and of life in general) as one of change through time, the search for the sources of change becomes nothing less than a quest to expose the very 'nature of life itself' (p. 1).
The book presents an empirically based argument that life has developed in great evolutionary waves. These waves have not so much culminated as continued during the relatively brief, though prolific, period of human life. Just as life in general has evolved in a wave-like process of genetic transformation, human life has progressed in very long waves of technological development. The duration of these waves has tended to shorten while their amplitude has risen around an exponentially rising trend of material progress. The period since the industrial revolution has been the latest of these waves of genetic/technological evolution. The author uncovers a contradiction between the life-long struggle for survival and material well-being and the barriers to progress threatened by environmental thinkers.
The Dynamic Society is itself part of an unfolding story. In it Snooks weaves into a more coherent whole themes that appear in his earlier books. Furthermore, throughout the present work he indicates his plans to pick up several of the more critical threads that could not be treated in full in this single volume. These include the relationship between ideas and material existence and, most critically, an analysis of the 'secondary dynamic' surrounding social institutions in the evolution of human society . . .
What many would find too daunting a quest Snooks attacks with a straightforward confidence. The style is clear and overflows with metaphor; the application of the model in Chapters 8 to 11 inclusive is nothing short of breathtaking; there is an unshakeable faith in the inductivist methodology adopted; and the prognosis for the potential of human society is refreshingly optimistic . . .
As to the future, Snooks is thoroughly enthusiastic about the ability of human life to adapt to, and indeed to prosper from, emerging ecological constraints. There is, nevertheless, a sense m which The Dynamic Society carries a profound warning about the much poorer future which could emerge if 'ecological engineers' succeed in putting in place barriers to material progress (chapter 13).
-- Peter Burn, Australian Economic History Review, vol. XXXVI, no. 2, September 1996, pp. 104–6.
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In this extraordinary book, the Australian economic historian Graeme Donald Snooks seeks to do not only the impossible, but the unthinkable: construct a single theoretical model that is capable not only of explaining all of human history and prehistory, but all of the most important transformations that have occurred on earth over the past four billion years! And he nearly pulls it off. Snooks formulates a model that he variously calls MATERIALIST MAN or DYNAMIC MATERIALISM. This model assumes that both genetic and social change are driven by a similar mechanism, which is the desire to gain control over resources so as to maximize the probability of survival and material prosperity. Applied specifically to humans, Snooks's model holds that humans have an innate desire to increase their wealth and power. Indeed, he claims that they have an insatiable desire to accumulate material possessions. The history and prehistory of human societies is therefore a complex tale in which humans have adopted one or another of four basic strategies in order to achieve their objectives: family multiplication, technological advance, conquest, and commerce. Societies may use more than one of these, but one is usually dominant, especially in the most successful societies. Strategies are chosen for their effectiveness, within the total context of social, cultural, and historical circumstances, in promoting economic well-being and growth. However, any given strategy will eventually exhaust its potentialities, and a new one must then be taken up . . .
I found THE DYNAMIC SOCIETY to be an extremely provocative read and compelling in many ways. In my view one of the most compelling features of the book is its resolute materialism. Snooks not only defends his MATERIALIST MAN against what he regards as the conventional view of social scientists and historians, MORAL/POLITICAL MAN, but he grounds his economic materialism in a deeper Darwinian materialism. Humans, for Snooks, are Darwinian organisms, which is to say that they have been built for a struggle for survival and a maximization of material advantage. It seems to me that this grounding assumption is not only fundamentally correct, but absolutely necessary to a proper understanding of the nature of human society, its historical evolution, and its future possibilities.
Snooks's model of MATERIALIST MAN leads him to many crucial insights. One of the most important is his argument that people usually do not struggle for power for its own sake, but rather seek it because it will promote the realization of material advantage. Power, he says, is largely about economics. Perhaps the best example of this is war. Snooks has exactly the right response to Weberian theorists like Michael Mann who assert that the military objectives of agrarian civilizations were essentially independent of economic objectives. War in the agrarian world, Snooks tells us, was all about economics, because conquest was the most cost-efficient strategy of material gain . . .
My grand conclusions on Snooks are therefore mixed, but I have to admit that I found this book tremendously exciting. Who should read it? Quite simply, all scholars who are concerned with BIG HISTORY, whatever their theoretical orientation or political stripe. It should have a wide audience, and will be both vigorously defended by some and bitterly attacked by others. I am well aware that its Darwinian and rational choice foundations will be strongly resisted by world-system theorists, but I have long believed that these are exactly the right assumptions for world-system theorists to adopt. Indeed, for me world-system theory only makes sense in light of such assumptions. And this should be especially the case for those, such as Frank, Chase-Dunn, and Hall, who wish to posit world-system-like activities thousands of years earlier than AD 1500. Let's face it, this is what humans are like whether we like it or not.
-- Stephen K. Sanderson, Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 351–5.
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In this inspiring book Graeme Donald Snooks unravels the driving force of human society. His exploration starts at the beginning of life, some 4 billion years ago. Once we are able to understand the nature of life on earth, we may comprehend the dynamics of human society. The author is not afraid to challenge modern evolutionists by his claim that the development path of life can be explained by an empirical economic model. Charles Darwin's natural selection hypothesis was, in fact, influenced by Adam Smith. Evolution is, then, an economic rather than a physical problem - the struggle by species to gain access to scarce natural resources in order to survive.
Snooks's economic model is based on the concept of 'materialist man'. The basic driving force of mankind is to maximise the probability of survival and material prosperity (accumulation and consumption of tangible goods and services) over his lifetime. Materialist man is not the homo economicus of economic theory. Snooks is very explicit about its value. Short-run equilibrium analyses contribute very little to our knowledge about long run dynamic processes.
Materialist man tries to satisfy his demands in a highly competitive world, to which end he uses dynamic strategies: family multiplication, technology, conquest, and commerce. These choices are rational, because they aim at the maximisation of material returns, given expected benefits and costs. The ambitions of materialist man in human society have resulted in three technological paradigms: the Paleolithic Revolution (some 1.6 million years ago), the Neolithic Revolution (about 10600 years ago) and the Industrial Revolution (200 years ago). These fundamental changes in economic systems were the outcome of different dynamic mechanisms and dynamic strategies . . .
At the end of his fascinating and exciting exploration, Snooks teaches the lessons of dynamic society. His evidence suggests that human nature is genetically determined, unchanging, and unchangeable. Without the materialistic drive, the survival of mankind during the past millions of years would not have been possible. The world of today is, perhaps, facing the exhaustion of the industrial paradigm, but according to Snooks the dynamic society provides an answer. In his view the stationary state, in which there is no room for further technologically based expansion, can only be laid down by ecological dictatorship. However, if we stop technological change as a dominant strategy, there is only one remaining, undesirable, strategy left over: conquest, a dangerous game in the nuclear era. Snooks believes that our environment needs protection, but we should not forget what history tells us. The dynamic society will produce a fourth paradigm shift, and it will come soon. This conclusion is based on the fact that the technological shift of the Industrial Revolution took only 100 years. It is uncertain what this will bring us. According to Snooks a substitution of solar energy for fossil-fuel energy is plausible.
This well-documented book has much to offer and is highly recommended. Why should economists, as Snooks puts it ironically, when historical process is mentioned, lose interest and return to their computers?
-- Paul van de Laar, The Economic Journal, vol. 108, no. 446, January 1998, pp. 236–8.
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Graeme Snooks's new book The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources of Global Change (1996) is a veritable tour de force, beginning with the establishment of the universe 15 billion years ago and the emergence of life on Earth 4 billion years ago. It goes on to analyze the biosocial or sociobiological ascent of humankind and of human society over 2 million years, and the rise and development of civilization over the past 10,000. The author offers a novel interpretation of the causes of the industrial revolution 200 years ago and stresses the demographic revolution of the past 50 years. The political payoff from all this and more is the author's recommendation to face the future global ecological crisis by developing a new technological paradigm, rather than giving in to Club-of-Rome-type ecological limits to growth, the existence of which the author denies.
Snooks's resolute and uncompromising materialism is out of step with all manner of past and contemporary idealist positions: "A major message of The Dynamic Society, namely that the driving force is provided by an overwhelming desire to maximize material advantage, is both distasteful and unacceptable to many people [especially] intellectuals" (p. 13). "Ideas . . . do not constitute the driving force. This position is diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom" (p. 203). The real life or motor force of this long and still ongoing process, the author is at pains to demonstrate, is economic -- or more precisely materialist -- competition to use scarce resources for survival. The author himself refers to the simile of a great game of life on earth. The gameboard and the rules of the game represent the constraints of universal chemistry and terrestrial geology. However, "man [sic] makes himself." Indeed so does all life itself, for it is not a given or a mere product of chemical or natural forces. For the object of playing the game of life for all players derives from the genetically internalized ar~d selfish individ ual quest for material sustenance to permit survival. The open secret of this social process in The Dynamic Society is the economic competition with all other individuals, which itself requires and generates rational biological and social choice among different combinations of "dynamic strategies" and tactics to permit material sustenance and survival within these physical constraints. Thus, Snooks appeals to the authority of Darwin -- and of the evidence! -- to argue that natural, including social, selection is itself generated and driven by economic competition among all individual claimants for the scarce material resources that permit survival. Social institutions are only enabling derivative mechanisms. The idea that ideas or the intellectuals that formulate them move history is no more than the ultimate intellectual fantasy . . .
Snooks constructs a complicatedly simple model to explain endogenously driven social change. Decision-making individuals, acting during their own lifetimes in a competitive environment that is subject to transformation and whose rate of change is mostly much slower than a generation's life cycle, choose among available "dynamic strategies" to maximize their material well-being. Snooks's short summary of these dynamic strategies is procreation, predatation/conquest, generic/technological change, and symbiosis/commerce, and/or their combination in sets of such "dominant" and "dependent" strategies . . .
Snooks arrives at the practical political policy payoff from his tour de force: It is not that this new technological capacity now does or threatens to exhaust the physical and natural capacity of the Earth to support life as we know it, as environmental ecologists try -- wrongly, according to Snooks -- to persuade us. No, says Snooks, it is the dominant dynamic strategy of technology that itself requires and will undergo still another major paradigmatic shift. For "materialist man is the same yesterday, today and forever. Only the underlying economic conditions facing him have changed" (p.197). Human "dynamic society" can and will come up with the necessary and therefore economically rational dynamic strategy to face and overcome these new conditions -- if only its intellectuals will wise up and let it do so . . .
Snooks stresses that "a major expression of the humanist spirit of this book is my argument that the dynamics of human society arises from the decision-making not just of small elites but of all members of society both male and female throughout the world. . . . It may come as a surprise to some that focus upon fundamental economic forces involving a central role for materialist man should lead to an uncompromisingly humanist outcome" (p. xiv) . . .
-- André Gunder Frank,"Materialistically Yours: The Dynamic Society of Graeme Snooks", Journal of World History, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 107–15.
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