Social Complexity I: Origins and Measurement

Abstract

What is social complexity? How did it originate in human societies thousands of years ago? How is social complexity measured? How is the emergence of complexity detected in a previously simple society? What do we know about the long-term evolution of social complexity? What does current knowledge about social complexity tell us about the likely features or plausible trajectory of future trends? This chapter covers both the "Cosmology" or "Big Historical Picture" of social complexity, as well as underlying foundations in CSS. It introduces facts, methods and theories about social emergence and subsequent dynamics, starting with the simplest social systems that originated in early antiquity and their long-term evolution. The chapter leverages materials from previous chapters, showing how ideas learned in previous chapters are essential for a deeper understanding of how social systems operate and can be modeled computationally. There are concepts, measurement methods, and theoretical models of social complexity in early, contemporary, and future societies. Accordingly, this generates something like a 3 x 3 matrix of topics. These are presented from a scientific perspective (i.e., the main sections of this chapter) rather than by historical epochs. The chapter ends with an overview of measurement, which leads to more formal approaches to description (laws) and explanation (theory) in the next chapters.