"It was behaviorally modern humans, with their ultrasocial behaviors and complex societies that spread across the Earth, became increasingly larger scale societies, ultimately gaining the capacity to transform the entire Earth.
For most of human history, attaching military to rule would have been redundant, because almost all political regimes in large-scale societies of the premodern period fused military, religious, economic, and monarchical power.
What also unites these thinkers is the hope that there are alternatives to markets for organizing the economic life of large-scale societies.
I propose that signals of social identity facilitate assortment for successful coordination in large-scale societies, and that the multidimensional, context-dependent nature of social identity is crucial for successful coordination when individuals have to cooperate in different contexts.
Ferdinand Tönnies, in his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887; translated as Community and Society), sought to explain all major social problems in the West as the consequence of the West's historical transition from the communal, status-based, concentric society of the Middle Ages to the more individualistic, impersonal, and large-scale society of the democratic-industrial period.
Has any large-scale society succeeded without prosocial religion?
A well-designed landholding system should aim to ease the transitions of diverse customary tenure systems towards the requirements of a modern large-scale society.
His own project, FuturICT, envisioned a "planetary nervous system" to collect and analyze data on a large scale in order to model society and predict epidemics or the next financial crisis.
"Still, the large scale of modern societies is daunting," Ellis cautioned, "and for these trends to reach their full potential will require far greater strategic effort – just letting things happen will not yield a better future".
To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society's full range of resources.
