When ideas about society become programmes

Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner · 1860s–1910s

Herbert Spencer, one of the most widely read thinkers of the Victorian age, coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864, five years after Darwin's Origin of Species. He saw society as an organism evolving from simple to complex, and argued that competition weeded out the unfit. State aid to the poor interfered with this process. In the United States, William Graham Sumner of Yale, one of the first American professors of sociology, put it bluntly in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883): essentially nothing.

Political career

Gilded Age laissez-faire; opposition to labour laws and poor relief. Spencer was hugely popular among American industrialists. Variants fed into imperialism (“fitter” races ruling “weaker” ones) and into the eugenics movement, which led to forced sterilisation laws in the US, Scandinavia and, most murderously, Nazi Germany.

Odd twist

Spencer himself was an anti-imperialist and opposed militarism. And some early socialists and progressives were enthusiastic eugenicists too: the idea was never confined to the right.

Afterlife Discredited as science; “social Darwinist” is now mostly an insult. It survives as a warning about dressing up political preferences as natural laws — a warning that applies to claims that any particular arrangement of AI is “inevitable”.

Marxism and its children

Marx, Engels; then Bernstein, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg · 1848–present

No social theory has had a larger political career. Marx's analysis — capitalism is built on the exploitation of wage labour, it produces a polarised class structure, and it will be overthrown by the class it creates — became the official doctrine of mass parties across Europe within a generation of his death.

Then it split. Around 1899 the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein argued in Evolutionary Socialism that capitalism was not collapsing, the middle classes were not disappearing, and socialism could be reached gradually through elections and reforms. This “revisionism” was denounced by orthodox Marxists and became, in practice, the path of social democracy: the Scandinavian welfare states, the British Labour Party, the post-war mixed economy. Lenin went the other way: a vanguard party seizing state power. The result, after 1917, was the Soviet Union and eventually a third of the world's population living under governments calling themselves Marxist-Leninist, with the famines, purges and labour camps that came with them.

Left uses

Social democracy, democratic socialism, communism, trade unionism, much of anti-colonial nationalism.

Right uses

Mostly as the opponent that defined the twentieth century. But Marx's analysis of capitalism's restless creative destruction was admired by Joseph Schumpeter, who borrowed it to defend entrepreneurship.

In sociology

Class analysis (Erik Olin Wright), world-systems theory, labour process theory (Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974, argued that management deliberately strips skill from work — a thesis now reapplied to algorithmic management).

Afterlife The revolutionary predictions failed and the states built in Marx's name failed catastrophically. The questions — who owns the machines, who gets the surplus, what happens to workers when technology changes — are back at the centre of AI politics.

Solidarism and the welfare state

Émile Durkheim, Léon Bourgeois · 1890s–1940s

Durkheim's theory of organic solidarity had a political corollary: if people in modern society depend on each other through the division of labour, then they owe each other something. Léon Bourgeois, a French prime minister, turned this into a doctrine called solidarism in his book Solidarité (1896). Each person is born in debt to society — to everyone whose work built the roads, schools and knowledge they inherit — and that “social debt” justifies progressive taxation, public education and social insurance. Solidarism became the semi-official philosophy of the French Third Republic, a middle way between laissez-faire liberalism and socialism.

Durkheim also proposed rebuilding occupational groups — something like modernised guilds, joining employers and workers in each industry — to give economic life a moral framework and cure anomie. That idea had a darker afterlife. The corporatist regimes of the 1920s and 30s, in Mussolini's Italy, Salazar's Portugal and Vichy France, also organised society into state-supervised occupational corporations, though in a coercive, anti-democratic form Durkheim would have rejected.

Afterlife The idea that individuals owe a debt to the society that made them is the deepest justification for the welfare state, and it reappears in arguments that AI models trained on the collective work of humanity owe something back — through taxes, data dividends or public ownership.

Weber, leadership and Weimar

Max Weber · 1917–1920

Weber was not only a theorist of politics; he was briefly a participant. After Germany's defeat in 1918 he helped found the liberal German Democratic Party and advised on the drafting of the Weimar constitution. Worried that parliamentary politics would be captured by party bureaucrats and that the state bureaucracy would rule unchecked, he argued for a strong president elected directly by the people — a charismatic leader with a popular mandate who could stand up to the machine.

The constitution created a powerful, directly elected president with emergency powers under Article 48. Those powers were used in the early 1930s to govern by decree, bypassing parliament, and helped pave the way for Hitler. How much responsibility Weber bears is still debated; he died in 1920 and cannot be blamed for what others did. But the episode is a lesson in how a theory of legitimacy can be turned into a constitutional design with consequences its author did not foresee.

Afterlife Weber's typology of authority — traditional, charismatic, legal-rational — is still used everywhere. When people ask whether an AI system's decisions can be “legitimate”, they are asking a Weberian question: what makes people accept a decision as binding?

Elite theory and the iron law of oligarchy

Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels; later C. Wright Mills · 1890s–1950s

Three Italian-connected thinkers argued that every society, whatever its formal constitution, is ruled by an organised minority. Mosca called it the political class. Pareto described a “circulation of elites”, in which ruling groups decay and are replaced. Robert Michels, studying the German Social Democratic Party — the most democratic, egalitarian organisation of his day — found that even it had developed a self-perpetuating leadership. His conclusion, in Political Parties (1911), was the iron law of oligarchy: “who says organisation, says oligarchy.”

Right uses

If democracy is an illusion, why not rule by the best? Pareto welcomed Mussolini's rise and was made a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1923. Michels moved from socialism to fascism and joined Mussolini's party in the 1920s.

Left uses

C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956) used the same framework to criticise American democracy from the left, and G. William Domhoff's long-running Who Rules America? continues the tradition.

Liberal uses

Joseph Schumpeter (1942) accepted that elites rule but redefined democracy as competition between elites for votes, which became the standard model of “democratic elitism”.

Afterlife The iron law is regularly invoked about technology: open, decentralised projects (the early internet, open-source software, even AI labs founded as non-profits) tend to concentrate control over time. Whether that is an iron law or just a strong tendency is an empirical question worth asking.

Hegemony, left and right

Antonio Gramsci · written 1929–35, published from 1948

Imprisoned by Mussolini, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci filled notebooks trying to understand why revolution had succeeded in Russia but failed in the West. His answer was hegemony: in developed societies, ruling classes govern less by force than by consent, by making their worldview appear as common sense through schools, churches, newspapers and popular culture. Changing a society therefore requires a long “war of position” in civil society, not just a seizure of the state.

Left uses

Eurocommunism in the 1970s; the British New Left and cultural studies (Stuart Hall, who used Gramsci to explain “Thatcherism” as a hegemonic project); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theory of populism, which influenced Podemos in Spain.

Right uses

The French Nouvelle Droite of Alain de Benoist, from the late 1960s, openly advocated a “Gramscianism of the right”: win the culture first and politics will follow. The idea that “politics is downstream of culture” is now a commonplace of the American right.

Afterlife A rare case of a theory adopted with equal enthusiasm at both ends of the spectrum. It frames current fights over recommendation algorithms and AI models: whoever shapes what seems like common sense — including what a chatbot treats as neutral — holds a kind of hegemony.

Critical theory and 1968

Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse; later Habermas · 1930s–1970s

The Frankfurt School argued that advanced capitalism had absorbed the working class through consumerism and mass culture. Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) claimed that affluent society created “false needs” and smothered dissent by tolerating it. Since workers had been co-opted, Marcuse looked to students, racial minorities and the Third World as agents of change. The book became a manifesto for the New Left in the US and West Germany, and Marcuse was a hero of the 1968 student movements.

The relationship was not simple. Adorno called the police when students occupied the Institute in 1969, and the students in turn disrupted his lectures. Critical theory influenced the movements more than it endorsed them.

Since the 1990s, a conspiracy theory about “Cultural Marxism” has claimed that the Frankfurt School deliberately plotted to destroy Western civilisation through multiculturalism and political correctness. Historians and scholars of extremism describe this as a conspiracy theory that echoes the Nazi-era smear of “Cultural Bolshevism”, and note that it has appeared in the manifestos of several far-right attackers.It is possible to criticise critical theory's influence on the humanities, and many conservative and liberal scholars do, without the conspiracy narrative. The distinction matters: one is an intellectual argument, the other an accusation of a secret plot.

Afterlife “Instrumental reason” and “the culture industry” are the ancestors of most critiques of algorithmic media. An endlessly personalised feed is a culture industry that no longer needs to standardise its product.

Modernisation theory and the Cold War

Talcott Parsons, Daniel Lerner, W. W. Rostow, Seymour Martin Lipset · 1950s–1960s

Functionalist sociology produced a theory of development: societies move from “traditional” to “modern” along a single path, shedding particularistic loyalties, adopting achievement-based roles, urbanising, industrialising and secularising. Lipset argued in 1959 that economic development is a precondition of stable democracy. The economic historian W. W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) set out five stages ending in “the age of high mass-consumption”, and gave the book a revealing subtitle: A Non-Communist Manifesto.

This was not academic. Modernisation theory became the intellectual basis of American foreign aid in the Kennedy and Johnson years, of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and, in the hands of Rostow — who became Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser — of the strategy in Vietnam. Social science and the national security state grew close. In 1964–65, the US Army funded Project Camelot, a social-science study of the causes of insurgency, with Chile as a planned site. When Chilean academics exposed it, the scandal led to its cancellation and a lasting debate about the ethics of sociology in the service of the state.

Afterlife The single-path model is largely abandoned in sociology, though the correlation between wealth and democracy that Lipset described remains a central topic in political science. The idea of one universal road to modernity reappears whenever AI is presented as something every country must adopt in the same way and in the same order.

Dependency and world-systems

Raúl Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Immanuel Wallerstein · 1950s–1980s

Latin American economists and sociologists turned modernisation theory upside down. Poor countries were not “behind”; they had been made poor by their position in the world economy, exporting raw materials on worsening terms of trade and importing manufactured goods. Andre Gunder Frank called it the “development of underdevelopment”. Wallerstein generalised the idea into a world-system of core, semi-periphery and periphery.

Political career

Import-substitution industrialisation across Latin America, promoted by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America under Prebisch; the non-aligned movement; the call by developing countries at the UN in 1974 for a New International Economic Order.

The irony

Fernando Henrique Cardoso co-wrote one of the classic texts, Dependency and Development in Latin America (1969, with Enzo Faletto). As President of Brazil from 1995 to 2002, he carried out privatisation and market-oriented reforms. He argued his theory had always allowed for “associated dependent development”; critics on the left were unconvinced.

Problem

The rapid growth of South Korea, Taiwan and later China, through export-led industrialisation, was hard to square with strong versions of the theory.

Afterlife Dependency thinking has a vigorous second life as data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019) and debates on “digital sovereignty”: countries supplying raw data and cheap annotation labour while importing finished AI from a few companies in the core. See the AI section.

Spontaneous order and the market

Friedrich Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society · 1940s–1980s

Not every influential social theory came from sociologists. The economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek argued that societies are too complex for any planner to understand. Knowledge is dispersed among millions of people, and only the price system can coordinate it. Social order is “spontaneous” — the result of human action but not of human design — and attempts to impose “social justice” from above lead, as he argued in The Road to Serfdom (1944), towards tyranny.

In 1947 Hayek convened the Mont Pelerin Society, a network of liberal economists and intellectuals, which over the following decades helped build the think tanks and arguments behind the policies of Thatcher and Reagan. Thatcher's “no such thing as society” line was, in context, an argument for personal responsibility; but it neatly captured a deep disagreement with the sociological tradition.

Afterlife Hayek's knowledge argument is now used on both sides of the AI debate. Some say AI, by processing vast data, could finally make central planning workable; others reply that AI centralises knowledge in a few firms, which is exactly the danger Hayek warned about — just in private hands.

Poverty: culture or structure?

Oscar Lewis, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Murray, William Julius Wilson · 1959–present

Few academic arguments have shaped as much policy as the one about why poverty persists. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis described a “culture of poverty” in 1959: present-orientation, fatalism and family instability that, once established, passed between generations. Lewis himself saw it as an adaptation to capitalism and supported radical change. But the idea was soon read as blaming the poor.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Labor Department official and trained sociologist, wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. It argued that slavery, discrimination and unemployment had weakened Black family structure and that this was now an obstacle in itself. Moynihan intended it as a case for jobs programmes. It was attacked by civil rights leaders as blaming victims, and later cited by conservatives as vindicated. Charles Murray's Losing Ground (1984) argued that welfare itself created dependency, and influenced the 1996 welfare reform signed by Bill Clinton.

The sociologist William Julius Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged, 1987; When Work Disappears, 1996) offered a structural answer: the loss of industrial jobs from inner cities, and the departure of middle-class families, created concentrated poverty. Culture mattered, but as a response to structure.

Afterlife Current research mostly rejects the either/or (see Mario Small, David Harding and Michèle Lamont's 2010 reconsideration of culture and poverty). The debate's logic shapes AI directly: a model that predicts who will default on a loan or reoffend implicitly treats some patterns as properties of individuals, when they may be properties of their circumstances.

Feminist theory and intersectionality

Simone de Beauvoir, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Raewyn Connell · 1949–present

Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) argued that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”: gender is made socially. Sociology took the distinction between biological sex and social gender into the core of the discipline from the 1970s, and showed how gender organises work, family, violence and the state. Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift (1989) documented the unpaid domestic work employed women did after work. Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity (1980s) described a dominant ideal of manhood that subordinates women and other men.

The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined intersectionality in 1989 to describe how Black women fell through the gaps of anti-discrimination law: a company could hire Black men and white women and so be found to discriminate against neither Black people nor women, while hiring no Black women at all. Patricia Hill Collins developed the sociological version as a “matrix of domination”.

Political career

Second-wave feminism; equal pay and anti-discrimination law; “gender mainstreaming”, adopted at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995; intersectionality in equality policy and in progressive movements.

Opposition

From the 2010s, campaigns against “gender ideology” have spread across Europe, Latin America and Africa, often led by religious and nationalist groups who see the idea of socially constructed gender as a threat to family and nation. Critics within feminism have also debated the relation between sex and gender.

Afterlife Intersectionality became a technical concept in AI. Buolamwini and Gebru's “Gender Shades” study (2018) showed facial analysis systems performed worst on darker-skinned women, a failure invisible if you only checked error rates by gender or by skin tone separately. See the studies.

Social capital and the politics of community

Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman, Robert Putnam · 1980s–2010s

“Social capital” has three parents with different politics. For Bourdieu (1986) it was a resource of the privileged: the connections that convert into jobs and influence and reproduce inequality. For James Coleman (1988) it was the networks and norms that help communities function, such as parents who know each other's children. Robert Putnam, a political scientist, made it famous with Bowling Alone (2000): Americans were joining fewer clubs, unions and churches, and civic life and trust were declining as a result. He blamed television and generational change more than anything else.

Political career

Communitarianism (Amitai Etzioni); the World Bank's social capital programmes of the late 1990s; the rhetoric of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; David Cameron's “Big Society” from 2010, which critics said used community language to cover public spending cuts.

Disputes

Critics argued Putnam missed new forms of association and that the concept was too vague to test. Others noted that strong in-group ties can exclude outsiders: “bonding” social capital can be the glue of a mafia as well as a church.

Afterlife The large 2022 Nature studies by Raj Chetty and colleagues used Facebook friendship data on 72 million people to measure social capital directly, and found that friendships across class lines (“economic connectedness”) were among the strongest predictors of upward mobility. See the studies.

The Third Way

Anthony Giddens · 1994–2008

Giddens is the clearest recent case of a sociologist directly writing a governing philosophy. In Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way (1998), he argued that globalisation, individualisation and the knowledge economy had made both old-style social democracy and free-market neoliberalism obsolete. The answer was a renewed centre-left that accepted markets but invested in education and skills (“social investment” rather than passive welfare), combined rights with responsibilities, and modernised public services.

Tony Blair's New Labour adopted the language explicitly; Giddens, then director of the LSE, was an adviser. Similar ideas shaped Bill Clinton's “New Democrats” and Gerhard Schröder's Neue Mitte in Germany. Giddens later sat in the House of Lords, where he served on its 2017–18 select committee on artificial intelligence.

Afterlife Critics on the left argued the Third Way surrendered to neoliberalism and contributed to inequality and, later, to the populist backlash. Defenders point to large investments in education and health. The “reskilling” answer to AI-driven job loss is pure Third Way.

Risk society and green politics

Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens; ecological modernisation theorists · 1986–present

Beck argued that the central conflict of advanced societies was shifting from the distribution of wealth to the distribution of risk — nuclear, chemical, genetic, climatic. These risks are produced by modernisation itself, are often invisible without expert science, and cross borders. Society becomes “reflexive”: it must deal with the consequences of its own success. Beck's ideas, published the year of Chernobyl, became influential in German politics and in the Green movement.

Afterlife The precautionary principle in European environmental law and the framing of AI as a matter of risk management both descend from this line of thought. The EU AI Act is organised explicitly in tiers of risk. Beck's warning still applies: a society that runs on risk calculations becomes dependent on experts whose judgements are hard to contest.

Broken windows

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling · 1982–present

In a 1982 article in The Atlantic, the political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling argued that visible disorder — broken windows, graffiti, public drinking — signals that nobody cares, invites more serious crime, and should be policed firmly. They cited an informal 1969 experiment by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who left cars in the Bronx and Palo Alto and recorded how quickly they were vandalised.

Political career

Order-maintenance policing in New York under Commissioner William Bratton in the 1990s, followed by mass stop-and-frisk. A US federal court ruled in Floyd v. City of New York (2013) that the city's stop-and-frisk practices violated constitutional rights.

Evidence

Crime fell sharply in New York in the 1990s — but also in cities that did not adopt the strategy. Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush (1999, 2004) found that disorder and crime both stemmed from low “collective efficacy” (neighbours' willingness to intervene for the common good) and that disorder did not directly cause most crime. Some field experiments have found modest effects of cleaning up disorder. The overall evidence is contested.

Afterlife Predictive policing software inherited this logic of targeting places and minor offences, and with it a new problem: the data it learns from records where police went, not only where crime happened. See the AI section.

Deliberative democracy

Jürgen Habermas, James Fishkin and others · 1980s–present

From Habermas's theory of communicative action came an ideal of democracy as reasoned discussion among equals, not just the counting of votes. Researchers built institutions to test it: deliberative polls, citizens' juries, participatory budgeting (begun in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989) and citizens' assemblies of randomly selected members of the public.

The best-known case is Ireland's Citizens' Assembly (2016–18), ninety-nine randomly chosen citizens whose recommendations on abortion led to a referendum in 2018 in which voters repealed the constitutional ban by about two to one. Assemblies have since been held on climate in France and the UK, among others.

Afterlife Several AI developers and researchers have experimented with deliberative methods to decide how models should behave, and with using language models to help large groups find common ground. Whether a machine can facilitate deliberation without steering it is a very Habermasian worry.

Explaining populism

Cas Mudde, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Arlie Hochschild, Justin Gest · 2004–present

The rise of populist parties and leaders since the 2000s has become a major subject for sociology and political science. Cas Mudde's widely used definition (2004) treats populism as a “thin” ideology that divides society into a pure people and a corrupt elite. Explanations divide roughly into economic ones (deindustrialisation, the “China shock” to manufacturing jobs, austerity after 2008) and cultural ones. Norris and Inglehart's Cultural Backlash (2019) argues that rapid changes in values produced a reaction among older and less educated voters who felt like strangers in their own countries.

Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), based on five years among Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, tried to understand their politics from the inside. She described a “deep story”: people waiting patiently in line for the American Dream, watching others cut in front with the government's help. The book was praised for its empathy across political lines, and criticised by some for underplaying race and by others for treating conservatives as subjects to be explained.

Afterlife Social media algorithms are often blamed for populism. The evidence is more mixed than the headlines: see the large 2020 US election studies in the studies section. Hochschild's method — listening across an “empathy wall” — is a reminder of what no dataset replaces.