The Semantics of Political Science

That an animal, presumably a cousin of the simians and certainly very similar to them, has developed societies in which millions and even hundreds of millions of individuals live and act together in orderly relation to each other is one of the astounding facts of history; and an impartial observer would hardly be surprised if the incredibly intricate network of cooperation, overstrained, should suddenly tear apart. The aggregation of men into huge organized groups is, of course, relatively recent. For a million years or longer men or near-men lived an animal-like existence, scattered in small groups. It was not until fifteen or twenty thousand years ago that men, perhaps as a consequence of unprecedented pressure from the environment, organized groups of any considerable size; it is only within the last three or four thousand years that large-scale societies have existed; and it is only in the last three or four hundred years that complex orderly interplay and interaction among individuals and subgroups in societies have been developed.