Authors
Peter Turchin
Abstract
This article engages with Mark Moffett’s proposed definition of society, which emphasizes shared group identification over social interaction, and argues for a different, problem-driven approach to definition in evolutionary social science. Rather than treating definitions as primary, I situate them within the broader research agenda aimed at explaining the Great Holocene Transformation—the dramatic expansion of human societies in scale and complexity over the past 10,000 years. My central analytical focus is on cooperation: the capacity of individuals to coordinate actions toward collective goals despite incentives to free-ride. Accordingly, society is defined here as a collective of individuals engaged in sustained cooperation, with interest group proposed as a more flexible and analytically useful term. Within this framework, polities represent a key subtype of interest groups, characterized by their role as independent political units whose persistence depends on maintaining cooperative cohesion, particularly among elites. Other commonly cited features of societies—such as group identification, territoriality, and intergenerational continuity—are treated as secondary mechanisms that support cooperation rather than defining properties. Ultimately, I argue that flexible, operational definitions are most valuable at intermediate stages of scientific inquiry, where they facilitate the construction and empirical testing of theoretical models.
Journal
Theory and Society
Publication Details
Vol. 55 · No. 4 · pp. 63
Cite This Publication
Peter Turchin. (2026). What is society? Theory and Society, 55(4), 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09709-8
Connections
Related work
The Great Holocene Transformation
What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies
Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states? During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological…
Current Research Projects
Combining quantitative analysis with large historical datasets, Peter Turchin and collaborators study how complex societies evolve, why they periodically enter crisis, and why some recover while others undergo severe breakdown.