Primitive social theory: On the history of the ‘primitive concept’ in sociology and its applications under post-digital modernity

Abstract

This article offers a new account of the ‘primitive society’ concept in the history of sociology. While accounts and critiques of the primitive concept pervade adjacent disciplines, few have investigated the role of the primitive in sociological thought. This article contends that while ‘primitive society’ was often peripheral to the ‘classical’ generation of European sociologists, it became central to modernization theory’s efforts to build a generalized theory of global modernity. While the decline of modernization theory saw a coincident decline in the usage of the primitive concept, this article notes recent efforts by social theorists to revive the concept. The article concludes by arguing that the ‘primitive’ concept may be more useful in post-digital modernity than it was in 19th-century social science.

Many of sociology’s internal debates have concerned the nature, extent, and variation of modernization around the world. These debates often draw on the contrast between a celebrated Western modernity and an ‘invented’ conceptual opposite: the primitive society.

This implicit contrast would be hardened into more pointed theoretical and normative arguments by 20th-century modernization theorists. Thus, in a passage that fulfills his most unflattering caricature, Talcott Parsons (1966: 110) wrote that only a ‘radical cultural relativist’ would contend that the ‘primitive’ Arunta people were to be ‘judged as equals’ with ‘such modern societies as the Soviet Union’. Building atop the foundation of Parsons’ grand theorizing, modernization theorists would contend that modernity represented nothing less than an evolutionary leap beyond the primitive: stultifying traditional economies swept away by the energetic spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism, stale and oppressive hierarchies eliminated by rational and meritocratic order, and the prejudices of ancestral religion purified by unrelenting secularization.

However, the ascendance of modernization theory was soon challenged by the rise of postmodern social theory and the critical, post-Marxist theories of global exploitation offered by world-systems theory and dependency theory. With the breakup of modernization theory (and the fracturing of the ‘modern’ concept altogether), what became of its old antagonist, ‘the primitive’?

This article re-reads the history of the primitive concept in sociology. It does so with a special focus on the work of Talcott Parsons, whose work did much to synthesize and popularize ‘classical’ sociological theory and who worked to develop a general social evolutionary model centered on the development of primitive society. This revisionist account of sociological history demonstrates overlooked tensions between European sociology’s ‘classical’ generation and those subsequent sociologists who sought to popularize and generalize the sociological account of modernity. Just as significantly, though, this article advocates for what might be called ‘primitive social theory’. This position may seem out of place, even anachronistic, when read alongside calls for a new ‘digital’ form of theorizing (e.g. Roth, 2025; Roth et al., 2025). Yet the spirit of primitive social theory shares a core impulse with those who would seek to digitize the ‘false distinctions’ of social theory. Namely, the path to insight lies not in throwing away inherited ideas but rendering them intelligible for the present moment.

Advocates of the new digital social theory have suggested one path forward: ‘translating’ founding distinctions, like ‘capitalism/socialism’, into poles and scales in a relationship or some alternative distinction (e.g. Roth, 2023; Roth et al., 2025). In advocating for a primitive social theory, this article suggests an alternative. Namely, founding theoretical distinctions can remain rich sources for critical social theorizing. The primitive concept is a case in point: it offers jagged edges that contrast with the smooth processes of digital society while providing a more pointed social critique than those currently on offer.

The historical peculiarity of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ in 19th-century European sociology

Sociology has an ancient lineage. Yet it was only with the rise of European modernity that the discipline gained a degree of self-consciousness and public recognition. Its formalization in the late 19th century was no accident. This period saw the coincidence of both grand historical theorizing and the expansion of empirical social scientific methodology. Once combined, these impulses could yield the distinctly modern discipline of sociology.

And sociology was a modern discipline – not just by virtue of its maturation in 19th-century Europe, but also by virtue of its interests. The foundational works of its classical period were not solely interested in developing a generic science of humanity. Most shared a common fixation on the singular case of European modernization. For thinkers as varied as Tönnies, Marx, Weber, and Spencer, there was something distinct about 19th-century Europe, and that something needed to be explained.

Efforts to establish and explain European modernity took many forms. A range of empirical work on topics as varied as suicide rates, capital accumulation, and population density documented a clear shift in social organization during fin de siècle Europe. An equally eclectic range of concepts and theories accompanied these empirical efforts. New ideas like ‘anomie’ could illuminate the unique qualities of modern European life, while new theories, such as the labor theory of value, could explain emerging patterns of social organization.

Yet for all of their diversity, these empirical and theoretical efforts often began from a common, implicit assumption: that European modernity was distinguished not by its internal qualities but by a sharp binary contrast with some other, earlier age. In other words, classical sociology’s efforts to craft a social science of European modernity depended on a foundational binary contrast. But if modernity was one half of this binary, what was its opposite?

Many historical and critical accounts of sociology’s development have pointed to the notion of ‘tradition’ or ‘traditional society’ as serving this binary-oppositional function (e.g. Bendix, 1967; Nisbet, 1966). If modernity was a period in which, to quote Marx and Engels (2021: 67), ‘all that is solid melts to air’, tradition was a historical periodization characterized by ‘fixed-fast social relations’.

But if modernity referred to a definite set of historical processes clearly demonstrated in 19th-century Europe, what of tradition? Was there any substance to this binary opposition, or was it merely a useful fictional contrast helpful only in demonstrating the supposed uniqueness of Western modernity? Revisiting those classical works that offered the first and fullest accounts of Western modernity’s distinctive qualities suggests that ‘tradition’ was no conceptual straw-man, but referred to a definite historical period with clear and distinguishing empirical traits.

Consider Ferdinand Tönnies, whose work offers one of the clearest and most polemical arguments about the distinctive nature of European modernity found in 19th-century social science. For Tönnies (2002), gemeinschaft social groupings are those in which members ‘remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors’ (p. 65). They are united, fundamentally, by tradition. This is as true in political rule, which is ‘based on the nature of things and on tradition (concord, folkways, and mores)’ as it is in economics, wherein ‘detailed rules . . . have mostly been fixed by ancient custom’ (Tönnies, 2002: 58, 60). This is because gemeinschaft social groupings are defined, above all else, by a traditional culture – or, in other words, ‘a sacred tradition which determines and rests upon [a] natural distribution’.

Although the defining features of the gemeinschaft social grouping may appear abstract, they are established with reference to a specific case. Whether Tönnies is analyzing the economic, political, or cultural essence of gemeinschaft, the case for the concept is always made with reference to examples from feudal Europe. ‘Traditional politics’ is, for Tönnies, the politics of landed aristocracy. ‘Traditional economics’ consists of the accumulated farming practices developed by European peasants across the centuries. Indeed, the terms ‘feudal’ and ‘traditional’ are used interchangeably in describing gemeinschaft social groupings. While occasional references are made to other historical cases, these are secondary and cursory.

Tönnies’ use of European feudalism was hardly singular among members of the classical generation. Like Tönnies, Emile Durkheim introduced a powerful conceptual binary that demonstrated the distinguishing features of emerging European modernity. While Durkheim’s concepts of organic and mechanical solidarity differ quite markedly from Tönnies’ gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, he also relied on the case of European feudalism to demonstrate the difference between traditional, ‘organic’ societies and modern, ‘mechanical’ societies.

Thus, discussing how the power of tradition fades under modernity, Durkheim turned to demographic transitions that pushed feudal France into early modernity (specifically, the ways in which concentrations of younger workers in cities allowed for greater autonomy and significantly diminished the influence of the carriers of tradition, namely the elderly) (Durkheim, 1960: 293–294).

Similarly, in demonstrating the uniqueness of modern European industrial capitalism, Marx did not draw on abstract comparisons with a fictitious traditional society. Instead, capitalist modernity is shown emerging from European feudalism through the process of what Marx calls ‘primitive accumulation’. Whatever this concept may conjure in the reader’s imagination, Marx’s use of primitive accumulation was confined to the gradual emergence of the urban bourgeoisie in feudal Europe.

Marx, Durkheim, and Tönnies each developed a distinct social science of modernity. Taken together, and supplemented with a range of other thinkers, this project would eventually be called sociology. In these three thinkers, there is a common tendency to describe and explain the distinguishing features of 19th-century European society. One means of achieving this end was to draw powerful contrasts, specifically with ‘traditional’ social arrangements. Yet a reading of early and formative works in sociology demonstrates that such contrasts were not rhetorical or abstract. Instead, the ‘modernity’ of these authors was defined by concrete historical processes unfolding in 19th-century Europe, just as ‘tradition’ was defined in terms of the specific historical qualities of European feudalism.

Modernization theory: from ‘tradition’ to ‘the primitive’

As sociology developed and became more professionalized, it faced a dilemma: what to do with the intellectual legacy left by 19th-century European social scientists interested in explaining the birth of European modernity? One path forward, the path taken by thinkers like Norbert Elias, would be to continue the ‘great debate’ over European modernization, perhaps now with a more reflexive approach and greater sensitivity to historical variation (see Mennell, 2006). This, however, was largely the road not traveled (Elias himself working in relative obscurity for most of his career). Instead, a core task of those who followed the classical generation and sought to professionalize sociology was to generalize – even universalize – a binary set of concepts that were highly particular.

Efforts to de-provincialize classical sociological models have taken many forms, from Marxist studies of imperialism to world-systems theory and, most recently, efforts to craft a Southern Theory. Of these, none were as explicit in pursuing this goal as 20th-century modernization theorists. Starting with Parsons, modernization theorists sought to draw on classical European models of modernity to both explain and encourage modernization.

If the central goal of modernization theory was to produce a general theory of global modernity, then rethinking the foundational tradition-modernity binary formed an essential first step toward that end. The historical pathways to modernity traced by classical generation sociologists, in which feudal society (i.e. highly unequal, low-density agrarian societies bound by strong systems of traditional authority) was gradually replaced with any given theorist’s desideratum of variables, could be stretched to some cases outside of Europe. Japan, for example, invited comparison; its unique feudal history offered a case that appeared amenable to classical models of modernity and modernization (see Jansen and Stone, 1967).

Yet not all cases yielded to simple acts of theoretical translation. A range of societies never developed anything analogous to feudal social systems. The world was simply too crowded with small tribes, subsistence societies, nomads, and a range of other social forms that could not easily be subsumed into the classical vision of political and social development. To overcome this theoretical obstacle, modernization theorists had to extend and develop the story of modernity. Modernity could no longer be the story of fading feudal traditions displaced by incipient forces of rationalization, financialization, urbanization, and secularization. Instead, the story of modernity would be extended; its fundamental conceptual opposite was now something much more promethean: the primitive.

The sociological turn toward primitivism begins, surprisingly, with Talcott Parsons, the 20th-century structural functionalist often remembered for his triumphal account of Western modernity. It was Parsons who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for establishing a sociological canon and using the canonization project to establish sociology as a science of modernity. It is therefore noteworthy that Parsons, in his efforts to popularize and canonize 19th-century European sociology, largely overlooked that generation’s shared interest in European feudalism.

In his efforts to establish a sociological canon, Parsons famously exiled Herbert Spencer. This excommunication was striking; it occurred at the very beginning of Parsons’ 1937 book The Structure of Social Action. Contemporary readers may be aware, in the wake of postmodern criticism, of the exclusionary processes that accompany the canonization process. But such acts of exclusion are often surreptitious; Parsons, by contrast, ejected Spencer from the canon with the subtlety of a nightclub bouncer. His dismissal was as cutting as it was concise: ‘Who now reads Spencer?’ (Parsons, 1949: 3).

It is a phrase that is often remembered, though not often studied. Once examined, several things become clear. First, the vituperative question was not Parsons’ own but was borrowed from the historian Crane Brinton. Second, in opening his study with this question, Parsons was not being dismissive. This was a question prompted not by hostility but genuine curiosity.

Spencer presented Parsons with a serious intellectual challenge. Parsons sought to develop a generalized theory of social action. Two nascent sympathies accompanied this general goal: first, an explicitly evolutionary view of history; and second, an implicit political liberalism. It is for this reason that Parsons had to begin his canon-building by addressing Spencer, a thinker whose concerns presaged Parsons’ own efforts. Given these potential affinities, Parsons had to begin his canon-building project by addressing Spencer. Thus, despite potential similarities, Parsons finds Spencer an ‘extreme individualist’, and one whose individualism is overly reliant on the powers of rational deliberation to collectively achieve self-sustaining social equilibrium.

If Spencer’s liberalism was too utilitarian (i.e. too individualistic and too dependent on deliberative rationality), his vision of social evolution was too ‘Darwinian’, too fixated on conflict and fitness (Parsons, 1949: 4). Reading the first volume of Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, it is clear why Parsons, in his quest to build a new liberal evolutionary sociology, would need to exile the eminent Victorian. For Spencer, Western European society was more evolved than primitive society, and this fitness could be measured biologically. Whereas modern Europeans were cerebral, tall, healthy, and strong, members of primitive societies were defined as ‘less powerful’ and ‘ape-like’ (Spencer, 1898: §26–27). Cataloging the physical, emotional, and intellectual qualities of primitive society, with a focus on comparing them to modern (i.e. Western European) societies, Spencer repeatedly invoked this same analogy. Primitive society is to modern society as infant is to adult (the comparison is at times quite literal: Spencer suggests that ‘primitives’ have larger stomachs than ‘moderns’ because they exist in an infantile state) (Spencer, 1898: §26).

Spencer’s evolutionary theory, dependent on racist and pseudoscientific characterizations of ‘primitive society’, was out of favor by the mid-twentieth century. To develop a new theory of social action, one that might leave room for social evolution and liberalism but would be freed of Spencer’s extreme liberalism and social Darwinism, Parsons famously turned to 19th-century continental thought (focusing on Durkheim and Pareto in ‘The Structure of Social Action’). Yet, after developing a critique of existing social theory (one that extends from Spencer through his positivist and utilitarian perspectives), Parsons begins his substantive theorizing with an often-overlooked act of exegesis focused on the British political economist Alfred Marshall. While Parsons is sometimes credited with establishing the ‘classical’ canon of social theory (his work on Durkheim, combined with his translations of Weber doing much to popularize both thinkers in the English-speaking world), his interest in Marshall never proved contagious. Among contemporary sociologists, Marshall is mentioned less frequently than Spencer (or any other 19th-century social scientist, for that matter).

Why Marshall? Parsons suggests that Marshall developed an important break from the ‘positivist tradition’. For Parsons, Marshall offers a social theory, which contains many of the attractive qualities of Spencer without its faults. To start, Parsons argues that Marshall’s view of rationality is contingent and historically contextualized. Unlike competing modes of rationality, Marshall allows for a wider range of motivations (e.g. tradition, habit, and virtue) in human behavior while also suggesting that the economic rationality of modern, enterprising capitalists was historically contingent (rather than a natural tendency).

According to Parsons, the core goal of Marshall’s intellectual project is to explain the historical rise of a preferred present (the modern free enterprise system). To explain this phenomenon, Marshall develops a binary contrast between his vision of capitalist modernity, a society built on ‘free industry and enterprise’, and its theoretical opposite: the primitive society.

The contrast between modernity and primitivism offers a subtle but powerful alternative to the historical imagination of 19th-century European sociology. Whereas continental thinkers like Marx, Durkheim, and Tönnies were preoccupied with the transition from feudal tradition to modernity, Marshall was interested in the contrast between primitive societies and a modernity defined by free enterprise and economic rationality. Marshall’s social evolutionary theory could not accept European feudalism as a binary contrast with capitalist modernity. This is because Marshall saw the emergence of the petite bourgeoisie in European feudalism as an important evolutionary step toward 19th-century modernity (in other words, feudalism was the antecedent, rather than the opposite, of modernity).

Thus, Marshall’s development of the primitive concept, and Parsons’ reliance on Marshall, represents a development in the sociological study of modernity. However, what did Marshall mean by the term ‘primitive’? In a footnote, Parsons explains that for Marshall, ‘Custom forms the principal characteristic of the Primitive . . . adherence to it is both irrational and an indication of “sluggishness”’ (Parsons, 1949: 157). Parsons (1949) further elaborates that primitivism here refers to a universal category encompassing both ‘primitive peoples’ and ‘the original state of our own ancestors’ (p. 155).

Marshall’s ‘primitive’ concept serves an important purpose, never explicitly stated but visible in Parsons’ own theoretical contributions. For Parsons, and later for his students, the evolutionary development of Western Europe (and eventually North America) represents modernity in its purest form. This modernity was not merely a historical epoch but ultimately an aspirational social and political condition. If modernity is something to be aspired to, then a historical account of modernization centered on ‘traditional’ European feudalism will necessarily be limiting. By contrast, ‘primitive’ offers a generic, even universal contrast. Where the contrast between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ society drew attention to highly specified practices and relationships, the contrast between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ depicts far more generic contrasts.

Thus, in Parsons’ own writing on social evolution, he could draw implicitly on Marshall’s ‘primitive’ to offer a more generalizable, even global story of modernization. For example, in his writing on evolutionary universals in human history, Parsons writes of the great historical leap toward modernity: ‘the process of “breaking out” of what might be called “primitive societies”’ (Parsons, 1949: 301). Here, the process of modernization is far more generic than the historicized theories of Durkheim, Tönnies, or Weber. Where those sociologists saw modernity emerging from specific processes in European history, Parsons saw the same historical developments seeding in generic patterns of social stratification and political legitimation outside of kinship ties.

It must be restated that Marshall’s vision of social evolution does not seem to have had any direct effect on the historical development of sociology. Instead, his influence is felt indirectly, passing through Parsons’ own writing on social evolution, in which primitive societies demonstrate the deepest contrast with modernity. This contrast was carried forward by Parsons’ students and allies, most notably in one of 20th-century social science’s dominant paradigms: modernization theory. To take one example, leading modernization theorist Edward Shils, expounding on Parsonian theory in a general article on the nature of society, saw ‘primitive societies’ as those where Parsonian social elements (integration, value orientation, etc.) were undifferentiated in the figure of a single person, while modern societies saw the most intense differentiation and specialization across these same elements (Shils, 1961: 99).

Shils was not the only modernization theorist to draw on the Marshall-Parsons conceptual lineage of the primitive, nor was his conception of primitive society singular. Gabriel Almond (2005), another notable modernization theorist influenced by Parsons, also contrasted the intense differentiation of modern societies with the ‘primitive society [in which] the shift from economy to church to polity may be . . . imperceptible’ (p. 164). If modernization theorists were quick to adopt the primitive as a binary contrast with modernization, they did not abandon the notion of ‘traditional society’ altogether. Instead, notions of tradition tended to be decoupled from European feudalism (as in 19th-century social theory) and came to resemble the undifferentiated society of functionalist primitivism (as in Rostow’s account of economic modernization, see: Rostow, 1959).

It would not, then, be wholly accurate to say that the concept of ‘primitive’ entirely replaced ‘tradition’ in mid-20th-century sociology. Yet for Parsons, who sought to craft a science of modernity that could be generalized beyond 19th-century Europe, and for the modernization theorists who followed him, the concept of the primitive proved useful. Notions of the primitive allowed 20th-century sociologists to overcome the limits of classical accounts of tradition, which were concerned with the social practices, political organization, and daily habits of feudal Europe.

In generalizing the process of modernization, mid-20th-century sociologists also generalized the primitive, such that it eventually became broad enough to encompass everything from North American Indian tribes to European peasantry in the 15th century. In all cases, theorists of modernization positioned the primitive as that which, in its complete lack of differentiation, was completely opposed to modernity. At the same time, the guiding premise of this theoretical consensus foretold the inevitable decline, even extinction, of the primitive, destined as it was to be replaced by the rapidly differentiating forces of modernity. Ultimately, though, it was not the world-historical process of modernization that caused the decline of the primitive, but the emergence of a new, postmodern theoretical orientation that would spell its demise.

The primitive after modernization: endangered or reborn?

Although certain premises of modernization theory abide in contemporary sociology – assumptions about the interrelation of ‘economic development’ with political and cultural change, for example – the paradigm itself is now a relic of scientific history. If modernization theory stood for the triumph of Western-styled modernity, its demise reflected the rise of a new reflexive style in social science.

The critique of modernization theory rested in large part on its conception of modernity, a conception seen by a new generation of scholars following S.N. Eisenstadt’s conception of ‘multiple modernities’ as teleological. However, an equally substantial host of critics targeted modernization theory’s assumptions about primitive society. These latter critics contended that the ‘primitive society’ of modernization theory was no less than a container for Western sociology’s most obvious and enduring bigotries.

This position was initially articulated by those first, formative voices in what would become postcolonial theory. In ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said (2014: 231) argued that ‘Primitiveness therefore inhered in the Orient, was the Orient’. Here, Said observed a subtle irony: in dwelling on the ‘undifferentiated’ nature of primitive (Oriental) society, scholars in Europe and America were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, such that all acts of reason, artistic expression, or emotion could ultimately be attributed to the ‘primitive’ nature that defined Oriental society. For all of their differences, other key postcolonial thinkers would agree that the primitive was an essential category of thought for 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals in the Global North (Bhaba, 2012: 82; Spivak, 1999: 82–83).

These broadside critiques of the notion of the primitive were joined by more pointed critiques of the concept in social science. As early as 1964, anthropologist Hsu (1964: 177) set out to show ‘the empirical, theoretical, and practical obsolescence of the concept “primitive”’. In Hsu’s analysis of mid-century social science, he found that usage of ‘primitive’ was declining in peer-reviewed social science literature. This was, for Hsu, a cause for celebration; if the goal of social science was classification, then the classic primitive-modern dichotomy was a gross simplification.

Elsewhere, social scientists began to critique the use of ‘primitive’ by modernization theory. Scholars of dependency theory, a conflict-oriented model of economic development that would rival modernization theory, saw the ‘primitive’ concept as mere ideological subterfuge. In his 1972 book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney (2011) saw the social scientific deployment of the ‘primitive’ concept as a means to strip colonized people of their history, thereby justifying their colonization (p. 225).

By the late 20th century, a range of criticisms of the primitive concept were in circulation. It was Eurocentric, racist, simplistic, and anachronistic. In 1988, Adam Kuper could write of ‘The Invention of Primitive Society’, arguing that the concept of the primitive was not merely prejudicial, but illusionary, an invention of social scientists that was no longer fit for late 20th (and presumably early 21st) century practitioners. Here, finally, was the concept’s demise: not just hateful and inaccurate, but fictitious too.

Today, the concept of the primitive no longer occupies the place of centrality in sociology or social science that it once did. Where the concept is used, it is almost inevitably accompanied by scare quotes, a marker that allows for some degree of ironic distance between writer and concept.

Given the dramatic decline of the primitive concept, the use of the concept in any context other than genealogical critique is noteworthy. This is particularly true in those rare instances where the primitive is used as a catalyst for theoretical renewal. Two such efforts invite further consideration, their use of the primitive concept offering a stark contrast to the concept’s otherwise disgraced reputation.

The first effort at reviving the concept of the primitive comes from Jeffrey Alexander’s efforts to craft a ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology. Central to this effort has been Alexander’s revisionist account of Durkheim. Where Durkheim has sometimes been taken as a proto-typical modernist, a figure who drew deep distinctions between modernity and traditional society, Alexander contends that this is not the case. Instead, Alexander asks us to read Durkheim, especially the late Durkheim, as containing still valuable theoretical insights.

Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is fixated on identifying, defining, and analyzing the primitive (a word which appears nearly 200 times in the text). Like other 19th-century European social scientists, Durkheim’s analysis of the primitive draws on ethnological research carried out in colonial North America, Africa, and Australia. This is, in other words, a project that would seem ripe for postcolonial critique. Yet far from a colonial administrative science, further still from Spencer’s social Darwinism, Durkheim’s interest in the primitive is humanistic and universalizing.

The primitive, for Durkheim, is ‘that which is indispensable. . . that which is essential, that is to say, that which we must know before all else’ (Durkheim, 1915: 6). If the primitive lacks anything, it is mere luxury. Where some scholars of his time had sought to impugn religion generally by drawing associations to primitive ritual, Durkheim’s (1915) goal was equal and opposite: ‘when we turn to primitive religions it is not with the idea of depreciating religion in general, for these religions are no less respectable than the others’ (p. 3). Some had scorned or dismissed primitive intellectual life for its failure to distinguish and differentiate. But ‘If the primitive confounds things which we distinguish, he also distinguishes things which we connect together’ (Durkheim, 1915: 239). What the primitive reveals – about tribal life observed by colonists but also about modern life in the metropole – is that all distinctions in cultural life emanate from the original (i.e. primitive) distinction between the sacred and the profane. In locating this fundamental distinction, Durkheim (1915) suggests that ultimately ‘there is no abyss’ between modern scientific thought and primitive religious thought (p. 239).

How can contemporary social theory benefit from Durkheim’s understanding of the primitive? In Alexander’s (2021) analysis, contemporary cultural sociology should follow Durkheim and attempt to ‘recover the primitive in the modern’, to paraphrase the title of a recent article. ‘Working the binaries’ of cultural background representations, Alexander has analyzed electoral politics, revolutions, and the media. If the goal of modernization theory was to establish a sharp contrast between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’, the goal of Alexander’s cultural sociology, motivated by Durkheim’s work in The Elementary Forms, is the opposite, locating in modernity the endurance of cultural patterns often associated with the primitive.

The second notable effort to resuscitate the primitive concept comes in another act of swashbuckling revisionism, this time of Marx. Just as Alexander develops a novel interpretation of ‘late’ Durkheim, so too does Kohei Saito’s effort to re-read Marx depend on a ‘late’ Marx. In Saito’s reading of Marx, the father of modern communism experienced an overlooked transformation in his later thinking. At its essence, this transformation concerned a waning enthusiasm for urban industrial production coupled with an increasing concern for ecology. Saito’s green Marx provides the foundation for radical political economy tailored to the crises of the Anthropocene: de-growth communism.

How does Saito get from classic Marx, whose communism emerges from capitalism’s revolutionary, industrial, and urbanizing techniques, to Marx as a de-growther? For Saito, the answer passes through primitivism. Specifically, Marx’s late encounter with the work of historian Georg Ludwig Maurer and the botanist Karl Fraas encouraged him to revisit the idea of the primitive (Saito, 2022: 200). Specifically, these authors encouraged Marx to rethink the relationship between ecology, material relations of production, and radical equality. Where once Marx associated the primitive society with brute domination and passive adherence to tradition, he gradually came to associate it with a model for a more radically equal and more ecologically sustainable way of life. In Saito’s reading, Marx was energized and transformed, having found ‘what is newest’ (i.e. communism) in ‘what is oldest’ (i.e. the primitive society) (quoted in: Saito, 2022: 200).

Saito and Alexander offer recent radical attempts at revisionism. Each seeks to reinterpret the foundational concepts of sociological theory in order to revitalize it for a present crisis (in Alexander’s case, that crisis involves the fracturing of liberal democracy, in Saito’s that crisis is global ecological collapse). Although both invite controversy, these two projects diverge in nearly every meaningful way. That is except for their central concept – the primitive – which both authors use as the catalyst to build a new sociological vision. This prompts an obvious question: why now? Why, after decades spent trying to shirk the concept, should sociology return to the primitive?

Return of the primitive: a new ‘guiding distinction’ for digital modernity

The preceding paragraphs have not dared to engage in any bold revisionism on the scale of Alexander or Saito. Rather, I have attempted a simple re-reading of the history of sociology, focusing on the concept of the primitive. Such a re-reading must begin with an acknowledgment of the obvious: that the primitive concept has never played quite so central a role in sociology as it does in adjacent disciplines like anthropology. The ‘guiding distinction’ of 19th-century sociological theory has long been read, with some justification, as the distinction between modernity and tradition. What is less often observed, though, is that the ‘tradition’ of classical European sociological theory was historically particular, focused on the habits, customs, economics, and politics of European feudalism.

The historical particularism of this guiding distinction allowed for many of the original insights of Europe’s late 19th-century sociologists. Yet it also presented a limitation, both for the discipline of sociology and for the development of a more generalizable account of modernity. Little wonder, then, that those who sought to popularize sociology and widen the analysis of modernity beyond Europe’s borders would seek to develop a new guiding distinction. For Talcott Parsons and modernization theory, the concept of the primitive proved useful toward that end.

Yet the ascendence of the primitive in sociology was short-lived. A concept so deeply attached to the European colonial project, one which historically revealed the worst of Eurocentric prejudice, had little value in the era of postcolonial social science. The primitive disappeared from sociology as quickly as it had arrived.

That is, until recent acts of revisionism. An important conclusion of these revisionist histories is that the primitive has played a greater role in sociology’s canon than the discipline has understood. Where adjacent disciplines like anthropology have diligently excoriated the role of the primitive in their own disciplinary history, much work remains to uncover the extent and nature of the primitive concept in early sociological theory.

Beyond this historical novelty, though, is a more substantial theoretical concern: does the concept of the primitive hold any value for contemporary sociological theory? Viewed from our current location at the peak of digital modernity, such a question seems to answer itself. If the primitive appeared anachronistic at the end of the 20th century, surely it has been rendered obsolete by the epochal changes of 21st-century history?

Yet these recent acts of revisionism suggest that the concept may deserve further consideration. In fact, the very nature of digital modernity may require social scientists to take up the concept of the primitive. Here, I would like to suggest two possible uses for the concept of the primitive in contemporary sociology.

First, the primitive has a long association with what might be called romantic nostalgia. Here, the primitive is used to describe an Edenic, pre-historical condition. When this romantic, nostalgic variation of the primitive is used analytically, it will inevitably flatten the social complexity of whatever case it is applied to. Yet, this use of the concept – drawing vivid contrasts between the primitive and the present – need not be analytic. It can be put to better use in social critique. In this latter usage, the romanticized primitive is not used to describe some ‘Other’ society but instead is used to draw out the problems of the present.

Here, for example, is Marx (2015) in a footnote from Capital, using the primitive in exactly this way:

The primitive forester is owner of the primitive forest and uses the primitive forest as his property with the freedom of an orang-outang . . . As far as his health is concerned, such a man would well bear comparison, not only with the modern proletarian but also with the syphilitic and scrofulous upper classes. (p. 489)

Here, Marx is hardly analyzing an actually existing society; instead, he is critiquing his own society using a romanticized version of the primitive concept.

How does this attempt to preserve or revive the primitive concept stand in relation to ongoing efforts at forging a ‘digital social theory’ out of sociology’s founding theoretical distinctions? The very terms employed here suggest clear opposition (the meetings of primitivists and technophiles have never been friendly, and conscious efforts to synthesize the two, as in the case of the Burning Man festival, often conclude in the mud). Yet a clearer understanding of the work coming out of contemporary systems theory and others who seek to ‘digitize’ social theory reveals a commonality (e.g. Roth, 2025).

Where the Silicon Valley masters of digital society have often sought to ‘move fast and break things’, the advocates for the new digital social theory are marked by a conservationist spirit. They have cataloged founding distinctions in social theory not to purge them from use but to ‘digitize’ them (e.g. Roth et al., 2025). Such efforts at digitization mean freeing founding theoretical distinctions, like primitive/modern, from their self-limiting simplicity. This is done by either transforming distinctions into more complicated relationships (like poles on a scale or grades on a continuum) or locating distinctions within (rather than between) supposed oppositions.

Such efforts are laudable when attempting to craft an explanatory theory of social life. They are less valuable, though, when the goal is critique. To take Marx’s distinction between primitive forest peoples and modern factory workers as an example, little would be gained (and much would be lost) if the distinction were transformed into a (doubtless more accurate) scale of economic development. The point of the distinction lies not in its account of differences between one fictitious group and another, but rather in the radical and pointed critique of contemporary social life. As critical theorists have sometimes said, ‘the only truth is exaggeration’ (paraphrasing Adorno, 2005: 49). It is an aphorism that likely won’t satisfy systems theorists looking to build a new explanatory digital theory, yet it captures the role that dramatic distinctions have played, and could continue to play, in a critical social theory for the digital age.

The deployment of a romanticized ‘primitive’ in service of social critique may prove essential in the age of digital modernity. Every critic of digital modernity, whether amateur or academic, will be familiar with the canned rejoinder of the current age: that critique of ever more rapid technological innovation is only the shallowest luddism, a mere fear of the new. A romantic conception of the ‘primitive’ may inoculate against such charges, urging us to think in deep, epochal terms about the contrasts between digital modernity and that long, unnamed period which has been left behind. One of the more lasting accomplishments of modernization theory was to bequeath a version of the ‘primitive’, which accommodated everything from nomadic herding societies to the settled lives of feudal Europeans. Here, the ‘primitive’ shelters nearly all of human history, providing an even more powerful contrast with digital modernity.

While the primitive could prove a powerful conceptual cudgel wielded in critique of digital modernity, it need not be confined to this critical capacity. Handled with care, the primitive may also provide interpretive clarity. Modernization theorists made much of primitive society’s ‘undifferentiated’ condition, a state that offered clear contrasts with modernity’s unrelenting differentiation. Many have taken this conceptualization to be but the clearest depiction of Eurocentric bigotry. But others have found in it a kernel of truth, if not a truth countenanced by its modern advocates.

In his 1945 essay ‘Poesie et connescance’, Aime Cesaire, leading light of the Negritude movement and predecessor to the postcolonial turn, took the modernist view as true. Yes, rationalizing, calculating, and differentiating modernity was in stark contrast with the ‘unitary’ nature of the primitive. The fault of modernization theorists was not this guiding distinction, but the triumphant politics that underwrote it. For Cesaire (1982), differentiated modernity – the era of ‘reflection, observation, and experiment’ – was also an era in which ‘mankind has sacrificed everything: desires, fears, feelings, psychological complexes’ (p. 17).

For Cesaire, the primitive offered an anthropology of the whole human. What does this mean? Cesaire’s poetry suggests that, in contrast with modernity, which constantly ruptures the fabric of life with its classifications and differentiation, the primitive is that which pursues a continual unity. As Cesaire (2011) writes in his poem ‘Preliminary Question’, ‘The weakness of many men is that they do not know how to become either a stone or a tree’ (p. 125).

Digital modernity has proceeded to differentiate apace. Where early modernity pursued differentiation in knowledge and classical modernity in the differentiation of the social world, digital modernity pursues the differentiation of such basic elements of life as experience and physical sensation. Against these tendencies, a renewed analysis of the primitive may point to a more wholly human mode of existence. This analytic primitivism, coupled with the vivid contrasts of romantic primitivism, evokes a historical alternative to digital modernity, one in which humanity retains the ability to master the tools of its own invention.