Comments on Charles Macdonald’s “Order Against Harmony

Authors

• Kenneth Sillander University of Helsinki https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9658-595X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.v33i2.116434

Abstract

Charles Macdonald has presented a highly interesting and inspiring paper. Its greatest value is indicated by the title: “Order against Harmony”. Its principal achievement is that he has presented a stimulating and widely relevant conceptual model of two basic types of societies: harmony- and order-oriented. Thereby he has created a very useful analytical scheme, one which may be used, among other things, for analyzing modernization in many contexts. For the small-scale harmony-oriented peoples that he discusses, modernity indeed usually involves increasing order-orientation. But order-orientation is of course not exclusively associated with modernity; it is an ancient invention almost inherently associated with the transformation of small-scale societies into large-scale societies, and there are also, as he indicates, small-scale, pre-modern order-oriented societies. One benefit of his model is precisely that it is does not approach things from the viewpoint of modernity, and that it is particularly designed for understanding certain conditions associated with so-called simplesocieties, which, unlike theories of modernity, it takes as the starting point, rather than treating as inverse mirror-images of ourselves.