ABSTRACT
The history of society is, among other things, that of specific units of people living together and definable in sociological terms. It is the history of societies as well as of human society, or of certain types of society and their possible relationships, or of the general development of humanity considered as a whole. One of the major themes of the history of modern societies is the increase in their scale, in their internal homogeneity, or at least in the centralization and directness of social relationships, the change from an essentially pluralist to an essentially unitary structure. The history of societies requires us to apply, if not a formalized and elaborate model of such structures, then at least an approximate order of research priorities and a working assumption about what constitutes the central nexus or complex of connections of our subject, though of course these things imply a model.
