Interdependence is core in the creation of groups, but from where do groups originate? What are the earliest groups? This would be the earliest form of social interdependence, right? Afterall, cities didn’t just spring up from the desert sands. Something came first.
Rousseau, Locke and de Jouvenel all focus on family as the earliest groups:
In the “On The First Societies” section of his noted work ‘On Social Contract’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated that, “The oldest of all societies and the only natural one is that of the family. The family is, if you will, the first model for political societies.”
In the “Of Political or Civil Society” section of the famous ‘Two Treatises Of Government’, John Locke, wrote, “God having made man such a creature, that in his own judgment, it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination to drive him into society, as well as fitted him with understanding and language to continue and enjoy it. The first society was between man and wife, which gave beginning to that between parents and children…”
In “The Group” section of his work ‘Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into The Political Good’, Betrand de Jouvenel wrote, “The ‘isolated’ man is not a natural phenomenon but a product of intellectual abstraction. That which is natural (in the sense of both primary and necessary) is the group. Without the group man is an impossibility. We issued from the womb in so helpless a state that, but for the protection and supporting cover furnished us by the group, we must have died. The group also imprints on us the human characteristics which at birth are only potential.” And de Jouvenel continued in “Of Social Friendship”: “But almost everyone subconsciously wishes to recover the warmth of the primitive group… the social breast at which he was formed, for the small, closely-knit society which was the school of the species. The small society, as the milieu in which man is first found, retains for him an infinite attraction.”
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