From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy: An Evolution of Human Polity

Victor N. Shaw

Oct 2020 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy.

The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.

About the author

Victor N. Shaw, PhD, is a Professor of Sociology, Criminology, and Justice Studies at California State University-Northridge. He is interested in the study of crime, deviance, social control, organizational behavior, higher education, and public policy, and has published widely in those areas. He is the author of Substance Use and Abuse: Sociological Perspectives (2002); Career-Making in Postmodern Academia: Process, Structure, and Consequence (2004); Crime and Social Control in Asia and the Pacific: A Cross-Border Study (2007); Conspicuous and Inconspicuous Discriminations in Everyday Life (2013, 2015); Three Worlds of Collective Human Experience: Individual Life, Social Change, and Human Evolution (2018); and five other academic books.