Herbert Spencer made many astute assessments of the way societies work. He created theories to explain the way they grow and change and interact with one another. Spencer viewed society as an organism, and he referred to society as a super-organic system. He believed that, in both organic and super-organic systems, evolution was the result of the system becoming more differentiated. He emphasized three developmental tendencies shared by societies and organisms: 1) growth in size, 2) an increase in structure, and 3) an increase in functions. So, the more differentiated a society becomes, the harder it must work to integrate all of its parts. Spencer identified five basic stages of societal evolution: simple headless, simple headed, compound, doubly compound, and trebly compound. Then he said that each of these five stages has a regulatory system, an operative system, and a distributive system. Social control becomes an issue as a population and...