Interactive Ritual Chains

On his blog Abandoned Footnotes, Xavier Marquez does an excellent, thoughtful review of Randall Collins' Interactive Ritual Chains. Between this review and the fact that I am thoroughly impressed by Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies, I am clearly going to have to tackle pretty much everything Collins has written. I think the idea of interactive ritual chains is very important, and given Marquez's tentative development of the idea into politics suggests the fruitfulness of this idea. I will particularly note that the first paragraph of his point 1 could almost describe chimpanzee social structures around the dominant male. Political ritual chains of this sort are indeed deep in our evolved psychologies. Now, while his point 1 does explain the emergence of organizational network structures, much of the rest is suggestive of how social self-organization can take place, from spontaneous orders to swarms. I think Austrian school economists could benefit a great deal from bringing in Collins' theories.