To begin, one considers the fundamentals of any society, the most foundational of which population, of which society is comprised. Conventionally, population has been classed as the human populace of a society, which provides an acceptable definition for population, at least for now. This populace requires sustenance to maintain, such as nutritional, emotional, social, medical, etc., which in turn requires labour to satisfy; for brevity, any matter relating to labour, whatever the product or manner of its production, is simply referred to as labour; manufacturing, research and development, entertainment and so on are all considered as labour, with productivity being the rate at which said labour is produced. In addition, one also includes capital as a means of measuring the worth of labour and acting as a means of exchanging goods and services, to aid and facilitate societal mechanisms.

Furthermore, one introduces and defines the term social contract as the prevailing agreement of the citizenry of a society, implicitly or explicitly, that dictates how said citizens relate and interact. The citizenry is the portion of the population that can act autonomously, either following the contract or not. As such, the social contract is a dynamic entity, with citizens’ autonomy defining many of the terms within a contract. The terms on which other terms can change are usually included in the contract itself, though a lack of proper recourse can lead to contravention of the social contract and introduction of these terms, through reform and revolution. The contract may also include cultural terms, not solely legal; regional differences in lifestyle are thus variations of the same contract, providing those regions fall under the same regime, obviously. Thus, the social contract can be considered to express the usual routine of a society, its political, cultural, socioeconomic and other behaviours.

Regardless of the content of its terms, a social contract is never unopposed; even in such a society where all agree on intent, demographics differing in circumstance result in differences of opinion, inevitably leading to conflicting views. Any given society will require a diverse range of vocations to sustain itself, which can lead to the aforementioned difference in opinions through differences in experience and expertise. These disparities are only those that are considered economically relevant; difference in belief, race, culture and so on only add to these complications. Hence agreement, or disagreement, is introduced and defined here as the degree of acceptance, or opposition, to any number of a social contract’s terms. The more terms that are accepted/opposed, the larger the supporters/opponents’ numbers and the greater their collective capital, the larger the agreement/disagreement. To this end, society tends to establish a leadership,

an agency that the citizenry either submits to or otherwise entrusts with organizing and administering the social contract; as such, a leadership is defined as any such entity acting as a recognized representative of a social contract.

These four features related by a single behavioural entity are proposed to be the most fundamental system necessary for a society to exist. Furthermore, the interrelation and interaction of each within such a system is similar to what one would consider an economy, such determining productivity, profit, sustenance, agreement, etc., across society; thus, economy, and economic, will be used to refer to such interdependencies and related phenomena. Concordantly, one complements this model with a final measure, the metric of civilization; this phenomenon is characterised as a gauge of the distribution and dynamics of capital, labour and agreement across all of society in optimizing said distribution and dynamics. Thus, a civilized society consistently distributes capital and labour across society to sustenance of the population and to the satisfaction of the majority of the citizenry, which in turn ensures cooperation and capability to participate with the current social contract.

Though introduced as a metric, one generalizes civilization to also refer to both a state and a process; the state of civilization is to have achieved the aforementioned criteria, while the process of civilization is the reorganisation of society in pursuit of said state. Similarly, civil and civilizing refers to phenomena supplementing either process or state, while uncivil and uncivilizing intuitively refer to impedances of both. Though not entirely fundamental, civilization is considered a necessary addition to society, as a means of ensuring its viability at any given moment, present or future; indeed, the means of civilization are not always constant, changing with the circumstances of a given society. Thus, one concludes the approach by which this treatise proposes to evaluate society and so now turns to its application.