Unilineal evolution

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Unilineal Evolution
Theory of
Cultural evolution
Key concepts(both disproven):
  • All cultures evolve the same way
  • Western society is the of highest-evolved culture
Terminology on cognition

Unilineal evolution, also referred to as classical social evolution, is a 19th-century

academic
circles.

Intellectual thought

Theories of social and

European thought. Prior to the 18th century, Europeans predominantly believed that societies on Earth were in a state of decline. European society held up the world of antiquity as a standard to aspire to, and ancient Greece and ancient Rome produced levels of technical accomplishment which Europeans of the Middle Ages sought to emulate. At the same time, Christianity taught that people lived in a debased world fundamentally inferior to the Garden of Eden and Heaven. During the Age of Enlightenment
, however, European self-confidence grew and the notion of progress became increasingly popular. It was during this period that what would later become known as 'sociological and cultural evolution' would have its roots.

The Enlightenment thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages of increasing development and looked for the logic, order and the set of scientific truths that determined the course of human history. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, argued that social development was an inevitable and determined process, similar to an acorn which has no choice but to become an oak tree. Likewise, it was assumed that societies start out primitive, perhaps in a Hobbesian state of nature, and naturally progress toward something resembling industrial Europe.

Scottish thinkers

While earlier authors such as

mercantile
society.

Philosophical concepts of progress (such as those expounded by the German philosopher

Comte de Saint-Simon developed these ideas. Auguste Comte in particular presented a coherent view of social progress and a new discipline to study it: sociology
.

Rising interests

These developments took place in a wider context. The first process was

US Constitution which were paving the way for the dominance of democracy
, forced European thinkers to reconsider some of their assumptions about how society was organized.

Eventually, in the 19th century, three great classical theories of social and historical change were created: the social

social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to the present and future events. Those theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the laws of history
.

Birth and development

While social evolutionists agree that the evolution-like process leads to social progress, classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories, known as theories of unilineal evolution. Social evolutionism was the prevailing theory of early socio-cultural anthropology and

Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer. Social evolutionism represented an attempt to formalize social thinking along scientific lines, later influenced by the biological theory of evolution
. If organisms could develop over time according to discernible, deterministic laws, then it seemed reasonable that societies could as well. This really marks the beginning of Anthropology as a scientific discipline and a departure from traditional religious views of "primitive" cultures.

The term "classical social evolutionism" is most closely associated with the 19th-century writings of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase "

collectivity
) is the unit of analysis that evolves, that evolution takes place through natural selection and that it affects social as well as biological phenomenon.

Progressivism

Both Spencer and Comte view the society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growth—from simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalization to specialization, from flexibility to organization. They agreed that the process of societies growth can be divided into certain stages, have their beginning and eventual end, and that this growth is in fact social progress—each newer, more evolved society is better. Thus progressivism became one of the basic ideas underlying the theory of social evolutionism.

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte, known as father of sociology, formulated the law of three stages: human development progresses from the theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings, through metaphysical stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from them until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship. This progress is forced through the development of human mind, and increasing application of thought, reasoning and logic to the understanding of world.

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer believed that society was evolving toward increasing freedom for individuals; and so held that government intervention, ought to be minimal in social and political life, differentiated between two phases of development, focusing is on the type of internal regulation within societies. Thus, he differentiated between

decentralised, interconnected with other societies via economic relations, achieves its goals through voluntary cooperation and individual self-restraint, treats the good of the individual as the highest value, regulates the social life via voluntary relations, and values initiative, independence, and innovation.[1]

Regardless of how scholars of Spencer interpret his relation to

gilded age
all developed theories of social evolutionism as a result of their exposure to Spencer as well as Darwin.

Lewis H. Morgan

social institutions, organisations or ideologies have their beginning in the change of technology.[2]
Morgan disagreed with the accusation of unilinealism, writing:

In speaking thus positively of the several forms of the family in their relative order, there is a danger of being misunderstood. I do not mean to imply that one form rises complete in a certain status in society, flourishes universally and exclusively wherever tribes are found in the same status, and then disappears in another, which is the next higher form...[3]

Morgan thus argued that the forms evolved unevenly and in different combinations of elements. Morgan's theories were popularised by Friedrich Engels, who based his famous work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" on it. For Engels and other Marxists, this theory was important as it supported their conviction that materialistic factors—economical and technological—are decisive in shaping the fate of humanity.

Émile Durkheim

division of labor
.

Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan.

Anthropologists

indigenous people, who they claimed represented earlier stages of cultural evolution that gave insight into the process and progression of cultural evolution. Morgan would later have a significant influence on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who developed a theory of cultural evolution in which the internal contradictions in society created a series of escalating stages that ended in a socialist society (see Marxism
). Tylor and Morgan elaborated upon, modified and expanded the theory of unilinear evolution, specifying criteria for categorizing cultures according to their standing within a fixed system of growth of humanity as a whole while examining the modes and mechanisms of this growth.

Their analysis of cross-cultural data was based on three assumptions:

  1. contemporary societies may be classified and ranked as more "primitive" or more "civilized";
  2. There are a determinate number of stages between "primitive" and "civilized" (e.g. band, tribe, chiefdom, and state),
  3. All societies progress through these stages in the same sequence, but at different rates.

Theorists usually measured progression (that is, the difference between one stage and the next) in terms of increasing social complexity (including class differentiation and a complex division of labor), or an increase in intellectual, theological, and aesthetic sophistication. These 19th-century ethnologists used these principles primarily to explain differences in religious beliefs and kinship terminologies among various societies.

Lester Frank Ward

There were however notable differences between the work of Lester Frank Ward's and Tylor's approaches.

sociogenesis
, which is the science of shaping the society to fit with various political, cultural and ideological goals.

Edward Burnett Tylor, pioneer of anthropology, focused on the

evolution of culture
worldwide, noting that culture is an important part of every society and that it is also subject to the process of evolution. He believed that societies were at different stages of cultural development and that the purpose of anthropology was to reconstruct the evolution of culture, from primitive beginnings to the modern state.

Ferdinand Tönnies

neo-evolutionism
.

Critique and impact

Franz Boas

The early 20th century inaugurated a period of systematic critical examination, and rejection of unilineal theories of cultural evolution.

culture history
approach focused on anthropological fieldwork in an attempt to identify factual processes instead of what he criticized as speculative stages of growth.

Global change

Later critics observed that this assumption of firmly bounded societies was proposed precisely at the time when European powers were colonizing non-Western societies, and was thus self-serving. Many anthropologists and social theorists now consider unilineal cultural and social evolution a Western

World Wars that occurred between 1914 and 1945 crippled Europe's self-confidence[importance?]. After millions of deaths, genocide
, and the destruction of Europe's industrial infrastructure, the idea of progress seemed dubious at best.

Major objections and concerns

Thus modern socio-cultural evolutionism rejects most of classical social evolutionism due to various theoretical problems:

  1. The theory was deeply ethnocentric—it makes heavy value judgements on different societies; with Western civilization seen as the most valuable.
  2. It assumed all cultures follow the same path or progression and have the same goals.
  3. It equated civilization with material culture (technology, cities, etc.)
  4. It equated evolution with progress or fitness, based on deep misunderstandings of
    evolutionary theory
    .
  5. It is contradicted by evidence. Some (but not all) supposedly primitive societies are arguably more peaceful and equitable/democratic than many modern societies.[citation needed]

Because social evolution was posited as a scientific theory, it was often used to support unjust and often

racist social practices—particularly colonialism, slavery, and the unequal economic conditions present within industrialized Europe
.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Ron Bolender".
  2. ^ Morgan, Lewis H. "Ancient Society by Lewis H. Morgan 1877".
  3. ^ Morgan, Lewis Henry (1877). Ancient Society. Henry Holt and Co. pp. 461–462.
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