The Evolutionary Perspective
Chapter Four
Syllabus topic 1.4, "Theoretical Perspectives- Evolutionary, Functionalist, Conflict, Social Exchange theory, Symbolic Interaction, Post Modernism."
Pages 17 to 21 of 451
In one line
The evolutionary perspective says that societies develop through a series of stages, from simple to complex, in a direction that can be identified.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: evolutionary theories hold that human societies pass through definite and successive stages of development, moving from the simple, small and homogeneous towards the complex, large and differentiated, and that this movement is orderly, cumulative and, in the classical versions, progressive. Its leading names are Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan, and it dominated sociology in the nineteenth century.
Why the subject began here
The founders of sociology were writing when two things had just happened. Biology had produced a powerful account of how species change over time, and Europe had industrialised within living memory. Both suggested the same idea: that societies are not fixed, that they change in a direction, and that the direction can be discovered.
The appeal was enormous. A single scheme could arrange every society ever recorded, from the smallest band to industrial Europe, on one ladder, and could claim to explain the whole of human history by one principle. That ambition is the perspective's strength and, as the criticism below shows, its downfall.
The classical statements
Auguste Comte: the law of three stages
Comte held that human thought, and with it human society, passes through three stages: the theological, in which events are explained by the will of gods; the metaphysical, in which they are explained by abstract forces and essences; and the positive, in which they are explained by observed laws established scientifically.
Each stage carries a form of society and a dominant social group with it: the theological stage is the age of priests and of military rule, the metaphysical of lawyers and philosophers, the positive of scientists and industrialists. Comte is taken up fully in [Auguste Comte], which is where the law of three stages belongs to the syllabus; here he stands as the first evolutionist.
Herbert Spencer: the organic analogy and differentiation
Spencer treated society as an organism. As an organism grows it becomes larger, its parts become unlike one another, and those unlike parts become interdependent; and society, he argued, does the same. Social evolution is the movement from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, which is the phrase examiners like to see.
He drew from this a famous typology: militant societies, organised for defence and compulsory cooperation, give way to industrial societies, organised for production and voluntary cooperation. He also applied the language of survival of the fittest to society, and that application, social Darwinism, is the part of him that has aged worst.
The Evolutionary Perspective
Lewis Henry Morgan: savagery, barbarism, civilization
Morgan arranged human history in three great ethnical periods, savagery, barbarism and civilization, each with lower, middle and upper subdivisions, and tied the passage between them to technology: the bow, pottery, the domestication of animals, iron smelting, the phonetic alphabet.
Morgan matters for this syllabus beyond his scheme. He connected each stage to a form of family and a form of property, and Friedrich Engels took Morgan's scheme as the basis of his own account of the origin of the family. That is why he returns in [Theories of the Origin of the Family].
The common shape
Strip the three of their detail and the same skeleton appears in all evolutionary theories, and it is what an answer should identify.
- Change has a direction. It is not random.
- The stages are successive. A society passes through them in order.
- The movement is from simple to complex, from homogeneous to differentiated.
- The process is universal. All societies travel the same road, though at different speeds.
- In the classical versions, later means better. This last assumption is separable from the others, and modern versions drop it.
The perspective applied to law
Each perspective in this module is tested here on the same subject, so that the six can be compared.
An evolutionist looks at law and sees a sequence. Custom, unwritten and enforced by the group, comes first. Then custom recognised and declared by an authority. Then codes: written, public, applying to a whole territory. Then legislation, a standing machinery for making new law deliberately. Then specialised courts, professions, procedures.
Sir Henry Maine's proposition that the movement of progressive societies has been a movement from status to contract, from a condition in which a person's rights and duties are fixed by the group they are born into towards one in which they are fixed by agreements they enter into freely, is the best-known evolutionary account of law, and it is the one to cite. Durkheim's account of law moving from repressive to restitutive, in [Durkheim: Division of Labour and Social Solidarity], is another, though Durkheim is a functionalist and not an evolutionist in the classical sense.
A worked example
Take one village in the Konkan and ask an evolutionist's question about it.
Ramrao's grandfather cultivated land held by his family, made most of what the household used, settled quarrels before the village elders, and knew nothing written down about his rights. Ramrao cultivates the same land under a recorded title, sells his crop into a market whose prices are set elsewhere, banks with a cooperative, and took a boundary dispute to the civil court.
An evolutionist reads this as a stage transition. The society has moved from the simple towards the complex and the differentiated: functions once performed by the household and the village are now performed by specialised institutions, the bank, the registry, the court. Maine's formula fits the change exactly: Ramrao's position rests on a recorded title and a set of contracts, where his grandfather's rested on his standing in a family and a village. That is the movement from status to contract, visible in two generations of one household.
The Evolutionary Perspective
Now apply the criticisms to the same case, which is why the example is here. Nothing about this was inevitable: neighbouring districts with the same technology did not develop the same institutions, which is the objection to unilinear evolution. It is not obviously progress: Ramrao has a title his grandfather lacked and no elders who will settle his dispute in a week. And the direction was not produced by internal development alone but by legislation, land settlement and a market, which are external causes the perspective's mechanism does not name. The example supports the description and undermines the explanation, which is the fair verdict on this perspective.
Criticism
The perspective is examined as much for its faults as for its content, and there are five.
- Unilinear evolution is not supported by evidence. Societies do not all travel one road. Some skip stages, some reverse, some remain stable for centuries with no sign of the predicted development.
- It is ethnocentric. The ladder was invariably drawn with nineteenth century industrial Europe at the top, and every other society was ranked by how closely it approached that. The words savagery and barbarism are not neutral descriptions.
- It confuses change with progress. That a society is later and more complex does not make it better. Industrial societies produced industrial warfare.
- It was used to justify domination. Social Darwinism, and the claim that some peoples were at an earlier stage and needed to be governed by those at a later one, supplied a scientific vocabulary for colonial rule. This is not an incidental misuse; it was a mainstream application at the time.
- It explains too little about mechanism. Saying that societies become more complex does not say why, or what makes a particular society change at a particular moment.
Neo-evolutionism, associated with Leslie White and Julian Steward in the mid twentieth century, revived the perspective by giving up the worst assumptions: it dropped the single ladder in favour of multilinear evolution, in which different societies follow different lines of development, and it dropped progress in favour of a measurable criterion such as energy use or technological capacity. Mention it and the answer looks current rather than antiquarian.
What this perspective is NOT
It is not the same as social change. Social change is any alteration in social structure or culture, however small and in whatever direction, and is the subject of [Social Change: Meaning and Characteristics]. Evolution is a particular theory about the shape of long-run change.
The Evolutionary Perspective
It is not biological evolution applied to society. Some evolutionists borrowed the language, but societies pass on culture by learning, not genetically, and cultural transmission is far faster and can move backwards.
It is not extinct. Its assumptions survive, often unexamined, in words such as developed, developing and backward, which arrange societies on exactly the old ladder with new labels.
Distinctions worth having
| Evolutionary | Cyclical | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape of change | A line, from simple to complex | A circle or a wave: rise, maturity, decline, and again |
| Direction | Cumulative and one way | No permanent direction |
| Names | Comte, Spencer, Morgan, Maine | Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, Pareto |
| Mood | Optimistic in its classical form | Usually pessimistic, or at least resigned |
Both reappear as theories of social change in [Theories of Social Change], where the cyclical school is treated in full.
Quick revision
- Societies pass through successive stages, simple to complex, homogeneous to differentiated.
- Comte: theological, metaphysical, positive.
- Spencer: society as an organism; from indefinite incoherent homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity; militant to industrial.
- Morgan: savagery, barbarism, civilization, each in three subdivisions, driven by technology.
- Maine on law: from status to contract.
- Five common assumptions: direction, succession, simple to complex, universality, and (classically) progress.
- Criticisms: unilinear evolution is unsupported, ethnocentric, confuses change with progress, served colonial justification, and is thin on mechanism.
- Neo-evolutionism (White, Steward) keeps the idea but goes multilinear and drops progress.
Test yourself
1. State the central claim of the evolutionary perspective. That human societies develop through definite and successive stages, moving from the simple, small and homogeneous towards the complex, large and differentiated, and that this movement has an identifiable direction and is broadly the same for all societies.
2. Give Spencer's formula for social evolution and his two-fold typology. Evolution is the movement from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity. His typology contrasts militant societies, organised for defence and resting on compulsory cooperation, with industrial societies, organised for production and resting on voluntary cooperation.
3. What did Maine say about the movement of progressive societies? That it has been a movement from status to contract: from a condition in which a person's rights and duties are fixed by the family or group into which they are born, to one in which they are fixed by agreements the person enters into voluntarily.
4. Give three criticisms of the perspective. That unilinear evolution is not borne out by the evidence, since societies skip, reverse and stagnate; that it is ethnocentric, ranking every society by its distance from nineteenth century industrial Europe; and that it confuses change with progress and so supplied a justification for colonial rule.
The Evolutionary Perspective
5. How does neo-evolutionism differ from the classical version? It abandons the single ladder for multilinear evolution, allowing different societies to follow different lines of development, and it abandons the assumption of progress, substituting a measurable criterion such as technological capacity or the amount of energy a society can harness.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.