Social Evolutionism and the Stage Schemes

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The stage schemes read the history of human society as a sequence that every society passes through in the same order, from simple to complex, with living peoples standing at different points along it. They are the arrow reading of the unfolding sense applied to societies: one direction, many societies on it at once. The same history is told from the side of philosophy of history in Deep time and evolution.

The nineteenth-century ladder

Auguste Comte’s law of three stages, in the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), held that knowledge and society pass through a theological, a metaphysical and a positive stage; his word was progress. Herbert Spencer made evolution the name of a universal law, the passage from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and applied it to society in a sequence from militant societies, organised for war, to industrial ones, organised for exchange. Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) treated the customs of living peoples as survivals of earlier stages, and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) gave the ladder its most detailed rungs: lower, middle and upper savagery and barbarism, then civilisation, each opened by an advance in the arts of subsistence, from fire and the bow to pottery, domestication, iron and writing. Keying the stages to technology became the schemes’ lasting habit.

The break

Franz Boas’s “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” (1896) argued that the ladder was assumed rather than found: similar customs could arise from different histories, and each culture had to be understood through its own. What Marvin Harris later called historical particularism became the founding stance of American anthropology.

The return

Leslie White brought evolution back in 1943 with an energy law: culture evolves as the energy harnessed per person increases, or as the efficiency of its use improves. Julian Steward’s Theory of Culture Change (1955) proposed multilinear evolution instead, regularities arising where societies adapt in parallel to similar environments, and Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service’s Evolution and Culture (1960) distinguished general evolution, the rise of complexity across culture as a whole, from specific evolution, the adaptation of particular cultures to their settings. The stages came back with new rungs. Service’s Primitive Social Organization (1962) ordered societies as band, tribe, chiefdom and state, and Gerhard Lenski’s Power and Privilege (1966) and Human Societies (1970) classed them by subsistence technology, hunting and gathering, horticultural, agrarian and industrial, holding the accumulation of technological information to be the most powerful factor in the evolution of human societies.

Revolution

The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe kept the sequence and changed the word. Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942) described a Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of farming, and an Urban Revolution, the rise of cities, writing and the state, which corresponded largely to Morgan’s civilisation. Childe chose “revolution” deliberately.

The border

Steward’s multilinear evolution and Sahlins and Service’s specific evolution speak of adaptation, and so reach toward the descent sense: particular societies fitting themselves to particular environments. Sahlins and Service took their pair of terms from biology, where Julian Huxley had distinguished the overall advance of life from its adaptive radiation into particular forms. Lenski went further: in his ecological-evolutionary theory, societies with more advanced technology displace or absorb others, a process he called intersocietal selection, and he held its outcome to be as blind and purposeless as natural selection. The descent sense in the study of societies is found more fully in the population models of cultural evolution and in Peter Turchin’s competition between societies.

See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · Deep time and evolution · Progress and direction · Cultural evolution · L. H. Morgan · Boas · L. White · Spencer