Social change

Social change

Already in the eighteenth century the main writers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar) had asked how society developed; how the modern West had ascended from savagery through barbarism and up to its current civilized condition. In an attempt at a unified social science they had outlined the pattern of social progression from hunting, pastoral and farming through to modern commercial society. Meanwhile in France the Marquis de Condorcet had produced a seven-step theory of social progress that went one stage further. He believed that if you grasped the logic of development, then you could deduce where it was heading. You could predict the future. In this way Condorcet helped set the agenda for much nineteenth-century social theory.

In his System of Logic (1843) JOHN STUART MILL outlined the task of the social sciences as being to discover the laws by which one stage of society produces its successor. Mill himself was convinced that human history exhibited a certain order of development. However, unlike some of his major contemporaries, Mill did not suggest clearly delineated stages nor did he feel confident in forecasting the future. This was in

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stark contrast to Auguste Comte, with whom he had an intense but fairly short-lived correspondence in the 1840s.

For Comte the advance of humanity was determined by the progress of the human mind. He claimed to have discovered the fundamental law by which each branch of knowledge passes through the consecutive stages that he labelled theological, metaphysical and positive. Whereas for Comte, as with Hegel (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM), intellectual development was primary, Marx gave significance to what

he termed the mode of production. He outlined the sequence whereby feudalism generated capitalism that, in its turn, was destined to produce its own grave-digger, communism. Spencer also followed what was becoming almost a norm and produced a three-stage sequence of development. In his scheme primitive anarchy gave way to militant societies that, in their turn, were replaced by industrial societies. This inevitable development was simultaneously a longterm progression from homogeneity to hetero geneity, that is, from a very simple to a highly complex social structure.

This emphasis is now more associated with Emile Durkheim. His concern was with social solidarity and he explained how the gradually developing division of labour had moved society from primitive and fundamental mechanical solidarity to the organic solidarity typical of modern industrial societies. Whereas originally society had been united by its similarities of beliefs and practices, Durkheim believed that it was now held together by its differences; greater specialization had facilitated the economic survival of larger numbers but had simultaneously increased mutual dependence. We thus have a model of development that has only two fundamental stages, the origin and the destination, with a rather hazier picture of anything in-between, which is seen less in its own terms than as part of the process of transition between the beginning and the end. This was also true of Alexis de Tocqueville whose writings were intended to illustrate the inevitable process that led from the aristocracy of his French ancestors to the democracy that he observed in North America. Summing up the cumulative changes in France since the eleventh century, he concluded that the nobility had gradually declined as the commoners had risen. It seemed that they were getting nearer to each other and would eventually meet.

Of all these theories one can ask: What moved some societies forward and what held others back? Nineteenth-century social science emerged, in large part, as an attempt to answer this important question. For Marx social change was facilitated by class conflict; for Mill from the free development of ideas; for Durkheim from an increasing division of labour. For Tocqueville providence, the guiding hand of God, lay behind the visible social processes, and the God who set this process in motion, who watches and guides it, is the God of Christianity. God had apparently chosen to advance only the Christian nations. They were favoured with social progress denied to the heathen. Tocqueville’s theological explanation, though far from ubiquitous in social theory, shared the normal tendency of presuming European superiority. All these theories outlined how societies developed along a monolinear trail that led upward from barbarism to civilization. Non- European societies were thus categorized as backward; as occupying a lower step on a ladder that ascended to the place where ‘we’ in the West now were. In this way they formed part of the culture of the European imperialism that was such a significant feature of the century (see IMPERIALISM AND EMPIRE).

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