Cultural evolutionism

Sociocultural evolutionism and the idea of progress

While sociocultural evolutionists agree that an evolution-like process leads to social progress, classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories, known as theories of unilineal evolution. Sociocultural evolutionism became the prevailing theory of early sociocultural anthropology and social commentary through the work of scholars like Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), Benjamin Kidd (1858–1916), L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Models incorporating distinct stages and ideas of linear models of progress not only had a great influence on future evolutionary approaches in the social sciences and humanities, but also shaped public, scholarly, and scientific discourse surrounding the rising individualism and "population thinking". Sociocultural evolutionism attempted to formalise social thinking along scientific lines, with the added influence from 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. Human society was compared to a biological organism, and social-science equivalents of concepts like variation, natural selection, and inheritance were introduced as factors bearing on the progress of societies. The idea of "progress" led to that of a fixed "stages" through which human societies develop, usually numbering three – savagery, barbarism, and civilization – but sometimes many more. At that time, anthropology was rising as a new scientific discipline, separating itself from the traditional views of "primitive" cultures that were usually based on religious views.