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The Course of Social Change: A Hypothesis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Extract
During the last five years or so there has been a happy revival of interest in social change and evolution. The remark by Talcott Parsons: “Slowly and somewhat inarticulately, emphasis in both sociological and anthropological quarters is shifting from a studied disinterest in problems of social and cultural evolution to a ‘new relativity’ that relates its universais to an evolutionary framework,” epitomises the direction of the trend. Of course such recognition has not altogether banished the emphasis on static studies that has reigned in the fields of sociology and anthropology for the last four decades. Under the influence of this insistence on the study of societies as they are at a point in time, all serious endeavor to understand the broad course of social change has been at a discount. Attempts in that direction have been looked upon with suspicion and discarded as “unscientific,” “metaphysical,” or “architectonic.”
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- Copyright © 1966 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Talcott Parsons, "Evolutionary Universals in Society," American Sociological Review, 29:3 (June 1964), p. 339.
2 Malinowski writes: "In my concern with the ethnographical aspects of the ceremonial, I forgot the circumstances of the tragedy even though one or two singular facts occurred at the same time in the village which should have aroused my suspicions… Only much later was I able to discover the real meaning of these events: the boy had committed suicide." Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 77.
3 There are numerous rhythmic theories of social change which can be variously classified according to the different criteria that we choose. Sorokin has also classified them according to the number of their "phases: " two-phase rhythms, three-phase rhythms, four-phase rhythms, and five-phase rhythms and still more complex rhythms. (P. A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, New York, Bedminster Press, 1962, vol. IV, pp. 398-421).
From the viewpoint of our hypothesis, a society which is only one step lower than the most advanced society is in an advantageous position for moving a stage beyond it, showing a two-phase rhythm. This argument can obviously be extended further.
4 Wilbert E. Moore, Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 44.
5 Cf. V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (New York, Henry Schuman, 1951), p. 15.
6 Cf. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1947), pp. 63-156.
7 Cf. P. A. Sorokin, C. C. Zimmerman and C. J. Galpin, Systematic Source-book in Rural Sociology (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1930-32), vol. II.
8 For a relatively recent discussion in favor of the village community's rights over cultivable land, see Ramkrishna Mukerjee, Dynamics of a Rural Society (Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 1957), p. 15 ff.
9 From the viewpoint of our hypothesis the following incidental remark made by Mumford is interesting: "The neotechnic phase represents a third definite development in the machine during the last thousand years. It is a true mutation: it differs from the paleotechnic phase almost as white differs from black. But on the other hand, it bears the same relation to the eotechnic phase as the adult form to the baby." Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London, George Routledge & Sons, 1947), p. 212.
10 Apart from the important differences in circumstances, the reshaping of borrowed institutions and traits may be due to a conscious attempt on the part of the elite in these countries to preserve the identity of their traditional cultures, while accepting modernization and change. Cf. Daya Krishna, Con siderations Towards a Theory of Social Change (Bombay, Manaktalas, 1965), pp. 172-173.