History of Western Social Evolutionary Thought
Elmer Beal Jr. - Instructor

Course Syllabus

The customs and languages of groups which are foreign to us are intriguing, and no doubt it has always occurred to those who encounter one another to ponder how it is that they are so different. When the 16th century Europeans set out on voyages of discovery, they brought back tales from all parts of the world of languages and cultures which seemed completely different from their own. While there was much ethnocentric judgment passed as to the "savagery" of the non-European world, there were those who came to live among the "other," recording their cultures and learning of their personalities, aspirations, ambitions, and so on, and who came to recognize the common humanity which they shared.

By the end of the 18th century, there was a body of literature describing the diversity of cultures and which began to speculate on the nature and cause of the differences. It was John Locke in his An Essay on Human Understanding (1790), who made the revolutionary claim that the "mind is an empty cabinet," asserting that humans become what they are as a result of environment and experience. The prevailing view was that God had made humans as they are, and that through a struggle for perfection, wisdom, reason, humans had made "progress" out of "savagery" and into "civilization." While secular and religious thinkers struggled with each other for the ascendant view, both groups grappled with the idea of progress as a linear trajectory along which all human groups were moving. (While Enlightenment thinkers spawned the idea of cultural relativity, most didn't abandon their culturocentric values.)

The intellectual ferment of the 19th century, fueled by dramatic social forces like the American and French revolutions, the industrial revolution, urban squalor, colonial wars and ethnocide, incorporated the ethos of conflict, struggle, competition into grand schemes of evolutionary change, shaping the disciplines of biology, sociology, economics and psychology. Social thinkers pondered the evolutionary trajectories of different cultures and hypothesized unilinear, multilinear, divergent and convergent sequences; they also sought to describe the forces which drive culture change - whether they be changing ideas, changes in technology, unconscious or mystical teleologies or structures in nature of the mind.

In complete contrast to the grand theories, there also arose "historical particularism," a perspective which presumed no connection between the historical trajectories of the world's cultures. Today, we inherit a richly diverse set of explanations of how human groups came to be so different - idealism, theism, Marxism, materialism, structuralism, and particularism, among others. Perhaps even more intriguing than what these "isms" hope to explain in terms of the past and the present, is the possibility that they might shed light on the future of humankind as well.

Can a model of social evolution hope to compare with the one we have for biological evolution? Can we describe relationships in terms of dependent and independent variables? causal forces? We are hardly at a point of agreement in western social thought today, with the several "isms" having been joined by post-modernism, post-structuralism, nihilism and obscurantism. So this course introduces students to the major currents in social evolutionary (or non-evolutionary) thought and to the persons responsible for them.

The contributions to social evolutionary thought of major 18th, 19th, and 20th century figures is approached through secondary sources, as it is a very large topic. However, student term-papers will be based on selected topics which will use primary sources as well.

College of the Atlantic; 105 Eden St. Bar Harbor, ME, 04609
Phone: 207-288-5015 Fax: 207-288-4126
Admission: 1-800-528-0025

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