Metaphor and History by Robert Nisbet

Author:Robert Nisbet [Nisbet, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781351505628
Google: QK00DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-08T01:45:28+00:00

2. THE ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

The theory of social evolution is more commonly dealt with in terms of the patterns of assertedly universal origins and stages which the evolutionists put forward than in the terms of the major premises regarding the nature of change which underlay these origins and stages. It is the premises that will form the subject of this section, for they, rather than the other, more obvious aspects, have proved to be the really durable and the most influential features of evolutionary theory.

What are these premises? They are drawn, all of them, from the metaphor of growth, from the analogy of change in society to change in the growth-processes of the individual organism. Six seem to me the most constitutive and far-reaching in their relation to the theories of the major social evolutionists in the century.

Change is natural. Natural, that is, to the entity chosen by the evolutionist for his study. None of the theorists of social evolution ever made the mistake of supposing that change is in fact constant in a given area or period of time. None was blind to the manifest facts of inertia and fixity in history. But, recognizing this, the social evolutionists nonetheless assumed that change in time is natural, is normal, and that when fixity is encountered it is either to be categorized as abnormal, as a kind of monstrosity, or else it is fixity of appearance only, with reality to be understood in terms of underlying forces of change which required only further time for their manifestation.

For all of the social evolutionists the overriding problem in the study of society was that of finding proper reconciliation between what Comte called statics and dynamics.4 The great error of all preceding theories of society, Comte wrote—and his words were to be echoed by all of the others—is that they introduced a false dichotomy between order and change. Order, Comte declared, is order-in-change; and change is simply the incessant realization of a higher level of order. Comte made statics and dynamics the two broad areas of his new social science, sociology, but he never failed to insist, in his numerous elaborations of these two divisions, upon their inseparability when it came to actual observation of things.

What was true of Comte was equally true of the others in the century—Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Spencer, Morgan, Newman, and Tylor, to name the principal exponents of the theory of development—who similarly proceeded from the assumption that change is as natural to a social entity as any of its elements of structure. The entity for Comte was human knowledge fundamentally, although he widened this in later work to civilization in its entirety; for Hegel the entity was freedom; for Marx the means of economic production through the ages; for Tocqueville it was democracy in the West; for Spencer each of the whole range of society’s principal institutions; for Newman (who resurrected Augustinian developmentalism, though in very sophisticated ways indeed, ways which had full currency in his century) it

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