Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The emergence of the idea of development in western culture is closely linked to the evolutionary worldview that began to gain ground in Europe in the eighteenth century and has as such also been constitutive for sociology as a discipline. Like evolution, development has taken on a variety of meanings, the common denominator of which can be seen in the idea of continuous, orderly social change usually proceeding in several, clearly demarcated stages and entailing an improvement of living conditions. However, as will be shown in the following, while most evolutionary theories implicitly are theories of development, the reverse does not apply. In contrast to the relative social stability and the deterministic outlook characteristic of previous centuries, such major political upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the French Revolution, the American Revolutionary War, and the South American Wars of Independence, along with the rise in social mobility that accompanied the spread of industrialization, gradually imposed the notion that social and political change, rather than being exceptional, was the norm. Modern society, and with it western civilization, were increasingly seen as the product of progress in which such constant change had resulted. Viewed in turn as static, undifferentiated, and lacking in complexity, traditional societies were relegated to an earlier ... log in or subscribe to read full text