Unilineal evolution theory is a concept which became formally defined in the nineteenth century but whose fundamental assumptions were derived from the ideas of social and cultural modernity of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The idea of the “modern,” like the sociological concept of unilineal evolution that it inspired, posits the existence of a singular, teleological course of social evolution, in which both the beginning and end points of historical progress are fixed entities which can be scientifically demonstrated. Because it was Europe that saw the birth of rationalism, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and the belief in a stadial evolution of history, Europe served as the model by which the progress of all other world civilizations could be assessed.
Unilineal evolution theory was influenced by the works of many different European intellectuals. August Comte argued that from its most prehistoric antecedents to the present day, civilization evolves along a linear path and moves through predictable stages, from the theological (religious) to the metaphysical (philosophic) to ultimately the scientific. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels similarly argued for the linear evolution of society, except that they maintained this evolution occurred as a result of massive shifts in the “means of production” upon which a given society’s socioeconomic base was founded. For them, the means of production first permitted a hunter-gatherer way of life, then a slave-owning society, feudalism, and modern bourgeois capitalist society. Marxism anticipated a next and final stage of social evolution, that of the proletariat revolution that would produce a communist society, which was not yet in existence during Marx and Engels’s lives.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim made similar arguments for the evolution of society, but he instead focused his research on the evolution of religion. In his famous The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim argued that, prior to the emergence of modern-day Christianity, with its many different divisions and groupings, there must have existed in past times some form of primordial religion, out of which the basic building blocks of what makes religion possible could be identified. Durkheim argued that from this primordial religion (which he traced to the totemic religions of the Australian Aborigines), religious practice evolved to the pagan, the animistic, and eventually the complex religions of his own day and age. What all of these philosophers had in common was that they believed in a singular, predictable path of social evolution that could be used as a common standard to judge the relative level of modernity of all the world’s peoples.
The problems associated with this way of thinking were that, as European intellectuals essentially founded the method of rational knowledge production, Europe itself was placed atop an artificial civilizational hierarchy. Of course, no European thinker wanted to identify his own society as somehow inferior to those of the far-off regions of the world. This was particularly salient given that that industrial revolution in the nineteenth century had generated unparalleled material wealth and splendor, which many Europeans found to be sorely lacking in other, non-industrial, undeveloped parts of the world. Thus, “modernity,” with its corresponding social science theory of unilineal evolution, was a Eurocentric concept that was used to justify European colonization of the planet and the brutal exploitation of indigenous people and natural wealth from Africa, Asia, and the New World.
Historical particularism is a concept that stands in contrast to unilinear evolution by positing that historical progression is not fixed and incontrovertible essence but is rather a product of the specific evolution of any given civilization. In the historical discipline, contribution to this theory, and to this way of thinking in general, came from individuals such as the German historian Leopold von Ranke, Thomas Macaulay, and George Bancroft in the nineteenth century and G. R. Elton in the twentieth. These historians emphasized the importance of using archival sources in the construction of historical narratives.
It was out of social science theories like historical particularism that new methods for the study of history and civilization were developed. The idea that culture, individual people, science, technology, the environment, and material commodities themselves could serve as historical objects for analysis emerged as a way to explain the course of social evolution for certain societies in such a way that did not simply assume divergence from the “correct” European path. More recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty has taken the implications of historical particularism to promote the field of postcolonialism. Postcolonial theory takes historical particularism to its extreme by arguing that the colonized peoples that Europeans encountered during their imperial projects influenced the course of European history just as much as Europeans changed the colonies. Thus, he reinforces the conclusion that history is not an inevitable and predictable procession but is rather contingent on material and social forces that cannot be readily explained or defined.
Unilinear Cultural Evolution Theory, popular through the nineteenth century, is the idea that all societies progress along the same general timeline: cultures start off as primitive groups (nomadic hunter-gatherers) and develop to become civilized communities (technological, literate, and rooted in a permanent location). This was an amalgamation of many anthropologists’ perspectives of the day, including those of Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward B. Tylor.
One problem with this was that the researchers were judging all societies by their own western European ideals of civilization, which (they believed) had reached its pinnacle with the ancient Greek and Roman societies and that society began to decline thereafter. They assumed that the progress of social evolution could be compared to Darwin’s theory of biological evolution: simple structures naturally become more complex.
Historical Particularism, introduced by Franz Boaz in the twentieth century, suggests that we can’t judge every society’s development by one standard. Geography, climate, regional history, and individual behavior all play a role in how a society develops and how unique communities could define “civilization.”
The Unilinear theory relied on second-hand information about different cultures, such as reports from traveling missionaries and merchants. Boaz felt that first-hand field work was necessary to really understand how individual cultures develop.
Visit the links below for more information about each theory, its proponents, and their methods.
https://anthropology.ua.edu/anthropological-theories/?culture=Social%20Evolutionism
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