Social Evolutionism

Study of primitive society was initially...

... a branch of legal studies- marriage, the family, private property and the state

Concept of primitive society linked...

...to imperialism and nationalism- fulfilled several ideologies linked to this

problems associated with evolutionary classification:

1. Ethnocentrism 2. Hierarchical 3. Fosters racism 4. Promotes unilinear models

Almost all of the new specialists agreed with the following propositions by the end of the 19th c....

1. Primitive societies= kinship relations 2. Kinship relations= descent groups 3. Descent groups= exogamous- related to series of marriage exchanges 4. Primeval institutions= presented in fossil forms- promoted by long dead practices 5. Private property= emergence of the territorial state

Henry Maine

Ancient Law (1861)

Lewis Henry Morgan

Ancient Society (1877)

Friedrich Engels (1885)

Applied Morgan's evolutionary stages to Marxist analysis and Marxist political theory. Relations of production at the first stages of civilisation were primarily collective. People had not a great desire to accumulate wealth. The only division of labour was by gender. Monogamy as related to male supremacy- concepts surrounding adultery and promiscuity that were applied mainly to women- only liberation would be through the entrance of women into public industry

John Ferguson McLennan (1865)

Argued for the matriarchal origin of human civilisation- at the beginning there was matriarchy and polyandry. Paternity became an important issue when people wanted to regulate the transmission of property

Henry Main (1861)

Argued that patriarchal despotism was the original stage of human organisation- 'primitive' society as highly authoritarian, under the control of patriarchal law. Kinship societies turned into state led societies. From status to contract. 'greatest evolution in human history'. Used evidence from Roman history, Aristotle and patriarchs described in the bible- weak and unscholarly data and evidence

Edward Tylor (1871)

Attempted to define culture(and religion)- relied on 'survivals'. His own proposed stages are savagery, barbarism and civilisation

Darwinian evolution applied to the social would argue that:

Groups with the same origin would develop in different ways if they were isolated in different environments

Links to nationalism in that...

It fulfilled the ideas surrounding the belief that societies were built upon foundations of blood and soil- and that concepts of territory can be linked to race and citezenship

Social evolutionism

Preoccupied with the idea that human history could be sorted into various stages of evolution

Edward Tylor

Primitive Culture (1871)

John Ferguson McLennan

Primitive Marriage(1865)

Lewis Henry Morgan (1877)

Produced an elaborate system of classification of human societies into evolutionist stages. The first stages emphasised matriarchy. 15 evolutionary stages: from confused promiscuity to the development of private property. As technology advances, people make property and create institutions to deal with it, e.g. family and monogamy- regulation of the transmission of property

Kuper(1988)

The Invention of Primitive Society

Friedrich Engels

The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1885)

'Survivals'

Traces of earlier evolutionary stages- assumes an unchanging existence for such societies- 'fossil evidence' of social evolution- METHODOLOGICAL FALLACY

Primitive society...

defined as nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist

Modern society as...

defined by a territorial state, the monogamous family and private property

Social Evolution is linked to Darwinian evolutionism but..

paradoxically, is more connected with Lamarckian theory- Darwin implied evolution to be random, non-directional, with no specific development- social evolutionism is the opposite