Morality in the Evolution of the Modern Social System

Abstract

The early sociologists, at least until the First World War, and perhaps even until the Second, confidently assumed that the course of social evolutlon had an analogue in the process of biological evolution. Such an idea, already anticipated by Auguste Comte, is central to the work of Herbert Spencer and can be easily identified in the optimistic early Durkheim, but it had perhaps its fullest expression, and acquired its special application to moral evolution, in the work of the early English sociologists. Almost simultaneously, L. T. Hobhouse produced his two volume work Morals in Evolution, and his eventual successor as Martin White Professor, Edward Westermarck, published his two volumes on The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. Today, those works stand as neglected monuments of a past age of sociological thought; but I seek neither to compare them nor to speculate on the sort of intellectual debate that might have occurred when two dominant figures each set to work on a common theme. Rather, I seek only to add a tentative footnote, albeit a somewhat lengthy one, to the task which, in Morals in Evolution, Hobhouse set himself. That task, Morris Ginsberg later told us, was 'to trace the growth of morals' and, if my assumptions differ somewhat from those of Hobhouse and, if I find myself unenthused by the optimism that permeates his pages I speak, none the less, in honour of that pioneer sociologist whose memory and whose work we are here today to commemorate. Hobhouse assumed that one might properly speak of 'moral progress'. He wrote,