The Course of Social Change: A Hypothesis

Abstract

During the last five years or so there has been a happy revival of interest in social change and evolution. The remark by Talcott Parsons: “Slowly and somewhat inarticulately, emphasis in both sociological and anthropological quarters is shifting from a studied disinterest in problems of social and cultural evolution to a ‘new relativity’ that relates its universais to an evolutionary framework,” epitomises the direction of the trend. Of course such recognition has not altogether banished the emphasis on static studies that has reigned in the fields of sociology and anthropology for the last four decades. Under the influence of this insistence on the study of societies as they are at a point in time, all serious endeavor to understand the broad course of social change has been at a discount. Attempts in that direction have been looked upon with suspicion and discarded as “unscientific,” “metaphysical,” or “architectonic.”