Abstract
The idea that societies or cultures can evolve and, therefore, can be compared and graded has been central to modern history, in general, and to big history, in particular, which seeks to unite natural and human history; biology and culture. However, while extremely useful, this notion is not without significant moral and ethical challenges, which has been noted by scholars. This article is a short intellectual history of the idea of cultural evolution and its critics, the cultural relativists, from the Age of the Enlightenment, what David Deutsch called the “beginning of infinity,” to the neo-Hegelianism of Francis Fukuyama. The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment ultimately prevailed over historical partic-ularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether.
Highlights
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy
The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment prevailed over historical particularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether
Bacon was making the case for the Moderns in the Ancients versus the Moderns debate, which grew out of the Renaissance, with the rediscovery of classical learning, and intensified during the Scientific Revolution
Summary
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the positivists in Mexico—the científicos, as they were called—urged the government of Porfirio Díaz to engage in social engineering in order to fastforward, leap-frog, or accelerate the country’s evolution and thereby catchup with the more advanced societies in Western Europe and North America.[33] Later, Marxist-Leninists in Russia and China who believed that what is past is prologue would likewise promise shortcuts to modernization by means of “five-year plans” and “great leaps forward.” On the right, Corrado Gini, an Italian statistician who was interested in the demographic evolution of nations—he favored a cyclical theory of population over Thomas Malthus’s theory of constant geometric increase— developed the “Gini coefficient,” on the eve of the First World War. This index, which measured the dispersion of wealth in a society, could test the ideas of a Marx or of a Turner, to determine whether a society was advancing toward greater inequality or toward greater equality.
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