Sociocultural Evolution: A Concept and its Difficulties

Abstract

There are probably few concepts in the social sciences which bear so many difficulties as the concept of sociocultural evolution. The reasons for it are at least twofold: on the one hand theories about evolution of societies were often mixed with ideologies about race, nation or sociocultural classes; on the other hand since Darwin the concept of evolution has more and more been identified nearly totally with biological evolution. Therefore social theorists who tried to develop a theory of sociocultural evolution had not only to defend themselves against the reproaches of ideology, but had also the task to classify their approaches in regard to the overwhelming paradigm of Darwinian biological evolution. It is no wonder that often social theorists declared the concept of evolution to be useless for the social sciences.