Explain the classical concept of social change and critically examine the contribution of the linear theories of social change. (1995)
For classical sociology change was not one topic among many but the discipline’s founding problem, born of the industrial and democratic revolutions. Its concept of change carried a built-in assumption — that change is directional and cumulative — and the linear theories are that assumption made explicit.
The classical concept of social change
- Definition. Kingsley Davis restricted the term to alterations in social organisation — the structure and functions of society. Morris Ginsberg defined it as change in social structure: the size of a society, the balance of its parts, or the type of its organisation. Robert MacIver and Charles Page located it in changing social relationships.
- Attributes. Change is universal, continuous, temporal and community-wide rather than individual, and proceeds by chain reaction. Its speed and direction vary, and it issues from many causes, so any monistic explanation fails.
- The classical conception proper. Auguste Comte split sociology into social statics and social dynamics, making change lawful and knowable. Change was equated with evolution and evolution with progress; the method was comparative-historical, present-day simple societies being read as specimens of humanity’s past.
The linear theories
Comte’s law of three stages — theological, metaphysical, positive — set the pattern. Herbert Spencer derived a cosmic law of evolution from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity, through simple, compound, doubly and trebly compound types. Lewis Henry Morgan staged history as savagery, barbarism and civilisation. Émile Durkheim traced mechanical to organic solidarity, Ferdinand Tönnies Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Karl Marx‘s succession of modes of production is linear though dialectical, and W. W. Rostow‘s five stages of growth (1960) the twentieth-century heir.
Contribution
- They made change a legitimate scientific object, replacing providence with lawlike explanation.
- They isolated a trend that has survived every criticism: increasing structural differentiation, still the working vocabulary of Talcott Parsons and development sociology.
- They built the first systematic comparative and cross-cultural databases, and supplied the theory of transition: Marx’s scheme remains the most powerful account of how one social order becomes another.
- They shaped practice, Rostow’s take-off underwriting post-war planning, including India’s early Plans.
Critical examination
- Teleology and value bias. Progress was assumed, not found, and “savage” and “civilised” were moral labels; the First World War destroyed the equation of complexity with improvement.
- Eurocentrism. The terminus was Western Europe, and Spencer’s social Darwinism lent the scheme to colonial apologetics.
- Empirical failure. Societies borrow, stagnate, regress and skip stages; Julian Steward‘s multilinear evolution replaced one ladder with many.
- Method and agency. They were armchair theorists using unreliable secondary accounts, and their impersonal unfolding leaves no room for conflict, movements or conquest.
- The Indian test. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) showed caste associations carrying democratic modernity, and M. N. Srinivas showed mobility through a traditional idiom. The Census 2027, notified in January 2026 with caste enumerated for the first time since 1931, confirms that ascription has not withered on schedule.
Conclusion
The linear theories were wrong about the route and right about one variable, differentiation. Their lasting contribution is not the ladder but the questions they forced sociology to ask: where change originates, at what rate, and towards what. Neo-evolutionism answers those without the ladder.