Discuss various theories of social change. Explain the limitations of unilinear theory of social change.

Discuss various theories of social change. Explain the limitations of unilinear theory of social change. (2024)

Kingsley Davis defined social change as alterations in social organisation — the structure and functions of society. Sociological theories of change differ on three questions: the direction of change, its engine, and the unit analysed. The unilinear evolutionary theory with which the discipline began answers all three most confidently, and is for that reason the most vulnerable.

The main families of theory

Family	Engine of change	Direction
Evolutionary — Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies	growth of knowledge; structural differentiation; rising material and moral density	one ladder, simple to complex
Neo-evolutionary — Leslie White, Julian Steward, Talcott Parsons, Gerhard Lenski	energy captured per capita; ecological adaptation; differentiation, adaptive upgrading, inclusion, value generalisation	several lines, no fixed order
Cyclical — Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin, Vilfredo Pareto	organic life-span; challenge and response; immanent change and limits; circulation of elites	recurrence, no progress
Conflict — Karl Marx, Ralf Dahrendorf, Lewis Coser	relations of production become a fetter on the forces; authority conflict in coordinated associations	rupture, then reconstitution
Functionalist — Parsons, Neil Smelser, Robert K. Merton	strain, structural differentiation, accumulated dysfunction	moving equilibrium
Technological–cultural — William Fielding Ogburn	invention, diffusion and the lag of adaptive culture	uneven and accelerating
Development–dependency — W. W. Rostow against Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein	internal modernisation versus external extraction of surplus	stages, or a fixed core–periphery hierarchy

Limitations of the unilinear theory

• Teleological and value-laden. Progress towards a known endpoint is assumed, not demonstrated. Labelling societies “savage” or “primitive” while treating Europe as civilisation imported a moral judgement into an ostensibly scientific scheme; the First World War destroyed the assumption at its source.
• Eurocentric. The terminus of the ladder is nineteenth-century Western Europe, which converts a particular history into a universal law and, through Spencer’s social Darwinism, supplied a defence of colonial hierarchy.
• Empirically false. Societies borrow by diffusion, stagnate, regress and skip stages. Julian Steward‘s multilinear evolution and Franz Boas‘s historical particularism showed development lines diverge with ecology and history.
• Method. The classical evolutionists were armchair theorists relying on travellers’ and missionaries’ reports of doubtful reliability.
• No agency, no conflict. Change appears as an impersonal unfolding, leaving out class struggle, movements, war and colonial conquest — the forces Marx and later historical sociology put at the centre.
• Indian evidence contradicts the ladder. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) showed caste associations acting as vehicles of democratic modernity, and M. N. Srinivas‘s Sanskritisation shows mobility achieved within a traditional idiom. India’s sequence also breaks Rostow’s: agriculture still absorbed 43.0% of workers in the 2025 Periodic Labour Force Survey while services led growth. The Census 2027, notified in January 2026 with caste enumerated for the first time since 1931, shows ascription becoming more institutionally salient, not withering away.

Conclusion

No single family explains change by itself: evolutionary theory accounts for growing complexity, conflict theory for rupture, cyclical theory for decline, dependency for global hierarchy. Unilinearism survives only in its weakest claim, that differentiation increases. As a law of universal stages it is dead, and multilinear and neo-evolutionary models have taken its place.