Social evolutionism

Social evolutionism is a nineteenth-century theory that societies pass through successive stages from simpler to more complex forms. It often ranked contemporary societies on a single scale of development.

Auguste Comte: Auguste Comte was a French philosopher who proposed that human thought develops through theological, metaphysical, and positive stages. His law of three stages offered an influential model of intellectual progress.
Social progress: Social progress is the idea that societies can improve over time according to some standard of human welfare or development. Evolutionists treated movement toward complexity as a form of progress.
Historical particularism: Historical particularism is an anthropological approach that explains each culture through its distinct history rather than a universal sequence. Franz Boas used it to reject universal evolutionary rankings.
Social Darwinism: Social Darwinism applies ideas associated with biological evolution to competition and hierarchy among human groups or societies. It turned evolutionary language into arguments about social competition and inequality.
Lewis Henry Morgan: Lewis Henry Morgan was an American ethnologist who divided human social development into savagery, barbarism, and civilization. His sequence gave social evolutionism a prominent account of cultural stages.
Unilineal evolution: Unilineal evolution is the theory that all societies follow one general sequence of developmental stages. It captures the single-track model underlying many nineteenth-century schemes.
Cultural relativism: Cultural relativism is the principle of understanding beliefs and practices within their cultural and historical contexts. It counters judgments that measure all societies against one presumed endpoint.
Unilineal cultural evolution: Unilineal cultural evolution is the nineteenth-century claim that cultures advance through a common sequence of stages. This label identifies the cultural version of the theory’s central developmental scheme.
Edward Burnett Tylor: Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist who studied culture as a subject of comparative, evolutionary inquiry. His account of cultural development helped establish evolutionism in anthropology.
Cultural evolution: Cultural evolution is the study or theory of how cultural practices and institutions change over time. Social evolutionism is a historical, stage-based form of cultural evolutionary thought.

Linked from 12 pages