Sociocultural Evolution

Sociocultural evolution is the study of how societies change their institutions, technologies, and moral habits over time, and of whether that change follows any discernible pattern. The nineteenth-century version held that all societies climb the same ladder from savagery to civilisation. The twentieth century abandoned the ladder. What survives, and what conservatives take seriously, is the weaker claim that customs and institutions are selected over long periods by their consequences, and that the reasons for their survival exceed what any observer can articulate.

Conservatives approach the subject with a divided mind. They reject the progressive reading, in which history has a direction and the present is the highest rung reached so far. They accept the evolutionary reading, in which surviving institutions carry information that no committee assembled them to hold. The difference between the two is the difference between Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Hayek.

Key Takeaways

• The unilinear model, associated with Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) and Herbert Spencer’s sociology, ranked all societies on one scale of advancement.
• Franz Boas and his students dismantled that model between 1890 and 1930 on empirical grounds.
• Hayek revived a non-progressive version: cultural selection acting on group practices, with no guarantee of improvement.
• Conservatives read inherited custom as accumulated adaptation rather than arbitrary prejudice.
• The chief conservative objection to the older theory is its use as a justification for imperial rule and eugenic policy.

History And Context

The idea has an eighteenth-century Scottish origin that predates Darwin entirely. Adam Ferguson wrote in 1767 that nations stumble upon establishments which are the result of human action but not of human design. David Hume and Adam Smith made parallel arguments about law, money, and language: each is an institution nobody invented and everybody uses. This is the conjectural history of the Scottish Enlightenment, and it is evolutionary in structure without being progressive in temper.

The nineteenth century hardened it into a ladder. Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in Principles of Biology (1864), applied it to societies and argued that social complexity increases as populations grow and differentiate. Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) divided human history into savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, each with defined sub-stages keyed to technology: pottery, the bow, iron smelting, the phonetic alphabet. Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) supplied a matching theory of religious development from animism to monotheism.

Friedrich Engels read Morgan closely and built The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) on his stage scheme, which is why the theory entered Marxist orthodoxy and stayed there. The same framework justified colonial administration on the grounds that some peoples were merely earlier, and lent respectability to the eugenics movements of Britain and the United States before 1914.

Franz Boas broke the scheme apart from the 1890s onward. His fieldwork with the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia showed cultural traits diffusing between neighbouring peoples in patterns no ladder predicted. Boas and his students, among them Alfred Kroeber and Ruth Benedict, established that each culture must be described in its own terms. By 1930 the unilinear model was dead in anthropology, though it survived in political rhetoric for decades afterwards.

Hayek retrieved the older Scottish version in his later work, arguing that group selection operates on rules of conduct rather than on genes, and that the extended market order arose because the groups practising private property, contract, and family obligation grew and absorbed the groups that did not.¹ He was explicit that this account carries no promise of improvement and no direction.

The Conservative Position

The conservative argument begins with a claim about knowledge. Institutions that have persisted across many generations encode solutions to problems their present users cannot state. Burke made the case in 1790 against the French revolutionaries who proposed to rebuild France on abstract principle: he preferred the general bank and capital of nations and of ages to the private stock of reason in any individual.² The point is epistemic rather than sentimental. Custom is a store of tested information, and the reformer who dismisses it as prejudice is discarding data he cannot replace.

Michael Oakeshott extended this into a theory of practical knowledge. Cooking, seamanship, and government each involve technical rules that can be written down and a practical knowledge that exists only in the doing and is transmitted by apprenticeship.³ Institutions carry the second kind. Abolish the institution and the knowledge disappears with it, because it was never anywhere else.

Robert Nisbet applied the argument to the family, the parish, the guild, and the voluntary association, which he called intermediate bodies. He argued that the modern state has absorbed the functions of these associations across two centuries, and that their decline produced the isolation and the appetite for total politics characteristic of the twentieth century.⁴ On this account the evolutionary process can run backwards: selected institutions are destroyed faster than replacements can be tested.

Conservatives therefore accept gradual, tested change and reject wholesale redesign, on grounds that are evolutionary rather than nostalgic. Reform at the margin permits error correction. Reform at the root removes the mechanism that would reveal the error.

Differing Positions

Progressive theorists respond that the argument functions as a defence of whatever exists. Slavery, hereditary caste, and the legal subordination of women all persisted for many centuries and passed the survival test. Persistence measures the interests of those who benefit at least as well as it measures social utility, and the conservative account supplies no way to tell the two apart.

Marxist and neo-evolutionary anthropologists such as Leslie White and Julian Steward revived stage theory after 1945 in modified form, tying social complexity to energy capture per capita and to specific ecological adaptations rather than to a single universal sequence. Their work is testable and has been productive in archaeology.

A third objection is methodological. Group selection on cultural rules is contested among evolutionary biologists, and Hayek’s version was formulated before the modern literature on multilevel selection and cultural transmission developed. Critics argue that the mechanism does the work of an analogy rather than a demonstrated process.

References

1. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790).
3. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962).
4. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953).