Evolutionary Universals in Society

This paper is meant as a contribution to the revival and extension of evolutionary thinking in sociology. It begins with the conception that in the evolution of living systems generally, certain new developments have greatly increased the adaptive capacity of the system, so much that without them further major developmental steps would be blocked, though survival in a niche is possible and frequent. For organic evolution the conception is illustrated by the cases of vision and the human hands and brain. The body of the paper is devoted to six cases at the social level. The first two are differentiation on the basis of a scale of stratification and the development of patterns of cultural legitimation independent of the social structure, both of which are important in the transition from primitive social conditions to those of the archaic civilizations. The remaining four cases are-in order of treatment-bureaucratic organization, money and markets, a universalistic legal system, and the democratic association in both governmental and private forms. These four, taken together, are fundamental to the structure of the modern type of society, though each is highly complex and subject to a whole series of developmental stages.