Free Will and Determinism

Historical Change

SOME THEORIES OF 'SOCIAL EVOLUTION' ON A GRAND SCALE

Darwin 1809-1882

The theory of evolution by natural selection was put forward by Darwin (and Wallace!) in the mid-nineteenth century - and it concerned the development through time of types of animals and plants. In the same period - before and after Darwin - there were suggestions that we should think of a process of 'evolution' occurring amongst societies.

Herbert Spencer

(1820-1903)

The nineteenth century polymath Herbert Spencer was responsible for proposing perhaps the closest parallel between organic and social evolution. Social evolution, which begins, he proposed, with a number of elementarily simple forms of society, from which arise a wider and ever-widening diversity of forms of ever-ascending orders of complexity.

In other words, just as the diversity and complexity of modern animals and plants are supposed to have evolved from one or a few simple primeval organisms, so Spencer supposed that the varied and sophisticated societies of his day could trace their ancestry back to one or two ancient social systems of simple organization.

That's Spencer.

Comte 1798-1857 More on Comte Large Comte website A more recent highly influential theory, by W.W.Rostow

Auguste Comte

1798-1857

A different 'evolutionary' thesis leaves out all talk of a common root for modern societies and insists more simply that all societies pass through one and the same developmental path.

The view of Auguste Comte, one of the spirits behind modern sociology, writing before Darwin, was of this kind.

Marxism

Marx has recently been voted the greatest philosopher ever (by the UK Radio 4 audience), with David Hume running second.

(Not a crazy result at all imho, though when you get to No 10, the thing goes all BBish - Popper!)

Marx's distinction, goes a key argument, lies in his impact on history: maybe it's all gone away now, but not so long ago Marxism was looked upon as driving humanity, or at least significant segements of humanity, down a particular path of historical change, with Marx himself as responsible for inspiring the people who actually held the guns.

There is a paradox in this, because the revolution that swept in the regimes that claimed inspiration from Marx did not happen as Marx himself had predicted. It happened not in the established capitalist economies of Western Europe or America but in Russia, where there were large numbers of people still yet to make the transition to the factory system, still living within a framework that retained much of the Feudal.

If Marx predicted otherwise, what was his thinking? It was a theory about how you should approach the study of what brings about change in human society: the approach called historical materialism.

I wonder what you think makes societies change over time? What is it do you think that caused the transition in this part of Europe from medieval times to the time of Hobbes and Locke say - the 16th and 17th Centuries, the beginning of 'Modernity'? And what caused the transition from that to say the industrialised world of the late nineteenth century? And from that to what we have had more recently, the post industrialism we ourselves are directly familiar with? And what is driving the transition we now worry about, or welcome, globalisation?

What would be candidates for bringing about historical changes such as these? Could it be kings and queens? Could it be ideas, like Marxism? Could it be discoveries and inventions, such as the stirrup, or the printing press, or the abacus, or gunpowder? Could it be a complex of these different things - and maybe others - interacting together?

Marx has an answer.

He thinks to begin with that the important thing about a society is its way of producing life's necessities. That is, the important thing is how it organizes the production of food, shelter, warmth and so on.

Important in what sense?

It is, thinks Marx, the way a society organizes itself to produce these things which determines its other, less basic characteristics.

The form of life exhibited by modern industrial society, for example, is structured by its productive processes: by the fact, for one thing, that essential production is largely by machine, requiring the cooperation of many closely adjacent individuals in a factory. Factory production means concentrations of population in centres of good communications; which means large towns; and large towns in themselves impose a certain structure on the lives of their inhabitants.

But Marx goes further. Not only is the structure of society determined by its economic organisation, but its mental life, its ideas, are, he argues, bound up with 'economics' - let's use this word for the way a society is organised to make its necessities - too.

So feudal society will be characterised by a different morality, a different literature, a different art, a different music from that which is characteristic of capitalist society, and, to take a different example, working class art and thinking, within capitalist society, will be different from that of the bourgeoisie (Berg v. Kaiser Chiefs).

He invokes the image of a superstructure built upon a base to describe the relation between 'ideas' and the economic structure within which they occur.

It is the way it is organised for the production of food and shelter and warmth that governs the nature of the conceptions that frame the mental life of its people, the art and music that flourishes, the type of relations that comprise what we might call 'family life', whether and how new knowledge is sought and transmitted.

Let me suggest one example to try and make this claim clear. The mode of production we have developed in this part of the world relies on the preparedness of people to lend money on the promise of interest. In setting up a new venture an entrepreneur will need finance, s/he raises this by saying to everyone who might have spare money: I have this grand money-making idea, only I need a bit of capital to launch it. Lend me your spare money now, and I'll let you have it back with interest next year.

But there was a time when the principle in operation here - the principle of lending money against the promise of interest - was not regarded well at all. "Money is barren," Aristotle had taught, and at the height of the Middle Ages at any rate people thought this absolutely right. How could you legitimately make money just by sitting on your backside doing nothing but wait for your interest to roll in? Just lending money could not be regarded as a proper way of earning one's living. The practice was known as 'usury', and the Church as well as ordinary persons regarded it as morally wrong.

But with the rise of capitalism - a system of organising productive activities which relies on usury - the moral condemnation of the practice gradually lapsed, until today no more than the faintest vestige is left.

What used to be regarded as morally disgraceful comes to be accepted as entirely reasonable. So that what we have, I am suggesting, is an example of a value shift, a change in people's moral judgment, coming about as a result of a change in our way of organising our productive activities.

What 'ways of organising the production of necessities' are there? Marx thought the industrial system of his 19th Century Western world was one - with Preston actually at the absolute heart of it. In the great lock-out of 1854 (following the shooting of Mill workers in 1842 in Lune Street) Marx wrote in support of the starving thousands:

The memorial in Preston of the workers shot in 1842, looking up Lune Street

The people actually involved in working the mills are not slaves, and they are not the landowning peasants of the medieval world. They are instead, as Marx understands it, individuals who sell their power to work - their labour - for a wage, to the owners of the means of production. So the organisation is: there are factories where things are made and there are two great orders of people: those who own the factories, and those who work in them.

In the earliest form of organisation, earlier even than the slave based economies of the Ancient World, people have only the most primitive tools at their disposal, thinks Marx, and it is a hard business to wrest the most basic of livings from the soil. Hunting and fishing provide food and clothing, with cattle-breeding and settled agriculture developing at the highest point. Division of labour is elementary in this simplest of forms of human living - amounting only to division of labour within the family. the social structure is simply an extension of the family structure.

An alternative organisation is possible if numbers grow sufficiently: a portion of the population is considered to have the right to a life of ease, while another portion is called on to expend most of the necessary labour, the fruits of which support the whole population. This is the system of slavery.

Feudalism is characterised by a third type of organisation. The producers were now not slaves but individuals who had rights over the land they worked: peasants. Corresponding to their rights they laboured under the obligation to support the hierarchy of 'nobility' which was ultimately parasitic upon them.

So those are various different ways a society organises itself to make its necessities.

But actually Marx thinks they form an historical series, like this:

The question then is, what produces this ? What is it that made historical change follow this order?

Because he thinks the basic thing - the thing everything else depends on - is a society's way of organising itself to make its necessities, he thinks that it is changes in this aspect of life - the economic aspect - which is at the root of the historical sequence.

But then, how is change in production, in economic organization, initiated?

Marx thinks there is a dynamic at the heart of any system of production. There's a sort of inbuilt conflict which gets more and more explosive as time passes: until there actually is an explosion, the order is blown apart and a new one emerges from ground zero. And the same thing happens to that: there is bound to be an inbuilt conflict, the conflict develops, there is an explosion, and yet a different order comes to be.

Several questions!

What is this inbuilt conflict? It's a conflict between people's aspirations towards a better life and the constraints imposed by a particular economic order.

Let me explain in terms of an example - Marx's account of how this internal conflict will tear capitalism apart and bring in a new economic order.

We already have the picture of capitalist society as Marx saw it in its hey-day, the early and middle part of the 19th Century: essentially a divided society, with the owners of 'the means of production' - the factories and so on - on the one hand, and the actual producers, the workers, the proletariat on the other.

That is the simple structure of high capitalist society. But it is not a stable structure. The situation is a developing one, evolving in response to a dynamic that is intrinsic to its very nature.

Take for a moment the point of view of a member of the bourgeoisie. To survive as a businessman in the market economy you have got to compete. It is not enough to go on making the profit that you have made previously: you've got to make more profit, and then more, and then more again if you are going to survive.

This leads to a crescendoing series of crises of overproduction. The factories frantically produce more and more, and cut wages down and down: with the result that nobody can buy the goods that are produced! Businesses go bankrupt, workers get madder and madder.

Eventually workers realize their true situation and burst into revolution: capitalism is swept away.

What sets up this process is the factory on the one hand, capable of producing almost limitless quantities of goods, and on the other the people who work in it, pushing for a less awful life.

And the general picture that emerges from Marx's writings is this: it is the struggle to make life less and less oppressive that drives the development of society forward. The way we organise ourselves in order to produce life's necessities changes as new and more efficient ways of producing things are devised - until we end up with the modern Western society (19th century Western society for Marx) where human beings are organised so as to work large-scale industrial plant and machinery.

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POPPER'S CRITICISM OF 'HISTORICISM'

K.R.Popper Pic thanks to University of Canterbury

Does this mean the course of social change is fixed? Some loud critics have thought so: Marxism, they say, is deterministic. And that is a basic error.

Karl Popper for example (Number 10 on the greatest Philosopher list) is one who thinks this, and one who thinks he has a decisive objection to it.

It is based, he declares, on a simple demonstrable mistake.

'Our Town' by LS Lowry Thanks to l-s-lowry.co.uk

We must agree, he argues, that change in a society is often influenced by its members' acquisition of new knowledge.

The course of our own society, for example, has surely been influenced by the invention of the steam engine, and by the 'discovery' of North America, and by our determination of the structure of the carbon atom.

But if there is one thing we cannot know now, it is what we shall only come to know in the future.

To anticipate an invention is to make it.

It follows, Popper concludes, that any idea that social change has proceeded along a determined path is mistaken.

Summary: POPPER'S CRITICISM OF 'HISTORICISM': CHANGE SOMETIMES DEPENDS ON THE ACQUISITION OF NEW KNOWLEDGE WHICH NECESSARILY CANNOT BE PREDICTED

What do you think?

Hegel

Herder

Hegel 1770-1831

Let me just point to another kind of thinking about historical change.

I'm thinking of a philosopher from whom Marx drew a good deal of inspiration - Hegel.

Hegel developed the view that a society was in some key respects like an individual human being - like an individual human being, at any rate, as he or she is seen from one particular perspective. The human being, according to the this way of thinking, is born relatively unformed but with a potential, a potential that is gradually fulfilled, if all goes well, during the course of the individual's life. Hegel's theory of a society was parallel to this. A society - in the sense of a 'culture' - began, he taught, in a relatively unformed state but possessed of a definite potential. Its history was the gradual fulfillment of that potential.

The idea of the life of an individual human being as a gradual realisation of potential was being articulated in Hegel's period, beginning perhaps with the writings of Herder. We recognise it today, and perhaps it is something we subscribe to. But it was articulated in Modern times at least by the movement to which both Hegel and Herder belonged, the movement which tried to put a stop to the sweepingly ambitious advance of science throughout the 18th Century. The revolutionary anti-science movement was Romanticism, Herder a early prophet, Hegel a mighty central figure. The development through a lifetime of the individual was not to be understood as the workings of a complicated mechanism but as the striving of an individual towards self-realisation; and the history of a people likewise was to be understood not as the workings of natural laws of social change but as a People seeking its Destiny.

Suddenly I am reaching for capital letters as we begin to hear the pre-echoes of culturalist and racist ideology that was to drive 19th imperialism and 20th Century genocide.

Hegel didn't make the shortlist.

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Credits

Acknowledgement of originals shown where known; otherwise where they are borrowed from.

Portrait of Darwin

I ought to know where this portrait is, but I don't. Reproductions of it are all over the net, eg on the wonderful Victorian Web, but I can't find it anywhere attributed.

Portrait of Spencer

Lithograph by Francis Carruthers Gould 

Print published in Vanity Fair, April 26th 1879

Thanks to the Smithsonian Libraries.

Portrait of Comte

Not sure where the original is. I borrow with thanks from Blupete.

Portrait of Marx as a Young Man

I borrow with thanks from Rich Warms

Portrait of Herder

Thanks to the Goethezeitzportal

Portrait of Hegel

Thanks to filosofica.net