Trigger on the Enlightenment View of Humanity and Social Evolution
  From Bruce Trigger's 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought . Citations omitted.

    ...The reasons for this growing optimism included the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as manifested above all in the work of Galileo and Newton, the application of scientific discoveries to the advancement of technology, and a widespread appreciation of the literary creations of English writers in the reign of Elizabeth I and of French ones under Louis XIV. Especially among the middle classes, these developments encouraged a growing faith in progress and a belief that to a large degree human beings were masters of their own destiny. They also inclined Western Europeans to regard the ways of life of the technologically less advanced peoples that they were encountering in various parts of the world as survivals of a primordial human condition rather than as products of degeneration.
    Neither the Renaissance discovery that the past had been different from the present nor the realization that technological development was occurring in Western Europe led directly to the conclusion that progress was a general theme of human history. In the seventeenth century successive historical periods were viewed as a series of kaleidoscope variations on themes that were grounded in a fixed human nature, rather than as constituting a developmental sequence worthy of study in its own right. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1774) viewed history as having cyclical characteristics and argued that all human societies evolve through similar stages of development and decay that reflect the uniform actions of providence. He prudently stressed, however, that this view of human history as governed by strict laws did not apply to the Hebrews, whose progress was divinely guided. Although he was not an evolutionist, his views helped to encourage a belief that history could be understood in terms of regularities analogous to those being proposed for the natural sciences.
    An evolutionary view of human history that was sufficiently comprehensive to challenge the medieval formulation not only on specific points but also in its entirety was formulated by the Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century. This movement began in France, where it is associated with leading philosophers, such as Montesquieu, Turgot, Voltaire, and Condorcet, but it also flourished in Scotland in the school of so-called 'primitivist' thinkers, which included John Locke, William Robertson, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and the eccentric James Burnett, who as Lord Monboddo remains notorious for his claim that human beings and orangutans belong to a single species.
    The philosophers of the Enlightenment combined a more naturalistic understanding of social processes with a firm belief in progress to produce an integrated set of concepts that purported to explain social change. They also created a methodology that they believed enabled them to study the general course of human development from earliest times. In England and the Netherlands, where political power was already in the hands of the mercantile middle class, intellectual activity was directed towards assessing the practical political and economic significance of this change. The continuing weakness of the French middle class in the face of Bourbon autocracy appears to have encouraged French intellectuals to engage in broader speculations about the nature of progress. The great impact that these ideas had on scholars in Edinburgh reflected not only the close cultural ties between France and Scotland but also the greater power and prosperity suddenly acquired by the Scottish middle class following Union with England in 1707.
    The following are the most important tenets of the Enlightenment that were to become the basis of popular evolutionary thinking among the European middle classes:

1.  Psychic unity. All human groups were believed to possess essentially the same kind and level of intelligence and to share the same basic emotions, although individuals within groups differed from one another in these features. Because of this there was no biological barrier to the degree to which any race or nationality could benefit from new knowledge or contribute to its advancement. All groups were equally perfectable. In its most ethnocentric form this constituted a belief that all human beings were capable of benefiting from European civilization. Yet it also implied that an advanced technological civilization was not destined to remain the exclusive possession of Europeans. Cultural differences were generally either ascribed to climatic and other environmental influences or dismissed as historical accidents.

2.  Cultural progress as the dominant feature of human history. Change was believed to occur continuously rather than episodically and was ascribed to natural rather than supernatural causes. The main motivation for progress was thought to be the desire of human beings to improve their condition, principally by gaining greater control over nature. Many Enlightenment philosophers regarded progress as inevitable, or even as a law of nature, while others thought of it as something to be hoped for.

3.  Progress characterizes not only technological development but all aspects of human life, including social organization, politics, morality, and religious beliefs. Changes in all of these spheres of human behaviour were viewed as occurring concomitantly and as following, in a general fashion, a single line of development. As a result of similar ways of thinking, human beings at the same level of development tended to devise uniform solutions to their problems and hence their ways of life evolved along parallel lines. Cultural change was frequently conceptualized in terms of a universal series of stages. Europeans were viewed as having evolved through all of these stages, while technologically more primitive societies had passed only through the first ones.

4.  Progress perfects human nature, not by changing it but by progressively eliminating ignorance, passion, and superstition. The new evolutionary view of cultural change did not negate either the traditional Christian or the Cartesian notion of a fixed and immutable human nature. Yet human nature as it was now conceived was far removed from the medieval preoccupation with sinfulness and individual dependence on divine grace as the only means of achieving salvation.

5.  Progress results from the exercise of rational thought to improve the human condition. In this fashion human beings gradually acquired greater ability to control their environment, which in turn generated the wealth and leisure needed to support the creation of more complex societies and the development of a more profound and objective understanding of humanity and the universe. The exercise of reason had long been regarded as the crucial feature distinguishing human beings from animals. Most Enlightenment philosophers also viewed cultural progress technologically, as humanity's realization of the plans of a benevolent deity. A faith that benevolent laws guided human development was long to outlive a belief in God among those who studied human societies.

    The Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart labeled the methodology that Enlightenment philosophers used to trace the development of human institutions 'theoretic' or 'conjectural' history. This involved the comparative study of living peoples whose cultures were judged to be at different levels of complexity and arranging these cultures to form a logical, usually unilinear, sequence from simple to complex. These studies were based largely on ethnographic data derived from accounts by explorers and missionaries working in different parts of the world. Despite disagreement about details, such as whether agricultural or pastoral economies had evolved first, it was believed that these sequences could be regarded as historical ones and used to examine the development of all kinds of social institutions. In the writings of the historian William Robertson and others, the apparently similar sequences of cultures in the eastern hemisphere and the Americas were interpreted as proof of the general validity of the principle of psychic unity and of the belief that human beings at the same stage of development would respond to the same problems in the same way.
    It is generally acknowledged that a cultural-evolutionary perspective was widely accepted for explaining human history long before the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Glyn Daniel doubts the importance of Enlightenment philosophy for the development of archaeology since Enlightenment scholars, with few exceptions, ignored archaeological data in their own writings. That they did so is scarcely surprising since, in the absence of any established means for dating prehistoric materials, archaeology had little to contribute to their discussions of cultural evolution. This does not mean, however, that the writings of the Enlightenment did not influence the thinking of antiquarians. On the contrary, their advocacy of an evolutionary view of human development from primitive beginnings encouraged a more holistic understanding of prehistoric times.

back to list of readings