Ideas on the Development of Culture.
As a result
of eighteenth-century progressivism and nineteenth-
century evolutionism the
very notion of “develop-
ment” has become culture-impregnated. It has as-
sumed the status of an absolute, a universal
value, a
symbol of modernity and, as such, a conscious goal or
ideal
in a growing number of social cultures. Ideas on
the
development of culture are, therefore, in a real
sense, also ideas of the development of culture.
Apart from the assumption of continuous improve-
ment (intimately associated with unilinear ideas on
progress),
three other assumptions commonly underlie
the notion of cultural
development. First, there is the
belief that despite discontinuities there
is a substantial
degree of continuity between phases or stages of a
given culture, although writers differ regarding the
individual
significance and the mutual linkage of such
stages. Secondly, there is a
widely shared consensus
that striving towards ends is implicit in the
notion of
human or cultural development, even if it is frequently
not
clear whether a thinker is discussing teleology in
history or the teleology of history, or both. Lastly,
there
is the assumption that culture constitutes not a
“thing,”
but a relational continuum in and through
time, so that
culture is both a product of the past and a creator
of
the future.
It is evident from these assumptions, particularly the
last, that the
notion of cultural development raises the
problem not only of change but
also of persistence.
Generally speaking, writers employing the
organismic
paradigm of growth—and these tend to coincide
with
the “holists”—have acknowledged the
significance of
persistence. Civilization, Edmund Burke, for example,
insisted in his Reflections on the Revolution in
France
(1790), was chiefly a matter of past achievements over
the
ages (Works, London [1899], II, 351). The political
romantics, likewise, preferred to cast their gaze back-
wards rather than forwards.
The prevalent orientation, however, was forward-
looking or progressivist, even among those who traced
cyclical
or dialectic patterns in development. Vico, for
example, envisaged the
course of development in terms
of recurrent cycles, with each cycle
comprising three
ages, of gods, heroes, and men, dominated by
religion,
myth, and philosophy, respectively, and reappearing,
not in
identical form, but in a “diversity of modes”
as an
upward-spiralling movement (New Science,
§1096). Kant, Hegel, and Marx insisted in their differ-
ent ways on dialectic rather than unilinear change,
but
at the same time saw each stage subservient to the
next,
inexorably leading to a predetermined end. Even
Herder, the most outspoken
opponent of the idea of
linear progress, never concealed his faith in
secular
redemption as the terminal goal of the historical proc-
ess. Curiously enough, the man who set the
tone of
the progressivist era, Voltaire, was no sanguine pro-
gressivist himself. It is true that the
distant past was
for him an age of darkness or semidarkness, yet he
expressed no inordinate trust in the future as the har-
binger of apocalyptic portents. Acutely conscious of
the debits that accompanied the credits in the ledger
of history,
“later” did not self-evidently mean
“better”
for him. In comparing his own age with that
of Louis
XIV, for example, he left no doubt about his preference
for
the latter. It would seem, therefore, that it was
Voltaire's contempt for
the more remote past, in par-
ticular the
Middle Ages, rather than his faith in contin-
uous progress which cast him into the mold in which
others came to
see him.
But if the origin of the idea of uninterrupted cultural
progress has
somewhat erroneously been associated
with Voltaire, its culmination is
rightly identified with
Condorcet's Sketch for a
Historical Picture of the Pro-
gress of the
Human Mind (Esquisse d'un tableau his-
torique des progrès de
l'esprit humain, 1794), which
expressed unbounded optimism in
man's progressively
mounting capacity to understand and hence to
control
the “laws” of his own development. For
Condorcet,
no less than for Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson
after
him, the “march of civilization” was continuous.
Barbarism was bound to recede before the advance and
diffusion
of knowledge and the emergence of a new
social and political ethic.
Scientific procedures would
liberate man from the excess baggage of the
past.
While for Vico and Herder religion and myth were
vital
ingredients of culture, Condorcet dismissed them
summarily as the work of
cheats and scoundrels. And
in contrast to their skepticism towards cultural
diffu-
sion, Condorcet displayed complete
confidence in the
transferability of cultures from more to less
developed
countries, maintaining indeed that the latter would,
after
importing the “know-how,” actually overtake the
former, whenever they were able to avoid their mis-
takes. For Condorcet cultural development consisted
essentially
in technological and scientific advance, and
his
Sketch surveyed the history of man's intellectual
achievements,
divided into ten stages of scientific and
technologically based progress.
Arriving at his own age
he felt that “philosophy has nothing
more to guess,
no more hypothetical surmises to make; it is enough
to
assemble and order the facts and to show the useful
truths that can be
derived from their connection and
from their totality”
(Introduction, trans. June Barra-
clough).
Condorcet's faith in strict empiricism and scientific
procedures profoundly
inspired Auguste Comte's Cours
de philosophie
positive (1830-42). In it Comte sought
to establish universal
historical laws, the most funda-
mental of
which stipulates three phases through which
all human societies must pass,
the theological, meta-
physical, and
positive. Of considerable interest is
Comte's analysis of cultural
development in terms of
social statics and social dynamics, in that it
emphasizes
the two-dimensional nature of interaction to which
Herder
had drawn attention. Social statics seeks to
study the interconnections and
functions of cultural
components within a cultural whole at a given
time,
while social dynamics focuses on the vertical interrela-
tions and changes over time.
Comte's demand that
sociocultural development should be studied in a man-
ner analogous to that applicable to causal
uniformities
in the realm of nature did not fall on deaf ears.
Two influential works that appeared in close succes-
sion, Henry Thomas Buckle's History of
Civilization
in England (1857) and Karl Marx's A
Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy (1859) attempted
to
pay heed to Comte's insistence on inductive inquiry.
Buckle sought
to demonstrate that “the actions of men
being determined solely
by their antecedents, must
have a character of uniformity, that is to say,
must,
under precisely the same circumstances, always issue
in
precisely the same results” (Buckle, Vol. I, Ch. 1).
Like Comte,
he was convinced of the superiority of
European (and particularly English)
culture and the
derivability of universal laws from its study. Marx also
generally wrote as if he regarded historical tendencies
to be akin to the
operation of natural laws, having
universal applicability and
“working out,” as he put
it in the Preface of the
first edition of Das Kapital
(1867),
“with iron necessity towards an inexorable
destination,” so that the laws of development operating
in
industrially advanced countries “simply present the
other
countries with a picture of their own future
development.” The
most succinct statement of Marx's
views on cultural development is in the
Preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Zur
Kritik der politischen
Oekonomie), according to which
“the sum total of the
relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of
society—the real foundation,
on which rise legal and political
superstructures and
to which correspond definite forms of social conscious-
ness.” In addition to
his descriptive theory of socio-
cultural
development Marx advanced a prescriptive
doctrine intended to meet the
problem of alienation,
on which he had focused in his earliest writings
and
in particular in The German Ideology (Die Deutsche
Ideologie, 1846, with Engels). The
theme of alienation
links Marx most intimately with the romantics, but
whereas Marx sought the cure of man's alienation in
the future, the
romantics reverted to the past, finding
that man had taken the wrong turn
by seeking libera-
tion from a traditional
order of society.
Among attempts to reconcile traditionalism with
progressivism, or
persistence with change, Herder's
treatment of Bildung and Tradition is undoubtedly the
most
original contribution which still has lost none of
its relevance. Both
these terms were used by him in
their original dynamic sense of
“becoming” or “build-
ing up” and of “passing on,”
respectively, and not in
their better-known acquired sense. Thus Bildung is not
equated with a particular state of development or
confined in its connotation
to intellectual or strictly
individual pursuits. Instead it is viewed as an
inter-
active social process in which
men receive from and
add to their distinctive cultural heritage. The
modern
concept of “socialization” comes, perhaps,
closest to
Herder's interpretation of Bildung.
It is also of interest that Herder conferred upon
Bildung a distinctly dialectic meaning by
identifying
it with evaluation as well as assimilation (Werke, XIII,
343-48). Thus understood, it is not simply a
replicative
process but also a process of change. Indeed, Herder
saw
in Bildung the only alternative to sociocultural
discontinuities attending the replacement of values
through their
destruction rather than their trans-
formation. But he was aware that the merging of the
old and the new
involves in its operation both affirma-
tive
and negative properties, and that change is not
tantamount to a smooth advance or progress. Every
discovery in
the arts and sciences, he wrote in the
Ideas, knits a new pattern of society. New
situations
create new problems, and every increase in wants (even
if
they are satisfied) does not necessarily augment
human happiness (ibid.,
XIII, 372-73).
Tradition, likewise, is not identified with a stock of
accumulated beliefs, customs, and ways of
doing things,
but with an ongoing process of intergenerational trans-
mission. Bildung and Tradition entail culture as both
a
product and an emergent force at any given time,
insofar as Bildung leads to shared patterns or forms
of life
that have become “patterns” by virtue of a
greater or
lesser degree of institutionalization through
Tradition. Although Herder opposed the idea of
linear
progress, he nonetheless refused to view stages of de-
velopment in a dichotomous manner. Hence,
in place
of the idea of polarity he advanced the idea of inter-
play. Tradition and
progress no longer embody two
opposed tendencies, but a single continuum.
Progress,
or more precisely change, becomes a built-in charac-
teristic of tradition, and
development is seen, therefore,
as at once part of a given culture
continuum and the
instrument for its transformation.
It requires not only
historical antecedents but also emerging goals
pointing
to the future. What is also worth noting is that, while
Herder admitted conflict and tension as potentially
inherent in the
processes of Bildung and Tradition, he
categorically denied the possibility of complete
discon-
tinuity within any given culture.
In this he revealed
considerable astuteness. For it is difficult to see
how
one can speak of “development” in terms of
complete
or total change without raising serious problems of
identity.
Finally, Herder's analysis of socialization as
a nonreplicative process and
his interpretation of tra-
dition as a
dialectic continuum clearly suggest that any
attempt to explain change must
entail a recognition
of persistence or vice versa. A theory which
cannot
account for both is therefore unlikely to account for
either.
