Stages of Evolution. Antoine Yves Goguet (De
l'Origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences, Paris [1758],
I, 16) distinguished two classes of positive (historical)
laws, namely, those “which are, or at least ought to
be, common to all the different kinds of society,” and
those “which are peculiar to a society which has made
some progress in agriculture and commerce and in the
more refined arts of life.” The reconstruction of the
stages of human evolution is a means of determining
one's own place in the history of civilization. The task
is undertaken on the basis of historical research as well
as comparative and ethnological observations; where
there are missing links in the record, judicious con-
jectures have to complement the picture. Hume,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson,
John Millar, and others delineate subsequent stages of
evolution. According to Smith “the natural course of
things is first agriculture, then manufactures, and finally
foreign commerce [though] this order has been in many
respects inverted” (Book III, Ch. I). Millar distinguishes
the stages of barbarism and matriarchy, the pastoral
age, the age of agriculture, that of the useful arts and
manufactures, and finally “great opulence and the
culture of the elegant arts.” The tripartition, later used
by Comte and Hegel, is rather usual.
“Conjectural history” does not imply a purely logical
reconstruction of the origins (as has been frequently
suggested). Rousseau's account of the evolution of soci-
ety owes something to the uncontrolled flights of the
imagination. However, in general, the conjectures used
by Montesquieu, Smith, Robertson, Ferguson, et al.,
are not the “large” ones which are used to prove a
case, but conjectures of detail based upon experience
and historical probability, in the sense in which
Niebuhr was to say in 1804: “I am a historian, for I
can trace a complete picture from individual extant
data, and I know where parts are missing and how
to complement them” (DieBriefe Barthold Georg
Niebuhrs, Berlin [1926], I, 317). Annals may be written
without conjectures, history requires a judicious sense
of what is possible and probable, “a just observation”
and “the knowledge of important consequences” of the
progress of mankind which “they build in every subse-
quent age on foundations formerly laid” (Ferguson
[1767], Part I, Sec. I). In this sense Robertson was one
of the first to trace the history of the Middle Ages as
a step in the history of European civilization. The
introduction of the concepts of progress and evolution
did not entail a deterministic or teleological philosophy
of history. In the hands of the authors of the Enlight-
enment, most highly developed by Millar, it amounted
to a taxonomy dealing with the accumulative character
of objective knowledge and rational technique, a sober
illustration of especially important types of structural
innovation in the course of social change.
In particular, the conception of evolutionary stages
served to combat the naive attribution of cultural,
political, and social innovation to the legendary legis-
lators of previous historiography. In the process of
historical reconstruction all relevant variables have to
be taken into account, whether technological and bio-
logical, structural or cultural. An “infinite variety of
circumstances” (Turgot) determines the organic growth
of society which arises “from the instincts, not from
the speculations of men... the circumstances in which
[they] are placed... the result from human action,
but not the executions of human design” (Ferguson;
similarly Hume). Human contrivance leads to unfore-
seen consequences (the “heterogeneity of ends”—fol-
lowing Wilhelm Wundt's psychological terminology).
However, this insight does not entail the helpless
acceptance by
Historismus of the status quo. For the
Enlightenment it establishes the need for a closer anal-
ysis of historical sequences; it calls for the development
of the theoretical social sciences whose task it is, in
the words of Karl Popper, “to try to anticipate the
unintended consequences of our actions” (Popper,
“Reason or Revolution?,”
European Journal of Sociol-
ogy [1970], 260).
