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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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.


620

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


621

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.