ABSTRACT
From the very birth of sociology the idea of progress seemed to be inextricably linked with theories of social dynamics. Sociology's ambition was to become the science of progress. It was easy to overlook the fact that the concept of progress is necessarily, logically linked only with a rather special kind of social dynamic; it has a meaning only within a particular image of social change. Already in the nineteenth century, within its predominant organic-turned-systemic model of society, three kinds of social change had been studied. One was a normal, everyday operation of society; a set of repeatable, regular, patterned processes supporting the functioning of a social whole, without modifying its character or identity. “Operation without transformation” was to become a focus of structural-functional theories from Malinowski to Parsons, with their emphasis on equilibrium, structural continuity, self-regulation, and reproduction. Another variety of change was the cyclical processes, from the daily routine of family life, through the weekly cycle of industrial labor, the yearly work-pattern of agrarian communities, and ending with various circular transformations of wider societies—economic, political, cultural—returning to the starting point after a more or less intricate and prolonged sequence of changes. “Change without novelty” was to become a focus of various cyclical theories, from Spengler to Sorokin. But there was also a third possibility: one could treat social changes as directional, producing an orderly, patterned sequence of fundamental transformations, in which each stage is basically novel, emergent, never repeated and each next stage brings the process closer to some specified ultimate standard. “Directional transformation” was the image central for theories of social development, with evolutionism and historical materialism as their major nineteenth-century varieties.
