ABSTRACT
One of the great intellectual changes of the early nineteenth century was the realisation that history was a developmental process, rather than a display of movement to and from a fixed, ‘natural’ order. Historical evolution and progress are modern ideas. Before the nineteenth century there was limited cognisance of a process of political, economic or technological development. Many political movements looked back to the past, and aimed for its restoration. They did not aim to advance beyond that which had gone before. The Renaissance was itself a notion of a re-birth of the culture of Classical Antiquity. Even the word ‘revolution’ originally meant a cyclical return to normalcy, rather that the construction of something entirely new (Western, 1972, p. 1).
