ABSTRACT
It is difficult now to realise the strength of the impact of evolutionary ideas on social theory in the period following the publication of the Origin of Species. There is hardly a branch of social inquiry which remained unaffected. As the historian Heitland said in 1924, ‘We are all evolutionists of sorts nowadays, though we differ widely in the use we make of evolutionary principles’. 1 This remains true today even of the critics of the theories of social evolution and of progress, so deeply have ideas of growth and development come to pervade the public mind.
