ABSTRACT
Belief in the inevitability of progress is another assumption about social change which exercises an enormous hold over people’s minds. It is a belief which owes a great deal to scholarly efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to construct a scientific theory of progress. The intention was to show that ‘civilization’ was the product of certain inevitable processes in history and that contemporary industrial society was the outcome. During the second half of the nineteenth century these efforts gave rise to several different theories of social evolution. All of this work received an enormous amount of publicity, especially in Britain and America. Catching the optimistic mood then prevalent, it fired the popular imagination in such a way that it left a permanent mark.
