ABSTRACT
The proportion of historical studies among the contributions to this seminar raised implicitly the question of the relation between historical studies of social change and a theory of evolution. It is of course true that nineteenth-century evolutionary theory was a way of seeing the world in historical terms: but surely no one proposes to revive evolutionism as a way of classifying societies on a historical scale running from the Lower Savagery of the Palaeolithic to the Higher Civilisation of the industrialised West. Nineteenth-century evolutionists put forward linear models of a unified world history; what implications have the change from unilinear to multilinear concepts of evolution and the sophistication in the use of non-historical comparative typologies developed during the functionalist period for the relation between evolutionary anthropology and history?
