ABSTRACT
For most of the twentieth century, as I noted in the Introduction, historians and social scientists have tended to steer clear of investigating long-term social processes in general. But they have given a particularly wide berth to a set of questions which preoccupied their nineteenth-century precursors: the issue of how what may loosely be called humans’ “psychological” makeup changes in the course of social development. The problem is often raised only to be summarily dismissed. In a recent elementary textbook (1994), Chirot, for example, poses the question:
why, despite the essential psychological and biological similarity of humans today and those of, say, twenty thousand years ago, almost all aspects of our lives except for our basic physical functions are so different, and why, despite the basic similarity of all human beings on earth today (we are all one species and interbreed perfectly well) there are such huge differences in economic, social and political behaviour. (Chirot 1994, xvi)
