ABSTRACT
Observers of human societies have sought a “natural history” of society and its institutions. They not only hoped to discover the secret that drives change or development along a particular course, but hoped to find it in an analytically convenient place, namely, within society or the institution undergoing the succession of differences in time. The seeds of change, then, whether civilizational or societal, or more narrowly, political, economic, or something else, were imagined to lie within the thing changing. In the twentieth century, Pitirim Sorokin, with his central premise that each sociocultural system has an “immanent destiny” and undergoes “immanent self-determination,” is known for what amounts to a variant of the “natural history” approach. The environing or external circumstances, without which sociocultural change cannot be understood, include social and cultural intrusions, diffusions, impacts, collisions of peoples and ideas in time and space, conflict, coercion, force, crisis, critical events, and chance or accidental factors.
