ABSTRACT
Thomas Carlyle represents a different intellectual tradition. A nineteenth-century literary lion, he was a romantic who gave voice to a common sense perspective on social change. Carlyle's major contribution is the 'great man' theory. In politics, great men provided the hinges upon which history turned. Auguste Comte was a more scientific-minded contemporary of Carlyle. According to Comte, humans advanced through three stages of intellectual development. In the beginning, hunter-gatherers relied upon theological reasoning. Prehistoric nomads had few options in how they attempted to cope with environmental challenges. Morgan was aware of the advances that had been made in uncovering the technological innovations of our ancestors. Protestantism, at least in its Calvinist version, preached that because God was omniscient, future events were inevitable. Bureaucracies achieve organizational objectives by establishing a functional division of labor that is operationalized in defined offices. By the beginning of the twentieth century, bureaucracy had taken hold, as had complicated technologies.
