ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how nineteenth-century anthropologists proposed to reconstruct cultural evolution. It describes some of their observations with respect to its general course and considers their ideas regarding the determinants of this evolution. A consistent materialist interpretation of cultural evolution is not to be found among the classical evolutionists. Of the nineteenth-century thinkers who dealt broadly with the culture process, only Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their disciples held to an explicit and thoroughgoing historical materialism. Theories of inherent causation, as understood, portray culture as evolving through the operation of forces intrinsic in human beings themselves. The psychic unity of man, though not always thought of as a dynamic factor, was sometimes employed as "an active spontaneous principle," as A. L. Kroeber once put it. Brinton was by no means alone among those early evolutionists whose adherence to psychic unity masked an underlying racial determinism.
