ABSTRACT
Almost all early theories in sociology revealed a view of societies as moving from simple to more complex forms of organization. Most theories posited a series of stages, marking particular points in the history of human societies, from simple hunting and gathering through horticulture and agrarianism to industrialism. These portrayals of societies moving from “primitive” to “advanced” stages were often tinged with ethnocentrism if not outright racism, but at the same time, they did provide a view of society’s institutional systems as changing with growth in the size of a population and development of new technologies; and while many of these stage models of societal evolution went to their deserved death by the second decade of the 20th Century, many useful ideas were lost and abandoned, only to be resurrected in the 1960s. Today, stage models of societal evolution are far more sophisticated and less evaluative, and thus, they can be found through the new evolutionary sociology.
