Evolutionism and Its Critics: Deconstructing

Evolutionism and Its Critics is a critical history of evolutionary theories in the social sciences and a defense of them against their many critics. Sanderson deconstructs not only the wide array of social evolutionary theories, but the criticisms of the antievolutionists. Deconstructing evolutionary theories means laying bare their fundamental epistemological, methodological, conceptual, and theoretical assumptions and principles. Deconstructing antievolutionism means showing just where and how the critics have, for the most part, gone wrong. But Evolutionism and Its Critics aims to reconstruct as well as deconstruct and does this by building, on the shoulders of past giants of evolutionary theorizing, a comprehensive evolutionary interpretation of human society based on abundant scientific and historical evidence.

Prologue	p. vii
The Nature of Social Evolutionism	p. 1
Classical Evolutionism: I	p. 1
Herbert Spencer	p. 10
Lewis Henry Morgan	p. 12
Edward Burnett Tylor	p. 14
The Epistemologies of the Classical Evolutionists	p. 16
Ordinary Causal Explanation in the Classical Evolutionists	p. 21
The Classical Evolutionists and Darwinism	p. 27
Classical Evolutionism and the Doctrine of Progress	p. 30
Notes	p. 33
The Antievolutionary Reaction	p. 35
Classical Evolutionism and the Comparative Method	p. 36
Were the Classical Evolutionists Unilinearists?	p. 40
Classical Evolutionism and Diffusion	p. 42
The Contributions of the Classical Evolutionists	p. 44
Notes	p. 45
Marxism as Evolutionism	p. 49
Cohen's Interpretation of Marx	p. 50
Was Marx a Technological Determinist?	p. 52
Was Marx a Developmentalist?	p. 53
An Alternative Conception of Marx's Theory of History	p. 58
Marx's Periodization of History	p. 60
Engels's Evolutionism	p. 62
Marx, Engels, and Morgan	p. 66
The Darwinian Connection	p. 68
Conclusions	p. 69
Notes	p. 71
Classical Evolutionism: II	p. 74
L. T. Hobhouse	p. 74
William Graham Sumner and Albert Galloway Keller	p. 83
Edward Westermarck	p. 94
Comparisons and Conclusions	p. 99
Notes	p. 102
The Evolutionary Revival	p. 105
V. Gordon Childe	p. 105
Leslie White	p. 113
Julian Steward	p. 120
Some Comparisons and Conclusions	p. 125
Notes	p. 129
Sociological Evolutionism: I	p. 132
Parsons's Theory of Social Evolution	p. 133
The Logical Structure of Parsonian Evolutionism	p. 137
Parsons's Theory of Social Evolution: A Critique	p. 143
Talcott Parsons: The American Hegel	p. 148
Conclusion	p. 150
Notes	p. 152
Anthropological Evolutionism Since 1960	p. 154
The Evolutionism of the Young Marshall Sahlins	p. 154
Elman Service's Functionalist Evolutionism	p. 157
Robert Carneiro's Spencerian Evolutionism	p. 161
Marvin Harris's Materialist Evolutionism	p. 172
Coda: Marxian Alternatives to Anthropological Evolutionism	p. 183
Notes	p. 188
Sociological Evolutionism: II	p. 192
Gerhard Lenski's Ecological-Evolutionary Theory	p. 192
Jonathan Turner's Institutional Selectionism	p. 206
Maryanski and Turner's Normative Evolutionism	p. 212
World-System Theory and Social Evolutionism	p. 214
In the Parsonian Tradition	p. 218
Notes	p. 221
Evolutionary Biology and Social Evolutionism	p. 223
The Concept of Adaptation in Biological and Social Evolutionism	p. 223
Biological and Social Evolution as Processes of Differentiation	p. 235
Evolutionary Progress	p. 246
A Note on Darwinian Theories of Social Evolution	p. 258
Notes	p. 260
Contemporary Antievolutionism	p. 263
Evolutionism and External Influences	p. 264
Evolutionism and the Comparative Method	p. 267
Evolutionism and Human Agency	p. 268
Evolutionism and Human Psychology	p. 272
Evolutionism and Directionality	p. 273
Notes	p. 276
Evolutionary Materialism: A General Theory of Social Evolution	p. 280
The Theoretical Strategy of Evolutionary Materialism	p. 282
In What Way and When May Social Evolution Be Progressive?	p. 307
Conclusion: The Quality of Life in Different Social Systems	p. 321
Epilogue	p. 326
References	p. 331
Index	p. 355
About the Author	p. 374
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Evolutionism and Its Critics: Deconstructing and Reconstructing an Evolutionary Interpretation of Human Society

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