Social change and history : aspects of the western theory of development
- London Oxford University Press 1970
- 335p.
The primary purpose of this book is to set forth the essential sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development. The book is in large part historical, in smaller part analytical and critical. In the rather long final chapter I explore some of the difficulties which seem to me to arise in the study of social change when this study is made subject to the fundamental concepts of developmentalism. But although this final chapter is closely re lated to the chapters which precede, it must nonetheless be kept distinct from the central and guiding aim of the book, which is well within the realm of the history of ideas. Developmentalism is one of the oldest and most powerful of all Western ideas; very little in the Western study of social change, from the early Greeks down to our own day, falls outside the perspective of de velopmentalism; this perspective, together with its constitutive assumptions and its consequences to the study of society, is the essential subject of this book.