Social Change and History

Abstract

The primary purpose of this book is to set forth the essential sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development.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.