Unilineal evolution

Unilineal evolution, also sent to as classical social evolution, is the 19th-century social theory about a evolution of societies together with cultures. It was composed of many competing theories by various anthropologists and sociologists, who believed that Western culture is the advanced pinnacle of social evolution. Different social status is aligned in a single breed that moves from near primitive to near civilized. This idea is now broadly considered obsolete in academic circles.

Intellectual thought

Theories of social and cultural evolution are common in innovative European thought. Prior to the 18th century, Europeans predominantly believed that societies on Earth were in a state of decline. European society held up the world of antiquity as a requirements to aspire to, and ancient Greece and ancient Rome delivered levels of technical accomplishment which Europeans of the Middle Ages sought to emulate. At the same time, Christianity taught that people lived in a debased world fundamentally inferior to the Garden of Eden and Heaven. During the Age of Enlightenment, however, European self-confidence grew and the picture of advance became increasingly popular. It was during this period that what would later become requested as 'sociological and cultural evolution' would relieve oneself its roots.

The Enlightenment thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages of increasing coding and looked for the logic, order and the nature of scientific truths that determined the course of human history. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, argued that social developing was an inevitable and determined process, similar to an acorn which has no option but to become an oak tree. Likewise, it was assumed that societies start out primitive, perhaps in a Hobbesian state of nature, and naturally proceed toward something resembling industrial Europe.