Evolution, history, and collective subjectivity

Abstract

The article analyzes contemporary sociology’s conceptions regarding the relationship between social evolution and history, focusing on three streams of thought: functionalism and neo-func­tionalism, from Parsons to Alexander; the British ‘historicism’ of Gellner, Giddens, and Mann; and German genetic structuralism from Habermas to Eder. It demonstrates how the question of historical contingency and the role of collectivities have steadily made space for themselves within evolutionary theories — even in an exaggerated fashion and at the level of cognitive and moral development; a rigid neo-Darwinian pan-selectionism is rejected while historicism’s outright rejection of the theory of evolution is also criticized. The article closes with an analytical evaluation of current issues and of the impasses found in these approaches, and suggests ways to move towards a theory of evolution able to take historical contingency into account in multilinear fashion. Evolutionary stages could thus appear alongside a broad analysis of the mechanisms of evolution, wherein social creativity and interaction among collective subjecti­vities prove quite important.