Social Change

We have frequently had to refer to the obvious fact that cultures change during the course of years. Are there any rules which determine the course which these changes will take? This question has been answered by sociologists in many different ways. There are, indeed, two main ways of dealing with it: a long-range view and a short-range view. Those who take the former seek to discover certain stages in human development which are depicted as the more or less inevitable manifestations of some underlying process, which pursues its way more or less independent of human intention, though doubtless influenced by it. The degree to which we are represented as the victims of a process which operates, as it were, through us, and the degree to which we can assist or impede it by our own effort, is hardly ever made clear, because the authors of these theories tend to regard the past as determined by some transcendent process, while they wish to give advice about the present.