GRE ISSUE PART I1.THREE CLASSICAL THEORIESIn the 19th century, three great classical theories of social and historical change were created : the sociocultural evolutionism, thesocial cycle theoryand the Marxist historical materialism theory. These theories had one common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of the social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to the present and future events. Those theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the laws of history.2.colonialismThe first process was colonialism. Although imperial powers settled,most differences of opinion with their colonial sbujects with force, increased awareness of non-Westem people raised new questions for European scholars about the nature of society and culture. Similarly ,effective adminsitration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolutinon allowed Eiurpeans to organize their new knowledge in a way that reflected and justified their increasing political and economic domination of others: colonized people were less evolved, colonizing people were more evolved. When the 17th-century, English philospher Thomas Hobbes described primeval man as living in conditions in which there are "no arts, no letters, no society" and his life as " solittary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", he was very much proclaiming a popular conception of the "savage". Everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development out of this stage. Even rationalistic philosophers like Voltaire implicityly assumed that enlightenment gradually resluted in the upward progress of humankind.
