Abstract
From the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘evolutionism’ had prevailed among social scientists in many fields, such as sociology, philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, ethnology and archaeology, as a framework of their research. One of the origins of this idea was the belief in ‘progress’ that characterized eighteenth century’s enlightenment thought. The evolutionists assumed that society, economy and culture progressed through a sequence of deterministic developmental stages, and always toward a completion of civilization.
However, in the late nineteenth century, many objections to this notion of evolutionism emerged within the above academic fields, mainly in history and ethnology. Historians and ethnologists pointed out that evolutionism failed to offer an appropriate explanation for the complex and non-deterministic character of the historical process. Moreover, innovation theories, which came into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely rejected the idea of progress and evolutionism.
In the present paper, the author argues that early innovation theorists, such as Gabriel Tarde and Joseph A. Schumpeter attempted to offer more general theories than the development stages theory, and to transcend the out-of-date ideas of the evolutionists.
