社会发展阶段I： 殖民主义
The first process was colonialism. Although imperial powers settled most differences of opinion with their colonial subjects with force, increased awareness of non-Westem people raised new questions for European scholars about the nature of society and culture. Similarly, effective administration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution allowed Europeans 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 philosopher Thomas Hobbes described primeval man as living in conditions in which there are “no arts, no letters, no society” and his life as “solitary, 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 state. Even rationalistic philosophers like Voltaire implicitly assumed that enlightenment gradually resulted in the upward progress of humankind.
社会发展阶段II： 工业革命
The second process was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism which allowed and promoted continual revolutions in the means of production. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution reflected a belief that the changes in Europe wrought by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism were obvious improvements. Industrialization, combined with the intense political change brought about by the French Revolution, U.S. Constitution and Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, which were paving the way for the dominance of democracy, forced European thinkers to reconsider some of their assumptions about how society was organized.
