Evolutionism and its Critics: Deconstructing and Reconstructing an Evolutionary Interpretation of Human Society

Evolutionism and Its Critics is a critical history of evolutionary theories in the social sciences and a defense of them against their many critics. Sanderson deconstructs not only the wide array of social evolutionary theories, but the criticisms of the antievolutionists. Deconstructing evolutionary theories means laying bare their fundamental epistemological, methodological, conceptual, and theoretical assumptions and principles. Deconstructing antievolutionism means showing just where and how the critics have, for the most part, gone wrong.

But Evolutionism and Its Critics aims to reconstruct as well as deconstruct and does this by building, on the shoulders of past giants of evolutionary theorizing, a comprehensive evolutionary interpretation of human society based on abundant scientific and historical evidence.

Stephen K. Sanderson is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Riverside. He is a specialist in sociological theory and comparative and historical sociologyl and is one of the leading sociologists to develop a Darwinian understanding of human society. He is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Evolutionism and Its Critics (Paradigm 2007).