p In recent years many Western sociologists have begun to display an interest in social change and social evolution. But they generally regard social evolution as a continuous process of social change which they identify with quantitative changes not leading to any qualitative, fundamental social changes. When they do acknowledge qualitative changes, they do not regard them as a necessary stage in social evolution which signifies a transition to another quality.

p In this Western sociologists are true to the old traditions of Tarde, Ross and other sociologists of the older generation. Tarde once explained social evolution as an “endless repetition”. Ross regarded changes not as fundamental social changes, but as mere changes in social institutions and their various forms, i.e., the parts and elements of society. In Changing America he puts forward the following classification of social changes: 1) development of democracy, 2) emancipation of women, 3) increase in the number of divorces, 4) increased immigration, etc.

p McClung Lee writes that social changes are not essential changes in social life, they alter not the essence of social life, but its forms and the functions and structures of various social institutions or social systems. Social change is the process in which we can discern an essential 160 change in the structure and function of social systems (see 99; 263).

p The theory of social change is thus concerned not with objective social laws which are the essence of the social process, but its different forms or rather the functions and structures of these forms. It completely ignores any investigation of internal causes and laws of social changes, which in turn evoke changes in the structure and functioning of social institutions.

p The theory of evolution, according to which there are no leaps either in nature or in history, and all changes in the world occur gradually, was long ago demolished by Hegel. In the first volume of his Logic he wrote that, when we want to understand the emergence or disappearance of something, we usually imagine that we gain an insight into the matter through the concept of the gradualness of such emergence or disappearance. Changes in being, however, occur not only through transition from one quantity to another, but also through transition from quantitative to qualitative changes and vice versa, the transition which interrupts the gradualness and replaces one phenomenon by another [see 100; 313-14).

p But even the vulgar interpretation of the social evolution concept does not satisfy some sociologists.

They replace it by a category of “social change" which, as B. Grushin correctly observes, is “the most abstract, the most general category reflecting the objective processes operating in the world. It effaces the eternal conception of the real diversity of the forms of processes; moreover, the question of the structure of the process entirely disappears in it. The category of ’change’ pinpoints only the most obvious, the most general, characteristic of any process, namely, the existence of differences in the selfsame object (or its part) taken at two points differing in time" [101; 61].