Abstract

This article critically examines some of the major assumptions of structuralevolutionary theory. This examination has accepted as valid one basic implication of this approach - namely the strong tendency, among human beings, to "expansion”, and has examined the different dimensions of such expansion.But contrary to the classical evolutionary perspective, our approach has emphasized that the different dimensions of such expansions - especially the symbolic and the structural differentiation, need not always go together.Of central importance in such a reappraisal is the distinction between, on the one hand, social division of labor which contains the core of structural differtation and on the other hand what has been called the basic elite functions - those functions or activities which are oriented to the problems generated by the very constitution of social division of labor, i.e. the constants of trust, regulation of power, construction of meaning and legitimation. The social activities oriented to these problems can be defined as elite functions and which are indeed distinct from those engendered by the social division of labor.This distinction has, however, not been fully recognized in the relevant literature and it is the examination of this distinction ana its implications for sociological analysis that constitutes the starting point, or the reappraisal, of structural-evolutionary perspective which is presented in this article and which is based above all on some of the research in comparative macro-sociology which I have undertaken in the last three decades — starting with the analysis of the Political Systems of Empires.This reappraisal has accordingly emphasized that it is indeed the different combination of these dimensions that gives rise to the dynamics of societies and civilization which indicate a much greater variability than has been proposed in classical and contemporary structural-evolutionary analysis.