The Complexity of Evolution: History as a Post-Newtonian Social Science

The sciences of the 20(th)century largely inverted the understanding of the world fostered by Newtonian science. In recent years, that changed worldview has increasingly manifested itself in the social sciences. This paper examines the Post-Newtonian worldview and the conception of Social Sciences that has emerged. Drawing particularly on Complexity Studies, the author suggests that PostNewtonian History can picture the course of human cultural evolution as 'punctuated equilibria', a series of stable states interrupted by phase transitions so that Modernity can be interpreted as such a phase transition, a Second Axial Age.