Q.Would you agree with the statement that rapid social change is a comparatively new phenomenon in human history? Give reasons for your answer.

Social change has always occurred, but sociologists separate slow 'evolutionary' change from fast, large-scale 'revolutionary' change, and only the fast kind is genuinely new to the modern era.

Rapid, self-conscious social change is indeed largely a modern phenomenon, even though no society has ever been perfectly static. Sociologists distinguish change by its pace: 'evolutionary' change (the slow, incremental kind Darwin described for biological adaptation, later borrowed into 'social Darwinism') unfolded over centuries or millennia in pre-modern societies — a village's caste practices, methods of cultivation, or religious beliefs might stay broadly recognisable across several generations. Fast, visible 'revolutionary' change — exemplified by the French Revolution (1789-93) or the Russian Revolution of 1917, and more loosely by phrases like the 'Industrial Revolution' or 'telecommunications revolution' — becomes common only from the late eighteenth century onward.

Several examples show why the pace quickened specifically in the modern period. The steam engine and the railway transformed economies and social geography within decades, not centuries; the introduction of paper money restructured banking and finance far faster than the slowly-evolving metal-currency systems it replaced; ideas about childhood, and the child-labour laws that followed, changed within a century. Even discoveries that existed for a long time without much social effect — such as gunpowder and paper in China — only produced rapid, world-altering change once they entered the fast-moving context of modernising Western Europe. This shows that pace depends not just on the invention itself but on how quickly the surrounding economic and technological environment is already moving — and that environment has itself become steadily faster-moving.

Two structural reasons explain why the modern period accelerated change specifically: technological change increasingly compounds, each breakthrough creating conditions for further, quicker change; and modern political change — the spread of universal adult franchise, the shift of power from hereditary rulers to elected representatives — is itself a comparatively recent and unusually fast-acting driver of transformation. This supports treating rapid, large-scale social change as a comparatively new feature of human history.