Piagetian Theory and the Psychogenetic Development of Humankind Throughout History. Towards a General Theory of the Human Being.

J. Piaget wanted to study children to find a key to understanding history of mind, culture, science, and philosophy. The new theory program, called the structural-genetic theory program, developed by the author of this article, is an off-spring of Piagetian theory and follows Piaget's main idea concerning the study of parallels between ontogenetic and historical developments. It maintains the full identity of the child's psyche and that of the adult archaic human being concerning traits and features of the preoperational stage and partially the concrete operational stage, thereby evidencing the total sally of the formal operational stage in the minds of archaic people. The identity of the stage structures is not partially given but rather entirely and implies even the smallest details. The article exemplifies this identity concerning several central issues, such as logic, physical understanding, categories such as causality and chance, animism, personification of plants and animals, belief in magic, metamorphosis, ghosts, and understanding of dreams and myths. Accordingly, there is no difference between ontogenetic stages and the psychogenetic development of humankind throughout history. Historically, humankind has gone through the same stages as children do. The new theory program presents the fundamental theory of the human being as he or she existed in history and peopled archaic, ancient, and medieval societies. Consequently, the world history of culture, mind, worldview, politics, law, science, philosophy, morals, religion, and arts must be reconstructed in terms of stages, a task already accomplished by the new program, at least to a certain extent.

Civilization Theory and Structural-genetic Theory Programme : Two Fundamental Theories in Comparison.

The Civilization theory of N. Elias combines the scrutiny of psychogenetic and sociogenetic developments shaping history from ancient to modern times. Both forms of developments are seen by him as deeply interconnected to each other, being to each other cause and consequence alike. Medieval respectively premodern societies harbor people staying more close to childlike levels, while modern societies force humans to attain more elaborated psychological stages. Otherwise modern societies couldn´t function. It is shown that Elias has problems to evidence his psychogenetic assumptions. Civilization theory can be improved by the application of learned developmental psychology, by using theories and data coming from Piagetian cross-cultural psychology. It is not only possible to improve the insights into psychogenetic data hereby but also to illuminate much better central phenomena of modern society. Piagetian data enable to refer crucial phenomena of modern society - sciences, industrial economy, democracy, constitutional state, humanitarian revolution, traits of the fine arts - to psychogenetic advancements much better than Elias had done.

Child and Ancient Man: How to Define Their Commonalities and Differences.

Developmental psychology is not only a psychology of development from childhood to old age but a psychology of human development in world history. Eighty years of cross-cultural empirical research findings indicate that the adolescent stage of formal operations evolved late in history and is not a universal development of adult humans across cultures and history. Correspondingly, preoperational or concrete operational stages describe adult psychological stages in past or premodern cultures, as Jean Piaget and some of his followers have mentioned. Developmental psychology is likewise a historical or anthropological psychology capable of describing humans in premodern cultures. The article develops a general anthropological or psychological theory answering the many questions that arise from the correspondences between (modern) children and ancient adults. On this psychological basis, the new structural genetic theory program is capable of explaining, better than previous approaches, the history of humankind from prehistory through ancient to modern societies, the history of economy, society, culture, religion, philosophy, sciences, morals, and everyday life. The accomplishment of this task was once demanded of some classical founders of psychology, sociology, history, and ethnology but was largely avoided by the postwar generations of authors for political and ideological reasons.

Relevance of Piagetian cross-cultural psychology to the humanities and social sciences.

Jean Piaget held views according to which there are parallels between ontogeny and the historical development of culture, sciences, and reason. His books are full of remarks and considerations about these parallels, with reference to many logical, physical, social, and moral phenomena.This article explains that Piagetian cross-cultural psychology has delivered the decisive data needed to extend the research interests of Piaget. These data provide a basis for reconstructing not only the history of sciences but also the history of religion, politics, morals, culture, philosophy, and social change and the emergence of industrial society. Thus, it is possible to develop Piagetian theory as a historical anthropology in order to provide a basis for the humanities and social sciences.