State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse 9780231541282

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife
1. Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form
2. Political Economy and the Question of Progress
3. Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society
4. The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology
5. Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human
6. The Social Psychology of Religion
7. Novels as Conjectural Histories
Conclusion: Conjecturalism Now
Appendix 1. Enlightenment Conjectural Histories
Appendix 2. Hegel, History, and Conjecture
Appendix 3. Were Conjectural Histories Racist?
Notes
Index

Citation preview

STATE OF N AT U R E , STAG ES OF S O CI E T Y

columbia studies in political thought / political history

columbia studies in political thought / political history

Dick Howard, General Editor

Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History is a series dedicated to exploring the possibilities for democratic initiative and the revitalization of politics in the wake of the exhaustion of twentieth-century ideological “isms.” By taking a historical approach to the politics of ideas about power, governance, and the just society, this series seeks to foster and illuminate new political spaces for human action and choice.

Pierre Rosanvallon

Democracy Past and Future, edited by Samuel Moyn (2006)

Claude Lefort

Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, translated by Julian Bourg (2007)

Benjamin R. Barber

The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House (2008)

Andrew Arato

Constitution Making Under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq (2009)

Dick Howard

The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolution (2010)

Paul W. Kahn

Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (2011)

Stephen Eric Bronner

Socialism Unbound: Principles, Practices, and Prospects (2011)

David William Bates

States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (2011)

Warren Breckman

Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (2013)

Martin Breaugh

The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom, translated by Lazer Lederhendler (2013)

Dieter Grimm

Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept, translated by Belinda Cooper (2015)

State of Nature, Stages of Society ENLIGHTENMENT CONJECTURAL HISTORY AND M OD ERN SO CI A L D I S CO U R S E

Frank Palmeri

columbia university pressnew york

columbia university press

Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Palmeri, Frank. Title: State of nature, stages of society : Enlightenment conjectural history and modern social discourse / Frank Palmeri. Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. | Series: Columbia Studies in Political Thought, Political History | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015015131 | ISBN 9780231175166 (cloth : acid-free paper) Subjects: LCSH: History—Philosophy. | Enlightenment. | Social history—Philosophy. | Progress—Philosophy. | Commerce—Philosophy. | Religion and sociology—Philosophy. | Prediction (Logic) | Imaginary histories. | Social sciences—History. | Social sciences—Philosophy. Classification: LCC D16.9 .P245 2015 | DDC 901—dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2015015131

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Andrew Brozyna References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

contents

f o r e w o r d b y d i c k h o w a r d  VII a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s  XI introduction



Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife1

one



Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form27

two



Political Economy and the Question of Progress59

three



Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society89

four



The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology121

five



Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human163

six



The Social Psychology of Religion198

seven



Novels as Conjectural Histories225

conclusion



Conjecturalism Now250

a p p e n d i x 1 . e n l i g h t e n m e n t c o n j e c t u r a l h i s t o r i e s  273 a p p e n d i x 2 . h e g e l , h i s t o r y, a n d c o n j e c t u r e  275 a p p e n d i x 3 . w e r e c o n j e c t u r a l h i s t o r i e s r a c i s t ?  281 n o t e s  287 i n d e x  361

foreword

Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse offers for discussion and debate a remarkable and sweeping archaeology. He catches hold of a speculative theoretical impulse that enjoyed an international vogue in the latter half of the eighteenth century before it was, in a silent dialectic, “suppressed” in the nineteenth century when it sponsored the positivist and empirical methods that gave birth to the social sciences that are today called simply economics, sociology, and anthropology. That dialectic comprises only the first half of this book, and it is a subtle read on its own. As the narrative moves forward, we learn that the origins of “conjectural history” were polymorphous, both rich and suggestive; the earlier impulse was redoubled rather than reduced or suppressed (as Palmeri shows in the critical work of Darwin and Nietzsche); was recalibrated in studies of the foundations of religion (including, but not limited to, Freud); and again reinvigorated by and for the literary imagination (alluded to by the brief mention of Zola). Nor did the impulse abate in the twentieth century, as the sweeping imaginative constructs of H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, and Oswald Spengler spun their webs. The deeper the reading, the wider the scope; and today, science fiction seems ever more naturally realistic than its mid-eighteenth century forebears could have imagined. Although Palmeri does not address directly the concept of the political, his historical study of the forms of conjectural history poses questions that will concern readers of the series Political Thought / Political History. Palmeri presents a clear definition of the concept of conjectural history in his first chapter. He is concerned throughout the book with a generic

f r a n k pa l m e r i ’s s tat e o f n at u r e ,

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form of thinking rather than with the specific content of any particular theory. Similarly, although many of the theorists he discusses took positions on political issues of their times, and some offered utopian visions of the future, Palmeri’s study does not propose to redefine the concept of the political, although the lineaments of such a theory are present in his careful work.* A “conjecture” is different from a hypothesis, which sets out a framework for empirical investigation that demands proof. A conjecture is more like a critical judgment that begins from a singular collection of facts in order to ask “what must have been the case” for things to have come to this state. This style of questioning asks for an answer that can never be demonstrated by any science because the facts of the past (or the nature of nature before it was civilized) cannot be known. Critical judgment, for this reason, is similar to political judgment; it is a quest for sense, for the meaning of what has become and how it became what it has become. Although it is unconcerned with politics and ignores the contemporary political arena, in spite of its speculative project, conjectural history offers a critical horizon for the exercise of political thought. The critical element in conjectural history can be derived from its judgment of “what must have been the case” in the past. From this perspective, the present must be found wanting; it is either a deviation from the natural order of things, or it is merely a stage toward something grander. In the latter case, conjectural history will then look toward an apparently more political question: “What could be the case” given the possibilities offered by the singularity of our present situation? This future-oriented style of thought, however, runs the risk of proposing a utopian goal that blocks critical analysis of the present. This temptation betrays the structure of conjectural history, which can provide only a critical judgment of “what could be the case.” There is a vital difference between conjectural history and its twin, political judgment, and the affirmation of practical tasks or moral imperatives that normative philosophical reason is said to impose on citizens.

* I have suggested some of the elements of a theory of the political in Dick Howard, The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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This distinction between normative morality and political judgment needs to be underlined. The archaeology of conjectural histories offered by Palmeri carries a warning for the contemporary political theorist. For the same reason that political thought must go together with political history, it is necessary to avoid the tempting passage from the critical judgment about “what could be the case” to the moral or normative imperative of “what should be the case.” Normative theories of social evolution can become slippery utopias if they are not embedded in historical reality. That is another lesson that contemporary political theory can learn from the older, and not just science fictional, practice of conjectural history presented and documented by Frank Palmeri. The theories offered by conjectural history are not hypotheses to be verified or norms to be actualized; they are critical judgments about the sense of history that provide exercises for our faculty of political thought. Dick Howard

acknowledgments

productive conversations and responses that have contributed over the course of a decade to bringing this book to completion. So many people have helped me think about the form of conjectural history and its afterlives. I have learned much from Mark Phillips, who entered into the spirit of this subject from the beginning, and engaged over the years in exchanges about specifics ranging from Kames’s providentialism to the conjectural bases of anthropology. Tim Alborn gave generously of his time and knowledge in a conversation that helped me chart my way early in this project. Similarly, Simon Evnine read a very early version of this argument and raised questions about ethnocentrism that stayed with me throughout the writing of the book. Joe Valente helped me think about what I wanted to do with Hegel. Those who read chapters at later stages deserve special thanks: Michael Miller suggested a ready and easy way of clarifying the argument at a crucial point; Charles Whitney raised important questions about the treatment of secularization; and Kunal Parker proposed drawing Heidegger into the discussion of conjectural thinking. Among those at the University of Miami from whose scholarly expertise and engaging conversation I have benefited are Mary Lindemann, whose always lively responses included recommendations of works on the Radical Enlightenment; Guido Ruggiero and Laura Giannetti, for reflections on fiction and history; John Paul Russo, for discussions of Vico and Darwin; Edward LiPuma, on early cultural anthropology; and Bill Turner and Barbara Woshinsky on fictions of prehistory. I am grateful to Pamela Hammons, Chair of the Department of English, and Leonidas Bachas, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for supporting my research, and I gladly

it is a pleasure to remember

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acknowledgments

acknowledge Provost’s Research Grants that supported work at the British Library and the Cambridge University Library. This book has benefited greatly from responses to the presentation of my argument on a number of occasions: to the British Studies Group at Yale University; as a Taft Lecture at the University of Cincinnati (thanks to Hilda Smith and Tracy Teslow); to the Early Modern Research Group at Pennsylvania State University (thanks to Joan Landes and Clem Hawes); and to the Atlantic Studies Research Group at the University of Miami (convened by Ashli White and Tim Watson). My thanks to Wendy Lochner for her early interest in my project and for her expert guidance throughout. I also appreciate the responses of the anonymous readers for Columbia University Press: both were thorough and constructive in their assessments, and one in particular made uncommonly helpful suggestions for extending the range of Enlightenment conjectural history. This was the kind of engaged reading that one hopes for but rarely receives. For their knowledgeable and energetic assistance, I am grateful to the staff of the Manuscripts Department of the Cambridge University Library, where I read the notes Darwin made as he prepared to write the Descent of Man; as I am to Roy Goodman and the staff of the American Philosophical Society Library, where I enjoyed an Isaac Comly Martindale Fellowship that also enabled me to examine Darwin’s papers. In addition, I would like to record my appreciation of the staffs of those two extraordinary national libraries, the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. At the Richter Library of the University of Miami, I am grateful to Bill Walker, former Dean of Libraries, Phyllis Robarts, the Interlibrary Loan staff, and Eduardo Abella, all of whom facilitated the work of research. I first read many of the works discussed in this book—from Hobbes, Rousseau, and Smith through Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—in the required core course in Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. For that experience, I am indebted to those who designed the course a hundred years ago, as well as to the instructor, Donald Scharfe, and my fellows in the classroom. Engaging with these texts made a far deeper and more lasting impact than I could have conceived at the time. Not to compare small things to greater, but J. S. Mill wrote that he considered his partner Harriett Taylor to be his collaborator in most of his works. It is even more true that Mihoko Suzuki has been coauthor of this and other of my books, and yet of much more too: she makes both me and my work better. This is for her.

STATE OF N AT U R E , STAG ES OF S O CI E T Y

introduction

Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife

w h y conj e c tu ral h i s to ry ?

c o m p o s e d h i s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755), he was inaugurating a new kind of historical writing. What characterized this historiography was the attempt to fashion a plausible account of the earliest periods of human social life, for which no documentary or other material evidence exists. In response to the question posed by the Academy of Dijon concerning the origins of inequality, Rousseau placed his narrative outside Genesis and biblical history, which had supplied the official, essential, and sole understanding of the earliest times for Christian Europe for more than a millennium. In giving definitive shape to this new genre of conjectural, nonbiblical history of earliest society, he opened up access to the framing of previously undefined and unformulated fields of investigation and knowledge. Claude Lévi-Strauss saw Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality as a foundational work of social anthropology; Louis Althusser viewed it as a groundbreaking work of political thought. Similarly, Adam Ferguson’s conjectural Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has been regarded by many historians of thought as generative of the field of sociology.1 Two hundred sixty years after it emerged as a distinctive form of Enlightenment historical thought, it is possible to see that this genre made a crucial contribution to the framework of modern knowledge, by replacing biblically authorized narratives of early society with the knowledge produced by the social sciences. This book traces that genealogy in the when jean-jacques rousseau

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tangled lines of affinity, opposition, and development extending from the genre of conjectural history to the emerging fields of political economy, sociology, and anthropology in the course of the nineteenth century and in early twentieth-century sociology. Conjectural histories exerted such effects because they changed the intellectual paradigm that had characterized early modern thinking about the first periods of human history. As part of Enlightenment attempts to free thinking from the constraints of myth and superstition, these universal histories of mankind separated themselves from ancient poets’ mythical accounts of a golden age, but also, more importantly, from the biblical account and all providential explanations dominant in Christian cultures. Based often on reports of travelers to societies that Europeans had not known before their voyages of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and on observed patterns of human psychology, speculative or hypothetical histories worked out the stages that might or must have brought human beings from a posited original condition outside society to a state with recognizable institutions of religion, government, law, and exchange.2 Enlightenment conjectural histories by Scottish, French, and German thinkers thus constitute a major achievement of the historical imagination. As various thinkers explored the mental landscape opened up by nonprovidential, conjectural histories, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer formulated in their different ways the sociological study of the main eras of human history, leading to the present; Edward Burnett Tylor proposed an anthropological understanding of “primitive culture” based on the history of religious thought, from animism and fetishism to a modern rationalism shorn of irrational beliefs; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked out a materialist economic theory of human history as a series of stages generated by conflicts between classes that arose from the harnessing of evergreater forces of production.3 These conjectural histories—which speculated about the prehistoric origins of human society or, like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), about the mechanisms of shifts between social stages—were written between 1750 and 1800, after which the genre has been widely understood to have disappeared and to have exerted little or no influence. I  argue, however, that the patterns of thought that shaped conjectural history persisted in altered but recognizable forms throughout the nineteenth century. In so doing, they provided a model or template not only for the

introduction

3

early social sciences but also for the social and historical thinking of such cross-disciplinary figures as Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. This examination of genealogical relations between Enlightenment conjectural history and modern social theory suggests revision of some widely held views. In particular, it challenges accounts that represent conjectural history and the works it influenced as simple and straightforward advocates of modernity, progress, and secularization. In fact, most of the major statements in the emerging social disciplines do not present a vision of one-directional, uninterrupted historical progress, whether in material conditions, political freedoms, or increased rationalism (Spencer constitutes a notable exception). Rather, those whose writings most strongly shaped modern Euro-American social thought recognized not only material accomplishments and the realization of previously ignored potential in capitalist, democratizing societies but also newly harsh and unequal constraints in the lives of large numbers of people subjected to such systems. Such a position, with antecedents in Smith and Ferguson, informs not only the work of Marx and Engels but also of Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Freud, finding memorable expression in Max Weber’s contention that citizens of modern societies find themselves trapped in an “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of rationalized labor.4 Similarly, although all of these thinkers perceived a turn away from traditional Christian beliefs and practices in the modern period, and they themselves participated in the rejection of providential explanations, far fewer subscribed to the thesis that Weber advanced and that Freud hoped would be borne out—that a process of necessary, universal, and openended secularization defines modern society.5 Many foresaw the need for an alternative to or a substitute for religion, a line of thought that was particularly strong among French thinkers, including Comte and Émile Durkheim, with Durkheim seeing the nation as a new basis of social cohesion that could replace religion. Even Nietzsche participated in this effort as he imagined a new kind of man beyond Christian morality, strong enough to create his own autonomous values following the death of God. The original formulators of modern social thought displayed little triumphal celebration of modern society. Many considered it not only licit but incumbent on them to conjecture about ways that future societies might address the unease, deficiencies, and constraints produced in modernity.

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It is not only in the twentieth century that the influence of conjectural history on early social thought has been suppressed; many of the early social thinkers whose works were themselves shaped by the Enlightenment form deny or occlude that influence. The earliest among these, Thomas Robert Malthus, mocked Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet for engaging in utopian speculation about the future, yet he too had recourse to conjectural history in order to gather evidence for his principle of population. In addition, Spencer, Darwin, and Nietzsche—for divergent reasons, to differing degrees, and in various ways—suppressed the use of conjectural history in their projects. They thus helped render the afterlife of this form a hidden history. Even Comte, who engaged in speculative thought himself and acknowledged and respected the earlier conjectural historians, raised facts to such a degree of authority that his system of positivism ironically came to mean regard for facts to the exclusion of speculation. Among the later social thinkers, Freud most openly placed himself in relation to conjectural historians and their line, including Rousseau, Darwin, and Nietzsche. But Freud was the exception. Throughout the nineteenth century—an age that widely granted the highest authority to scientific fact—conjectural historical thinking persisted, providing a form for social historical speculation, while its influence usually remained unacknowledged. This silence has produced a tangled history in which thinkers disavowed or attacked conjecture and speculation even as they engaged in conjectural historical modes of thinking and writing themselves.

When Rousseau distanced his history from the Bible, he did so in a veiled way. In the introduction to the Discourse on Inequality, as he discusses his method of approaching early human history, he declares: Let us begin by setting aside the facts, because they do not affect the question. One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin. . . . Religion commands us to believe that since God himself withdrew men from the state of nature they are unequal because he willed that they be; but it does not forbid us to make conjectures, based solely on the nature of a man . . . as to what the human race might have become if it had been abandoned to itself.6

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The second half of this passage and the historical context indicate that when Rousseau speaks of setting aside the “facts,” he means that he intends to put the biblical and Christian account in parentheses. He needs to move beyond the nonexplanatory statement that the divinity created men unequal, therefore he wanted them to be unequal. That way leads to a dead end for thought and no prospect of new knowledge. By calling the narrative in Genesis the “facts,” he can appear to accept religious orthodoxy while dismissing it. The alternative he presents is hypothetical in the sense that naturalists or physicists (physiciens) make use of suppositions to guide their investigations. His methodological approach is, to use his own word, conjectural, but that does not make it untrue or fantasized. It may not establish historical truths, but it is the only way to “clarify the way things are” and were in prehistoric times. Given that this interpretation of Rousseau’s self-defining passage is borne out by the rest of the Discourse on Inequality, which avoids all reference to Genesis and relies entirely on natural explanations for the development of human society, it is remarkable that the Discourse on Inequality is hardly ever considered a conjectural history. Indeed, many of the conjectural histories I list in appendix 1 are excluded from most discussions of the form. Although several reasons may help explain why their formal identity has been misrecognized, we can first note that conjectural history has been considered as distinctively Scottish in origin and practice. Because many of the most familiar conjectural histories were written by Scots—Smith, Ferguson, John Millar, and Henry Home, Lord Kames—and because Smith’s student Dugald Stewart first named the genre and identified it with Smith, the genre came to be closely associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.7 I will argue, however, that different conjectural histories participate in the genre in different ways, as they are shaped by their religious and political milieus—Scottish Presbyterian, French Catholic, and German Lutheran cultures—although they all participate in the form.8 The conjectural works of Rousseau, Condorcet, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Immanuel Kant do not employ the same three- or four-stage theory that almost all the Scots employed; consequently, they are most often excluded from the canon of undoubted members of the genre. However, devoting attention to a single element of some works in the genre—especially four-stage theory— leads to the neglect of the other characteristics that constitute the genre.9 The tracing of individual ideas in works of different kinds falls within an

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earlier tradition of the history of ideas; this study pursues, rather, a history of forms of thought and discourse.10 The misrecognition that excludes many conjectural histories from consideration as members of the genre may also derive from a tendency to categorize all works as belonging to a single genre, whereas conjectural histories are often found mixed with other genres or make up only a part of a larger work. Rousseau’s conjectural history in part 2 of his Discourse on Inequality forms a portion of an imagined oration, whereas part 1 depicts the static condition of human animals in a presocial state. The conjectural history in Herder’s multivolume Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784– 91) is set between a planetary history and an encyclopedic survey of the peoples, empires, and nations of world history (it is not uncommon for a conjectural history of earliest times to shade into a historical account based on documentary records). In Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the conjectural history occupying book 3 and investigating the transition to capitalism is inserted into a treatise on classical economics, and this conjectural history by the author whose works served as models for the genre is often not seen to participate in the form. As the second foundational writer of conjectural histories, Adam Smith needs to be discussed alongside Rousseau here. The first history that Smith published that possesses all the characteristics of the conjectural form— “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages” (1762)— argues that the earliest languages spoken by small social groups must have employed elaborate inflections. Later languages, such as English, have adopted simpler structures which make them easier to understand by a larger number of people, but this development is not necessarily progressive: English suffers from being less precise, less forceful, and more wordy than highly inflected languages such as ancient Greek.11 In this and other early conjectural histories, Smith extrapolates a prehistoric state from what is known historically, then constructs a set of steps that must have occurred to bridge the distance between the postulated earlier state and the later historical condition. It was in reference to this essay on early languages that Dugald Stewart characterized a distinctive strand of Smith’s writing as “conjectural history.” A philosopher and one of the last figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Stewart wrote an account of his teacher’s life and works a few years after Smith died in 1790, in which he called the “Considerations” a “specimen of

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a particular sort of inquiry . . . entirely of modern origin” that had a strong attraction for Smith. He explained that, in a civilized society, “it cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated” as modern civilization. Lacking “direct evidence” of these stages, however, we must supply “the place of fact by conjecture.” Consequently, to this kind of investigation Stewart gives the name “Theoretical or Conjectural History; an expression which coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History, as employed by Mr. Hume.”12 (David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion [1757] will be one of the principal conjectural histories to figure in this study, although, like Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is not often regarded as a conjectural history.)13 Stewart, like Smith, is clearly fascinated by the form, and in a line of argument that counters the later accusation that conjectural histories are dogmatically universalist, Stewart justifies the writing of multiple and divergent theoretical histories of the same early area of human endeavor, “for human affairs never exhibit, in any two instances, a perfect uniformity.” But whether the conjectured events actually occurred is not the question: “it is more important to ascertain the progress that is most simple than the progress that is most agreeable to fact; for paradoxical as the proposition may appear, it is certainly true, that the real progress is not always the most natural.”14 In Stewart’s understanding, as in Rousseau’s, conjectural history sets aside the facts, although by “fact” Stewart does not mean scriptural narrative but what actually took place. Since the historical occurrences remain undocumented and unavailable to us, all we can do is to construct plausible conjectures, more than one of which may be valuable, illuminating, and productive of insights. At least, as Stewart points out, a plausible narrative obviates the need to have recourse to miracles or providence to explain the origins and early development of societies and social institutions. Stewart also cites parts of Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence (delivered late 1750s and 1762–63) as a prototypical conjectural history, in which, significantly, the conjectural history does not make up the entire work. In these lectures, Smith laid out the famous four-stage history of social life— hunting, herding, farming, and commerce—in which stages are defined by modes of subsistence. Smith establishes periods of historical development based on connected and parallel changes in different social spheres.

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As basic needs are satisfied, new needs arise, along with, eventually, the means of meeting them. New conditions of life lead to changed institutions. Decisions on justice and practices of law depend on forms of subsistence and of property. “Among hunters,” Smith writes, “there is no regular government; they live according to the laws of nature. The appropriation of herds and flocks, which introduced an inequality of fortune, was that which first gave rise to regular government. Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.”15 Rousseau and Smith share the view that inequality proceeded from the establishment of property, although their attitudes toward the development differ markedly. For Rousseau, inequality of property and riches result from an artificial and unjust imposition on the smaller natural inequalities among men; for Smith, the instinct to barter and trade has led to the advancement of civilized society, to the betterment of all. Smith’s most famous work also employs conjectural historical thought in significant ways. Near the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, Smith posits in human psychology that innate and distinctive “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,” which has led through a “very slow and gradual” process to the elaborate division of labor characterizing modern commercial and manufacturing societies.16 In the more consequential narrative that Stewart singles out, Smith devotes the whole of his third book to the “different Progress of Opulence in different Nations,” a speculative history of the emergence of trade and the accumulation of wealth, in which he pays particular attention to the transition from medieval, feudal societies to the commercial societies that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This account builds on but also condenses and sharpens the explanatory narrative provided in the Lectures on Jurisprudence. In the Wealth of Nations, the transformation is brought about by the increase of manufactures and foreign trade. In the earlier society, Smith argues, the only way a large landholder worth thousands of pounds a year could spend his income was by maintaining hundreds if not thousands of retainers and their families, over whom he thus exerted complete authority. However, with the increasing availability of imported luxuries and manufactures such as jewels, silver, clothing, and furnishings, the wealthy and powerful could spend their money on themselves and dismiss large numbers of their

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retainers: “For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. . . . And thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority” (Wealth 1:418–19). Power thus flowed from the self-indulgent lords to provident merchants, but neither intended this historic transition: “A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the publick.  .  .  . Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about” (Wealth 1:422). This disparity between intentions and results exemplifies the lack of conscious planning in the developments explained by conjectural histories.17 The motivations of the actors are psychologically plausible—both the vanity of the lords and the pursuit of profit by merchants and craftsmen. In addition, as this canonical account demonstrates, conjectural history does not occupy itself solely with origins; transitions between major periods whose mechanism is not documented can also serve as the focus of speculative, conjectural narratives. In fact, the transition recounted here to capitalist, modern society constitutes precisely the subject of two of the later works most strongly shaped by conjectural form and thought: Marx’s Capital, volume 1 (1867), and Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). It is worth emphasizing that, from its beginnings, conjectural history includes this second line of inquiry, focused not on origins and genesis but on transitions and their mechanisms. On the one hand, Smith famously celebrates the ability of the economic system to work for the benefit of the whole, without a contract and without the greater good being the purpose of any of the agents, who pursue their own interests. On the other hand, he does not view the modern capitalized system with its ramified division of labor as a pure and simple improvement over all other systems. In fact, although it is less well known than the doctrine of the invisible hand, Smith recognizes the deleterious effects of factory labor on the minds and lives of workers who repeat the same motions thousands of times each day. He devotes several chapters of

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the fifth and final book of the Wealth of Nations to the importance of government funding of universal public education as well as “entertainments” and “diversions” to provide relief and stimulation for workers whose occupations have dulled their minds and their capacity for moral and aesthetic judgment (2:758–88). The ambivalent view of progress in Smith’s work can again serve as a model for other conjectural histories. Here too we can link Rousseau with Smith, in that both distance themselves from an unambivalent embrace of progressive improvement. Although much has been written about Enlightenment historical thought as progressive and optimistic, Rousseau, Smith, and most other conjectural historians stop well short of adherence to a doctrine of linear, continuous progress through the stages they recount. Although Rousseau’s bleak vision of continuing decline is extreme, Smith shares with him some skepticism toward the doctrine of progress. Considering Rousseau alongside Smith indicates the ways in which conjectural histories vary according to national culture. Although the genre spanned different cultures during the Enlightenment, variations in cultural contexts made for divergences in the form. This inquiry seeks to distinguish the various forms of conjectural history, which are not always acknowledged, and at the same time to demonstrate their common features and family resemblances. In Scotland, which produced the largest number of conjectural histories, the Union with England Act in 1707 was followed in a few decades by increased commercial activity, which provided a vivid instance of the transition from a precapitalist to a more commercial and prosperous society. It is consistent with this historical development that the four- or three-stage theory of social and economic history was first formulated by Scots and that the progressive theory of stages remained stronger in Scottish conjectural history than elsewhere. In addition, the Calvinist Presbyterian conception of the salvific effect of individual labor, and the high value placed on work to overcome obstacles such as those posed by the environment, shaped most of the works in the Scottish variety of conjectural history. (Hume’s Natural History of Religion constitutes an exception.) Among the French, anxiety about excessive civilization, observable in both Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (1772), was linked with a deep concern with decline.18 The French experience of a more effective direction of policy

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and administration by the established church in league with the state encouraged histories that stressed centralized control by planners or intellectuals. The French conjectural histories emphasize the shaping role in society of a small number of powerful men: the rich, in Rousseau’s history of the institutionalization of inequality; the elders, in Diderot’s speculations about the true purpose of Tahitian sexual practices; and the scientists, in Condorcet’s history of a future with longer life spans and freedom from many diseases. The German states, united by language but not political institutions and aspiring to a national identity, defined themselves culturally by opposition to Britain and France, producing figures such as Herder, who, in advance of writers from other cultures, expressed a stronger interest in organic unfolding of inner qualities than in linear development. The Pietist emphasis on contemplation and cultivation of an inner light of conscience encouraged a conception of individual cultures as striving to realize their own distinctive potential. Each culture possessed such potential, although the local and particular content differed in each case. Johann and Georg Forster, who were German by birth but worked for many years in England, sailed with James Cook on his second voyage, and they published their Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World in London, in 1778 (originally in English; later translated by Georg into German). In their emphasis on the cultivation of each culture’s individual potential, they more closely resemble Herder than the Scottish historians. As the case of the Forsters indicates, in addition to producing distinctive varieties of speculative history, conjectural form, ideas, and influences crossed and recrossed national boundaries. After participating for many years in English intellectual culture, Georg Forster ended his life as a partisan of the French Revolution in poverty in Paris, having lost his position as a revolutionary authority in Germany. Both Hume and Charles de Brosses were working on their accounts of the earliest forms of religious belief during the same years, in the late 1750s. Hume also corresponded with A. R. Jacques Turgot, contesting Turgot’s sanguine view of progress in his inaugural oration of 1750.19 Smith knew Rousseau’s conjectural history very well, having reviewed the Discourse on Inequality and having cited Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1715; part 2, 1729) as an analogous work. As a point of departure for his Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson critiqued Rousseau’s presumptions, especially his vision

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of the earliest human beings living outside society, and he made numerous references to Father Joseph-François Lafitau’s work comparing American natives with ancient Greeks. Kant was an energetic reader of the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, and Kames, all conjectural historians; he wrote his early essays on race in order to counter Kames’s thesis of multiple originals of man in his Sketches of the History of Man (1778). Finally, Malthus responded critically to Condorcet’s conjectural history, but, as he sought evidence to support his principle of population, he had recourse to and recapitulated the views of William Robertson, William Falconer, Cornelius de Pauw, and other conjectural historians on the harshness and bare subsistence of savage life. Thus, frequent and extensive crossing of national and cultural boundaries characterized the conjectural histories throughout the time of their flourishing. These transcultural exchanges took different forms, exerting influence and provoking critical and revisionary responses, producing a complex, multilayered, and multidirectional conversation. However, this wide cultural, ideological, and intellectual range of conjectural history in the eighteenth century has been narrowed in retrospect to a single nationalcultural tradition, or even to a focus on a single characteristic, such as fourstage theory, not only by scholars who work on the Scottish thinkers but also by those who study the French and German Enlightenments. Another factor contributed to the retrospective narrowing of the genre: the nineteenth century saw a reduction of the Enlightenment republic of letters to more restrictively national traditions of intellectual inquiry. Throughout this book I contest this reduction of the conjectural form. In a similar misapprehension, even when conjectural history has been recognized and its influence assessed, it has been considered an Enlightenment form that was left behind and played little if any role after 1800.20 The principal argument of this book challenges this view by demonstrating the continuing influence of the genre and especially its shaping importance for nineteenth-century thinkers working in the emerging, predisciplinary social sciences, as well as for early twentieth-century sociology and psychology of religion. A few later thinkers openly acknowledged the influence of the Enlightenment conjectural historians: Comte names days of the month in his new Positivist calendar for the major conjectural historians, and Tylor quotes Hume and de Brosses (the latter in his epigraph) as predecessors of his anthropological study of natural religion.

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However, in most of the later works, the presence of the eighteenthcentury form remains hidden. For example, Spencer insistently asserted his claims of originality, and Nietzsche exhibited an extreme ambivalence about the Enlightenment thinkers, veiling his debt in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) to some of those whom he had acknowledged as predecessors in Human, All Too Human (1878).21 In many cases, the authors’ silence about their debt to conjectural histories results from pressure to claim scientific authority and to avoid charges that they indulged in wild speculation. Darwin’s preparatory notes for the Descent of Man (1871), for example, show that he made decisions concerning authorities to cite based on such calculations (discussed in chapter 5 of this book). The afterlives of the conjectural form and its influence on later thought do not constitute a history that can be reduced to a straight line of growth or progress but a buried history that needs to be excavated.22 Perhaps recent interest in interdisciplinarity has enabled us to apprehend some of the submerged patterns of influence that previously remained obscure. Before the disciplines were established, thinkers showed little concern about boundaries between areas of knowledge. Once the dividing lines were drawn, however, in most cases during the late nineteenth century, connections between fields became obscured. In addition to recovering the interdisciplinarity that preceded the establishment of the disciplines, this book’s own aims and methodology are interdisciplinary, contributing to intellectual history by making use of literary theory and formal analysis. In discussing works that respond to each other across national and cultural borders, it also adopts a comparative and transcultural approach. I work from the methodological postulate that literary form and its history can provide a useful means for understanding intellectual history; differences between antecedent and later iterations of the form can reveal continuities of thought that go beyond the tracing of a single explicit motif or concept, such as “four-stage theory” or “primitivism.”23 The resources of genre can bring to light convergences between the lines of thought of Rousseau and Nietzsche, Hume and Darwin, Millar and Engels.24 State of Nature, Stages of Society thus offers a historical explanation for the generic shift from conjectural history, contending that scientistic and positivist pressure to provide factual demonstrations led to the occlusion of the shaping presence of such history in the discourses of predisciplinary social thought.

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Speculative and conjectural thought continues to be understood as a negative constraint on knowledge, as a limitation to be overcome. However, the development of conjectural history in the Enlightenment served as a creative force that opened up fields of investigation and knowledge. This creativity can be explained by reassessing the value of conjecture. Indeed, the limits of a positivist approach based on established facts can be overcome by attention to frameworks in which facts are constituted. Conjectural history opens up a space for theory, for hypotheses. Darwin emphasized the need for theory, in his letters and notebooks; once he had conceived of the mechanism of natural selection, he explained, “Here, then, I had at last got a theory with which to work.”25 In chapter 5, I point to evidence that Darwin made use of conjectural history in formulating his theory of natural selection in the Origin of Species (1859), and again when writing the Descent of Man (originally titled the Origin of Man), where for the first time in print he speculated at length on the basis of inference and on very little evidence concerning the animal-humans who preceded both savage and civilized humans. Rousseau, Nietzsche, Durkheim, and Freud speculated with a similar paucity of evidence and boldness of inference concerning the psychology, values, and behavior of the earliest humans. Smith, Marx, and Weber worked out inferential conjectures concerning the path of the transition to modernity. More recently, Michel Foucault attempted to characterize the transition to modernity around 1800 in numerous works, founding his thought not on documented facts but on attempts to understand the frameworks that made knowledge and truth possible in different periods. Indeed, the recent example of Foucault indicates that the temporality of conjectural history and its early social science descendants can be defined by a sensitivity to the question of possibility, the question of what provides the ground that makes human history, the history of society, possible. Martin Heidegger asks, “Does historiography have what is possible as its theme?” He responds by asserting that it is not the facticity of world history that is primary but rather the possibility of its existence. Conjectural history proposes a similar response. In Heidegger’s terms, “Because existence always is only as factically thrown, historiography will disclose the silent power of the possible with greater penetration the more simply and concretely it understands having-been-in-the-world in terms of its possibility.”26 We can understand the project of conjectural history as analogous to

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that of historiography in Heidegger’s thought. The genre conceives of the possibility of human existence as primordial, as preceding, encompassing, and serving as the ground for later facts of history, the having-been-in-theworld. Refusing to be limited by the irreparable absence of facts, conjectural history aims to infer the conditions of possibility of human existence and human social history.27 As the reference to Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud alongside Darwin and Foucault indicates, the use of conjecture, even if it has led only a shadowy existence since the Enlightenment, is closely related to the use of theory in the humanities during the last half century. Both conjecture and theory provide the possibility of working out alternative and dissentient frameworks of thought. Like conjecturalist thought, theory is not grounded on facts but on what we do not know with certainty. It explores those areas where we do not find facts but must employ speculation or inference based on such evidence as is available. Theoretical thinking may not always add to the existing structures of knowledge, but it can sometimes reveal new lands for investigation. The accumulation of factual knowledge can then follow the establishment of new paradigms, disciplines, or institutions. To account for the differences between present society and its original form, conjectural history adopts a framework of stages through which a society and all its institutions proceed. In Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, as in many works of this kind, these stages mark the steps leading from the human animal to civilized humans. As a result, conjectural narratives develop and employ an alternate temporality to that of a Christian history. In the Christian conception, human time unfolds along a line that includes three critical events: the fall and expulsion from paradise; the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the deity’s son, making salvation after life available for all who believe in him; and his return at the end of time to transform the world into a new heaven and new earth. History has a firm beginning, a definite end, and one supremely meaningful moment between these. According to conjectural history, however, the origins of society are murky; they arise from human action alone, although not as a result of intention or planning. Each succeeding stage of society has its own distinctive form of governance, property, and beliefs, arrived at without premeditation. These stages constitute an open-ended series that often takes the form of a progression or improvement, but it can also, as in Rousseau, describe a progressive decline into states of greater inequality and unfreedom.28

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One mark of the distinctive temporal address of conjectural history is its use of a particular verb tense. After Rousseau describes the culminating event in his history, the establishment of the rule of law to protect the rich and deprive the poor, he concludes, “Such was, or must have been the origin of society and of laws, . . . which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty [and] established for all time the law of property and inequality” (my emphasis).29 The genre of conjectural history signals its distinctive temporality through the use of what could be called the “conjectural necessary” form of the past. This form figures prominently in speculative assertions of what “must have” occurred in the past, given the current state of our knowledge. Such formulations differ from the past perfect or the simple past, the statement of what “had” happened before what happened. At first sight, the assertion that a certain development “must have” taken place at a certain point may appear to be more definite than these other assertions of past occurrences. But the “must have” harbors in its assertion of necessity a doubt of actuality. The past that is so predicated “must have” happened because we do not know if it “did” take place. Just as importantly, however, the conjectural necessary also differs from the past conditional, the contrary-to-fact statement that an occurrence “would have” taken place if certain conditions were met, if certain non-occurring events had come first. The conjectural necessary tense, the “must have,” indicates not a conditional and contrary-to-fact past but a speculative, possible, and necessary past. Most people probably still consider a “conjectural” theory to be one unsupported by facts, knowledge, or evidence. It is true that the eighteenth-century thinkers had no records, no bones, no remains of human works on which to base their inferences about the earliest human societies and the transitions that followed. Although nineteenth-century thinkers had somewhat more evidence to work with—multiplying ethnographic data, newly discovered Paleolithic sites, and even, by the late 1850s, the bones of very early human ancestors such as the enigmatic Neanderthal— they were still confined almost entirely to speculation when considering the origins of language and of religion, early forms of domestic relations, the beginnings of agriculture, and the inequality of ranks. Indeed, despite the slightly increased availability of additional evidence, many nineteenth-century thinkers exhibited less nuance in their speculations about early human social life than did many of their eighteenth-century predecessors.30

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But it is not widely understood that conjecture continues to play a necessary and important role in some fields of inquiry, such as social and cultural anthropology. The history of preliterate human societies does not, even now, finally rest on undisputed facts or solid evidence. A recent scholarly synthesis of current knowledge about the passage from Pleistocene hunters to Holocene agriculturalists (confirming the shift from the first to the second of Smith’s four stages) stresses the tentative, speculative nature of the most important transitions reconstructed by contemporary archaeology and anthropology. For example, the idea of a “Pleistocene band society” between about 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, an important hypothesis for the development of human society (with parallels to Darwin’s positing of early human “hordes”), proves to be, in the words of the anthropologist Peter Bogucki, “a form of social organization about which we can make only indirect inferences from the behavior of modern foragers and high primates.” Similar qualifications attend the best current accounts of the earliest use of fire, the first human encampments, and the origins of language.31 All are still based heavily on hypotheses drawn from inferences based on indirect and scanty evidence. Comparable reliance on speculation and conjecture characterizes recent synthetic works on the origin of languages, on agriculture, and on Cro-Magnon man.32 The best available arguments for the early developments of human society must still rely on very slim evidence and remain inferential, hypothetical, and speculative. In this context, to charge conjectural history with being limited and insufficiently grounded in factual evidence neglects the fact that some of what is most productive in current thought, and potentially paradigm changing, necessarily takes the form of speculation and conjecture. A study of the conjectural histories and their descendants among the proto–social sciences suggests it is time to reevaluate the use of the term “conjectural” as pejorative and to consider the necessary role that conjecture and inferentially grounded speculation still play not only in scientific hypotheses but also in theory and knowledge in the social sciences, especially historical anthropology and archaeology. con j e ct u ral and h i s to ri c al s o c ia l t ho ught

As Mary Douglas has emphasized, in summarizing Claude Lévi-Strauss’s method, “it is the nature of the mind to work through form.”33 Form and thought are closely related: genres are forms of thought, rather than

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structures or containers. Just as forms provide a repertoire of thoughts and techniques that individual writers employ or combine in distinctive ways, so conjectural histories provided a model or template for thought in the emerging fields of social inquiry. The form provides a grammar, syntax, and vocabulary for statements, a flexible instrument with which to think, not an unvarying formula or message. In the case of conjectural history, the most important of these elements gives the example of and the authorization to speculate. In positing a conjectural temporality, the various concepts of stages provide a means of organizing social history into units or parts, and the theories of transition offer a syntax for articulating the relation among them. The axiom of nonprovidential explanation defines the field of social inquiry as independent of religious dogma. Conjectural histories propose nonprovidential narrative explanations of origins or significant transitions. They offer distinctively stadial or epochal outlooks, their narratives divided into periods in which various institutions and realms of activity constitute an organic or integral whole. The genre exhibits a generalizing and universalizing tendency that can also at times be combined with more local, particular histories. These histories recount noncontractual, unplanned developments; a constitutive irony permeates the form, as human beings establish and proceed through different social forms without intending or even realizing the consequences of their actions. The discrepancy between limited purposes and beneficial results (such as that specified by Mandeville’s subtitle to the first edition of the Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Publick Benefits) underscores the workings of processes that are beyond the consciousness of human actors and can only be discerned in retrospect, as the operations of a hidden hand, in Smith’s version, or as the ruses of reason in Hegel’s conception (see appendix 2). Works written in this form, with their various ideological perspectives, engage with the idea of progress, processes of secularization, and narratives of modernity. Chapter 1 will investigate these traits and their variations in Enlightenment conjectural histories and will analyze the most important exemplars of the form. The most direct relation between conjectural history and a field of social inquiry links the conjectural form with political economy. This close connection, the subject of chapter 2, resulted from the derivation of political economy from Smith’s Wealth of Nations but also from Malthus’s Principle of Population. Malthus’s work, like Smith’s, took the form of a conjectural

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history in one of its parts—the first book of its second and later editions. In fact, Malthus’s Principle constitutes a thoroughly transitional text from Enlightenment conjectural history and natural philosophy of wealth to a nineteenth-century political economy of poverty. Malthus wrote the first edition, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), explicitly to contest Condorcet’s utopian projection that a growing population could be fed in the future through improvements in agricultural technologies. Beginning with the second edition, he dramatically expanded the work, devoting the entirely new first book to a collection of historical accounts of bare subsistence, suffering, disease, and hunger that have suppressed the population of different peoples around the globe. For information about the lives of people who left no written records, Malthus had recourse to conjectural histories. For example, for his depiction of the miserable lives led by Native Americans, he relied almost exclusively on William Robertson and his History of America. In other words, when Malthus researched specific examples and empirical evidence to support his thesis concerning the result of the “positive checks” that suppress population—famine, disease, war—he produced a series of conjectural histories of population, and wrote in the same speculative genre as Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, opposition to which prompted him to write the Principle of Population in the first place. However, Malthus also modified the conjectural histories that emphasized the bleakness and meager resources of the life of “savages.” Robertson and Falconer contrast the endemic hunger, disease, and high mortality among technologically less developed peoples with improved conditions of life in civilized societies; Malthus, however, sees the persistence of primitive conditions for the vast majority of people in all times, even in modern Europe. When Harriet Martineau wrote one of the first and most elaborate attempts to explain and defend the principles of political economy in a fictional form, a series of novellas under the collective title Illustrations of Political Economy (1830–32), Malthus’s principle of population served her as the inviolable law of the economic world. Martineau repeatedly wrote tales to drive home the lesson that, if workers will not restrict the size of their families, and hence the supply of labor, through abstinence, then they and their children will continue to starve. Martineau’s tales qualify as speculative not only because they are fictional but also because some of them assume the form of a conjectural history of society. The first narrative, for example,

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recounts the stages of progress made by a group of English settlers in South Africa after they have been reduced to a primitive condition of life following a raid by native Africans. Over the next few months they proceed, as though in an accelerated laboratory experiment, from living in a cave and subsisting on what they can gather or hunt with bow and arrow to occupying a settled, farming community with a ramified division of labor, a formal structure of government, and a desire to trade with similar small communities. Having reviewed Martineau’s collection favorably, J.  S. Mill, at the beginning of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), laid out a classic understanding of stages of economic development that is consistent with Smith’s four stages of social development. Yet, later in the Principles, Mill diverges from Smith’s vision of indefinitely increasing national wealth, as he imagines a time when the struggle for growth in economic production might be suspended because everyone would have enough, and so could give more time to cultivating their creative and intellectual abilities outside the sphere of work. In this speculative historical vision of the future, the functioning of economic laws produces progress, which may relieve the need for further progress, thus providing a way out of what Weber would call the steel-hard shell of work. Unlike Ferguson, who conceived of stadial progress checked by failure and regression, Mill imagined a society able to maintain material production and thus shift the energies of its population to a more creative and intellectual sphere. This admittedly passing vision in Mill resembles Condorcet’s utopian vision of the future more closely than Malthus’s dismal one. Vigorously disputing Malthus’s argument for the inescapability of hunger and poverty, Marx too foresaw the coming of a utopian order, based on the abolition of private property. He also drew heavily on the conjectural histories in developing his concept of the stages of universal and progressive history, and the transitions between them, especially in the German Ideology (written 1845), Capital (1867), and his writings on precapitalist economic formations and non-European (“Asiatic”) modes of production. Marx used Smith’s conjectural form to explain again the transition from precapitalist to capitalist phases, although their accounts differ, and indeed Marx offers multiple accounts.34 Both in classical political economy and in Marx’s autocritique of the discipline, conjectural history serves as a foundational form.35 In his last years, Marx brought full circle the line of development that began with the

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intertwining in Malthus of political economy and ethnography, as Marx sought evidence of a stage of primitive communism in ethnographic texts by Lewis Henry Morgan and John Lubbock. Since Marx did not publish his notes, Engels mined them for his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). (Lubbock, Morgan, and Engels are discussed in chapter 4.) Chapter 2, on political economy, thus follows the development of the field into the 1880s, after which quantitative approaches gained dominance and the influence of conjectural history faded eventually into a distinction between developed and undeveloped or “developing” countries. These intersections occurred because sociology, the subject of chapter 3, also took shape under the influence of conjectural history. Auguste Comte acknowledged the importance of Condorcet’s thought for his own. Comte refined and sharpened Condorcet’s ten stages, reducing them to three, but he retained the emphasis on science and technology, and the conviction that the final period of human life had just begun. Comte regarded the conjectural historians as secular saints in the humanistic religion that he predicted would replace Christianity. Although Spencer was much less forthcoming in acknowledging his sources, his sociological works explicitly and extensively conceived of societies as organic wholes and stressed the unpredictable and important effects of unregulated social action on the model of the natural functions of organisms. Spencer attempted to find parallels in biological organisms for each of the institutional developments he traced, but he still had to rely on the kind of evidence that his Enlightenment predecessors used: narratives of travelers, sailors, missionaries, and merchants. As a consequence, his Principles of Sociology (1876–96) was a more massive compendium of the same kind of materials used in Ferguson’s History of Civil Society or Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History. In the first sociological works, the idea of holism, the organic unity of society, played an important role: each institution had a part in defining the society, and change did not occur in one part alone; rather, society being of a piece, it characterized the whole. In addition, the early sociologists and founders of the discipline diagnosed a decline in religious beliefs, at least among Europeans, and sought through their work to provide substitutes for traditional faith, sometimes through a new belief in progress based on science. They thus built on the anticlerical program of the radical Enlightenment, advancing a thesis of secularization in the modern stage of society.36

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The disciplines of social thought, in the process of emerging in the nineteenth century, had not yet separated into distinct and exclusive categories, so we encounter what strike us as hybrid discourses, interwoven or combined protodisciplinary forms. In the first three-quarters of the century, ethnography in particular commonly combined with other fields, so that these fields were inflected toward ethnographic sources and methods in a way that later, institutionalized forms of the disciplines were not. Chapter 4, on the relations between conjectural history and anthropology, begins with consideration of James Cowles Prichard’s ethnographic Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1814–47), which, although it has not previously been considered a conjectural history, culminates in an undoubtedly speculative reconstruction of the earliest period of social life. The anthropological writings in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London in the unsettled and formative 1860s give evidence of having been shaped by the conjectural histories, delineating stages of social life, an organic relation between social spheres, and the unforeseeable development of social forms. In addition, the foundational texts of cultural anthropology in the 1860s, by John F. McLennan and E. B. Tylor, largely take the form of conjectural histories. Both assert that any social practice may be a survival, and thus an indicator of an earlier social form. In Primitive Marriage (1865), McLennan reasons backward from evidence of surviving customs, such as figuratively carrying off brides, to posit the universality of bride capture as the earliest form of marriage. In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor similarly moves by inference from existing popular beliefs and metaphorical practices to earlier beliefs that must have been accepted literally and enacted physically. George Stocking has productively emphasized that early anthropology borrowed from conjectural history what was called the “comparative method,” the supposition that civilized people can observe an image of the life of their early ancestors in contemporary “savage” societies.37 The filiation between conjectural history and anthropology, however, extends much further than the use of the comparative method in both. Nineteenthcentury anthropology retains a vision of social history as a sequence of stages proceeding from the savage to the barbarian and the civilized; it approaches its subject outside the framework of providential history; it presumes a lack of plan and contract among peoples; and Tylor’s founding definition conceives of culture as a unified whole in which institutions, symbols, customs, and beliefs work in accord with each other as parts of the

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same system. Early cultural anthropology continued to make use of all the characteristic features of conjectural history. In another founding text, Ancient Society (1877), L.  H. Morgan proposed an alternative to McLennan’s theory of early kinship and marriage, using an elaborate theory that divided savage and barbarian societies each into three substages. He also contended that the different spheres—of kinship and marriage, political authority, and property relations—exhibited coordinated forms in each stage. Like Ferguson, he brought consideration of ancient Greek and Roman customs into close relation with those of Native Americans, especially the Iroquois. Marx paid the greatest attention to this work in his ethnological notebooks, and it was on Morgan’s work and Marx’s notes that Engels based the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In its focus on the status of women as an index of civilization, Engels’s work parallels Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), although Engels’s Origin, in a reversal of Millar’s, considers the status of women in capitalist society to be low and their position among Native Americans to be high. In its formal features—in returning to a period before documents, in adopting a holistic vision of society, in its universalizing stadialism, in its concern with defining and assessing capitalist modernity, and even in anticipating the next stage of family and property relations—Engels’s work takes the form of a conjectural history. Like many of the writings considered in chapters 2 and 4, Engels’s Origin demonstrates the interweaving of anthropology and political economy in nineteenth-century works influenced by conjectural history. This chapter on early anthropology, like the preceding one on political economy, takes the narrative of the discipline up to the 1880s, after which Franz Boas effectively questioned the historical, cultural evolutionary approach, which was eventually replaced by the structuralist, formalist mode of Bronisław Malinowski and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. One late practitioner of conjectural historical anthropology, William Robertson Smith, will be discussed in chapter 6, because his Religion of the Semites (1889) had a strong impact on the social psychology of early religion in both Durkheim and Freud; Robertson Smith’s influence illustrates the intersections of anthropology and sociology in the second half of the nineteenth century, before these fields were securely institutionalized. Chapters 2 through 4 thus concern the influence of conjectural history on emerging social science disciplines. The fifth chapter focuses on

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two works that lie outside the emerging disciplinary boundaries yet make extensive use of Enlightenment conjectural history—Darwin’s Descent of Man and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. In writing his own conjectural history of the earliest state of human society, Darwin employed arguments from natural selection to offer a nonmetaphysical path by which moral ideas developed and were preserved. In his notebooks, he referred to the conjectural histories as he formulated his own speculative history of the transition from human animals to civilized humans, but he occluded this influence in the text and notes of the Descent of Man.38 Nietzsche posited and investigated another defining transition in the history of morality: the inversion of moral frameworks that led from a knightly tribal code to a priestly, ascetic one. Without fitting into the developing disciplines, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, as much as Darwin’s Descent, adhered to the classic form and function of the conjectural histories even as it updated them. Both of these thinkers—and to them we could add Tylor as he traced the progress of religious thought from animism to morality—distinguished stages of moral and social thought that are ambiguously progressive, to show how the meaning of a biological organ or a social institution may change, while the form remains the same or alters less and more slowly. Like an institution, a discursive form that evolves over a long time can nonetheless see its function and meaning change quickly from one historical moment to another or from one author to another. Darwin and Nietzsche built on the work of many conjectural historians who were concerned with the origins and early history of religion and morality—especially Rousseau, de Brosses, Hume, and Condorcet—and, as I have discussed, Comte, Spencer, Tylor, Darwin, and Nietzsche also worked on the history of morals and religion. Chapter 6 brings together works by Weber, Durkheim, and Freud, who had strong filiations to these conjectural predecessors and who pursued the origins and nature of religious feelings and institutions. In his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber explored the transition from precapitalist to capitalist society (explored earlier by Smith and Marx), speculating that radical Protestantism played a determinative role in the shift. Later, in the Sociology of Religion (1922), he sought to align major world religions with the economic forms that shaped and were shaped by them, using an encyclopedic conjectural form closely parallel to that of Spencer’s Principles of Sociology and Tylor’s Primitive Culture.

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A practitioner of conjectural history himself, Robertson Smith, in his Religion of the Semites, influenced both Durkheim and Freud through his speculations concerning the ritual sacrifice and communal meal that expressed the essential identity of the tribe or society, the totem animal, and the divinity or divine ancestor. In Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim returned to what he conceived to be the most primitive surviving form of religion, that of the aboriginal Australians, to derive from it the principle of all religion—the force or mana that turns out to be an incarnation of the power of society itself. As Robertson Smith had, Henry Maine influenced Freud, through his Ancient Law (1861), where he conjecturally reconstructed a time before legal records to argue for the thorough patriarchalism of early society and the continuity of the father’s rule into historical and modern times. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud followed a path back to what he considered to be the founding moment of human society, morality, and religion—the murder of the father of a Darwinian “horde” by a band of brothers, a scene anticipated by Robertson Smith’s account of the originary form of sacrifice in Semitic religions. Both Durkheim and Freud made their arguments by employing speculative historical narratives in a form that can be followed back through early anthropology to the conjectural histories. Chapter 7 examines fictional narrative as a form of social thought comparable to that in the emerging disciplines, tracing continuities between conjectural history and the social historical novel, and focusing on Walter Scott (Waverley, 1814), Honoré de Balzac (Lost Illusions, 1843), George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871), and H.  G. Wells (Tono-Bungay, 1908). All of these novels explored contrasts and transitions between stages of society, especially between premodern—tribal, feudal, or preindustrial—and modern social forms; they represented historical developments that exceed the control of individuals; and they registered a deep ambivalence about progress and modernity. It is worth remembering that conjectural history does not concern itself solely with the early history of mankind but, from Smith’s foundational Wealth of Nations through Weber’s Protestant Ethic, has attempted to investigate and speculatively explain transitions between major stages or periods of social history. Scott, who is widely recognized as having been influenced by the conjectural histories of Ferguson and Smith, addressed some of the same questions as early anthropology. Eliot, like Martineau a half century

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earlier and Millar a half century before that, examined the status and treatment of women as indices of the state of civilization that a society has attained; she also agreed with some of Comte’s principal ideas.39 Wells contrasted the earlier country house form of English society with the modern world of commerce and advertising, even as he satirized both. The novels offer another descendant of conjectural history—a fictional history—that worked on the same issues as the early, predisciplinary fields of historical social inquiry. Hence, the account here helps tell part of the story of the passage from Enlightenment conjectural history to modern social thought. Conjectural history has continued to exert its influence in the century since Weber, Durkheim, and Freud published their psychosociologies of religion. Michel Foucault belongs to this line of conjectural thinkers, as he distinguished stages and followed transitions between phases in epistemology, forms of punishment, and sexuality, producing forceful analyses, sometimes based on sparse documentary evidence. His histories reveal significant parallels with the conjectural works of Kant, Comte, and Nietzsche. After briefly considering Foucault’s example, the conclusion notes the underlying structure of conjectural history in popular and scholarly archaeology and prehistoric cultural anthropology—in accounts of the origins of language, early kinship relations, and agriculture, for example. The recent universal or general histories of Francis Fukuyama, Ian Morris, and Robert Bellah also find their place here in the line of descent from conjectural history, along with prehistoric fiction.

Exemplifying the speculations of Darwin and Nietzsche concerning the persistence of cultural and biological forms through adaptation to newly challenging times, the practice of conjectural thinking for two and a half centuries itself provides an instance of the persistence of a form of historical thought, even as its function and meaning change in response to altered social and cultural circumstances. The form that emerged as conjectural history during the Enlightenment separated out into the disciplines of social thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and continues to persist, to serve purposes in scholarly and popular cultures, and to evolve—not progress—in the twenty-first. The current prominence of conjectural historical works demonstrates the importance and usefulness of conjectural narratives in the present late-disciplinary formation.

1

Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form

t h e p r e h i s to ry o f c o nj e c tu ral histo ry

of the conjectural genre, it makes sense to go back, as the form itself did, to origins, and delineating the emergence of conjectural history requires taking into account late seventeenth-century natural law and social contract theories, especially those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Samuel von Pufendorf. Although Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1725; 3rd ed. 1744) bears a close relation to conjectural form, Pufendorf ’s work constitutes more of a bridge from natural law theory to conjectural history. Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, part 2 (1729) has almost all the major features of the later conjectural histories and can thus be considered the first instance of the form. However, long before these seventeenth-century writers, various classical works formulated accounts of the earliest stage or stages of human life. Hesiod’s Works and Days described a paradigmatic progression and decline, from the Golden Age through the Silver and Bronze ages to the Iron Age of the present. Ovid (in the Metamorphoses) and Juvenal (in the Satires) provided idyllic, somewhat ironic views of early humans eating acorns. The most detailed classical narrative of the passage from human animal to civilized human appears in book 5 (lines 925–1457) of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things; mid-first century b.c.e.). Lucretius’s narrative intersects with those of the Enlightenment in a number of striking ways. In keeping with his Epicurean philosophy, Lucretius’s narrative of the emergence of human society is materialistic and nontheistic, and hence, t o t r ac e t h e h i s t o r y

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like the later conjectural histories, nonprovidential: the poem attempts to show how human social institutions such as language, laws, and property could have developed without the help of providence or the intervention of supernatural agencies. It also is predocumentary, concerned with developments before written language, beginning, indeed, before spoken language, at a time when the human animal had no control of fire or even the ability to make clothes. The development of language, Lucretius asserts, was natural, as we can observe that other species of animals communicate among themselves, varying the sounds they make in accord with their emotions. The invention of property and the discovery of the uses of metals—gold, silver, copper, lead, and iron—mark the emergence of distinctly human societies in Lucretius, as they do in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, with which Lucretius’s poem has more in common than with any other later conjectural work. Kings make their appearance early in Lucretius, but they are soon killed, and in the chaotic violence that ensues, men decide to form a compact among themselves to observe fixed laws, “of their own will to submit to statutes and strict rules of law.”1 The basis of society, in Lucretius’s view, is contractual, although the agreement he describes does not coincide with the compact of any of the later contract theorists. Lucretius’s history of humanity traces and laments the development of religion from fear of powerful forces, paralleling many of the later conjectural histories. In Lucretius, the stages of early society largely take shape through the emergence of new and more powerful technologies, and in this respect, his vision is closely related to Condorcet’s. In the earliest stage, one man might be carried off by a large predator; later, powerful weapons provided security from wild animals but also caused thousands of deaths in one day of battle. As his repeated attacks on war indicate, Lucretius considers social developments to be ambiguous and double, resulting in both regress and progress. His work thus bears comparison with both Rousseau’s and Adam Ferguson’s. Lucretius’s account of the history of human society constitutes the most extensive and naturalistic proto-conjectural history before the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. However, the numerous and striking convergences between Lucretius’s narrative and those of later conjectural historians do not justify conflating the ancient poet with like-minded early modern figures. Crucially, the conjectural historians all write in revisionary

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response to the dominant Christian providential narrative. In addition, the later historians attempt to take into account empirical evidence based on encounters with non-European peoples to which the ancients did not have access. Moreover, none of the conjectural histories takes Lucretius’s form of a cosmological, philosophical epic poem, although J. G. von Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91) and G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) come close to modern prose versions of this form.2 Seventeen centuries after Lucretius, natural law theorists of the origins of human society, such as Hobbes and Locke, thinking outside the previously inescapable biblical paradigm, posited that, at some unspecified point in the past, humans emerged from a primitive condition and formed themselves into a society by means of a contract. According to Hobbes, solitary, asocial humans living in a natural condition entered into a compact among themselves, each man motivated by fear of his neighbors. Since no covenant could be enforced without a power over the contracting parties, the contract bound people to surrender most of their natural rights into the hands of a sovereign, who would guarantee the life and property of members of society but whose authority could not be questioned. Hobbes acknowledges that the condition of nature, the “war of each against all,” may never have existed, at least not over the whole world at the same time, but he contends that the only alternative to such a sovereign is the breakdown of society into civil war (Leviathan 1.13). In Locke’s view, although free, propertied individuals in a natural condition did not live in fear, yet they decided to come together to form a community for the more “secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are not of it.” To do so, they entered into a compact among themselves to accept a power that would protect their property and security. Significantly, these “Freemen” compact both among themselves and with the authority they set up to protect themselves and their property; therefore, in the event that the governing authority fails to accomplish its purposes, they retain the right to overturn it and replace it with another. Although Locke calls his thought experiment a “conjecture” and a “hypothesis,” yet he defends it strongly. To the objection that history gives “very little account of Men, that lived together in the State of Nature,” he responds that we may as well suppose that the armies of Xerxes were never children because we do not hear of them in history until they were already grown men and soldiers.3

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The theories of both Hobbes and Locke depend on speculation concerning the prehistory of human social life in times for which no documents, records, or remains survive, and they both avoid appealing to providence for an explanation of the earliest developments of society. However, they also adopt features that will prove to be incompatible with conjectural history. For instance, both depend on a foundational contract as a crucial explanatory hypothesis. Significantly, also, neither account represents a history of gradual changes taking place over hundreds of generations and proceeding through several stages to the modern era; rather, each describes only a conjectured historical moment—that is, not a narrative history at all. Pufendorf makes a decisive break with such theorists, in Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), by providing a detailed and extensive discussion of the passage from a state of nature to society, revising Hobbes’s account of the natural state and the reason for government and positing multiple founding contracts.4 For Pufendorf, the original state of human life consists not of a war of each against all, but rather of a confluence of individuals and families who came together to protect themselves from wild beasts.5 In this state, government has not been formed but people are sociable and peaceful. If these early humans had really been at war with each other, he reasons, they would not have survived. But they did survive, and therefore must have lived on terms of friendship, bound together as reasonable creatures, not by an agreement or covenant among themselves (Law 2: 2.2–2.10, 104–15).6 The impetus for heads of families to form civil societies came from the growth of agriculture, trade, and urban life, which produced luxury, competition, and inequality, with the potential to lead to conflict. The fathers established government to provide against future evils that they could apprehend. According to Pufendorf, their founding actions did not consist of a single, all-encompassing compact, as in Hobbes or Locke, but of a series of agreements: first, the decision to set up a state and provision for how to proceed; then a decision on a particular form of government; and finally, a covenant with the one or the group who became sovereign, and who must have agreed to care for the well-being and safety of the new citizens in return for their obedience. In the absence of monuments and documents recording social foundations, this conjectural account, Pufendorf contends, takes us as close as possible to the succession of events. Such agreements must have taken place at least tacitly in the institution of

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commonwealths (Law 7: 2.6–2.10, 458–71). Pufendorf thus retains the language of contract, but he steps away from its earlier form by multiplying the founding agreements, and his delineation of a sequence of covenants moves in the direction of elaborating a set of stages of social development. Rather than basing his argument on a single founding moment, Pufendorf conceives of the development of institutions of exchange and of government over an extended period, following the emergence of human society. However, he presumes that goods were exchanged by the earliest men, and that trade persisted through all the intervening years.7 In the wake of the natural law theorists who draw together many elements of the conjectural genre, two works from the 1720s have a claim to be considered the first full-length conjectural history: Vico’s New Science (1st ed. 1725) and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, part 2 (1729). Part 2 of the Fable more closely realizes the form of conjectural history, even though Vico includes some important features, such as the use of the necessary conditional to designate what must have been the case in earliest times.8 Beginning with the giants who roamed the earth after the flood, in the “so-called state of nature,” Vico gives a naturalistic account of the original steps in the constitution of society: again, fear—this time, fear of thunder and other meteorological phenomena—gave savage men a conception of the gods and of religion. From a feeling of shame before the gods, which had been instilled by providence, men and women adopted regular unions, and marriage was born. With the contracting of marriages, families moved out of caves and settled near sacred springs and lands that would become burial sites.9 Settlements became permanent, trees were cleared by burning, and agriculture was established. Although an elaborate social life had developed, properly political institutions only appeared when families were divided into the strong and the weak, then into nobles and serfs.10 The struggle of the serfs to obtain just and equal treatment in the commonwealth determined the shape of the history of the prototypical people and republic of Rome, concerning which some documents and monuments survive—the earliest written laws. Here, Vico leaves behind speculative or conjectural history proper. In Vico’s account, the savages who first become cyclopean families, and eventually republican patricians, did not rely on contracts or agreements for social development.11 Perhaps most strikingly, each stage of human history—whether the age of gods, heroes, or men—possesses an organic

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unity, a holism that binds together all the institutions and forms of one culture. Thus, in the earliest age, the youth of the world, to which Vico devotes the greatest part of his attention, the gods ruled human affairs; theology was poetic; language was ritual, gestural, or onomatopoetic; and knowledge was concrete and sensory. These homologies, along with the other features just observed, bring the New Science into close relation with conjectural history. On the other hand, Vico consistently appeals to providence to explain the course of the gentile nations. These appeals have a force and frequency greater than would be required of a pretense to disguise a naturalistic method. The title of book 2, chapter 5, for example, is typical: “It Is Divine Providence That Institutes Commonwealths and at the Same Time the Natural Law of the Gentes.”12 Moreover, in Vico’s conception, history takes the form of a cycle through the course of the three ages, and then a recourse to a new age of reflective barbarism. It is difficult to see this cyclical structure as the expression of a naturalistic account of social development. Even if there were regressions in history as a result of excessive reason and philosophy, it is not clear why each of these declines would need to return the society to its beginnings and a new age of barbarism. Vico’s New Science is still committed to a view of history as the work of divine providence, which takes not an unpredictable, disorderly progressive course but reveals a neater, indefinitely and repetitively cyclical shape. It thus departs in significant ways from the essential features of conjectural history.13 In dialogues 5 and 6 of the Fable of the Bees, part 2, Mandeville provides a plausible reconstruction of the beginning and earliest development of social institutions, including language, religion, morals, kinship, poetry, and music.14 He is the first to expand the temporal dimension to take into account the hundreds of generations or more that must have elapsed from the tentative beginnings to the gradual consolidation of any social institution.15 He claims that fear—though not of each other, as in Hobbes— brought men together to establish a society and government. Cleomenes, Mandeville’s spokesman, calls this his “Conjecture, concerning the first Motive, that would make Savages associate in a society: It is not possible to know any thing, with Certainty, of Beginnings, where Men were destitute of Letters; but I think, that the Nature of the thing makes it highly probable, that it must have been their common Danger from Beasts of Prey” (emphasis added).16 When he imagines the institution of religion,

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it is again fear—of thunder, lightning, and unseen powers, as in Vico— that must have provoked its foundation among savage men striving to make sense of a threatening world. Only after Cleomenes has laid down the original foundations of society in fear does he acknowledge that men formed contracts, and agreed in one of their contracts to institute a form of government. However, before there could be a compact to create a government, people must have had a concept and system of law; for there to have been laws, written language must have existed; before there could be writing, language must have been spoken for many generations; and spoken language itself must have developed extremely slowly from gestures and inarticulate sounds, again over generations (Fable, 2:269, 287–90). Thus, like the later conjectural histories, Mandeville traces back from the known end point of government the periods for which no documentation exists, but through which human societies must have proceeded in order to reach recognizable political institutions. Yet, after all these developments have occurred, two further steps must have taken place for a historically recognizable society to emerge: “No number of Men, when once they enjoy Quiet, and no Man needs to fear his Neighbour, will be long without learning to divide and subdivide their Labour” (2:284). In addition to this early recognition of the importance of the division of labor, which generates divisions among ranks and eventually classes, Mandeville argues that metallurgy would have contributed to the construction of a complete society by enabling the production of tools and weapons, after flint blades had been employed for centuries. Although the Fable of the Bees, part 2, does not delineate a distinct set of stages through which all social institutions passed as a unit, in congruence with each other, it consistently shows the series of steps and the length of time that must have elapsed in the passage to modern commercial society.17 Without naming Locke and other natural law theorists, Cleomenes criticizes the “absurdities” of “alleging as the Causes of Man’s Fitness for Society, such Qualifications as no Man ever was endued with, that was not educated in a Society, a civil Establishment, of several hundred Years standing” (Fable, 2:301). Fable of the Bees, part 2, makes use of all the characteristic strategies of the conjectural histories, elaborating a speculative, inferential vision, based on little or no documentary evidence, of a naturalistic, noncontractual, and extended historical process caused by men who did not foresee the results of their actions but who, through their everyday responses to

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their environment, took unrecorded, laborious, and time-consuming steps toward the institutions of society.18 a h i s to ry o f e nli g h te nm e nt c o n je c t ur a l histo ry

In order to see the influence of the conjectural histories on later social thought, it will be useful here to combine a more extended analysis of the principal traits of the genre with an approximately chronological consideration of further examples that illustrate those characteristics. Doing so will bring into focus a canon of conjectural histories that had the greatest impact, including (in addition to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757), Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91), and Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). Specifying the traits of these major conjectural histories and of some less well-known works can indicate the range of variation and the different combinations of generic traits in individual works. Every conjectural history exhibits almost all of the following characteristics; only rarely does a work in the genre lack more than one of these features. First, this kind of historical narrative traces the origins of society back to a time before the existence of documents and other remains. As a consequence, the form often makes use of a rhetoric of the necessary conditional tense.19 Second, conjectural histories speculatively return to earlier times as an alternative to accepting providential accounts based on scripture. Third, the form is also noncontractual. Unlike natural law theory, conjectural narratives aim to provide plausible narratives of slow historical developments, not thought experiments focused on a single founding moment of contract. Fourth, adopting a long view of early society, conjectural narratives distinguish stages or periods in the development of social life. In each stage, institutions belonging to various spheres of life exhibit a common structure. A variety of conjectural history is devoted to analyzing transitions between stages for which no clear evidence exists, especially the transition from feudal to capital society. Fifth, conjectural narratives presume that human actions often have unintended and unplanned consequences; humans make their history, but without knowing in advance what

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course that history will take (as Marx later put it). Finally, as they trace the stages of society or of institutions such as religion from their earliest days to historically documented and even modern times, conjectural histories exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward modernity, secularization, and the thesis of historical progress. In sum, conjectural narrative adopts a speculative, naturalistic, noncontractual explanation of early social forms that usually falls into stages and shows the unintended consequences of human actions. Absence of Documents

As a fundamental generic marker, conjectural history provides a narrative of early times for which no written material or man-made objects now exist. Rousseau’s narrative in the Discourse on Inequality encompasses the span from the earliest solitary human animal to the civilized slaves of a large state dictatorship. The conjectural narrative can be more narrowly focused, however. Hume’s Natural History of Religion concentrates on delineating the earliest stages of religious belief, from animism to anthropomorphic polytheism, and from there to monotheism. John Millar, in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, traces the increasing differentiation of authority in different spheres and in different stages of society, examining both domestic arrangements and forms of government, and giving exceptional attention to the improving status of women in a commercial state. More expansively, Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture, focuses on progress in scientific knowledge, from the prehistoric time of the bow and arrow to the use of machinery at the time of the French Revolution and beyond, singling out individual scientists and mathematicians wherever possible as those whose thought defines epochs. A second subgenre of conjectural history takes as its subject not the origins of social institutions but the means and path of a transition between stages—for which, again, no written document or monument provides direct evidence. Most often, as already seen in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, this transition concerns the passage to modernity, whether the preceding period is characterized as feudal, tribal, or precapitalist. William Robertson’s “View of the State of Europe,” the hundred-page introduction to The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), constructs a bridge from the medieval, feudal period, which Robertson regarded as backward and chaotic, to the sixteenth century, in which he saw the restoration of

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order and learning. Gilbert Stuart’s angry response to Robertson, A View of Society in Europe (1778), examines the same shift but inverts Robertson’s assessment. Adopting a parliamentary and Whiggish position from the seventeenth century, Stuart looks back to the medieval period as a time of greater freedom, before the imposition of feudalism that followed the Norman invasion.20 This conflict illustrates the flexibility of conjectural form, which can be used to express divergent and opposing political and ideological positions. Nonprovidential Origins

Consistent with Rousseau’s methodological statement, Dugald Stewart’s definition of conjectural history, and Heidegger’s suggestion for the project of a radical historiography, conjectural histories do not explore facts, nor do they study history under the rubric of necessity, presuming that developments in the past, because they occurred, were necessary or ordained. Rather, works in this form explore possibility, and specifically the question of how human social existence became possible. What does it mean about human beings that society could come into being without the intervention of a divine agent? In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau contends that human civilization did not need to take place, and that socialization might have been brought to a halt at an early state, from which no further progress need have succeeded. There, but for something that might well not have happened, humankind could have remained.21 It is for this reason that Dugald Stewart suggests “natural history” as a close equivalent for “conjectural or theoretical” history, and cites Hume’s Natural History of Religion as an example. The conjectural historian does not have recourse to any force or agency outside or above nature to account for the possibility of human history. Hume’s Natural History constitutes a model speculative history in the naturalism of its inquiry into the historical phenomena of religion. Hume traces back to an early period the source of religious feeling in the fear of unknown powers and a desire to placate them. As Statius wrote in the Thebaid (bk. 3, line 661), in a sentence that could be found in many conjectural works: “Primum in terra deos fecit timor” (“First among things on earth, the gods made fear”), or “Primus in orbe deos fecit timor” (“Fear first made gods in the world”). Hume traces successive stages in religious thought, from animism and polytheism

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to monotheism; however, his narrative does not describe an indefinite ascent to purer and more rational forms of religion, with a theism purged of all superstition at the apex of belief. Rather, theism emerges as believers ascribe more and more power to their favorite local god, making their deity more abstract and demanding, increasing the distance between themselves and the divine, until they must find psychological relief in appealing to minor deities, heroes, and saints who can serve as models and mediators. In one age, polytheism or superstition may predominate; in another, the fanaticism of pure theism. Historically, religion oscillates unendingly between these two states. Thus, Hume undercuts a favorite thesis of Christianity, asserted for more than a millennium, that monotheism constitutes an advance over polytheism. But Hume goes further by inverting the moral values ascribed to each of these two forms of belief, arguing that polytheism encourages the kinds of virtuous action in this world that theism neglects. Monotheism, by its very nature, is more intolerant, proselytizing, persecuting, and violent than polytheism. Monotheists abase themselves before their infinitely powerful deity; polytheists strive to imitate the heroes whose courage rid their world of monsters. Polytheists actively seek liberty and the improvement of the world; theists tend to accept authority and withdraw into monasteries out of selfish concern for their own salvation. The Natural History of Religion establishes a point-by-point contrast between monotheism and polytheism, but because monotheism serves as a transparent substitute for Christianity, the opposition actually concerns Christianity and the polytheism of the ancients.22 In the satiric structure that emerges, Hume first seems to conform to the orthodox opinion, by demonstrating the irrationality of polytheism, but then turns to show that the apparent alternative, Christian theism, is in fact much more violent, irrational, and demeaning.23 Hume repeatedly associates religion with a madness that leads men who seek to elevate themselves to debase themselves instead. “Madness, fury, rage, and an inflamed imagination,” although they are supposed to bring us into communication with the deity, “sink men nearest to the beasts.”24 The history of religion illustrates the discrepancy between intention and result. In addition, however, Hume explores the psychology of monotheistic religion from outside, in an unprecedented way, again beginning with the paradox of vertical extremes: “The higher the deity is exalted in power and knowledge, the lower of course he is depressed in goodness and benevolence”

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(Natural History, 178). In Hume’s judgment, monotheists understand the inconsistency of asserting that an all-powerful and all-knowing deity is all good, but their faith prohibits them from openly acknowledging the cruelty and violence that then characterize the divine. This inner conflict aggravates their misery and produces an even more acute sense of guilty terror in relation to the divine. The analysis here anticipates the arguments of Nietzsche and Freud concerning the growth of conscience: antagonism to the father or deity is turned inward against oneself; the energy of revolt is converted into the agency of self-punishment and further infliction of fear. (For further discussion of this process, see chapters 5 and 6.) Hume concludes that one who surveys religions in all ages and countries will decide that they are nothing but “sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies [monkeys] in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational” (Natural History, 184). There is no middle ground of moderate religious belief between the superstitious whimsies of polytheism and the fanatical violence of theism. The only position of calm that Hume can see on the subject of religion is that of the philosopher who stands apart from any organized religion and belief.25 Hume thus writes one of the earliest histories of religious belief and the psychology of religion from outside a religious position. As the Natural History opens for study the field of the history and psychology of religion, it provides a model for the freedom from providential explanations that constitutes the framework of understanding in the social sciences.26 Some conjectural historians adopt an even more extreme anticlerical position than Hume. Condorcet, in the Sketch for a Historical Picture, regards the first priests as imposters, and their followers as the first dupes, with descendants of both tribes continuing down to his own time.27 Mandeville, in the “Essay on the Origin of Moral Virtue” in the Fable of the Bees, characterizes in similar terms the first politicians who manipulated the majority into pursuing virtue before their own pleasure. However, many conjectural historians are more moderate in their stance toward religion. They do not attack religious authority, like Mandeville and Condorcet; nor do they even take religious beliefs as a subject of discussion and analysis, like Hume. In this respect, Smith’s practice can be taken as representative. He leaves religion entirely out of his analysis of wealth and his lectures on jurisprudence and rhetoric. His Theory of Moral Sentiments

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(1759) pointedly does not derive morality from religion, but instead works out a naturalistic account based, like Hume’s, on sympathy. But Smith refused to go as far as Hume. After Hume’s death, Smith declined to publish Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777), his devastating dismantling of the argument for the existence of a deity from the supposed evidence of intelligent design.28 Smith does provide a secular replacement for transcendent providence in the doctrine of the hidden hand, which by immanent means accomplishes beneficial ends that none of the participants intended: “Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . By directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”29 The doctrine of the hidden hand can, like belief in providence, be called on to explain the harmonious working of many separate, self-interested agents, but it does not require an all-seeing agency that oversees the operation of the whole. The hidden hand functions as a figure for the entire system.30 Smith’s approach constitutes a middle ground in the practice of the genre: Ferguson, Millar, Robertson, and most others follow the same path, avoiding recourse to providential and religious explanations, but declining overt, demystifying anticlericalism.31 Immanuel Kant’s conjectural histories can be placed among this number. In the earliest of them, “Conjectural Origins of the Human Race” (1786), he makes running references to chapters and verses of the Bible, but he first establishes his own reasonable speculations “according to nature,” then cites Genesis, inverting the established order and making his conjectures the authority to which the other account corresponds. His later conjectural histories drop any references to Genesis. Sketches of the History of Man (1778) by Henry Home, Lord Kames, displays a providentialism at the opposite extreme from the satiric anticlericalism of Condorcet. On almost every other page of the conjectural parts of this book, Kames pursues speculations concerning the earliest undocumented period of human existence, only to amend, withdraw, or repudiate them in order to conform to revealed religion.32 For this reason, it is questionable whether his History of Man should even be regarded as

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a conjectural history, although in other respects it conforms to the genre and is almost always included with others from the Scottish Enlightenment. Kames permits himself to look out over previously forbidden waters of thought, but quickly returns to the shore rather than navigate them like the other thinkers who work in this genre.33 Herder and Rousseau both refer in their conjectural works to a role that providence has played in history, but they do not appeal to providence, as Kames does, to close off speculation. In Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind, Herder argues that each people, like a species or an individual, passes through the stages of infancy, childhood, maturity, and old age. He casts his narrative and his judgments almost entirely in secular terms, although at some points he expresses the conviction that the divinity implanted distinctive potentials in the various peoples on earth, and that a distant providence helps work out the way that peoples realize their potential. Rousseau, in the long ninth note to his Discourse on Inequality, which considers the disadvantages, harms, and vices of life in a civilized state, nevertheless claims that a return to a natural condition is not an option, that it was ordained that humans should emerge from a natural state so that they could realize a higher moral purpose. When we examine the conjectural historians’ relation to providential explanations, therefore, we find a wide range of perspectives within an overarching agreement.34 With the exception of Kames, all agreed that the new historiography required abandoning the framework of Genesis. They differed on the extent to which the practice of conjectural universal history should diverge from religion and renounce providential explanations. Beginning at the more skeptical pole, Condorcet believed that humans must leave behind organized religions if they want to free themselves of their illusions. Hume regarded both monotheism and polytheism as pathological, but he did not anticipate that either of these forms would be superseded in the future. Rousseau asserted the legitimacy of setting aside the biblical account, yet his own narrative took the form of an irreversible fall from a happy state, and he implied that humans were led into their social condition by a divinity. Thus, some conjectural histories pressed strongly for secularization, others accepted elements of a providential scheme, and many, including most of the Scots, pursued a way between these two extremes, mostly by avoiding explicit consideration of the claims of religion and providence. The wide variation in attitudes toward providence among

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the conjectural historians indicates the range of possibilities in the genre, which is far from monolithic. Works in this genre place themselves in relation to a secularizing movement because of the nonprovidential framework they adopt: some actively press a critique of religion or an aggressive desacralizing; a few continue to use the language of providence; most participate quietly in the secularizing process. Distinguishing Stages

The framework of profane history constructed by conjectural narratives needed some way of marking change in the new field of universal nonprovidential history. Though their nature and contents vary, the stages in these histories link the earliest times to documented, literate societies, and these to the present and, in some cases, the future. Smith developed one of the most productive and long-lived set of stages, based on four modes of subsistence. Because he thought that these would occur in every society in the same order, he had a difficult time acknowledging that the native North American tribes that practiced agriculture had not passed through a stage as shepherds, after being hunters. His conception of stages continues to affect contemporary thinking, where two major forms of thought derive their structures from Smith’s stadial conception: economic theories characterizing societies as developed and undeveloped or developing, and Marxist theory focusing on material modes of subsistence as the basis for legal and cultural forms. Ferguson’s three-stage theory of societies passing successively through the savage, barbarian, and civilized periods exerted an even wider influence than Smith’s, constituting a nearly ubiquitous part of the implicit knowledge of the nineteenth century.35 Those in the first state of savagery, like those in Smith’s first stage, consist mostly of natives of small societies dependent on hunting and fishing for survival; Ferguson locates these outside Europe, in Africa and the Pacific Islands. At the other extreme, the civilized live in large, highly organized societies that are based on monetary and commercial exchanges; Ferguson locates these only in Europe and European colonies. He takes the position that what Europeans considered a lack of social change and progress in China and India for more than two millennia disqualifies these societies from being fully civilized—that is, dynamic, enterprising commercial nations—and he uses the same argument against

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static social orders to argue that Mexican, Peruvian, and African societies fall short of being fully civilized.36 Undoubtedly, by not acknowledging non-European civilizations in East and South Asia, North Africa, and Central and South America, Ferguson occupies a strongly Eurocentric position (discussed further in appendix 3). There was no category in his or in most stadial schemes for such social forms. As unchanging, despotic societies, they did not take part in history but fell outside the sequences of changes that constituted his tripartite history of civil society.37 Ferguson identifies as barbarian those peoples who live by herding or who for various reasons fall between savage and civilized states. These include archaic Greeks, native North Americans, and tribal peoples such as the Scottish Highlanders. Ferguson was the only one of the Scottish conjectural historians to come from the Highlands and to speak Gaelic. Consistent with his proximity to such social forms, he celebrates characteristic tribal traits of loyalty, magnanimity, and gratitude, as well as the military virtues of courage and discipline. Indeed, Ferguson makes a striking case for the need for war: “Without the rivalship of nations and the practice of war, civil society itself could scarcely have found an object, or a form” (History of Civil Society, 28). For Ferguson, war constitutes the indispensable arena in which men sharpen their abilities through struggle. He finds inspiration even in the most notorious mass slaughters of previous times and his own, characterizing them as “ages of enterprise.” After mentioning the Crusades and the English Civil War, he includes the present time, “in which having found means to cross the Atlantic, and to double the Cape of Good Hope, the inhabitants of one half of the world were let loose on the other, and parties from every quarter, wading in blood, and at the expense of every crime, and of every danger, traversed the earth in search of gold” (201). Although he acknowledges the atrocities committed by the colonial powers and the Crusaders, he still considers their times to be “remarkable” because they roused the weak and idle to unusual exertions. Ferguson underscores the need for peoples to strengthen themselves in their struggle for existence. Finding and commending energy, courage, enterprise, and aggressive war making among the early Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Native Americans, Ferguson occupies a medial position among conjectural historians. He shares his respect for barbarians and their values with Rousseau, although he strongly disagrees with Rousseau’s speculation that human beings lived as solitary individuals in a state of nature. But Ferguson also

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worries that excess of civilization entails the corruption of civic virtue. He does not yet, as Hume did, separate luxury from vice.38 In fact, he devotes the last two parts of his Essay on the History of Civil Society to tracing the progress of corruption in civilized nations, the loss of civic virtue that leads from independence and military strength to despotism and political slavery.39 In addition, he emphasizes that the continually multiplying division of labor leads to a severing of bonds among men, producing a fragmented, atomistic society. In addition to his ambivalent view of the advantages and disadvantages of the barbarian and civilized states, which is paradigmatic for the genre, Ferguson provides a notably clear statement of the discrepancy between purpose and result—the unplanned nature of social change: In striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, [mankind] arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, and pass on, like other animals, in the track of their nature, without perceiving its end. He who first said, “I will appropriate this field; I will leave it to my heirs” did not perceive that he was laying the foundation of civil laws and political establishments. He who first ranged himself under a leader, did not perceive, that he was setting the example of a permanent subordination, under the pretence of which, the rapacious were to seize his possessions, and the arrogant to lay claim to his service. (History of Civil Society, 119)

The second sentence in this crucial paragraph shows Ferguson’s kinship with Smith, emphasizing the civic order that results from the pursuit of advantage or interest. But the third shows his affinity with Rousseau in stressing the dark side of subordination to the law. In neither case does Ferguson admit any sign of an ordering providence at work in history. Men act according to their natural reason, “like other animals, in the track of their nature,” and then pass on. The stadial theories of Smith and Ferguson are congruent versions of material and economic ways of ordering social life into epochs. Hume, however, focuses his stages in the Natural History of Religion on the forms of religious thought and their social consequences: first, the ascription of power and intention to local natural forces and phenomena in animism; then, the consolidation of these objects of worship into divinities in polytheism; and finally, the subsuming of all divine attributes in an all-powerful

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deity in monotheism.40 Like the stages of economic life in Smith and Ferguson, the stages of religious life in Hume had extensive influence, shaping, among other works, Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor’s foundational work in anthropology of 1871. Working in the same conjectural form as Smith, Ferguson, and Hume, Condorcet developed a theory of history based not on economic or religious stages but on scientific thought and technological advances. In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, he devotes four of his ten stages to conjectural history. The first three concern the earliest stages in prehistoric times, while the tenth stage lays out a vision of a dramatically better, future stage when infectious diseases will be eradicated, equality between men and women will prevail, and growth in the food supply caused by improvements in agricultural technologies will enable a significant increase in length of life and improvement in people’s health. The intervening six periods trace the history of scientific thought from the Greeks through the French Revolution. In each of these phases, Condorcet discovers advances in scientific and technical knowledge that could have increased human freedom but whose effects were blocked by the mystifications of priests in league with the power of kings. Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture thus begins with a conjectural history, then makes the transition to a documentable history of later times. Hume’s Natural History similarly begins with the prehistory of religious thought, before going on to Greek and Roman myths and Judeo-Christian beliefs, both of which can be thoroughly documented. But Condorcet diverges from the Scots’ use of the genre in two ways. First, in a sign of a weaker conception of the stages, the six historical stages in the middle of the Sketch for a Historical Picture do not constitute transformations of all the institutions of the society in accord with shifts in the key area of this history—science and technology. Although Condorcet divides the historical record into stages in order to mark advances in natural philosophy, the social and political circumstances of the individual thinkers remain unchanged; their work is bounded by the combined power of priests and kings. Moreover, Condorcet’s focus on named individuals differs sharply from the emphasis in other conjectural histories on societal shifts resulting from impersonal and anonymous developments. However, Condorcet innovates powerfully by introducing a conjectural history of the future as his final period. Like stages in prehistoric times,

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this stage cannot be documented, yet speculative inferences concerning what may or must happen in the next phase of human history can be drawn based on the present and the historical past. Here Condorcet, along with Kant, who joined him in a similar speculation, in “Perpetual Peace” (1795), finds another way in the conjectural form, imagining a radical historiography concerning the possibility of a future human history—a human society not limited by being necessary or by the constraints of what is known, but one that is imaginably different. Neither Condorcet nor Kant, in their future conjectural thinking, adopts the mode of the Jewish prophets. They do not write to castigate the present generation and call for a return to earlier, more virtuous times; rather, they call for an unprecedented realization in the future of the potential for the human species. In large part because they do not appear to delineate a clear set of stages through which all societies pass, as most of the Scottish works in this genre do, previous commentators have not categorized as conjectural histories Herder’s This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774) or his Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind. In fact, Herder conceives of stages of social life, but he does so in organic terms. As opposed to the presumption of a linear, stadial progress that all nations or peoples must follow at faster or slower paces, Herder argues that each culture has its own nature and potential, which must be developed out of themselves according to their own internal principle of growth. He does critique the presumption of many of the conjectural histories, energetically attacking their self-regarding ethnocentrism and narrow universalism.41 Nevertheless, he does not abandon the form. Instead, in This Too a Philosophy of History, he himself writes an alternative, autocritical conjectural history, speculating about undocumented societies, outlining how one could write the history of such societies without confining them to greater or lesser progress through an invariant set of stages, tempering universalism with respect for local cultures. Later, in Ideas for a Philosophy of History, a speculative encyclopedia of early histories of cultures around the globe, he attempts to discern and describe the unique character of each culture, refusing to rank any culture as less valuable or valid than any other. That he does not always realize this ideal becomes clear from some of his derogatory representations of Africans, Eskimos, and Jews. Nevertheless, Ideas for a Philosophy and This Too present the most extensive and self-conscious critique of Eurocentrism and acceptance of cultural relativism among the conjectural histories.42

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Herder does not employ the three- or four-stage scheme of most of the Scottish historians, yet neither do Hume or Rousseau, and their works served as foundational conjectural histories; even among the Scots, James Dunbar, in his Essays on the History of Mankind (1781), questions whether Ferguson’s terms “savage” and “barbarian” should continue to be used. This Too and Ideas for a Philosophy engage in the same kind of speculations as other conjectural histories, using most of their characteristic techniques. They may seem to stand apart from many of the Scottish conjectural histories because they critique some frequent assumptions of the genre, but they hardly do so more than Dunbar does. Examination of a half dozen major conjectural histories thus demonstrates the range of their criteria for historical stages: they can be defined in terms of material and economic ways of life, forms of religious belief, accomplishments in science and technology, or phases in the life of an individual organism. The Scottish historians typically organize their conjectural stages around means of subsistence and the social and institutional forms that accord with them. The French thinkers, with the significant exception of Condorcet, tend to be skeptical about the possibilities for gradual, sustained improvement. The German conjectural writers often find ways of mitigating the ethnocentrism that can attend assertions of a single line of development for all peoples. But writers from all three national cultures conceive of a social stage holistically, as a characteristic shaping of daily and domestic life, legal institutions, cultural forms, and forms of thought and knowledge (Condorcet again constitutes an exception). Encompassing all these varieties, the concept of stages provides a way of thinking and organizing change and transformation from prehistory through historical times. Noncontractual Bases

According to the conjectural histories, human beings make their own history, yet no planning, foresight, or agreement leads them into social life or through the transitions from one social form to another. Hume forcefully contests the postulate of a founding social compact in his essay “Of the Original Contract” (1748).43 Maintaining that most people do not know anything of a foundational contract that would serve as a basis for society, he argues that there can be no contract when one of the parties is unaware of having assented to it. Smith, as we know, argued that the pursuit of

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self-interest leads to the good of all through the mechanism that adjusts supply to demand. Although the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including the conjectural historians, have often been credited with observing the importance of the discrepancy between intentions and results, Condorcet too notes this pattern in his Sketch for a Historical Picture.44 Although the Crusaders did not intend to bring about closer trade relations between the Arab lands and Europe, their campaigns to capture Jerusalem produced this result. Those who developed gunpowder did not intend to weaken the aristocracy, but the new technology made the swords and armor of knights obsolete. In keeping with his emphasis on science, Condorcet’s explanations of such discrepancies tend to be based on technological advances. From this point of view, it may appear that Rousseau is anomalous, because social compacts play a role in both the Discourse on Inequality and later Of the Social Contract (1762). In the Discourse on Inequality, following the institution of property and the growing inequality of wealth that follow the establishment of agriculture and mining, the rich propose that everyone should agree to live under the same rules, for the protection of everyone’s security and property. The dispossessed give their assent to a false contract, hoodwinked by a rhetoric of common interests; they agree to the establishment of laws to protect property, leaving themselves no legal recourse and outlawing their own use of force. Moreover, the false contract in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is not a single, unique founding moment, but only one step, if a crucial one, among many in the process of socialization that the work traces. It is preceded by decline, and is followed by an accelerating descent into absolute rule. But the founding compact in the Social Contract figures in a very different genre than conjectural history.45 Natural law and social contract theories conceived of the foundation of society as a result of conscious deliberation. In contrast, the conjectural histories conceived of change as the unplanned work of generations. The noncontractual basis of human society constitutes one position on which all conjectural histories agree, whatever their national culture or ideological perspective. Universalizing Tendency

Conjectural histories exhibit a general, universalizing tendency. Narratives that assert a universally valid sequence of stages are often, and accurately, charged with partiality in unjustifiably generalizing from a local occasion

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and establishing a European particular as the norm. For example, the histories of Ferguson, Robertson, and William Falconer imply a single direction of development and an unvarying definition of the savage, barbarian, and civilized stages of society. Ferguson passes over China, India, and the rest of Asia without notice, and his one mention of Africa consigns the continent to a state of savagery because of its hot climate.46 For Ferguson and Falconer, climate constrains social possibilities. Only societies occupying the temperate zone are challenged to develop all their energies, and apparently only those of Western Europe have attained a civilized state. Robertson, in his chapter on the native peoples in History of America (1777), considers that the harshness of their lives and the difficulty of finding subsistence condemn Native Americans to a perpetual savagery.47 For these and other conjectural historians, Europe defines the norm of civilization that other societies cannot or have not yet demonstrated the capacity to attain. However, universalism may also prove useful and productive. It need not exclude giving serious attention to the accomplishments of other cultures, and it can lead to a critique of Eurocentrism. Rousseau does not employ Ferguson’s three stages, but he contrasts savage with civilized man. He diagnoses a paradoxical progression in history, in which each apparent step forward in fact constitutes a regression, so that if Europe is the most advanced and civilized of the continents, then Europeans are also the most degraded, unnatural, and artificial. Rousseau’s history is Eurocentric, but it inverts the presumed superiority of Europe as the most advanced society. Herder understands stages of development in organic terms, believing that nations and national cultures undergo stages of development like those in the life of an organism. Although these stages are formally universal, they are in any specific case constituted by cultural particulars and varying local meanings. Johann and Georg Forster, in Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (1778), and Georg Forster, in A Voyage Round the World (1777), pursue a similar strategy in their accounts of the societies of the Pacific Islands. They employ the categories of savage, barbarian, and civilized, but they do not consign all the Pacific Island societies to the first or second of these stages; rather, they diagnose a range of stages among the island societies: the Tahitians have reached a civilized society (with some regrettable institutions, such as infant exposure), while other island societies may still be in a barbarian or savage state. Civilization, then, is not confined to Europe, but may take other forms among non-European peoples. Even within a universal narrative of stages, local particulars can vary widely.

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Shortly after the publication of the Forsters’ works in London, two Scottish conjectural histories appeared that take positions close to those of Herder and the Forsters. The earlier of these, Gilbert Stuart’s A View of Society in Europe (1778), contests the progressive history of other conjectural narratives, especially Robertson’s “View of the Progress of Society in Europe.” Stuart’s history of Europe in the modern world refuses to equate modern society with civilization and to consign all other social worlds to an inferior status. The other relevant conjectural history published at this time, Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind, after referring to Stuart’s View of Society, goes further to make a more general and explicit critique of Eurocentrism. Dunbar still sees societies moving through phases, but a period of eclipse is likely to succeed any period of preeminence and power. He questions the use of the terms “civilized” and “barbarous,” and argues what may not seem controversial now: that races are not inherently “savage” or “civilized” (see appendix 3).48 These conjectural histories of the late 1770s and the 1780s, while they remain committed to investigating and characterizing periods of social history, explicitly challenge the presumption of linear progress that informs many of the earlier conjectural narratives, by depicting non-European peoples as neither morally or physically inferior, neither animalistic nor insensible. Examination of the tendency to universalism in the conjectural histories again demonstrates wide varieties in the implications of the form. Narrative of Progress

Most of the conjectural histories recount a narrative of progress, rather than describing change without improvement. Accordingly, the conventional position has held that eighteenth-century historiography took a strongly progressive view, often characterized as linear and uninterrupted.49 The situation, however, is far more complex. Although a progressive improvement figures in most conjectural narratives, many do not assert that human societies follow a constantly ascending line of improvement, on which an invariable set of steps must be followed in the same order. Few conjectural histories actually conceive of historical change as constant, linear progress. Those by Robertson, Kames, Millar, and Smith come closest to advancing such a vision. Kames shows a greater commitment than any of the other conjectural historians to a belief in continued, linear progress, but, tellingly, this position appears in conjunction with a belief in the everyday workings

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of providence. Despite Smith’s faith in the beneficent workings of the hidden hand, he, like Ferguson, recognizes the deleterious effects of working in factories, and Ferguson sees serious damage to civic and moral life from progress in material conditions. Millar’s ideological leaning is strongly Whiggish, but he emphasizes serious reversions from more to less free conditions through history—in the greater constraints imposed on women and slaves, for example, as well as in the shift from savage to pastoral and from barbarian to agricultural societies. Millar also sees the possibility of a decline in personal and civic morals as a result of excessive luxury and overcivilization, although he tends to locate such a possibility in earlier historical moments. By contrast, when he traces the history of the hierarchical distinctions, he diagnoses a gradual movement away from harshness and brutality—the relaxing of the authority of fathers, and limitations placed on slaveholders in his own time. Devoting the first quarter of his work to the condition of women in various social stages, Millar argues that commercial manufacturing society encourages the education of women and respect for their abilities. He may overstate the progress that has occurred, and he presumes that British and European societies have progressed further than others. Nevertheless, he includes in his narrative encouragements to further change, arguing, for example, that the elimination of slavery not only answers a moral imperative but also would be in the economic interests of plantation owners. Thus, although Millar’s progressive vision adopts a Eurocentric perspective, it also presumes the ability of slaves to become free, salaried citizens, and of women to join men as near equals in educated company.50 Ferguson and Hume offer exemplary instances of the complications and ambiguities that shadow progressive historiography in the conjectural narratives. It is true that Hume argues for parallel advances in different spheres in “On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742), his conjectural essay on the linkages between capital markets and progress in science and technology.51 However, when writing the history of religion, he diagnoses, after the initial step away from animism, an indefinitely continuing oscillation between phases of theistic belief, not a process of one-directional and inevitable secularization. As for Ferguson, his assessment of the effects on the worker of the division of labor is even harsher than Smith’s. “Manufacturing prospers most,” he asserts, “where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may . . . be considered as an engine, the parts of which

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are men.”52 Thus, although Ferguson considers that commercial, manufacturing society marks an advance on the barbarian state—by increasing the supply of necessities and comforts, and by eliminating slavery—still, it is an improvement that brings serious losses in its train, weakening the social bonds and turning workers into automata.53 Ferguson further complicates his narrative of progress by paying attention to the distinctive virtues of barbarians and to the potential loss even of the benefits of commercial society if a commitment to the common good is allowed to lapse. His vision of history is potentially oscillating, like the history of religion in Hume’s view, because of the threat of a return to barbarism as a result of an excess of civilization and prosperity.54 Both Hume and Ferguson thus delineate a historical temporality that combines progress and reversion or, in Hume’s terms, “flux and reflux.” Each relates an improvement from an initial stage (from animism to polytheism; savagery to barbarism), but then analyzes the possibility that a second, more ambiguous transformation (from polytheism to monotheism; barbarism to commercial civilization) may prove reversible, yielding an oscillation between the second and third stages. In the pattern followed in both cases, stages one, two, and three succeed each other, then potentially stages two and three are repeated indefinitely. If the Scottish conjectural historians exhibit uncertainty about the inevitability of social improvement, ambivalence about progress generally plays an even stronger role in the speculative histories of their French and German counterparts. Rousseau famously conceived of the history of society as a regressive sequence involving deprivations of liberty and declension in morals. Although Condorcet foresaw a coming period of spectacular advances in both material and moral life, he believed that all previous periods of history had eventuated in standoffs between the progressive forces of science and the resistant powers of priests and kings. Kant understood history to describe a clear ascent from savagery and barbarism to a civilized state, but in his late conjectural histories he sharply criticized worldwide European war making and colonialism for the unjustified suffering they caused native peoples. These European practices did not signal moral progress but a globalizing of injustice.55 Herder, the Forsters, and Dunbar offer other examples of conjectural historians who dissented from a narrative of universal progress because of their respect for the distinctive cultures of non-European “savages.” These historians accepted that there are stages

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or degrees of civilization, but they questioned whether such stages could be arranged on a single, unvarying scale, and they doubted that Europeans could claim a moral or intellectual preeminence even if they did exercise dominant physical power. The evidence shows that many conjectural histories regard progress and improvement as discontinuous, inconsistent, and noncumulative. When examined closely, perhaps most conjectural histories do not reduce societies to a single pattern of development, requiring that they all proceed through the same stages in the same order. Conjectural histories still contain passages that presume the superiority of European cultures, intelligence, or ideas of beauty. Such ethnocentric presumptions can function in extensive and organizing ways, but they are neither inevitable nor always dominant. In fact, the chapters that follow suggest that a presumption of homogeneous linear progress may more strongly inform nineteenth-century social thought than eighteenth-century conjecturalism. The argument concerning the complexities and ambiguities among the conjectural historians’ attitudes toward progress could be paralleled by an argument concerning their related assessments of modernity. In addition to the question of progress and modernity, three other concerns—the history of religion, the holism of culture, and attitudes toward race—figure repeatedly in conjectural histories and in the following chapters. It is understandable, and almost inevitable, that many conjectural histories would reflect on the history of religion, because in doing so they reflect on the conditions of their existence; stepping outside a religious framework constitutes the foundational move of the genre. As these works speculated about the early or unrecorded history of human society, they sought units of analysis, and the idea of a culture, all of whose institutions were of a piece, could provide such a unit. One might think that race, too, must have served, more problematically, as a category of analysis. Actually, however, in the conjectural histories and the social thought they shaped, race was usually not a factor, and, when it was employed, it very rarely carried a polygenist, racialist significance. Kames again stands out as an exception, along with some early anthropological works of the 1860s and 1870s. Because of the prominent role they play in this secularizing, stadial conception of history, the history of religion, the unity of culture, and the question of race, in addition to the half dozen other features of the genre, will continue to play a role in the following chapters.

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The understanding of conjectural history that emerges from this examination complicates previous ideas of the form. To a certain extent, its defining traits can be designated by way of negatives. These histories establish their narratives not on direct documentary or material evidence but on inferences of what might or must have happened in earliest or transitional times. They are thus undocumented, but they are also nonprovidential and naturalistic. They discern processes not external to but immanent in human beings, which can explain the first formation (and later transformations) of social phenomena. Finding it implausible that human beings just about to emerge from an animal state would be able to articulate, fix the terms of, and signify their agreement to a compact instituting society, they offer accounts that are noncontractual. In doing so, they typically establish a discrepancy between intentions and results that enables limited or selfish purposes to lead to socially beneficial results. The remaining elements of the genre also give evidence of greater variation and complexity than previously recognized. The successive stages of conjectural history, perhaps the most identifiable trait of the form, need not always be based on the means of obtaining subsistence, but can instead be founded on forms of religious belief, technological advances, or periods of cultural development. The universalist tendency in the form remains strong, but it is possible for it to be reconciled in some cases, especially in the 1770s and 1780s, with respect for the specific paths and accomplishments of local cultures. Conjectural histories continue to be interested in ascertaining evidence of progress toward modernity, by means of a process of secularization. Yet each of these key ideas proves to be ambiguous, open to question and qualification, in the works of some of the conjectural historians.

The concept of conjectural history proposed here carries implications for an understanding of the Enlightenment, especially those views that assign blame to the thinkers in this period for many, if not most, modern ills, including racism, colonialism, sexism, Eurocentrism, and a self-satisfied belief in progress. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, for example, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, accuse Enlightenment thinkers of paving the way for Nazism through the elevation of instrumental reason that seeks to maximize profits and measurable results, using people merely as means to its own material and technological ends. Their argument relies,

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problematically, on casting the Marquis de Sade as the quintessential and, in effect, the sole Enlightenment thinker, the only one quoted in their essay (except for Nietzsche, who wrote almost a hundred years after the Enlightenment and often dismissed in excoriating terms most of the thinkers of the period).56 But it is an extremely weak argument to equate Enlightenment with Sade and Sade with fascism, and to ignore all the Enlightenment figures, including Denis Diderot, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Condorcet, and Millar, none of whom had anything to do with preparing the way for the death factories of the Nazis.57 For Horkheimer and Adorno, Enlightenment instrumental reason led to fascism (and, in the United States, to control of the populace through the culture industry). For Isaiah Berlin, the similarly utopian rationality of the Enlightenment led to communist absolutism. Berlin is fascinated with figures of what he calls the Counter-Enlightenment, perhaps chief among them Herder. For Berlin, the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers rebelled against the optimistic Enlightenment debunking of superstition; they emphasized the essential role of unreason, prejudice, and belief in human life and the idea that identity is grounded in being a member of a local community. Berlin opposes the beliefs of the Counter-Enlightenment to what he calls the three “central theses” of the Enlightenment: that there is a universal human nature, which undergirds universal human values; that analytical, scientific reason can attain the truth; and that men can solve all their practical problems using reason, thus inaugurating an era of unending progress. In addition, Berlin believes that Enlightenment thinkers fail to appreciate the values of primitives and barbarians. Perhaps Berlin’s characterization applies to one or two French figures—Voltaire and Baron d’Holbach—but in relation to the whole range and variety of Enlightenment thinkers, he, like Horkheimer and Adorno, identifies the movement with a very small number of thinkers and a narrow range of ideas.58 Montesquieu’s concern for the unity and variety of cultures implies a deep respect for local values and particularities. Diderot, Rousseau, and Hume—for all the differences among them—were none of them rationalists or believers in unlimited progress. Rousseau, Ferguson, Diderot, and the Forsters exhibit an admiration for primitives and barbarians that denies modern civilization the moral high ground. Herder, Kant, and Diderot strongly and consistently oppose colonialism.59 Both Horkheimer and Adorno’s attack on and Berlin’s simplification of the Enlightenment have invited similarly ill-conceived claims

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that Enlightenment works are all racist, misogynous, and imperialistic. A close reading of a wide range of Enlightenment conjectural histories shows that such broad characterizations of the Enlightenment and its works cannot be sustained.60 But if arguments that attack the Enlightenment as the source of all modern ills lack a basis, celebration of the Enlightenment as the origin of all modern values—egalitarian democracy, secularism and religious toleration, anti-imperialism, and feminism—is also misguided. Jonathan Israel has written two large books maintaining that precisely these values were introduced by the only true Enlightenment (the radical one), that they all had their source in the writings of Baruch Spinoza, and that they were disseminated by his followers. But these claims ignore or dismiss the existence and importance of other Enlightenments. Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau are crucial Enlightenment figures, yet Israel dismisses the first three as lukewarm moderates, and he can hardly find a place for Rousseau at all.61 Moreover, the attempt to trace all that is of value in the Enlightenment to a single figure such as Spinoza seems reductive and problematic. Finally, and paradoxically, despite his plea to broaden our understanding of the movement, Israel’s view of the Enlightenment, like Berlin’s, narrows a complex and plural movement by reducing it to a single strand. By contrast with the rest of these thinkers, Michel Foucault, in his late talk “What Is Critique?,” provides an essential understanding of Enlightenment not as a set of theses to which allegiance must be paid but as the adoption of a critical attitude to the reigning frameworks of knowledge and authority of one’s time.62 This defining distance from the authoritative knowledges of their present is shared by the conjectural histories of the Enlightenment. con j e ct u ral natu ral h i s to ry an d a rt histo ry

Conjectural historical thinking was pervasive in the second half of the eighteenth century, shaping not only examinations of the history of society but also such fields as nascent art history and natural history. Johann Winckelmann first sought to determine the historical origins of the visual arts in his History of Ancient Art (1764). Winckelmann stressed the coherence among different social domains such as politics, religion, and art—the holism of culture. He also traced various kinds of stages in the early history

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of art—in the materials used, for example, and the progression from sculpture as a sign to sculpture as an expression of a human figure. Although Winckelmann’s conjectures concerning the historical origins of art were incidental to his primary aesthetic concerns, the conjectural project played a central role in two works that appeared soon after his History. Abbé Ottaviano di Guasco’s De l’usage des statues (On the Usage of Statues, 1768) appeared about a month after the first two volumes of Pierre François d’Hancarville’s Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities (1767), which was written to introduce the vase collection of Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy in Naples.63 In his later two volumes, d’Hancarville borrowed some of Guasco’s key terms but also expanded the range of his concerns to include all the arts, not only sculpture.64 Although they diverge in some of their emphases and arguments, Guasco and d’Hancarville share many features as conjectural historians of the origins of the visual arts, beginning with sculpture. According to both, the first sculptures were boetiles, large stones set upright and anointed with oil, like the one Jacob dedicated after wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32). Later, a circular or spherical stone was set on top of such a sign of a divinity, to represent the face or head; in later steps, phalluses, then arms and hands, were incised in the main block. But the most important shift in these histories consists of the transition from sculptures as signs of the gods to sculptures in the form of human figures. This crucial passage could be related to other passages, such as in the materials used, from wood and pottery to stone and finally to ivory and gold. At a later date, the transition from signs to forms also occurred in painting—from outlines of heads to faces with features, and eventually from monochrome to polychrome figures. Thus, both Guasco and d’Hancarville structure their narratives around stages in the development of the arts. Guasco admits that the nature and the order of these stages is speculative, but all he can do is to make “reasonable conjectures” based on the few available facts and remaining artifacts.65 In any case, both he and d’Hancarville assert that one can only estimate the progress in any artistic medium by the state of the whole society, especially its politics and material culture.66 Both accept the principle of the holism of culture, the congruence between the structures of institutions in different spheres. They agree that statuary reached its height in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e., that after Alexander the Greeks were no longer fighting for their freedom, and that the end of the arts followed the “conquests

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and depredations of the Romans.”67 Both Guasco and d’Hancarville push the origins of art back into deep time, more than six thousand years ago. D’Hancarville, in particular, makes determined attempts to render the origins of art coeval with the beginnings of society. The conjectural natural historians agree with the conjectural historians of art and religion that religion first arose among humankind from fear. For Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (Antiquity Revealed, 1756), the universal deluge must have impressed all later generations of humans with a traumatic sense of their own helplessness. The astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly and the renowned naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, by contrast, speculated on the accomplishments of a culture that must have existed more than a thousand years before the flood recorded in Genesis. In his History of Ancient Astronomy (1771), Bailly speculates that a more exact and powerful form of astronomy than any of which we have record existed seven thousand years ago, a science whose observations of regularities in the heavens enabled inhabitants of the earliest culture to emerge from their fear of the unknown. Of this more perfect knowledge, the earliest astronomical discoveries are merely fragmentary remnants. Yet the commonalities among the later forms of astronomical knowledge provide evidence from which the existence of the earlier, prehistoric synthesis can be inferred. Bailly counts as evidence that the French, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese named the days of the week for the same planets in the same order. He contends that the special importance of the number sixty in the calendars of the Tartars, Chinese, Indians, Babylonians, and Europeans must be antediluvian, and he provides conjectural evidence of the existence of a “deep science” among a “great people” who came from the north.68 In Epochs of Nature (1778), Buffon defends speculations along the lines laid out by his friend Bailly, arguing (as had Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality) that his narrative of the long life of the earth, being only hypothetical, could not threaten the truth of the narrative of origins in Genesis. Buffon conjectures that the planets resulted from a comet hitting the sun, and that the age of the earth may be as great as 130,000 years, because it would have taken tens of thousands of years for the burning solar material to cool enough for creatures to survive on its surface. Moreover, there probably intervened another fifteen or twenty thousand years when the planet was entirely covered by water.69 Even then, the earliest land animals must have appeared in the far north, because the poles would have cooled

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off first. These animals must have been as large as the elephants and rhinos whose bones and tusks are still found in Siberia and North America, and who eventually made their way south, as the lower latitudes of the planet cooled (fifth epoch). For the same reasons, the first human civilization must have appeared in the north—in northern Asia, in fact. Here Buffon adopts Bailly’s thesis: the ancient northern people made inconceivable strides in astronomical knowledge and endured for thirty centuries before suddenly and mysteriously disappearing.70 Only after another three thousand years do we possess enough knowledge to appreciate their achievement. By elongating the span of history through reasonable speculation based on fossil finds and animal remains, Buffon contributed significantly in the late eighteenth century to the creation of deep time, a prehistory of previously unimaginable extent, consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of years of the earth’s existence, rather than six thousand. Buffon concludes with a vision of the future that rivals that of Condorcet almost twenty years later: in the grains that man sows and makes into bread, he has modified nature; he has improved the fruits and flowers he uses; he has even bred more useful animals, so that millions of men will exist in the future where only thousands did before. He asks: Who knows what men might accomplish in the way of reducing inequality and improving health? Anticipating not only Condorcet’s but also Comte’s utopian prophecies, Buffon’s vision shows the extent of conjecturalist thinking in the late eighteenth century. What emerges from this discussion is a sense of the genre as a complex and various form of historical thinking, capable of being used as an instrument and developed in many directions by later thinkers in the social arena. As Nietzsche says of any institution or genre of discourse, “The form is fluid; the meaning even more so.”71 The form exhibits a notable flexibility in its ability to accommodate different ideological perspectives, but the meaning of the form in any individual work, in relation to the cultural field and the historical moment, is even more open to multiple possibilities. T.  R. Malthus, who also steeped himself in this tradition, demonstrated the wide range of ideological possibilities in the genre and its descendants, as he turned the form against itself, arguing against Condorcet and William Godwin that technological innovations cannot negate the quasimathematical iron law of wages. Malthus, and his conjecturalist successors and antagonists, helped create the field of political economy, a process that is examined in the next chapter.

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Political Economy and the Question of Progress

among the disciplines of social inquiry,

political economy stands most directly in the line of descent from conjectural history. Throughout its development in the nineteenth century, political economy adopted a multistage perspective, regarding a society based on commercial relations as a development distinct from other and earlier stages, with its own laws and producing specific institutions and forms of social life. It is no coincidence that the lineal relation of political economy to conjectural history should be so strong, since Adam Smith, whose writings helped form conjectural history and gave it its name, formulated the fundamental laws and relations of political economy. Smith’s conjectural history in the Wealth of Nations (1776) builds on Hume’s earlier conjectural narrative of the shift from feudal to commercial society in “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742). Drawing parallels between the development of a middle class and the dissolution of a monolithic political system, Hume argues that the impetus given to mechanical inventions by commercial possibilities leads to a flourishing of the fine arts and a softening of manners. When complemented by Hume’s later economic essays, such as “Of Commerce” (1752), the “Progress of the Arts and Sciences” knits together, more closely than had been done before, the history of economic forms with the history of social, political, and cultural forms. In some of his early writings, such as the essay “History of Astronomy” or “Considerations Concerning the First Formations of Languages,” Smith speculatively investigates the earliest areas of inquiry or means of communication. However, for Smithian political

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economy, conjectural history is useful less as a search for origins and more as a means of speculatively narrating, and thus understanding, transitions between historical stages of society. Moreover, in the Wealth of Nations, as in any other conjectural history, the organizing operations of providence have been displaced onto a law of unintended consequences. The invisible hand of the market replaces the guiding hand of providence.1 This chapter explores the role of conjectural history in the thought and formal practices of Smith’s heirs—T. R. Malthus, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, and Karl Marx. Malthus relies on, writes, and revises conjectural history in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; 2nd ed. 1803), although the histories on which he builds his argument are not those of Smith or Adam Ferguson but those with grimmer narratives, by William Robertson and William Falconer. Malthus breaks with the Enlightenment form of conjectural history, being concerned not with stages of development but with a necessary lack of progress—the inevitable persistence of misery, starvation, disease, and early death for the large majority of the people in any society, past, present, or future. Martineau in turn makes the demonstration of Malthusian principles central to her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34). In these didactic narratives, fiction takes the place of speculation, allowing readers to see the force of the laws of political economy, stated at the end as the morals of the tales. Mill presents an extensive, conventional four-stage history as the prologue to his Principles of Political Economy (1848). However, he also revises the usual open-ended, progressive implications of conjectural history, by imagining a final and desirable stationary stage for society and economy. Moreover, he provides a middle ground between the doctrinaire political economists on one side and the communists on the other, as he investigates with increasing interest the possibilities for modifying capitalism through workers’ shared ownership and management of industrial concerns. Marx’s extensive practice of speculative history, from the early German Ideology (1845–46) to the late Ethnological Notebooks (1880–82), includes numerous reconstructions of the earliest forms of social life as well as repeated investigation of transitions between stages, especially the shift from feudal to capitalist economic and social forms. Although unilinear and Eurocentric in his earlier accounts of historical stages, in the late notebooks Marx expands his narratives to include alternate stages and courses of development in Asia, Russia, and North America.

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ma lt h u s , am b i vale nt c o nj e c tu ral ist

Malthus wrote the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) to demonstrate the impossibility of Condorcet’s utopian visions of the future, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), and of William Godwin’s, in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and the essay “On Avarice and Profusion” (1797) from his Enquirer. Relations between Malthus and Godwin have been explored extensively—including Malthus’s tendency, in later editions of his work, to move toward Godwin’s position that humans can exert some rational control over their reproductive behavior—partly because Godwin, unlike Condorcet, was alive and able to engage in an extended exchange with Malthus on the subject of population. However, much can still be said concerning the relation between Malthus’s thought and Condorcet’s. In particular, the form of Condorcet’s conjectural historical Sketch for a Historical Picture helped shape the new book 1 in the second and later editions of the Principle of Population. Thus, book 3 of the Wealth of Nations, stage 10 of the Sketch for a Historical Picture, and book 1 of the 1803 edition of the Principle of Population participate in the same conjectural form. Through Smith and Malthus, the form helped shape the emerging discipline of political economy in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. As I have shown in the introduction, Condorcet foresaw the elimination of infectious diseases in a future age, significant improvements in agricultural techniques, and an indefinite extension of human longevity. He believed that as health improved and life expectancy increased, humans would be able to overcome religious prohibitions, or “superstition,” and use birth control to limit the size of the population. Godwin subscribed to the idea that increasingly rational human beings could control their sexual urges and would become less compelled by them; as a consequence, he foresaw a world without war or want. Malthus regarded these utopian, late-Enlightenment visions of dramatic improvements in health, nutrition, and longevity, and reductions in suffering and need, as “systems of equality,” and he responded with the accusation that such thinkers as Condorcet and Godwin engaged in “unfounded conjectures”: “In forming improbable and unfounded hypotheses,” he charged, “so far from enlarging the bounds of human science, they are contracting it.” In the chapter headings for the first edition

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of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus repeatedly uses the word “conjecture” to convey the impatience and contempt with which he regards the systems of Condorcet and Godwin. To this “rage” for “unrestrained speculation” and “unsupported assertions,” Malthus opposes his own “patient investigation and well authenticated proofs.”2 In the Principle of Population, Malthus offers as examples of this more “severe and chastised thinking” the three propositions, articulated at the end of chapter 2, that constitute his principle of population: 1. Population is necessarily limited by means of subsistence. 2. Population invariably increases, where the means of subsistence increases. 3. The checks which repress the superior power of population, and keep its effects on a level with the means of subsistence, are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. [“Moral restraint” was added in 1803 and retained in all later editions.] (Principle of Population, 1:23)

He presents these propositions as consequences of the numerical ratios that he asserts govern the production of food and the increase of population: humans, like any species of animal, will, if unchecked, increase in a geometric series, whereas the means of subsistence can only increase in an arithmetic series. Malthus asserts that these two series are inviolable, but he did not in the first edition of the Principle of Population demonstrate or even cite evidence for them, and he studiously avoids any discussion of birth control, although Condorcet had stressed its importance.3 It was to provide historical evidence of the operation of checks on population that Malthus wrote books 1 and 2, first published in the second edition of the Principle of Population, in 1803. This second edition, extending to three times the length of the first, was divided into four books, of which the third and fourth consider policies, including the Poor Laws and the Corn Laws, that had been tried—unsuccessfully, according to Malthus—to mitigate the effects of overpopulation. The second book depends on registers of births, deaths, and marriages in modern Northern European states to offer numerical evidence of ways that varying policies and conditions have affected population.4 In book 1 Malthus investigates “less developed,” non-European societies to provide “an historical examination of the effects of the principle of population” on particular societies, and to buttress his argument “by illustrating the subject more generally and drawing those

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inferences from it, in application to the actual state of things which experience seemed to warrant” (Principle of Population, 1:1). It is this first book that, from 1803 on, constitutes the conjectural history in Malthus’s Principle of Population. Entitled “Of the Checks to Population in the Less Civilized Parts of the World and in Past Times,” book 1 makes use of many of the elements of conjecturalist thought and form. After stating the thesis of the whole work—the two numerical ratios and the three principles—carried over from the first edition, Malthus attempts to determine the operation of the checks on population, beginning with “the lowest stage of human society.” These people, including natives of Tierra del Fuego, the Andaman Islands, and New Holland, or Australia, obtain food from grubs and insects, wear few clothes, are subject to exposure to the elements, and are victimized by plague and infectious diseases. As he attempts to provide specifics to support and strengthen his argument, Malthus moves from this “lowest” stage of human savagery to the conditions of life in societies around the world in the following order: Native Americans; South Sea Islanders; ancient inhabitants of northern Europe (Goths, Alemanni, Vandals); modern nations of herdsmen (Tatars, Mongols, and Arabs); followed by inhabitants of Africa, Siberia, Turkey, Persia, Indostan, and Tibet. Finally, in the last two chapters, he moves to southern Europe to consider ancient Greece and Rome. The chapters of book 1 are thus organized according to stages of development in agreement with the theories of Ferguson, Smith, and most of the Scottish conjecturalists. From the most primitive savages to the higher savages among the Americans, Malthus proceeds to barbarian nomads dependent on their herds, such as Tatars and Mongols, and from them to the lower states of civilized life, in Persia, India, and China, before concluding with the most civilized peoples before modern Europeans—the ancient Greeks and Romans. For Malthus, civilized society consists of settled urban life, the use of writing, and the institutions of law, government, religion, and private property. The barbarian tribes fall between civilization and savagery—more developed than savages in their use of domesticated animals, metal weapons, and the beginnings of agriculture; less developed than civilized states in the absence of permanent settlements, written laws, and a ramified division of labor. However, whereas multistage theory almost always focuses on salient differences among human groups at different stages of development (even Rousseau sees a progressive direction in history—a

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progressive degeneration of man from savage to civilized), for the purposes of Malthus’s argument, all the stages of society share in the same condition and exhibit the operation of the same dynamic: civilized, savage, and barbarian alike demonstrate the workings of the principle of population—the pressure to increase geometrically, unless held back by powerful checks.5 In every stage of society, according to Malthus’s principle, the vast majority of the population has struggled to survive, vulnerable to early death from war, disease, starvation, or exposure. The only difference between the lowest and the most advanced human groups is that every member of a savage society lives on the edge of survival, whereas in civilized societies inequality of property has freed a sliver of the population from concern for necessities. Still, the remaining 95 or 98 percent in, for example, Malthus’s “advanced” England must continue to live at a bare subsistence level. Therefore, although Malthus adopts the form and terminology of conjectural multistage history, he reverses the usual argument of the form. Instead of improvement or decline, the history of population tells the same bleak story. Poor workers in a civilized society live in the same desperate conditions as savages or barbarians. The only movement that Malthus’s conjectural population history shows is an “oscillation” between times of prosperity, when population expands based on the availability of work and food, and times of retrenchment, when excess numbers lower resources or wages below the level of subsistence (Principle of Population, 1:20). In another sign that Malthus casts book 1 of his Principle of Population in a conjectural mode, he provides no direct evidence of a geometrical rate of population increase or an arithmetical rate of agricultural growth, but only indirect evidence, inferences, and suppositions. For example, when he considers the ancient pastoral peoples of northern Europe—Goths, Vandals, and others—he infers that the waves of invasions that swept over the Roman Empire from the north were impelled by the need to discharge excess population. The growth of riches in cattle and plenty of food produced their “natural and invariable effect, an extended population.” But soon enough, “want pinches the less fortunate members of society. . . . Young scions are then pushed out from the parent stock.” These parties of hardy adventurers must have been a formidable force to all whom they encountered: “The inhabitants of countries long settled, engaged in the peaceful occupations of trade and agriculture, would not often be able to resist” such adventurers. Encounters among the tribes themselves “would be so many struggles

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for existence and would be fought with a desperate courage” (Principle of Population, 1:61; my emphases). Malthus’s frequent use of the present tense in this passage indicates that he is recounting the general history of what happens among healthy and prosperous barbarian tribes once they reach the limits of their resources. His use of the conditional tense later in the passage carries the force of a past conditional necessity, asserting what must have happened when barbarian tribes grew in numbers and when the expelled adventurers encountered a settlement of agriculturalists. Malthus thus advances his explanations by means of conjectural historical narrative, making frequent use of locutions such as “I think it highly probable” (66), “I am inclined to think” (71), and “If . . . we were to suppose . . . , the effects would probably be” (90). In addition to using and subverting a stadial view of social history, and formulating his discussion in the temporality of the inferred and conditional necessary past, Malthus frames the Principle of Population as a conjectural history through the sources and authorities on whom he bases his argument. These consist almost entirely of the narratives of travelers, missionaries, explorers, and government officials—the same sources on which most previous conjectural histories were based—as well as on other conjectural histories themselves. None of these sources can provide incontrovertible evidence of the history of population among the peoples whose conditions they describe, nor could they indicate for Malthus the proportion of the whole reduction in population that was constituted by each of the checks on population among a people. In an appendix to the third edition (1806), Malthus acknowledged the inadequacy of the evidence on which he relies in book 1. Maintaining that the survey of savage and barbarian societies was never meant to prove the ratios that he asserted governed increases in food and population, he states, “The chief object of my work was to establish what effect these laws, which I considered as established in the first six pages, had produced, or were likely to produce, on society: a subject not very readily exhausted. The principal fault of my details is that they are not sufficiently particular; but this was a fault it was not in my power to remedy” (Principle of Population, 2:212–13; my emphasis). Malthus points out here exactly those conditions that make his historical survey of populations around the world a conjectural project, for adequate documentary or physical evidence to establish the historical argument did not exist. As a result, he drew plausible

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inferences from the available sources of information. This was a valid intellectual project, but it sits strangely in a work that begins with insistent attacks on conjectural thought. In the preface to the fifth edition (1817), Malthus acknowledges the limitations of the historical evidence on which he relied in book 1: “It would have been easy to have added many further historical illustrations of the first part of the subject; but . . . it appeared to me that the conclusion, which I had before drawn from very ample evidence of the only kind that could be obtained, would hardly receive much additional force by the accumulation of more, precisely of the same description” (Principle of Population, 1:6). Here Malthus concedes that the only evidence concerning the history of checks on population in non-European and premodern societies is uncertain, incomplete, and of dubious reliability. Yet he also asserts that it has provided “ample evidence” to demonstrate his principle of population.6 Because Malthus first formulated and published his thesis concerning population, and only later undertook a course of readings on the “past and present state of society” in search of support for that principle, readers may feel that he chose the texts to use as sources somewhat selectively, and that he employed an array of arguments with great flexibility, to make the evidence illustrate his principle.7 For example, in the chapter on the checks on population among the American Indians, Malthus cites the conjectural history in book 4 of Robertson’s History of America more than once per page; even when not referring to Robertson, he acknowledges that he frequently gives the same references, “but never without having examined and verified them” (Principle of Population, 1:31). Robertson’s book 4 considers the American Indians’ physical and mental constitutions, political arrangements, religious ideas, and particular customs. Robertson asserts the general intellectual weakness of the Native Americans, censuring their supposed indolence and lack of thought for the future.8 He praises their independence and love of freedom (History of America, 217), and the exercise of their spirits and abilities during the hunt (173). However, he stresses the proximity of the conditions of life of many Americans to the lives of animals: “Like the other animals, he has no fixed residence; he has erected no habitation to shelter him from the inclemency of the weather; he has taken no measures for securing certain subsistence” (167). Even the more advanced tribes, Robertson says, do not store up provision for the future, so they are often subject to famine; moreover, because of the harshness of

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the women’s lives, they produce very few children (170). Robertson’s conjectural history here seeks to provide a generalized view of the life of savages that stresses the harshness of life and the difficulty of survival. In these respects, Robertson’s attitude parallels that in several other conjectural histories, such as William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate Situation, Nature of Country, Population [etc.] (1781) and Cornelius de Pauw’s Philosophical Researches on the Americans (1768). In this chapter on the population of Native Americans, Malthus also refers frequently to the Edifying and Curious Letters, a vast but uneven collection of reports from Jesuit missionaries in North America and the Far East, known in English today as The Jesuit Relations. It makes sense that, in his search for supporting materials, Malthus would choose to rely on Robertson and similar texts, because they enable him to infer that population presses on food supply, and to speculate on the way that checks such as famine, war, disease, and infanticide work to limit population in native societies. Malthus also refers a few times to Father Joseph-François Lafitau’s Customs of the American Savages, Compared to the Customs of the Earliest Times (1724), which traces parallels between the customs, morality, and way of life of the Hurons and those of the ancient Greeks and Romans: both the Hurons and the ancients lived in a warlike society and exhibited the virtues of bravery, patience, endurance, and a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the community.9 Lafitau lived for six years among the Native Americans, unlike Robertson, de Pauw, and others who had never visited North America. But Malthus does not want to give too much attention or authority to a text that finds parallels between the virtues of Native Americans and ancient Romans, because, according to his argument, the checks on population in the two cases were very different—excess and luxury among the Romans, lack and starvation among the Native Americans. When discussing native societies such as those in Tahiti or Mexico, where the food supply has been more plentiful than in North America, Malthus follows a different line of argument, drawing on accounts of voyages such as James Cook’s. Because these societies developed rigid hierarchical systems, Malthus argues, any reduction in the food supply because of war or drought will affect slaves, servants, and the lower ranks and be absorbed by them, while to outside observers it will seem that society—that is, the rulers and the upper class—is not affected (Principle of Population, 1:57–58).10

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In addition, Malthus sometimes cites philosophers as authorities on the subject of population. Almost everything he says about the population of India comes from the ancient Brahmanic legislator Manu, although Malthus makes no provision for inconsistency between the official code and the actual practices of a society over the last two and a half millennia. When he encounters in the city of Rome an example of a society that provided a secure supply of bread for its people and yet did not experience an explosion in population, or a reduction by war or plague, he has recourse to the explanation that vice—promiscuity and “unnatural” practices (nongenital sexual practices? prophylactics? abortion?)—suppressed the level of population in the city for centuries. Although Malthus provides almost no evidence from ancient writers concerning the checks on population in Rome and her empire, he accepts at face value Tacitus’s assertions of the vitality, chastity, and fighting spirit of the Germans, which Tacitus almost certainly exaggerated in order to charge his Roman contemporaries with the lack of these virtues (Principles, chapter 14).11 Finally, Malthus also confines his references to philosophers in discussing ancient Greek society, arguing that Plato and Aristotle show an awareness of the need to keep population under control; however, neither says anything about actual social practices and experiences such as war, starvation, and disease as a means of population control in ancient Greece (Principles, chapter 13). In fact, in a strange irony, Malthus wrote his Principle of Population to deny the possibility that the utopian speculations of Condorcet and Godwin could ever be realized, yet he concludes the first book of the expanded Essay, which was intended to provide historical evidence for his principle, by citing Plato’s eugenicist and utopian Republic, whose policies contravene Malthus’s positions—his advocacy for freedom of choice in marriage and against infanticide. Although he castigates Condorcet for engaging in unfounded conjectures concerning the future, Malthus also formulates broad conjectures about what can or cannot come to pass—asserting the absolute impossibility of providing a system of retirement insurance for older workers, for example, or of witnessing an increase in agricultural production in any country that would keep up with or outstrip population growth. Both of these propositions were advanced by Condorcet, and mocked by Malthus, and in both cases Malthus’s conjectural but dogmatic assertions of impossibility have proven to be mistaken. Later

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chapters will show that Malthus is not the only thinker who criticizes or disparages conjecturalist thought while engaging in such thought himself. His practice calls for attention, however, because his own position is so contradictory—scientistic and anticonjectural as well as speculative and inferential. Malthus thus writes a conjectural history of population in savage and barbarian society in the first book of the Principle of Population, although his use of the form does not mean that he takes the same position as the conjectural historians who assert the moral and intellectual inferiority of savages and barbarians to civilized Europeans.12 Rather, Malthus perceives the same struggle for food—the pressing of population against food supply—among the vast majority in modern England or France as in Tahiti or Peru. In all stratified societies, those who bear the brunt of scarcity or excess population are the lower classes, the workers and servants. Moreover, Malthus writes his conjectural historical survey of human populations without acknowledging that he is writing in the conjecturalist mode. He claims to be providing historical particulars of an empirical nature in order to ground his principle upon them. But the statistics that made possible the calculation of, for example, the ratios of births to deaths, of marriages to population, and average age at marriage were only available for modern European countries. Malthus’s thought and use of form are poised between the methodologies and narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, between the openly conjectural attempts to sketch a history of stadial alterations in the organization of society and the statistical analyses that reveal the relatively constant structure and function of society.13 Malthus’s historical temporality allows only for oscillations in population, not for advances in the conditions of life for the 98 percent in all societies who live on the edge, up to and including his own time. He employs conjectural history in book 1 of the Principle of Population to demonstrate or illustrate the workings of the constraints on population throughout history. He uses the form not to delineate stages of change but to deny historical change, to assert an inescapable set of constraints that have limited and will continue forever to limit the conditions of life for humans. Thus, his conjectural history works not to open up or expand but to close off possibilities for understanding the past and conceiving of social futures.14

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ma rt i n e au : f i c ti o n as c o nj e c tu r a l histo ry

Like Malthus’s Principle of Population, Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) was the first major work of a writer of about thirty years of age; and like Malthus’s work, which exerted a tremendous influence, Martineau’s twenty-four tales enjoyed an extraordinary popularity. Martineau made use of Malthus’s principle of population, although she was not a Malthusian exclusively; she drew on the work of other thinkers in political economy, including Adam Smith, James Mill, and J. R. McCulloch. She seems not to have been concerned with (or even aware of ) the inconsistencies and controversies among these thinkers, regarding them as the discoverers and proponents of a unified set of doctrines called political economy.15 She did not claim to make an original contribution to this field; rather, she made it her mission to disseminate to the middle classes what she saw as the laws of political economy, so that they could in turn teach these rules to the working poor for their own benefit and improvement. Martineau employs conjectural history in several ways in her Illustrations, and she later published a translation of a large part of Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42); her translation provided the means through which most English-speaking readers came to know Comte’s thought, which first defined and established the field of sociology, making extensive use of conjectural historical thought. That Martineau could, at different points in her career, serve as the popularizer and disseminator of the fundamental doctrines of political economy and of sociology demonstrates the close relation between the incipient fields of social scientific thought considered here, all three of which separated out from a shared tradition of social, moral, and historical thinking in the eighteenth century. The intertwining of emerging social science fields appears again in the relation between the late political economy of Marx and Engels and the anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan (see chapter 4). In “Life in the Wild,” the first of the Illustrations, Martineau writes a condensed conjectural history that might be observed in her own time; it proposes an understanding of society through a narrative of the stages of its development. A group of English settlers in South Africa one morning finds that an attack by Bushmen the night before has left them with little more than their lives. Their houses burned, their cattle stolen, their tools destroyed or taken, they are left in a state where they must provide food

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and necessities for themselves without the use of metal tools. They have gone back, in the course of a night, from a civilized condition to a primitive state. As though they are inhabitants of a new Stone Age, their first tools are sharpened rocks and poisoned quills. Boys make the first bows and arrows, hunt small animals, and gather fruit and honey. Soon they are hunting larger animals by chasing them toward camouflaged pits. The community devotes considerable effort to an irrigation project, diverting water from a nearby stream to their fields, digging with stone implements and carrying away the dirt in reed baskets. They build several multifamily dwellings without wood, baking bricks and covering the roofs with thatch. Although the women do not make cloth, they repair clothing using quills for needles. Eventually, the early rush baskets give way to rough pottery. At the culmination of the process, a delegation from the group visits the two de facto leaders to ask one of them to become the governor and the other the spiritual authority of the group. Thus, Martineau produces for her inaugural Illustration an updated conjectural history of her own time, retracing within her small settler society the steps by which any society must have progressed, from hunting and gathering using stone tools to the practice of agriculture, the manufacture of pottery and bricks, an increasingly elaborate division of labor and ranks, and finally the (re-)establishment of civil society. The narrative claims to establish the thesis that the history of human society is a history of unending progress. However, in several ways, elements of the nineteenth-century civilized and commercial present find their way into this putatively original state of mankind. A fragment of a metal saw survives the attack, like a piece of an unrealized future transported to the past, and members of the group soon find two of their domesticated dogs and return them to the settlement. These holdovers from the present in the imagined primitive past influence the genre of the tale, giving it, in addition to the features of a conjectural history, those of a Robinsonade, in which a stranded man or small group must survive through their own resourcefulness, without most of the technologies to which they are accustomed. Moreover, Martineau’s conceit requires an extreme temporal compression to proceed through the stages from Stone Age to civilized society in about two months. Divisions of labor appear from the beginning in the laboratory society and multiply quickly. This foreshortening actually stands as the opposite of the

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extensive tracts of time required for the unfolding of social stages in the conjectural histories. This consideration points to the crucial difference between the conjectural histories and Martineau’s fictional reconstruction: all the characters in the tale bring the knowledge and experience of civilization to the task of survival. They do not need to imagine, discover, or experiment in order to arrive at the domestication of animals or the planting of crops. They know the end state to which they wish to return, as those who were born to an earlier social condition could not, when they sought or stumbled upon solutions to difficulties or adaptive improvements in their lives. In addition to being a conjectural history and a Robinsonade, Martineau’s tale thus also takes the form of a fable that actually depends on an ahistorical conception of social stages, in that the participants in the experiment never leave their modern consciousness, never approximate the way of thinking of other societies in different times.16 Finally, Martineau presumes the highest stage of civilization, the state to which her little society will return at the end of its development, to be imperial.17 But this acceptance of imperialism elides the question whether all peoples receive benefits from the commercial civilization of some. Similar ahistorical fables result from or are contained in Martineau’s efforts to demonstrate the laws of political economics in other Illustrations. In “A Manchester Strike,” Wentworth, one of the mill owners, attempts to explain to the dissatisfied men whose wages are being lowered that the level of wages is more dependent on their actions than on the decisions of the owners or acts of Parliament. “What wages,” he asks the workers, “did Adam pay his under gardeners?”18 He makes the Malthusian point that if the workers multiply their numbers by two or four every year, while the owners’ capital hardly increases at all, then they themselves are responsible for the decline in the wages that each worker can command. It does seem that the workers multiply with supernatural speed in this and other Malthusian tales and arguments of the nineteenth century, with the workers’ numbers doubling and quadrupling from year to year, although even Malthus presumed that the doubling would take twenty-five years.19 The most glaring anachronism in Mr. Wentworth’s fable, however, is the idea that Adam, having been expelled from Eden, is a capitalist who employs gardeners—that at the beginning of society a market already exists

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for goods and labor. Martineau gives no sign of distancing herself from Wentworth’s explanation of the owners’ inability to pay more than subsistence wages, and of the workers’ responsibility for their plight: the iron laws of political economy have held from the beginning of time, when Adam, the first owner of land and capital, was entitled to a “fair surplus” for his own profit.20 Malthus had recourse to the records of travelers and missionaries to construct a conjectural history of peoples around the globe whose stories could demonstrate his principle of population, thus questioning the possibility of progress for any beyond a small minority of any society. Martineau presumes a development through stages, but in an ahistorical way that moves her conjectural narratives sharply toward becoming narratives of political economy in her own time. Even the “Illustrations” that do not propose conjectural narratives take the form of fables, and many of these tales exhibit a discrepancy between the import of the narrative and the concluding principles that it is supposed to illustrate, a discrepancy that resembles the tension between a fable and the moral it is made to carry. Martineau’s novelistic focus on the difficulties and sufferings of individual characters can lead to sympathies that are not in accord with the principles she sets out to illustrate.21 For example, William Allen, who agrees to lead a Manchester strike, proves to be an honest and good man but, for all his pains, he is blackballed by the mill owners and must work the rest of his life as a street sweeper. We feel the injustice of this punishment, despite Martineau’s assurance that such is the inevitable result of strikes and attempts to form trade unions.22 The contrast between the detailed fictional representation of the workers’ sufferings and Martineau’s reassurances that these necessarily accompany the improvements brought about by political economy produces a characteristic tension or fissure in her work. The split between Martineau’s fictional focus on suffering individuals and her optimistic morals move her toward the kinds of ironies found in later novels depicting shifts in forms of social organization.23 Walter Scott had already based his historical novels on conjecturalist thought and had drawn out such ironies and the losses that accompany historical progress (see chapter 7). Whereas Scott drew on the mixed view of progress in Ferguson and Smith, Martineau, a few years after Scott’s death, made Malthus’s far grimmer principle of population the basis of many of her fictions, thereby initiating a long line of novels with Malthusian themes in nineteenth-century England.24

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mi l l : be yo nd p ro g re s s

John Stuart Mill reviewed Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy favorably, with a few reservations.25 Twenty years later, Martineau published her translation of Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy. It is significant and indicative of the early interweaving of disciplines such as sociology and political economy that Comte’s work so strongly impressed Mill that he initiated a correspondence with Comte in which he at first assumed the role of a disciple.26 The warmth of the exchange cooled considerably over the course of a year and a half, as the areas in which Mill disagreed with the older French thinker emerged more clearly. Still, Mill collected a subscription among his friends in England to support Comte for a year after he lost his academic position. When Mill wrote The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1865)— after the publication of the increasingly eccentric doctrines in Comte’s second large work, the utopian System of Positive Polity (1851–54), including Comte’s appointment of himself as the pontiff of his new Religion of Humanity—he made clear his disagreements with Comte. For example, Mill believed that Comte erred seriously in dismissing psychology and political economy as legitimate areas of study and knowledge. He considered Comte’s embrace of phrenology ridiculous, and he distanced himself firmly from Comte’s position that women’s role was to provide an ideal of love and altruism in the home but never to leave the domestic sphere or the control of husband or father.27 Nevertheless, Mill affirmed what he still considered to be Comte’s great and lasting accomplishment in the writing of “universal history” in the Course of Positive Philosophy. For Mill, Comte showed that all societies and forms of thought proceed through three stages, from the theological to the scientific by way of the philosophical, and that all beliefs, practices, and institutions in each stage are in accord with each other and give coherence to the social and mental world of the time. This general, conjectural history continued to impress Mill twenty-five years after he first read the Course of Positive Philosophy and corresponded with its author. He writes, “Whoever disbelieves that philosophy of history can be made a science, should suspend his judgment until he has read these volumes of M. Comte” on universal history.28 Comte’s was not the only example of conjectural history with which Mill was familiar; his father James, who schooled him from the age of three, had

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been a student in Edinburgh in the time of Ferguson and Smith.29 J. S. Mill employs a conceptual framework derived from the conjectural histories of Adam Smith, dividing human economic activity into periods or stages, and he sees a progressive increase in productive capacity from each of these stages to the next. His historical and economic analysis is focused primarily on Europe, but (like the early Marx) he defines and places an “Asiatic” mode of production and distribution outside the European progression of stages. Mill devotes the second half of his preliminary remarks in the Principles of Political Economy to a conjectural history of economic and social periods, conforming to the pattern established by Smith and Ferguson. In the first period, for which Mill still uses the term “savage,” people obtain a bare subsistence by means of hunting and fishing, unless they can exchange furs with civilized people for foreign products. Although he does not dwell, like Robertson or Malthus, on the privations and misery of such a state, Mill echoes Malthus when he writes, “This is the state of greatest poverty in which any entire community of human beings is known to exist,” although, he adds, “there are much richer communities in which portions of the inhabitants are in a condition, as to subsistence and comfort, as little enviable as that of the savage.”30 He thus draws out the point that Malthus made at length but implicitly in his Principle of Population, that the urban poor remain in a condition of savagery even in the midst of a civilized state. The domestication of animals and the adoption of a pastoral way of life, which Mill associates with metal working, first introduce inequality in society.31 An agricultural stage follows, which, once established, does not lead immediately to greater progress, largely because governments appropriate agricultural products from the people. Here Mill introduces the idea of an Asian form of society—consistent with Montesquieu’s and N.-A. Boulanger’s notion of Oriental despotism—that also presents an obstacle to further development. The single ruler in this case claims all the produce of the land as his own, and after returning a small portion to the cultivators to enable them to plant and bring in a harvest the next year, spends the remainder on his own ostentation and on the support and comfort of his favorites, government bureaucrats, and mercenaries. Mill acknowledges that such societies produce large-scale public works, such as granaries, wells, and irrigation canals, although he focuses on works of personal display that do not serve a public purpose, such as the Egyptian pyramids or the Taj Mahal (Principles of Political Economy, 13–14). Most importantly

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for Mill, such a society is static; it does not develop into different forms or through later stages. Such societies—supposedly typical of Asia—existed before the beginnings of recorded history in the same form that they still assume in Mill’s time, and which they will continue to assume unless and until disturbed by foreign forces. To this statist and static “Asiatic” form of agriculture, Mill opposes the dynamic European form organized around towns. In an idealizing vein, Mill maintains that each family possesses its own land and produces its own food, there are no taxes, and the citizens make up the body of the army. Against such benefits, however, he sets the disadvantage that these small communities are almost constantly at war. The growth of population following increased food production forces communities to send out armed forces to conquer other peoples, to expel them from the land or compel them to cultivate it for the benefit of their conquerors.32 This dynamic process of conquest, he asserts, led to the heights of cultural production in Athens, but also to the universal domination of the Mediterranean world by Rome and the “melancholy” economic history of the empire in which great landed estates swallowed smaller farms before misgovernment allowed the nomads to overrun the empire. This dissolution and devolution led to medieval society, followed by the emergence of modern, improving society. Conquest by the northern tribes produced two ranks in all European lands: landowners and serfs, from whom the dynamism of improvement and capitalism derived. As the serfs earned money and bought their freedom, or simply escaped from the estates where they were born, they populated towns and became craftsmen. The stability of fortune and security of person in urban centers enabled improvements in comforts and the arts of life, producing a prosperous and energetic population of artisans, burghers, and traders in the late Middle Ages. Thus far, in seeing emerging capitalists as former serfs, Mill’s account shares substantial features with Marx’s in the Grundrisse (written 1857–58). But at the point of capping his account, Mill returns to a version of Smith’s argument. Since the bourgeoisie of the towns were a saving class, he says, and the feudal aristocracy were squanderers, the former gradually came into possession of the landed estates and displaced the previous owners (Principles of Political Economy, 18). By the nineteenth century, the process resulted in a number of prosperous and energetic countries capable of constructing public works, educating their people, freeing their slaves, and making conveniences and luxuries available to a wider circle of citizens. To

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this account, Mill added, in the first edition, “whatever doubt may exist as to the amount of improvement in the condition of the harvest of all” (19). Although Mill withdrew this clause in later editions, its inclusion shows his awareness of the miserable and unimproved conditions of life for most people in nineteenth-century capitalist societies. Mill also notes that earlier states continue to exist simultaneously in different parts of the world, including hunting, pastoral, and feudal societies in America, Arabia, and Russia (20). It is not the case that all societies go through the same stages in tandem; still, Mill conceives of each society as being organized according to one dominant form, whereas Marx complicates this view by asserting that uneven development exists within a single society. Almost all the rest of the Principles of Political Economy is devoted to the workings of the capitalist system in a synchronic mode, apart from historical development. However, when Mill considers whether the system will have an end point in the future, whether all the struggle and activity will lead to anything other than more struggle and activity, he adopts a conjecture advanced by some of the earlier political economists, but places it in a very different light. Because of the law of diminishing returns on agricultural lands postulated by David Ricardo, many political economists of the first half of the century had foreseen the eventual advent of a condition in which declining profits would lead to an end of investment and, consequently, an end of growth. The prospect of such a stationary state provoked anxious concern for a society having lost its dynamism, supposedly like China, which in this view had ceased to change. Although political economists sought to theorize ways in which the onset of stasis might be delayed, Mill did not find the prospect of a stationary state frightening or dystopian. Rather, he cast doubt on the desirability of indefinite progress, the imperative that the system must constantly expand, use more and more resources, and produce more and more goods and wealth. Indeed, in book 4, chapter 6 he turns from the frenetic world of commercial activity to a vision of the possibility that, when enough is produced for all to live with at least a modicum of the comforts of life, a steady state of production and population (the latter is crucial) would enable people to develop intellectually, artistically, and morally (Principles of Political Economy, 752–57). “I am not charmed,” he writes, “with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on.” By contrast, he suggests that all the “trampling, crushing, elbowing, and

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treading on each other’s heels”—the competition of all against all—need not be permanent, but the “disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” Although the later stage would be static in terms of material production, that does not imply a “stationary state of human improvement”: there would be “as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on” (Principles of Political Economy, 754–56).33 Such a prospect has points of convergence with Marx’s prophecy that, in another order of society, we might each pursue our own interests and skills and reverse the increasingly specialized division of labor.34 This stage that follows industrial capitalism, one based on an unchanging level of material production and population, may, in Mill’s view, also be socialist. Mill makes a strong moral case against capitalism on the basis of its inequitable distribution of wealth, arguing that there would be no contest between socialism and the present system if private property necessarily meant that rewards should be apportioned as at present, “almost in inverse relation to the labour—the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, . . . until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life” (Principles of Political Economy, 207).35 However, Mill was also concerned with the preservation of liberty, and he believed that a communist society would most likely restrict individual liberty more than the pressure of public opinion already does in commercial society (208–9). As a middle way, and as a response to the principal objections to socialism, Mill advocated the formation of associations through which workers would become owners of the companies for which they work. He thereby came to foresee a kind of socialism organized around workers’ associations or cooperatives formed through voluntary actions, not centralized state directives.36 This quasisocialist stationary stage of production, then, can be added to the stages of historical development that Mill traced in the preliminary remarks to the Principles of Political Economy.37 Mill proves to be a theorist not of the triumph of industrial capitalism but of its mutation into a more humane and equitable system. However, although the possibility for such creative self-realization should, according to Mill, be open to as many people in a society as possible, including women, it is severely limited by being applicable in his political

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imaginary only to societies capable of self-government. Other societies, in Mill’s view, cannot be given freedom to develop because they will misuse it; they must undergo a process of maturation, usually under the tutelage of Europeans.38 Mill’s ascription of maturity and hence the possibility of selfdevelopment only to northern Europeans and North Americans excludes the rest of the world from the benefits of economic and political maturity, for at least a generation and possibly for much longer. His thought thus exemplifies the kind of tension that can result from the use of multistage theory: on the one hand, he can imagine and work toward socialism as a future and more equitable stage of social development; on the other hand, he excuses or fails to acknowledge the injustices of imperialism because he sees non-Europeans as savages or barbarians who have not yet advanced to the stage of civilized maturity. ma r x i a n ve rs i o ns o f c o nj e c tu r a l histo ry

Marx wrote of Malthus and Mill with scorn and sarcasm, as he almost always did of those with whom he disagreed. He treated Malthus much more harshly than Mill, who was, like Marx, critical of the deep inequity of “the system of private property” and, as we have seen, inclined toward a kind of socialism in his later thought.39 However, in one area these political economic thinkers share common ground: all three employed the conceptual and narrative framework of conjectural history. Malthus, in his conjectural history of savage and barbarian life, could conceive of no way around the iron law of population, except for the poor to delay sex and reproduction for decades, or even to abstain altogether. Marx, however, foresees the end of conditions that consign the vast majority to bare subsistence when the final, communist stage of social life is realized. Transitions between stages are of no interest for Malthus because they do not bring significant change for the great mass of people, even in a civilized state. In discussing political economy, Marx places himself more in the central line of conjecturalist thought in that, like Adam Smith, he usually focuses on stages of development and on transitions from one stage to another. Along with Comte and Weber, Marx proved to be one of the most innovative theorists of historical stages and transitions after the Enlightenment. He does not employ the frameworks of Smith or Ferguson; rather, all of his formulations of stadial history compress hunter-gatherers, herders,

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and farmers into one stage that he considers ancient. In addition to this period, the feudal, capitalist, and communist remain the other invariable epochs in his historical narratives. Although he devoted thought and effort to the means for effecting the transition from capitalism to communism, it was actually the shift from feudalism to capitalism that exercised the greater part of his conjectural historical thinking. The different formulations of Marx’s conjecturalist thought reveal a nonchronological progression from the most formulaic to the most nuanced. The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) present the historical sequence most schematically. The repeated iterations of the sequence in the German Ideology (written 1845–46) complicate the theory by introducing the notion of uneven development. In the chapter of Capital (1867) devoted to “primitive accumulation,” Marx further speculates concerning the transformation of feudal into capitalist society. Although the Grundrisse consist of notebooks written as preparation for Capital, they actually provide the most complex account of this historical transition, and thus of historical transitions in general.40 In the preface to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx distinguishes four forms of production that have defined four “epochs” in the economic shaping of society: “the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeoisie.”41 But this statement constitutes all he writes about such periods in this work. His formulation is similarly dogmatic when he considers transitions between epochs here: when changes in forces of production bring them into conflict with social relations, including legal, political, and cultural forms, then the material structure will eventually transform the ideological relations so that they are more consonant with the economic. These massive transformations, Marx asserts, are effected through social revolutions. Although this is among the most frequently cited passages in his writings, its brevity does not allow for any variation in development among stages or transitional periods; it provides a formulaic account of the processes whereby one economic and social era gives way to another. Marx’s conjectural history in the Communist Manifesto addresses the past but is primarily concerned, like Condorcet’s ninth and tenth stages, with the present and future stages. Being a manifesto, the work paints Marx’s view of history in broad historical strokes rather than exploring processes of transition in detail. Even so, it exhibits a striking ambivalence in the way it regards the dominant class in the capitalist period. According to this view,

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the bourgeoisie reduces all relations to cash relations: it hypocritically attacks prostitution, but practices legalized prostitution in marriage; it claims to be interested in universal human rights and legal protections, but is only interested in its own ability to exploit workers and accumulate profits. On the other hand, this class has also been responsible for bringing under control the most powerful productive forces in history, and for exponentially expanding channels of communication and of shipping. Through its mastery of technological innovations and its own energetic striving, it has made the investments and improvements that were necessary to render possible a postbourgeois society in which slavery, and the bourgeoisie itself, will be eliminated, and in which none need want. This vision of a future in which humans are able to provide enough for everyone, partly as a result of technological improvements, partly as a result of social revolution, bears a close kinship with Condorcet’s conjectural history of a future of indefinite improvement in quality of life, health, and longevity. The ambivalence with which Marx regards the bourgeoisie also recalls Ferguson’s similar ambivalence toward modern commercial life, which makes available a great number and range of conveniences and comforts, and eliminates slavery and serfdom, but also sacrifices the virtues of earlier tribal life, such as honesty, bravery, and loyalty. Delineating stages from the beginning of social life to the capitalist era occupies much of the first part of the German Ideology, with an emphasis on transitions, especially from feudal to capitalist society. In defining the first stage in his historical vision, Marx compresses the first three stages worked out by Smith into an “undeveloped” stage that includes hunting, gathering, herding, and the beginnings of agriculture. After this first stage, which will become more prominent and is the subject of important elaboration in the late notebooks (see chapter 4), Marx outlines the development of three further phases of production: the ancient communal city, based on slavery; the feudal form, based on serfdom; and finally, the commercial or capitalist form, based on wage labor. Each new productive force (including the social relations necessary to its operation) causes a further development in the division of labor, and the various stages in the division of labor define so many different forms of ownership.42 After making the methodological point that such abstract distinctions between stages have no real existence in history but only serve to indicate the sequence of the historical strata (German Ideology, 48), Marx focuses on the transition from feudalism to modern capitalism. Having proposed

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that competition from serfs escaping to towns contributed to the formation of the guilds for self-protection, he accounts for the breakdown of that system in the cities by means of the increasing concentration of population, which was excluded from the guilds but survived, for example, by weaving. The disbanding of swollen armies and the expulsion from the country of yet larger numbers of farm laborers because of enclosures and improvements in agriculture resulted in large numbers of vagabonds or masterless men, the daily wage workers whose status defines the modern condition of labor: they must work for those with capital because they have none (68–75). Along with this change in the division of labor comes a shift in the forms of ownership, from feudal landed property to merchant capital, small-scale manufacturing, and finally modern capital (79). Although Marx’s conjectural history of social, economic stages and transitions in the German Ideology is more finely detailed than Smith’s, it shares an essential feature with Smith’s conjectural histories. Like the phenomena in Smith’s accounts, the events in Marx’s account are not planned by any man or group of men; they are the unintended results of the pursuit of survival and interest by members of society, of technological innovations, and of the pressures exerted by existing social forms (German Ideology, 87). Marx refers to Smith’s idea that trade extends an “invisible hand” that hovers over the world “like the fate of the ancients,” allotting fortune and misfortune to men (55). Although his tone is sarcastic, Marx does not criticize Smith’s point but in fact employs a similar concept of impersonal causation and unintended effects in his own narrative argument. Yet Marx’s conjectural histories in the German Ideology extend Smith’s in that they are based on external forces rather than the workings of an individual universal psychology, including such traits as the “universal propensity to truck and barter” that Smith discerns.43 In Marx’s account of the transition from feudalism to capitalist modernity,44 it is not the infantile self-indulgence of the Renaissance aristocrat that leads to the dissolution of feudal forms but the combined workings of developments in the division of labor, forms of ownership, and forms of production.45 This emphasis on multiple contributing factors characterizes Marx’s analysis of transitions throughout the German Ideology. Finally, although Smith and the other eighteenth-century conjectural historians often distinguish periods sharply and do not take into account the simultaneous existence of different stages, Marx calls attention to the

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“uneven development” of different cultural domains, the persistence in later stages of the forms of philosophy, law, and art characteristic of earlier ages. The previous forms are not entirely superseded but are “subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries” (German Ideology, 87). Such uneven development within a single period productively complicates the somewhat neat schematizing of the eighteenthcentury historians. In his writings of the late 1850s and 1860s, Marx continued to elaborate his theory of historical development in the tradition of the conjectural histories, arguing that historical stages result from the material conditions and the actions of men but are unintended (except that, in the last case, the transition to communism is to be consciously willed). Marx devotes the last part of Capital, volume 1 (1867), “On the So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” to the conditions in feudal societies that contributed to the formation of capitalist economic and social relations. In these chapters he sets out to controvert what he considers the “fairy tale” in Smith, Malthus, and other political economists that capital was first accumulated by the hard-working and frugal, while the lazy and improvident became workers for others.46 By contrast, Marx argues that numerous specific historical developments had to take place to make men into wage laborers, on one side, and capitalist owners and employers on the other. As in the German Ideology, he asserts that the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers released large numbers of “free” men into the labor market, to become an urban working class. Although Smith considered this factor crucial in the Wealth of Nations, he assumed the previous accumulation of stock in capital; Marx, however, believes this accumulation still needs to be explained. In addition, Smith did not link the luxury items purchased by the late feudal nobility with the importation of treasures from outside Europe. But Marx records the way that the gold and silver of America, the profits of the slave trade, and the conquest and plunder of India—all activities of foreign merchant traffic and early colonialism—also contributed to the accumulation of capital in Europe (Capital, 1:915–18). In addition to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, which pushed more men into the market, Marx considers the centuries-long enclosing of commons and the expulsion of small farmers from their lands (1:886–92). Throughout this detailed discussion of steps by which social relations of capitalist production were forged, Marx can cite very few documents or figures. For support, he usually refers to indirect or negative evidence, such as

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laws whose prohibitions reveal the seriousness of the problem they address, for example the statute of 1 Edward VI that prescribed branding for those who repeatedly refuse to work. From Raphael Holinshed, Marx obtains the estimate that seventy-two thousand vagabonds, mostly petty thieves who stole to survive, were put to death during the reign of Henry VIII (Capital, 1:897–98). Even Holinshed’s number, one of the most specific pieces of evidence Marx cites, from a nearly contemporaneous source, can be little more than a guess. Although he draws on a wider range of developments that probably or “must have” contributed to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx’s narrative remains as speculative as Smith’s. He seeks to explain how it happens that relations of production change, but he can only accumulate conditions of possibility for such a transition.47 In one striking passage, he locates the crucial shift in the change from a system in which weavers worked in their homes, on materials and looms that they owned, to a system in which men “freed” by expropriation were employed for wages in large buildings, spinning cloth owned by the master on machines that were also his. As Marx says of the change from the first to the second case, “the flax looks exactly as it did before. Not a fibre of it has changed, but a new social soul has entered into its body” (Capital, 1:909). It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain how such consequential shifts have taken place in the past, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, over the course of decades or generations. The point for Marx is that these are not necessarily or solely the result of changes in technology. Nor are they willed by any of the participants, such as the nascent capitalists in this narrative. The alterations in question are changes in social relations determined by ownership of the means of production and the roles that others must fill, being dependent on those owners.48 In Capital, Marx analyzes the conditions of possibility for the appearance of wage labor; a few years earlier, in the preparatory notebooks for Capital, the Grundrisse, he investigated the other side of the coin: the prerequisites for the emergence of capitalists. There he notes that emancipated serfs not only became the new proletariat: some became the new capitalists.49 Moreover, in the Grundrisse he speculates concerning the succession of periods of production, from the earliest times to a future communist stage. Thus, the account in the Grundrisse has closer and clearer parallels to the conjectural histories than do any of Marx’s other narratives before the late Ethnological Notebooks.

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In the Grundrisse Marx both adopts and revises the eighteenth-century form, which, like his own view, emphasized the means of subsistence in shaping social orders.50 As in the German Ideology, Marx conflates huntergatherers and pastoralists, savages and barbarians in the earliest stage.51 At one point, he identifies them as pastoralists, herdsmen who live in the country (Grundrisse, 472). At another, they are like the American Indians, living in a constant state of warfare with other tribes for access to the game in the forests (491). Although this scheme collapses the first two stages in the Scottish conjectural histories, it has the benefit of bringing together groups with the same attitude to property. Whether savage or barbarian, they think in terms of communal ownership, not private property; no individual owns the land on which they hunt, fish, gather, or herd. Marx conceives of humans in this epoch appropriating elements of the natural world for use only, not for exchange. Because no private property exists at this stage, the only inequality and hierarchy is based on personal traits; without classes there can be no class divisions.52 Marx next discusses what he calls the Asiatic form of production. In this form, all landed property is the possession of one man, to whom all others owe their temporary use of it and consumption of the goods it produces. This mode, Marx theorizes, may have arisen because of the need for largescale hydraulic projects to make lands arable. The centralized authority that enforced such conscripted labor may have persisted into the later agricultural stage, producing a system of “Oriental despotism” that generated no inner dynamism and so resisted change for centuries, even millennia, a concept to which Mill and others subscribed, going back to Joseph de Guignes and N.-A. Boulanger.53 The “Asiatic” mode of production has been the subject of sharp controversy for more than a century.54 The Soviets formally discussed and rejected such a mode. Critics of the concept have pointed out that largescale public projects have been constructed in parts of the world employing political structures that are more flexible and less despotic than those Marx was assuming. Irrigation projects, for example, can be local to begin with and then become parts of a larger system. Moreover, Marx knew little about ancient conditions in China, the prototype for this stage, such as the reasons for the irrigation projects or the methods employed. It seems that this was one occasion on which Marx’s speculative thinking, following the lead of de Guignes, Boulanger, and others, led him astray. In addition to

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being based on little knowledge of the history of Asian peoples, the idea of this stage reveals a Eurocentric way of thinking that Marx otherwise sought to avoid.55 The next three stages that Marx discusses are much more familiar from his works and others, and in the West, each gains ascendancy upon the dissolution of its predecessor. In the mode of production characteristic of classical antiquity, all the citizens of the city-state own the property of the state in common, but those who are not citizens own nothing, and production depends upon the labor of slaves and small agriculturalists (at least in the beginning). From the dissolution of this form, there emerges and becomes hegemonic what Marx calls the Germanic form—although it was not limited to Germanic peoples—based on small, individual landholdings (Grundrisse, 489).56 Marx envisions this as the germ or basis from which the feudal system developed, tracing the development of the prerequisites for the actualization of social relations between capitalists and wage laborers. He returns to this transition throughout his career, analyzing it from various perspectives and constructing an increasingly full account. On this occasion, however, he reflects on the value of the transition itself and tries to assess the earlier stage, weighing a common attitude since the Romantics that regards life in feudal times as more noble than in the commercial period, because it was less tainted with the desire for profit. Although Marx insists many times, especially in the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism developed the productive forces of nature beyond what men in previous eras could have imagined, here, somewhat surprisingly, he also looks back at the preceding era and acknowledges that it does seem loftier in its ideal and practices than does the present period of capitalist exploitation (Grundrisse, 488). His attitude in the Grundrisse again closely approximates that of Ferguson, who, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), acknowledges the accomplishments of the commercial stage but also notes, in the increasing commerce between strangers, the fading away of the virtues of tribal society. At the end of this section, Marx cites the crucial chapter of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (bk. 3, chapter 4), on the transfer of property from the aristocratic landowners to new capitalists, in support of his own formulation that capital purchases the hands and the implements that make possible and control manufacturing production. Again, complex social relations, not technical factors alone, prove necessary for the emergence of capital and capitalism.57

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But we know from the Communist Manifesto and Capital that, in Marx’s speculative history of the future, one further epoch will be ushered in by the expropriation of the expropriators. In the Grundrisse, Marx conceives of history as consisting of six epochs of production, each harnessing an increasing power to exploit nature for human use. Although they may not succeed each other in the same order in all societies, these stages describe a cyclical movement, because they begin and end with an epoch of communal proprietorship. Marx’s history of socioeconomic stages therefore fulfills the major criteria for conjectural history. It attempts to provide a historical narrative of developments for which documents are scarce or unavailable. It does not appeal to providence or design as a warrant for its narrative.58 Men make this history, but their actions produce results other than what they intended (except in the transition to the final stage—although, ironically, the form of state organization that was erected in Marx’s name differed from what he intended). Marx sought to give an account not only of the earliest stages of social life but also of crucial transitions between epochs. Although he combined into one the earliest stages of most of the Scottish conjectural histories, and although his categories for stages diverged from those of others, he maintained and even intensified the focus on material forms of production and their relation to social, legal, religious, and cultural forms. Although Marx’s Asiatic form of production, even in the statements of the 1860s, demonstrates the possibility for conjectural history to be ethnocentric, the rest of his theory shows that it is not necessarily so.59 Building on and revising the insights of Smith, Ferguson, Rousseau, and Condorcet, Marx renews conjectural history as he organizes his philosophy of history around the reconceived form.

The works of these four thinkers illustrate ways that conjecture and conjectural historical form shaped nineteenth-century political economy. Malthus employed conjecture in an attempt to prove the negative, to demonstrate that Condorcet’s hopeful speculative history of the future was unattainable because mathematically impossible. In doing so, he reversed the usual implications of the genre, converting it from an open to a closed form, from a narrative of past or future possibilities into a recounting of interminable misery and constraint. Martineau’s conjectures took the form

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of fictional plots that revealed and taught the lessons of political economy. Her tales combine a sympathetic representation of the suffering of workers that Malthus considered their necessary fate with an optimistic confidence that, if the laws of political economics were understood and observed, they would lead to unprecedented material progress. The only woman among these thinkers, Martineau made it her mission to disseminate laws of political economy to workers through her middle-class readers. Both Mill and Marx contest the Malthusian revision of conjectural form. Mill sets out from a classical Smithian conjectural history of social and economic stages in the past but, on the basis of slight indications of another possibility, he conceives of a future state that will correct the inequities of the “system of private property,” whose workings he explicates authoritatively for his generation. Marx also envisions a conjectural utopian future of a richer life for workers. But as the last major figure to work in the line of classical political economics—with its basis in historical analyses—he also elaborates the most complex theory of transitions between stages, and his distinctively reformulated stages exerted as extensive an influence as those of Smith or Ferguson. These four political economic thinkers therefore worked in the tradition of conjectural history, redefining and expanding the range of the form. Others whose conjectural thought helped define a new field of knowledge include the early anthropological writers of the 1860s and 1870s in England—among them Marx, in his late notebooks. I will consider these conjectural thinkers in chapter 4. After about 1870, what had been political economics changed fundamentally, shifting from a concern with historical evidence and social facts to a focus on present policies and quantifiable formulations. This shift is often attributed to the emergence of theories of marginal utility and their replacement of theories of labor as the source of value. As the field became more mathematical, professional, and academic, with new university departments and scholarly journals accompanying and signaling the change, the study of economics replaced the more general, social, and historical inquiries of political economy. From this point on, until the surge of theories of development after World War II, mainstream economics did not take an interest in historical precedents or patterns for its formulations, and consequently the effect of conjectural history on the new field dwindled almost to nothing.60

3

Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society

Malthus was writing against Condorcet and the Enlightenment thinkers only a few years after their last works were produced. But about a generation separates the last of the conjectural historians from the earliest thinker in the emerging sociological field, Auguste Comte, whose foundational Course of Positive Philosophy was published from 1830 to 1842. Herbert Spencer’s equally influential work in the field began with Social Statics (1851) and culminated forty-five years later in the three volumes of the Principles of Sociology (1876–96). The search for antecedents of sociological thought has often been narrowed to a single individual or a series of individual thinkers, such as Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, or John Millar.1 Ferguson, in particular, has figured prominently, beginning with an early study by William Lehmann, which considered him the father of sociology.2 Rather than tracing continuities between individual earlier thinkers and the later discourse of sociology, however, I will demonstrate the extent to which the new field was shaped by the generic features of conjectural narratives in Comte and Spencer, its two most consequential nineteenthcentury practitioners. The relation between the earlier form and the later field does not follow a continuous line but an irregular genealogical descent, especially in Spencer, whose work is marked by significant silences concerning predecessors, and testy, insistent disavowals of influence. Although both Comte and Spencer claim that their studies are founded on science and facts, their use of speculation and theory was crucial in opening up the new field. i n t h e f i e l d o f p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y,

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Many thinkers in the last two centuries have argued that the French Revolution accounts in significant part for ruptures in forms of thought and discourse that produced the defining features of modern politics and thought. Georg Lukács attributes the historical novel to changes wrought by the Revolution, and Robert Wokler traced to the Revolution the modern form of mass representative politics as rule by competing elites.3 The sociological thought of philosophers such as Comte and Spencer registers the effect of the Revolution in other ways as well. The period of disorder and bloodshed that followed the dissolution of traditional bonds and institutions led to the sense of a loss of legitimacy in the postrevolutionary world and promoted the conviction that all social groups and institutions needed to be connected in a new overarching framework. As a result of this increased sense of the precarious interrelatedness of all social functions, the nineteenth-century sociological thinkers sought a substitute for waning religious faith to serve as a grounding for moral values and social cohesion. Neither Comte nor Spencer foresees a coming freedom from religion, period. For each, some nonmetaphysical way of thinking or feeling will need to serve as a substitute for an exhausted religious tradition that has set itself against facts. For both Comte and Spencer, the science of society itself, the sociological inquiry that they pioneered, served as the primary replacement for religion. s a i n t - s i m o n and c o m te : af te r the disso l ut io n o f t h e fe u dal wo rld

Marx considered Henri de Saint-Simon to be, along with Hegel, “the most encyclopedic mind of his age,” and he was impressed with the way SaintSimon linked the progress of ideas with changes in social states in his philosophy of history.4 But Saint-Simon exerted a much greater influence on Comte than on Marx, and it is worth examining Saint-Simon’s thought in relation to the emergence of a sociological framework in Comte. In this field, Saint-Simon serves as a transitional figure—as Malthus had in political economy—between Enlightenment thought and nineteenth-century forms. He critiques and departs from antecedents among the conjectural historians, but he also maintains substantial continuities with these figures, building upon as well as revising their thought in ways that are then elaborated by Comte in many of his characteristic arguments.

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Saint-Simon’s thinking takes the form of a stadial history of the past and a conjectural history of the future. He is not concerned with prehistoric times, before writing and documents. However, he is engaged in the same task as Smith was in the conjectural portion of the Wealth of Nations—the delineation of stages and investigation of the passage from the first and second of these to the third. To see the importance of Saint-Simon as a bridging figure between conjectural history and sociology, it is useful to examine five or six of his characteristic doctrines. First, society for Saint-Simon is holistic; its various fields cohere with each other. All societies go through a series of three stages—from theological to metaphysical to scientific. This sequence of stages of thought parallels the sequence of stages of society and, significantly, includes the sequence of the sciences, which, however, follow their own independent series. Astronomy and physics attain scientific maturity first, social physics or sociology last. Saint-Simon accords to men of scientific knowledge a primary and decisive role in his community of the future (he does not employ the category of the state or government). Rather than celebrating the nation, Saint-Simon conceives of the need for a federated Europe. In this new, cosmopolitan union, industrialists will administer secular power, and the new clergy of scientists and engineers will exercise spiritual or moral power. For example, Saint-Simon disparages the thought of the Enlightenment and the work of the French Revolution for having been solely critical and destructive. However, when he develops his own view that revolutionary or critical periods alternate with longer, organic periods in a pattern that integrates a cyclical movement with a widening or rising spiral, he formulates a philosophy of history with recognizable affinities to Enlightenment conjectural history.5 In this view, historical laws shape the development of society through discernible, progressive stages. After a revolutionary period that followed the height of the ancient world based on slavery, another organic period took shape in medieval times—a feudal period based on serfdom, which in its turn was falling apart under the pressure of the critical energies of the French Revolution and would be replaced by an industrial system based on science and commerce. Thus, although he criticized the conjectural basis of Enlightenment historiography, Saint-Simon’s own system employed a conjectural historical framework based on a progressive sequence of stages.

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Similarly, Saint-Simon distanced himself from the Enlightenment anticlericalism of Hume or Voltaire, maintaining that a renewed or purified form of religion would be necessary to give a unified moral force to modern society. However, his philosophy of history adopted the stages of religious development formulated by Hume and de Brosses: an early stage of polytheism and imagination gave way to an epoch of theism and philosophy, while the modern era taking shape in Saint-Simon’s own time would be based on science and the positive knowledge gleaned from observation.6 Again, Saint-Simon’s assertions of difference between his thoughts on religion and those of the Enlightenment conjecturalists stand in tension with and should not distract us from the strong continuity between their stages and his. Moreover, Saint-Simon argues that, in any of its stages, society is holistic: the dominant systems of religion, politics, and education exhibit congruence and correlations because they are all expressions of the reigning system of ideas (Social Organization, 21). As that system of thought changes, so too do the social institutions that put it into effect. The coherence of institutions in different spheres during the same period reiterates a fundamental insight of the stadial conjectural historians such as Ferguson and Smith. Saint-Simon recalls conjectural history even more directly in his discussion of the progress of the sciences, beginning with astronomy. Saint-Simon pursues the same form of thought that Adam Smith did in his conjectural history of astronomy when he contends that men first developed scientific knowledge by observing regularities in the motions of the stars and planets. Astronomical phenomena were the simplest to isolate and systematize, and thus form the basis of confirmable predictions. After astronomy, chemistry was the next field in which observations capable of being repeated were separated from suppositions (or conjectures) and were used to confirm or disprove theories. Eventually, according to Saint-Simon, the most complex subject, concerning the physiology of organic life and the psychology of human beings, will attain the status of a science—the science of society, on which his proposals for social regeneration will be based (Social Organization, 8). Thus, Saint-Simon builds on the earlier conjectural history of science as he articulates a theory of the sequence of the sciences, which Comte will in turn elaborate as one of the foundational ideas of his system. In Saint-Simon’s conjectural history of the future, scientists again occupy a position like that in Condorcet’s vision. For Saint-Simon, mathematicians

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and engineers should be the governors of the future prosperous and fair society. Again, Comte will develop this idea as a crucial feature of his philosophy, especially in his System of Positive Polity (1854). In Saint-Simon’s view, a new priesthood is necessary to regenerate European society, a cadre possessing greater authority than the discredited Christian clergy that aligned themselves with monarchs and aristocrats. Scientists offer knowledge and certainty in place of superstition and belief. In order to eliminate wars and ensure a greater equality of condition among peoples, Saint-Simon proposes reorganizing Europe as a federation of states, building on Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project to Render Peace Perpetual in Europe (1713) as well as Kant’s more recent “Perpetual Peace” (1795). Although Saint-Simon considered Europeans to be superior to other peoples and favored colonization to spread European civilization, his proposals for reform and renewal within European societies are farsighted and productive. His most specific proposal comes in New Christianity (1825), his last work, in which, departing from the views of the future in Condorcet and Kant, he lays out the need for a renewed Christianity, lacking churches, based not on dogma or ritual but solely on morality. For SaintSimon, the overriding moral imperative enjoins all those with authority and power to bring about the quickest possible amelioration in the lives of those in the poorest classes (Social Organization, 86–87). The new morality must be based on inverting conditions in a world that has turned upside down, in a society that believes “the poor should be generous to the rich, and that therefore the poorest classes should daily deprive themselves of necessities in order to increase the superfluous luxury of the rich” (74). At the same time, the guiltiest, the biggest robbers, are responsible for punishing the most minor offenses of the poor. Saint-Simon contends that reversing these injustices constitutes the core task not only of the new religious morality but also of the science whose advent he announces: the science of society is ethics.7 Comte spent seven years as Saint-Simon’s secretary, associate, and student, beginning when he was not yet twenty and Saint-Simon was fiftyseven. The dissolution of this father-and-son relationship was bitter when it came, in 1824, the year before Saint-Simon’s death.8 Due to his angry desire to separate himself from his mentor, Comte almost never referred to Saint-Simon in his later writings. However, he gave detailed, at times extensive assessments of his other predecessors, including the conjectural

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historians. Thus, although both Malthus and Saint-Simon served as transitional figures between the conjectural historians and nineteenth-century fields of social inquiry—whether political economy or sociology—both a parallel and a divergence in their roles now emerges. Malthus derided the speculative thought of conjecturalists such as Condorcet and claimed mathematical precision for his own argument, even as he silently and extensively adopted the conjectural method and, after 1803, used conjectural predecessors in the first book of his Essay on the Principle of Population. Saint-Simon contended that thought was moving from a speculative to a scientific state, but he regarded conjectural thinking as a stage through which society must pass, and his own writings reveal a continuing influence of conjectural form. But, paradoxically, Comte’s suppression of Saint-Simon’s influence on his own thought led him to give full credit to his earlier conjectural predecessors, including Condorcet, Herder, Smith, Ferguson, and Hume. Conjectural thought as antecedent receives much more open acknowledgment in Comte’s predisciplinary sociology than in Malthus’s early political economy. Comte’s earliest writings, from 1822 to 1826, give evidence of his close association with Saint-Simon and of the influence of conjectural thought on both men. These writings also set out in recognizable form almost all the major doctrines of his mature philosophy, especially the Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42). In fact, when he published the complete System of Positive Polity, Comte included his early writings as evidence that his thought had borne the stamp of his individuality from the beginning, and that even his late works were developments of the earliest pamphlets. In accord with Saint-Simon’s thinking, Comte accepts the distinction between organic and critical periods and forms of thought.9 Working from this fundamental distinction, he states the need for a law of historical development (Positive Polity, 4:86), and in response formulates his own law of the three stages of social development: the first or theological stage, the metaphysical or transitional stage, and the scientific or positive stage (4:77). This statement marks the first appearance of the law of three stages, which continues to structure Comte’s thought throughout his career. Comte pays tribute to Condorcet as the thinker who most nearly approached his own conception of the development of thought through epochs, although he criticizes Condorcet’s stages for being mechanical and superficial, comprising only a chronology of scientific advances, cut rather

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arbitrarily into segments (4:109–19).10 (Saint-Simon had shown how one could correlate the history of ideas with the history of societies, but Comte ignores Saint-Simon.) When he begins to work out the sequence of the maturity of the sciences, beginning with astronomy, Comte refers explicitly to Adam Smith’s “History of Astronomy” (1795; written in the 1750s), the work whose method gave rise to the term “conjectural history.” As he expands and refines his law of the three stages and the sequence of the sciences, Comte refers to Montesquieu, Herder, Kant, and others who sought social laws, although, as he points out, the regularities that Montesquieu articulated are not laws of history or historical development.11 Montesquieu, unlike the other conjectural historians, did not present a narrative or tell a story. In this context—the search to discover both natural laws and the laws of history—Comte writes without regret of the unavoidability of theoretical or speculative thought in any human attempt to produce knowledge, including the conjectural historians’ project and his own (Positive Polity, 4:66, 166). Unlike most of the Enlightenment conjectural historians, however, Saint-Simon foresaw the need for a new constellation of power after the French Revolution, and Comte shares his vision of this new order. Spiritual authority will be held not by men of religion but by men of knowledge. Temporal power will be exercised not by kings or elected representatives but by heads of industrial concerns (Positive Polity, 4:72). Like SaintSimon, Comte takes as his model what he considers to be the separation of spiritual and temporal authority in the Middle Ages. Although they view modern Christianity as morally bankrupt, neither Saint-Simon nor Comte proposes the inevitability or desirability of secularization. Rather, both are convinced that concrete and dramatic measures must be taken to address the spiritual anarchy that characterizes modernity (4:178). In addition to making a new clergy of the men of science, both see a need for a union of all European peoples, which will be able to recapture the coherence of life in the Middle Ages. Although kings and aristocrats will be replaced by technocratic industrialists, the scientists must exercise a moral force that will restrain the exploitation of workers by the owners of machines. Without such a new spiritual or moral force, “modern society will only replace the conquests of ancient society with monopolies, a despotism of strength with a despotism of riches” (4:211). Comte agrees with SaintSimon on the injustice of a reign of the rich.12

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comt e: th e h i s to ry o f k nowle d ge

For Comte, the social troubles that reached a climax in the French Revolution can be traced back several centuries, to the Reformation and even earlier. From Gregory VII in the eleventh century to Boniface VIII at the end of the thirteenth century, authentic Catholic leadership in Europe lasted only two centuries.13 Comte looks back to this high medieval period with nostalgia and admiration. During these centuries, all Western Europe shared the same beliefs and the same polity, enjoying the benefits of security and order that derived from unity. Comte believes that Catholic society of this time provided a model of the separation of church and state, because the doctrines and institution of the Church were not under the control of state authorities, nor did the Church involve itself in the politics of the various Christian states. However, papal ambitions to expand temporal rule in Italy already signaled the retrograde character of the Catholic polity two centuries before Martin Luther (Positive Philosophy, 3:151). Then came the disaster of the Reformation, when Luther persuaded half of Europe that each man could think as he liked. John Calvin established a strict theocracy in Geneva, which allowed no distinction between political and religious power. Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries and established the reigning monarch as the head of the English church. These divisions proved to be revolutionary, as their advocates maintained, but also led to anarchy, as the continent fractured into bloody civil and foreign wars. Even after the settlement of the religious wars, belief remained atomized in a period characterized by deism, in which individual faith was shorn of all institutional and social support. The French Revolution constitutes the climax of this transitional period of intellectual disorder, political disintegration, and religious decay: “Since the French Revolution, Catholicism is only a majestic ruin” (Positive Philosophy, 3:294).14 Thus, the period of revolutionary anarchy extends for almost five centuries, up to the threshold of the positive, scientific stage, whose coming to self-consciousness is signaled by the writings of Comte himself. Even this brief overview makes clear that, in his Course of Positive Philosophy and, later, in the System of Positive Polity, Comte writes a stadial history like those that undergird the conjectural histories. His history of the intellectual stages of European peoples refuses providential explanations; his account remains naturalistic, the principle of social change immanent. Nor

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does he ground the social forms he traces in a contract of any kind.15 Intellectual and social developments lead to unplanned and unforeseen consequences. However, unlike many of the nineteenth-century social thinkers who worked in this tradition, Comte acknowledges an indebtedness to his predecessors among the Enlightenment conjectural historians. Further continuities with conjectural history can be found in Comte’s delineation of a small number of universal intellectual stages that shape cultural and political institutions, his focus on advances in science and technology, and his arguments for the correlation of intellectual with social conditions of life. Comte’s writings show that he was well aware of these continuities, and he repeatedly refers to the conjectural historians, calling Condorcet in particular his “principal precursor” and “spiritual father” (Positive Polity, 4:64, 300). In assessing the contributions of his predecessors, he calls attention to the argument in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) that the history of human societies exhibits a progressive tendency as a result of the workings of a natural process: “The general conception of the subject needed to raise politics to the level of the sciences of observation has been discovered by Condorcet. He was the first to see clearly that civilization is bound to follow a progressive course in which each step is strictly linked with the rest according to natural laws” (Positive Polity, 4:109). Condorcet and Comte both viewed the history of Western societies as a series of stages of intellectual and technological or scientific accomplishment. Comte understood there to be only three stages, whereas Condorcet had divided history into ten periods. However, as Comte points out, the lack in Condorcet’s account of a discernible shift in the internal logic or paradigm, in the mode of thought from one stage to the next, shows the need for a more systematic classification of historical stages, the criteria for differentiating among them, and the reasons for the progress they exhibit (4:110). In Comte’s account, all forms of knowledge and of society progress through the same three stages: the theological, metaphysical, and positive—or the religious, philosophical, and scientific. Not only in the society as a whole but also in each field of thought, the first two of these stages express forms of anthropomorphic thinking—the earliest by ascribing will and power to all things, the second by allegorical personifications. The third, however, defines itself by accepting as knowledge only the results of scientific observation and reasoning. On these grounds, Comte constructs

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a narrative of the progressive development of human sciences in which the most simple and abstract disciplines, mathematics and astronomy, reach a degree of scientific or positive perfection first, to be followed by physics, chemistry, and biology. Sociology—the word coined by Comte to designate the study of human society—will attain positive form last because it is the most complex and the most dependent on particulars for the establishment of its truths. The law of the three stages and the sequence of the sciences constituted from the beginning the core of Comte’s thought; the rest of his ideas took shape around these fundamental laws. Contrary to the later meaning given to the term “positivist,” however, Comte did not place the whole value of science in the attainment of factual certainty. In the Course of Positive Philosophy he argues for the importance of the imagination in constructing hypotheses and conjectures, and in the System of Positive Polity he constructs his own utopia on “scientific fictions.”16 Condorcet’s history of the stages of human thought also focuses on the sciences, and his narrative gives the greatest attention to the development of technological innovations and scientific insights from the more basic and simple to the more complex. For example, discussing the Hellenistic period in his fifth stage, Condorcet calls attention to the advances of Archimedes in geometry, mechanics, and hydrostatics; the foundational works of Hippocrates in medicine; and the advances of Hipparchus in astronomy.17 Condorcet focuses on the accomplishments of single figures of genius and their establishment of first principles, the simple but necessary axioms that define the field. As Comte later argued, these are the most basic insights in the most basic sciences, to be followed later by advances in these fields and the founding of the more complex sciences. In Condorcet, however, the notion of early advances in the simpler sciences remains at the level of an empirical observation rather than a fully articulated, organizing principle for the history of the human mind. Comte consciously extends and elaborates the stadial conjectural history that Condorcet wrote. For both Condorcet and Comte, these different stages of thought correlate with stages of social organization. According to Comte, a theological regime typically establishes an alliance between the ecclesiastical caste and an aggressive military, as priests give legitimacy to the warriors by whom they are in turn protected and obeyed. (This alliance plays a major role in Condorcet’s history.) In a metaphysical stage, legists and lawyers carry out the ideals formulated by philosophers, and the military shifts from an

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offensive to a defensive posture. Finally, in the positive era, accurate knowledge of the world gained by scientists will replace belief and opinion, and the military form of organizing external affairs will give way to peaceful relations based on trade. Moreover, in Comte’s holistic understanding of society, each of the parts functions in accord with the others, in a way analogous to the complementary functioning of parts in organisms. Comte often argues that the life of the individual recapitulates the stages of life of the species, not only in biological development but also in social, intellectual, and moral history, and, most significantly, in the subordination of passion and personal instincts to reason and the social faculties.18 At least, this is his view at the time of writing the Course of Positive Philosophy; in the Positive Polity he restores emotions to a position of greater authority in the reconstituted religion he envisages. In both cases, he draws his fundamental metaphors and similes for society and history from his understanding of the organic world. Comte diverges from Condorcet on some important issues. For Condorcet, the appearance of priests constituted the first instance of the duping and subordination of some men by others, whereas, for Comte, the appearance of a priestly class marks an achievement, the first separation of man from material necessity. Condorcet believes that, having throughout history served as the agents of superstition and obscurantism, priests should have no place in the society of the future, whereas, for Comte, the first class of thinkers is synonymous with the first class of priests. Moreover, Comte believes that, because Christianity has lost its moral authority, a new religion with its own priesthood will be required to secure order and meaning in the future.19 Still, the views of Condorcet and Comte are striking for their shared orientation toward that future. Comte strongly defends Condorcet’s concluding vision in the Sketch for a Historical Picture: “Condorcet has been reproached for daring to conclude his work with a picture of the future. This bold conception is, on the contrary, the only philosophical perspective of great importance that Condorcet introduced in carrying out his work” (Positive Polity, 4:118). Comte criticizes Condorcet for having lost his way in speculating about the indefinite perfectibility of the human species (Positive Philosophy, 2:201); however, Comte, like Condorcet, foresees the necessary and beneficent rise to power of scientific technocrats, ministers in the science of social engineering, who will formulate and execute social

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policies. Comte’s works thus provide detailed and acknowledged evidence of his indebtedness to Condorcet and to the form of conjectural history that he employed in the Sketch for a Historical Picture. Further signs of the influence of the Enlightenment conjectural histories appear in almost all of Comte’s works. For example, he makes an exception for Adam Smith when he critiques political economists who respond to all crises with cries of “No regulation” and “The market will work everything out” (Positive Philosophy, 2:203–7).20 When he introduces positivism and sociology as the means of overcoming the intellectual anarchy of the long revolutionary transition, Comte cites as his most important predecessors after Condorcet the “Scottish school,” naming Hume and Smith. He recognizes Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1738) for the boldness and originality of its dismantling of the notion of causation (a foundational analysis for Comte, who grounds positivism and science in a renunciation of the search for supernatural causes). When he discusses Smith, he cites the “able survey . . . of the sciences, and of astronomy particularly, in which he approaches even nearer than his friend Hume to the true sense of rational positivity” (2:270). Comte here cites Smith’s conjectural histories of astronomy and of early languages (see introduction) as signally important precursors for his own distinctive doctrines of historical development—the Law of the Three Stages and the Law of the Sequence of the Sciences. “It gratifies me,” he writes, “to record here my special gratitude to these two eminent thinkers, whose influence was very useful to my early philosophical education, before I discovered the great law which necessarily guided it from that time forward” (2:270). Almost alone among social thinkers of the nineteenth century, Comte explicitly and unambiguously acknowledges the influence of conjectural history on his own thought. Comte appends to the System of Positive Polity a Library of Positivism, which consists of a list of required readings for positivists. The culminating section of that list, “Synthetic Works”—a list that begins with the Bible and the Koran, includes the works of Bacon and Descartes, and concludes with Comte’s own Course of Positive Philosophy and System of Positive Polity—also makes Smith’s founding conjectural history of astronomy part of the canon, as well as Hume’s Political Essays, which include the conjectural historical essay “On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.”21

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Comte’s high regard for conjectural history also appears in his Positivist calendar, which formed part of his new religion of humanity in the Positivist Catechism (1852).22 In this calendar, comprising thirteen twenty-eightday months, the names of heroes of the mind and the spirit, both secular and religious, replace the names of the saints associated with their feast days. Comte retains the form of the ecclesiastical calendar, although he radically alters the content to produce, in effect, a serious parody of the form. The last week in the tenth month—the month named Descartes and devoted to heroes of modern philosophy and history—contains days assigned to more than half of the Enlightenment conjectural historians: Hume, Smith, Kant, and Condorcet are all commemorated every year; Ferguson earns a place as an alternate for leap year. One day is named Vico, and Herder serves as an alternate. Comte was not only well acquainted with these thinkers; he was also aware of the distinctive historical form they employed. Observing that Condorcet carried Montesquieu’s investigations further, in order to determine the “successive developments of the human species,” Comte considers, in the same category, “the efforts undertaken in England during the preceding century to perfect the writing of history, by giving it an explanatory or scientific character instead of the descriptive or literary one it had previously. In Germany, the works of Kant and Herder on the philosophy of history . . . display the general tendency of our century toward positive doctrines in politics” (Positive Polity, 4:157). Comte praises the conjectural histories of Herder and Kant for advancing historical thought, along with the conjectural and philosophical histories of Hume, Ferguson, and Robertson (although he mistakenly places these Scotsmen in England). Despite the apparent contradiction, the Enlightenment conjectural historians, in Comte’s view, are foundational for his positivist philosophy of history. In fact, the Course of Positive Philosophy and the third volume of the System of Positive Polity constitute a revised and expanded conjectural history that provides an account of the forms of human thought, from the earliest period to Comte’s own time and into the future. Like most of the Enlightenment conjectural histories, these two works divide all human history into three stages: in Comte’s universal narrative, the theological, metaphysical, and positive stages succeed each other, as savagery, barbarism, and civilization constitute a universal sequence in most of the earlier histories. Comte’s argument for a natural progression of forms of thought

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parallels the arguments of the conjectural historians working from psychological plausibility. For example, in the Natural History of Religion (1757) Hume maintained that, in the natural order of religious forms, animism and polytheism must have preceded monotheistic systems; similarly, Ferguson traced the characteristic features of societies from the barbarian to the excessively civilized in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). In addition to this general conformity of the whole project to the form of a speculative history, we can locate several self-contained conjectural histories in both of Comte’s major works; such parts occupy the same place in Comte’s works as the first book in Malthus’s Principle of Population (2nd ed., 1803) and Mill’s preface to his Principles of Political Economy (1848). Comte’s conjectural histories particularly concern developments under the historical regime of fetishism, which figures in the Course of Positive Philosophy as the presiding form of belief when some of the fundamental advances in human social life took place: “It was in primitive fetichistic [sic] times, that men learned to associate with tamed animals, to use fire, to employ mechanical forces, and even to effect some kind of commerce” (Positive Philosophy, 3:16). Comte does not claim to know all the mechanisms involved, but he is willing to speculate in the necessary conditional past tense: “As agricultural life was certainly instituted before fetichism passed away, it is clear that there must be in fetichism something favorable to the change.” He considers the highest form of fetishism to be worship of the stars, taking this belief to conform to a settled, agricultural way of life, because “agricultural peoples must fix their speculative attention upon the heavenly bodies.” In addition, by worshipping the spirits in certain favored species of animal and vegetable life, fetishism led to the domestication of both. In opposition to Condorcet, who viewed the emergence of religion and social hierarchy as the result of a conspiratorial manipulation by the first priests, Comte asserts that “theological theories must have governed the social and political meditations” of men at the time (3:21–23; all italics mine). When Comte returns to the subject a decade later in the System of Positive Polity, in another speculative ten-page account of that early period, his catalog of the accomplishments under fetishism includes more specifics and even more clearly justifies respect for that system. In this section, the necessary past is subsumed under a generally valid assertion of what fetishism is, partly because Comte is now more aware of the existence of

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fetishists in Africa and of the contribution he foresees them making in the transition to positivism.23 Partly, too, Comte wants to contrast the achievements of the fetishistic stage, the earliest period of religious life, with the inadequacies of monotheism, its latest form before the establishment of the Religion of Humanity.24 Comte begins the System of Positive Polity by tracing steps in the early development of language, both gestural and vocal, up to the threshold of alphabetic writing. He discusses accomplishments in poetry, dance, and sculpture that fall into this period, including the accurate and closely observed visual depictions of animals.25 He asserts that we owe the taming of animals to fetishists whose knowledge and brotherly understanding of animals enabled them to make certain species our companions and associates. Fetishism also gave us the arts that help us satisfy our most basic needs—the use of fire for cooking and heat, sewing for clothes, and architecture for shelter. The family took shape at this time, along with the practice of adoption, which was used with slavery to compensate partially for losses incurred in almost constant war. In addition, sedentary communities with fixed settlements make their first appearance in this stage. Only late in the period does a distinct priesthood emerge, following the formal worship of the stars; all the earlier accomplishments precede priestly influence. Finally, under fetishism, collective ownership of the soil for hunting or pasturage begins to be supplemented by a form of collective farming in which the tribe turns over parts of its domain for some years, without rent, to families wishing to cultivate them. Thus, a number of steps must have intervened before the complete institution of individual private property. Comte uses this example to criticize those who, like Rousseau, assume that human beings moved in one leap from recognizing no property to accepting the modern form of personal property. He also uses this entire conjectural history to contrast fetishism with monotheism and polytheism, to assert a strong affinity between fetishism and Positivism, and to claim that, as a consequence, fetishistic nations will be more likely to adopt Positivism than will peoples who have been corrupted by the metaphysical tenets of theism.26 Having defended Condorcet’s venture into future history, Comte devotes the final volume of the System of Positive Polity (vol. 4) to his vision of the future. This 500-page volume sketches some principal elements of the social and political order after the Positivist Religion of Humanity has

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been accepted, but it focuses more on the specifics of the transition from the current late metaphysical regime to a Positivist society. Comte returns to the argument that positivism will be able to incorporate the essentials of fetishism, while overcoming metaphysics and other forms of theology, primarily because of the predominant role played by feeling in fetishism and Positivism, as opposed to the elevation of intellect in metaphysics. Indeed, a strange subordination of reason to affect characterizes Comte’s exposition of his social thought in the System of Positive Polity. To take the most consequential example, Comte assumes throughout his work that unity of belief produces benefits and pluralism causes harm, although he never makes an argument for this position. He asserts that order must be chosen over anarchy, even if portions of the platform of order are “retrograde.” But it might be, as Mill would later maintain in On Liberty (1859), that the greatest possible degree of individual choice and freedom of action allows for the greatest degree of human flourishing, whereas the pursuit of order as the first priority necessarily entails external constraints and suppression of human capacities. Indeed, repression figures prominently in the Positive polity, both under the transitional rule of the benevolent dictator that Comte anticipates and under the permanent leadership of a triumvirate of ministers (from agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce). Comte advocates the closing of all colleges and universities, and the demise of journalism. The loss of his position at the École Polytechnique may help explain, though not justify, the first of these measures. Comte argues that universities only serve to give employment to mediocre, unoriginal minds, but his alternative—having the Positive priesthood issue occasional pamphlets to explain its actions—hardly seems to encourage intellectual development. As for the elimination of journalism, Comte insists that there will be complete freedom of the press under the dictatorship, but the priesthood’s pamphlets and posters, being free, will quickly drive conventional newspapers and periodicals out of business. The same end will be served by a revival of weekly salons and, through them, the dissemination of Sociocratic policies. However, in addition to anticipating the need for such repressive measures, Comte works out a theory of utopias that enables him to anticipate the direction that technological and moral developments may take. He argues that utopias do not need to be literally or completely realized or practicable in order to produce their beneficial effect; they may formulate

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a set of desiderata for a better constitution of society, articulating the improved condition as a goal, or serving to anticipate the better state (Positive Polity, 4:275).27 So, for example, Comte introduces his Utopia for Women through a critique of Malthus’s principle of population: by appealing to the certainties of mathematics, Malthus produced a false sense of an iron law at work in his theory, “veiling its metaphysical and empirical character under a varnish of science” (4:278). But Malthus failed to take into account two strong contrary trends. According to one, species decrease in fecundity as they rise higher in the scale of beings. In addition, and in confirmation, although human well-being has increased over the past three millennia, there has been no explosion of population among those whose existence has become more comfortable and secure. In fact, Comte observes, as people become more prosperous members of a middle class, the size of their families tends to decline, not to increase geometrically as Malthus’s theory would have it. However, to ensure that his polity does not suffer from overpopulation, and to raise the standing of women, Comte provides that, in the Positivist future, women will themselves be able to decide whether and when they will become mothers, by using the male “vivifying liquid” without the male participating. This procedure of artificial insemination will allow women to realize “the utopia of the Middle Ages when maternity was compatible with virginity” (Positive Polity, 4:276–79). He anticipates that this form of reproduction will be the preferred choice among the patricians, those of a nobler nature, who would still marry for spiritual companionship.28 The workers or “proletariat” will continue to reproduce in the old way, and even the nobler natures will not be forbidden from having sex once or twice in their lives.29 Like Condorcet, Comte proves farsighted in his conjectural history of the future, not only in his critique of Malthus’s supposedly iron law and in his plan to empower women by decreasing unplanned pregnancies; he also makes clear and forceful arguments against colonialism and imperialism. His call for Sociocracy to end British domination of India might be dismissed as a product of his animus against England and Protestantism (he often refers to Catholic countries as having “escaped” Protestantism), but it is consistent with his anticolonialism generally. He writes that France will have to withdraw all of its troops from Algeria, ending an occupation that was engineered by war hysteria to distract the French from their own

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political dissatisfactions (Positive Polity, 4:471). Any French who want to remain he would leave to their own devices. He also calls for the independence of Corsica and, in one of the more impressive signs of the moral imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, he announces that in his future polity, which he believes will be established by 1900, all the islands of the Caribbean will need to be handed over to the descendants of African slaves in the Americas, with some indemnities for loss of property by European Americans (4:520). Comte’s vision of the conjectural, future stage of human society—following the long-lived theological phase and the transitional metaphysical period—thus combines widely divergent ideological impulses. The Positive state rejects a failed Christianity, and yet its new religion is clearly patterned on Catholicism—from its secular saints’ days to its cult of virgin mothers and its corps of philosopher-priests, who have been schooled not in the writings of the “charlatan” Plato but in the thought of the founder and first high priest of the Religion of Humanity, Comte himself. The form of the religion is little changed, although the meaning and function have been transformed dramatically. In the economic realm, the new society will be structured like medieval Europe, with a ruling class of capitalist lords or patricians and a vast class of proletarians and plebeians. On the other hand, laborers will have the right to form trade unions and to strike for better treatment, as long as they do so nonviolently; if they and the capitalists cannot come to an agreement, the Sociocratic priests will step in to serve as mediators. Political entities such as nation-states will be dismantled: France will be divided into seventeen republics, Europe into seventy, and the world into five hundred. However, a contrary principle of centralizing power will apply in the small republics: each will be ruled by a triumvirate of capitalist ministers who will appoint their own successors, subject to confirmation by popular vote (a system close to that which prevailed for almost a century after the Mexican Revolution). In Comte’s thought, history exhibits a progressive impulse that finds its determining shape in the intellectual realm, producing in a logical order a series of distinct religious forms and knowledge of scientific laws. Humans made a huge first step early in the theological period—with fetishism the dominant worldview, they brought fire under control, domesticated animals and plants, and developed language. The only comparable advance

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in history is occurring in Comte’s own time—the transformation of metaphysical thought by his own new Positivist ideological and social order. But this bracketing of history by world-changing shifts does not mean that the course of progress has been uniform and uninterrupted. In particular, after the high point of monotheism in medieval Christendom, centuries of intellectual and moral disintegration ensued, to be ended only when failing monotheisms are replaced by the Religion of Humanity and excessive rationality is replaced by a system based on feeling. In this sense, the Positive polity represents a fetishism that has been restored after having conquered the realm of the exact sciences. Sociocracy also resembles a feudal order in which landed gentry have been replaced by capitalist barons, a movement toward a capitalist feudalism characteristic of Thomas Carlyle’s thought in Past and Present (1843) and elsewhere. Comte’s new religion repeats the formal features of Catholicism, but without any reference to Christ.30 As Nietzsche would later observe, the social and religious forms are somewhat fluid, but their meaning and function are even more so (see discussion in chapter 5). In a final and salient paradox, Comte formulated the positivist doctrine of the supremacy of the simple fact, and yet he used the theoretical space opened up by the form of conjectural history in order to do so; he employed a speculative form in order to move into a realm of certainty beyond speculation. s p en cer and s o c i al e vo lu ti o ni sm

Like some of the conjectural historians, Comte and Spencer believed that the time of the effective preeminence of Christianity and other theistic religions has passed. Unlike most of the earlier historians, however, these two early sociological thinkers anticipated the need for a new religion based on science as a source of moral authority. Spencer’s thought is related to the earlier form of conjectural history in a number of other ways, even though he does not acknowledge the affiliation between his work and that of his predecessors. The method and argument in the Principles of Sociology, in fact, closely parallel the formal and conceptual structure of the conjectural histories. Much of the work is concerned with the early forms and development of the family, property, a military corps, and other social institutions. Moreover, Spencer, like the conjectural historians and like Comte, conceives of society as an organic whole, and even

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more, as an organism, drawing attention to the coherence of the parts as they function together as a system. At its most general—excessively general—point, after hundreds of pages focusing on specific illustrations of parallels between organs and social functions, between organisms and societies, this principle takes the form of asserting that “All kinds of creatures are alike in so far as each exhibits co-operation among its components for the benefit of the whole; and this trait, common to them, is a trait common also to societies.”31 In addition, like many conjectural historians, Spencer argues that the unpredictable effects of unplanned individual activity can be beneficial, while regulation and planning will almost always produce results opposed to what was intended. For example, he cites Taine and de Tocqueville to argue that, in the years preceding the French Revolution, an excessive bureaucratic regulation of citizens’ actions made ordinary life “impracticable”: the regulators of that day “contemplated only the effects of particular interferences on the actions of particular classes of men, and ignored the effects produced by a multiplicity of such interferences on the lives of men at large.”32 Finally, Spencer understood social history as a developmental process in which tightly knit, interrelated institutions, proving themselves fit, evolved through such unregulated activity toward greater complexity and greater interdependence, and away from the practices of war and empire. Two stadial schemes inform Spencer’s sociological thought. One of these is based on the contrast between what he calls the military and the industrial forms of social organization. This contrast parallels Comte’s distinction between the same terminal stages, although Comte adds a third, transitional stage (associated with the metaphysical form of thought), when the military organization shifts from an offensive to a defensive mode. The other set of stages in Spencer’s case derives from the difference between a single and a compound (or doubly compound) society. A single society is a tribal, relatively homogeneous society, without permanent hierarchical divisions; a compound society has incorporated different gradations, powers, even beliefs into its own structure, through conquest or internal divisions—and a doubly compound society has incorporated other societies several times. This criterion for stages of social development expands on the conjectural work of John Millar in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771).

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Both of these ways of describing stages of social organization—from military to industrial, and from simple to compound—depend on a progressive, evolutionary conception of history that Spencer finds to be at work also in inorganic natural processes.33 Both exemplify what he believes to be the single, overriding principle of evolution throughout the universe: the movement from simple and homogeneous to complex and heterogeneous forms of matter and of life. The earlier, simple stage of society is characterized by a small population that is almost undifferentiated by occupation, role, and status; the later, compound societies show increasingly wide and numerous divisions of labor and distinctions of rank. In addition to biologists such as Bichat, who argued for increasing differentiation of organic forms, all the conjectural historians who observed and analyzed the importance of the division of labor and the growth of roles, occupations, and ranks in human society constituted important predecessors for Spencer’s thinking in this regard—not only Millar but also Smith, in the Wealth of Nations, and Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society. Although the stages that Spencer employs do not conform exactly to those of the conjectural historians, he presumes the most widespread division into periods, as established by Ferguson: the distinctions among savage, barbarian, and civilized periods of society.34 In Social Statics, his first work of social theory, Spencer makes a programmatic statement that seems to exclude conjectural history on methodological grounds. He rules out any need to go back to an imaginary state of nature in search of foundational social principles.35 However, Spencer criticizes Locke’s theory that mixing our labor with natural products gives us a property in them. Spencer will argue to the contrary, that there is no legitimacy to assertions of private property in land. Moreover, Spencer takes issue with the thesis of social contract theory that society came into existence as a result of a compact among early humans. Rather, he asserts that not only the original appearance of society but all later developments and advances have taken place as the unplanned results of human actions directed to other, more limited and more selfish ends. Spencer takes to task Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau for asserting that society is founded on a contract. Against Locke, he asserts that “the circumstances of savage life render the principles of abstract morality inapplicable” (Social Statics, 146). Before society, people did not—could not—gather together to decide how to protect property that they did not yet possess. As

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opposed to Rousseau’s argument, in the Social Contract (1762), for a comparably conscious moment of social formation, Spencer asserts, “It is not true that once upon a time, men said, ‘Let there be law’ ” (Social Statics, 290). Spencer situates himself outside the natural law tradition, which, he implies, merely replaces divine fiat with a human fiat. Spencer’s argument here accords with the conjectural historical view of social developments as the unplanned and unintended result of human actions directed toward survival or immediate ends. Unlike Comte, who throughout his career recognized Condorcet’s importance as a thinker, Spencer did not acknowledge his predecessors willingly, and he repeatedly asserted his independence from Comte.36 In his later works, he refers to some of his near contemporaries whose thought has a place in the line of conjectural histories. Still, he occasionally refers to Ferguson, as in the Study of Sociology (1872),37 and he often implicitly refers to Smith. These appear to have been his closest antecedents among the conjectural historians, if one considers the importance of the division of labor and the three-stage history of society, but he also shares with these thinkers an emphasis on the unforeseeable and beneficent results of actions undertaken in the pursuit of self-interest. Smith’s notion of the invisible hand that turns selfish behavior to the general good was sufficiently well known. Ferguson explains even more emphatically the way human behavior establishes results that could not have been predicted: “Mankind, in following the present sense of their minds, in striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, and pass on, like other animals, in the track of their nature, without perceiving its end.”38 Similarly, Spencer argues in the Study of Sociology and the Principles of Sociology that the establishment of institutions, progress in thought, and improvements in the material conditions of life do not result from planning. The division of labor, for example, develops from “mutual facilitations in living. Each new specialization of industry arises from the effort of one who commences it to get profit; and establishes itself by conducing in some way to the profit of others. So that there is a kind of concerted action, with an elaborate social organization developed by it, which does not originate in deliberate concert.” In the development of such relations, “public ends . . . are not thought of ” (Principles of Sociology, 182).

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Most often, when conjectural historians such as Smith and Ferguson treat this topic, they stress the positive results that follow from the lack of conscious design, the replacement of providence by the incalculable sum of individual intentions. Spencer, however, goes much further than the conjectural historians in insisting explicitly and unrelentingly on the converse—the restrictions and losses that result from attempts to plan for and establish progress. He argues that virtually any attempt to improve conditions or increase equity in a society through legislative or other deliberate means will at best fail and will most likely prove counterproductive. Although he concedes that a little altruism can be a good thing, “beyond that point, it curses giver and receiver—physically deteriorates the one and morally deteriorates the other” (Study, 185). For Spencer, the need for egoism outweighs the need for altruism in any society; the intention to do good usually recoils and proves to be a curse. When governments and charitable organizations pursue such plans, their interventions constitute the most wrongheaded and counterproductive form of social action. Spencer asserts almost obsessively, in the essays collected in The Man Versus the State (1884) and in the final volume of Principles of Sociology, that all organized efforts at alleviating suffering and reducing economic injustice will cause far more harm than the good they project. He holds that this argument applies not only to government-funded welfare programs and regulations to protect consumers’ health and safety but also to efforts to support and improve public education: “Legislators who in 1833 voted £20,000 a year to aid in building school-houses, never supposed that the step they then took would lead to forced contributions, local and general, now amounting to £6,000,000; they did not intend to establish the principle that A should be made responsible for educating B’s offspring; they did not dream of a compulsion which would deprive poor widows of the help of their elder children.”39 In these essays, he echoes Malthus’s arguments against governmental efforts to relieve the poor, as well as Ferguson’s emphasis on the importance of struggle and the exertion of energies for the survival and advancement of social orders.40 Convinced that evolutionary progress has taken place throughout the organic and inorganic realm and that it will continue to do so, Spencer holds that the moral condition of his society will improve inevitably, but only slowly, and apart from conscious efforts in that direction. There is a natural rate of progress that cannot be accelerated by, for

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example, education (Social Statics, 383–84). Attempts to educate children of workers and the poor will therefore have no effect, and the expense will be a waste of ratepayers’ money. Spencer’s dystopian vision of government regulators making concerted efforts to protect the health and welfare of the nonpropertied finds a complement in his utopian vision of the state to which the gradual evolutionary process is carrying the human species. This goal takes the form of a society in which war has given way entirely to the peaceful pursuit of trade and industry, in which there is no need for jails and education because there will be no criminals and no ignorant people (see, e.g., Social Statics, 209). The horrors of imperialism will have disappeared, along with conflicts between states; in fact, states and governments also will have disappeared, because they will have become superfluous. In other words, like Condorcet and Comte, Spencer foresees a final stage in the development of social forms, in which all the problems that characterize earlier stages are resolved and the previously ineluctable process ceases to produce change. Spencer’s end state differs from those of Condorcet and Comte in that it is not brought about by developments in science or advances in technology. Rather, the mere absence of interference will allow the force of self-interest to produce universal peace and prosperity (although, on the way to this developed world, all the “inferior races” of dark-skinned “savages” will have to be killed or will die out). The result constitutes, in contrast with the dream of Comte, a libertarian’s dream, in which the pursuit of rational self-interest and an absolutely unfettered market spontaneously produce the greatest harmony. Spencer also resembles the conjectural historians in his emphasis on the parallel between the differentiation of functions and structures in human societies and in other organic forms. This is one of the few subjects on which he gives credit to his predecessors, citing Ferguson for his recognition that human beings are social creatures (contra Rousseau), and Comte for seeing the extensive parallels and overlap between the fields of biology and sociology (Study, 328–29). Thus, for example, Spencer argues that, like the most primitive protoplasm, “primitive tribes show no established contrast of parts” (331). As social aggregates increase in size, they become more unlike, with parts devoted to different functions. Survival in social organizations, as in individual creatures, is only made possible by the dependence of each part on all others; the weapon maker depends on the hunter

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to supply him with meat. As the individual organism and the social group become larger and more complex, a more efficient system must be set up to convey the material products of different parts to one another. The function performed by a vascular system in an organism parallels the function performed by the mechanisms of trade in a social group (332–34). At a certain point, a regulatory or governing agency emerges, both in the organism and in the society. Spencer carries this analogy to such an extreme in the Principles of Sociology that, over the course of several hundred pages, each chapter traces a different way in which a principle of development in the organic world parallels a stage of social development. For example, just as societies divide first into two principal classes and then develop a third and mediating class that helps distribute material between the other two, so too coelenterate animals, after dividing into a body wall and an alimentary cavity, develop a third part consisting of blood vessels and a pump that distributes material between the parts of the organism: “In both individual and social organisms, after the outer and inner systems have been marked off from one another, there begins to arise a third system, lying between the two and facilitating their co-operation. Mutual dependence of the primarilycontrasted parts, implies intermediation” (Principles of Sociology, 54). Spencer thus pursues an obsessively literal and baroque elaboration of the widespread metaphor of society as an organism, present in a more moderate form in the Enlightenment conjectural histories and throughout the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The flaws and illogicalities of Spencer’s thought emerge when he extends the principles of biology literally into sociology and considers the results of attempts to affect or ameliorate the consequence of biological processes of adaptation in human society. If “legislators and philanthropists” succeed, for example, in improving sanitary conditions or reducing the deadliness of a disease, then, Spencer argues, the result will be “a somewhat larger number of a somewhat weaker race” (Study, 340). He asserts that the worthy preserve themselves by undergoing difficulties and surviving challenges; conversely, “removal of certain difficulties and dangers which have to be met by intelligence and activity, is followed by a decreased ability to meet difficulties and dangers” (344). Spencer equates the unworthy and the weak with the poor, who he believes must be allowed to die off so that the prosperous and strong can continue the progress of the race to higher levels of

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intelligence and skill. However, even by Spencer’s criteria, this principle is logically inverted; it actually proves the opposite of what Spencer believes it to prove. The offspring of the rich and successful do not face difficulties that challenge them to develop their fortitude and intelligence, whereas the children of the poor must exercise their mental and physical abilities to the utmost in the harsh struggle to survive. By the terms of Spencer’s argument, it is the children of the rich, protected from difficulties and dangers, who will grow to adulthood without having to overcome challenges and who are thus more likely to be feeble, unintelligent, and unenterprising.41 Spencer single-mindedly overlooks this necessary implication of his thought throughout the half century of his publishing career.42 As is evident in this passage, a strong willfulness characterizes Spencer’s way of arguing; he will take almost any available argument to support his theory, without regard to its other implications. This proclivity did not escape Darwin, who, in his Autobiography, criticized Spencer’s entirely deductive mode of argumentation, free of any observations that might challenge, test, and strengthen his thesis.43 As we will see in chapter 5, Darwin could make extraordinary use of conjectural and theoretical reasoning, but he always tried to pursue his hypotheses through observation and induction. In a letter to his close friend Joseph Hooker, Darwin says ironically of Spencer: “When I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved.”44 As Derek Freeman points out, there is no doubt, considering the context and the friendship between Darwin and Hooker, who shared the same opinion of Spencer, that Darwin is not complimenting Spencer for the extraordinary effort he put into “wriggling” out of logical difficulties rather than submitting himself to the discipline of observing more.45 However, Spencer’s insistent focus on the continuity between organic principles and social organization can at times produce less-compromised results. For instance, Spencer stresses that social facts must be studied over long durations, not only in relation to the present. When the longer view is adopted, one can make out the persistence of social forms— tools, customs, languages—in changed circumstances. Latin continued to be used in Roman Catholic services for a millennium after it ceased to be spoken outside liturgical contexts; the sacred flame of the Hindus had to be produced by friction, although that method was no longer employed in everyday contexts (Study, 107). Although Spencer does not make this

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comparison, the surviving social forms resemble vestigial organs or structures in a natural organism. In such cases, a practice that had extended throughout society came to be confined to a sacred context. The practice remained the same, although its meaning changed from profane and practical to sacred and symbolic. This pattern of persistence of form through change in function has been called the “doctrine of survivals,” although Spencer was not the first to formulate the idea. J. F. McLennan and E. B. Tylor both proposed studying the survivals of social forms as indicators of early states of society, and Tylor made extensive use of this method in Primitive Culture (1871) (see chapter 4).46 Furthermore, Darwin, in the Origin of Species (1859), and Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morality (1887), explored how a biological organ and/or a social institution could acquire altered functions and meanings in the long history of life and society (see chapter 5). Nietzsche and Darwin go far beyond conceiving of “survivals” as relics of an earlier time, understanding the persistence of forms as the result of an ongoing appropriation and reappropriation of them for quite different purposes. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, the forms may evolve, but the purposes to which they are put tend to alter more quickly. Although Spencer’s understanding of survivals does not approach this degree of complexity, he does use the concept to sharply critique imperialism as a holdover from an earlier, more military stage. In a striking and atypically satiric six-page imagined report from the future about the English of the nineteenth century, Spencer imagines an observer noting inconsistencies between the Christian doctrine of forgiveness and love that the English professed and the course of action that they followed. Being anxious to proselytize for this creed that they professed but did not practice, the English sent men to other parts of the world, where, when they encountered the resistance of one sect (in India, during the Rebellion of 1857), they exemplified the “gentle precepts of their faith” by taking fifty rebels who had surrendered and, “without any trial, blew them from the guns, as they called it—tied them to the mouths of cannon and shattered their bodies to pieces” (Study, 142). Spencer’s unaccustomed but powerful use of irony and satire here not only raises the question of who is civilized but also compels the answer that the grotesque and goodhumored atrocities of the English define them as the true and bloodyhanded savages.47 In the acts of empire, Spencer’s observation of the

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survival of an aggressive military ethos from an earlier social state carries a strong charge of moral condemnation.48 Most indicative of his relation to the Enlightenment conjectural thinkers, Spencer relies on the same sources and methods that the eighteenthcentury historians used: he read numerous European narratives of travel as well as classical and contemporaneous ethnographic accounts of peoples, which offered evidence of life in the tribal stage. He concentrates, throughout the Principles of Sociology, primarily on transitions between the earliest stage and the second stage of political, economic, and ecclesiastical organization, between what he terms the tribal and the supertribal conditions of social life—a shift on which the conjectural historians also focused much of their attention. On the basis of his readings, he inferred or speculated concerning what must have occurred, and which transitional, mediating states would have intervened in order to bring about the shift to the later, larger, more hierarchical society. In the Principles of Sociology, Spencer usually proceeds by describing a transition in a general introductory passage of anywhere from a short paragraph to a few pages, and follows that conjectural description of the earlier stage(s) with a list of specific cultures whose history and customs provide evidence for the thesis he is advancing. Thus, he argues that, in the very early stage of society, tribes that were organized entirely along military lines possessed an advantage in the struggle for existence over tribes that were not so constituted. Subordination of individuals to a central authority, the existence of a military chief, many gradations of status, and compulsory cooperation all contributed to producing a society that was a fighting machine, with a strong chance of survival and a resistance to change (Principles of Sociology, 500–509).49 He then illustrates this militant type of society, using as examples the people of Dahomey, in West Africa; the Incas of South America; the Russians; the ancient Romans; and the modern Prussians and British (509–23). Without choosing peoples from the same period or even the same stage of development, without distinguishing differences among those chosen, Spencer surveys societies from around the world to convey a sense that the empirical evidence for his inductions is global. This kind of argument depends on what George Stocking calls, in relation to James Frazer’s method, the use of evidence from the Amongthas: “Among the Dahomey . . . ,” “Among the Incas . . . ,” and so forth.50

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In considering another transition—the rise of a separate priesthood— Spencer cites a wide sample of societies in their earliest stages, and of tribal people, including New Zealanders and people of Madagascar; Chinook and Bolivian Indians; Mayans and Incas; Javanese, Chinese, and Japanese; Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks; and ancient Scandinavians. Among all of these peoples, he says, the patriarch “ceases to have the three-fold character of domestic, political, and ecclesiastical head” but remains ruler and priest. At this early stage, all felt the need to propitiate the ghost of the departed heads of families, so there was no distinction between the chief and the head priest. However, as the chief ’s influence grows, other people, often younger brothers or other members of his family, are assigned different functions, which had originally been united in one man. “With increase of a chief ’s territory, there comes an accumulation of business which necessitates the employment of assistants; whence follows the habit of frequently, and at length permanently, deputing one or other of his functions, such as general, judge, etc. Among the functions thus deputed, more or less frequently, is that of priest” (Principles of Sociology, 580). Again, Spencer provides a list of examples, which includes the early Romans, the Mexicans, the Khonds in India, the Tahitians, the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians, the Dahomans, and the Inca. Finally, he notes that the same result may be produced not only by expansion of one tribe but by “the spread of a conquering tribe, and the establishment of its members as rulers over subordinate tribes,” along with “local ministrations of the cult it brings with it” (585).51 As Spencer produces similar lists of sources and inferences concerning the development of military, ecclesiastical, commercial, and educational institutions, it becomes clear that he is using the method employed by the earliest anthropological works of the 1860s, such as McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865) and Tylor’s Primitive Culture, which are themselves strongly influenced by speculative history (see chapter 4).52 We can see the sources, the narrative arc, and the intellectual procedure and method of conjectural history underlying and helping to shape Spencer’s sociological writings. Such methodological parallels testify to the proximity of early sociology and anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century—before the practice of fieldwork with its intensive and long-term focus on a single small, non-European society began to characterize anthropology, and before the study of conditions in modern Euro-American society came to define sociology. Perhaps more importantly for this study, Spencer’s method in the

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Principles of Sociology gives evidence of a characteristic paradox. It is the only one of his works on sociology to be structured as a historical narrative—describing the emergence of social institutions such as a priesthood, ranks, property, and so on. In fact, Spencer’s thought is imbued with historical time; it is always concerned with making statements about the nature, rate, and direction of historical developments and of transitions between social stages. His grand narrative of the evolutionary progress of the species accords with his even grander narrative of the evolution of life and of the cosmos. On the other hand, when he lists, as he repeatedly does, instances of a social form or development among the Japanese, the Khonds, the Tahitians, the Romans, the Russians, the Mayans, the Dahomans, or the ancient Assyrians and Scandinavians, he flattens out all differences among these extraordinarily disparate societies.53 These societies range from tribes without writing to nations and empires with written laws, literature, and elaborate bureaucracies. The number and reliability of the sources on which Spencer must rely also differ widely from one group to another: on the Khonds and Dahomans, he refers to fewer than a handful of sources, mostly travelers or missionaries, while for the Romans and the Greeks he can mine thousands of volumes of writings by historians, epic poets, philosophers, and legislators. But Spencer does not distinguish among his sources according to their reliability; all are introduced with variations of the same formula: “Among the Mayans, . . . the ancient Scandinavians, . . . the Chinese. . . .” In fact, Spencer displays little of the ability required of a good historian: to evaluate his sources and to give credence to or question the credibility of their reports in proportion to the authority they merit. His method is at once suffused with history and deeply unhistorical.54 As already noted, Spencer is chary in referring to his predecessors among the Enlightenment conjectural historians. However, he refers explicitly to the works of two of his near contemporaries who themselves wrote in the line of conjectural history. The most important of these is Henry Maine, whom Spencer cites on dozens of occasions in the Principles of Sociology. Maine asserted that Roman law provided evidence for a widespread transition from a society based on status to one based on contract (see chapter 6). In addition, like Tylor, Spencer adopts the thesis that ancestor worship, religion, and a priesthood originated in the fear of ghosts (Principles of Sociology, 446, 579; see chapter 4).

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In Spencer’s understanding of history, an inevitable though gradual evolutionary development leads all organisms—including, especially, human beings and their societies—to a progress that consists of greater differentiation of form and function. Spencer’s emphasis on the unplanned nature of all beneficial social change leads him to adopt a philosophical anarchism early in his career, and even to question the right of property in land, not only in Social Statics but also as late as the Principles of Sociology (487). However, it also leads him to oppose any efforts to ameliorate the condition of the unpropertied or to reduce the number of deaths from starvation and disease. Despite such extreme confidence in the impersonal and unstoppable nature of progress, Spencer does occasionally acknowledge that improvement will not necessarily always pursue a linear course free of setbacks. He maintains that historical progress results from an always-present tension between a radical perspective, which attempts to realize the ideal state and the ideal man, and a conservative position, which defends coercive institutions and customs that persist from the state of savagery and barbarism (e.g., Principles of Sociology, 499–501). Spencer thus takes a small step toward Nietzsche’s argument that the ethos and values of the knightly aristocrats have not entirely died out after more than two thousand years of struggle against the newer morals of Christianity and democracy. The two thinkers identify the principal value systems in the history of human society in similar ways, and they are both radical individualists and enemies of socialism, although their own allegiances are diametrically opposed. Spencer admires modern capitalists and is committed to the teleological triumph of the peaceful state that he associates with individual selfinterest, whereas Nietzsche is attracted to knightly aristocrats, castigates the moral weakness of the moderns, and calls for an individual overcoming of self-satisfied middle-class mediocrity. (Nietzsche’s contempt for Spencer figures in chapter 5.) The works of Comte and Spencer point to an understanding of history shared by the first two self-described sociological thinkers, which has strong continuities with the historical framework of conjectural history. Both restrict human social history to naturalistic causes. Both believe that history proceeds through two principal stages, although Comte adds a prominent transitional stage. In both cases, history gives evidence of unstoppable improvement: in Comte, progress is based in the first instance

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on intellectual accomplishments; in Spencer, it results from biological struggle for survival. Neither believes that improvements result from compacts or planning. Only Comte’s Positivist state of the future—planned in great detail in the final volume of the System of Positive Polity—constitutes an exception to this pattern.55 It is true that Comte advocated a maximal role for government in the regulation of private morals and public markets, whereas Spencer favored a minimal role.56 Nevertheless, despite this fundamental opposition, both thinkers adopted, adapted, and expanded the kinds of thought, narrative patterns, and distinctive features of the conjectural genre that was practiced by the Enlightenment thinkers. In sociology and political economy, conjectural history played an important role in clearing the ground for new conceptions and understandings of social phenomena. It made available a method of using theory, of constructing inferential arguments and hypothetical narratives concerning societies for which we have no documents and few remains. In offering a naturalistic, stadial account of society, conceived as an organic whole with constituent parts that operate in accordance with noncoercive orders generated by the pursuit of commerce, interests, and knowledge, conjectural history opened the way to the constitution not only of sociology and political economy but also of cultural anthropology. I now turn to a discussion of this field.

4

The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology

a relation between conjectural history and early anthropological thought. George Stocking, in particular, has observed the importance in evolutionary anthropology of the “comparative method,” which was derived from the stadial framework of conjectural history. This method of analysis made it possible to conceive of the early, unrecorded history of European societies by asserting parallels between the ancestors of civilized peoples and contemporary preliterate, tribal, “savage” people around the world. The methodological inference follows, as Stocking pointed out, from the presumption in the conjectural histories of a universal human nature, and from the argument that all societies go through the same or very similar hierarchical stages of development.1 Although this methodological approach played an important role in early anthropology, the comparative method does not exhaust the characteristics of conjectural history, as I have shown in the introduction. Indeed, I argue here that conjectural history exerted a much more substantial and extensive influence on early anthropology than has previously been acknowledged.2 The dominant voice in the ethnological, pre-anthropological field in the first half of the nineteenth century belonged to James C. Prichard; this chapter first examines the extent to which he made use of elements of conjecturalist thinking. After his death in 1848, activity in the increasingly contested field shifted to the anthropological journals to which the chapter then turns. J. F. McLennan and E. B. Tylor made important contributions to the discussion in articles and books in the 1860s, but it was only in the years following the publication of Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) that the new discipline was consolidated. Finally, L. H. Morgan, in Ancient Society

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(1877), constructed an elaborate conjecturalist argument that was significant both in itself and for attracting Marx’s sustained attention in his last years; it provided the model and impetus for Engels’s narrative and arguments in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). Because of their use of the comparative method, a mediated effect of conjectural history has been recognized in the works of McLennan and Tylor. However, none of the works discussed in this chapter has been considered to possess significant elements of the form of conjectural history. Nonetheless, with the exception of a few journal articles, they all give evidence of having been strongly shaped by this form. The characteristics of conjectural history that are relevant for predisciplinary anthropology include reliance on speculative inference, necessarily based on little or no documentary or material evidence for prehistoric times. In addition, these early anthropological writers view society as holistic, with all its institutions interlinked and in accord, so that the study of the religion, laws, manners, or arts of a society would show them all to be congruent. Tylor’s definition of culture became canonical and foundational because it articulated this presumption, or axiom, of holism. The conjectural histories are also distinctly based on delineating stages of social life. The comparative method follows as a corollary of such stadialism, but it need not render the earlier tribal society debased or inferior. When Adam Ferguson followed J. F. Lafitau in comparing the tribal natives of North America with Europeans of an earlier stage, both of them chose the archaic Greeks—those depicted in the Iliad—as analogues, and Ferguson went on to add the Scottish Highlanders, whose tribal life was being broken up and was giving way to commercial society even as he wrote. The issue of whether and in what ways civilization and modern commercial life constituted an advance over previous social forms remained sharply contested among many of the early conjectural historians. However, some of their nineteenth-century inheritors became more certain of the superiority of civilization and modernity. Although it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect, this more fixed belief in progress and the superiority of the modern is associated with a vastly increased use of the category of race and the identification of those in the earliest stage of society not only with tribal, preliterate peoples but also with dark-skinned, “savage” races. Although conjectural histories often present demystifying, satiric narratives of the early history of social institutions,

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they can also uncritically accept established hierarchies of power and knowledge—especially an ethnocentrism that assumes the superior intelligence and culture of wealthy or educated Europeans. A combination of Enlightenment demystification and ethnocentrism is a recurring feature of many conjectural histories and of much of the early social thought derived from conjectural history (a tension I will discuss with respect to Darwin’s Descent of Man in chapter 5). However, despite a frequent universalizing ethnocentrism, most conjectural histories—and the ethnography and anthropology they influenced—do not exhibit anything like the racism that characterized the Anthropological Society, formed by James Hunt in the early 1860s, whose journals will be studied in this chapter. This group generally opposed cultural anthropology with which it was later associated. In appendix 3, I contest the view that either conjectural history or the three- or four-stage theory it sometimes adopted served as a primary source of “scientific racism” in the nineteenth century.3 The Enlightenment conjectural historians, and then the first cultural anthropologists, including Tylor and McLennan, were monogenists who viewed humans as a single species; they may have exhibited an unattractive ethnocentrism, but they were not racist. The emerging field reveals a conflict between, on the one hand, conjectural history and early cultural anthropology, which were generally ethnocentric, and, on the other hand, polygenism and physical anthropology, which tended to be racist. Although these contrasts generally hold, some independent thinkers from the 1860s constitute exceptions; a polygenist and comparative anatomist such as Hermann Schaaffhausen could contest both racist and ethnocentric presumptions among his fellow investigators. Conversely, an anonymous conjecturalist could directly equate stages of development with races, with Africans as perpetual children at the bottom and Europeans as adults at the top. Beginning in the second half of the 1890s, in essays and lectures by Franz Boas, collected in 1911 as The Mind of Primitive Man, and then in the 1920s, in the works of Bronisław Malinowski and A. R. RadcliffeBrown, first American and then British anthropology turned away from conjectural, stadial, racial, and evolutionary approaches.4 This later generation of anthropologists objected to anthropology written on the basis of work in the study alone. They stressed, as a defining requirement of the discipline, the need for extended fieldwork in the societies being

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examined, and observation of their structures, apart from their histories and without comparing them to modern European societies. Such a methodology necessarily eliminates speculation about the early stages of civilized societies. Beginning with Boas, anthropologists became dissatisfied with recounting the procession of every society through the same stages of development. Moreover, in the context of the second half of the nineteenth century, when peoples that failed to reach the highest stages came to be identified with races, it seemed to be a more valid approach, and one less tied to racist assumptions, to establish not the history and origins but the structure and function of the institutions of a particular culture. When Radcliffe-Brown formulated his functionalist method in the 1920s, he defined it in explicit opposition to the approach of observers who engaged in conjecture and wrote histories of the peoples they studied; he proposed a method based on observations of existing societies.5 Much was gained by this methodological turn, but something was also lost in the renunciation of history.6 p r i ch a r d ’s s e arc h f o r o ri g i ns

The investigation of early human history was thus in a fluid state in the 1850s and 1860s, and it was unclear, as late as 1870, what would be the direction, scope, and approach of the emerging paradigm and discipline of anthropology.7 As Stocking puts it, the field was in a transitional state, between the paradigms of ethnology and anthropology.8 The earlier ethnological framework was closely identified in England with James Cowles Prichard, whose Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (editions in 1813, 1826, and 1847) aimed above all at demonstrating the unity of mankind.9 Prichard’s unwavering determination to assert that all humans are members of a single stock arose from religious convictions, and to this extent his conclusions are predetermined by his belief in the plans of the divinity for mankind. However, in his Researches he does not grant the Bible any extraordinary authority, and he pursues his investigations in a consistently naturalistic mode. Prichard collected information about human groups from around the world—their anatomy, practices, beliefs, and especially their languages—to show that they could be derived from one another and traced to an original source. Although the great bulk of Prichard’s book is devoted to recapitulative accounts of such information, the argument that

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he constructs from this ethnographic material eventually forms a narrative that changed little from the first edition to the last. His method dictates working backwards from contemporary and recent evidence; he begins with the most far-flung and apparently isolated peoples, and in each case shows that they could be related to another group closer to the original home of human beings. Thus, the Polynesians are closely related to the Malays, and the Malays to South Asians, because of resemblances in language and physical appearance. All the American Indians can be traced back to people from East Asia because of cultural and physical traits, and the East Asians in turn to the South Asians. The European peoples, from the Celts and the Finns to the Greeks, can be shown to descend from the East Indians by language and physical traits; moreover, Egypt and India are asserted to share crucial elements of culture and mythology, and thus a common history. The argument culminates in the final chapter, where Prichard reverses direction and offers his history of the diffusion of human peoples, beginning from a single source in South Asia. This brief narrative summarizing the implications of the rest of the Researches, in which inference is piled on inference and possibility on possibility, is irreducibly speculative. Researches possesses many of the features of a conjectural history: it does not propose a history divided into stages, but its ethnographic history depends heavily on conjecture and inference about earliest times for which we have no documents or remains, and it avoids appeals to providential explanations or contractual origins. These features enable us to revise the view that conjectural history underwent a thorough eclipse in the first half of the nineteenth century.10 In a striking and, according to present knowledge, accurate conjecture, Prichard argued in the first edition of Researches that the earliest human beings were black, with lighter skin colors appearing only later. However, in the second and third editions, Prichard silently omitted this argument.11 Indeed, with each new edition, as he expanded his Researches to amass more information for his monogenist theory of culture, Prichard apparently felt that, in the face of the growth of racist, polygenist views, he had to move to less radical positions on the question of race. Prichard worked as a physician in Bristol, with no institutional framework of support for his researches until, in 1843, he participated in the founding of the Ethnological Society of London.

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r ace a n d th e j o u rnals o f e th no lo gy a n d a n t h r o p o lo gy, 1848– 187 0

The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, the vehicle for publishing works of members of the society, provides important evidence of the persistence and strength of conjecturalist thinking at midcentury. In its first series, published between 1848 and 1856, the journal followed an editorial line that was monogenist and neither racist nor even ethnocentric.12 The editors not only included but featured conjecturalist arguments concerning the earliest stages of human cultures. The essays of the inaugural issue set out methodological positions based on wide acquaintance with and appropriation of conjectural history. In a programmatic first essay, “The Study of Ethnology,” Ernest Dieffenbach made extensive reference to J. G. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91) to establish the relation between ethnological and historical studies and a framework for ethnological inquiry. Based on Herder, Dieffenbach argued that such research should recognize that culture is a living organic whole, a growth of nature; that the history of every people depends on the soil, weather, domesticated animals, and natural products of the land; and that languages reveal the “moral physiognomies” of peoples. From such considerations, Dieffenbach concluded that Britain, although an imperial power, should respect the differences between its own and other cultures, rather than seeking to eliminate them by violence.13 In a second methodological essay, the founder of the society, Dr. Thomas Hodgkin (for whom Hodgkin’s disease is named) referred repeatedly to the conjectural histories of Herder, Falconer, and Kames as predecessors in ethnological studies that investigated the relations between natural circumstances and forms of government, religion, opinions, and manners. He made the foundational argument of Dugald Stewart that, in the absence of written records or authenticated traditions concerning ancient phenomena, the construction of accounts based on careful inferences and conjectures is legitimate.14 This essay established an explicit, programmatic defense of conjectural histories as a basis for ethnological inquiry in the articles and volumes that followed. These and related essays in the first years of this journal again indicate that conjectural history was not moribund in the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Journal of the Ethnological Society was informed by conjecturalist thinking throughout the first decade of its publication.

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In the late 1850s, however, the Ethnological Society went into decline, and by 1862 the second series of its journal, the Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (1861–69), came under the editorship of John Crawfurd, a polygenist and racialist who vigorously opposed the theory of natural selection that Darwin had proposed in 1859.15 Crawfurd considered Africans inherently inferior to other races, although he did not believe that this inferiority justified their enslavement.16 However, even in the hands of someone whose racial ideology stood at the opposite extreme from that of Prichard and Hodgkin, conjectural history continued to exert an influence. Because Crawfurd was interested in historical thought about the emergence and development of human institutions, his arguments often took the form of conjectural histories. He pursued the same questions of origins as had the Enlightenment conjectural historians, even as he took issue with many of their arguments. He accepted and employed the stages of barbarism, savagery, and civilization, and he speculated, like Adam Smith, on the characteristics of the earliest languages, although he disagreed with Smith’s theses in the “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.”17 He published many articles in the Transactions that elaborated hypothetical narratives about the origins of institutions, such as the domestication of animals (by Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the founder of eugenics).18 Crawfurd himself wrote a prodigious number of articles, sometimes three or four lengthy essays in a single issue. Thus, even under the editorship of the polygenist Crawfurd, the work that appeared in this second series of the Ethnological Society’s journal illustrates and confirms the wide influence of conjectural history in the early anthropological thought of the 1860s. Crawfurd’s case illustrates that polygenism, even when racialized, was not always aligned with antihistorical and anticonjectural lines of thought. At the same time, many anthropological writings in the 1860s contested the arguments of conjectural history. For example, the duke of Argyll’s Primeval Man (1869) adopted a degenerationist position consistent with the biblical account of a fall, maintaining that morality and religion were pure in the earliest times and only became corrupt later in history. Argyll does not sketch a natural, stadial history of human society but questions the idea of progress, even in the mechanical arts.19 Two related journals published in the 1860s provided both the greatest resistance to conjectural history and the best indications of the complex

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state of the field between ethnological and anthropological paradigms: the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London and the Anthropological Review. The former was the official publication of the proceedings of the newly formed Anthropological Society of London, the latter a more popular and general journal on the subject; they were bound together annually. The editor of both journals was the physician James Hunt, an aggressively racist polygenist who had broken away from the Ethnological Society.20 Believing that human beings derive from multiple origins and that different races constitute separate species, Hunt, in a programmatic article for one of the first issues of the Journal of the Anthropological Society entitled “The Negro’s Place in Nature,” argued that Africans are inherently inferior, are incapable of becoming civilized, and deserve enslavement.21 As a statement of position, Hunt’s essay bears comparison and contrast with the opening essays by Dieffenbach and Hodgkin in the now defunct Transactions of the Ethnological Society: Hunt is polygenist and racist, Dieffenbach and Hodgkin monogenist and nonracializing. For the accompanying first issue of the Anthropological Review, Hunt wrote another programmatic essay on anthropology in which he insisted that the “science of man” should be based on facts and avoid speculation. What he means by “facts” remains unspecified, but from the context of his other writings it appears that he means anything that might be used to “demonstrate,” according to his judgment and criteria, the inferiority of Africans, including measurements of cranial capacity and the lengths of arm and leg bones, as well as unsupported assertions of laziness and ineducability.22 It also becomes clear that by “speculation” Hunt does not mean just any kind of hypothesizing but specifically inferential narratives representing the earliest stages of mankind—that is, conjectural history: “In the long expected work ‘On the History of Human Folly,’ ” he writes, “a most important chapter will be occupied in treating of the absurdity of the gratuitous assumptions and speculations on the origin of mankind.”23 Hunt therefore opposed any “speculations” concerning the early history of mankind and instead embraced the “facts”—measurements to support racist presumptions. The articles and discussions that followed Hunt’s essay show that many members of the society took positions very close to the editor’s. In the discussion that followed Hunt’s presentation on “The Negro’s Place in Nature,” the first few speakers shared Hunt’s presumptions and conclusions. Carter

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Blake read a seven-page speech echoing Hunt’s racism, also claiming to rest his case only on “facts, positive facts,” and warning against the introduction of “opinions of a political nature . . . foreign to those objects for which this society is founded” (Journal of the Anthropological Society 1 [1863]: xxiv; emphasis in original). The political opinions thus condemned seem to include any critical reflections on slavery during the American Civil War, and the facts recommended turn out to include not only measurements and casual observations but also anecdotes and jokes. Blake tells the society that when the Comanche classify races they place “the red man first, and the white man next . . . The horse they put third, the squaw fourth, and the Negro fifth [laughter]” (xxvii). Like Hunt, Blake joins his hearty racism with opposition to any argument concerning the historical origins of humankind, including conjectural history and the theory of evolution. However, and significantly, although Hunt was the president of the Anthropological Society, his sarcasm and Blake’s jibes did not go unchallenged. In the further discussion of Hunt’s paper, Reverend Dingle objected to “the entire manner of treating the subject,  .  .  . which aim[s] to cut off a large part of the human family from the common rights of humanity” (Journal of the Anthropological Society 1 [1863]: xxix). Thomas Bendyshe disputed the “supposed facts” about the measurement of the Negroes’ bones, which had been advanced by Hunt (xxxiv–xxxix). And finally, Hunt was answered by Pliny Miles, an American who imitated and satirized the perversely illogical logic of Hunt and his fellows to their faces. They had argued that the Negro more nearly resembled an ape than a European and occupied an inferior place in nature. “It is evident to me,” Miles declared, appearing to agree, “that the Almighty, in creating [the Negro] in the likeness of a human being, has done so in order that we might not think him to be one, and he has given him one of the worst places in the world to live in— the tropics. It must be evident that the Negro is an inferior race, for no one but an inferior race would live in the worst part of the world” (xli). Miles’s speech takes the form of a series of such skewed, parodic syllogisms. In New Orleans, he reports, slaves taken from the French or the English quarter to the other quarter learn to speak their new language in six weeks; “having that extraordinary facility of acquiring a language, they must be considered to be a degraded race” (xlii). Miles slightly extends, in order to satirize, the emphasis on dubious “facts” in the presentations by Hunt, Brown, and other comparative anatomists: “Now I shall consider that you will take for granted

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what I state to-night, without troubling me to bring up any skulls; I shall propound all my facts ex cathedra” (xlii). As a good satirist, Miles catches the bullying arrogance in Hunt’s pronouncements and associates them with the doctrines propounded by the pope when speaking from the chair of Saint Peter. One of the most telling strikes against Hunt’s position comes from pointing out the distinctive skill of the white race in oppressing others: “The white man, therefore, must be a superior man, because he has exhibited that peculiar kind of ability that tyrannises over his fellows” (xlii). Claiming to praise, he blames in their presence the self-satisfied, self-deceived, and despotic whites and their supporters, like the racist Hunt. One speaker thus parodied and a few challenged Hunt’s dogmatic racism. Others diverged from his program by presenting papers that were built on conjectures about early human history and the stages of social development, instead of conforming to Hunt’s ahistorical emphasis on fixed and unchanging racial types. One anonymous article, “Thoughts and Facts Contributing to the History of Man,” constructs an elaborate scheme of the stages by which humans have progressed in forms of thought, language, religion, and technology, as a race and as individuals. The accompanying table draws on and synthesizes progressive sequences from several sources: the phases of “man as race” are derived from the four-stage version of conjectural history; the phases of language are drawn from Adam Smith’s “Considerations on the First Formation of Languages” (radical, agglutinative, and inflectional); stages of mental development are taken from Comte (theological, metaphysical, and positive). The graduated forms of tools are taken from John Lubbock’s archaeological periods (Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron); and religious ideas go through stages derived from the natural history of religion, including those of Hume and de Brosses (fetishism, polytheism, anthropomorphism, monotheism).24 Most of these sequences of unplanned stages of development are derived either directly or indirectly (through Comte, for instance) from Enlightenment conjectural history. While the essay suggests a synthesis of schemes of historical development, however, it adopts the polygenist position that Europeans and Africans derive from different origins. It thus combines positions that usually appear separate and opposed. A more conventional and less elaborate scheme, by Hodder Westropp, aligns the standard four stages of social life with the technology appropriate to each stage (barbarians used Paleolithic tools; herders used Neolithic

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tools; farmers used those of the Bronze Age).25 At the other extreme of simpleminded stadial thinking, theorizing about the stages through which societies and groups advance could take the crude form of aligning each race with a stage in the maturation process of the individual. In “The Psychological Unity of Mankind,” Australian aborigines exhibit unrestrained selfishness, like infants; American Indians demonstrate strength of will and cruelty, like young boys; Africans are emotional, like youths; Asians are empirical and cannot generalize; at the summit, Europeans reveal the workings of the mature intellect.26 One further article deserves to be mentioned here because it reveals continuities with accounts of the origins of religion in both Hume’s Natural History of Religion and Darwin’s Descent of Man—in fact, Darwin refers to it. “On the Psychical Elements in Religion,” by Luke Owen Pike, traces the early history of religion to the worship of stars, animals, and parts of nature. Pike maintains that not only prehistoric and ancient faiths but also later popular beliefs arise from anxiety and uncertainty: “Fear is the great emotional basis of all popular religions.”27 This thesis concerning fear as the foundation of religion closely echoes Vico, Mandeville, and Hume (as discussed in chapter 1). Because it does not depend on any particular evidence or inferences drawn from undeveloped societies but only speculatively generalizes about societies at all times and presents a demystifying naturalistic perspective on its subject, Pike’s essay constitutes a brief conjectural history. In the following year, as chapter 5 shows, Darwin advanced the same argument in the Descent of Man concerning the origin of religious beliefs in fear, though with a much sharper satiric edge. Thus, the anthropological journals do not reveal polygenist, racist, and ahistorical thought clearly dominating the emerging field, to the exclusion of all conjectural and historical thinking. Rather, conjectural history constituted one element of a diverse range of theoretical positions that animated early anthropological thought in the 1850s and 1860s, although this influence has not previously been noted. At one extreme of the spectrum stood a rhetoric of “facts” and anatomical measurements, usually linked with an ahistorical method and racist presumptions. Members of the Anthropological Society who adopted these positions comprised the self-identified “cannibals,” whose regular, rowdy dinner meetings were called to order with a mace featuring an upper end in the shape of an African head. By naming themselves cannibals, these members identified themselves mockingly with

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the peoples from whom they most sought to differentiate themselves and over whom they sought to establish their superiority. The indecorous meetings of this group made it resemble a fraternity or a secret society more than a professional organization, although it was the dominant faction in the Anthropological Society under Hunt’s leadership, through the 1860s.28 At the other extreme stood a monogenetic belief in the development of cultures, from earliest times, through stages, meaning that any society could progress from earlier to later phases. Many in this group had intellectual, social, or religious ties to the tradition of ethnology, which studied non-European peoples in order to protect and enable them to survive. Although adherents of this line of thought were not usually racist, as the polygenists typically were, most assumed the moral and intellectual superiority of Protestant English culture. Many would have ranked Asian, Celtic, and Southern European peoples below Northern Europeans, and would have placed the “savage” natives of North America, Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific on the lowest steps of the developmental ladder.29 However, many contributors to the anthropological journals took positions that combined or mediated between these two extremes. The anonymous author of “Thoughts and Facts,” with its elaborate stadial theory, adopted an approach that combined a conjectural multistage theory and polygenism, as did J. M. Allan, who combined polygenism and evolution by means of natural selection.30 The anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen—who was one of the first to propose that Neanderthal man was a very early variety, different from modern humans—formulated one of the most noteworthy and thoughtful combination of generally opposed paradigms. Schaaffhausen expressed reservations about the theory of natural selection and argued for the possibility of multiple human origins.31 As a comparative anatomist, he might have been expected to endorse a firm set of hierarchical distinctions among races. In fact, however, Schaaffhausen attacked racism and ethnocentrism, asserting that, despite differences in the cultural stages they have attained, “the same nature and disposition is innate in all races of man—that each race has the right to live and possesses the faculty of development.”32 Schaaffhausen here echoes Herder’s thesis in his Ideas for a Philosophy of History that each people, each culture, has a right to develop its own unique and valuable potential. He even argues that every race has capacities that exceed those of Europeans in some respects. In a reversal of the ideas of Hunt and Arthur

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de Gobineau, he maintains that the mixing of two races does not weaken either. In fact, anticipating an argument made a hundred years later on the basis of knowledge about gene pools, Schaaffhausen claims the opposite: “One of the great means which nature employs for the improvement of the species is the intermixture of races.”33 Schaaffhausen is noteworthy, also, for opposing the common idea that the “lower races” are incapable of developing civilization on their own. He points out that Peruvians, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese had reached high states of civilization long before many Northern European peoples. “We should never forget,” he cautions, with a salutary use of historical perspective, “that the history of the most civilised people points back to periods of savagery; that the vestiges of human sacrifices are found both in Homer and the Old Testament. . . . The Romans, who sold Celts and Germans in their slave markets, had a better right than we have to say, ‘These barbarians are incapable of civilization.’ At the time of Julian, German tribes were dressed in skins, or went about naked.”34 Schaaffhausen here calls attention to the savage ancestors of modern Britons and Germans. As he had contested the assumptions of an ahistorical racism, Schaaffhausen also thus contradicts an ethnocentric historicism— whether developmentalist or degenerationist—which often underlay an acceptance of imperialism as necessary and justified. As noted in chapter 2, John Stuart Mill, like his father, contended that society in India was not yet mature enough for the people to govern themselves. Rather than constructing a ladder of civilization with Europeans on the highest rung, however, Schaaffhausen reminds the reader that, just beneath the surface and the monuments of civilization in the main European traditions, one finds barbaric violence, including in his own time. He asserts that contemporary imperial Englishmen have less right to vaunt their moral superiority than the bloody and ruthless ancient Romans. Schaaffhausen’s skepticism about natural selection and his preference for polygenism are consistent with the positions of many other comparative anatomists, but his clear opposition to racist and ethnocentric arguments sets him apart from most other polygenists and anatomists. His example shows that comparative anatomy, polygenism, and racism are not always aligned at this time.35 Schaaffhausen was not alone among anthropological thinkers, even polygenists, in critiquing imperialism. If Schaaffhausen pointed implicitly to the violence and injustice of imperial powers, the anonymous author of

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“The Willful Extinction of Aboriginal Races” condemned the genocidal murders of native peoples by Europeans around the world—“that indefinable thirst for blood which seems so mysteriously to come over civilized man when he is placed in contact with inferior tribes, and feels himself untrammeled by any human law.”36 Rather than concluding that civilized man is the true barbarian, however, this essayist assumes the inferiority of the tribal peoples, but goes on to cite massacres and outrages committed not only by the Spanish in South America and the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope but also by British colonists in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It is true that this article is an isolated instance in an issue containing seven articles on “Negroes,” one on race antagonism, and two on the Negro “revolt” in Jamaica. Those two essays, one by the American Josiah C. Nott, commended the “firm hand” of the brutal governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, arguing that Negroes had not produced any intellectual culture and belonged in slavery.37 Still, the publication of an attack on the genocidal acts of imperial powers demonstrates the existence of such a position among the anthropological writers. Nor was “The Willful Extinction” unique. This essayist does not reveal his position as either monogenist or polygenist, but some polygenists, believing that each race can survive only in its native climate, argued that colonialism would not work, because the settlers would either die out or produce a new race by intermixture.38 Hunt himself took this position and turned his sarcasm against the colonial powers, including the English. Criticizing “the boastful Anglo-Saxon,” he asserts that “although his skill in war and chicanery may exterminate the native races, it will yet be demonstrated that in the New World the almost exterminated savages will be amply revenged by a slow, gradual degeneracy, and perhaps final extinction, of their conquerors.”39 Hunt has not modified his racism— he conceives of any mixture of Anglo-Saxons with natives as a degeneration—but it does lead him to criticize both the colonial project and the moral character of the English. Conversely, even Alfred Russel Wallace, who showed considerable respect for the culture and ethical values of dark-skinned Malays and Polynesians, took positions in the mid-1860s that seem quite ambiguous. Wallace is known for having split with Darwin and for arguing from 1869 onward that all races of men are separated by a gulf from other animals by virtue of unique mental abilities.40 As a result of this view, he could maintain that

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tribal peoples were comparable in intellectual abilities and moral character with civilized peoples, including Europeans. However, when he first spoke to the Anthropological Society in 1864, he argued for a different thesis. Suggesting that natural selection enabled one to reconcile monogenesis and polygenesis, he proposes that humans were members of one species until the unique mental abilities of the species had appeared. By that early time, the separate races had been formed as the result of different climates and geographical conditions, but after that date the intellectually endowed humans did not need to adapt physically, because they could use clothing, fire, or a new technology to survive and satisfy their needs.41 Still, Wallace believes that human beings would again become a single homogeneous race. This second transformation will come about, he argues, because “the most extreme forms, the native American, the New Zealander, the Australian, and the Polynesian races, are all doomed.” Europeans will be dominant on every continent, and the “lower races and lower civilisations” will not be able to compete with them. The people doomed to disappear include “the great races hitherto dominant in their own areas—the Negroes, the Hindoos, and the Mongols.”42 Wallace thus, in the mid- to late 1860s, endorsed a hierarchy of races, with dark-skinned peoples among the “low,” and he accepted the disappearance of these non-European peoples as the unavoidable consequence of historical, evolutionary development. In short, the intellectual landscape in the anthropological journals in the 1860s was extremely complex. Ahistorical polygenism and racism were dominant, while an evolutionary, ethnocentric, usually monogenetic position was subordinate. In some cases, unexpected combinations and alignments occurred, such as polygenetic attacks on racism, or a monogenetic racism. The appearance of many essays influenced by conjectural history in the Anthropological Review, where the editor and many of the contributors opposed such speculations, indicates the continuing influence of this stadial form of historical thought in this fluid, protoanthropological field. In the late 1860s, two deaths led to a resolution of these conflicts and enabled the initial disciplinary self-definition to go forward with less opposition than it might otherwise have faced. On the death of Crawfurd, in 1868 (age 72), and of Hunt the following year (age 39), evolutionists led by T. H. Huxley and Lubbock gained control of both the Ethnological and the Anthropological societies and, as Stocking has shown, eventually

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merged them, accepting for the unified institute the name Anthropological Society, which Hunt had originally used for his breakaway group.43 It took several years to accomplish the integration of the two societies and the transformation of their dominant outlook to an evolutionary one, but the institutional redefinition was accomplished by 1873, when the newly constituted board of the Anthropological Review included a majority of evolutionists. In the meantime, Tylor published Primitive Culture in early 1871, contributing to the coalescence of the new discipline of cultural anthropology around a consensus that studying changes in cultures could reveal their nature. This consensus rejected the use of anatomical measurements to rank races. The evolutionists who gained control of the Anthropological Society in the early 1870s thus moved away from a generally racist and ahistorical polygenism and replaced it with an evolutionary and generally ethnocentric monogenism.44 mcl e n n an, lu b b o c k , and ty lo r: fo un din g t h e di s c i p li ne

In addition to contributions by anonymous or unknown writers, essays by three men who proved to be founding cultural evolutionists also appeared in the Anthropological Society journals. In major works written in the mid- to late 1860s, all three of these writers show the impact of conjectural history in their thinking and use of form. J. F. McLennan, in Primitive Marriage (1865), E. B. Tylor, in Primitive Culture (1871), and John Lubbock, in The Origin of Civilisation (1871) all employ the “comparative method” to speculate about the earliest stages of society, but the influence of conjectural history is not limited to their use of that method. Like the Enlightenment conjectural histories, the founding works of McLennan and Tylor, in particular, are developmental and historicist, proposing detailed naturalistic accounts of the unplanned stages through which societies proceed. McLennan focuses on forms of marriage and kinship, Tylor on myths, rituals, and religion. Both accept the Enlightenment and ethnographic axiom of the mental unity of humankind. Neither employs the category of race in these works, and indeed McLennan never would do so. Lubbock is remembered as the originator of the terms “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic” to distinguish between the earlier and later stages in the technology of making stone blades. His Origin of Civilisation proposes

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a mechanical version of conjectural history in which the same societies repeatedly figure as instances of earlier, lower, or savage forms of various institutions. European societies exemplify the higher, civilized forms, and others, such as East or South Asian societies, occupy a midway point between the civilized and the savage. Like conjectural history, evolutionary anthropology can be strongly ethnocentric. McLennan relies throughout his work on the reports and narratives of travelers, the same material on which most of the Enlightenment conjectural histories also depended, proceeding by the same methods as historians such as Kames. In Primitive Marriage, McLennan refers frequently to Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man as he seeks to establish the contours of early marriage institutions by drawing inferences from a range of later customs. Most important methodologically, McLennan employs the idea of “inequality of development,” the principle that the existence of “symbolic forms in the present implies the existence of corresponding realities in the past,” just as the rings in a tree’s trunk tell the number of years it has lived.45 To vary the metaphor, each example of the form of an institution such as marriage by capture, in a later culture, is a trace of the once actual existence of that stage, “like a fossil fish in a stone” (Primitive Marriage, 4). McLennan articulates a version of the doctrine of survivals, postulating that elements of earlier stages of social life survive as formal remnants in later stages; if a belief or custom carries only symbolic value or serves no clear purpose in the present, it can be understood as the vestige of an earlier stage when it was believed literally or enacted.46 In Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865), Tylor employed this method in his studies of folklore, games, myths, and religion.47 Because McLennan finds symbolic remnants of the practice in many cultures, he infers that men actually did take brides by force in the earliest times of most human societies (Primitive Marriage, 44). On the basis of these survivals, he draws further inferences and advances hypotheses that would reconstitute and explain the earliest social stages (158). Most pages of his book contain some version of a hypothetical supposition that constitutes a link in his argument. Thus, he writes of “what is likely to have happened” (47); proposes, “Let us postulate  .  .  .” (53); suggests, “If we suppose . . .” (206); or asserts, “It is impossible not to believe . . .” (203). All the transitional moves and logical connections in Primitive Marriage express the temporality of the conditional necessary; they are based on

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suppositions, conjectures, inferences, and statements in the form of assertions of what “must have been” the case in the past. The longest chapter in McLennan’s work—a hundred-page conjectural narrative of stages of prehistoric practices relating to sex, marriage, and kinship—summarizes and presents the argument that a natural progression took societies from bride capture, through group marriage and matrilineal exogamy, to marriage contracts and eventually to patriarchal endogamy (the highest form of marriage union). The earliest practice, female infanticide, is constructed on the basis of inferences from a Malthusian “struggle for food and security” (Primitive Marriage, 165). Intervening stages, inferred by means of the evidence of survivals, are recounted in detail as “what must have happened” in the transitions from the earliest stages to those periods that left recorded evidence. In McLennan’s account, an originary shortage of females led to the practice of raiding other human groups to capture women, and, in the earliest stage, the result was a condition of promiscuous sexual relations between all the men of the tribe and the captured women. Such a state, in which kinship could only be determined through the mother, because any man in the group could have been the father, would have been succeeded by polyandry, in which one woman had multiple husbands, and then by a postulated form of polyandry in which all the husbands would have been brothers sharing a wife in the household of their mother. Such a system, in which descent could begin to be traced through the house of the brothers and eventually through the oldest brother, constitutes, according to McLennan’s inferences, the penultimate step before a system that traces descent through the father, and in which marriage is based on agreement and contract. Like the earlier conjectural historians, then, McLennan constructs a progression of stages, from promiscuity to polyandry, and from fraternal polyandry to patriarchy and contractual marriage (167–74). The major parts of McLennan’s argument have been forcefully contested. For example, if each early human group were raiding others, then any single group must be not only raiders but also raided, and it is hard to see how the raids would result in a net gain for any group. In fact, these attacks must result in a net gain of zero because they don’t increase the total number of women. Again, there is scant to no evidence of an early stage of simple polyandry or fraternal polyandry in most societies. Nevertheless, McLennan first employed the terms “endogamy” and “exogamy,” which

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have been widely accepted and remain in use, and he first directed attention to the way in which systems of kinship relations determine forms of society—not a trivial accomplishment. Although his specific conjectures have been cast into doubt or disproven, his influential narrative offers an example of speculations opening up a fruitful area of study—kinship— for later investigation.48 In an extremely unusual repetition of this result, McLennan also formulated the terms for and drew attention to another controversial field, with his articles on the subject of totem animals and plants.49 Similarly, by closely examining stone tools from many European sites, Lubbock had established, in Primitive Times (1865), the distinction between Paleolithic and Neolithic. Conjectural history makes more of a mark on The Origin of Civilisation, where he turns from physical anthropology to cultural anthropology. In the preface, he acknowledges as predecessors Kames, whom he cites frequently; Johann Jakob Bachofen, the author of Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right; 1861), a work that also influenced McLennan; McLennan himself; Henry Maine, on ancient law and Tylor’s Early History of Mankind. All of these are either conjectural historians or figures who worked in the tradition of, or in close proximity to, conjectural history. Lubbock, like McLennan, uses the doctrine of survivals, crediting Tylor with its formulation. Opposing those like the duke of Argyll who argued, along biblical lines, that human history consisted of a degeneration from an original and purer moral state, Lubbock argues that comparative studies provide evidence for a linear progression through unvarying stages, from primitive to civilized, in religion and morality. Remains of earlier primitive beliefs can be found in higher civilizations, but primitive beliefs and customs do not give evidence of being survivals from more developed stages that might have preceded them. Lubbock’s method consists of starting with what he considers to be the most primitive and earliest instance of a cultural institution, then filling in the steps by which it may plausibly have come to take the form it possesses in civilized society. So, on primitive marriage practices, he accepts the early existence of general promiscuity or communal marriage, but he does not believe that such an initial condition necessarily led to a matriarchal stage; rather, children were first considered to be related to the whole tribe, then to the mother, to the father, and then to both.50 He also sees polyandry as less prevalent in the earlier stages than McLennan did. Not surprisingly,

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Lubbock considers patriarchal monogamy to be the ethically highest form of marriage. In Lubbock’s history of civilization, whatever practice or institution has been adopted by European society, especially English middleand upper-class society, proves to be the highest form of the institution. Thus, the method of “tracing up” or tracing back practices from their modern, civilized forms through previous stages to their origins constitutes an uncomplicated procedure in Lubbock’s hands. For example, he places the stages of religious life in ascending order, from the earliest lack of conception of a deity, through fetishism, to nature worship (totemism), shamanism, and idolatry, before eventually reaching monotheism and, at the highest point, Protestant Christianity.51 Lubbock does not see the anthropological project the way Tylor will, as a demystifying exercise that demonstrates the common ground between savage and civilized societies. Lubbock sees continuities, but he accepts without question the superiority of the British constitution, the Christian religion, modern science, and the European race. His narratives always lead through two or three similar stages to the moral and intellectual surpassing of the “lower” races by the “higher.” Lubbock alone among these foundational anthropological thinkers accepted natural selection as a mechanism of cultural evolution or development. Although he does not explicitly invoke the concept of the survival of the fittest in the Origin of Civilisation, he does presume the accomplishments, the goodness, and the rightness of those “higher” races that survive and dominate in the modern world. Although the Origin of Civilisation has much in common with the conjectural histories, the work presents a notably less skeptical, less ambivalent account of social stages than most Enlightenment conjectural histories. It signals a narrowing of the historical and moral vision of the earlier conjectural histories, a temporality of inevitable, unrelenting progress toward the status quo in Victorian England as the highest form of social life. Tylor’s Primitive Culture delivers a much more extensive, detailed, and nuanced theory of cultural development than does Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation, especially concerning its chosen focus, the history of forms of religious thought. Tylor’s work became the most authoritative text of early anthropology largely because of its formulation in its first sentence of, and its commitment throughout to, an understanding of culture as a complex whole, in which language, myth, religion, and philosophy are interrelated:

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“Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”52 Tylor’s foundational emphasis on the holism of culture extends the Enlightenment conjectural histories’ positing of the coherence of the practices, beliefs, and institutions in any stage of a culture. Primitive Culture also stands out for the extent to which it explores and draws implications from the concept of survivals, maintaining that remnants can appear in the form of children’s games, jokes, riddles, or superstitious beliefs and practices: “Most of what we call superstition is included in survival, and in this way lies open to the attack of its deadliest enemy, a reasonable explanation” (Primitive Culture, 1:17). Among his examples of superstitious holdovers, Tylor offers the worship of saints in Catholicism, which he considers a vestige of the worship of local gods and nymphs in antiquity (Primitive Culture, 2:206). In this argument, he agrees with Hume on the lowering of polytheistic gods to the status of semidivinities in a newly dominant monotheistic system. He also sees a return to superstitious beliefs, practices, and prosecutions in the later medieval period, when belief in witchcraft was revived; he figures this resurgence also as a survival of earlier pagan beliefs, even of attitudes from the Stone Age (1:139–40). Tylor cites a multitude of examples from other religious traditions of the persistence of a related form in a later context. For instance, in Vedic practice the priest shows the hair of an ox to the flames, where earlier Zoroastrians would have sacrificed and burned goats in honor of the divine Fire. Continuity in the form of a belief is accompanied by change in meaning and context, thus demonstrating the pattern that Tylor argues dominates in religious history: “The ancient distinctly meant rite has dwindled to a symbol, to be preserved with changed sense in a new theology.”53 The “distinctly meant rite” was physically practiced in the past, but when the practice fades, some vestige of it remains, standing in a figural relation to the original practice, sometimes metaphorical, more often metonymic. Tylor understood the responsibility of the ethnographer or anthropologist to be to separate those survivals that contain a kernel of truth or that can provide a framework for knowledge or ethical practices from those that merely express superstitions, obstinately defended in the present because they were believed in the past (Primitive Culture, 2:531). Participating in

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the Enlightenment struggle against religious superstition, Tylor identifies this project closely with Hume’s demystifying of theism and polytheism in the Natural History of Religion as well as with de Brosses’s reflections on African fetishism: he cites Hume on the tendency to personify unknown forces of nature (2:61) and chooses a passage from de Brosses as the epigraph for Primitive Culture.54 Devoting more than two-thirds of Primitive Culture to a history of religious forms, Tylor describes his aim of contributing to a history of “ ‘Natural Religion,’ properly so called”—increasing knowledge by discerning patterns such as the development from the philosophical but amoral early stages of popular religions to their later theological but ethical stages (Primitive Culture, 2:189). He arranges the varieties of religious thought in a sequence consistent with Hume’s, from the most widespread and primitive animism (still accepted, he argues, by children and the weak-minded in civilized societies) through fetishism and polytheism to monotheism. As he observes with disapproval the vested interest of priests in the maintenance of traditional beliefs (2:192), he takes a place in the tradition of anticlerical criticism which strongly colors conjectural histories such as Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, part 2 (1729) and Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). He repeatedly states that, although the collection and systemizing of mythical beliefs and religious practices contributes to an increased understanding of culture, the ethnographer’s work carries an ethical dimension; it leads to the “grim satisfaction” of the anatomist who exposes superstitions, even in his own culture and religion (1:158–59). Tylor began his book with a programmatic sentence; he concludes it with another, writing of the field he has been defining in Primitive Culture, “The science of culture is essentially a reformer’s science” (2:539). Lubbock devotes the largest section of his book to a natural history of religion, which also employs the doctrine of survivals; however, Lubbock exempts Christianity, confining his demystifying interpretations of religious superstitions to primitive peoples. In addition to calling attention to Catholic superstitions, Tylor accepts the need to remove similar survivals from Protestant Christianity, including the Anglican church. In his introduction to Primitive Culture, Tylor explicitly states that race is not a useful category in the study of ethnography: “Stages of culture may be compared without taking into account how far tribes who use the same

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implement, follow the same custom, or believe the same myth, may differ in their bodily configuration and the colour of their skin and hair” (Primitive Culture, 1:7). He anticipates that the discipline will be concerned not with the history of races but with successive forms of belief, religion, and culture. Primitive Culture observes that methodological requirement. However, Tylor later abandoned this position in the textbook he wrote for the new field, titled simply Anthropology (1881). The long first chapter of this popularizing book was devoted entirely to races and their physical characteristics, contradicting his earlier stance.55 These three studies, published from 1865 to 1871, came to be recognized as foundational for anthropology, although none of them designated their work by that term, and Tylor, the most influential of them, identifies his field as ethnography. All three carry marks of the influence of conjectural history in their form and their concerns. McLennan infers a nearly universal stage of human prehistory for which there is no other evidence than survivals in marriage customs, then connects that originary moment to later times through a sequence of stages dependent on speculations and chains of inference. He also uses this conjectural narrative as a basis for introducing the ideas of endogamy and exogamy, which proved to be productive categories for anthropology for generations. Lubbock associates his work not only with eighteenth-century practitioners of the conjectural form but also with Tylor and McLennan, and most of his work consists of establishing stages of development. His period classifications of the Paleolithic and Neolithic continue to inform knowledge in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. Tylor himself adopts an aggressively rationalistic and demystifying attitude consistent with that of the conjectural historians in his nineteenthcentury natural history of religion, which depends not only on evidence drawn from classical antiquity and Christianity (as Hume’s work did) but also on ethnographic materials and sacred writings from cultures around the world, and the inferences they enable of even earlier states of belief. Of these three, Lubbock’s work is the least innovative for anthropology, and the only one that participates in the biologizing and racializing of the history of cultures. By contrast, McLennan’s Primitive Marriage and Tylor’s Primitive Culture demonstrate that there was a possibility at the time for a science of humans that did not define race as its central category, a science of culture and society that had more in common with the ethnography of the first half of the century than with racialized anthropology of the second.

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mor g a n , k i ns h i p, and th e g e ns

Lewis Henry Morgan—a onetime member of the New York State legislature and a longtime student of the Iroquois, especially the Seneca—is exceptional in being the only American thinker considered in this study. But his work engages directly with the line of British thinkers that includes Tylor and McLennan. Like Tylor, Morgan understood anthropology to be a reforming science that could draw attention to the progressive direction of human history and even prepare the way for future improvements. In a sharp exchange with McLennan on the meaning and implications of kinship terms, Morgan opposed both McLennan’s ideas and Maine’s thesis of original patriarchy (discussed in chapter 6), and he argued that the earliest stage of society featured a matrilineal form of descent. Ancient Society (1877), the culminating work of Morgan’s career, conforms in its structures of thought to the conjectural histories in a number of ways. It employs one of the most elaborate stadial systems in nineteenth-century anthropological writing. In addition to the three standard stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, Morgan distinguishes a lower, middle, and upper period in each of the first two of these stages. Each of these seven stages is defined by different technological accomplishments, forms of marriage and kinship, and institutions of decision making or government. Thus, in the development of technologies, the middle stage of savagery begins with control of fire and ends with the development of bow and arrow; the upper stage of savagery includes the invention of pottery; the lower stage of barbarism sees the first domestication of animals (in the Eastern Hemisphere) and the cultivation of maize and construction with bricks (in the Western); societies in the middle period of barbarism introduced the smelting of iron and, in the upper period, the use of a phonetic alphabet. In Morgan’s view, only modern European and American societies reach the upper stage of barbarism and then civilization, employing industrial technologies and means of transportation such as the railroad. The forms of sexual relations characteristic of these stages follow a parallel progression, beginning with undistinguishing, “promiscuous” intercourse, then moving through marriages of a group of brothers with a group of sisters, through group marriages excluding brothers and sisters and marriages between dissolvable single pairings, before finally reaching the patriarchal family in the civilized state.56 In addition, each form of sexual relations or “marriage” also entails a distinctive form of kinship and affinity.

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Ancient Society exhibits serious weaknesses as well as distinctive strengths. Among the limitations, its detailed, coordinated sequence of stages implies a constraining, schematic view of social development that, like Lubbock’s, could involve mechanically inserting societies into the slots of an inflexible stadial framework. “The experience of mankind,” Morgan states, “has run in nearly uniform channels” (Ancient Society, 8). Morgan sometimes flattens out the features of a society so that each area will agree with the others and all will fit in the same stage. Because, for example, he assigns Hawaiian society to what he considers the lowest or earliest form of marriage, his correlated categorization of other features of that society (government and kinship) seriously undervalues its level of development. Similarly, Morgan does not acknowledge that Chinese or Aztec societies attained civilization, and he almost entirely ignores other societies of Asia, South America, and Africa. In addition, Morgan does not establish the strong correlation between the forms of kinship and the dominant technological forms in the early stages of savagery and barbarism, which his theory would require. Finally, although Morgan confidently inferred an original matriarchy and matrilineal descent in both Greek and Roman society, subsequent investigations have not found evidence of such a stage. Despite these limitations, however, Ancient Society contributed significantly to the research program of the nascent discipline of anthropology. Its importance lay in drawing attention to the importance of kinship terms and the widely varying systems of consanguinity.57 Morgan was also able to trace a close relation between forms of “marriage,” or permitted sexual relations, on the one hand, and categories of kinship, on the other. He argued that what he called the Punaluan (or Hawaiian) form of marriage—in which a husband could have relations with his wife’s sisters, and a wife could supposedly have relations with her husband’s brothers—would lead to a system of kinship terms that placed children of brothers or of sisters in the relation of siblings, rather than of cousins (Ancient Society, 435–39). Because the Hawaiian form of marriage and family, according to Morgan’s reasoning, must have given rise to the kinship system, Morgan inferred from what he saw as the continued existence of the kinship system the earlier existence of the Hawaiian marriage, even if it had been replaced in the interim by a form of pairing marriage. In following this line of inference Morgan conjectured the prehistoric existence of group marriage, even though no direct evidence could be found of its ever having existed, making use of the conditional

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necessary past tense. Although it might seem, from the highly schematic nature of Morgan’s stages, that all of a society’s institutions must fit into a single stage, this line of thought about surviving evidence of an earlier period gave Morgan, like Marx and Tylor, a way of conceiving of uneven, rather than simultaneous, development. It is true that McLennan’s forceful criticism threatened an important element of Morgan’s argument: Morgan’s view that a people’s use of kinship terms gives evidence of their beliefs about biological relationships. He thought that any person one called “father” was believed to be one’s biological father. McLennan, on the contrary, believed such terms were figurative and merely indicated social relations: one called male members of one’s own generation “brother” to indicate comradeship; one called male members of one’s father’s generation “father” to show respect.58 While Morgan almost certainly exaggerated the degree to which kinship terms denoted biological relations, an exaggeration that weakens his history of forms of the family, it does not substantially compromise his stadial history of technologies and forms of social and political organization.59 Although his work proved most influential in the long run by turning the attention of anthropologists to the analysis of kinship systems, Morgan devoted the first two-thirds of Ancient Society to the development of forms of social organization that would eventuate in political society and government. Here he was more successful in advancing his thesis than he was in some of the specific positions he took—on the early universality of matrilineal systems, for example. According to his understanding of governmental forms, the gens served as the key institution through which early society was organized. Taking his name for the institution from the Latin, Morgan found it to be constitutive of early Greek society as well, but he derived his definitive analysis of its working from the example of the Iroquois. In common English usage, “clan” would provide the closest synonym to “gens,” which comprised a subgroup of a people, related to each other by descent from a common ancestor. The members of a gens were prohibited from marrying within the group; they had the responsibility of avenging the death of any member or accepting compensation for that death; they had the right to elect and depose their chiefs; they had mutual rights to inheritance of the property of deceased members; they observed common religious rites; they interred the dead in a common burial place; among North American natives, they carried the name of an animal, often considering

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themselves descendants of and not eating the meat of that animal; and they possessed a council in which all adult male and female members had a voice (Ancient Society, 171–87). Although the written records are fragmentary or nonexistent, requiring inference and conjecture to complete or supplement them, the distinctive thesis of Ancient Society as a conjectural history proposes that “gentile institutions carried a portion of mankind from savagery to civilization” (Ancient Society, 65). The gens, according to Morgan, must have been the outgrowth of the first restrictions placed on sexual relations. It must have served as the first instrument of justice and constituted the most basic unit of political life and, later, institutions. Among the Iroquois, a number of gentes would have assembled to form the next highest unit, a phratry (from the Greek for such a grouping); these taken together constituted the tribe; and the tribes in association made up the Iroquois Confederacy—or, in the case of the Greeks and the Romans, they coalesced into a nation (66–67). Morgan considered the council of the gens, on which the larger tribal councils were based, to be the “great feature” and foundation of ancient society (Ancient Society, 84, 377). His admiration emerges clearly from his statement of the ideals that animated gentile social organization: “Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens” (85). Morgan associates the principles of the first form of social governance with those of the French and American revolutions; he asserts repeatedly that “gentile institutions are essentially democratic” (242) among the Greeks, Romans, and Germans as well as the Aztecs, Iroquois, and other native North American peoples (138, 202, 226, 296). He argues that the Greek basileus and Roman rex should not be translated as “king” because the offices were elective and carried none of the perquisites of monarchy (136, 241). Gentile societies, then—democratic, fraternal, and egalitarian—constituted the crucial stage that effected the transition from savagery to barbarism. But this nonhierarchical form of government was succeeded by civilized society, and Morgan proposes a striking hypothesis to explain the transition from gentile barbarism to civilization. In this account, Morgan’s conjectural history of marriage and the family dovetails with the history of private property to produce changes in governmental forms. Morgan reasons that the movement from group marriage to pairings would have been strengthened and accelerated by the increasing accumulation of private

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property. Male property owners must have come to require monogamous unions (at least from their wives) in order to ensure that their property would be inherited by their biological children. Under group marriage, nonexclusive pairings, and gentile law, inheritance passed through the gens, often, for example, from a man to his sister’s son or to the gens or clan. But the increase in private property that was being generated by technological advances and social relations produced a greater pressure for unambiguous male lineage and monogamy, and this pressure led to a system of government based on wealth and territory. In Athens, the shift was effected by the legislation of Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century b.c.e. These laws defined a citizen no longer by his gens but by his deme, or place of residence (Ancient Society, 270–75). The establishment of the deme (or township) and state organized the Athenians into a political society, completing the shift from the clan to the town as the constitutive unit of broadly political institutions. A parallel shift took place in Rome at around the same time: the gentes were replaced by classes defined by individual (men’s) wealth and, again, citizens were newly registered by the wards in which they lived. Morgan summarizes this development in Athens and Rome by asserting that in the later, civilized stage, “property and not numbers controlled the government” (333). Although he regarded the shift to political society as a necessary step in the development of institutions, Morgan maintained a strong respect for gentile society, which he called a monument of “the most remarkable and extended experience of mankind” (Ancient Society, 276). In his account of the transition from gentile to political society, Morgan both revises and retains some of the characteristic and important features of the conjectural histories. Almost all the conjectural narratives depicted shifts from one stage to another as unintended consequences of human acts, without clear agents. In Morgan’s narrative, however, the consolidation of monogamy and the development of political society occurred because propertied males wanted to protect their wealth; they produced the result they intended. Still, Ancient Society closely resembles Rousseau’s prototypical narrative in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), with its emphasis on property as the source of inequality and with its false social contract, in which the rich propose a system of laws to protect everyone’s property (that is, their own) from any threats (that is, from the poor).

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Morgan’s deeply ambivalent attitude toward civil society and modern, commercial civilization closely parallels the positions of Rousseau and Ferguson on the subject. For Rousseau, each step forward in political history takes place on the level of appearance, while an accompanying moral regression occurs in reality. For Ferguson, modern society makes some real gains, yet it entails the loss of loyalty, honesty, hospitality, and valor. Just as Ferguson associates these virtues with Scottish clans, native North American tribes, archaic Greece, and republican Rome, Morgan derives personal loyalty, liberty, and egalitarian relations from the same gentile, clan, or kinship societies. Indeed, Ancient Society makes clear Morgan’s commitment to the values of democracy, equality, and freedom, eclipsed by imperial and monarchic governments from the Roman empire to the nineteenth-century European monarchies. Of Roman history, he writes, “Imperialism of necessity will destroy any civilized race,” and he identifies Rome with a system of “unequal privileges and atrocious slavery” (Ancient Society, 314). Morgan interprets the American and French revolutions as harbingers of a new stage of world history. At the conclusion of Ancient Society, he joins conjectural historians, including Condorcet and Kant, in projecting a speculative history of the future, a vision of progress that involves reining in the power of wealth. He foresees a return to the virtues of gentile, clan society: “brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education.  .  .  . It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes” (Ancient Society, 552). The society of the future will both return to and move forward to gentile democracy; transcending private property, it will be constituted by communal property and democracy not of a primitive but of an advanced kind yet to be realized. In the distinctive temporality of Morgan’s thought in Ancient Society, significant advances occur in social life, especially as a result of technological leaps forward. He conceives of society holistically, as a complex in which different realms are usually aligned: forms of marriage, of kinship, and of government are consistent with one another. However, stage does not always succeed stage mechanically and synchronously, as he often implies. Crucially, kinship relations lag behind forms of marriage to reveal the existence of the earlier forms of marriage. The progression from savagery to barbarism to civilization, despite all the improvements it brings, is also characterized by loss—of democratic governance; equal, horizontal

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social relations; and civic virtue, including a public voice for women as well as men. The anticipated return to those conditions defines history as both cyclical and progressive. An ambiguous, double-edged sequence gives way to a return, at a more advanced stage, to the political virtues of the barbarous institutions. With his respect for the virtues of the barbarian clans, Morgan rejoins Rousseau and Ferguson; his vision of a future in which current injustices are overcome, including those produced by private property, helps explain the involvement of Marx and Engels with his work a few years after it was published. ma r x a n d e ng e ls , anth ro p o lo g i sts

From late 1880 to 1882, the year before he died, Marx kept a series of notebooks on ethnological writers. In these notebooks, which include two hundred pages of excerpts and comments on Morgan, Lubbock, and Henry Maine, and which were not published in their original multilingual form until 1972, Marx continued complicating his view of the stages of social development and pushed further away from a rigidly unilinear view, like that adopted in the Communist Manifesto (1848), to a potentially multilinear one. The notes also show him working out a universal but specific characterization of an early stage of society based on the gentes and the holding of property in common. Marx devotes the largest portion of his notes to Morgan’s Ancient Society, changing the order in which he considers the major topics of that work, from government, family, and property to the family, private property, and the state, making few critical comments on Morgan’s arguments, in contrast to his indignant and sarcastic responses to Maine and Lubbock.60 Marx exhibits the most interest in Morgan’s thesis that the gens or clan was the fundamental unit of organization in perhaps the earliest periods of social life. Following Morgan on this point allows Marx to posit a stage of society before private property in land, when land was considered the common possession of the kinship group. Movable possessions descended not from parents to children but through the mother’s kin, because most early gentile or clan systems were matrilineal. These systems exhibited many variations but were of the same kind among native North Americans, ancient Greeks and Romans, and even the Aztecs and Incas (although on the latter Morgan’s information is much sketchier). To these examples, Marx adds

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survivals of the early communal stage in Indian joint households, the Russian mir, and south Slavonic agricultural collectives. In a letter written at the same time as the notebooks, he even remembers communal ownership surviving near his hometown of Trier in his youth. Taking into account these kinds of communes, Marx infers, following Morgan, a nearly universal first stage of social life based on common ownership of land. The gentile condition preceded the patriarchal family and government—“where gentile institutions prevailed, . . . the State did not exist” (Ethnological Notebooks, 144). Early patriarchal societies such as the Roman and Hebrew were exceptional, not typical (119, 126). Thus, along with Morgan, Marx understands the original unit of society to be the gens or clan, not the family or contracting individuals. Increasing differentiation within society that separates out private and public, ruler and ruled, property-owning and propertyless, leads to the breakup of the gens and the transformation of society (Ethnological Notebooks, 22). As Morgan conjectures, the desire of men to possess individual property and to pass it on to their undoubted children leads to the formation of patriarchy and monogamy (at least for women). For Marx, the emergence of the monogamous family brings with it the institution of slavery; he accepts the etymology of familius from the Oscan famulus, that is, slave.61 In Marx’s view, the modern family “contains within itself, in miniature, all the antagonisms that later develop in society and the state” (120). The inability of Maine to imagine any other units than the patriarchal family and private property as the originary institutions of society accounts for Marx’s repeated expressions of exasperation with him.62 Despite the triumph of the family, private property, and the state in Western Europe, the survival of communal social groups of different types in other societies allows Marx to explore the possibility of alternate patterns of development outside Europe, and of multiple paths to the advanced communal society that he believes will succeed capitalism. Indeed, Marx most likely undertook his project of ethnological readings and note taking in order to complicate his earlier unilinear approach and to build on the Grundrisse (written 1857–58) in working out the specifics of a multilinear history of social development.63 He pursues this aim in part, like Morgan, by observing divergences among societies in different hemispheres. Morgan had noted, for example, that the Incas in South America, where only

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one large mammal, the llama, was capable of being domesticated, followed a different path than the Europeans, who could press several large animals into service for their labor. Following Morgan, Marx maintains that the gens among the Iroquois took an archaic form, while ancient Greek society exhibited the same gentile system in its most developed form (Ethnological Notebooks, 201); the divergence results from the different circumstances and resources in the two cases. But Marx also takes such comparisons in directions that Morgan did not contemplate. Whereas Morgan conjectured that “communism in living” developed as a necessary result of the consanguine family, the earliest form, and then was continued under the syndyasmian, or pairing family, among the Native Americans, Marx asks himself, “(and the South Slavonians? And even Russians to a certain degree?)” (115). The parenthetical questions show Marx connecting communal institutions among Native Americans, Russians, and Slavonians without negating the specific differences among them. Pursuing a similar line of investigation, Marx was reading and annotating Maine’s Early History of Institutions (1875) in order to study the institutions of early clan society among the Irish, and their persistence into modern times after the English conquest and colonization. His excerpts from J. Phear’s “Aryan Village in India and Ceylon” (included in the Ethnological Notebooks) follow from a related interest in the survival of the joint household in India. And, in the 1870s, Marx learned Russian in order to examine economic and social conditions in that country, especially the continuing existence of communal agricultural forms. Communal societies from the ancient gentes through Native American clans could have served Marx as models for a conjectural history of the communist society of the future, but contemporary survivals such as the Russian communes also could provide a means of transition to such a state, bypassing capitalism, under the right circumstances. When Marx was working on the Ethnological Notebooks, the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich wrote to ask if the agricultural commune might serve as the core or basis of the new society in Russia. In his response, Marx argues that the surviving agricultural communes need not disintegrate, as those in other countries had. He cites Morgan’s forecast that the next stage of society will be a revival of the ancient gentes in a higher form, and he concludes by paraphrasing Morgan: the contemporary crisis in capitalism will lead to the elimination of that form and the “return of modern societies to a higher

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form of an ‘archaic’ type of collective ownership and production.”64 Marx uses his reading of Morgan in support of his own tentative forecast of the coming of an advanced communal society in Russia, without a need for that country to pass through a capitalist period. Morgan had written, in the conclusion of Ancient Society, that “a mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind.”65 Both he and Marx conceived of capitalism not as the final phase of human social development but as a historically brief period between ancient and advanced forms of communal social organization. And Marx believed that several alternate lines of development might bring different societies to such a condition; not all needed to follow the Western European path. The temporality of Marx’s historical vision may thus appear to be cyclical, but in fact it diverges from a vision such as Vico’s, of an indefinitely recurring sequence of three ages followed by a return to barbarism each time. For Marx, European societies proceeded from a tribal or gentile stage through ancient slaveholding society, feudal states, and capitalism, while other, non-European and colonized societies could take other paths. All, he thought, would meet in a condition that would incorporate the technical advances of capitalism but would overcome that system and return at a higher level to the communal forms of the ancient, preliterate agricultural peoples. Such an overcoming would not involve a regression to barbarism and a resumption of the cycle but the achievement of a stage in which the unavoidable fetters of social bonds would impose less onerous constraints on human development.66 Marx occasionally complains that some of the ethnological writers engage in unwarranted historical speculation. For example, he inserts exclamation marks within Morgan’s supposition that some of the Iroquois tribes had lost a gens, “if (!) it is supposed (!) that the original tribes were once composed of the same gentes” (Ethnological Notebooks, 153), and he maintains that Phear should provide instances of the “agricultural communities” in India to which he refers, instead of just providing “hypothetical rubbish” (281). Yet Marx’s own narrative of the development of society participates deeply in the form of conjectural history, as it attempts to determine the original communal state(s) of society and to delineate the transitions between stages. In early writings such as the German Ideology (written 1845–46), he concentrated on the shift from feudalism to capitalism, but in the last decade of his life he was working on multiple paths toward a communal society in the future. He shares with Condorcet and Kant a

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concern to specify the future direction of society and he adds a desire to work out possible paths to that future. Like many figures in the tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he both criticizes and practices conjectural history.

Engels concludes The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) with a vision of the future that reiterates Morgan’s and Marx’s prophecy of a return to an “archaic,” clan form of social organization, at an advanced level of technology and production, with the new form transcending the modern family, individual property, and their instrument, the state. Like Marx, Engels quotes in closing Morgan’s declaration that “a mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind.”67 The Origin of the Family adopts the form of a series of conjectural histories. The first chapter consists of a summary exposition of the stages in Morgan’s scheme of social development, from savagery to the threshold of civilization. The final chapter sketches a Marxist view of history, inflected by Morgan’s contributions, as understood and expanded by Engels. The middle chapters, thus framed, recount in order the history of the family, with special attention to successive forms of marriage and kinship; a portrait of gentile or clan society; and finally, the emergence of the state among the Athenians, Romans, and Germans. The topics considered in The Origin of the Family, therefore, take the order followed in Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, altering the order and amount of attention given them in Morgan’s Ancient Society, where the successive stages of government take up the first three-fifths of the text, followed by forms of marriage and kinship, and finally a very short section on forms of property. Dedicating the first third of his book to marriage and the family, Engels directs much greater attention than Morgan or Marx to the role of women in early society and in civilization. This new focus accounts for some of the particular strengths and weaknesses of The Origin of the Family. First, and most damaging, Engels accepts Bachofen’s notion of “mother right” and prehistoric matriarchy more literally than do Morgan or Marx, even though he initially questions the use of the term because there can be no question of rights before property.68 When Engels reformulates Morgan’s argument, he characterizes human groups, from the earliest times through most of the period of barbarism, as

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communistic in their sexual relations and forms of property (Origin of the Family, 69), and he maintains that communistic housekeeping by groups of women of the same gens or clan led to the “supremacy of women in the house” (78–79). It is difficult to see the logic of Engels’s assertion here as he tries to support Bachofen’s hypothesis in order to argue, from such an inferred prehistoric superiority of women, that there must have been an overthrow of “mother right” or matriarchy by patriarchal systems, which resulted in a “world-historical defeat of the female sex” (86–87). The major transition in social history that Engels posits would take early society from matriarchal communism through a patriarchal household community and eventually to the modern single-family household, in which the father is the master of the wife and children (89–91). In the present stage of civilization, Engels asserts, the wife’s domestic position and her economic dependence make her equivalent to a slave and prostitute. As a consequence, in looking to the future, he argues that the first condition for their liberation is for all women to have access to employment outside the home (105). Although the progression of stages thus summarized may well be somewhat accurate, it is generally accepted today that no evidence exists for a prehistorical stage of matriarchy preceding the patriarchal societies found in early historical records. True matriarchies, in which women exercise the dominant power, may never have existed in human history. However, matriarchy differs significantly from matrilineality, in which inheritance is traced through the female line. In a matrilineal society, men still usually pass on property and status to male heirs, and a man’s heir is often his sister’s son. Matrilineality does not mean that women rule or exercise a dominant or deciding power; it carries little if any implication of an elevated status or power among women. It is noteworthy, nevertheless, that if Engels had scaled back and reformulated his claims, he could have made a related and valid point. According to anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock, it is generally the case that matrilineal systems gave way to patrilineal ones with the development of class relations.69 Even without this revision, Engels’s view of women’s loss of status and greater inequality, as a corollary to increasing confinement to domestic labor for husband and family, seems to be widely valid, and he did accurately foresee that the opportunity to work outside the home, by reducing women’s dependence, would be a necessary if not sufficient condition for an improvement in middleclass women’s lives.70

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In addition to relying on the questionable idea of matriarchy, Engels’s views of marriage among the working classes and the bourgeoisie present serious problems. He believed that only those in the working class contracted marriages on the basis of love rather than money, and he asserted that spousal abuse did not exist among working people, only among the loveless bourgeoisie (Origin of the Family, 102). Although Engels’s critique of the bourgeois marriage market, the double standard, and the allied practices of adultery and prostitution provides a sharp demystification of the ideology of the domestic family, his view of marriage among workers as uniquely loving, caring, and free of arguments over money stands as a comparably sentimental mystification of his own.71 On the other hand, although Engels’s focus on women and the family could lead him to take some dubious positions, that emphasis, and his reliance on Morgan, also enabled him to formulate a number of strong arguments that are widely accepted today. As Leacock points out, these include the thesis that the status of women declined in stratified class society, the importance of the “pairing family” in clan organization, and the crucial idea that monogamous marriage developed as a means by which property might be transferred more directly and with more certainty by males.72 Of course, it is not surprising that works of conjectural history will result both in productive insights and in what will later be viewed as errors (and even productive errors). Having observed some of both in Engels’s work, we can turn to the ways he employs conjectural form in the Origin of the Family. Engels often signals his overt speculations about the origins of social institutions by using the conjectural necessary past, writing of what “must have happened.” As I have noted, he employs this mode in inferring the necessary overthrow of matriarchy by patriarchy, and he uses the same formulation in his argument, repeated from Morgan, that there must have been an early, now lost, form of marriage that produced the “Hawaiian” or Punaluan system of terms for consanguinity, in which all male members of the older generation are referred to as “father” and all females of the same generation are called “mother” (Origin of the Family, 60, 68). Although Michèle Barrett, among others, has argued that any multistage theory of history must “almost inevitably” carry a strongly progressive implication (Origin of the Family, 16), in Engels’s understanding, history consists of movements that produce both progressive and regressive change, the sum of which, to date, has been more regressive than

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progressive. This thesis recapitulates the double view of history in conjectural thinkers such as Rousseau and even Ferguson. For example, Engels damns the modern form of marriage for its inequality, injustice, and hypocrisy, even though he argues that the introduction of this social institution marked a significant step in a progressive direction: “Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others” (96). Engels provides a close paraphrase of the argument of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality here. It is not only in forms of marriage that the pattern of simultaneous advance and decline holds true, but also in forms of work, such as in the development of wage labor from serfdom, and of wealth, as in the development of private property rather than the provision of community goods: “Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backward in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority” (Origin of the Family, 214–16). As in his and Marx’s German Ideology (to which Engels refers, although it remained unpublished during his lifetime), historical time here takes an irretrievably double form. In Rousseau’s formulation, civilization develops in steps that appear to be improvements but in reality are retrogressions; in Engels’s formulation, the increases in productive forces are real but the deprivations and suffering of the vast majority, the workers, are even greater. Moreover, history is probationary: the oppression of the workers will increase until they gain the self-consciousness that will allow them to redeem themselves and bring the doubleness of history to an end. This view of history as a progressively oppressive process underlies not only the development of the family and property but also the development of government and the state in Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. On the subject of governmentality, Engels makes more direct use of Morgan than he does on forms of marriage, although he adds a problematic chapter on the gens and state formation among the Germans, whom Morgan does not discuss. Rather than registering a loss of the clan or gens with the formation of the state, the chapter asserts and celebrates a continuity between the German gens and the modern German nation.73

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Engels accepts Morgan’s position that the gentile constitution was based on the values of democracy, liberty, equality, and fraternity. Gentile organization enables him to describe an already or previously existing condition, such as the Iroquois Confederacy, in which one finds a large and elaborate society without the apparatus of a state. Engels stresses the positive lacks in the gentile constitution: in such societies, one finds “no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, no kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons or lawsuits. . . . The household is maintained by a number of families in common and is communistic. . . . There cannot be any poor or needy. . . . All are equal and free, the women included” (Origin of the Family, 129). Engels here invokes Montaigne’s utopian view of native South Americans in his essay “Of Cannibals.” Montaigne, Rousseau, and Engels all conceive of Native American societies as more simple, honest, and egalitarian foils and alternatives to corrupt European civilization. They all celebrate the absence of class and class conflict, of crime, poverty, litigation, and oppression—all the “complicated administrative apparatus” of civilized stratified societies. As this passage indicates, Engels understands early clan society to be internally undifferentiated, and the process of development in social institutions to be a process of differentiation—of separating out the opposed spheres of public and private, and opposed social groups, such as rulers and ruled, the propertied and the propertyless. Again, his echoes of Rousseau are unmistakable. However, gentile society was doomed among the Iroquois, Greeks, Romans, and others. With the growth of private property and the need to ensure the transmission of property from father to biological son, as well as the division of society into classes, an institution was needed to secure the property of the rich and their right to exploit the nonpossessing: “And this institution came. The state was invented” (Origin of the Family, 141). Once more, it is impossible to miss the parallels with Rousseau’s analysis in his Discourse on Inequality, where he derives unnatural inequalities from the institution of private property. In this way, for Engels, modern class society began about 2,500 years ago in the West, leading to the increasingly more productive and more oppressive society in which we still live. The final chapter of The Origin of the Family takes the classic form of a brief conjectural history, in which the major stages closely track those in part 2 of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Here, Engels draws together the strands of his argument, noting the first social division of pastoralists from

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hunter-gatherers and the first class division between masters and slaves. The historical process takes the form of multiplying differentiations. After some time, he says, although we do not know exactly how or when, there must have occurred the passing of common property in flocks into ownership by individuals (in the temporality of the necessary conditional past). The second division of labor, of handicraft from agricultural workers, brought with it commodities, the division between rich and poor, monogamy, and what he considers to be military democracy (although there has been much controversy about the accuracy and usefulness of this category).74 This was the stage of upper barbarism, in Morgan’s terms, the age of the iron sword and ploughshare. The third division of labor produced merchants, who created nothing but skimmed off profits from handling goods. With the merchant class appeared metallic money, private ownership of land, and, almost immediately, mortgages. The gentile constitution gives way to the state, which classifies its citizens not by kinship but by wealth, which has been and continues to be the instrument of the possessing class (Origin of the Family, 196–216). The progress of civilization has led to indefensible extremes of inequality and coercion, as it does in the final pages of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Engels does not conclude on this bleak note, however; rather, he cites Morgan’s assertions in Ancient Society that democracy, equality, and brotherhood, the hallmarks of the gentile constitution, will be reestablished and realized on a higher level (Origin of the Family, 216–17). He adds that producers will once again control the now immensely more powerful means of production, as they did in gentile times. In addition, true monogamy will be realized, for men as well as for women, prostitution will disappear, and all children will be raised and educated together (107). On the exact form that sexual relations and the family or kinship groups will take in this new world, Engels, like Morgan, is reticent, allowing that such matters will be for later generations to work out (146). In addition to joining conjectural historians like Rousseau and Ferguson, who celebrated barbarian military virtues and love of liberty among Spartans, Romans, Germans, and Native American tribes, Engels also places himself in the line of visionary historians of the future, such as Condorcet, when he foresees the transformation of sexual relations, forms of kinship, marriage, and property, and the dismantling of the machinery of the state. In Engels’s conception of historical time in The Origin of the

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Family, two utopian conditions—one a gentile clan society, historically demonstrable; the other a higher form of gentile society, hazily discernible in the future—stand as termini from which and to which modern historical time flows, bracketing a millennia-long period of modern, civilized society, a dark and darkening era defined by private property, money, monogamy for women only, and the oppressions of the state. As sometimes happens with conjectural histories that address the same subject, Engels’s Origin of the Family inverts the thesis of its predecessor, John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), with regard to the history of the subordinate status of women. Whereas Millar argues that women endured the harshest treatment and had the lowest status among savages, and that their condition improved with the coming of commercial life and civilization, Engels maintains that women’s status and conditions of life have declined precipitously from the equality, respect, and power they enjoyed in late savage and early barbarian clan societies. Unlike Marx in the Ethnological Notebooks, Engels in The Origin of the Family does not develop a multilinear view of history. On the other hand, The Origin of the Family makes its own signal contribution in showing that women’s condition in modern life is historically, not biologically, determined.75 With regard to kinship, Engels’s work builds on the philosophy of history in the German Ideology and on Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks as it seeks to incorporate the insights of early anthropology, through Morgan, into Marx’s critique and reformulation of political economy. In addition, again developing Morgan’s ideas, Engels weaves into his account a history of the increasing sexual and economic oppression of women. Despite synthesizing these multiple strands, the result did not find a place in either of the main social science disciplines on which it drew— anthropology and political economy—nor did it prove generative of a new disciplinary form. Soon after The Origin of the Family was published, a line of counterargument emerged and gained strength in anthropology, asserting that monogamous marriage and the nuclear family had already existed in the earliest times and had persisted throughout history; the key text in this movement was Edward Westermarck’s History of Marriage (1891). However, The Origin of the Family did serve as a key influence and provocation for the project of materialist feminist thought, undertaken a hundred years after Engels’s work was published. Both Leacock and Barrett acknowledge the productivity of Engels’s use of conjectural history.

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Barrett gives Engels ambiguous credit for the “foolhardy zeal” with which he addressed questions concerning the origins of human society and provided answers that, while unprovable, remain of “abiding interest” (Origin of the Family, 29–30). Leacock makes a stronger case for the procedure that Engels followed, noting that evidence concerning nonliterate, preclass societies must always be ambiguous, sketchy, and mediated by recordkeeping observers; reconstructing communal societies as they functioned before coming into contact with state societies necessitates “making assumptions,” speculating about social institutions consistent with simpler technological levels.76 The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State also brings us close to the end of conjecturalist thinking in anthropology during the period under consideration here. Tylor continued to dominate the field for the quarter century after the 1871 publication of Primitive Culture, although, during the remainder of his career, he did not do important new work to redefine the paradigm he had established earlier. William Robertson Smith’s speculative reconstructions in the Religion of the Semites (1889) constitute a late instance, to which we will return in chapter 6. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890; 2nd ed. 1900; 3rd ed. 1913) still assumes a historical framework like Tylor’s, distinguishing between the stages of magic, religion, and science. However, Frazer did not seek to establish an origin or to place the myths he discussed in relation to these stages. He engaged, rather, in a largely synchronic comparison of beliefs and ritual practices, seeing little or no development in different cultures’ stories of the death and frequently the resurrection of their divinities. But the field was shifting from a cultural evolutionary perspective toward a more synchronic, less developmental direction of analysis. Beginning with Franz Boas’s “On the Limitations of the Comparative Method,” in 1896, and continuing through the first decade of the following century, Boas and the students he trained focused on detailed analysis of small, preliterate societies and rejected the theory of cultural evolution generally. The Cambridge Torres Straits expedition, one of the first efforts to move anthropology out of the study and into the observation of everyday lives on site, took place in 1898–1899. The transformation was accomplished soon after the end of World War I, when both Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Radcliffe-Brown’s The Andaman Islanders (1922) were published. Synchronic structural-functional analysis based on immersive study, by

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participant-observers, of a single people bound in a limited space dominated anthropology for decades after World War I, replacing diachronic focus on development, the psychic unity of mankind, and comparisons of European ancestors with primitive peoples. When Radcliffe-Brown articulated his method in the 1920s, he defined it explicitly in opposition to the first generation of anthropologists, whose work he termed both conjectural and historical.77 However, the reaction against conjecture and history itself came under criticism a generation later, when, among others, Leslie White advocated and practiced historical and evolutionary analysis in numerous articles and books, and in his 1964 edition of Morgan’s Ancient Society. In The Evolution of Culture (1959), far from confining himself to field observation of the present state of a single preliterate society, White offered a history of human culture from the Paleolithic to the end of the Roman Empire. The first threequarters of this book addresses primitive culture, beginning with the transition from anthropoid to human society, considering early technologies and patterns of kinship and marriage, and the work concludes with considerations of the agricultural revolution, the development of private property in land, and ancient myth and philosophy. On some of these topics, White closely and explicitly follows Morgan in Ancient Society; on others he differs. But White is clearly thinking and working again in the tradition of historical, evolutionary anthropology in which Morgan worked. Although conjectural thought faced opposition from those who favored ahistorical, empirical observation, the reaction against the structural-functional method, by White, Gordon Childe, and others of their time, indicates a return of conjectural historical thought and form. I will consider this pattern of cultural and formal struggle, submersion, and reappearance as an instance of the Nietzsche–Darwin principle in the next chapter. Significantly, although some of the assertions or parts of the arguments of conjectural histories may be disputed or even shown to be incorrect, the conjectural form has opened up fields for work that later thinkers have productively explored. And, as the conclusion will show, conjectural anthropology still provides a generative framework for current thought, not only in archaeology but in political theory and evolutionary theories of cultural institutions such as religion.

5

Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human

nineteenth-century works in the line of conjectural history that helped shape social thought in emerging fields such as sociology and anthropology. However, two of the most consequential works in the tradition adopt a multi- or metadisciplinary form: Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), and Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Darwin and Nietzsche situate their early histories of humankind in relation to recent anthropological thinking, including that of John Lubbock and E. B. Tylor, yet their works played no role in the institutionalization of that field. However, these speculative histories did have a delayed disciplinary effect. The Descent of Man provided a model for the recent cross-disciplinary approaches of cognitive evolution and evolutionary psychology, and the Genealogy of Morality served as the founding instance for genealogical history as practiced by Michel Foucault.1 Their multidisciplinary use of conjectural form, and their resistance to disciplinary appropriation in their own time, may have made them available to be employed later as formal resources, provocations, and models. t h e p r e c e d i n g c h a p t e r s h av e e x a m i n e d

t h r ee o u ts i d e r h i s to ri ans : b u c kl e , l e c k y, bage hot

Before turning to these two influential figures, however, we should note the work of three speculative historical writers who, like Darwin and Nietzsche, stand outside the emerging social science disciplines: H. T. Buckle, author of the History of Civilization in England (1857); W. E. H. Lecky, who wrote the History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869); and Walter Bagehot, author of Physics and Politics (1867–68). Buckle was an

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autodidact who died at forty-one, before he had finished writing even the massive introduction to his History of Civilization; the Irishman Lecky, after his early histories, had a successful career as a member of Parliament; and Bagehot, a dissenting Unitarian, was longtime editor of the Economist and a historian, author of The English Constitution (1867). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the canons of academic history—including especially the requirement of basing historical scholarship on documentary evidence—had become well-enough established that only those outside the universities were writing conjectural or philosophical histories. In seeking to determine the general laws of human development through stages in morals, politics, and religion, Buckle and Lecky wrote histories that belong as much to philosophical as to conjectural history. Buckle bases his faith in the existence of general laws on the regularities of sociological statistics, such as Adolphe Quételet’s observation that the rate of suicides or of crime in a particular society remains almost constant from year to year, and that such rates can be correlated with other factors such as climate, education, or alcohol use. Like Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson, Buckle traces the shaping role of climate and physical geography on political institutions. He assesses mental and political progress by focusing not on great thinkers, politicians, or generals but on the average, typical, or median in societies at different times. Lecky finds a lawlike pattern in the long-term movement in Europe away from superstition and religious persecution toward rational, scientific thought and democratic social forms. He echoes Ferguson in acknowledging that an increase in rational calculation and commercial virtues leads to a decline in reverence and heroic virtues. His work is more involved with the analysis of specific authors, texts, examples, and events than Buckle’s, and so is more nearly a philosophical than a conjectural history.2 Bagehot’s misnamed Physics and Politics, on the other hand, takes the form of a classic conjectural history. Indeed, it is the first work after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) to draw out possible implications of the principle of natural selection for a history of political forms. Bagehot repeatedly acknowledges that he has no documents or remains from the prehistoric times when societies were first formed. He therefore has recourse to Henry Maine’s conjectural theory of patriarchal power as originary, although he argues that even if there had been earlier matrilinear societies, they must have been defeated by the more cohesive patriarchal

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societies with which they would have come into contact.3 The most significant shift that he traces in human history—from an age of unthinking obedience to custom to a modern age of political discussion—is based on the related shift, described in Maine’s Ancient Law (1861), from ancient societies based on status to modern ones based on contract (Physics and Politics, 108) (see chapter 6). Like many of the Enlightenment conjectural historians, Bagehot speculates that fear would have dominated the life of the first humans. But, unlike previous conjecturalists, he maintains that the need for order must have superseded all else in the earliest societies. Without the obedience of all the members of a band to a leader or to unquestioned custom, there would be no society at all. In Bagehot’s central thesis, even if a government takes the form of absolute rule, “any form of polity is more efficient than none” (Physics and Politics, 18). Bagehot considers later forms of political organization that promote free inquiry and discussion to be superior to earlier tribal and authoritarian forms, but in their time the earlier forms would have been favored by natural selection, because human groups required a strong unifying bond in order to survive. Nietzsche borrowed extensively from Bagehot’s Physics and Politics. In Human, All Too Human (1878–80) and Daybreak (1881), he argues in terms very close to Bagehot’s for custom constituting morality, and for the morality of custom, die Sittlichkeit der Sitte.4 In addition, Bagehot maintains that, among early humans, the more obedient and coherent groups, possessing even a slight advantage in military organization, would have been stronger than less disciplined groups and thus more likely to survive. Conflicts involving values shape history, in Bagehot’s view, but they are much less violent for him than they are for Nietzsche. The final section of this chapter will pursue these convergences between Bagehot and Nietzsche—including Bagehot’s early adumbration of the Nietzsche–Darwin principle.5 da rw i n : th e c o nj e c tu ral d e s c e nt o f m a n

Darwin’s Descent of Man was published almost twelve years after the Origin of Species, which, in its single mention of human beings, states that the theory of natural selection will throw “some light” on “the early history and nature of man.”6 Darwin originally conceived of the Descent of Man, Sexual Selection, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

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(1872) as three parts of a single work on man, but because of the length to which the first two had grown, he published Expression of the Emotions as a separate volume. The composite title of the first published volume indicates its two parts: part 1, “The Descent or Origin of Man” (seven chapters), followed by part 2, “Sexual Selection,” which devotes eleven chapters to exploring that subject in the animal kingdom. In the final two chapters of part 2, Darwin brings the subject of sexual selection to bear on human evolution. Thus, he places eleven chapters on sexual selection in nonhuman animals between the first seven chapters, on the earliest developments in human society, and the last two, one on sexual selection in humans and one a general summary of both parts. In the peculiar structure of this composite volume, the nine chapters on humans, omitting the long inserted work on sexual selection, form a conjectural history of early human life that employs the idea of natural selection. The Descent of Man may therefore be said to consist of these nine chapters. Darwin begins the Descent of Man with a chapter on anatomy that underscores the extensive continuities between humans and other mammals, as indicated by the study of embryos. However persuasive his demonstration, it is not foundational. The physical commonalities and discrepancies between humans and other animals had been a subject of controversy within comparative anatomy for decades, and relations between humans and apes had been treated most extensively and recently by T. H. Huxley in Man’s Place in Nature (1863). The chapters between the first chapter and Sexual Selection proper, with its concluding chapter for both parts, are concerned with tracing the development of human intellectual and moral faculties, especially the continuities between those abilities that, in the West, have traditionally been taken to distinguish humans as unique and the abilities of all other animals, especially primates and the more social mammals. Stressing continuities here, then, carries important implications that are lacking from the comparison of embryonic physical traits in Darwin’s chapter 1. For one thing, Darwin ascribes emotions and abstract thought to the large-brained social mammals, including emotions indicating moral capacity such as remorse, as well as virtues such as loyalty, sympathy, and self-sacrifice. In these speculations in the Descent of Man proper, Darwin argues, without denying the distinctions, that they are differences of degree, not of kind. Here Darwin does not seek to degrade humans to the level of animals; rather, he attempts

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to bring about a recognition of other animals’ participation in moral and mental life. Yet, in the conclusion of the Descent of Man, he does lower certain humans to the level of other closely related animals, or below them: these are the human savages, whether those who reputedly kill their own parents and children or eat others of their kind. Through his focus on continuities between humans and other animals, Darwin aims to construct a more rigorous naturalistic account of the development of the higher mental and moral faculties in humans than had previously been advanced. His narrative of human origins in the Descent of Man proper takes him into the areas of social, cultural, and physical anthropology, which, as we have seen, were in the 1870s being consolidated as disciplines, using conjectural methods in Britain as well as in France and the United States. In the absence of bones of human ancestors—Neanderthal had just been uncovered in the late 1850s, though consensus was lacking on the age of the bones or the species—Darwin was left to conjecture about the earliest stages of the social, cultural, and intellectual life of humanity.7 He did not study archaeological finds on-site like Lubbock, whose investigations and naming of the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages helped to found physical anthropology; nor did he study the social and cultural survivals of earlier customs, beliefs, and practices in later cultures, as did Tylor and J. F. McLennan in founding cultural anthropology. Darwin was working forward from the animal kingdom to the human species, rather than backward from human to animal, as were almost all anthropologists, the speculative historians of this transition. Although it starts from the animal-human and works forward, the Descent of Man still takes the recognizable form of a conjectural history, with close affinities in form to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). In addition to its acknowledgment of the need for speculation, because of the near absence of evidence, the Descent of Man signals its proximity to the earlier conjectural histories by refusing to ascribe any causation in the beginnings of humans to a creator or divinity—the parallel between Darwin’s work and Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) is strong. Rather, this and other species result from the figurative selections of personified nature. The Descent of Man points out, however, that the process of natural selection does not work in alignment with any individual intention or group planning. Darwin does not delineate a certain number of clear stages in the Descent of Man, as most of the

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earlier conjectural historians did; however, his tracing forward of the ascent from apes to humans results in at least three stages, of which two, the savage and the civilized, are familiar from most conjectural histories. The third stage he locates in relation to these first two is not the barbarian; rather, it consists of animals, or at least the most intelligent social animals, when he places individuals among the most advanced apes in a higher position than the least morally developed humans. Although Darwin repeatedly asserts that a wide gulf separates the animals from humans, there are exceptional instances. Even among the civilized, Darwin distinguishes degrees, from the nearly barbarian to the most highly advanced. Both of these scales—among humans, and between humans and animals—have momentous and ominous implications. Darwin analyzes the nature and sequence of the stages of human history in four different areas in the Descent of Man, examining the development of humans anatomically, emotionally, intellectually, and morally. Physically, he traces all humans back to their common “apelike” ancestor, who “no doubt” had pointed, mobile ears, was covered with hair, possessed a tail, and lived in trees.8 In maintaining that the adaptations that define humans had already occurred before the species split into races (or, as he prefers, subspecies), Darwin avoids a polygenist position. Physically, he is, as always, tracing continuities and affinities, but here he distinguishes only two stages, apes and humans, with the apelike ancestors occupying an early conjectural stage between them. On the emotional and intellectual levels, Darwin follows the line of argument that Montaigne took in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” He does not attempt to deny human reason or emotions, nor does he deny all differences between humans and other animals, but he asserts that dogs and other animals show the same range of emotions, behaviors, and mental states as humans. They feel terror, suspicion, and courage; pursue revenge; demonstrate grief, affection, shame, boredom, wonder, and curiosity; show attention; retain memories of persons; and exercise imagination (Descent, 1:39–40). Primates, like canines, possess all these faculties, though neither group to the same degree as humans. On the question of intelligence, Darwin, like Montaigne, cites telling anecdotes such as the sled dogs who fan out over a frozen lake to lessen their weight and their chance of breaking through the ice, or the monkeys who learn to avoid cutting themselves on sharp tools (1:46–47).

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Although articulate language is unique to humans, Darwin observes that the closest analogues among animals are to be found in the songs of birds and gibbons, both of which are used for courting. On this basis, he reasons that song probably came first among humans and that language developed out of music and song (Descent, 1:54–56). In the area of religion, Darwin traces the most elementary form of religious faith to belief in invisible and unknown spirits. Although he ascribes such convictions not to fear but to wonder and curiosity, in other ways he closely follows Hume, Mandeville, and Condorcet in their speculations about the origins of religion. The stages that succeed this original state are the familiar ones of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism—the same stages traced in Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published a few months after the Descent of Man. Here too Darwin stresses continuities between humans and other animals, noticing, for example, that the reverence of a dog for his master closely resembles that of a believer for his God. And he reduces the distance between humans by arguing that the violent and cruel behaviors of superstitious believers cannot be confined to those savages who engaged in human sacrifice, but also extend to those civilized Europeans who, until recently, in the cause of religion, tortured and burned their fellow Christians at the stake (1:68). Many of the arguments of the Descent of Man, as well as its form as a naturalistic conjectural narrative of early human society, suggest that it grows out of an ethnological paradigm as much as it participates in the later anthropological framework, a contrast discussed in chapter 4. The congruence between Darwin’s thinking about human origins, in the period around 1840 when he was formulating his theory of natural selection, and in the late 1860s, when he was working on the Descent of Man, emerges most clearly by comparing his notes and lists of readings on early human society from the two periods. Several passages from the M and N notebooks—written between mid-1838 and late 1839, and concerned with the human mind, morality, and social behavior—form the basis for passages in the Descent of Man, and many of the readings point to an understanding of the Descent of Man as a conjectural history.9 In 1840, Darwin records that he read and made extracts of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, part 2 (1729).10 The first entry in the notes made in preparation for the Descent of Man, probably in 1866, also concerns the second volume of the Fable of the Bees. Here, Darwin focuses on Mandeville’s

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speculation that fear of wild animals must have drawn otherwise unsociable human beings into a social order; he notes that Mandeville provides a model to follow because he dispensed with providential explanations and focused on plausible inferences drawn from observations.11 Darwin’s close reading of the Fable of the Bees, part 2, shows his knowledge of and interest in conjectural history. Part 2 offers a naturalistic account of the way that religion, morality, and language must have developed gradually, through hundreds of generations. Darwin’s reading of the Fable of the Bees in 1840, and his return to it in 1866, indicates that it served as an exemplar and point of reference for his own account of the origins of human society. The philosopher whose work appears most often in the notes from both the 1830s and the 1860s is David Hume. Darwin read most of Hume’s writings, some of them several times.12 Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) figures prominently in the early notebooks (DAR.80, 117; DAR.88, 3) and is referred to in a note in the Descent of Man (1:85). The early chapters of the Descent of Man follow Hume’s argument in the Enquiry that ethical behavior depends not on reasoning about right and wrong but on a moral sense that arises from living in society and sympathizing with others.13 Both the early and the late lists show Darwin drawing also on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in formulating a naturalistic argument concerning the basis of morals. Reading Smith’s Theory as a potential conjectural history of the origin of morality, Darwin writes in his notebook for 1842 that Smith “ought to be studied for comparison of man & animals—derives all from sympathy—considers we approve or disapprove of ourselves by placing ourselves in person of another . . . —perhaps this [the] origin of such instincts” (emphasis in original).14 Although the terms he uses in the Descent of Man make reference to those that Smith employs, Darwin concludes, as he indicates here, that moral actions follow from instincts and not from the ability of humans to imagine ourselves in the place of others.15 Still, he draws the moral theories of Hume and Smith into the framework of conjectural history by considering social life as a historical development, noting parallels and continuities between human morals and the protomoral behavior of other intelligent social animals.16 Further works of conjectural history appear in the reading lists and notes, both in the late 1830s and in the late 1860s, such as, for example, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773) by James Burnett, Lord

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Monboddo. In the early loose papers that he labeled “Old and Useless Notes” (1838–40)—after he had mined them in writing The Descent of Man—Darwin writes about an article in the Athenaeum concerning reason and language: “quotes Mondobbo [sic]—language commenced in whole sentences.—signs—”; then he exclaims, “Were signs originally muscical [sic] !!!??—.”17 Consistent with the strong feelings he harbored from his early years about music and the importance of music for language, Darwin develops this insight from three decades earlier, when he speculates in the Descent that articulate language and human music developed out of a single source—the melodies of mating songs, like those still sung by birds, baboons, and other mammals.18 In preparing the second edition of the Descent in late 1872 or 1873, Darwin again exclaims at finding an antecedent to his own conjectures on the origin of language: “A Gibbon if it learned to speak would modify its lisping [?] tones for the purpose . . . there appears to be relation between speech and music. The same statement is in Lord Monboddo! Origin of Languages vol. I (1794), p. 469” (DAR.89, 140). In the Origin and Progress of Language, Monboddo reports the theory of his friend Thomas Blacklock that “the first language among men was music” (emphasis in original). Although Monboddo does not go this far himself, he does maintain that “musical modulation was, if not prior to language, at least coeval with it.”19 Monboddo’s work offers significant confirmation for Darwin’s thesis that music either preceded or emerged simultaneously with language, but Monboddo also could be seen as a precursor of Darwin because he went further than any other eighteenth-century thinker in asserting a kinship between apes and humans. In the embedded conjectural history of the earliest human society in book 2 of the Origin and Progress of Language, Monboddo maintained that orangutans (he was probably thinking of chimpanzees) belong to the same species as humans.20 He also argued that orangutans have the physiological capacity to speak, and that if they were to develop that potential, they would probably alter the tones they already use in courting. Thus, Darwin’s notebooks indicate his engagement with some of the major conjectural histories of the eighteenth century. He refers repeatedly in his preparatory notes to the Fable of the Bees, part 2, Hume’s Natural History of Religion, Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1778), Monboddo’s Origin and Progress of Language, and Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments.21 J. G. von Herder is not mentioned in the notes, but Darwin

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probably read extensive abstracts of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History (1784–91) in the original Journal of the Ethnological Society.22 Moreover, the title that Darwin first assigned to his book on man gives evidence of its affinities with the conjectural histories. A number of times in his correspondence of the late 1860s, Darwin reports that he is thinking of writing a “little essay on the Origin of Man.”23 This phrase echoes the titles of Monboddo’s Origin and Progress of Language, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. In the published work, part 1 is still entitled “The Descent or Origin of Man.” Darwin may have altered the title from “Origin” to “Descent” because he did not want to repeat too closely the form of the Origin of Species; perhaps he did not wish to recall the conjectural histories too openly, for reasons considered later in this chapter. Even under its changed title, Darwin’s narrative reveals important affinities with the conjectural histories. Most obviously, all these works go back to a time before written records, and many to a time before culture or society. Mandeville and Monboddo both write of the animal-men who preceded modern humans, lacking speech, social institutions, or culture. Almost all the conjectural historians emphasize, as Darwin does, the important role played by human sociability. Consonant with the ideas of many conjectural historians, Darwin argues that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (Descent, 1:72). The Descent of Man thus shares with the conjectural histories a naturalistic account of the origins of human language, religion, and morality. The conjectural histories trace progressive developments that led to improvement in the conditions of human life, yet almost all complicate and qualify their narrative of progress. Darwin believes the increasing variation in traits has produced both the human species and, within it, civilized societies; however, he also feels it is “impossible not bitterly to regret, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase” (1:180).24 In the Descent of Man, Darwin does not acknowledge the most telling convergences between himself and Hume, which arise from their demystifying satire of popular religious beliefs based on fear. In the Natural History of Religion, Hume argues that early humans ascribed to unknown powers the ability to affect their lives, attributing feelings and

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intelligence to these forces. Out of such a system, theism develops from a natural tendency to attribute ever-greater powers to a local god or a ruler among the gods.25 Darwin’s speculative account of religion begins by arguing, like Hume’s, that the earliest humans would have had no idea of an omnipotent god; rather, they would naturally have believed in the power of unseen agencies embodied in animals, plants, and natural phenomena. He notes that such a belief is almost universal among “the less civilized races” in his own day (Descent, 1:65). Tracing the same progress as Hume from polytheism to theism, Darwin repudiates the thesis of degeneration from an originary monotheism and, like Tylor and Hume, draws attention to the persistence of superstitious behavior such as executions for witchcraft even in Christian theism, on the part of Catholic and Protestant Christians alike (1:68). Both Hume and Darwin draw a satiric continuity between the distinctive religious behavior of humans and the behavior of other animals.26 In the conclusion to the Natural History of Religion, Hume notes that what is most sublime and inspiring in religious phenomena is often linked to what is absurd or intolerant. Despite the accomplishments of human reason, he asks his reader to “examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies [monkeys] in human shape.”27 This for Hume is the insoluble paradox posed by religions. In a comparable passage near the end of his discussion of religion in the Descent of Man, Darwin suggests a similar analogy between religious beliefs and animal behavior: the reverence that the human faithful feel for their divinity parallels the reverence of dogs for human beings themselves. Although religious devotion is a complex feeling that includes dependence, fear, and gratitude, “nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind, in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings” (Descent, 1:68). The detailed correspondence that Darwin draws between human and canine devotion lends a tone of dispassionate scientific analysis to the satire of beings who assert that their worship of their deity demonstrates their reason and intelligence.28 Early anthropological discussions of religion often assert a qualitative difference between primitive and advanced systems of belief, with fear the

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foundation of the former but not of the latter. As F. W. Farrar put it, “A vague fear of the Unknown is found even among the animals, and is widely different from the belief in a god.” L. O. Pike went further, to argue in a passage Darwin marked, that all popular religions, whether primitive or advanced, have their foundation in fear.29 Pike’s passage resembles Hume’s, but it does not carry the same satiric charge. The comparison between human worshippers and animals does figure in an anonymous satiric article asserting that no single trait distinguishes humans from animals, which Darwin called, on the back cover of his copy, a “clever paper.”30 Although this article drew the satiric implication that religious ideas based on fear of the unknown are shared by humans and other animals, Darwin does not cite it in the Descent of Man, probably because it was too satiric; nor does he refer to Hume on this point. Indeed, despite the parallels between their arguments, Darwin does not cite Hume on religion, although we know that he read the Natural History in the late 1830s and that Hume was the philosopher he referred to most often in that crucial period. He refers to Pike’s essay, calls it “able,” and mentions that “Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god” (Descent, 1:68). Here, then, the Descent of Man closely resembles Hume’s conjectural Natural History of Religion in its form and argument, and we know that Darwin read and was influenced by it, yet reference to the work in The Descent of Man is lacking.31 Darwin cites contemporaneous anthropological studies by McLennan, Lubbock, and Tylor—themselves influenced by conjectural history, as we have seen in chapter 4—more than fifty times in the Descent of Man, but he does not refer to the conjectural histories of Hume and Mandeville. Many of Darwin’s ideas about the early evolution of language, morals, and religion had already been formulated in the late 1830s, in the framework of the conjectural histories, and they remained largely unchanged through the late 1860s and the writing of the Descent of Man. By that time, several conjectural histories were more than a hundred years old, and Darwin may have felt that conjectural history as a form was anachronistic. In addition, to increase the authority of his work, Darwin wanted it to be seen as based on empirical data, not mere conjecture. He acknowledges the speculative nature of his arguments at a number of points (see for example, Descent, 1:139–49, 160, 167; 2:385), but he tries to provide observations to support as many arguments as he can. Thus, he may have elided references to the

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conjectural historians because of a desire to avoid appearing to be a theorist or speculator unmoored from empirical evidence, as the earlier historians often appeared to be.32 Darwin’s citations in the Descent of Man reveal displacements and indirection at work. His frequent references to Lubbock, who was a committed Darwinian, allow him, in effect, to cite himself and his own thought at one remove. Citing, agreeing with, and differing from these cultural anthropologists provided a way of including but also displacing and obscuring the influence of the conjectural histories. Avoiding reference to the Enlightenment conjectural historians allowed Darwin to make the implicit claim that his arguments are grounded in recent intellectual developments, observations, and empirical research. Such a strategy also enabled him to offer alliances with contemporaries such as Spencer and the early anthropologists. On the question of language and music, Darwin cites Spencer, with whom he disagrees, but he does not reveal the extent of his disagreement, probably because he wants to be allied with Spencer, not to antagonize him.33 On fear as the basis of religion, he cites Pike’s essay from the 1860s but not Hume’s Natural History of Religion, because he seeks to be allied with contemporary anthropologists rather than the notoriously irreligious Hume. Throughout the Descent of Man, Darwin formulated his ideas so as to maintain alliances on the fundamental issue of evolution by means of natural selection.34 The notebooks for the work show him considering how to present his arguments, which implications to underscore, which to leave implicit, and which authorities and contemporaries to mention. The notebooks reveal that he was reading Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863) and thinking about the relation between utilitarian ethics and his own theory of morals—for example, the benefit or utility to a tribe from cultivating sympathy as a principle of action. Nevertheless, he observes to himself, “I had better avoid all allusion to Utilitarian or intuitive theory and allusion to leaders & priests” (DAR.80, 47, 148). Darwin considered reference to utilitarian arguments to come dangerously close to attacking political and religious orthodoxy and, in the presentation of his views, he sought to downplay their challenge to established authorities of church and state. This entry shows him deciding not to refer to the theory that ethics is based on intuition or a moral sense, although he was presenting such a theory himself in the Descent of Man.

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Silvan Schweber has argued that, because Darwin did not want his theory of natural selection to be seen as dependent on an ideology with radical political implications, he employed Henri Milne-Edwards’s notion of a physiological division of labor in the Origin of Species, rather than Smith’s economic division of labor, as an analogue for his principle of increasing variation among successful organisms.35 A similar motive may be at work in the way the Descent of Man shies away from references to Hume, Mandeville, and other conjectural historians, who were often associated with atheism, cynicism, and revolution. Displacing references to these predecessors allows Darwin instead to cite the contemporary anthropologists Tylor, McLennan, and, most frequently, Lubbock—and other thinkers with whom he seeks to be allied, such as Spencer.36 Despite these successful efforts at finding common ground with the early anthropologists, the Descent of Man did not become part of the anthropological canon but occupied a tangential relation to the discipline. On the one hand, the work remains very close to conjectural history, and thus would seem to participate in the earlier paradigm of ethnology. On the other hand, the Descent differs from the conjectural histories and the other early anthropological texts in having been written to demonstrate the work of natural selection in the history of humankind. Even Lubbock does not appeal to this principle explicitly to account for the progress of civilization. Once subordinated to this crucial idea, the concept of a progressive development from the primitive to the civilized—held in common by the conjectural histories, ethnography and anthropology, and the Descent of Man—moves from the cultural dimension to a biological and racial one. In order to illustrate the operation of natural selection, Darwin reduces cultural accomplishments to biological traits; he thus participates in the racializing tendency of his time, and his argument in the Descent of Man often takes the form of a biological determinism based on race.37 The eighteenth-century conjectural historians did not employ in their narratives a concept of race as a set of fixed and heritable characteristics; such a notion was not part of their cultural paradigm. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, human groups that exemplify the savage, barbarian, or civilized stages of social existence were almost always characterized as races, and the subdivisions of humankind often became equated with racial categories.38 Despite Darwin’s opposition to slavery, when he wrote the Descent of Man he participated in this tendency to conceive

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of human groups as a hierarchy of races, from dark-skinned savages to civilized whites.39 As Darwin, in defense of his paramount concept of natural selection, aimed to dispel the idea of a gulf between humans and animals and to show mediating positions between civilized humans and apes, he also represented primitive peoples as intellectually and morally inferior to Protestant northern Europeans.40 In his intensely racialized culture, Darwin prognosticated that in the not-too-distant future, “the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races” (Descent, 1:201).41 Against such an announcement of inevitable genocide, Darwin might have directed some of the skeptical intelligence that he employed against anthropocentric religious beliefs. His thought about human evolution reveals a sharp tension between a demystifying Enlightenment history and a racializing narrative of natural selection.42 The conjectural histories were largely monogenetic and ethnocentric but mostly not racist, whereas early anthropological writings were largely polygenetic and racist, as chapter 4 showed. Darwin was closer to the first way of thinking early in his career, but approached the second view later in his career, when he was writing the Descent of Man. It is telling that in the M and N notebooks and the other notes on humans from the 1830s and 1840s, Darwin makes no significant references to race; he did not employ the category in first formulating his theories about the course of human evolution, but relied instead on the concept of the essential uniformity of intelligence and psychology across human groups. Possibly, Darwin became more racist later in life, although there is no evidence that he did. Possibly, also, he pursued a strategy in the Descent of Man of adjusting his argument to the reigning milieu in the late 1860s, when “scientific” racism had become ascendant. As evidence of the latter strategy, we can observe that Darwin equivocates on many important issues. For example, he does not go as far as most polygenists in maintaining that races constitute separate species, but he does argue that races include enough divergences that they can be considered subspecies or varieties (Descent, 1:227–28). In addition, he believed that many racial traits could best be explained not by means of natural selection but by sexual selection, by what is considered beautiful in different human groups. The aim of promoting both natural selection and sexual selection led him to emphasize racial differences.43

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Darwin did not have to take this path. He could have decided not to biologize cultural differences but to acknowledge that there is much savagery even in the highest cultural accomplishments of Europeans. In his critique of religion, he notes the burning of witches and heretics by different sects of Christians, a survival of superstition to which Tylor referred in Primitive Culture (Descent, 1:139–40). Hermann Schaaffhausen, the physical anthropologist, followed such a line of thought when he insisted that entire races could not be distinguished as savage or civilized, but that a mixture of conditions and a potential for both exists in all peoples. Darwin marked the margin next to Schaaffhausen’s point about the remnants of savagery in Homer and the Old Testament, but he did not employ such arguments in the Descent of Man. Like the works of many ethnographers and early anthropologists, the Descent of Man was indebted to the Enlightenment form for many of its features and concerns, including naturalistic explanations of the origins of language, religion, and morality and of the relation between the behavior of humans and nonhuman social animals (ethology).44 Attending to the continuities and displacements between the conjectural histories and the Descent of Man, as it silently uses the antecedent form as a model, makes visible Darwin’s connections to Enlightenment thought. But Darwin’s thinking in the Descent of Man also carries newly racial implications, as he looks for evidence of natural selection at work among human groups in the time since the emergence of culture, writing, and history.45 There remains to be discussed an aspect of Darwin’s thought that is related to conjectural history, a principle concerning the persistence of form through changes of function that he and Nietzsche formulated independently. I will consider the relation between Nietzsche and conjectural history before turning to this convergence, which has been called the Nietzsche–Darwin principle. n i e t zs che ’s c o nj e c tu ral h i s to ry o f m o r a l it y

Through his subtitle, Nietzsche identifies On the Genealogy of Morality as a continuation of his previous book, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). But it is also the culmination of his work since Human, All Too Human and Daybreak. The Genealogy of Morality exhibits critical elements of the Enlightenment conjectural histories.46 It provides a history of the origins

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of morality in times and manners for which there is little if any direct evidence, describing a process by conjecture and speculation. The emergence that it traces stands opposed to any supernatural causation. This genealogical history distinguishes, in each of its three essays or parts, stages of moral life and the transitions between them. The first essay follows the supersession of a knightly, aristocratic, unreflective way of acting and valuing by a calculating, resentful, and reflective form of behavior and set of values.47 The second registers the accretions of meanings that take in new directions institutional practices such as punishment, even as they appear largely unchanged in form. The third essay brings the history of the resentful, cunning, and ascetic priestly caste up to the present and into the near future, as it is embodied in the honest philosophers who seek not only the truth but also the reasons for which they do so. Like other conjectural histories such as Condorcet’s and Kant’s, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality moves from the unknowable past to a vision of the future, after the struggle between Christianity and its truest and most rebellious successors, the atheistic overmen. In addition to its history of morality, however, the Genealogy proposes a critical history of human socialization and expresses a radical ambivalence concerning the civilizing process.48 For Nietzsche, civilization involves the taming and domestication of the human animal. In essay 2 he discusses what must have been necessary to turn the unthinking and forgetful early human into a being who could remember and promise, and he concludes on the basis of early punishments that only suffering could have made a strong enough impression to induce memory. He goes on to list in detail gruesome punishments that were inflicted by Germanic peoples until well into the Christian era, including breaking on the wheel, impaling, boiling in oil, and flaying. This reflection leads to the concluding exclamation: “How much blood and horror lies at the basis of all ‘good things’!” (Genealogy of Morality, 2.3). Nietzsche not only infers that memory arose as a result of extreme violence; he also conceives of socialization as a self-disciplining that involves extreme physical and psychological constraints. Indeed, he uses a striking metaphor from the animal world as he imagines the change that must have occurred in man when he found himself “imprisoned within the confines of society and peace”; it must have been no different for this wild, wandering semi-animal “than it was for the sea animals when they were forced

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to either become land animals or to perish—at one go, all instincts were devalued and ‘suspended.’ . . . The poor things were reduced to relying on thinking, inference, calculation. . . . All those instincts of the wild, free, roving man were turned backwards, against man himself. . . . [Man,] this animal who battered himself raw on the bars of his cage and who is supposed to be ‘tamed’ ” (Genealogy of Morality, 2.16).49 Human animals becoming civilized human beings find themselves in the same position as sea creatures entering a new element in which their limbs must adapt to other kinds of movements; their instincts of aggression must be suppressed, inwardness must be cultivated, and the organ of intelligence, reckoning, and cunning must be relied upon for survival. This process is not imposed upon man by an outside force; humans themselves subject themselves to the new, civilized conditions, to the self-persecuting lacerations of consciousness and conscience.50 Man disciplines, socializes, and tames himself; he distinguishes and defines himself as the tame animal, through working cruelly on himself. Nietzsche regards this process as at once a sign of sickness and the work of an artist disciplining and shaping his material—himself. It is thus an instance of a fundamental paradox and of a radical ambivalence in Nietzsche’s view of civilization. Because he conceives of one group of people—the nobles—molding the rest of the “raw material of people and semi-animals [Halbthier]” (Genealogy of Morality, 2.17), Nietzsche sees no role for a contract to explain the foundation of society.51 His anticontractualism allies him with the conjectural historians and against the earlier natural law theorists Pufendorf, Locke, and Hobbes. There are no reasonable parties to come together, discuss, and agree to terms at the beginning, precisely because people capable of reasoning are first produced by the founding violence performed, in Nietzsche’s view, by the nobles, the “master race” (Herrenrasse), the “blond beasts” (blonden Raubthiere) (1.11; 2.16) (although his listing of them includes Romans, Arabs, Japanese, and Greeks—none of them blond—as well as Vikings and Germans). These aristocratic human animals, Nietzsche says, left behind them the concept “barbarian” wherever they went. However, not only do these violent barbarians, through their domination, shape other humans into tamed creatures of resentment and reasoning, but they are also surpassed by their creations, who, especially and increasingly in the modern world, have used their instruments of

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calculation, patience, and hatred to become dominant in turn. “Assuming that what is at any rate believed as ‘truth’ were indeed true, that it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man,’ then one would undoubtedly have to view all instinctive reaction and instinctive ressentiment, by means of which the noble races and their ideas were finally wrecked and overpowered, as the actual instruments of culture” (Genealogy of Morality, 1.11). These bearers of culture, who no longer inspire fear, also represent, in Nietzsche’s view, the decline of human beings, and he leaves no doubt of his preference for the kind of men one might fear but can also admire over the kind of weak mediocrities who inspire neither fear nor admiration. Nietzsche here embraces a position of respect for barbarians—their physical strength, tribal loyalty, and honesty—over modern, urban, commercial men, which was articulated by earlier conjectural historians. It is true that Nietzsche casts his respect for barbarians in a rhetoric of extreme violence. However, Rousseau and Ferguson also celebrate the violence and shedding of blood by barbarians, whose virtues and form of life they admire.52 As he traces the transformation from human animal to socialized human, Nietzsche acknowledges that he is dealing in conjecture and inference. Concerning the idea that “to make someone suffer is pleasure in its highest form,” he adds, “I say all this in speculation: because such subterranean things are difficult to fathom out, besides being embarrassing” (Genealogy of Morality, 2.6). His speculation is not groundless, however. He cites evidence from legal codes, customary practices, and artistic works, such as, for example, the pleasure that the duke and duchess and their court take in tormenting Don Quixote in the second part of Cervantes’s novel. From such fragments, from related instances of festive violence, and from his understanding of human psychology, Nietzsche, like Adam Smith, constructs a narrative that may help explain the shift from one stage to another, consistent with what evidence we can gather. Similarly, he speculatively infers the early opposition of good and bad from the later, modern opposition between good and evil, finding philological evidence for his inference from the history of German, Latin, and Greek, where the words for “noble” also carry implications of “happy,” “healthy,” and “honest,” whereas “plebeian” and “vulgar” are associated with “low,” “poor,” “unhappy,” and “pitiable.” The noble, he reasons, regarded themselves as “good” and regarded the plebeian or vulgar as “bad.”

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However, in the later stage, when the “good” stands in opposition to “evil,” it is not the knightly aristocrats who remain under the sign of the “good” and the plebeians who have become the “evil,” but the reverse. From the point of view of the plebeians, who regard and define themselves as “good,” the formerly “good” aristocrats, with their strength, health, activity, and direct expression of their wants and wishes, define the new category of “evil.” What was presumed not to have a history—the moral categories of good and evil—must have been, in Nietzsche’s conjectural and narrative argument, a deeply historical product of shifts in meaning and interpretation of key terms of value such as “good.” Moreover, rather than being gradual, accretive, or progressive, these shifts can consist of inversions: what was “good” comes to define what is later called “evil”; those who were “bad” seize the standard of the new “good.” In addition, in presenting the shifts from one stage to another as never settled or complete, and the struggle over meanings and values as ever present, Nietzsche imagines a newly complex relation between stages in his conjectural history. The moralities and values of different stages constantly struggle with each other, so that there are no ruptures between stages of the kind that Comte made fundamental in his system.53 Nor is there a clear progression of the kind to which Marx still subscribed: from feudal to capitalist to communist forms of society. On the contrary, even where the newer set of values has been dominant for centuries, the older ways persist: “The two opposing values ‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil’ have fought a terrible battle for thousands of years on earth; and although the latter has been dominant for a long time, there is still no lack of places where the battle remains undecided” (Genealogy of Morality, 1.16). This and other battles over values and meaning are internalized in modern men because no clear or definitive accommodation between the two has been forged. In an extension and complication of ideas opened up by conjectural history, Nietzsche asserts that, as a new set of values emerges, it struggles with the dominant existing values, which push back in turn, and the process of revolutionary attack, reactionary counterattack, and continuing struggle for dominance characterizes history in the realm of morals and values, in the area of social and legal institutions, in the sphere of organic life, as well as in the emergence and relations of cultural forms and artistic genres. In doing so, he joins the important group of conjecturalist thinkers in whose view history, from its beginning, has taken shape as a result of struggle between

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antagonistic forces—for Rousseau, the conflict between rich and poor; for Condorcet, the opposition between priests or kings and scientists; for Marx, the struggle between dominant and subordinate classes. The conflict may take different forms in successive periods or stages, but the fact of struggle and antagonism persists, and its persistence constitutes history. Nietzsche’s insight is the source of the methodological thesis that “the origin or the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness” are entirely separate: No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form, or religious rite) you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged. . . . [T]he whole history of a “thing,” an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The “development” of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore . . . [not a progressus, but] a succession of . . . more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time. . . . The form is fluid, the “meaning” [Sinn] even more so. (Genealogy of Morality, 2.12; second and third italics mine, indicating the conditional tense of the verbs in the passage)

In this statement of historical method, Nietzsche significantly revises dominant ideas of the importance of origins and progress, even his own. As I have discussed, in the opening essay of the Genealogy of Morality, when Nietzsche appeals to etymologies to support his speculation that “good” originally referred to the happy, violent aristocrats, he implies that this origin provides the proper meaning of the term, from which resentful and priestly conceptions of who or what is “good” constitute a decline and a corruption. In this self-corrective passage, however, he argues that establishing the original meaning of a term, or of a practice such as punishment, establishes little about its later history or current significance and function. This radical uncertainty follows from the contestatory history of any institution or rite; one meaning gives way to another without itself being lost or becoming unavailable. These changes result in a shifting and layering of meanings that express the opposing values of antagonistic groups.

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Such an understanding of historical processes undermines the explanatory value of origins, overturns the concept of historical progress, and complicates the distinction between stages or periods. No cumulative effect, clear direction, or meaning emerges from history. A subordinated group wields a new set of values to attack a dominant group, and may gain ground or even triumph locally or for a time, but the proponents of previously dominant values counterattack to assert their right to power. The resulting struggle over the interpretation of a text, a law, a custom, or a ritual does not eventuate in a synthesis of the old and the new; the conflict is neither resolved nor raised to a higher level. Historical change takes the form not of a progressive improvement, but of an unceasing series of displacements and contestations that result in an unpredictable series of new directions and a sedimentation of interpretations. In this process, forms, laws, or institutions may persist for some time unchanged, or only gradually and slightly altered, while interpretations, meanings, and functions often shift more suddenly and extensively. With the thesis that “the form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ even more so,” Nietzsche formulates an insight that subtends many works in the conjecturalist tradition. (I examine the consonance of this view with Darwin’s in the next section.) The speculations of Nietzsche and Darwin point toward a reconception of historical temporality as a layering of frameworks of thought, usually at odds with one another. Paradoxically, speculation about prehistory and transitions between stages complicates the possibility of arriving at clearly demarcated stages, and even of any overarching meaning or progress in history. To take only one example among innumerable possibilities, the keeping of large exotic animals in captivity figures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as a sign of the power and riches of the prince who could afford to buy, transport, and maintain such creatures, whereas in the nineteenth century, such animals were held by metropolitan governments, which made them available for viewing by the entire citizenry for education and the gathering and disseminating of scientific knowledge. In the twentieth century, with a revulsion against keeping animals in captivity, zookeepers increasingly turned to justifying or interpreting zoos as a means of preserving and breeding species threatened in the wild.54 In form, the practice of capturing, breeding, and holding large animals for viewing has remained relatively little changed from the time of princely animal parks through zoological gardens to contemporary cageless zoos, although its significance

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or function has been defined in starkly different ways by successively dominant ideological forces. The earlier justifications have not died out, but a layering or entanglement of possible meanings of the form can be traced back from current function to original purpose.55 With some qualifications, Nietzsche shares with Rousseau, Freud and, to a lesser extent, Ferguson the argument that increasing intelligence, calculation, and repression define the progress of civilization but constitute a decline in the strength, health, and intensity of life of human beings.56 However, he takes the paradox a step further and, in the concluding sections of the final essay, gives it another turn as he looks to a conjectural future of humanity and morality. Nietzsche celebrates violent noble barbarians for being more healthy and more alive than tame, modern, commercial, democratic men. Beginning with Odysseus among the Greeks, and with what he calls the “slave morality” among the ancient Jews—which, however, only blossoms into full flower in Christianity (note, for example, the strong preference for the Old Testament over the New in the Genealogy of Morality, 3.22)—this process consists of the triumph of asceticism and of priestly classes. Through the first half of essay 3, Nietzsche identifies priestly ascetics as hostile to life. Among them, “the green eye of spite turns on physiological growth itself . . . while satisfaction is looked for and found in failure, decay, pain, misfortune, ugliness, voluntary deprivation, destruction of selfhood, selfflagellation and self-sacrifice” (3.11). As he pursues the meaning of asceticism, however, Nietzsche recognizes that the contrary must, in fact, be the case—that for asceticism to have lasted so long and been so successful, it must have been adaptive and favorable to the species in some way. (The necessary conditional again indicates the speculative nature of his thinking.) Thus, he proposes that the ascetic ideal works in the interest of life, turning the instincts and emotions inward and against the self, in order to arouse humans from their lethargy and to awaken them from the melancholy that accompanies domestication. It provides another instance of human beings working on themselves as an artist works on his material. The sick man is turned into a sinner; he reinterprets his suffering as punishment and guilt. In the presence of the conscience, “the old depression, heaviness, and fatigue were thoroughly overcome by this system of procedures, life became very interesting again.”57 The ascetic priests serve as the artists creating a new kind of man, more advanced but

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also more tame and weaker (Genealogy of Morality, 3.20–21). The paradoxical doubleness of civilization and the deep ambivalence toward the process persist in as sharp a form as ever. In this last phase of his argument, Nietzsche turns to using the first-person plural more often, especially when referring to modern philosophical atheists, as he concludes that he and the atheists he addresses prove to be not so much the enemies as the heirs of ascetic Christianity, indeed the highest expression of asceticism. The discipline and self-denial involved in the search for the truth, the refusal of sentimentality and belief in God, are paradoxically outgrowths of Christian asceticism.58 The Christian morality of truth-telling—“the confessional punctiliousness of Christian conscience”—has pushed beyond Christian belief, beyond interpreting nature and history in honor of the divine, as evidence of a benign providence. “This severity makes us good Europeans if anything does, and heirs to Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-overcoming” (Genealogy of Morality, 3.27, quoting his own Gay Science). The final self-overcoming— or the last one that Nietzsche can foresee—involves calling into question even the will to truth: “What meaning does our being have, if it were not that that will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem in us? . . . Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most dubious drama, but perhaps also the one most rich in hope.” Thus, in the three essays in the Genealogy, Nietzsche proposes overlapping, palimpsestic accounts of the origins and history of morality. All three narratives are grounded on conjectures, fragments of linguistic history, and shreds of other historical evidence.59 Each essay adopts a particular temporal focus as it recounts a reversal in values or meanings. The first essay establishes a prehistoric and early historical period in which the category of “evil” does not exist, but only the “good,” healthy aristocrats and their opposite numbers, the poor, “bad,” and unhappy sufferers. When the priests introduce a new regime of values, they reverse the meaning of “good,” redefine the aristocrats as “evil,” and initiate a millennia-long struggle between the two sets of values. The second essay looks to the past for evidence of multiple reinterpretations of the practice of punishment, arguing for the incommensurability in the history of institutions between original purpose and present use. The third essay, in a culminating reversal, identifies asceticism

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as the ideal guiding modern philosophical atheists such as Nietzsche, whose project is to root out the weakness and dishonesty of Christian belief. Thus, paradoxically, the priestly schemers who triumphed over the knightly warriors have as their true descendants thinkers like Nietzsche, as Christian morality gives way to the morality of atheist truth-seekers. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, therefore, concludes with a conjectural history of the future, like Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture (1795), although the content of the same formal move is quite different. Condorcet and Nietzsche share an extreme anticlericalism that sees priests as power-hungry, hypocritical deceivers, but Condorcet foresees a world heralded by the French Revolution, in which opposition from priests and kings to the progress of science and technology will fade away, infectious diseases will be cured, education will be universal, and longevity will increase indefinitely. Nietzsche’s projected future exhibits no utopian progressivism, but neither does it express a one-sided dystopian pessimism. The centuries-long struggle will stage the “most terrible” (furchtbarste) but also perhaps the “most hopeful” (hoffnungsreichste) of historical dramas. In the future, the struggle between opposing values will, as ever, go on. A lapse of two or three hundred years may witness a partial settling of this conflict, but it may also see other struggles between opposing values, or the old struggle continued under new forms. Condorcet’s concept of temporality sees the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath making a radical break in history, after which doubleness and oppositions cease to have any force, opening the way for unlimited progress. In Nietzsche’s eyes, human history has been and always will be agonistic, shaped by attempts to seize control of interpretive and evaluative discourses and by countermoves by proponents of an opposed set of values. His vision of an unending conflict between disciplinary asceticism and less repressed, healthier forms of life closely resembles Hume’s vision of religious history as an unending ebb and flow of superstition and enthusiasm, a scene from which the philosophical skeptic seeks refuge in the calm realms of thought.60 Much as Hume compares the behavior of religious believers to that of playful monkeys in his Natural History of Religion, Nietzsche speaks of the early Christians’ canine “pawing and muzzling impertinence towards God” (Genealogy of Morality, 3.22). In the Descent of Man, as we have seen, Darwin also compares the submission, reverence, and fear felt by religious believers to the fear, reverence, and submission dogs feel toward humans.

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In his reflections on historical method in the Genealogy of Morality (2.12), Nietzsche includes as appropriate subjects of such analysis not only biological features such as organs or appendages (like Darwin), not only legal institutions (like Henry Maine, discussed in chapter 6), not only cultural practices and beliefs (like E. B. Tylor, discussed in chapter 4), but also artistic genres and disciplines of knowledge. Genres of discourse take shape by borrowing from, revising, and contesting previous genres, appropriating and reshaping them to serve new purposes and to carry new meanings. Histories of intellectual disciplines reveal the same pattern of appropriation, contestation, and alteration of purpose and meaning. Indeed, Nietzsche’s principles apply to the conjectural form and the forms of social knowledge examined here. Conjectural history emerged from, and in revisionary opposition to, providential universal history. Its characteristic features also place it in a line of descent from natural law, although it lacks other features, such as an originary social contract. The conjectural form served different purposes and was divided into different varieties among practitioners in different cultures—Scottish, French, German—as well as in the hands of individual writers. After Malthus appropriated the form from Condorcet and reoriented it to express the impossibility of progress rather than its probability, it became less available for cultural uses than it had been in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, the form persisted in print and in cultural memory, offering a pattern for lines of thought and forms of discourse for new disciplines, involving conjectural, naturalistic, noncontractual stages of historical development producing unintended consequences. Malthus, Comte, and Tylor turned the resources of conjectural history to their own purposes, giving the form revised significance in the process, and helping to bring new disciplines into existence. Conjectural history did not constitute the entire skeletal structure in any of these cases, but it contributed importantly to all of them, including the multidisciplinary projects of Nietzsche and Darwin. Nietzsche’s methodological program in the Genealogy of Morality constitutes a metadisciplinary account of how institutions, species, and disciplines of knowledge have taken shape for one purpose, are appropriated for others, and are remolded under the pressure of new needs, challenges, and counterpressures. As an analysis of this process, the passage in Genealogy of Morality (2.12), on the lack of progress in history and the continual struggle between opposing values, lies close to the central concerns of this book.

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Nietzsche’s work not only formulates a theoretical program for the practice of genealogical history but also constitutes an object for analysis by that method. A genealogy of Nietzsche’s Genealogy would begin by recognizing the agonistic nature of his relations with other thinkers and writers—his emphasis on his critique of and differences from other thinkers and his obscuring of shared ideas and strategies. Antagonism and misdirection characterize his relations with his predecessors among conjectural historians, such as Herder and Rousseau, as well as with contemporary thinkers who pursued their own naturalistic accounts of morality, such as Darwin and Paul Rée. It might be useful first to examine an indebtedness that Nietzsche uncharacteristically acknowledges—to Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, discussed earlier in this chapter. In addition to arguing that custom constitutes morality, Bagehot insists, like Nietzsche in the Genealogy, that human society results from a self-taming: “Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself ” (Physics and Politics, 38). However, for Bagehot, self-taming into a social and a civilized state leads not to degeneration, as it does for Nietzsche, but to stability, and the security eventually to allow public discussion of policy options. In his own version of the dictum that the meaning changes but the form alters much more slowly, Bagehot argues for progress by “preservative addition”—for change, but as little as possible (76). When discipline and order have been firmly enough established in modern society, discussion becomes the custom and the source of morality that results in the most gradual pace of improvement, although any serious threat of disorder could justify a return to absolute rule. Nietzsche’s response to Bagehot is among the most uncomplicated of his relations to his antecedents. That said, Nietzsche does not refer to Bagehot in his later works, even as he appropriates and develops Bagehot’s thesis concerning the equivalence of custom and morality and the idea that, to develop, humans have domesticated themselves. Nietzsche stands in much more antagonistic relations with other thinkers with whom he shares crucial insights. Among German thinkers, Nietzsche’s style most closely resembles Herder’s. Both employ powerful sarcasm and invective, an encyclopedic range of references and allusions, and a dramatic and direct personal voice. Moreover, the commonalities extend beyond style: Herder energetically exposed self-congratulatory

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narratives of universal progress in a rational direction (such as, for example, Voltaire’s effort in his Philosophy of History, 1766), just as Nietzsche, in the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874), attacked the presumption that the present is the most advanced age, superior to all earlier periods. When he discusses Herder, in “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (1880), Nietzsche recognizes that Herder’s style “flickers, crackles, and smokes”61—an apt description of Nietzsche’s own style—yet he concentrates on Herder’s frustrated ambition, his failure to carry off the palm in style or thought from Goethe and Kant, and his consequent envy. The passage characteristically does not acknowledge the extensive continuities between Herder’s style and Nietzsche’s own. In some cases, Nietzsche acknowledges his encounter with another strong thinker, but usually only in order to assert his energetic opposition to his predecessor. Thus, although he names Rousseau as one of the four consequential moderns with whom he has had to struggle (along with Montaigne, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer) (Human, 288), almost every other time he mentions or refers to Rousseau he excoriates him for his revolutionary, democratic ideas and his belief in the original goodness of human nature (see, for example, 169).62 Nietzsche does not acknowledge that, for all his vitriolic criticisms of Rousseau, his conception of historical temporality approaches that of Rousseau more closely than that of any other conjectural historian. For both Rousseau and Nietzsche, history consists of a series of double developments in which what may appear to be advances in civilization prove to be regressions, disasters leading to greater weakness, not strength. For both, increased ability to think and reflect signifies an unnatural sickness, not a means of realizing the species’ potential. Nietzsche’s reaction to his contemporary and one-time friend Paul Rée provides a third example of his disavowal or obscuring of the commonalities with other thinkers. It was in association with Rée, and under his influence, that Nietzsche originally formulated the project of a naturalistic ethics and a history of morality, a project whose first signs appear in Human, All Too Human. There Nietzsche singles out Rée for comparison with the great French psychologists and moralists La Rochefoucauld and Vauvenargues, praising Rée as “one of the boldest and coldest of thinkers” for his “incisive and penetrating analyses” in The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877) (Human, 32–33).63 However, by the time Nietzsche writes the opening sections of the Genealogy of Morality, ten years later, he has long since broken

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with Rée and now groups him with the boring, swamp-dwelling “English genealogists” of morality who get everything upside down by arguing that morality had its origin in the useful, before people forgot that derivation and only remembered the approbation accorded to such behavior. Later still, Nietzsche asserts that, from the first, he utterly opposed everything that Rée argued in his books. Nietzsche is covering his tracks here, as he was in similarly revisionary statements on his early relation to Rée in the new preface that he added to Human, All Too Human in 1886.64 Nietzsche’s late sarcastic critiques of Rée obscure his early regard for Rée as a respected ally, just as Nietzsche’s angry condemnations of Rousseau give no indication of the substantial continuities between their historical visions. However, the most remarkable instance of Nietzsche’s polemical masking of a shared understanding occurs in his relation with Darwin. In fact, it has to do with Nietzsche’s principle of historical methodology (Genealogy of Morality, 2.12) and a crucial feature of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which explains the usefulness of small changes in form producing large changes in function, a feature that Stephen Jay Gould has called the Nietzsche–Darwin principle. t h e n i e t z s c h e – darwi n p ri nc i p le

In the Origin of Species, Darwin first postulates a view of change over evolutionary time for all species, which Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morality three decades later, extends (without reference to Darwin) to apply to the historical time of human societies.65 In this conjectural view, temporal change describes a course that is nonteleological, irregular, often tortuous; it can fold back on itself or take off at an angle to previous developments. Accurate historical as well as evolutionary narratives trace minor changes of form that accompany larger revisions of function or significance, and unpredictable shifts from one state to its successor. The central thesis of this view of history maintains that a biological organ or a cultural form developed for one purpose may, with a gradual or small change of form, come to fulfill a very different purpose. The history of an organism or an institution consists of the history of the appropriation of biological or cultural features for sometimes radically different purposes than they earlier served. This principle constitutes the core of Nietzsche’s genealogical method.66 I argue here for a strong methodological congruence between Darwin and

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Nietzsche: Nietzsche’s history of human institutions and values in the Genealogy of Morality takes almost exactly the same theoretical approach that Darwin adopted for the history of living beings in the Origin of Species, although Nietzsche includes the history of nonhuman animals in his argument as well. In The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Gould refers to this parallel between the two thinkers, on the discrepancy between the origin of a feature and its current utility, as the “Nietzsche–Darwin principle,” basing his discussion on the methodological section of the Genealogy of Morality (2.12). Darwin’s formulation possessed a cardinal importance for Gould as an evolutionary biologist.67 But Gould makes no argument concerning Nietzsche’s formulation of the principle, which is of cardinal importance because it opens up the possibility of genealogical investigations of the histories of human social and cultural institutions generally—including the history of genres—and the emergence of new areas of social thought and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and political economics. In the first edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin did not emphasize or name the principle that a minor change in form could be correlated with a radical change in function. In chapter 6, “Difficulties on Theory,” he considers the objection that some organs are too perfect or elaborate to have been developed by means of the gradual, incremental process of natural selection, or are of too little importance to have affected the survival of a species. He argues that if one proceeds in retrograde temporal order, and can show “numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple,” with each grade giving some advantage to its possessor, then the changes may have been produced by natural selection.68 The first example Darwin takes up concerns the idea, accepted in his day by physiologists, that the lungs of animals developed from the swim bladders of fish. It is now believed that the swim bladder developed after the lungs, when land animals returned to the water, but the principle remains the same, regardless of the direction in which the change occurred. In the current understanding, the organ used by a land animal for breathing, after undergoing only slight changes, served the new purpose of adding buoyancy to an aquatic organism that now obtained oxygen through its gills.69 Darwin also cites the possibility that a tail, originally developed to aid propulsion among fishes, may have been adapted among land animals for whom, with minor modifications, it came to serve divergent purposes,

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such as a means of balancing (in small mammals), an instrument for swatting flies (in cattle and giraffes), and a prehensile organ (in monkeys) (Origin of Species, 196). In a set of examples to which he returns repeatedly in the Origin of Species, Darwin points out that, structurally, the bones found in a monkey’s arm, a horse’s foreleg, a bat’s wing, and a seal’s flipper are the same, but that they serve widely different functions in each species: “We may believe that the progenitor of the seal had not a flipper, but a foot with five toes fitted for walking or grasping; and we may . . . believe that the several bones in the limbs of the monkey, horse, and bat, which have been inherited from a common progenitor, were formerly of most special use to that progenitor” (Origin of Species, 200). The early animal in which the mammalian plan of limbs first appeared probably used all of its limbs for walking and running, but later, with minor changes in the design of the bones, the same structure was adapted for the diverse purposes of flying, swimming, galloping, and grasping. In the sixth and final edition of the Origin (1872), Darwin’s expanded discussion of the topic takes up most of the only chapter he added to the book after the first edition. This chapter is concerned largely with responding to the attack on his theory by St. George Mivart, who, in his Genesis of Species (1871), argued that natural selection, working by the gradual accumulation of small changes, would be unable to account for the “incipient stages of useful structures.”70 How, Mivart asks, could an organ such as a wing or an eye be produced by “minute, fortuitous” changes; what use would be 10 or 20 percent of a wing?71 In his response, Darwin elaborates on the pattern he had discussed in the first edition, which he now calls “gradation of characters, often accompanied by a change of function,” examining several instances of this nonlinear pattern of development with sudden swerves in the direction of an adaptation. For example, the tenfoot plates of “bristles” in the mouth of a baleen whale could have developed in a way analogous to the process by which the hornlike teeth of geese gave way to the small plates of “bristles” that a duck uses to sift water in its mouth. The relatively small shift in form from dental horns to bristles was accompanied by a discontinuous shift in function from biting and chewing to sifting food.72 Among recent insights of evolutionary biology, one of the most striking confirms Darwin’s principle, arguing from fossil evidence that feathers

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seem to have appeared first on small dinosaurs, probably in order to help regulate body temperature. These feathers took many different forms and were therefore already present to be appropriated, with some minor changes of form, for the quite different purpose of locomotion through flight. Such evidence effectively answers one of Mivart’s principal objections: that natural selection could not account for the development of features such as birds’ wings or mammalian eyes. The functions of formally similar features, in all these cases, vary widely in contingent, unplanned, and unpredictable ways. Darwin develops his thesis concerning gradations of structure and changes of function precisely to preserve his understanding of natural selection as acting gradually, continuously, and uniformly over hundreds of thousands of generations, in opposition to the alternative thesis proposed by Mivart and other critics of evolution, in which the process moves by sudden leaps and expresses an implanted and internal principle of improvement. Although Nietzsche wrote scathingly of Darwinism in the last decade of his career, it has become clear in the last fifteen years that his attacks are based on a deep misunderstanding of Darwin’s thought and fall far wide of their mark. For example, he consistently thought of the Darwinian struggle for existence (Kampf ums Dasein) as a physical conflict, a war of all against all, resolved in favor of those with more brute force, and (in common with most nineteenth-century German biologists) he conceived there to be an internal principle of striving that operates independent of adaptation to external pressures, named by Nietzsche the “will to power.”73 He argued that change occurs as a result of this drive, not as a result of a struggle for scarce or limited resources.74 Because of such misunderstandings and misdirections, we can conclude that, for all their intensity, Nietzsche’s criticisms of Darwin are “ineffective.”75 But perhaps Nietzsche decided not to read Darwin directly for the same reason that Freud gave for not reading Nietzsche: because he suspected or feared that strong affinities would influence the development of his own thinking.76 John Richardson, in a recent extensive analysis of the relation between Nietzsche’s thought and Darwin’s, concludes that, despite mentioning Darwin “only sporadically, and then usually to rebuke him, [Nietzsche’s] thinking is deeply and pervasively Darwinian.”77 As we have seen, in the second essay in the Genealogy of Morality, in the midst of considering the history of punishment, Nietzsche pauses

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to consider the difference between “the origin and purpose of punishment,” or the origin and present purpose of any institution or rite. Opposing the common view that “the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp,” he writes that the history of an organ or an institution can consist of a discontinuous series of adaptations that reveal no direction  or  purpose (Genealogy of Morality, 2.12).78 Nietzsche establishes homologies between forms of life in the organic world and social forms in human history, between organs or physical traits in the biological realm and social or religious institutions in the cultural realm. Considering neither as a metaphor for the other, he maintains that the biological process of adaptation or appropriation of parts for different functions follows the same principles as the cultural, social, and political shifts that alter the significance of institutions and the beliefs of peoples. He conceives of both realms as constantly being shaped by struggle, although in Nietzsche’s theory the basic engine is a struggle for power rather than, as in Darwin’s thought, for existence.79 The biological form or structure occupies a place in the organic world equivalent to that occupied by the cultural form in the historical world, and a change of function in the organism corresponds to a change of function or meaning in the social, cultural world. Thus, Nietzsche makes essentially the same argument that Darwin does: minor gradations in form or structure are often associated with significantly altered functions. “The form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ [Sinn; or function] even more so” (Genealogy of Morality, 2.12). The form may change slowly, but a small change can be appropriated to perform a quite different function than the original, or to carry a widely different significance.80 Thus, in tracing the genealogy of morality and punishment in essay 2 of the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche posits that one institution— a form of punishment based on obtaining satisfaction from a debtor—has existed since very early social times, but that this form of social action has been appropriated, with only minor changes, for widely various purposes, and it carries widely divergent meanings. Punishment has served in different periods as a means of cleansing society, as a way of preventing the criminal from offending again, as a deterrent to others, as a way to reform, or as a festive celebration over a captured enemy, in addition to carrying other usages and meanings. Each of these appropriations involves a reinterpretation of punishment; moreover, their effect is cumulative, and they

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remain present as potential functions or meanings that may be reanimated at almost any time, so that it can be difficult to trace and disentangle the steps in such a history. The task of the genealogical historian is thus congruent with that of the evolutionary biologist who attempts to trace back and unknot the effects of natural selection, as an existing organ or form was appropriated with minor changes, then turned to divergent and, at times, widely divergent uses.81 Not only does Nietzsche recognize and theorize such long-running contestations in the history of human institutions, but by including artistic forms among the cultural forms that participate in such history, he opens up the possibility of a narrative of the history of genres—of the historical and fictional forms, for example, and of the discursive disciplines—through which humans have told the histories of their conflicts over meaning and value.82 The history of the genre of conjectural history conforms to this pattern, as the disciplines of the historical social sciences appropriated the genre and turned it to different uses. Although he did not know Darwin’s work directly, Nietzsche’s statement of the principle includes the organic realm. On the other hand, when Darwin came to write about human beings in the Descent of Man, he did not make use of this principle for his analysis of human history and evolution; he conceived of evolutionary change in human history as a linear, one-directional progress from savagery to civilization, rather than a contingent and unpredictable process. Darwin is committed to continuity, gradualism, and uniformitarianism, and, in cultural history, to a linear progress from savagery to civilization, whereas Nietzsche holds the will to power to be a universal first principle. In a chiastic set of sharp ironies, then, Nietzsche criticizes Darwinism harshly but extends Darwin’s argument about “gradation of character with change of function” into the social realm. On the other hand, Darwin formulated a principle that applied to all organic forms but did not carry it over into human evolutionary history, which he treats in the Descent of Man as an unvarying progress. The knowledge that their similar methodologies make available results from their comparable willingness to build on conjecture, to speculate not wildly but plausibly. The principles articulated in the Genealogy of Morality (2.12) not only define but also exemplify genealogical relations. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche reiterates the form of conjectural history, writing a nonprovidential account

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of an early stage of social life—for which the only positive evidence he has is etymology—and of its transition to another stage of society and morality. However, he also revises the form by stressing the conflict of values and the continuing struggle between them, rather than the continuity involved in the growth of one stage out of the other. This alteration results not in a developmental vision but one in which change and struggle take place constantly, without producing progress or improvement. An examination of the genealogy of Nietzsche’s work shows that the form of conjectural history remains recognizable but that the meaning and significance, the context and implications of the form, have been altered to express an overt and intense anti-Christian perspective and an antiprogressive historical view.

6

The Social Psychology of Religion

and economics, sociology did not depart from a conjectural and historical paradigm as it became institutionally established in the decades around 1900. To pursue into the twentieth century the afterlife of conjectural history in the developing social disciplines will involve investigating a second generation of sociological thinkers, focusing especially on Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. In doing so, the first two-thirds of this chapter centers on the sociology or social psychology of religion; the final third will take up the related work of Freud in the social psychoanalysis of religion. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5) and the Sociology of Religion (1922), Weber focuses on transitions between historical periods organized around successive economic and religious formations. The complementary relations between economics and religion testify to the interrelated, integrated, and even holistic nature of social forms in Weber’s method, as in that of the conjectural historians. His major interest is in the shift from noncapitalist forms to modern capitalism, that is, the advent of the modern world. As a sociologist, he adopts a perspective outside the religious formation he discusses, avoiding both providential and analogous explanations such as theories of inevitable historical progress. Weber is concerned with evaluating the nature and value of modern society, and his positions exhibit an ambiguity that is closely related to the double valence of progress in early conjectural histories such as Adam Ferguson’s. In fact, both Durkheim and Weber situate the problematic diagnosis of modernity at the center of their sociological studies of b y c o n t r a s t w i t h a n t h r o p o lo g y, p o l i t i c s ,

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religion, and their orientation toward the modern also involves them in an ambivalent attitude toward processes of secularization, the counterpart of civil progress in the religious realm. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim follows classic conjectural histories in turning his attention to the form of religion that is least encrusted with later additions and layers, where the function of religion stands out most clearly. His thesis concerning religion underscores the organic nature of society and the central importance of religion for society. Without specifying clear and distinct stages, Durkheim expresses a view of history that is comparable to Condorcet’s in its scope: it includes in its range the earliest or most primitive religion, more recent intervening forms, and future forms that religion and the gods may take. Freud’s theories of the origins, nature, and future of religion in Totem and Taboo (1912–13), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Civilization and its Discontents (1930) constitute the last important instances in the direct line of conjectural history that I have been tracing. Totem and Taboo exhibits many continuities with Durkheim’s Elementary Forms: both seek to locate the earliest and most elementary form of religious belief and practice; both find totemism at this first stage; and both determine that the foundational form of religious behavior consists of ecstatic events, potentially or actually violent, in which participants act as a group rather than as individuals. Durkheim and Freud work in the conjectural tradition of searching for origins; Weber in the Protestant Ethic focuses, like some of the conjectural histories, on the transition to the modern age. However, both there and in the Sociology of Religion, his argument requires him to speculate concerning the mental and emotional states of believers in various religions. His focus is strongly psychological, as Freud’s is psychoanalytical. In early conjectural history, speculation focused on external historical events. Adam Smith supplemented this focus by speculating, on the basis of universal and ahistorical psychology, how early humans would have responded to a problem and moved on to a later stage of social organization. Weber, in the Protestant Ethic, dramatically extends such static and universal psychology by differentiating psychological workings sociologically, with a particular focus on religion. In Weber’s work, deep and extended psychological analysis of individuals in specific historical circumstances takes on an unprecedented importance; the Puritan becomes an ideal type. Weber works out his theory on the basis of the behavior of

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Calvinists, Quakers, and Lutherans, not their theological writings. By contrast with the universal psychology of Smith and other early conjecturalists such as Hume, Weber’s psychology is deeply historical. Freud also fills out and completes historical speculations by means of psychological or psychoanalytical speculation. However, these psychic operations occur in the realm of the unconscious, a place where, according to Freud, time does not enter. For Freud, the earliest humans were shaped by the same mental and psychological process as modern children with animal phobias. Thus, although he employs a more complex psychology than Smith—one that can accommodate ambivalence and repression—both Freud and Smith work with a more ahistorical psychology than Weber, whose work provides the most complex example of historicized psychological speculation considered in this chapter. Durkheim’s method is closer to Freud’s than to Weber’s. He considers the Australian tribes to be examples of universal mental operations and ritual behavior. He sees modern humans separating themselves from ancient and traditional religious forms, and he concludes that some substitute is needed. For Weber, by contrast, no such replacement is necessary or desirable. Finally, all three of the principal writers discussed here illustrate Heidegger’s thesis that the first problem of history is realizing the possibility of there being no history. To achieve an accurate or adequate history, they do not conceive of the past as a series of facts; rather, they imagine what has been as not having been already determined, but as a future possibility for those who were living in the earlier times.1 w e be r , m o d e rni ty, s e c u lari z ati o n

For Weber, a web of reciprocal causation connects religious beliefs and economic practices: religious forms shape work habits and ways of obtaining necessities, which then reinforce or influence the religious ideas that nurtured them. Or one can say that economic roles shape religious beliefs, which then can serve as justification or a basis for the kinds of work performed in the society. In a crucial paragraph in the Sociology of Religion, Weber associates world religions with different strata of economic actors. It would be possible to characterize the “primary carriers or propagators of the so-called world religions,” he maintains, in a passage that can serve as a touchstone for his method, and he provides this concise and provocative

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list: “In Confucianism, the world-organizing bureaucrat; in Hinduism, the world-ordering magician; in Buddhism, the mendicant monk wandering through the world; in Islam, the warrior seeking to conquer the world; in Judaism, the wandering trader; and in Christianity, the itinerant journeyman.”2 Against Marx, Weber explains that these types should not be understood as acting in pursuit of their class interests but rather as “ideological carriers of the kind of ethical or salvation doctrine which most readily conformed to their social position” (Sociology of Religion, 132).3 Passages such as this reveal Weber’s long-standing interest in speculating—on the basis of extraordinarily wide learning—about the relations between economics and religion, in the Protestant Ethic and the Sociology of Religion. The Protestant Ethic seeks to illuminate and explain the origins of modern capitalism and the transition to modern society, like the third book of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the first part of Marx’s German Ideology. In pursuit of its argument, it analyzes the disciplining or taming of man, along lines parallel to those described in the Genealogy of Morality. The Sociology of Religion, like a classic conjectural and natural history of religion, traces the origins of religious beliefs and practices, the transitions between religious stages, and the intertwining of religion with other spheres of society.4 In the process, it both refers to and revises Nietzsche’s arguments concerning aristocratic warrior classes in the Genealogy of Morality. Weber does not focus in either work solely on the doctrines of the religion in question; rather, he speculates concerning the subjective, psychological situations, desires, and behavior of believers, thereby working out a social psychology of religion. Thus, in the Protestant Ethic he argues that Calvinists—who faced being predestined to either salvation or damnation, with no control over their fate for eternity, divorced from mediating institutions, external supports, and authorities apart from the Word—would have experienced a new aloneness and radical individuality: “The question Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and forced all other interests into the background. And how can I be sure of this state of grace?” (my emphases).5 To these anxious questions they would have responded by looking for signs, and would have determined that only an inward assurance of being saved might provide a reliable indicator. If they prospered, they would have read material success as confirming evidence (Protestant Ethic, 55–56). Moreover, Weber asserts, Calvinism established an ethical obligation to find

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one’s vocation and to practice it in the affairs of this world in a spirit of asceticism, cultivating just those virtues or self-disciplinary regimens that lead to the accumulation of wealth: prudence, calculation, and hard work, and the avoidance of waste, profligacy, and ostentation. The pious do not pursue or gain wealth for its own sake, but their success serves as a sign of election and salvation. The emphasis on the speculative past, on what he believes must have happened in the absence of direct evidence, marks Weber’s analysis as a conjectural one. Weber must speculate about the early development of modern capitalism because of his focus on the subjective psychological factors that must have or would have resulted from the adoption of Calvinist beliefs. Thus, he distinguishes between the Lutheran and the Calvinist, because the Lutheran, although believing in justification on the basis of faith alone, did not develop an ascetic doctrine and still credited many of the good impulses and the spontaneous morality of the believer. But the Calvinist, facing a predestined fate known only to a transcendent and unreadable deity, could only look for signs of his elect status by examining and interpreting all the details of life. He had to be constantly scrutinizing himself and his conduct, training himself in the “systematic rational ordering of the moral life as a whole” (Protestant Ethic, 65). Weber works here with historical events for which there are records—the association of radical Protestants with capital accumulation, and the importance for them of finding their vocation in this world and of rationally examining their lives for signs of election—but to interpret the record, he has to speculate concerning what must have been the case psychologically.6 Pursuing this method, Weber announces that he does not focus his inquiry on “objective social institutions,” such as the “very important” matter of explicit church discipline, because he regards as crucial the internal, voluntary discipline that would or must have been necessary for the development of the “spirit” of capitalism. He concludes that in some cases the external, inquisitorial discipline would have inhibited the release of those individual forces that were produced by the “rational ascetic pursuit of salvation” (Protestant Ethic, 79–80). Quakers proceeded furthest in repudiating the emotional bases of religion and external works of justification. Their emphasis on a sober, honest ethos, in Weber’s words, eliminated magic from the world, preparing the way for the disenchantment (Entzauberung—demagification; i.e., desacralization) of the world that

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he considers characteristic of modernity. Being excluded from and having excluded themselves from public employments, Quakers directed their energies to the world of commerce, where they proved to be models for the successful accumulation of wealth, supposedly without avidity. In instance after instance, Weber focuses on the psychological effects of the Calvinist ethos—not only its new definition of work (Protestant Ethic, 83) but the whole complex of which his thesis is composed: “The religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means to asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism” (90, my emphasis). As he summarizes the conclusion to which his speculations have carried him, Weber again formulates his argument as an inference or conjecture, concerning which direct evidence is not available; he has recourse to asserting what must have happened, what must have been the case, just as the conjectural historians did.7 This speculative argument leads to Weber’s characterization of the modern condition not only as the period of the disenchantment of the world but also as a time in which the psychological need for the acquisition of goods has become so inescapable that it constitutes an “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuse; literally, “steel-hard housing”) in which modern people live (Protestant Ethic, 96).8 The aim of the argument is also consistent with that of the conjectural histories, in that Weber is concerned with tracing the origins of capitalism and the transition to modern society. The search for inaccessible origins or beginnings defines most conjectural histories, as does speculation (often necessary or unavoidable) concerning the mechanisms of transitions from one stage or period to another. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber also speculatively traces the process of the disciplining of man—the adoption of an ascetic practice not just by monks and hermits but by all men—in the making of modern capitalist society. In drawing out the elements that have gone into this process of the taming and self-taming of humans, Weber places himself in a line of analysis that has its most striking proponents in Nietzsche and Michel Foucault but can be found as early as Mandeville and the Fable of the Bees.9 Like Mandeville, Hume, other conjectural historians, and the earlier generation of sociologists, Weber stands outside religion in order to study his

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subject. But he also makes this necessary methodological stance part of his theme, when he traces the development of the rational, disciplined pursuit of a vocation to the tradition of the Calvinist churches and characterizes modernity as a disenchantment of the world. He both studies and offers an example of such a disenchanted perspective. In addition, like many of the eighteenthcentury conjectural histories, the Protestant Ethic draws attention to the disparity between intentions and results. In Weber’s case, this focus produces a sharp historical irony: the intensely religious Protestants, concerned for the fate of their souls and disciplining themselves through the practice of a new kind of worldly asceticism, did not imagine that their way of life would introduce a modern world characterized by a secular public arena in which religion would constitute only one moral voice among many.10 Weber worked on the Sociology of Religion for more than a decade; it remained an unpublished monograph-length part of Economy and Society at the time of his death and was first published in German two years later. Presumably, the Protestant Ethic would have formed a part of the longer work, the scope of which extends far more widely. In the Sociology of Religion, Weber surveys the major religions of the world— Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—to determine the role in each of the prophet and prophecy, of intellectuals and intellectualism, of asceticism, and of mysticism. Alongside these inquiries, he repeatedly directs attention to the ways that religions relate to this world, accommodating themselves to or making use of the economic system in general and the acquisitive instincts in particular, and expressing the aspirations of a particular class or profession. The continuity of approach with the Protestant Ethic emerges clearly: Weber consistently interests himself in the ethos encouraged by a religion, and in the religious beliefs encouraged by an ethos, not only the explicit teachings of the religion and its prescribed practices but its unstated interests, predilections, and unintended results. The passage quoted at the beginning of this section, on the occupational type addressed by each of the world’s major religions, illustrates this focus and Weber’s methodology in both works. Sharing its concerns and methodology with the Protestant Ethic, Weber’s Sociology of Religion also assumes the form of a conjectural history such as Charles de Brosses’s Cult of the Fetish Gods (1760). Like its conjectural antecedents, the Sociology of Religion undertakes a search for the origins of religions to understand their nature—including the origins of their

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various observances, forms, and institutions, such as the form of a priesthood or congregation (Sociology of Religion, 63). In the earliest period of human history lies the first development of beliefs in particular gods, now “concealed by the mists of time” (13), like the subjects of most conjectural histories.11 Because of the absence of any evidence from this period, Weber, like Freud during the same years, can only speculate about the nature and operation of taboos, which he sees as a set of magical beliefs to ensure the favor and avoid the displeasure of the spirits. Taboos and the totemic systems that depend on them function with the support of magicians, before the appearance of priests (37–38). Like James Frazer, Weber distinguishes between magic and religion: the magician compels the spirits by means of his personal charismatic force; the priest communicates with and worships the divinity in accord with an institutionalized hierarchy. As taboos are rationalized, they are transformed into a system of ethical prescriptions, and the misfortunes of an individual or a group can provide signs not of the weakness or anger of a spirit but of a god’s ethical displeasure with transgressions that burden the conscience, even apart from immediate consequences (43). The discussion of the development of monotheistic systems proceeds along similar lines, paralleling Hume’s discussion of the subject more closely than any other part of Weber’s argument. Like Hume, Weber speculates that the preeminent god of a pantheon probably originated as one deity among many, then became prominent and displaced others through the efforts of priests who advocated for him in order to elevate their own position. The dominant god in any locality would not be a transnational god, but he could be on his way to a universal status if his worshippers could succeed in expanding the range of their rule. Weber finds this globalizing tendency in the growth of empire in China, the extension of power among the Brahmins in India, the development of the Persian and Roman empires, and the formation of a confederacy among the Hebrew tribes (Sociology of Religion, 23). He also observes that periods of feverish intensity, which he calls religious “anarchism,” and which Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers called “enthusiasm,” prove to be transitory and give way to greater regularizing or bureaucratization. In this way, in the Sociology of Religion, Weber pursues a form of speculation and analysis that is more exclusively sociological than the synthesis of psychological, historical, and sociological interpretation that he advanced in the Protestant Ethic.12

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As he speculates on origins and beginnings whose details are no longer accessible, Weber also seeks to explain transitions from one period to another. He speculates on the early passage from preanimistic naturalism to symbolism—from the actions of a man who tears out the heart of his enemy in order to possess the power attributed to that organ, to the appearance of a war dance that seeks by sympathetic magic to insure victory by magical means, perhaps through the sacrifice of animals which symbolize the enemy (Sociology of Religion, 8–9). He also observes the reversals that accompany and signal changes from one regime to another: when a new religion is imposed on a people, the earlier deities typically persist in the form of demons (28). As Nietzsche argued in his methodological reflections in the Genealogy of Morality, the form—here, of the deities—may persist, but the meaning can change radically, sometimes taking on an opposite significance.13 Like the conjectural historians and the earlier sociologists, Weber conceives of societies as integrated wholes in which the dominant religion is woven into the life of the people, into their mores and institutions. Again, the quoted passage on the relation between occupational type and religion illustrates the mutually determining nature of social fields, as it draws out the inner relations between the major world religions and the set of economic behaviors, morality, and everyday activities that best suit each. Weber’s entire approach assumes the holistic nature of society, of which religion forms an integral part. Traditional customs and ways of life give the religion of a society a certain shape, and the religion in turn encourages values and forms of behavior that feed back into the economic life of the community. Moreover, like the conjectural historians, Weber often insists on the nonvoluntaristic nature of religion. History, in its ironic way (in its cunning, as Hegel puts it), produces unintended, unforeseen consequences from the behavior that a religious community encourages. As already noted, the cultivation of rational asceticism among the Calvinist churches led to an unprecedented development of capital accumulation and to a widespread valuation of wealth as a sign of success. Such a high valuation of material riches and their pursuit was far from consistent with the presumptions of the early religious members of the Protestant communities. Weber’s analysis of these sequences accords with the conjectural histories of Smith and Condorcet and with Nietzsche’s genealogies, which demonstrate that what

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appear to be linear developments in fact consist of hidden reversals and results that often double back against and contradict an agent’s intentions. Weber further echoes and revises Nietzsche’s analyses of the ethical and religious views of the class of warrior nobles. For Weber, as for Nietzsche, such warriors are too well acquainted with the irrationality of the world to live according to a rational, prudential ethic, because they face death in battle as their defining experience (Sociology of Religion, 85–86). Their selfesteem is not relational, as is resentment, but depends on their unthinking expressions of will and energy, on their sense of their own being (106).14 Weber controversially agrees with Nietzsche on the importance of resentment in Judaism as a theodicy of the dispossessed (110). But he revises Nietzsche in assigning only a minor role to resentment in early Christianity and in Buddhism. For Weber, early Christianity did not depend on prohibitions against wealth or injunctions to asceticism but on a promise of salvation free from ritual observances based on caste hierarchies. Both in early Christianity and in Buddhism, Weber sees an opening up of salvation to all, even the wealthy (115–16). The temporality involved in Weber’s thesis of the progressive secularization of the West is crucial to evaluating his contribution to the understanding of religion and society, as well as his relation to conjectural history. The term Weber used for this process, “disenchantment” (Entzauberung), implies that modern secular societies sacrifice participation in a mystified and irrational worldview in exchange for a clear-eyed view that renounces the satisfactions or pleasures of illusion for the hard truths of science and instrumental rationality. Weber understands secularization as an irreversible and universal process. Secularization distinguishes, even constitutes, modernity; once the development begins in northwestern Europe, it moves forward ineluctably and spreads without limit. It is not a function with periods of stability punctuated by leaps forward; nor is it subject to suspension, reversal, or cyclic recurrences. For Weber, Western Protestant societies pioneered the entry into modernity, which societies based on other religions will eventually follow, and the modern condition consists of a rupture, allowing no compromise with or accommodation of traditional religious beliefs. In propounding this view of secularization as the criterion of modernity, Weber seems to place himself in the line of descent from the conjectural historians. However, the thesis may not take into adequate account Nietzsche’s

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insight that the history of any organ or institution consists of reappropriations of key terms and the transformation of their meaning or function. Even when such reinterpretations prove successful in imposing a new meaning on an old term or institution, such success meets with a counterattack by a more traditional, established view or set of values. Because of a resulting continual struggle over interpretations and values, no linear progress (or regression) takes place, but only constant struggles and slowly changing configurations of forces and value systems. Thus, a new set of values never overcomes an older paradigm entirely. Nietzsche imagined that the struggle between traditional Christianity and scientific atheism would be played out over at least two centuries after his own time. Even then, we can presume, both of the starting positions will have been modified by the struggle, their slogans, creeds, and moral values reappropriated, reinterpreted, perhaps inverted by the antagonists in turn. Nietzsche believed that even the triumph of priestly morality over the warrior ethos had not been completed in his own time, thousands of years after the struggle had begun. The last hundred and fifty or two hundred years have provided confirming evidence of the strength of the counterattack by religious and other traditionalists, and by those whose interests are threatened, against more recent interpretations of civil and human rights based on nonreligious moral values. Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, the most recent counterattack has been less strong in Europe than in the United States, where the separation of the realms of religion and politics, and the demotion of any specific religion from an officially privileged position, was first asserted. Weber’s thought resembles that of Ferguson more than that of any other early conjectural historians. Like Ferguson, Weber contemplates the advent of modernity with a deep ambivalence: the process that, like Kant’s Enlightenment, constitutes a maturation of intellectual powers and independence also imposes on modern peoples an “iron cage” of dependence on material goods obtained through wage earning, a web of production and consumption. Strikingly, in its universality, Weber’s secularization thesis does not depart definitely from the temporal vision of many of the early conjectural historians. Like Herder, Weber surveys societies and peoples of the world to construct his sociology of religion, but he does not conceive, as Herder does, that non-European cultures and religions may each find their own distinctive accommodation between bureaucracy, science, and modern capitalism, on the one hand, and local and traditional religious beliefs and

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practices, on the other. Ultimately, Weber envisions modern society not as an organism but rather as the machine that manufactures the “steel-hard housing” in which we are trapped. du r k h e i m and th e wo rs h i p o f s oc ie t y

Durkheim does not, like Weber, focus on the psychosocial mechanisms of world religions or the transition to modernity. Durkheim’s relation to conjectural history appears most clearly in his decision to trace back and locate the earliest religious form in order to determine the nature and function of religion in general. His search for origins brings him to focus, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, on a topic that he presumes to be characteristic of early religions, and that will also prove central for Freud: totemism. He finds this “most primitive and simplest” religion in the totemism of the Arunta tribe of Australia, because it exhibits the least complex form of social organization and because its beliefs and practices give no evidence of being based on earlier forms.15 According to Durkheim, such a society will present the essential elements of religion without any of the accretions and elaborations of later times. Although he registers some unease with the term “primitive,” Durkheim can provide no alternative, and his approach implicitly holds that the totemism of the Arunta is the simplest because it is the earliest that can be discovered. As he formulates his thesis, after having reviewed and critiqued competing perspectives, such as E. B. Tylor’s animism and Max Müller’s “naturism,” he explicitly adopts the language of conjecture—about the earliest forms of religion or totemism, concerning which we have no direct evidence (Elementary Forms, 136–42). As in the conjectural histories, Durkheim’s argument does not stand or fall on the empirical accuracy of the details on which it is based. Much of his understanding of Arunta society depends on the work of Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, in The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), the accuracy of which has been seriously questioned, as has the adequacy of other ethnographic sources on which Durkheim relied.16 Moreover, it may be that totemism constitutes not so much a religion as a form of social organization, or even a phantom, a unitary phenomenon only in the eyes of European ethnographers and anthropologists.17 However, Durkheim uses the appeal to the earliest and the simplest in order to draw out the essential, and his view of the essential nature of religion could have validity or be

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productive even if the grounds from which it was derived have been proven to be mistaken and are now superseded. Such is the methodological potential of conjectural history. Durkheim also shares with the conjectural historians a commitment to the organic nature of society, the isomorphism between all spheres of social activity. After positing that totemism is the simplest and thus most revealing form of religious life, Durkheim focuses on the totemic animal, which members of the clan are forbidden to kill or eat. (Plants and inorganic natural phenomena can also sometimes serve as totems, but most are animals, and for the sake of exposition, Durkheim considers all of them as such.) Durkheim is concerned with unraveling the meaning of the totem, the source of its mana or distinctive power. The totem embodies a founding ancestor; it serves as the origin of the force of opinion, the power to say what behavior is allowed; it can compel or prohibit actions; it has the same name as the clan members, and clan members are related to the totemic animal as well as to each other. In Durkheim’s view, the totemic animal has the attributes of a supernatural force as well as the defining features of a particular society: it is the “flag” of the clan. The totem, he concludes, represents both the divinity and the society and points to the identity of the two. In the totem, members of a society acknowledge and respect the society in which they participate and which gives them their identity. Society is “like a god to the faithful. . . . Because it has its own nature separate from ours as individuals, it pursues ends that are equally its own: but because it can reach them only through us, it imperiously demands our cooperation. Society requires us to become its servants, forgetting our own interests, and compels us to endure all sorts of hardships, privations, and sacrifice without which social life would be impossible” (Elementary Forms, 154). Through religion, society represents itself to its members; it respects its own establishment, power, and highest ideals. Thus, the sociology of religion reveals the organic nature of society, the way that all social functions and actions find their meaning in ideals that distinguish and define the society, providing its identity.18 Durkheim’s view of the role of religion carries the implication that religious feelings are still at work in modern, secular societies, because such societies also pay tribute to their own highest ideals. For example, although post-Revolutionary France tolerates many forms of religious belief or none

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at all, it still expects all citizens to honor the ideals of justice, democracy, and free inquiry (Elementary Forms, 161). These constitute French society’s real religion. Those who fight superstitions may assert that superstitious beliefs contradict scientific facts, but such an appeal only has an effect on people if their society has faith in science and respect for it. Durkheim thus adopts a far less critical attitude toward religion than the Enlightenment conjectural historians, especially Hume and Condorcet. Durkheim’s attitude toward religion also diverges from that of the conjectural historians of religion in that he does not ascribe the origin or central impulse of religious sentiment to fear—or to wonder, like the deists. Rather, he finds moral feelings and respect at the foundation of religious beliefs (Elementary Forms, 155, 169). Durkheim seeks to penetrate the mystery of religion, but the meaning he finds does not debunk religion or point to its expendability. Rather, in drawing an equivalence between the social and the divine, he registers the inescapability and benefits of religion. For in celebrating the divinity, believers celebrate the accomplishments of their society. Durkheim’s argument nevertheless reveals several strong continuities with the characteristic attitudes of the Enlightenment historians. He does not retreat from characterizing either the intensely religious as prey to states of exaltation that resemble delirium or the founders of religions as pathological, possessing both psychological and physiological defects. This diagnosis closely resembles Hume’s conclusion in the Natural History of Religion (1757) that religious principles that have been dominant in human societies appear to have been “sick men’s dreams,” or the “playsome whimsies” of monkeys in human shape.19 Still, Durkheim insists that these representations are not entirely imaginary; rather, the ideas of religious leaders construct the reality, the rituals and moral values, the social environment in which they and their coreligionists live. In Durkheim’s account, the group psychology of religion borders on the pathological because religious feeling depends on an intense experience of participation in the social, a state of “general effervescence” (Elementary Forms, 159). Such heightened states of identification with the group can produce great advances or barbaric consequences: Durkheim cites the night of August 4, 1789, when the French National Assembly abolished feudalism, as an example of the former, and massacres by Christian Crusaders and the French Revolutionary Terror as examples of the latter (157).

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Although he finds cause to celebrate the potential of episodes of intense social feeling to transcend established conventions, they often give rise to mob violence directed at those labeled different—enemies, foreigners, or dissidents. In the terms of Enlightenment thinkers, these are times of enthusiasm and persecution; in contemporary terms, they can be times of fanaticism, torture, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder. Despite Durkheim’s celebration of the phenomenon, a “general effervescence” of the social raises questions about the intertwining of religion with mob behavior, about the responsibility of religions, in some periods and places, for mass murder.20 Durkheim’s view of the close relation between religious sentiments and social feelings opens the possibility of stepping beyond or outside the absolute opposition between religion and society posited by many conjectural historians and sociological thinkers. Like Mandeville, Hume, and Condorcet, Durkheim asserts that it must be possible to interpret religious rituals in secular terms, but he also maintains that secular, scientific societies retain important elements of religious life. He argues that in modern societies, for instance, public opinion shapes most people’s perspective, as an external force, just as religious opinion did in previous eras (Elementary Forms, 273). Again, totemism propagated the idea of continuities among animals, humans, and plants that were neither visible nor obvious, and in doing so prepared the way for logical thinking about internal connections between phenomena in philosophy and science. Durkheim’s attempt to draw out the deep, hidden structures of thought in any culture’s distinctive narratives points the way toward the work of Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962) and Mythologies (1964–71). Durkheim’s argument thus brings him to emphasize the ambiguity of the sacred, encompassing as it does both auspicious and inauspicious omens, benevolent and malevolent results (Elementary Forms, 304–9). Humans may imagine beings outside themselves who offer benefits and blessings to those who act morally and benefit the group, or beings who cause fear and require propitiation, sacrifice, and suffering. In either case, the beings constitute projections of the humans’ own collective states. These double aspects inform not only religion but all of society. Durkheim’s understanding of religion thus parallels the positions of Smith and Ferguson on modern commercial society; both religion and society are double and ambiguous in their characteristics and consequences.

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Developing the implications of his insight that religious feelings are foundational for societies, even modern societies, Durkheim asserts that religion is necessary for social life: all societies have religious ideas, because all societies have ideals, and the ideal society helps give shape to the actual society. At regular intervals, all societies must, through gatherings, festivals, and congregations, affirm the “collective feelings and ideas” that give them their unity and identity (Elementary Forms, 317, 322). But religious ideas, social ideals, and institutional forms change. In retrospect, Durkheim feels that, although his predecessors saw the declining efficacy of Christianity in the nineteenth century, their responses were inadequate. Comte, for example, made the mistake of attempting to establish a new religion of humanity modeled too closely on the old Christian religion. Durkheim therefore turns to consider his own historical moment and the prospects for the future, to imagine what form social ideals will assume in the wake of Christianity, and what form religious ideals will take in the era of modernity. “We are in a period of transition. . . . The ancient gods grow old and die, and others are not yet born” (Elementary Forms, 322).21 Durkheim sees scientific thought, including the social sciences (in which he works), as developing out of religious speculation, but also as taking primacy in speculation away from religion and philosophy. Social science can study religion; religion does not study social science. This does not mean that religion will die out; it will continue to exist, but it must undergo a transformation, for religion provides a distinctive kind of speculation about ultimate meanings, and new rituals will take on religious functions.22 Moreover, religious sentiments will continue to support the highest ideals of societies. Durkheim cites again the ideals that were introduced into the modern world by the French and American revolutions, noting that these ideals have taken on a religious function in replacing the highest moral convictions of other times (323). Thus, at the end of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim returns to consider the stadial nature of history. He is not interested in delineating a sequence of stages in equal detail, from the prehistoric to the contemporary. Instead, he moves from a focus on the earliest and most elementary forms of religious and social life, then quickly through all intervening periods to a focus on the present moment, and from there to anticipate the form that gods will take in the future. His vision covers an extended span like Condorcet’s, but with an intense concentration on

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the first and last stages or periods. He agrees with Comte that theology provided the basis for metaphysics and that both of these prepared the way for science, but he also maintains that the earlier stages continue to survive and to exercise a binding function in modern society. Indeed, in imagining the way that there can be a layering of stages, with the later continuing and revising the earlier—with, for example, national holidays and annual sporting events taking their place alongside traditional religious celebrations in the calendar of modern society—he adopts a position like that of Nietzsche or Darwin on the continuity of form with discontinuity in function.23 Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life also parallels and anticipates Freud’s work on psychology and society—not so much Freud’s speculations about the origins of religion and morality in Totem and Taboo (the first parts of which appeared in the same year as Durkheim’s study) as his speculations in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) concerning the costs of culture and social life. Durkheim repeatedly considers the renunciations required in society, the costs demanded of individuals to produce cultural accomplishments (Elementary Forms, 235). He joins Nietzsche and Freud in suggesting that all observances and customs involving prohibitions depend to some degree on asceticism (231). His argument that we experience the conscience as a second soul, an external force that has power over us, also anticipates Freud’s arguments concerning the superego in the following decade (209). These observations prepare the way for considering the filiation between Durkheim’s sociology of religion and Freud’s social psychology of religion.24 pat r i a r c h y, parri c i d e , and th e or igin s o f c ult ur e

In tracing the lines of affinity between Freud and the early conjectural historians, it might be tempting to consider his theory of the development of the individual psyche as evidence of speculative history. In his naturalistic account of the origins of the individual, free of supernatural causes, development proceeds through a series of stages—pre-Oedipal, Oedipal, adult, or oral, anal, genital. The account lays claim to being both holistic and universal. However, in focusing on the individual mind and its stages, Freud stands outside the lines of thought being traced here, which address the origins of society and the transition between social stages. It is true that Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which takes as its point of departure

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observations about repetition among shell-shocked veterans of the war of 1914–1918, could be seen as a conjectural history of the deep future that announces the death instinct, the tendency of all organisms toward an inanimate state of equilibrium. In taking this long view, it agrees with H. G. Wells’s vision at the end of The Time Machine, and it moves in the opposite direction from Condorcet’s vision of indefinitely extended individual lives. Still, Freud’s middle and late works of social psychology have a place in the tradition of conjectural history because they speculate concerning the early history of human society and the crucial transitions that led to institutions of civilization such as religion and morality. In seeking relations between his thought and that of the conjectural historians and their nineteenth-century inheritors, I will therefore concentrate on the social psychology of Freud in Totem and Taboo and, to a lesser extent, Civilization and Its Discontents. However, in order to arrive at an accurate sense of Freud’s ideas concerning the origins of religion, it is important to retrace his steps and review the thought of two of his predecessors: Henry Maine and William Robertson Smith. In Ancient Law (1861), Maine asserts that the earliest forms of society were based on the patriarchal family and that all succeeding forms have been rooted in that earliest institution of patriarchy. He claims that the oldest surviving legal records in Europe—those of early Roman law—presume and codify a patriarchal society, and that inferences about divergent nonpatriarchal and nonhierarchical societies earlier than the foundational texts of Roman law are speculative and baseless. Maine claims that his own approach employs the true historical method, based on documentary or material evidence, providing a solid basis for knowledge, by contrast with fallible ahistorical speculation, such as that of Hobbes and the social contract school.25 Through close reading of ancient Roman law, Maine establishes the famous transition in social relations from status to contract. Nevertheless, despite his methodological strictures, he repeatedly speculates about times before legal records.26 Not surprisingly, his speculations regularly conform to his vision of universal patriarchal hegemony in human society and law.27 In several ways, then, Maine participates in the traditions of conjectural history, even as he asserts his opposition to those traditions. For the present purposes, his primary importance lies in his assertion of the purely patriarchal nature of the earliest forms of society.

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In The Religion of the Semites (1889), Robertson Smith does not distinguish among different Semitic peoples; instead, he infers the existence of early, fundamental practices from traces in the sacred writings of the Jews and in accounts of Arabs from times before the advent of Islam.28 Robertson Smith considers prehistoric sacrifice not as a gift to the god but rather as a means of establishing communion between the god and men. He locates the foundational sacrificial rite not in Hebrew scripture but in an account by Nilus, a late Latin writer, of a practice among Arabs in the fourth century. Here, he believes he has discovered the original form and essential meaning of sacrifice, in a frenzied ritual that, as in Durkheim’s later conception, binds the community together.29 According to Nilus, the ritual involved the sacrifice of a sacred camel by desert Arabs, a sacrificial feast in which all the members of the community were compelled to participate. The entire ritual had to be carried out while the morning star was visible and before the sun rose to obscure it. As the sky lightened, and after the priest had inflicted the first wound, the entire community would fall on the victim, hacking off pieces of flesh and eating them raw.30 Smith sees the savagery of this ritual meal as a way of affirming the common life that bound worshippers with one another and with the god on whose altar the animal was sacrificed. Acknowledging that the main lines of his argument are hypothetical, Robertson Smith maintains that the thesis depends only on the commonly observed phenomenon of survivals, in which an institution or behavior persists although the original meaning has been lost.31 The bloody sacrificial scene is repeated in all later stages; even though its external form has been displaced, the essential internal form remains close to what it was in the first and most primitive period.32 These arguments of Maine and Robertson Smith concerning foundational patriarchy and sacrifice contribute significantly to Freud’s narrative of origins in Totem and Taboo. Like other conjectural historians, Freud sets his narrative in a time before the establishment of social institutions, religion, and morality, proposing an account of the transition from the last stage of human animal existence to the earliest stage of human social life. He explicitly follows Darwin in postulating that the human animals would have been living in groups or small “hordes” (the same word is used in German and in English) of females and children dominated by a powerful, possessive male, like similar groupings of gorillas. Adolescent males would have been driven out of the group by the father who monopolized access to the women.33

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In addition, Freud calls on the psychoanalysis of childhood animal phobias, like the fear of horses or chickens in the cases of Little Hans and Little Arpad.34 He claims these show that in many cases fear of the father has been displaced onto the animal, and the ambivalence toward the animal—the combination of fear and fascination—duplicates the combination of hatred and love felt for the father. Freud speculates that the totem animal, about whom the clan feels a similar ambivalence, serves as a substitute for the father. In support of this conjecture, he refers to evidence that tribal people from many parts of the world believe that the totem animal is an embodiment of their ancestor. Thus, Freud can assert that his speculative account of totemism and the earliest stage of human social life brings together, for the first time, the originary sacrificial meal of Robertson Smith, Darwin’s horde of human animals dominated by a single male, and psychoanalytic studies showing the equation of animal phobias with fear of the father. The resulting synthesis produces the infamous narrative of the event that founds religion, morality, and society: “One day,” Freud posits, in a remarkable historical foreshortening, “the sons who had been excluded by the father returned as a band, killed the father, and [since they must have been ‘cannibal savages’] ate him” (Totem and Taboo, 141–42). Having satisfied their hatred of their father and incorporated him into their own bodies, their admiration and affection for him reasserted itself; they experienced remorse for the killing, repudiated it, and forbade the killing and eating of an animal that they thenceforth identified with the dead father. Their act was later commemorated in the first human festival, a sacrificial meal in which all had to share, which annually reenacted the murder that ended the father’s violent rule but which also brought back the experience of guilt for the murder. In addition to prohibiting the killing of the totem animal, and eventually the murder of other members of the community, the brothers also renounced the claim the father had made to all the women in the group. By establishing an incest taboo and exogamy, they altered the human group from a horde ruled by a jealous tyrant to a more democratic tribe in which power and privilege were shared by sons and brothers. The new regime was predicated on the condition that men accepted restrictions on the women with whom they could have sexual relations. Each gave up claims to women of his own group in exchange for access to women of other groups. By this means, patriarchy returned in a modified and limited form as the

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rule of the father in his own family, comparable to the rule of other fathers in their families. Freud here describes the same transition that Maine used conjecture to explain: from a cyclopean state in which each father rules in his own isolated family to a state in which they have equal authority in an aggregate of families. Freud maintains that the killing and eating of the father and the responses to these acts laid the foundations for society, religion, and art. With the acceptance of the taboo on incest and the prohibition of parricide and killing within the group, the two laws essential for the survival of human society have been put in place. No matter how incest is defined, some restriction on sexual choice and some willingness to allow other men access to women of one’s own group is necessary for the partial satisfaction of all, as is the rule against murder, however defined, for the persistence of the social system. Religion was based on reverence for the totem animal, the prohibition on killing and eating it, and the ritual violation of that restriction in the sacrificial meal, the reenactment of the foundational murder. Individual morality was based on the requirements of the system and the sense of guilt that persisted from the originary murder. Freud speculates briefly concerning the development of a divinity from being embodied in a totem animal to having a place in the myths of the Greeks and Romans. As the prototype of the emergence of art from religion, he cites the needful suffering of the Greek tragic hero, who embodies the murdered father by contrast with the choral group, originally representing the sons. Here he refers to Frazer’s argument that the early Latins were ruled by a foreigner who played the part of a god and was solemnly executed at an annual festival (Totem and Taboo, 151). Finally, Freud speculates on the way Christianity constituted a variation on the pattern of Greek and Roman myths in which the son of the god compensates for the guilt of the sons (and all humans) in relation to the god by taking on that guilt and sacrificing himself (153). His thesis here agrees with Nietzsche’s argument in the Genealogy of Morality, essay 1, that Christianity introduces the maximal guilt of any religious system. Totem and Taboo thus incorporates many elements of conjectural history, and many ties connect its argument to other works in the conjectural tradition. Freud finds the universal origins of human social structures, religious beliefs and behaviors, and morality and the sense of guilt in the conjectured killing of the father, in a period for which there are no records,

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only surviving institutions from which inferences can be drawn, moving backward in time. (He acknowledges his extreme temporal condensation when he introduces the notion that the murder occurred “one day.”) Still, he works from some evidence, such as Robertson Smith’s linguistic expertise and research in ancient Arabic and Hebrew sources, his own analyses of children’s animal phobias, and Darwin’s hypothesis of the gorilla-like structure of the earliest human animal hordes. In addition to suggesting the crucial steps in the transition from the human animal to all later social and religious forms, Freud also sketches some of the main succeeding stages. He speculates, for instance, that there must have been a time after the killing of the father and before the institution of the gods (those idealized images of the dead father) when “the great mother-goddesses” reigned (Totem and Taboo, 149). In this one brief passage, Freud finds a place for a cultural, social, and religious period that departs from patriarchy. However, the rest of his account takes shape in accord with Maine’s thesis that, from the beginning, legal and social institutions have always been patriarchal—that the history of legal and social forms is the history of patriarchy. In proposing an intensely naturalistic narrative of the origins of religion from outside a religious perspective, Totem and Taboo demonstrates a strong continuity with Enlightenment natural histories of religion, as well as with the extension of that project in nineteenth-century cultural anthropology. Indeed, early in Totem and Taboo, discussing the psychology of animist belief in anthropomorphic deities of location, Freud refers to Hume’s Natural History of Religion, as cited in Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Like Hume’s and other such natural histories, Freud’s account of the origins and elements of religion can be satirically demystifying. Rather than celebrating the creation of the world and of humankind by an omnipotent deity, it recounts the derivation of the deities’ existence from a cannibalistic feast following a parricide—a sordid and violent point of origin and continuing reference. Freud’s explanation of the process by which the primary deity is granted greater and greater powers proceeds along the same lines as Hume’s, although Freud, like Nietzsche, concentrates on guilt and admiration of the dead father rather than fear and pride in the local deity. Like Hume, Condorcet, Tylor, Darwin, and Nietzsche, Freud asserts the irrational, ignoble, violent sources of religion. Frazer produces the same effect of

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satiric demystification by clearly implying that the killing and resurrection of the man-god in Christianity finds its place amid the widespread belief in such sacrificed gods among pagans in the ancient world and among nonEuropeans in the modern world, making the story of Christ not unique but typical, one among hundreds of such dead and resurrected grain gods. Paradoxically, as Darwin says at the end of both the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, being able to stand outside the religious perspective and formulate such a naturalistic process of stadial development can bring its own satisfaction and wonder. The actions that lead to the founding of civilization and religion in Totem and Taboo do not result from foresight or planning. If the father’s murder founded civilized society, that consequence was unintended; it did not involve reasoning or contract. Many of the actions that Freud postulates took place in prehistoric times must have had unconscious motivations. Social order is based not on calculation or deliberation but on irrational emotions—fear of the father and a continuing desire to be protected by him. Irreducible and inescapable in Freud’s theory, such ambivalence accounts for the murderous hatred of the primal father, his elevation into a divinity, and his displacement onto an animal for whose death all are guilty. Freud claims a universal validity for his theory, based on the common elements of human sacrifice in “the most different parts of the inhabited globe . . . [which] leave little doubt that the victims met their end as representatives of the deity” (Totem and Taboo, 151). Animal sacrifice substitutes for the killing of the human father; when the worship of the animal expands to worship of an anthropomorphic god, the sacrificial victim can change back from an animal to a human. Thus, all forms of sacrifice—animals, humans, and eventually, the self-sacrifice of the divine son—refer back to the first sacrifice, concerning which men feel deeply guilty but also deeply proud. In the totemic sacrifice of the camel, recounted by Nilus, Freud sees just one prototypical instance of the rending and killing of a god; other examples include the tearing apart of the Titans, the dismemberment of Orpheus, and the castration of Attis (here he nods to Frazer’s Golden Bough). The rending of the god or the totem animal, and the incorporation of his substance in the totemic meal, take place in a frenzy in which all members of the community participate. These commemorative and

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displaced reenactments of the killing and eating of the father play a role in Freud’s theory comparable to the role played by the state of “effervescence” in Durkheim’s. In both accounts, human beings move outside their normal boundaries into an ecstatic state in which all identify with the community as a whole. The participants perform their roles in a ritual whose true significance they do not understand. In both, the frenzied, irrational action of the community is a universal trait that can be observed as the basis of all religions. Finally, Freud’s speculations about the origin of religion demonstrate the principle, prevalent in the late nineteenth-century conjectural tradition, that change of meaning accompanies persistence of form. In Freud’s history of religions, from totemic through classical pagan and Christian forms, the sacrifice of an animal or a god and the subsequent sacrificial meal remain central, even if the religion has changed in focus from the father to the son, from pagan or Jewish to Christian. There are good grounds for doubting both the universality and the historicity of Freud’s thesis. Although he claims that the killing of the primal father underlies all religions and societies, the evidence he considers comes mostly from ancient Arabic and Jewish practices, ancient Greek and Roman myths, and the tales and myths collected in Frazer’s Golden Bough35—neglecting almost all of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.36 Freud would assert, as he does in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents, that such bold speculations can be justified by their explanatory power, even if they cannot be proven. He does consider whether the murder of the father in fact took place, and whether the sons’ psychic state alone—their murderous hatred of the father, desire for his women, and urge to imitate him—would have been sufficient to bring about the totem sacrifice and the sacrificial meal, the move from an undifferentiated horde to a clan society. In Totem and Taboo, he concludes that only an actual murder could produce such extreme and lasting effects as the founding of society. But this means that in human groups around the globe, innumerable murders must have been carried out by small bands of brothers with the same result of instituting an incest taboo, the prohibition of murder, and a religious ceremony that involved sacrificing and eating an animal surrogate for the dead father. No evidence has surfaced of the universal historicity of this story. Again, though, this consideration returns us to the question of the genre in which Freud is writing—conjectural history—and of the historical temporalities opened up by this genre. For

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Freud, the murder and meal are hypothetical, what could have happened, what he feels must have happened, even if, as he comes to concede later, only psychologically.37 Two further works of Freud on the history and psychology of religion also belong to this genre. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), he follows Condorcet and Comte in speculating on the future course of society, envisioning a period in which human beings may leave behind their need for reassurance and protection from a beneficent and powerful father. The next step in maturation, for Freud as for the other two speculative historians, would or will be to accept reality, to practice observation, science, and the control of nature. The argument he advances is consistent with the Enlightenment project of piercing the illusions of religion, which Hume outlined in the Natural History of Religion, the need to grow out of immature reliance on external authorities, which Kant identified as the goal in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), and Tylor’s aim of leaving behind superstitions, outlined in Primitive Culture. In Civilization and Its Discontents, which is even more characteristic of conjectural history, Freud addresses the modern dissatisfaction with civilization by turning to the historical problem of the origin of conscience. This subject proves to have both a social and an individual dimension. Although the process Freud traces in this work again has to do with fear of, aggression toward, and idealization of the father, it does not require acceptance of a historical murder and cannibal feast as the basis of civilized society.38 He still maintains the theory proposed in Totem and Taboo, but the thesis of Civilization and Its Discontents does not depend on it. The later work is not as concerned with the historical origins of remorse and conscience as with the stages by which conscience develops in individuals, especially in modern times. The theory in Civilization and Its Discontents is based on the individual’s repressing aggression toward the father and his authority. Originally, perhaps, this internalizing took place under threat of the loss of the love and protection of the father. After this initial step, each successful act of repression directs the subject’s aggressive instincts inward, against himself, to produce an increasingly heightened consciousness of guilt.39 The result is an excessive repression among the most moral and civilized members of society and a general unhappiness with the renunciations required by civilization. Moreover, although the demands of the superego may be overwhelming

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in such individuals, they may be inadequate and ineffective in forestalling the organized aggression of groups and states. Freud concludes Civilization and Its Discontents on this note of ambivalence and uncertainty toward civilized society. This conjectural history calls into question the value of civilization even while acknowledging its accomplishments. The historical temporality of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents strikingly accords with that of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755). Both take the crucial distinction to be between humankind in a civilized state and in a natural state that can now only be imagined. Rousseau believes men to have been content, if not happy, in that earliest state, although for Freud only one man could be content in such a time—the leader of the local horde. In Rousseau’s narrative, the fall into society and property is a disaster that quickly generates competition, possessiveness, deception, jealousy, and bloodshed, then leads, after a few generations, to the lawless dictatorship of the local strongman, which is solidified when made lawful by a false social contract. In Freud’s case, the killing of the possessive father brings improvement for a time, a more stable and egalitarian mode of life, following the institution of the fundamental laws against murdering and against marrying within the group. But the restraints imposed by conscience, especially in modern, Christian societies, bring increasing unhappiness as more and more instinctual satisfactions fall under the ban of civilized morality. Civilization causes and intensifies unhappiness, according to both one of the earliest and one of the latest conjectural historical thinkers.40 Freud’s social psychology and psychology of religion take shape in response to and as a continuation of the conjectural histories of the eighteenth century and their nineteenth-century heirs. He questions the ability of civilization to provide happiness, following arguments close to those laid out by Rousseau, and he articulates a demystifying natural history of religion like Hume’s. His expectation that science could eventually entirely replace religious belief in its explanations of natural phenomena and as a guide to living finds its place in a line of descent from Condorcet through Comte. Darwin’s postulate that the earliest human groupings took the form of small hordes dominated by a single possessive male provided a crucial foundation for Freud’s speculations about the passage to society, religion, and morality. In addition, Freud’s account of the origins of conscience has close affinities with Nietzsche’s argument in the Genealogy of Morality concerning the origins of the ability to keep promises. Finally, religious

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beliefs and practices arise in Freud’s theory, as in Durkheim’s, not from rational wonder or a search for truth but from irrational ecstatic activity that defines the whole group and must be performed repeatedly.41 These works by Weber, Durkheim, and Freud thus exhibit the features of conjectural history that have been noted throughout this study. Both Totem and Taboo and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life employ a naturalistic, demystifying approach; speculate concerning the earliest stages of human society for which little if any evidence survives; and show human activity producing unanticipated results. Weber’s Protestant Ethic focuses on the determinants of the crucial transition to modernity, exemplifying the kind of speculative history that is concerned with later transitions between social stages. The kind of historical truth that Weber, Durkheim, and Freud arrive at is not dependent on fact or capable of demonstration. Nevertheless, though the thesis in each case may not be provable, it may be productive and illuminating. Weber did not base his idea of the Protestant ethic as an ideal type on empirical evidence, but it has generated productive contentions, modifications, and extensions since it was formulated. Although Durkheim relied on mistaken interpretations of Arunta totemism, his thesis concerning the importance of religion as a bond opens up a new approach to the analysis of society. Even though the killing of fathers by groups of sons may not actually have occurred in human history, the psychological mechanism that Freud proposes may in fact illuminate the foundations of society, religion, and morality.

7

Novels as Conjectural Histories

take the form of fictional conjectural histories, analysis can reveal the features they share with Enlightenment conjectural narratives as well as the intertwining developments in novels and in social thought, especially sociology, from about 1815 to 1910. The discussion in this chapter does not accept a contradiction between formal and historical approaches. Rather, I propose seeing literary form as a form of thought and knowledge, examining continuities between the conjectural historical form, emergent social fields, and a line of fiction that includes Walter Scott’s historical novels, especially Waverley (1814); Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43); and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). The last novel to be analyzed in this line will be H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1908–9), a novel of modern life that focuses on mass marketing, financial scams, and military technology. Although many conjectural histories begin with a stage whose particulars are lost in the earliest human times, some attempt to understand and explain transitions between historical stages. All the novels considered in this chapter present a narrative account of the transitional passage from a previous stage into modernity, and, like many conjectural histories, most of these conjectural novels register ambivalence concerning the modern age, viewing it as both liberating and limiting. But what most distinguishes these novels is the expansion of conjecture to include the field of the fictional. Conjectural history becomes the conjectural historical novel, capable of registering the otherwise unrecorded history of obscure and everyday lives amid the large movements of historical time.

b e c a u s e m a n y n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y n ov e l s

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t h e fi r s t g e ne rati o n o f c o nj e c t ur a l n ov e l s: s cot t a nd oth e rs

Walter Scott developed his characteristic form of the historical novel soon after the flourishing of conjectural history in his homeland.1 Educated at the University of Edinburgh, and a friend of Adam Ferguson’s son, he probably studied there with Ferguson himself. Among conjectural histories, Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) exerted the strongest influence on Scott, and through him on later nineteenth-century historical novels. Scott’s novels reveal a deep ambivalence concerning modern social life that is closely related to that present in Ferguson’s History of Civil Society.2 Beginning with his earliest novel, Waverley, most of Scott’s novels recount a conflict between two ways of life, which represent two stages of society. One takes a feudal or tribal form, dependent on personal loyalties, honor, and independence combined with small-scale hierarchies; this age, most often located among the Scottish Highlanders, corresponds to the barbarian stage of society in Ferguson’s three-stage history. The other kind of society, dominant in modern England and the Scottish Lowlands, is the commercial form, Ferguson’s third stage, which requires prudential calculation in pursuit of profit, everyday dealings with strangers, and involvement with bureaucracies.3 In Waverley, which can serve as the model for his other historical novels, Scott does not portray the Highlanders alone as instances of the second, barbarian stage of social life. In a consistent pattern in the novel, he identifies the Highlanders with two other instances of this state of society: the North American Indians and the archaic Greeks depicted in the Homeric epics. All three of these societies prized martial skill and proud, hospitable, loyal warriors. None of the three can coexist with the monetary, commercial society in which Edward Waverley’s father participates as a Whig member of Parliament. The narrator compares the athletic games of the Highlanders to those of the Greeks, and notes the importance of the bard and his song in both societies.4 In addition, he often conflates the behavior of the Highlanders with the practices of Native Americans. For example, in their night marches, the Highlanders follow each other in “single, or Indian file,” and when they are trying to elude detection, they exhibit the dexterity, quiet, and shrewdness of their American counterparts (Waverley, 280–81). Although Waverley has enlisted among them, as he looks over the ragged,

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wild-looking army of Highlanders wielding clubs and scythes in support of Charles Edward Stuart in 1745, he imagines that an incursion by such a force into England would produce as much surprise as “an invasion of African Negroes or Esquimaux Indians” (324; also 331).5 Waverley is not precisely analogous to an ethnographic observer in the novel; inexperienced, imprudent, and irresponsible, he becomes infatuated with both Flora and her brother Fergus. But he does closely observe the manners, customs, and language of the Highlanders, and he functions as a mediating figure who conveys these observations to Scott’s English readers and to a wider European audience, sixty-some years after the disintegration of Highland society (the novel is subtitled Sixty Years Since). He thus sets the example for most of Scott’s protagonists, who similarly bridge the distance between Scott’s own time and place and the strange or earlier societies they visit.6 Significantly, although the novel juxtaposes the Highland and the English ways of life, it focuses principally, almost exclusively, on the Highlanders, because they appear strange, colorful, and of the past, whereas the commercial, prudent English constitute unremarkable figures of the modern present. The contrast between the tribal Highlanders and the commercial English does not exist only on the economic or political plane; it is aligned with divisions in other areas, such as religion. The Catholicism of the Highlanders accords with their loyalty to the Catholic Stuarts, descendants of James II. The Protestantism of the Lowlanders and the English is tightly bound up with their acceptance of the Hanoverian Georges, who succeeded the last Stuart precisely because they were the Protestants most closely related to the previous ruling family. But the holism of each society and stage emerges most strongly from the association of the Highlanders and the Highlands with romance. Waverley finds the landscape itself “picturesque and romantic,” with its dramatic waterfalls, mountains, and ravines (Waverley, 90). In such a wild location, he has his first conversation with Flora and is bewitched by the woman and the scene. Repeatedly, the activities and the way of life of the Highlanders figure in Edward’s mind as attractively romantic; in Scotland, he considers himself to be in the “land of military and romantic adventures” (176). If Highland culture is associated with romantic landscape, emotions, and adventures, it is also identified with the past, a previous stage of life, and adherence to a lost cause. In all these ways, Highland society is of a

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piece—tribal, backward-looking, poetic, hospitable, romantic. By contrast, English society, which is also of a piece, is unimaginative and prosaic; honoring prudence, duty, and foresight; actual rather than dreamlike. When Waverley returns to the Lowlands after his Highland adventure, he feels that “the romance of his life was ended; its real history commenced” (Waverley, 415). The novel takes as its subject the depiction of life in a society that is passing in the time of the narrative and is past in the time of reading. It allows an imaginative experience of romance through the adventure of Waverley, but it also requires the renunciation of romantic dreams and an accommodation to the more bland and calculating, but also more secure and equal, society that succeeded feudalism and chivalry. In offering a narrative of a shift from one stage of society to another, and in presenting both states as self-consistent and coherent, Waverley participates in the conventions of conjectural history. It does so, as well, in constructing a history that does not base its particulars on documents. Such an assertion may seem to be contradicted by the increasingly elaborate apparatus of annotation that Scott added from the first edition of the novel to the last. However, careful reading of Scott’s notes reveals that they either depend for their authority on hearsay, legend, or song or, if they are based on printed or manuscript sources, the substance of the document bears a distinctly indirect if not tangential relation to the incident in the text. For example, Scott acknowledges in a note that there is no evidence that the Highlanders used a hunting expedition as a cover for a gathering of the clans to prepare their actions in 1745, yet he observes that such a pretext was employed in advance of the uprising of 1715. Thus, fiction plays a role in Scott’s novels analogous to the role played by speculation in the conjectural histories, except that, in Scott, the characteristic tense is the simple conjectural—what may or might plausibly have occurred—rather than the necessary conditional of the histories—what must have happened. In the dedicatory epistle to Ivanhoe (1820), Scott defends the method of his historical novels on the ground that they are plausible: we may not have documentary evidence for what occurs in the plot, but the narrative does not contradict the evidence that we do have; moreover, the forms of speech and thought, the customs, and the behavior of the characters are consistent with the society of the time and place in which the narrative occurs.7 Thus, Scott’s enabling criterion of plausibility is closely comparable to the standard of plausibility for the reconstruction of the past in conjectural

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histories, enunciated by Dugald Stewart. Scott’s method underscores the fictional nature of conjectural thought in Smith, Rousseau, or Ferguson, but it also carries on the historical thinking of the conjecturalists. Scott’s novelistic approach differs from that of his predecessors in the immensely greater detail and specificity of speech, action, and behavior that can be represented in a novel, and the extent to which such representations can reanimate a past society in the imagination. Although Scott’s historical fictions are naturalistic in avoiding any providential explanations, his modern society is not a-religious or antireligious. Protestantism suits the modern form of commercial society, just as Catholicism was consistent with the more hierarchical clan society of the Highlanders or of feudal times. Scott continues to engage these and other features of conjectural history in other historical novels, sometimes with shifting patterns of emphasis and selection. The history and political implications of religion play a paramount role in Old Mortality (1816), for instance, although this novel traces a shift not from Catholicism to Protestantism but from fanatical extremism in the service of either religion to a moderate and tolerant regime in which believers can live with dissenters. In Rob Roy (1817), Scott devotes as much or more attention to the everyday lives and mores of the Highlanders as in Waverley, but less severe dangers attend the Englishman who travels from the south to find himself among them. In fact, the plot that ensnares the visitor in this novel is woven by a member of his own family, and the eponymous outlaw serves more as a helper than as a Machiavellian tempter like Fergus. Redgauntlet (1824) focuses most deeply on psychology and on the disorienting consequences, for identity, of experiencing a major shift in social, political, and cultural stages; it thus points most directly to the deep psychology of later nineteenth-century novels. The satire on antiquarianism in The Antiquary (1816) constitutes a metacommentary that underscores the importance of conjecture in Scott’s fictions. As this novel insists, it is not the recovery of artifacts or the uncovering of ruins that defines the work of the historical imagination. Rather, in accord with the project of conjectural history, inference, interpretation of objects and documents, and the reconstruction of life in the past are crucial to avoiding the dry and empty knowledge of the pedant. In the final chapter of Waverley, the “Postscript That Should Have Been a Preface,” Scott writes of the great changes that came over Scotland in the century after the Acts of Union in 1707, and he attributes these changes to

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the dramatic development of commerce and its civilizing results. Similarly, at the beginning of Rob Roy, the narrator speaks of the 1720s as a time when wildness still persisted in the British Isles, in the persons of Rob Roy and the Highlanders, at the same time that Pope and Addison were writing in the southern part of the island. In these ways, Waverley and most of Scott’s other historical novels, especially those dealing with Scottish history, build on the kind of thinking that forms conjectural histories. The historical novelistic fictions diverge from the Enlightenment conjectural histories in focusing on the plights and decisions of fictional characters, giving them speeches, motivations, and psychological identities that comport with the historical moment in which they find themselves. Often, that historical conjunction involves a transition between stages of social life—and the novel proves capable of depicting fine-grained historical particulars of individual speech, thought, customs, and values that are characteristic of both the earlier form and its successor.8

Like Scott and Ferguson, the novelists in this line usually exhibit a deep ambivalence toward the civilizing process, recognizing the loss of traditional virtues while acknowledging gains and benefits brought about by the new era. For example, in The Pioneers (1823), James Fenimore Cooper focuses sharply on successive stages of social life, which, in the American context, are reduced from the three stages of Ferguson’s theory—savage, barbarian, and civilized—to two—savage and civilized. The novel meditates on the opposition between these two and on the passage from the former to the latter.9 Only a few isolated individuals occupy a middle ground in Cooper’s imagination, where one might find virtuous barbarians in Ferguson. The hero of the Leatherstocking novels, Natty Bumppo, falls much closer to savagery than to civilization: Cooper’s white semisavage depends for subsistence on hunting, follows a nomadic life in the woods rather than a life in the settlements, reveres nature as a deity, has no formal education, can read no book but the Book of Nature, and carries with him an unerring moral compass.10 Cooper’s hierarchy of values thus resembles that in Genesis 4, where the deity prefers the meat sacrifice of the shepherd Abel over the fruits of the earth offered by the more advanced agriculturalist Cain, although Cain’s descendants go on to be the first city dwellers and musicians, and the first to employ the technologies of mining and metallurgy.

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Cooper’s moral imagination also parallels that of Rousseau, who, in the Discourse on Inequality, locates the ideal of human life as close to the state of nature as possible. Like Genesis, the Discourse on Inequality relates a decline from a state in which humans lived in harmony with nature (but did not eat meat, unlike Cooper’s hunting man of nature) to a more advanced, civilized, and corrupt state in which humans outdo and cheat each other, cultivate the ground, live in settlements, and toil in mines. A few good savages people Cooper’s wilds: the doomed remnant of the noble Mohicans. Crucially, the other natives are all unregenerate, “lying Mingos” in Natty’s words.11 Cooper’s characterization of the noble natives agrees closely with Ferguson’s representation of the barbarian ethos and its virtues, which characteristically consist of courage, loyalty, discipline, and military prowess. Such a continuity is hardly coincidental, since Ferguson patterned his portrait of the barbarian on preclassical Greek warriors, Scottish Highlanders, and natives of the American Northeast. As in both Ferguson and Scott, the time of the earlier people is past. Nevertheless, Cooper also calls into question the legitimacy of the civilized and propertied elite. When old Indian John is counseled that the time has come when he must learn to live in peace and fear God, he responds with an angry critique of French, English, and now Americans, who have all his life been killing each other to possess his tribe’s ancient hunting grounds. Through Natty and his friends, Cooper critiques the law for being, as Rousseau argued, established by the rich to legitimize their property and power.12 Like Ferguson and Scott before him, and like Balzac and others who followed, Cooper’s conjectural historical novels express a deep ambivalence toward narratives of progress, a condemnation of the new, modern order, and a commitment to the values of the earlier, less civilized stage.13

The novels of Balzac’s Human Comedy (1830–50), written during the years when Comte was writing his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42), constitute a fictional counterpart of Comte’s conjecturalist sociology. In the preface to the Human Comedy, Balzac defines his project as the writing of a natural history of modern French society, including detailed representations of its major professions and classes. Each of these types—Napoleonic colonel, young writer from the provinces, upright lawyer, power-mad priest, scheming merchants—he conceives of as a separate species with its

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distinctive behavior to be described in narrative form. His central novel, Lost Illusions (1837), makes clear that he understands modern society as the pursuit of money and the emptiness of all other values. Money is “the solution to all problems,” “the answer to every riddle,” the principle that pervades and explains the working of the social whole.14 As the supposed priest, Abbé Herrera, tells Lucien at the end of the novel, apart from requiring individuals to conform outwardly, the principles of modern society can be reduced to two prescriptions: use people as means, and make money, because with money all is possible. In nineteenth-century France, every social group “in politics as well as ethics” has shown that “their opinions belied their behavior, or else their behavior belied their opinions.”15 When Lucien objects that this sounds “like a code for highwaymen,” the abbé argues that this was already the way to greatness for Richelieu and the Medici. Now, after Napoleon, the road is open to many more obscure young men from the provinces. The narrator’s analysis of the lessons taught by history and society does not seem to differ substantially from the abbé’s. It is money and money alone that provides the organizing principle for modern society. Moreover, this characteristic pervades society, defining the modern stage of social life in the technological, political, and legal areas as well. Of these, the technology of the printing industry figures most prominently in Lost Illusions. After the account of Lucien’s disastrous career in Paris, Balzac, in the third and final part of the novel, “An Inventor’s Tribulations,” details the obsessive and ultimately successful efforts of Lucien’s friend and brother-in-law, David, to develop a new method to produce fine-quality paper less expensively by using vegetable matter rather than linen or cotton rags. Although the process will be worth millions, David is in debt due to his poor business sense and because a desperate Lucien forged several notes in his name. By scheming and pressuring David, his competitors gain ownership of the process and become fabulously wealthy—one becomes a senator, the other a noble. Thus, Balzac details the emergence of a new social order as well as the survival of forms from the older one. By selling the rights to his paper process, David and Eve emerge from their financial troubles with a small estate in the country and enough income to live on modestly for the rest of their lives. Possessing residual virtues of honesty and trust, too scrupulous to survive in a fiercely competitive economy, they inhabit an anachronistic premodern idyll in the modern world.

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Similar kinds of doubleness inform Balzac’s depiction of public opinion and the institutions of justice. He portrays public opinion as a distinctive phenomenon of modern society, which writers in the public arena claim to respect and to influence, yet in this system, journalists and reviewers pander to and are shaped by established opinion as much as they shape it themselves. Public opinion thus works as a typically bankrupt modern institution whose meaning proves to be empty, its function the reverse of the claims made for it. But Balzac himself participates in the serial publication that he satirizes in the novel as hopelessly corrupt. Unlike the novel’s noble and high-minded author d’Arthez, Balzac does not labor in obscurity and poverty to write a masterpiece that can be appreciated only by posterity. His writing is directed toward the immediate, contemporary market, and his frenetic activity as a writer participates as much in the world of Lucien and the cynical journalists as in that of the high-minded artist.16 Finally, Balzac’s peculiar use of form bears a noticeable relation to the contemporaneous establishment of the sociological field. His novels do not exhibit closure; they always open out onto other narratives, usually making principals of the minor characters in the first work. Balzac has no architectural sense of part corresponding to part to produce a generically identifiable structure, or even a recognizable combination of structures. His unit of narrative is a long short story or novella, and the full-length novels consist of three or four such novellas, one or two of which can be added to the earlier ones years after their first publication. This method of composition produces the kind of effect that would result from collecting observations concerning a particular sociological problem, perhaps focused on a particular character, over the course of many years. Balzac realizes his sociological or natural historical ambitions not only in the content of his works but also in the accumulation of his “studies,” in the peculiarly loose form in which all narrative units are intertwined, bearing a relation to the others and to the social whole that is the object of representation in the Human Comedy.17 Balzac is concerned with the modern as the most problematic stage of social existence, standing in contrast with all the stages that have preceded it. Dependent on no contract or covenant, this atomized world favors those who are most selfish, scheming, ambitious, and ready to betray others. Nor does this world give any evidence of being under providential control; in some works, a small, shadowy group of men working behind the scenes

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supposedly controls events large and small. But, in fact, this representation too is devoid of significance. The stories included in History of the Thirteen, for example, do not in fact reveal the workings of a secret clique controlling the events of private and public life. s o ci olo gy and th e nove l: e li ot, c o m t e , a n d w e b e r

In an 1856 review of Wilhelm Riehl’s Natural History of the German People, Marian Evans (who had not yet adopted the pen name George Eliot) called for an English author “of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth” to study the “natural history of our social classes”; the effects of local conditions on small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers; their sayings, habits, and religious attitudes; their interactions with each other; and the tendency of their class to progress or decline, to “develop” or “disintegrat[e].” Such a work would enable readers to expand their sympathies by accurately depicting those in different conditions of life. In a passage that echoes Comte on the movement from simple to complex in the history of the sciences, Evans argues that “social science” examines a progress analogous to that from mathematics and physics to chemistry to biology. Social science produces its own natural history, by observing social kinds, just as biology observes species and the relations among them. Such observations of the social scientist must be as precise as the biologist’s observations of a “particular society of zoophytes, mollusks, and echinoderms.”18 One can see how such a project might produce a speculative narrative centering on exact sociological descriptions of examples of the species “idealistic young doctor in the provinces,” “provincial beauty,” “pious hypocritical banker,” “high-minded, puritanical gentrywoman,” or “antiquarian clergyman,” and might accurately bear the subtitle “A Study of Provincial Life,” as Middlemarch does. Published in 1871–1872, Middlemarch occupies a place in relation to knowledge that not only is in step with the predisciplinary projects of social knowledge at the time but also is congruous with and in a line of descent from the form of historical thought that uses conjecture in an extended narrative to assess the nature and value of developments in social life. In the first place, as in conjectural history, every part, class, and individual in Eliot’s holistic society is related to every other by tightly bound but invisible connections, figured in the language of the novel as the impalpable but consequential threads linking people in an inescapable web, the “stealthy

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convergence of human lots” of which the narrator speaks when Dorothea and Lydgate first meet.19 The passage concerning these “threads of connexion” is occasioned by the arrival of new residents and ideas in “old provincial society” (Middlemarch, 88), thus first stating another major subject of this novelistic natural history of society—the shift from the “old” stage to the contemporary one. Like the conjectural historians, the narrator adopts a stadial view of social development. In keeping with social holism, during the period 1829–1832, congruent transitional developments are taking place in distinct and apparently distant areas of society. Researchers in biology and medicine, like Dr. Tertius Lydgate, are attempting to isolate and determine the basic unit of life. The new technology of the railroad is reshaping the landscape and multiplying the number of contacts among people from different communities. The countryside sees continuing efforts not only to increase the productivity of the land but also to improve the housing of dependent small farmers. In politics, agitation for reform of the franchise divides communities like Middlemarch around the country. The Reform Act of July 1832 finally passes in the last pages of the novel.20 Eliot stingingly satirizes the moral and intellectual stupidity of small, tightly knit traditional societies with their ignorant gossip and sour conformism, but she also harshly criticizes the shallow hypocrisy of Dorothea’s uncle, who neglects the houses and fields of those who live on his land even as he campaigns for a seat in Parliament as a Whig reformer. Both sides in the political sphere prove to be terribly flawed, and a moderate political ground is elusive. With her fortune after the death of her first husband, Dorothea investigates the possibility of purchasing land on which to construct a small utopian community for agricultural workers, but she is dissuaded by her traditional, upright, and prudent brother-in-law. In the end, Eliot implies an extreme ambivalence toward historical development: she finds the status quo unsatisfactory, especially for women, but she rejects any radical reform. That leaves perhaps a conservative liberalism or a radical gradualism, an insistence on the importance of incremental, accretive, organic development and change.21 “What has grown up historically can only die out historically,” she writes in the review of Riehl “by the gradual operation of necessary laws.”22 Such ambivalence, caught between the self-satisfied stupidity of the old and the hypocritical shallowness of the new, assumes an attitude familiar from the conjectural historians and conjectural historical novelists.

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Marian Evans’s first publications were translations of two of the most radical writings on religion in Europe in the early 1840s: David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (trans. 1860) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (trans. 1854). Strauss’s Life of Jesus leaves aside as mythical all the miracles recounted in the New Testament and devotes its attention solely to what can be known of the historical Jesus. Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity argues that the divinity is a projection by humans of their own highest attributes onto another being. All men are thus God, or at least participate in the divine through their moral lives, through the extent to which they practice beneficence and contribute to the moral elevation of their own and others’ characters. Charles Taylor, among others, has noted that in the modern historical juncture, organized religion and religious dogma give way to ethical seriousness.23 Dorothea declares that her religion is to expand the “skirts of light” by desiring what is perfectly good, “even when we don’t quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would” (Middlemarch, 367). In one of the most simple but pointed passages of the novel, she asks her family and neighbors, witnessing Lydgate’s disgrace as she tries to help, “What do we live for if not to make life less difficult to each other?” (691). Eliot more specifically delineates what is required by such earnest morality: answering the imperatives of duty, being dedicated to finding one’s vocation, and working with as much energy as possible to do one’s work well. In this way, one can accomplish a life’s work that is neither meaningless nor defined by traditional religious injunctions. Caleb Garth incarnates this kind of reverence for work as the making of civilization and the bettering of lives: Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed.  .  .  . The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; . . . the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. (Middlemarch, 235–36)

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The last phrase speaks volumes about the moral direction religious feeling was taking in the nineteenth century in the absence of belief in a divinity. Caleb incarnates the highly ethical person whose respect for his own and others’ work replaces religious doctrine and a divinity with a reverence for labor. His attitude toward work as a vocation that requires high seriousness and exact attention conforms closely to Weber’s idea of the Protestant state of mind in which work and vocation take on a life-defining and salvific seriousness outside the clergy. Curiously (and ironically, in light of Weber’s later thesis concerning the linkage of the Protestant ethic and capitalism), although Caleb expresses and embodies such a reverence for work, which he calls “business,” he has no knack for financial dealings or monetary accumulation. In fact, he is the opposite of a profit-driven capitalist; a former bankrupt, he cannot make money because he trusts people too much. His calculations are directed not toward accumulating capital but toward accomplishing the work of improvement. This idea of work as a noble mission also underlies Dorothea’s desire to build a salubrious community for agricultural workers, where each will labor for the good of all. As she tells Caleb, “Such work is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it” (Middlemarch, 518). But Dorothea is unable to realize her visions of improvement because of her gender and her historical situation. Lydgate, who finds his vocation in biological research, also fails to realize it, because of his unwise decision to marry Rosamond. In this community in which personal destinies are tightly but invisibly intertwined, ironies multiply everywhere, arising from and giving evidence of the incommensurability between plans and results, between what characters know when they make their decisions and what they needed to recognize, between what they think is a gain but find is a loss—or the converse, as when disinheritance turns out to be a piece of good fortune. Fred Vincy, for example, loses a large inheritance on which he had been counting, but as a result is able to develop his character, learn how to work, and gain Mary Garth’s esteem and hand in marriage. Caleb Garth renounces a lucrative business with Bulstrode after he hears Raffles’s story, but later regains oversight of the Bulstrode estate as a result of the scandal surrounding Raffles’s death. And the latter piece of business that comes his way provides an opportunity for Fred to prove his ability as resident agent of the newly vacant estate. In a typical and parallel moment in his earlier conjectural history, Condorcet writes, at the head of a list of ironic developments,

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that the advent of gunpowder at the end of the Middle Ages increased exponentially the destructiveness of weaponry, but it also brought to an end the lengthy sieges that had led to suffering and starvation among civilians in besieged towns. The discrepancy between intentions and results in the conjectural histories prepares the way for the defining discrepancy between ideals and accomplishments, and the loss of illusions, in the novels of the nineteenth century.24 In describing the forging of the disastrous false social contract in the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau argues that, on hearing the proposal of the rich to establish laws to safeguard everyone’s property (meaning their own), those without property, instead of fleeing, agreed and “ran toward their chains”; intending to preserve their freedom, they lost it.25 The novel, Eliot shows, can trace the discrepancy between intention and result in more detailed and fine-grained ways than history, and can illuminate the evanescent holism of culture not only on the grand stage of historically significant actions and events but also in the lives of unknown, unhistoric country people. One further example demonstrates what can be gained and not gained as a result of a lost inheritance. When Dorothea decides to remarry, she gladly forfeits the estate and income of Casaubon and frees herself from his attempt to control her from the dead. She then finds, in her present, modern time, sexual love, marriage, children, and the satisfaction of private acts of beneficence and consideration. But her high ambition to do something for the betterment of her fellows goes unfulfilled. “Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth” (Middlemarch, 785). Eliot’s conjectural historical novel depicts a congruence between a microscopic tale of small changes in the lives of individuals in a provincial backwater and the macroscopic scale of historic changes among large strata of society. But although there may be a congruence, modern conditions do not allow for an intersection or overlap of the two, as was the case for reformers like Saint Teresa of Ávila in a previous age, as the author points out in the prelude. Conjecture plays a crucial role on three principal levels in the world of Middlemarch. In science, the researcher must be able to use his imagination to hypothesize, to speculate about the unseen explanation that may apply to the observed phenomena. In personal life and action, one must speculatively work out one’s own beliefs, apart from institutional,

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theological doctrines. Similarly, in fiction, the novelistic natural historian of society who studies the transition from one age to another must hypothesize or conjecture how various inhabitants of an environment, such as a small town in the provinces, will influence and be shaped by their neighbors and strangers as, in the midst of historic change, they attempt to realize their plans and must accommodate themselves to falling short of what they projected.

Among works in this line of conjectural historical novels, some of Émile Zola’s Rougon–Macquart novels deserve notice because Zola, like Balzac, conceived of himself as a social scientist whose analysis of different social strata carried the weight of an objective analysis of society in his time. He called the Rougon–Macquart series a “Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire,” and he regarded each novel in it as conveying in narrative form the results of a social scientific investigation of a specific subject or problem, whether drink (L’assommoir, 1877), prostitution (Nana, 1880), the coal mines (Germinal, 1885), or the railroads (The Human Animal, 1890). In The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), for example, he analyzes the department store as a place where desire, spurred by advertising, seeks satisfaction in shopping for mass-produced goods. Fashion and advertising characterize the modern world, and the department store, with its bright lights, large displays, elements of fantasy, and sensuous exhibition of clothing on mannequins contrasts with the older form of buying and selling by haggling in dark, cheerless shops. Studying workers, not shoppers, in Germinal, Zola represents without sentimentality the bleak plight of miners and their failed efforts to better their lives through a strike. Their actions result in disaster, deaths, and disillusionment; nevertheless, the utopian vision of a regime of greater justice appears on the last page of the novel as a goal toward which workers will continue to exert their desperate efforts. This is not a Marxist resolution; Zola implies sharp criticism of speechifying organizers who eat and dress well but do not suffer the hunger and brutal poverty that the workers endure. Zola’s vision may not conform to a particular social doctrine or theory, but it does foresee a future stage of social development, toward which humankind must be moving, no matter how numerous or severe the setbacks.

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Although it may seem surprising, the determining presence of many of these traits in the tradition of conjectural history reaches a culmination in H.  G. Wells’s works, especially in Tono-Bungay (1909), with its sense that the society as a whole is defined by techniques of advertising, marketing, meaningless consumption, technologies of resource exploitation and military power. However, Wells employs tropes and techniques of the conjectural histories not only in the novel but also in his speculative science fiction and his utopian writing (although we could also trace modern varieties of both science fiction and utopia back to the tenth stage of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture). In The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), for example, Wells implies that the central, originary transition from untamed animal men to civilized human communities never really took place in an effective form. When he returns to England, Prendick cannot escape the realization that modern city dwellers have not escaped their ancestry but constitute latter-day versions of the animal men that Moreau produced on his South Pacific island. Moreover, the short novel makes clear that the institutions of organized religion in civilized societies closely parallel the Law that the Beast Folk observe on the island, including the rhythms of the litany, which runs in part, “Not to go on all Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”26 Wells implies that the taming of civilized men proceeded on much the same lines as Moreau’s training of the Beast Folk; that religion and morality arose in both cases from fear, even terror—in the case of the island creatures, terror of the torture in which Moreau has bathed them in his House of Pain. Like Mandeville, Vico, Hume, and other conjectural historians, Wells believes that religion begins in fear. For Mandeville and Hume, locating the origins of religion in terror works to demystify and counter the theistic and deistic idea that the earliest humans developed religious feelings through perceiving the beauty and harmony of the world. If fear led to the first ideas of a divinity, and continues to motivate much religious feeling, then religious belief does not figure as evidence of human capabilities and divine beneficence but of human timidity in the face of divine power and anger. The Island of Doctor Moreau can be read as a natural history of religion, with the animal men constituting latterday instances of earlier human animals whose attitudes and behavior are

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consistent with those of the early humans imagined by Hume, Mandeville, Condorcet, and Darwin. Deciding not to restrict himself to the past and the present, in The Time Machine (1895), Wells writes a conjectural history of the distant future, when the problem of relations between workers and owners has been resolved, or reached a new equilibrium, in a later stage of social and physical evolution that both builds on conditions in industrial capitalism and surprisingly inverts them. Eighty thousand years from now, those who do not work live an apparently carefree life above ground, where fruits are plentiful, and colorful, diaphanous clothing is apparently provided for them. The workers, we learn, continue to tend the machines underground, emerging only at night, half-blind, to harvest an individual or two from among the small, defenseless ground dwellers who have become their food. Wells speculates that since the owners did not have to employ their intelligence or strength to survive, their physical and mental skills atrophied, and they became soft, weak, androgynous, playful creatures—cattle. Just as the narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau has a Swiftian vision of civilized human beings as thinly disguised wild animals, The Time Machine brings its narrator to another Swiftian recognition: rather than the owners eating the workers, as the English ate Irish babies in the past, the workers in the future will eat the owners’ idle descendants. But Wells makes his most extended novelistic use of conjectural history in Tono-Bungay. He does so primarily by meditating on the meaning of the transition in English society from a hierarchical society based on an ethos of the country estate, such as the one at Bladesover where the narrator George Ponderevo grew up as the housekeeper’s son (repeating the experience of Wells in his youth), to an urban, modern, commercial society, such as the London where George (the G in H. G. Wells) spends his adolescence and most of his adult life. Secondly, Wells explores the traits that pervade the modern city and give its inhabitants a characteristic form of experience. Neither George nor Wells has a strong allegiance to the country house ethos or to modern forms of social and individual life. After George has spent several chapters painting the stultifying effect of life among the traditional country gentry, he critiques their successors in even more scathing terms. When Bladesover is sold to new owners who made their fortune in business, Ponderevo writes, “a smaller, but more enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced the large dullness of the old

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gentry, and that was all.”27 Like many strong satirists, Wells critiques first one side of a pair of cultural contraries, the inanity and conceit of the landed gentry, then turns to deflate the presumed alternative, the shabby dullness of the merchant elite, satirizing both sides of the opposition for the deadening stupidity they share. Wells leaves the reader of this novel without a clear norm on which to base a judgment, any middle ground having been left absent or unspecified. Despite the opposition between the world of the gentry and that of the newly rich merchants and financiers, Wells suggests a genealogical filiation between the two social groups. The forms of behavior, speech, architecture, and deference remain those of Bladesover, he writes, but their function has changed, since they are employed in the interests of their new, untitled owners.28 The functions of institutions shift, but the forms change little or remain the same. Wells thus recapitulates Stephen Jay Gould’s Nietzsche– Darwin principle—one of the central insights of Darwin in the Origin of Species and Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morality (as discussed in chapter 5). In line with this principle of historical development, formulated independently by two authors whom Wells read early and carefully, a new set of social functions and forces emerges in Tono-Bungay, under an exterior of traditional forms and names. Most of the novel consists of an exploration of modern forms of life still half-hidden under the forms of the old society of the country gentry.29 The primary index of modern life is modern commerce, “an absurd and absurdly interesting game” (Tono-Bungay, 148–49), in which George participates as an associate in his uncle’s business. The novel concentrates largely on depicting modern techniques of advertising and marketing that make Tono-Bungay, like Coca-Cola, a tremendous and rapid success and the foundation of a financial empire.30 George does not conceal that, from the beginning, he believed his uncle’s product to be empty of value, “thoroughly dishonest” (137), along with the claims made for it as a tonic, the marketing campaigns, and the investments for which they provided the springboard. George himself recognizes that he “created nothing; he invented nothing” (220), except an advertising campaign for a nostrum. However, despite his intellectual understanding and ethical disapprobation, he accepts his uncle’s original urgent plea to join him in order to make enough of an income to marry. Significantly, Uncle Edward, the pharmacist (Coca-Cola was also developed by a pharmacist), needs his nephew’s help

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with the engineering side of the business, and George develops a system of bottling based on the principle of the assembly line (148–49). The modern stage of social life takes commercial society in the direction of advertising society, but it is not defined only by hyperbolic advertising campaigns for products manufactured with assembly line methods. George observes that those who are now in the financially ascendant classes— and this includes almost all the Americans whom Europeans see—have thrown themselves frenetically into “shopping, . . . a new life crowded and brilliant  .  .  . with jewels, maids, butlers,  .  .  . motor cars,  .  .  . [and] sporting equipment.” Instructed by sumptuously illustrated weekly magazines, the untitled rich constitute a newly “important element in the confusion of our world” (Tono-Bungay, 245).31 Creating wealth without creating any new product or service, and making a career of spending and shopping, the distinctively modern wealthy classes live life without an organizing principle, in mere empty economic activity. The very recent discovery of radioactive elements provides Wells with a metaphor for the decomposition of meaningful social and affective bonds. Radioactive decay of quap, the material George steals from the coast of Africa in an attempt to prop up his uncle’s imploding financial empire, functions as a parallel in physics to social decay, which eats away at the texture of society, rotting relations, producing a dispersion of people, a mutual alienation, a process of fission in civic life (329). This metaphoric connection brings together the empty activities of public, economic life in the modern world and the fragmented, futile nature of personal relations and private life. Throughout the narrative, George characterizes his relations with others, like his memories, as “inconsecutive, unconnected, and adrift” (Tono-Bungay, 35). In the end, as he reviews his life, he returns to this language, noting and lamenting the “inconsequential” nature of his experiences (381). His marriage with the lower-middleclass Marion turns into a nightmare of incompatibility and antipathy that ends after his affair with a typist. His infatuation as a boy with the wellborn Beatrice finds a frustrating fulfillment for a few days near the end of his narrative, after the collapse of Tono-Bungay. But she cannot marry him, as he wants, because of her drug addiction and dependence on the aristocrat who pays for her habit. All of George’s important personal relations prove to be interrupted, truncated, short-circuited, without continuation

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or issue. The same disconnection seems to affect all the marriages and relations in the novel. Thus, the modern experience of personal, affective relations with others lacks connection and meaning, and the modern form of public, economic life also revolves around a lack of meaning: “Nobody knows where we are— because, as a matter of fact we aren’t anywhere” (Tono-Bungay, 171). But the novel uses the repetition of this pattern in different spheres to find a meaning or significance in the modern world. What holds us moderns together, and all that holds us together, is our shared disconnection from each other and from ourselves. Modern society can be regarded holistically, in the sociological tradition deriving from conjectural histories, if what pervades and structures the world is just this lack of connection, consequentiality, and meaning.32 We might expect that Wells would offer at least some alternative to such a bleak diagnosis, some anticipation of a third possibility. And he briefly does so, when George’s right-hand man, Cothorpe, the socialist engineer who helps him with his new flying machines, argues that the scientific men will have to take over from the businessmen and the government. Cothorpe points to the vision of a benevolent and efficient technocracy that Condorcet spelled out in his conjectural history. In the Sketch for a Historical Picture, Condorcet foresees the coming triumph of scientific and technological geniuses who, no longer blocked by the powers of kings and priests, will find cures for infectious diseases, extend human life far beyond what had been the normal span, and calculate how to provide insurance funds to provide income for workers after they retire. Comte elaborated a related vision in his conjectural sociology of the future, where he imagines that it will be possible to bring the highest, positive stages of the other sciences to bear on social problems as the last and most complex science—sociology, the science of human society—also reaches its final, positive stage of development. Sociology will provide ways of taking spiritual care of the large populations of modern societies, establishing structures of authority that can replace the hollow institutions of earlier religions with a religion of humanity. But a development of the kind that Condorcet and Comte foresee, a possible tertium quid—an alternative to the Bladesover country house pattern and the excesses of unbridled modern commercial activity—never assumes realistic proportions in the novel. Cothorpe’s vision emerges for a page, and then evaporates. Similarly, the socialist ideas of George’s artist friend prove to be shallowly rooted and lightly held.

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In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells had imagined a society in which a self-selecting class of “samurai”—ascetic technicians and social engineers— manage and oversee epochal improvements in social fairness and general prosperity.33 But in Tono-Bungay, he refuses to pursue such utopian possibilities. Instead, he concludes the novel with George having developed the most technologically advanced weaponry—the fastest and most powerful destroyer of the time—for those who will pay the highest price for it. In A Modern Utopia, Wells had posited a world state as a prerequisite for advances in individual choice as well as social justice. In Tono-Bungay, nation-states persist, and the only kind of organization that transcends or evades the boundaries of the nation are international arms dealers. Whereas in A Modern Utopia, Wells, like Comte and Condorcet, foresaw the advent of a priesthood of benevolent technocrats, in the dystopian conclusion of Tono-Bungay, George the engineer presides over the development of more and more technologically advanced machinery of destruction, motivated by no ideals or moral ideas, content to sell his work to the highest bidder. As he takes the destroyer out on a test run under cover of darkness, and passes out of the lower reaches of the Thames, he writes, “I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space. . . . Out to the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river passes—London passes, England passes. . . .” (Tono-Bungay, 387). This conclusion might be read as an elegy for the passing of traditional English society. But the primary candidate for such a society—the conservative country house ethos—has been so effectively hollowed out in the first parts of the novel that it cannot be resuscitated, and the later parts demonstrate so well the ethical and psychological emptiness of the commercial, progressive alternative to the earlier stage that the world built by modern commerce cannot constitute a norm or a standard. Wells produces a bleak vision of modernity as the activity of engineers lovingly pursuing the work of death and destruction, a prophecy of twentieth-century history more accurate in retrospect than a vision of technocrats supervising the work of a peaceful and just world state. This dystopian vision develops the tendencies at work in the technologies of factory production and mass marketing in the novel. There is no future period, like Condorcet’s tenth stage, in which the suffering and injustices of the modern commercial

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stage will be overcome and corrected. Thus, Wells extends and revises the conjectural histories and the novelistic tradition that descends from them. His novel marks a terminus in the line that leads from conjectural history, through historical-sociological novels, to speculative novelistic assessments of the modern.

The novel proves to be a powerful form for magnifying and deepening the reach of conjecturalist thought. Being more concrete and specific than conjectural histories or sociological studies in the representation of individuals and the relations among them, novels can capture the indeterminism of decisions made and the unpredictability of their results. For example, in Middlemarch, Dorothea does not have to return to speak to Rosamond after she has seen her in a tête-à-tête with Ladislaw. But, having made the decision to comfort Rosamond and to speak well of her husband, she learns that Ladislaw in fact loves only Dorothea herself. By subordinating her own feeling of desolation to the desire to help, she unexpectedly prompts Rosamond to her one unselfish act in the novel, which clears away any doubts about Ladislaw’s feelings and opens the way for their marriage. The psychological novel excels at such fine-grained depictions of undetermined acts and their unpredictable results, although even Dorothea’s productive and satisfying marriage to Ladislaw does not allow her to escape the determinants of the condition into which she has been thrown, to use Heidegger’s term, by history. The reigning, though implicit, tense of the conjectural historical novel is thus the simple conditional—what might have occurred among given characters in the intricacy of their relations in a certain time—rather than the necessary conditional—what must have been—of the conjectural histories themselves, with their long historical sweep. The intense focus on individual psychology can claim to represent the lived experience of being caught, as most of Scott’s protagonists are, between two eras, but it can also direct attention to inwardness and to the inner lives of women in particular. In Middlemarch, by contrasting the possibilities for meaningful action by women in the Middle Ages—exemplified by Saint Teresa of Ávila—with the diminished possibilities in the nineteenth century, Eliot revises John Millar, who not only saw the treatment of women as an important barometer of the degree to which a society

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had advanced but also argued for a consistent improvement in the status of women from savage societies to the modern commercial societies of western Europe. The genre taken by these conjecturalist novels, often signaled by the conclusion, can then articulate or constitute a view of history. The contrast between premodern and modern social worlds structures these novels, with the attitude toward modernity almost always ambivalent. Scott’s novels are accommodating of the opposition, admitting the inevitability of modernity, although without much enthusiasm. He regrets the waning of the tribal virtues of loyalty, courage, and adventure, but he acknowledges improvement in material culture and the growth of religious toleration. He is drawn to the colorful romance of the older stage while accepting the historical actuality of the modern. He depicts moderate, unheroic heroes, seeks middle grounds, and moves toward qualified comic resolutions involving marriages that bring together representatives of the contending historical forces.34 Such marriages often involve some contraction of desire or reduction of aspirations: Waverley marries Rose, not Flora; Ivanhoe marries Rowhena, not Rebecca. These conclusions are comic in their historical resonances, if less than idyllic in their personal significance. Eliot also gives evidence of a mixture of conservative and progressive positions. She is sympathetic to the plight of women in Victorian society and conceives of a revised role for religious energies that would redirect them into ethics and social justice, but she is suspicious of the proponents of reform, countenancing only improvement that is slow and incremental, organic and not willed. Her rhetoric and narrative rhythms imply, at most, an approval of gradual, marginal, and invisible improvement. She attacks radical organizers of workers, in the speech she ascribes to Felix Holt, but she also looks toward radically reorganizing and improving social relations in England, through Dorothea’s muted utopian plans. Middlemarch concludes with a marriage, and thus a movement toward comic form, but it is a second marriage, after a first that has brought great disillusionment. The remarriage also comes with a recognition of the diminished sphere of action for the high-minded young woman who yearned to do something of moment for the good of her fellows. Her aspirations are subordinated to the social and political constraints of her time. Her husband will become a member of Parliament, while Dorothea’s contribution will be defined by the way she fulfills the roles of wife and mother, voiceless and unknown to

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history. The conclusion is tragicomic, the genre that of a reduced, compromised, melancholy comedy. In direct contrast with Scott, Wells is neither attracted to the past nor reconciled to the modern. He rejects the older country house society as a possible social ideal and refuses to accept the modern commercial world because it proposes an even more dishonest and dangerous growth than the older world. Wells’s attitude is the least ambivalent of these authors, as he diagnoses mass marketing and advertising to be constitutive of modern society, and represents the entire apparatus of modern society in TonoBungay as soulless—from inflated commercial activity through empty religion to dangerous technological developments such as the use of radioactive substances and advanced armaments. Although Wells’s grim diagnosis of modern society leaves no ground for hope, his critique of the preceding aristocratic epoch is even more devastating. George makes a disastrous marriage, based solely on sex, and the later possibility of a relationship with his childhood love is thwarted by her dependence on another for drugs. In the end, Ponderevo experiences his strongest emotional tie with his technology of mass destruction. No foundational values exist in Wells’s novel, and the exclusion of all middle grounds produces an unrelieved and intense satire.35 The most progressive of these authors, outside their fictions, and the least divided in his democratic socialist commitments, Wells presents the bleakest assessment of the extent to which modernity has realized any advance in social justice. What emerges is the tendency in the form, and the pressure exerted by the form, not simply to celebrate an earlier stage, whether the tribal Scottish Highlanders or the provincial gentry before 1832. Animating the form is an ambivalent attitude toward the stages of social history, which also distinguishes conjectural histories. Throughout the nineteenth century, the conjectural form persists in its altered, novelistic form, but its functions, the uses to which it is put, vary widely. In conjectural historical novels, fiction takes over and expands the role played by conjecture in the Enlightenment histories. As the understanding of conjecture expands to include the fictional imagination in these novels, they prove able to depict a macroscopic picture of the shape of society in adjacent periods, but also a microscopic representation of the intertwining of these historical conditions with the lives of obscure, unhistorical human beings. This project becomes most explicit and focused in the

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matchless final paragraph of Middlemarch. Because of the sphere to which she was confined, the heroine “had no great name on the earth. But her influence was incalculably diffusive, . . . for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and lie in unvisited graves” (Middlemarch, 785). The protagonist fades from the text, as we learn that her acts went unnamed and unrecognized. Her unhistoric life, like the lives of so many others of whom she is representative (and unlike the life of her chronicler), takes place outside the history that is recorded. To recount it, one must conjecture, going through fiction, beyond documents, records, and monuments. The novel shows and makes us feel that this woman’s very obscurity, which is conditioned by her historical situation, also paradoxically constitutes her significance.

Novelistic narratives may play out variations on the narratives of conjectural history in the period we have just surveyed, but the subsiding of this narrative genre as a paradigm for fictional interrogations of modernity does not mean that the form of conjectural history has been without influence or issue since the turn of the twentieth century. I will consider briefly, by way of conclusion, some thinkers whose narratives reveal the continuing influence of conjectural history—beginning with Michel Foucault, then turning to a series of contemporary figures working in political history, the sociology of religion, and anthropology.

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thought may seem to lead to the conclusion that by the third decade of the twentieth century, the tradition had played itself out. In some fields the ebbing of the conjecturalist influence had occurred even earlier. By 1890, political economy was already splitting into the modern academic disciplines of economics and political science, neither of which possesses a strong conjectural, or even historicist, bent. Economics came to define itself by a quantitative and mathematical mode of analysis that claimed to establish general truths about the workings of modern capital markets. This perspective is embodied most influentially in the work of W. S. Jevons (The Theory of Political Economy, 1871), Léon Walras (Elements of Pure Political Economy, 1889), and most influentially, in Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890). Political science, largely concerned with observable facts rather than abstractions, and with the quantitative measurement of psychological elements in politics, was similarly turning away from investigating the speculative origins or earlier stages of political development. These aims are evident in Graham Wallas’s Human Nature in Politics (1908) and Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908). Beginning with Franz Boas’s essays and the Cambridge Torres Straits expedition in the late 1890s, anthropology also gradually shifted away from the universalizing cultural evolutionism of E. B. Tylor and his followers, until, by the end of the early 1920s, the field was defined by a functionalist, formalist, and ahistorical mode of investigation and thought, which figures prominently in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s The Andaman Islanders (1922) and Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).1 r e t r ac i n g t h e h i s t o r y o f c o n j e c t u r a l i s t

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The conjectural historical sociology of religion remained strong and active into the 1910s, but sociology thereafter also saw a consolidation of focus, away from historical inquiries and toward the study of institutions and the formation of the self apart from historical specifics and change. Exemplifying this development, the work of George Herbert Mead, such as Mind, Self, and Society (1934), assumed a discipline-defining status, at least in the United States. All of these disciplines, as they assumed academic and institutional form, turned away from developmental, evolutionary paradigms. Nevertheless, conjecturalist thought has proven to be remarkably resilient and persistent. Conjecturalist thinking played an important part in theories of economic development, especially that of Walt Rostow, such as The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), which argued that development takes place through a series of stages leading up to a “takeoff ” into the modern, capitalist, and industrial world. Anthropology also saw a challenge to formalism and reassertions of historical and evolutionary thinking in the midcentury works of Leslie White, V. Gordon Childe, and other “new evolutionists.” But in the last two generations, and increasingly in the last two decades, conjecturalist narratives have experienced a new flourishing in all these fields. In the first part of this conclusion, I will examine ways in which the writings of Michel Foucault have a place in the line of conjectural thought. In the second part, I will consider some recent works in political thought, the historical sociology of religion, paleoanthropology, and fiction that reveal persistent, strong affinities with conjectural history. s tag e s and trans i ti o ns i n f o u c a ult

Late in his career, Foucault wrote three essays reflecting on issues raised by Kant’s own late essays. The most well known of these, “What Is Enlightenment?,” takes its title from Kant’s most famous essay. Foucault responds, in answer to this question, and to the one he poses in “What Is Critique?,” that Enlightenment and critique imply a determined effort to understand the present with a critical, skeptical distance. In the third essay, “What Is Revolution?,” Foucault explores conjectural historical essays by Kant, including “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784) and “Whether the Human Race Is Constantly Improving” (1798). In this last essay, Kant speculates about the future, at almost the same time that Condorcet was writing his vision of indefinite future progress. Kant argues that the enthusiastic

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reception of the French Revolution throughout Europe gives evidence of an aspiration toward republican government that in itself indicates that humankind will continue to make progress. Foucault’s discussion of this last piece shows that he was reflecting on Kant’s essays as attempts to understand the shape, direction, and accomplishments of history. Foucault’s late thought and his philosophic project throughout his career represent a close equivalent to Enlightenment conjectural history, and they bear affinities to works influenced by conjectural histories, among them, works by Comte and Nietzsche, and—as negative models—by Marx and Freud. Conjectural histories, as I have shown, almost always effect a demystifying reversal of previously authoritative historical accounts. In the Natural History of Religion (1757), Hume asserts that the first religions were polytheistic and arose from fear and dread; he also argues that polytheism, more than monotheism, encourages civic virtue and is thus a healthier form of religion. Rousseau argues that civilized society and rational thought did not improve but weakened and sickened human beings. The effect of Foucault’s arguments is similarly disruptive, overturning long-standing and unquestioned hierarchies of cultural value. Foucault produces this effect partly by taking as the subject of many of his historical reflections phenomena not previously thought to be constituted historically, and for which it would be difficult to provide exact or explicit documentation. For example, before the three volumes of his History of Sexuality were published in the late 1970s, the notion of a history of sexuality seemed a paradox or an oxymoron. It was generally presumed that sexuality was a biological phenomenon whose workings humans shared with other animals, and even theories that distinguished human from animal sexuality, such as psychoanalysis, regarded human sexuality as universal and unchanging. Moreover, how would one discern and demonstrate a pattern of change in a form of behavior that has been regarded as the most private and hidden of human behaviors? Foucault approached this problem with the method used by the conjectural historians. His first volume overturned the established Freudian paradigm for understanding sexuality. Rather than viewing Freud’s thought as a liberatory discourse aimed at lifting excessive repression, Foucault argues that Freud participated in the conversion of sexuality into a medical matter, bringing it into discourse, where it is subject to the disciplinary and normalizing gaze of professionals and experts. He also searched for documents

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from which inferences could plausibly be drawn, even though many of these texts do not give direct access to practices of or attitudes toward sexuality. However, by consulting different regimens for directing sexual activity in the ancient world, and for controlling and monitoring it through confession and self-examination in the Middle Ages and early modern period, he was able to draw inferences concerning a history of sexuality as constituting the subject. Like the stadial historical narratives of Ferguson and Smith, and like works in the conjecturalist tradition by Comte, Nietzsche, and Weber, which sought to understand the transition to modernity, Foucault’s histories repeatedly bring to light the rationality of past and seemingly alien paradigms and institutions, then trace the shift that led to the practices of the modern world. Thus, Discipline and Punish (1975) presents an analysis of early modern forms of graphic public punishment, before giving an account of distinctively modern structures of internalized self-control, incarceration, and disciplinary surveillance. By the time this account has been completed, disciplinary control in the modern prison, school, and factory come to seem as strange and oppressive as public torture and sovereign punishment, perhaps even more so, because of their ubiquity, intrusiveness, and invisibility. Foucault thus overturns the judgment of the institutional framework with which most readers approach his text. He also reverses conventional understandings of historical progress by showing that the efforts of reformers who sought to ameliorate the disproportionate and brutal elements of the older system paradoxically contributed to the establishment of the more effective means of control constituted by the system of surveillance. Like the conjectural historians, he demonstrates the unplanned and unintended results of human actions. In calling attention to the ever-increasing domain of disciplinary power, Discipline and Punish gives a speculative account of the transition to a regime of power whose existence and nature it is difficult to demonstrate empirically or with certainty. But this phenomenon of disciplining has been at the center of the concerns of many conjecturalist thinkers. Nietzsche sees in the modern regimes of self-discipline in science and philosophy a continuation and culmination of the original domestication and taming of the human animal. Weber’s argument concerning the “iron cage” or the “steel-hard shell” of rationality in which moderns find themselves confined constitutes a strong precedent for Foucault on this

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issue, and, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud stresses the denial of instinctual satisfactions that modern civilized society enforces on its members. If, through its focus on the costs of modern self-discipline, Foucault’s thought parallels that of many of the conjectural historians, however, he also pointedly revises crucial conceptions of earlier thinkers. For example, he challenges the hydraulic conception of power held by Marx and Freud in their key categories of oppression and repression. Rather than hewing to a concept of power involving pressure applied from above, Foucault, in the years after Discipline and Punish, proposes one that is more decentered and horizontal. Among Foucault’s major works, The Order of Things (1966) may seem to be the one least obviously constituted in accord with the form of conjectural historiography. It does focus on shifts between periods, each of which has its own distinctive framework of understanding, although these cultural forms do not depart significantly from the usual conceptions and temporal definitions of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment—or the “classical” age in France—and Romanticism. In this work, as throughout his career, Foucault pays much greater attention to the second transformation than to the first, viewing the decades around 1800 as the threshold of the modern. However, he significantly departs from precedent in this work by inverting the traditional emphasis in intellectual history on continuity, focusing instead on the incommensurability of successive paradigms, thus challenging the presumptions of gradual change, cumulative effects, and relations of influence. The subject of the narrative proves to be the ruptures and breaks between paradigms of understanding as much as the characterization of the frameworks themselves. In his commitment to a sequence of three epistemological paradigms, Foucault’s intellectual history of European thought since the Middle Ages bears a strong formal parallel to Comte’s characterization of the three epistemological frameworks that mark human society generally—the theological, metaphysical, and scientific—although Comte acknowledged that elements of an earlier paradigm could persist alongside later ones. In addition, Comte understood his stages as constituting a linear and irreversible progression—an idea foreign to Foucault’s conception. Throughout his career as a conjecturalist historian, Foucault adopts the program of those who investigate transitions between stages (like Smith in the Wealth of Nations, bk. 3), and he polemically criticizes the search for the origins of social institutions.

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The major narratives in which Foucault pursues his historical studies thus consistently exhibit elements that also shaped conjectural and conjecturalist histories: stadial thinking about phenomena that are difficult to specify directly or demonstrate empirically; emphasis on the unplanned results of human action; skepticism about narratives of progress; and concern with the transitions or ruptures between stages. His works have been criticized for empirical inaccuracies, and particular objections may be sustained. Yet, through their use of conjectural methods and theoretical techniques, they open up lines of thought that remained closed to more established, more empirically based forms of intellectual, institutional, and bodily history.2 t h e r e t u rn o f th e c o nj e c tu ral

Foucault may seem an isolated conjecturalist thinker, writing from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. However, the last twenty years have seen a new wave of works bearing in their form and arguments clear signs of having been shaped by the conjecturalist tradition—both the Enlightenment speculative histories and their heirs among modern social thinkers. Perhaps this resurgence of speculative prehistory responds in part to the turning of the millennium as an occasion for looking back over history judged in millennia rather than centuries or decades; the historical moment may help account for the turn to big or deep history, which also bears some relation to conjectural history.3 In addition, evidence newly available through carbon dating and genetic analysis contributes to the revival of conjectural projects: most of the recent conjecturalist works give evidence of the fundamental importance of evolutionary psychology in this strand of contemporary thought. Whatever the causes of this flourishing, it can be seen in political theory, the sociology of religion, and paleoanthropology—all fields in a line of descent from nineteenth-century conjectural thought. Among recent works of conjecturalist political theory, Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now (2010) seek to give an account of the origins of human society from very early times, for which we do not have written documents, inscribed monuments, or seals that can be interpreted.4 They adopt the core project of conjectural history, but now with access to a record of changes that was unavailable to previous generations. As Fukuyama

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observes, we are now able to read the record encoded in our DNA (Political Order, 46). Contemporary researchers also can make use of radiocarbon dating for remains of organic material, and the number of sites that have been excavated from before and soon after the last period of global cold, the Younger Dryas (10,800–9500 b.c.e.) has increased significantly. However, even these resources remain scarce, and their interpretations uncertain. For instance, the first investigations of Neanderthal DNA suggested there had been no interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals, but further analyses two years later showed that a small amount of the older species’ DNA can be found in all modern humans.5 Moreover, the recent techniques and finds tell us little if anything about the ways in which articulate language developed, or the meaning and purposes of the extraordinary cave and rock paintings that continue to be discovered in southwestern Europe and at other sites around the globe. Even in an area where the new evidence suggests revisions of previous narratives—concerning the earliest domestication of cereal grains and animals—those revisions remain heavily dependent on inference and conjecture: for example in the speculations that women came to prefer and hence select for grains that stayed on the stalk longer, until the female gatherer came to collect them, or that wolves who scavenged around ancient human waste piles and survived were likely to be the less aggressive and more docile of their species, and thus, to some degree, domesticated themselves. Significantly, both Fukuyama and Morris acknowledge the necessity for, and the value of, speculation (see, for example, Political Order, 54, 62, 82). Both recognize that the narratives they fashion are reconstructions based on very thin evidence. Fukuyama even identifies his project with “historical sociology and comparative anthropology” (24), two forms of inquiry taken by conjecturalist histories in the nineteenth century and examined in earlier chapters of this book. In addition, both thinkers organize their material into a series of stages. Fukuyama employs the four-stage taxonomy of political organizations formulated by Elman Service in the middle of the twentieth century: a progression in size and complexity through bands, tribes, and chiefdoms to states.6 The first two of these depend on kinship; the last two are based on territory. We can thus see, behind the stages of Fukuyama and Service, those that Lewis Henry Morgan diagnosed in societies as widely separated as the ancient Greeks and the nineteenth-century Iroquois.

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Rather than using such a classic stadial sequence, Morris tracks the scores of Eastern and Western civilizations on a social development index: high scores indicate societies are rising (enabling them to “rule”); low scores show them falling behind. In Morris’s history, one civilization after another reaches a “hard ceiling” in its capture and use of energy, a limit that is only exceeded for the first time around 1800, in the West. Morris’s pattern of the rise and fall and rise of societies therefore closely resembles Ferguson’s view that the achievements of civilization may themselves produce conditions (moral conditions, in Ferguson’s case) that lead to their own decline and reversion to a lower state. The unplanned and unforeseen consequences of human actions play a significant role in both of these contemporary conjectural histories. Fukuyama argues that the medieval church’s opposition to Roman marriage customs designed to keep property within a close kinship group—a policy of allowing women to inherit property—though intended to benefit the church through bequests, weakened the traditional power of the patrimonial family, and thus facilitated the later formation of modern states in Europe, by removing the propertied and corporately organized kinship groups that resisted state formation in other societies (Political Order, 236–41).7 Arguments for the incompatibility of plans and results pervade both of these works, just as they do the conjectural histories of Condorcet or Smith, through the idea of the “hidden hand.” The works of Fukuyama and Morris both take the form of Herder’s conjectural history, Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91)— that is, they devote their first chapters, about a hundred pages or one-fifth of the whole, to speculative accounts of the earliest formation of human society, before the advent of historical documents. These extensive foundational sections of the works make use of the best available evidence, which, however, remains sketchy, its interpretation uncertain and capable of being overturned a year or two after writing. The remaining four-fifths of each text, based on traditional historical sources, takes the form of a universal or philosophical history. Nevertheless, the conjectural history remains an integral part of the argument of the whole work. Finally, Morris’s work resembles Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) in moving in its final chapter to speculation about the future. Here he sees the categories of East and West breaking down, although they have structured his account of human

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history since the beginning of agriculture—as, in Condorcet’s vision, the conflict between scientific reason, on the one hand, and priestly and kingly power, on the other, will finally dissolve, giving way to a technocratic utopia. Morris considers the possibility of a realization by 2045 of the utopian moment that Raymond Kurzweil has named the Singularity, when the intelligence of machines will equal or surpass that of human beings, theoretically allowing all humans living at that time a kind of immortality. But Morris also considers the possibility that, by the same year, a dystopian Nightfall will occur, caused by a nuclear war in which civilizations and perhaps all human beings and many other species are destroyed. He concludes with the anodyne forecast that probably the species will continue to muddle through, led by “Chimerica,” a merging of the interests of China and America, but with neither “ruling.” By the end of his study, Morris comes to recognize that asking “who will rule,” despite the title of his book, turns out to be the wrong question. Like Fukuyama and Morris in political theory, Robert Bellah’s Religion and Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011) illustrates the continuing currency of conjecturalist thought in the sociology of religion. As his subtitle indicates, Bellah’s work constitutes a classic conjectural history that builds on recent findings and speculations in archaeology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy.8 By basing his account in deep evolutionary time and bringing it forward to the axial age (the middle centuries of the first millennium b.c.e.), Bellah is able to realize in practice his dictum that “the distinction between prehistory and history is arbitrary” (Religion and Human Evolution, ix). Consistent with conjecturalist form, he gives comparable and extensive consideration to times both before and after the use of writing. As his thesis, Bellah proposes the crucial importance of play in constituting human ritual (and thus, as for Durkheim, religion, art, and culture), extending the observations and speculations on play of Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens (1938), and contemporary ethologist Marc Bekoff, with Jessica Pierce, in Wild Justice (2009). As he advances his argument, Bellah employs the distinctive temporality of conjectural history: “There is reason to believe,” he writes, that in the period when modern humans were developing, and before the appearance of fully modern speech, “some kind of rituals probably evolved,” and ritual “might have been the innovation to provide the solidarity that was necessary” for people living in groups of

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more than one or two hundred (Religion and Human Evolution, 94; my emphases). These formulations of his central thesis carry the weight of the conditional necessary past, as in other conjectural histories; the conditions specified may or must have been true, despite the meager evidence, both because of the chain of inferences that leads to them and because of the desired consequences for the argument that follows from them. When Bellah characterizes ritual as the bond that brings about the unity and identity of the group, he refers explicitly to Durkheim’s argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) that regular periods of “collective effervescence” produced the foundational structure of religion, as all the members of the group worshipped the society that they formed in their corporate identity. Bellah differs from Durkheim in not having to base his theory on the ethnological descriptions of one or two tribes of Australian aborigines, taken to embody the earliest form of religious behavior; rather, he refers to the recent archeological analysis of numerous sites from different areas dating to 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Bellah also replaces the worship of the society by its members, in Durkheim, with the elements of play—release, celebration, carnival. With this revision acknowledged, Bellah’s account exhibits a close kinship with Durkheim’s conjecturalist history, and with the form generally. Further evidence of this affinity comes in Bellah’s thesis that music, especially song, was involved in the emergence of language; he argues not that music was an antecedent cause of language but that the two emerged through a process of simultaneous development. Thus, an early human “musilanguage” can be posited before the capacity to form grammatical statements, a “prosodic control of the voice” using tone, length, and emphasis (Religion and Human Evolution, 128–29).9 The recent discovery of bone flutes at sites from 40,000 to 30,000 b.c.e. lends credence to the idea of the primordial importance of music, and Bellah’s speculation recalls Darwin’s conjecture in the Descent of Man that speech may have developed from song, especially from songs of courtship, like those that are still sung by gibbons. In addition to these continuities with conjectural histories in form and content, Bellah makes use of a three-stage scheme for the development of culture and religion that closely parallels Comte’s three-stage framework for the mental development of all societies—the mythical, metaphysical, and scientific. In Bellah’s terms, which he adopts from Merlin Donald, the first

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stage in the development of religious ritual and thought takes a mimetic form in which humans, before having articulate language, took on the roles of animals or powerful beings, using gestures, dance, masks, and vocalization. In the next stage, the mythic, they possessed articulate language and could tell more complex narratives of animals and powerful beings. In the final stage, the theoretic, they come to reflect critically on what these firstorder representations and narratives mean (Religion and Human Evolution, xviii–xix). Bellah understands the philosophical and religious movements of the axial age to embody the achievement of this theoretic attitude, when figures such as Buddha, Confucius, Mencius, Zoroaster, the pre-Socratics, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets formulated challenging critiques of traditional values and customary views of the world. The third and final stage, for both Comte and Bellah—that of scientific, positivist society or theoretic religion—is reformist, universalizing, and satiric in its criticism of previous stages of culture, but, in Bellah at least, the final stage does not entirely replace the previous ones. Bellah is a most selfconscious and self-critical practitioner of conjectural history. He disclaims the notion that later stages constitute any simple—or complex—advance over early ones. He acknowledges the presumption of cultural and even racial superiority in a figure such as Kant, at the same time maintaining that a Kantian “universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view,” conducted in a spirit of openness and tolerance, would be a useful and valuable project to undertake in a time of increasing confessional tension and violence (Religion and Human Evolution, 598–600). If Bellah’s Religion and Human Evolution thus constitutes a classic conjectural history, in its search for the undocumented origins of the distinctive human institution of religion, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) provides an example of the second kind of conjectural history, focusing on transitions. Taylor can turn to documents as he seeks to trace and accurately describe the transition from an age dominated both tacitly and explicitly by Christian thought and authority to a period that earlier conjecturalist thinkers characterized as a secular age. However, the relevance and status of the documents presented as evidence of this shift is not clear. Moreover, the transition is precisely the one that occupied earlier conjectural historians, including Smith, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber—the shift to a modern, capitalist, and secular world. Taylor’s detailed and painstaking response, worked out in almost a thousand pages, argues that the secular world not

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only developed out of deep historical trends in Protestant Christianity but also remains consistent with these trends. Taylor is indebted to Nietzsche and Weber for the first part of his thesis that secularism has its roots in Christianity. However, both Nietzsche and Weber held that secular modernity had broken with Christian belief: Nietzsche argued that, in the wake of the death of God, the task for Europe was to overcome Christian ethics entirely; Weber underscored the extreme and ironic contrast between the sober seriousness of the early Calvinists and the shallow complacency of later bourgeois capitalists. Taylor, on the other hand, stresses the persistent and extensive continuities between Christianity and secularism. His explanations of the shift to modern secularism find that it consists not of a revolutionary rupture or an ironic reversal but of a continuous unfolding, a working out of potentials and aspirations carried within Christianity itself. In his view, modern secularism is still deeply shaped by Christianity and thus still part of a Christian world and Christian history. Apart from Taylor, who develops a conjectural history of a major cultural transition, almost all the contemporary works in the conjectural mode base their speculations concerning the origins of political or religious institutions on current archeological knowledge about the period 50,000 to 5000 b.c.e.—after the emergence of modern humans but before the appearance of writing. Steven Mithen’s After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC (2004) exemplifies this recent flourishing in combining a rigorous expertise in archaeology with a conjectural narrative mode.10 In his introductory methodological reflections, Mithen articulates a typical conjectural quandary: the people of whom he writes left behind no written records, no letters or diaries, so he will have to rely for evidence on their rubbish, remains, crafts, and technologies. However, he wants to do more than provide a dry catalog of items found at Paleolithic and Neolithic sites around the world. In order to convey a sense of the everyday experiences of early humans and to provide “a more accessible and appealing history, . . . a narrative about people’s lives” (After the Ice, 5), he imagines a time traveler from our own day who can visit the scores of sites and participate in the daily activities in each place and time. In a striking and revealing move, Mithen names this character after an earlier conjectural historian: John Lubbock (see chapter 4). The time-traveling younger Lubbock helps Mithen’s readers see that history is about more than inanimate

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found objects. Moreover, contemporary Lubbock carries with him on his temporal and geographic travels a copy of Victorian Lubbock’s 1871 Primitive Culture (as did Nietzsche), allowing Mithen to contrast the anthropological understanding of nonliterate cultures in the 1860s with the current state of knowledge in the field. Mithen employs conjectural thinking in a number of ways throughout After the Ice. Most obviously, he sets the scene at the beginning of most chapters and sections by placing the younger Lubbock in an early time and place, describing with the immediacy of the present tense the weather, vegetation, dwelling place, and attributes and activities of the early humans who lived there—including on occasion their hair color, physical size, facial features, clothing, cooking utensils, foods, tools, subjects of conversation, crafts, customs, arts, and rituals. Lubbock often participates in a typical but historically important activity of the people. At a certain point in each chapter or section, Mithen steps back from such involvement in the prehistoric scene to give an account of what objects or traces have been found by recent archeological expeditions, and where and when, and to consider possible interpretations of the evidence. The narration of the Paleolithic or Neolithic activities, with young John Lubbock as a silent and invisible participant, constitutes a kind of conjectural reanimation of people whom we otherwise know only through what they left behind after their passing. This dramatization of the earlier stages in the presence of modern, civilized people pursues a strategy related to that of Harriet Martineau in the first of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34; see chapter 2). In each case, moderns participate in an earlier stage in order to show readers what traits were required in that stage, and how these led to further developments. The discussion of how to interpret the physical evidence constitutes another kind of conjecture here—a necessary and fruitful kind in which all archeologists must participate if they are to go beyond a listing of objects and propose an understanding of them. On at least one occasion, competing interpretations of the evidence— concerning the first cultivation of squash and beans in central Mexico— lead Mithen to construct two competing narratives in which Lubbock plays a part (After the Ice, 276–85). In a third and most distinctive kind of conjecture, Mithen tries to imagine what the prehistoric people thought, to reconstruct their mental world from the surviving evidence. For example, when Mithen has his surrogate

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walk through the streets of one of the earliest known towns in the world— Beidha, in the Valley of Ravens, Jordan (ca. 8000 b.c.e.)—young Lubbock feels the uncertainty of guessing what is around the next corner, the impossibility of knowing what is happening behind all the thick walls. He senses “an atmosphere of distrust and anxiety, one brought on by the impact of town life on a mentality that had been evolved for living in smaller communities” (After the Ice, 76–77). This statement might have come from an early twentieth-century sociologist such as Georg Simmel, who, in “The Metropolis and Modern Life” (1903), observed the effect of encountering the sheer number of strangers with whom people in cities come into contact every day. Mithen’s diagnosis of an intense anxiety accompanying life in towns on the verge of civilization also bears an uncanny parallel with the theses of Weber and Freud—of an “iron cage” or a “discontent” produced by modern life—even though the modern civilization of Weber and Freud postdates the first urban scene by about ten thousand years. Mithen conceives of city life and farming as sources of terror and danger that did not plague earlier hunter-gatherers or shepherds, an inference confirmed in his account of Lubbock’s tour of Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey. In the dwellings of this very early town, Lubbock finds protruding from the walls “bulls’ heads with long twisting horns, bulls’ heads covered with exotic designs, . . . pictures of great black vultures viciously attacking headless people.  .  .  . a pair of modeled women’s breasts.  .  .  . Both nipples are split apart and peering from within are the skulls of vultures, foxes, and weasels: motherhood itself violently defiled.”11 Overcome by nausea, Lubbock crawls into a pitch-black storeroom for refuge. Mithen characterizes Lubbock’s (and his own) experience of visiting Çatalhöyük as “a nightmare vision of the world that farming has brought to these particular members of humankind” (After the Ice, 93). It might be strange that Mithen is so horrified by the mental world produced by farming and the associated settlement of large towns. But in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), Rousseau also considered agriculture, along with metallurgy, to be a source of the horrors of civilization. For Rousseau, agriculture depends on private property, and the first man who fenced in and claimed a piece of land as his own initiated all the woes of modern life, including unnatural, unjust, and increasingly severe inequality between men.12 Rousseau also recounts the horrors of town life at great length and in vivid detail in note I (or 9) of the Discourse on Inequality.13

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In fact, Mithen’s vision of the nightmarish life produced by agriculture and urbanism reveals a strong emotional attachment to the Paleolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherers that parallels Rousseau’s admiration for the first men, the savage Caribs, and the warlike barbarians who have overridden empires weakened by luxury and peace. This observation is not meant as a criticism of Mithen’s attempts to reconstruct Neolithic ways of thinking; the passage concerning Çatalhöyük is among the most imaginative and provocative in the book. Such conjectural reconstructions, however, place his work in a tradition of philosophical and historical analysis, although he seems not to realize the implications of doing so. The passage on Çatalhöyük echoes not only Rousseau, on the disastrous consequences of agriculture, but also Nietzsche, who wrote with compassionate indignation of the fear and damage to the spirit caused by the (self-) domestication and taming of the barbarian or animal man, in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality (1887). A further example illustrates the way that the speculative reconstructions of modern archaeology conform to the speculative arguments of earlier conjectural thinkers. When Mithen attempts to understand the mysterious hilltop site of Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey, he adopts the proposal that the 11,000-year-old circular ruins served as a religious, ceremonial center for settlements for many miles around. But it is a center of a new kind—intensely masculine, even phallic, including megalithic pillars with enigmatic pictograms and carvings of wild animals, like those at nearby Jerf el Ahmar. “Indeed,” Mithin concludes, “rather than notions of wholesome fertility and reproduction, the emerging religious themes from both Jerf el Ahmar and Göbekli are about fear and danger of the wild” (After the Ice, 67). Leaving to the side the strongly gendered ideology that regards women’s work of reproduction as “wholesome,” it is striking that the contemporary archeologist offers an account here of at least one kind of early religion originating in terror—in fear of animals and forces of nature—just as Hume, Mandeville, and Vico had maintained. In his practice of historical interpretation, Mithen disrupts the unvarying progression of monolithic stages that characterized the work of many of the early conjectural historians. Ferguson’s stages of savage, barbarian, and civilized societies, the dominant framework for over a hundred years, came to be replaced by Victorian Lubbock’s own stages of Paleolithic and Neolithic life (later supplemented by the Mesolithic). But Mithen

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demonstrates repeatedly that the evidence does not point to any clear and unvarying succession of stages. Elements of the suite of Neolithic practices—domestication of cattle and sheep, planting of cereal crops, making of pottery—were exhibited by many societies, although the whole was not adopted by many. For example, human groups in Corsica and Sardinia domesticated sheep and goats but did not plant grains or build timber houses; cave dwellers in northern Italy combined the typically Neolithic herding of sheep with the typically Mesolithic hunting of pigs (After the Ice, 189). In Western Asia, Japan, and along the Ganges, people adopted village life before they began to farm, whereas in Mexico and New Guinea, farming began before the adoption of permanent settlements (505; for other examples, see 35, 60, 169). Whenever people began to plant wild seed or tend wild squash, they could not have anticipated the kinds and scales of change that agriculture would entail. As a result of these disruptions of linear progress and the disproportion between intentions and results, “history,” for Mithen and young Lubbock, becomes “an extraordinary tangle of causes and consequences, of human ingenuity and complete accident, of environmental change and human response.” In different societies around the world, “the paths of change were many and varied” (After the Ice, 440, 505). Mithen adopts a view of history that is genealogical in the sense that Nietzsche uses the term, and that also conforms to the Nietzsche–Darwin principle discussed in chapter 5: minor alterations in habitual practices, often undertaken in response to changed conditions, may lead to momentous shifts in the long term; human action reveals no progress toward a predetermined goal; the disarticulation between means and ends (noted already by the early conjectural historians) implies that human agents have had little control over the history they have made. Despite these insights, Mithen includes a rather oblique criticism of postmodern history—presumably for not providing factual narratives—even as he participates in the postmodern version of conjectural history (514, note 11). He thus joins a large group of thinkers who criticize conjectural history even as they participate productively in the form—among them Ferguson, Malthus, and Nietzsche. In the realm of the novel, too, one can find evidence of the continuing effect of conjecturalist thought. Prehistoric fiction, a distinctive and popular genre concerning relations of competition, violence, and love between

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modern humans and Neanderthals during the millennia when the two coexisted in Europe—usually about 40,000 or 30,000 b.c.e.—has exemplars not only in the novels of Jean Auel, beginning with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), but also in Vo’hounâ: Une légende préhistorique (Vo’hounâ: A Prehistoric Legend, 2002), a graphic novel by Emmanuel Roudier. These novels share a remarkable ancestor in David Friedrich Weinland’s popular Rulaman (Berlin, 1878), which does not include Neanderthals but explores the competition between a conservative band of hunter-gatherers and a group of new arrivals who practice agriculture and metalwork, and who turn out to be Celts. In Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayala serves as a vehicle for the survival of the Neanderthal heritage through giving birth to a child of mixed Neanderthal–modern human parentage. The birth functions in the way that marriage works in Walter Scott’s novels, to bring together partisans on opposing sides of a violent conflict involving political, religious, and ethnic dimensions. As the relation between H. G. Wells’s science fiction and conjecturalist history indicates, a strong degree of filiation links conjectural histories of the future—such as those by Condorcet and Comte—with speculative fiction of the distant future, such as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) or innumerable multivolume sagas that follow the pattern set by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1942–50). The dystopian subgenre of future history, as practiced by Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed (1974) and Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), also has a place among speculative histories of the future, following the pattern established by Wells. con j e ct u ral c o nc lu s i o ns

Three questions about the form of conjectural history remain to be examined. The first, concerning form and concept, arises from the difficulty of distinguishing between formal and conceptual continuities among works; examples of both have figured in every chapter of this study. It may not be useful to draw a hard line between the form and concept, because each of these affects the other. Speculation based on little or no evidence forms the basis of the genre of conjectural history, but features such as nonprovidential, noncontractual explanations, and divisions of historical time into stages, are equally constitutive of the form. On the other hand, motifs that

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may appear with some frequency—such as the origin of religion in fear— do not possess form-determining status. These motifs do not occur in all, or even most, works in the form, and some undoubted practitioners of conjectural form adopt a different position. Speculations about the origins and function of religion from outside a religious framework characterize the form but do not always produce the same argument. Similarly, the number of stages and their characterization will vary in conjectural works. For the first century and more of conjecturalist history, the most common structuring division distinguished savage, barbarian, and civilized states. But as dissatisfaction with this implicit ethnic or racial hierarchy grew stronger, it was replaced by more value-neutral period designations—such as Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic in archaeology—and by the sequence of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states in political history. The use of stages (in combination with other features), not the specific definition of each stage, is crucial. Thus, the form is characterized by the adoption of different kinds and numbers of stages, not solely by Adam Smith’s four-stage theory based on means of subsistence. It is defined by a search for the origins of institutions such as religion, but not by the determination of a single origin, whether fear, guilt, or a need for social cohesion. Reasoning along these lines, it does not seem accurate to characterize conjectural history as evolutionary in a broad or popular sense—that is, as committed to a narrative of progress. Spencer’s speculative history is evolutionary, but most other examples of the form remain ambivalent on the question of progress. Their historical narratives do not reveal an unambiguous, uninterrupted, and irreversible progress, whether that is understood as an increase in complexity or intelligence, an improvement in material conditions, or a tendency to greater individual freedom or social justice. In fact, from Rousseau, Ferguson, and James Dunbar through Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, conjectural histories frequently subject to sharply skeptical analysis the processes of disciplining and self-disciplining that have led to social and civilized life, including especially modern civilization. In this focus on the discipline of culture, a shared feature that might have been seen as conceptual appears to be an intensification of a formal trait present from early examples. The bleak analyses of the taming of modern humans in the later histories do not depart from or reverse, but confirm and strengthen, the doubts concerning visions of progress in the Enlightenment histories.

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A related question emerging from this study has to do with the relation of conjectural history to the repudiation of the form by so many of its practitioners. As we have seen, Ferguson, Malthus, Darwin, Nietzsche, and other conjectural thinkers either paradoxically critique the possibilities of the form or occlude the filiation between their work and the speculative form. The number of those who acknowledge their use of the form or recognize the speculative work of their predecessors—such as Comte and Freud—is much smaller. I have suggested that divergent reasons may account for these denials—from a desire to base one’s claims on empirical evidence to prudential calculations, like Darwin’s, that association with radical conjectural thinkers would undermine one’s work. A partial analogue to this attitude might be found among some writers of realistic novels, such as Daniel Defoe, who, through a wealth of particular details (and sometimes an apparent unconcern with form), imply that their narrative has come directly from life or history and constitutes an empirical record of undigested, lived experience. Another kind of reluctance to acknowledge the genre in which they work figures among some authors of science fiction, partly because the form has often been considered a popular and low genre. More helpful is Le Guin’s characterization of speculative fiction as a “thought experiment,”14 a formulation that applies as well to conjectural history. A further historical observation is warranted: whereas many of the Enlightenment conjectural historians adopted the form in order to evade the constraints of biblical and providential history, some of the later figures employed the genre in order to escape the limitations of a positivist or empirical framework. Thus, again to adapt Nietzsche’s aphorism (in the Genealogy of Morality, essay 2, section 12), the form can change gradually, but the function or meaning of the form often shifts more quickly. This proposition, formulated most sharply by Nietzsche, which almost becomes a feature of the form after its use by the early anthropologists in the 1860s, raises a third question, concerning the relation between the form and the meaning or function of conjectural history itself. As with other genres (or institutions or organs), as changes in meaning or function become settled and others accumulate, a new form (or organ, or institution) eventually takes shape. In the Discourse on Inequality, for example, Rousseau writes a story of human origins, involving a fall, that helps explain the present human condition. He repeats the form of the story in Genesis,

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but revises it by omitting any mention of a deity or of a fruit whose ingestion was forbidden. In providing his hypothetical but naturalistic account, he deletes the doctrine of original sin; the revised form carries a new meaning. By a certain point, when such an account is accompanied or followed by similarly naturalistic narratives of origins, the form changes, and a new genre of conjectural history is brought into existence. The same process occurs when speculative fiction develops from conjectural histories of the future. In Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), a narrating character gives a detailed novelistic account of a friend’s personal experiences rather than an impersonal discourse on the future like the speculative historians. Wells changed the meaning or function of the older form, and gradually, as further narratives were written and incorporated, the new form of speculative fiction coalesced around the altered generic features.15 Changes in meaning occur first: as they become stable, and as further, correlated shifts take place, the form eventually changes and a new genre— or, in some cases, a new discipline—takes shape. Through their employment and modification of conjectural history, the thinkers examined in this study opened up not just new genres but new fields of study, institutional disciplines, and theoretical approaches. For example, based in part on the conjectural history in book 1 of the second and later editions of the Principle of Population, Malthus built on the partially conjectural work of Smith to consolidate the field of political economy. Comte brought into existence and named the discipline of sociology through his theoretical, holistic stages of social development. Working as the last of the classical political economists, Marx, through his revision and critique of that field, inaugurated the field of materialist political thought in which different classes—not, as in Comte, intellectual forms—dominate successive stages of society. Using the concept of survivals, McLennan’s and Tylor’s speculations about the original forms and successive stages of marriage, kinship, religion, and culture specified the terms and framed the questions that would lie at the heart of social and cultural anthropology for two or three generations. Weber, in his speculations concerning a transition in economic and religious forms, and Durkheim, in his speculations on the most primitive form of religion, contributed to shaping the sociology of religion as a field. On occasion, the effect of conjectural work becomes visible only after a considerable delay. It took almost a century for the emergence of new fields or approaches after Darwin’s speculations laid out the lines of

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argument for cognitive evolution, after Engels formulated the possibility and the issues of a materialist-feminist theory, and after Nietzsche’s conjectures articulated and exemplified the method of genealogical history. Thus, if a genealogical relation connects speculative history and speculative fiction, an even closer formal relation links conjectural history and theory, as that term has come to be understood in the last forty-five years. It is important to remember that Rousseau called his Discourse on Inequality a “hypothetical history” based on “conjectures,” and that in defining the genre, Dugald Stewart assigned it the equivalent names: “Theoretical or Conjectural History.”16 This kind of history has made its most important contributions in all the fields considered here by providing theoretical frameworks, despite counterexamples or empirical inaccuracies. Talcott Parsons writes of the “understanding” (verstehen) that Weber aims for through his use of the ideal type (such as the Protestant ethic, or bureaucracy), which is not a representation of actuality: “It is purposely a ‘fictitious’ construction, which can never occur in reality. Nor is it an abstraction in the ordinary sense. . . . It is a picture of what things would be under ‘ideal,’ not actual conditions.”17 The ideal type of the Protestant ethic is not refuted or disproven by a study that shows some sixteenth-century English Protestants to have been concerned with their calling but not engaged in pronounced capitalist activity.18 Nor is Foucault’s theory of disciplinary society invalidated if one can show that Foucault misread a tract about prison reform in late eighteenth-century England. Robert Merton makes the crucial point when he argues against “the fallacy of the latest word,” which holds that a theory must be dismissed once empirical evidence against it comes to light. This is the approach of “naïve falsification.” But a theory cannot be disproved; like a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it can only be superseded by another theory that provides a stronger framework for understanding: “Contrary to naïve falsificationism, no experiment, experimental report, observation statement or well-corroborated low-level falsifying hypothesis alone can lead to falsification. There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory” (emphasis in original).19 The criterion for the success of conjectural histories and theoretical constructions is their usefulness for interpretation, their explanatory power. The universal, cyclical (and more philosophical than conjectural) histories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee have not struck a chord that has been useful to later researchers, whereas the very problematic

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conjectural, theoretical constructions of Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) have opened up a new field of study (materialist feminism) for those seeking to modify or extend his arguments. Durkheim’s theory of religion as the binding force in society was built on deeply flawed early studies of totemism among the Arunta, yet it has produced a long-lasting and widely productive school of thought. Similarly, although Malthus’s argument that it is impossible for food supply to keep pace with population growth has no firm basis in mathematics or empirical evidence, his theory that population, if unchecked, will outstrip resources continues to resonate strongly today in the modified form known as neo-Malthusianism. The recent flourishing of conjectural history reclaims a tool used by the Enlightenment conjectural historians and the conjecturalist thinkers who followed in their wake. At present, the form is available in the intellectual repertoire, in revised and updated versions based on genetic analyses, primate ethology, and archeological advances, to be employed as a way of reflecting on the significance and meaning of contemporary civilization; of conceiving transcultural globalism in nonracial terms; of determining causes of the origins, accomplishments, and failures of states in modern and ancient history; of reflecting on the uses and abuses of religion in history; or of examining the role of evolutionary psychology in shaping different societies on similar and on divergent paths of development. The stages formulated by Enlightenment and nineteenth-century thought have become more complex, ambiguous, and entangled, yet the idea of nonprovidential periods making only ambiguous progress has not lost its usefulness for interpretive analysis. Political theory, the sociology of religion, and paleoanthropology continue to be shaped by a form of thought that has been productive over the past two hundred and fifty years and, suitably modified, may for some time to come continue to be a useful instrument for thinking theoretically about society and history. At the core of this form lies the supposition that what has been, rather than being fixed and settled, can be conceived as taking place in a past time when the future was undetermined. Recognizing the important role played by conjectural history in constituting modern social thought may lead to a greater reluctance to accept frameworks of history that declare the past closed, the facts decided, and the event determined.

appendix one

Enlightenment Conjectural Histories

Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees, part 2. 1729. Turgot, A. R. Jacques. “Philosophical Review of the Advances of the Human Mind.” Oration, 1750. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men [Second Discourse]. 1755. ——. Essay on the Origin of Languages. Written mid-1750s; published 1781. Smith, Adam. “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.” Written early 1750s. ——. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Delivered late 1750s and 1762–63. ——. The Wealth of Nations (book 3). 1776. Hume, David. “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.” 1742. ——. The Natural History of Religion. 1757. Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine. Antiquity Revealed. 1756. de Brosses, Charles. The Cult of the Fetish Gods. 1760. Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 1767. Guasco, Ottaviano di, Abbé. On the Usage of Statues. 1768. Robertson, William. “View of the Progress of Society in Europe,” in The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. 1769. ——. History of America (book 4). 1777. Millar, John. Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. 1771. 3rd ed. 1779. Bailly, Jean-Sylvain. History of Ancient Astronomy. 1771. Diderot, Denis. Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage. 1772. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Treatise on the Origin of Language. 1772. ——. This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity. 1774.

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——. Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind. 1784–91. Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord. Of the Origin and Progress of Language. 1773–92. D’Hancarville, Pierre François. Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities, vols. 3 and 4. 1776. Forster, Georg. A Voyage Round the World. 1777. Forster, Johann Reinhold, and Georg Forster. Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World. 1778. Stuart, Gilbert. A View of Society in Europe. 1778. Kames, Henry Home, Lord. Sketches of the History of Man. 1778. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de. Epochs of Nature. 1778. Dunbar, James. Essays on the History of Mankind. 1780. Falconer, William. Remarks on the Influence of Climate, Situation, Nature of Country, Population, Nature of Food, and Way of Life, on the Disposition and Temper, Manners and Behavior, Intellects, Laws and Customs, Form of Government, and Religion, of Mankind. 1781. Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” 1784. ——. “Conjectural Origins of the Human Race.” 1786. ——. “Perpetual Peace.” 1795. Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. 1795. Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population, book 1. 2nd ed. 1803.

appendix two

Hegel, History, and Conjecture

(1807) and Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822–31; first published in 1837), especially in the introduction to the Philosophy of World History, “Reason in History,” G. W. F. Hegel writes speculative accounts of the unfolding of reason throughout human history. Although these works do not stand in the direct line connecting Enlightenment conjectural histories with the developing fields of social thought, Hegel’s use of the conjectural form deserves discussion, especially his unique innovations in the Phenomenology. An overview of all human history through successive forms of consciousness, the Phenomenology reaches back to the earliest ages, for which no documents or clear evidence exist. In fact, Hegel cites no document at all except Rameau’s Nephew (1905) by Diderot—as an example of modern, alienated self-consciousness. For the earliest states Hegel considers, such as sense-certainty and perception, he employs the conditional necessary mode, speculating about the ways consciousness must have worked in the beginning, because, possessing self-consciousness, we no longer have access to these states. From these speculative beginnings, Hegel announces his intention to trace forward the modes of consciousness, a classical conjectural project to delineate and recount a sequence of mental stages, particularly close to those of Hume and Herder.1 By not confining his narrative of modes of consciousness to expositions of specific texts or historical particulars, Hegel extends his range of implications widely; however, he also makes it difficult to determine, at almost any point in the narrative, which historical time he has in mind and how or

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whether the order of the exposition follows a historical sequence. The sections on stoicism and skepticism seem straightforwardly to refer to forms of consciousness among the ancient Greeks and Romans (Phenomenology, para. 197–206). Yet a later portion of the text and the narrative brings a near recurrence of, or at least strong parallels to, these phenomena under the heading “Reason” and the “essential nature of Morality” (para. 347–59). Although we may then believe that the narrative has finally left the ancient world behind, it returns to consider Greek tragedy as ethical action, and the definition of personhood in Roman law and empire (para. 464–83). In similar sets of passages that disrupt a clear line of historical succession, Hegel’s discussion of the characteristic stance of Romantic irony precedes, rather than follows, the long consideration of the Enlightenment, and analysis of the “beautiful soul” which characterized German Pietism in the mid-eighteenth century follows, rather than precedes, discussion of the Terror in the French Revolution. Thus, the forms of consciousness whose sequence Hegel sets out to provide exist in at least two principal and seemingly inconsistent temporalities, both of which may be operative at any point in the text. The first comprises human history as a whole, which has gone through these phases in both unspecified and determined historical periods and cultures—perhaps the age and place in which they first appeared, or those in which they played a paramount or determining role. But they also exist transhistorically, outside such historical specifics, in individuals living in different times as they grow and mature.2 There could then be a discrepancy between individuals and the dominant or characteristic form of consciousness at the time; someone embodying the “unhappy consciousness” of the Middle Ages might live in the modern time of alienated consciousness. Because of this multiplicity of temporalities and sites of consciousness, and because of the absence of references to specific documents or events, Hegel makes it impossible to determine whether the narrative refers, at any point, to individuals or to historical periods. The mode of consciousness at issue could characterize a cultural and social age lasting centuries and involving millions of people or it could be a necessary, logical stage in the development of an individual; it could operate at both levels or oscillate back and forth.3 To take one instance of the productive ambiguity in the text, the discussion of master and slave seems to place that relationship on the level of an encounter between individuals that may occur in any historical period.

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On that level, the master gains his superior position because he is willing to risk losing his life (for example, in battle) to affirm his identity. However, the slave eventually turns the tables by actually producing effects, through work, that render him independent of the master, whereas the latter remains dependent on the slave for the recognition that he is master. On the other hand, coming as the first stage in the emergence of self-consciousness, this section of the narrative also may describe the earliest attainment of selfconsciousness by all humans, a stage reached by the division of the species into two kinds. In a third possibility, the narrative in this passage could describe the dialectic of relations between slaves and slaveholders in contemporary times, and may announce the triumph of the slaves over the masters, in a world where the consciousness of freedom will prove to be the content of all history—to use the terms of the introduction to the later Philosophy of World History. The lack of specifics keeps open the possibility of—and even requires—understanding the Phenomenology as pertaining to different temporalities throughout. This multilayered narrative construction results from a conjectural approach to consciousness, unanchored in a narrative based on specific documents or events. Yet Hegel diverges from most conjectural history in constructing a strongly teleological narrative that leads to Protestant Christianity as the highest form of religion and the goal of consciousness in history, with a Protestant providence—though not named as such—working itself out as the absolute that is realized in the world. Hegel translates this absolute outside the religious realm, however: the ultimate stage of consciousness is absolute knowledge, which subsumes the absolute in its religious form and makes it the last object of its own knowledge. The journey of consciousness reaches its end by overgoing Christianity and raising Spirit from religion to philosophy. Moreover, Hegel concludes in a prophetic mode, foreseeing, like Condorcet in the tenth stage of his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), a future state in which the contradictions of previous ages will find resolution and human history will come to an end. Like Condorcet, Comte, and Marx, Hegel stands, in his own conception, on the threshold of the final stage of history. Whereas The Phenomenology of Spirit presents two dozen stages in its conjectural history, Hegel sets out a much more conventional speculative history in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, beginning with a smaller number of stages, which receive clear formulation as the Oriental,

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Greek, Roman, and German worlds. The Persian empire gives way to the Greek city-states, which are succeeded by pagan and Christian Rome and finally by the German states. Each of these worlds and periods is defined not only by chronological succession but by a principle: authority is held first by one man, then shared by a few, and finally is diffused among the many. Moreover, the Philosophy of History (as it is more commonly known) contains no track parallel to the historical development on the level of individual consciousness; it is only concerned with nations or peoples. The work as a whole lays out a clear movement of political culture from East to West, from the rule of one man to rule of the many, but it also effects an impoverishment because it lacks entirely the simultaneous tracking of world-historical development and the development of individual consciousness. Like the Enlightenment conjectural histories, “Reason in History” asserts that, behind the scenes, history—or, for Hegel, reason—makes use of the passions and interests of men to produce results of which the actors themselves are unaware. This occluded cunning of reason is thus a close analogue to and development of the hidden hand of the market in Adam Smith, as well as the incommensurability of intentions and results in Mandeville, Ferguson, and Condorcet. Neither Hegel nor the conjectural historians accept any possibility of a deliberate, contractual founding of society. In addition, in the Philosophy of History, Hegel conceives of the states through which reason becomes realized in the world as the stages of life of an organism. The Orient embodies the childhood of the race, the Greeks the adolescence of mankind, the Romans its maturity, and the Germans ripeness and the fulfillment of possibilities (rather than old age). This organismic conception of human history reiterates the understanding of stages in Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind, where each culture develops like an individual or an organism, from youth through maturity to decrepitude. Both thinkers work in and define a paradigm in which the highest value is placed on interpretation cast in organic terms.4 In both “Reason in History” and the Phenomenology, history exhibits an intensely progressive and teleological drive. By contrast, the conjectural histories often suggest only mixed and qualified forms of progress. Still, in Hegel’s thought, the negative moment, the opposite of what has been realized, even its destruction, is necessary for any movement forward. Such a double or dialectical view is grounded on an acknowledgment that the material with which history works is human lives, including millions of

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deaths, untold suffering, and the ruin of civilizations. In this dubious theodicy, advancing reason justifies, by providing a meaning for, such suffering and destruction.5 Finally, like Ferguson, Malthus, and later Darwin and Nietzsche, Hegel criticizes conjecture even as he employs a conjectural method. In the introduction to the Philosophy of History, he attacks the higher criticism in Germany for being based on subjective notions that have little evidence to support them, and that contradict the plain facts of history, and he rebukes Rousseau for baselessly speculating about the early history of mankind.6 Despite these strictures on the use of the form, however, Hegel works in conjectural history in both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of History. The Phenomenology begins with the earliest times and proceeds, untethered from documents, to unfold a speculative history of consciousness through an idiosyncratic series of stages both in large historical periods and in the individual mind. Progressing through a much clearer sequence of stages, the Philosophy of History, also released from documentary evidence, articulates a narrative in which the real historical subject, reason, actualizes itself through the lives of millions who remain unaware of how their actions and sufferings further the plot of history.

appendix three

Were Conjectural Histories Racist?

(2000), Roxann Wheeler maintains that the “four-stage theory” of social history characteristic of the late eighteenth century constituted a “proto-racist ideology” that was largely responsible for the shift from classifying humans based on cultural factors to classifying them based on inherited physical traits, especially skin color.1 Yet an examination of all the texts mentioned by Wheeler, as well as more than two dozen others—not isolated sentences or passages, but complete texts—for evidence of racist thought does not bear out the contention that four-stage theory or the larger category of conjectural history exerted a racist or protoracist influence on nineteenth-century thought. I will use Fredric Jameson’s concept of an ideology of forms—the notion that each genre carries a core set of implications that constitute its attempt to solve a historical problem or contradiction—to argue that the ideology of the form of conjectural history was, in fact, not racist.2 Conjectural history makes a claim for the universality of the social or physical identities it discerns, but, as Judith Butler points out, a claim of a universal truth or right is not necessarily exclusionary, even though it may originally be made on behalf of a particular hegemonic group.3 Discerning a transcultural series of stages in social life, conjectural histories often subordinate other groups to the European particular. However, the genre can also produce works that balance respect for multiple particulars with the universalizing impulse of stadialism. Thus, the ideological center of gravity of the genre may be ethnocentric but not necessarily racist or proto-racist. in the complexion of race

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Two writers of conjectural history, Hume and Kant, made racist remarks in notes or in contexts where they are tangential and unexamined, although when they wrote conjectural history, the form seems to have moved them toward more reflective and nuanced statements. Hume included his comment about the superiority of whites to other races in a note to his essay “Of National Characters” (1748). The note is not a part of, nor is it a consequence or a corollary of, the conjectural histories he wrote—“Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742) and The Natural History of Religion (1757). In the case of Kant, the contradictions between his writings on race and his conjectural histories reveal an intractable tension between aspects of his thought, and between the forms that he used. In his first essay on race, “On the Different Human Races” (1775), Kant argues that the concept of race is useful in maintaining the derivation of all human beings from a single line. In response to critiques of the idea of race, by J. G. Herder and Georg Forster, Kant wrote a more philosophically elaborate essay on race, “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” (1788), which proposes an understanding of nature as teleological and purposive—in the creation of human races, for example. Kant’s anecdotal, derogatory comments about non-European races in his other nonconjectural writings, such as Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), are consistent with this theory. In the most disturbing of his notes on anthropology (no. 1520), published posthumously, he writes that only whites have the capacity to improve indefinitely, that all nonwhite races will be eliminated, and that racial mixing is “not good.”4 Although Kant emphasizes the ability to realize potential, both in the essays on race and in the conjectural histories, the conjectural histories focus on the history of social forms, not physical traits. The conjectural “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784) asserts that the full development of human potential cannot be realized by individuals but only by peoples, who will eventually establish a cosmopolitan civil existence. Eleven years later, in “Perpetual Peace” (1795), his conjectural history of the future, Kant writes of the coming of a world federation of republican governments and strongly criticizes European colonialism. While European powers “make endless ado about their piety,” they impose their will by force on darker-skinned people around the world, thus drinking “injustice like water.”5 Only by ceasing the violence against non-Europeans can

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the human race be brought closer to a peaceful and practicable cosmopolitan constitution. Thus, Kant’s writings on race, along with his casual racist comments, provide an early instance of a biologizing line of thought that accepts inherent, unchangeable, hierarchical difference. However, his conjectural histories make a case for the universal development of potentials among all humans, and the final conjectural history, the latest of all these writings, includes a sharp anticolonial critique.6 The center of gravity in the form of conjectural history is ethnocentric, but it is not racist, and in most cases is hardly concerned with race at all. Rousseau, in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), does not characterize people with different traits as races.7 Like Rousseau, Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), thinks in terms of peoples and nations, not races—of climate, not fixed biological traits. And John Millar does not biologize or racialize a people’s cultural stage in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771). As discussed in the introduction, Adam Smith wrote several conjectural and four-stage histories, including “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages” (1762), the opening section of Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763), and book 3 of The Wealth of Nations (1776); in none of these foundational texts does Smith use the modern concept of race as a set of inheritable physical traits.8 Among the Scottish conjectural historians of the 1770s, William Robertson comes closest to racializing when, in his History of America (1777), he represents Native Americans as cowardly, cruel, and incapable of abstract thought. Similarly, in “View of the Progress of Society in Europe” (1769), the introductory chapter of The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, where he traces the development in Europe from feudalism to commercial society, Robertson implies that European societies may have progressed so far because of an inherent superiority. By contrast, Gilbert Stuart, in A View of Society in Europe (1778), sees not an inevitable improvement in this shift from the medieval period to the sixteenth century but a decline into modernity. His account of this development is neither racialized nor ethnocentric. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo has been accused of expressing racist biases in his conjectural Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92) and Ancient Metaphysics (1779–99), because he argues that orangutans are of the same species as humans. However, Monboddo is not trying to lower some humans to the level of monkeys, nor does he employ the modern

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idea of race as a set of inheritable characteristics. Like other Enlightenment conjectural historians, when he uses the term “race” he means a line of descent—a family, a bloodline, class, or rank.9 When Monboddo discusses human groups, he always writes of “varieties,” “nations,” and “peoples,” not “races.”10 These conjectural historians, from Ferguson through Monboddo and from Rousseau through Condorcet, give little or no evidence of racist thinking, although some do exhibit various degrees of ethnocentrism.11 Some late conjectural or stadial histories went further and mounted a critique of the ethnocentrism implied by the vision of a single line of progress. For example, James Dunbar writes, in Essays on the History of Mankind (1781), that savagery and civilization do not constitute essential traits of peoples; rather, they are fluctuating and contingent. Europe may consider itself the acme of human accomplishment, but it will make way for other powers, as the Phoenicians, the Dutch, the Venetians, and other nations have. Dunbar articulates a powerful critique of Eurocentrism. Like Dunbar, and in the same decade, Herder, in his conjectural Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91) persistently maintains that we cannot essentialize or biologize cultures. The character and achievements of each culture or people remain incommensurable with those of others; therefore, cultures cannot be ranked. Similarly, disagreeing with his former teacher Kant, Herder sees no justification for the concept of race, because human varieties all shade into one another.12 Different races would imply different origins and multiple lineages, but “all mankind are only one and the same species” (my emphasis).13 Georg Forster, who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, also opposed the idea of fixed races in his conjectural history and other writings, criticizing slavery and the derogation of Africans, on the basis of his travels and observations.14 A close examination of fourstage theories or conjectural histories thus confirms that the genre is not built on racist or proto-racist foundations; although many of these works presume the superiority of European cultures and peoples, some even criticize ethnocentrism and racism. If conjectural history did not play a primary role in the racializing of European thought in the decades around 1800, other lines of thought contributed to establishing “scientific” racism. Physiognomy, phrenology, and ideas of beauty contributed to this discourse, as well as the desire to justify slavery through a plantocratic mythology and interpretations of biblical accounts, such as the story of Noah’s sons.15 But the principal form

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of thought that shaped such racializing was the emerging study of comparative anatomy, which asserted that races were biologically fixed types with inherited characteristics.16 J. F. Blumenbach, the most important early comparative anatomist, worked to resist the concept of race and a hierarchy of races—with mixed success. Discerning four varieties within a single human species—European, African, Asian, and American—Blumenbach did not rank these in any order of intelligence or worth, nor did he focus heavily on skin color, and he maintained that environmental factors could have an effect on external traits. However, Blumenbach used “degeneration” as a neutral term to describe the process by which a variety might be altered, either in appearance or in some other feature. Blumenbach’s comparisons of the shapes and sizes of specimens in his extensive collection of skulls led others, later, to a ranking of races, based on the assumption that a large skull correlates with high intelligence. Blumenbach expresses the clearest resistance to racism among the early comparative anatomists, yet the varieties he proposed quickly came to be regarded as fixed, hierarchical races. One of the first to produce hierarchizing generalizations based on measurements of human anatomy was Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, author of On the Physical Difference Between the European and the Negro (1785). Sömmerring maintained that the nerves at the base of the brain are larger and thicker in Negroes, in line with his belief that Negroes’ senses are stronger than those of Europeans, but their intellectual power weaker. Extensive direct quotations of Sömmerring’s arguments about Negro anatomy made their way into later works in the tradition. Although Sömmerring thus influenced the development of attitudes in racial science, the single figure whose pronouncements on race had the greatest effect in shaping nineteenth-century “scientific” racism was Georges Cuvier, one of the most prominent natural historians of his day. Cuvier strongly believed in the fixity of species and races.17 Caucasians, distinguished by a beautiful oval head, were the model humans, and Western Europeans the exemplar of the Caucasian race; by contrast, according to Cuvier, the thick lips and protruding jaw of Africans more closely resembled the features of other primates.18 Cuvier’s authority as the founder and preeminent authority in the field of comparative anatomy gave legitimacy to his views.19 In the 1830s, Americans became prominent for their use of craniometry. Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician who had accumulated a

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large collection of skulls, issued his Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), which ranked the cranial capacity of races, from Caucasians to Ethiopians.20 Morton asserted that racial groups had not changed over time and that their different characteristics were inherent. As a monument to Morton after his death, J. C. Nott and George Gliddon published Types of Mankind (1854), which offered an elaborate compendium of arguments for the separateness, inadaptability, and hierarchy of human races or species. At about the same time, in England, the physician Robert Knox argued in The Races of Men (1850) that “race is everything.”21 Maintaining that all contact between races takes the form of a life-and-death struggle, he predicted the extinction of Native Americans and Africans. On the other hand, he was also convinced that intense heat in the tropics would protect the natives there, and he anticipated that most colonial enterprises would consequently fail.22 From Sömmerring and Cuvier through Morton and Knox, then, we can trace a tradition based on the presumption that quantitative measurements of bone length and cranial capacity, along with skin color and hair type, constitute the most accurate and scientific means of defining races. Almost all works in this line assert that races are unchanging, that climate does not alter racial characteristics, and that hybrids between races are either impossible or short-lived. Adopting an ahistorical stance and confident that current racial differences are primeval, they show no interest in early human history.23 In contrast to conjectural history, both the center of gravity and the spectrum of possible positions of comparative anatomy—committed, after Blumenbach, to multiple human races and condemning their overlap or mixing—presume the category of race and a hierarchy of races. The form of conjectural history and of comparative anatomy remained consistent from the 1770s to the 1870s. Whereas conjectural history was most often uninterested in race, or even antiracist in emphasizing the value of non-European cultures, comparative anatomy typically sought to establish the racial superiority of Europeans over Africans.24 Some conjectural histories in fact maintained as a universal value the possession by each people of its own autonomous and incommensurable local culture.25

notes

i ntroducti on 1

2

3

4

5

William Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930). Although many of these travelers’ narratives were unreliable, they were the only sources available to historians of non-European societies. To ignore them would have meant consigning European thought to a petrified status quo, foregoing the opportunity to evaluate and integrate new information into a new paradigm. Nicholas Thomas has argued, along similar lines, that the accounts by missionaries to the Pacific Islanders and other nonliterate cultures before the professionalization of anthropology may have been biased and imperfect but were not, for all that, useless or entirely inaccurate (Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse, 2nd ed. [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996], 14, 69). See also Nicholas Hudson, introduction, in Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996). The metaphor of mental landscape opened up by eighteenth-century thinkers is that also of Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1972). Peter Baehr points out that stahlhartes Gehäuse might be more accurately rendered in English as “shell hard as steel” (or, I would say, “steel-hard shell”); “iron cage” is Talcott Parson’s translation. See Baehr, introduction, in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), xxiv. On theories of secularization and attitudes toward the phenomenon, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Taylor argues that secularism is a development and outgrowth of Christianity, having extensive continuities with the Protestant tradition; his argument takes the same form as arguments advanced by Nietzsche and Darwin in their conjecturally inflected works. See also Talil Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); James E. Crimmons, ed., Religion, Secularization, and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill (New York: Routledge, 1990); David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Michael Warner, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1984), 78. The extensive and valuable Conjectural History and Anthropology reprint series from Thoemmes Press focuses exclusively on Scottish works in this genre. Among the exceptions—scholars who understand conjectural history to be a discursive form not practiced only by the Scots but also by French and German thinkers—should be included Robert Wokler, “Conjectural History and Anthropology in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: EighteenthCentury Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31–52; and George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968). Ronald Meek focuses on the influence of four-stage theory on histories of society, with particular attention to Native Americans as exemplars of savagery (Social Science and the Ignoble Savage [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976]). My assessment of the limitations of an exclusive focus on fourstage theory accords with that of Mark Salber Phillips, who contends that the use of four-stage theory results in a “simplification” of the range and variety of conjectural histories (Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 172–73). If four-stage theory proves to be too narrow a base for an argument about the origins of the social disciplines, philosophical history consists of too large and diverse a set of works. Departing from dynastic, antiquarian, universal, or Christian providential history, philosophical history sought to give

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meaning to historical narratives through the recognition of general patterns, especially relations of cause and effect in the prosperity and power of nations. Philosophical history included speculative accounts, such as Montesquieu’s Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734), as well as historically documented accounts of individual people or nations, such as Hume’s History of England (1754–61), and works that combined these approaches, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) or Voltaire’s Essay on Manners and Morals (1756). Philosophical history was important for the shaping of thought in the social disciplines, because it was historicist, nonprovidential, and in search of logical patterns. However, philosophical history as a whole lacked what was most important and influential for the later disciplines—the inferential speculation practiced in conjectural history concerning times when historical records did not exist, the division of history into stages, and the account of transitions between prehistoric and historic ages. It is such conjectural narratives that provided the historical grounding for political economy, early anthropology, and sociology. Jean-Jacques Rousseau also wrote a work on the early history of languages— the Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781)—at the same time as, and originally as part of, the Discourse on Inequality. See Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses Together with the Replies to the Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 360. Other conjectural historians also wrote essays on the beginnings and early history of languages, including Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, who wrote Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92). In fact, speculative narratives of the steps by which articulate language came to be a faculty of humans, then were differentiated and distinguished, make up a genre that is closely cognate to or a subset of conjectural history, one that sometimes forms a part of a larger conjectural history, as in the case of Monboddo, and sometimes stands as an independent genre. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Matthew Lauzon, Signs of Light: French and British Theories of Linguistic Communication, 1648–1789 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bruce, and I. S. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 292–93.

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Many scholars have written on the nature and significance of conjectural history; I have indicated my particular points of agreement or divergence throughout this introduction. Gladys Bryson and Christopher J. Berry have shown how the social thought of the Scottish Enlightenment worked out an innovative and distinctive theory of society. See Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945); and Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Duncan Forbes mentions conjectural history only in passing, but his analysis of the Whiggism of Smith and Millar draws out features that are significant for the conjectural genre, including the “heterogeneity of ends,” or the idea of unintended consequences, and the rejection of social contract theory (“ ‘Scientific’ Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal 7 [1954]: 643–70). H. M. Höpfl discusses some of the characteristics of conjectural history, including the idea of unintended consequences and the possible combination of conjectural history and documentary history in a single work (“From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17 [1978]: 19–40). Wokler understands conjectural history as a European phenomenon (“Conjectural History and Anthropology in the Enlightenment”). J. G. A. Pocock argues for conjectural history as one of the genres that contributed to the establishment of the modern discipline of history (Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], and vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages, and Empires [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008]). Phillips has drawn attention to the distinctive features of the conjectural form by placing it in relation to other historical genres of the time (Society and Sentiment). Stewart, “Account,” 296. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 404. See also Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (1896; New York: Kelley and Millman, 1956). Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 1:25. Subsequent citations refer to this edition by volume and page number. Forbes, “ ‘Scientific’ Whiggism,” 658–67. For a valuable corrective to assertions of the essential optimism or progressivism of Enlightenment thought, see Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

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David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 2:180. The most noteworthy instance of this argument appears in John Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Although I do not share Burrow’s idea that conjectural history disappeared in the nineteenth century, his work established many relations between evolutionary thought in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, including early anthropological studies (see, for example, chapter 4 below). Friedrich Nietzsche refers to Rousseau as one of the very few thinkers he has had to reckon with—along with figures such as Plato, Montaigne, and Spinoza (“Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 299). On Nietzsche’s affinity with Enlightenment thinkers, which becomes pronounced in Human, All Too Human, see Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). This continuity with the Enlightenment persists through the rest of Nietzsche’s career, although he does not acknowledge the influence in his late works and instead devotes much of his energy to condemning, for example, Rousseau the early Romantic. Some scholars have written on the relation between Enlightenment conjectural history and the nineteenth-century social sciences. However, none discusses all or even most of the features of the genre for which I argue here, and all of their accounts remain partial or passing. Frederick Teggert discussed the widespread use of theoretical history in the late eighteenth century, and the influence of the “comparative method” derived from it on early anthropology and sociology (Theory of History [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925], 86–93). Burrow gives sustained attention to the afterlife of conjectural history (Evolution and Society). George Stocking discusses the importance of the “comparative method” in early anthropology (Victorian Anthropology [New York: Free Press, 1987]). Dorothy Ross, in writing of the matrix of Enlightenment thought from which the social sciences emerged, discusses many of the eighteenth-century conjectural histories (The Origins of American Social Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Mary Poovey has examined the role played by conjectural history as practiced by Adam Smith in the emergence of the fact in modern political economy (A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society

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[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]). Although not explicitly concerned with conjectural history, Gladys Bryson examined the gradual transformation of eighteenth-century moral philosophy into economics and political science in nineteenth-century American college courses (“The Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy,” International Journal of Ethics 42 [1931]: 304–23). Historians of sociology or anthropology sometimes cite an eighteenth-century conjectural historian as a predecessor or founder of the modern discipline (usually Rousseau for anthropology and Ferguson for sociology); however, these discussions remain focused on the influence of individual thinkers and do not concern the relation between conjectural form and the disciplines that reveal continuities with that form. Arthur Lovejoy, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). For analysis of the significance of the history of genres, Fredric Jameson provides a helpful precedent, although Jameson analyzes the fictional form of romance, not historical narrative (The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981], chapter 3). Despite his injunction to “always historicize,” Jameson’s chapter on romance does not always analyze the historical circumstances that contributed to transmutations in forms. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1993), 120. Sandra Herbert argues for the importance of Darwin’s work as a theorist, even though there was no role for a theoretical scientist in his time. See Herbert, “The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin’s Theory of Transformation,” part 1, Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 217–58; and part 2, Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 155–227. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 375. In a passage that works to a comparable effect, Rousseau considers the possibility that there might have been no human history. He imagines that the species might have persisted undisturbed in the ideal golden age between animality and civilization, speculating that the period of “the golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our own pride, must have been the happiest epoch and the most lasting. . . . Man can have left it only as the result of some fatal accident, which, for the common good, ought never to have happened” (Discourse on Inequality, 115). One could argue, following Heidegger’s suggestion, that the project of imagining the possibility of history

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also involves imagining the possibility of there having been no human history. If most nonhuman animals probably lack history and do not think historically, then investigating the passage from animal to human society may consist of tracing hypothetically the emergence of historical temporality among humans. (However, we are beginning to observe evidence that elephant and whale communities think somewhat historically, remembering previous losses and changing their cultural repertoires.) My understanding differs from that of Karl Löwith, who contends that modern historiography continues to be haunted by the linear, Christian historical narrative established by Augustine in opposition to the cyclical historical narratives of the classical world, as though these are the only alternative conceptions of historical time (Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949]). For example, the temporality of evolution, in which we can situate human history after Darwin, takes the form neither of a narrative of progress nor of a cyclical return of the same stages, but of a constant process involving the extinction of species and the emergence of others. Ernest Tuveson argues that the Christian idea of a millennial reign before the coming of a new paradise on earth provided a template for the modern, secular idea of utopia (Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949]). The newer form of thought grows out of the religious, specifically Christian form, even as it turns against and negates it, as is often the case, illustrating the Nietzsche–Darwin principle (discussed in chapter 5). Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 122. This decline in flexibility can be attributed partly to the increased importance of race for some of the later figures; see appendix 3. Peter Bogucki, Origins of Human Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 30, 47, 54, 67. See, for example, Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language (London: Wiley, 1994), which traces all languages back to a single language originating in the highlands of Central Asia—like Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who argues for a North Asian origin of humanity in History of Ancient Astronomy (1771), or several nineteenth-century hypotheses, including James C. Prichard’s, concerning the original Central Asian homeland of human beings (see chapter 4). Several contributors to Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and Stephen Brown, eds., The Origins of Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999) speculate valuably but on very thin evidence that the capacity for musical performance evolved

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in humans prior to the capacity for language; they agree on this point with Darwin’s and Diderot’s speculations (see chapter 5). See also Brian Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). On the uncertainties still attending our knowledge of the domestication of animals, see Juliet Clutton-Brock, Animals as Domesticates: A World View Through History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). Mary Douglas, “The Meaning of Myth, with Special Reference to ‘La Geste d’Asdiwal,’ ” in The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, ed. Edmund Leach (London, Tavistock, 1969), 49–70, 49. For theories of transition within the Marxian tradition that have implications for other modes of conjecturalist thought, see Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1997); and R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985). Further discussion of relevant theories of transition can be found in chapter 2 below, on Marx, and in chapter 6, on Weber. Even through the second half of the twentieth century, the dominant paradigm of economics has continued to understand national economies according to their placement in an invariant universal set of stages of development, and one of the chief aims of U.S. and World Bank international relations has been to enable or compel underdeveloped countries to join the developed. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). The literature on economic development, including studies of “underdevelopment” and critiques of such a framework, is extensive. Roger L. Emerson argues that a replacement of all religious presumptions by a scientistic method and perspective is already visible in Jeremy Bentham’s thought (“The Religious, the Secular, and the Worldly,” in Religion, Secularization, and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill, ed. James E. Crimmins [London: Routledge, 1989], 68–89). Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, and Victorian Anthropology. His discussions, however, tend to reduce conjectural history to the use of the comparative method. On possible consequences of the comparative method, see Johannes Fabian, who argues that the use of this method, which he considers endemic to anthropology, denies societies deemed underdeveloped contemporaneity with European societies (Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983]).

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I am not arguing that evolutionary theory in general depends on conjectural history, although the connection between The Origin of Species and conjectural history has been made by Silvan Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology 10, no. 2 (1977): 299–316. I argue in chapter 5 that in the Descent of Man Darwin addresses the paradigmatic problem of conjectural history—the early state and stages of human society— and employs both the form and the tools of the Enlightenment conjectural histories, referring to them in his preparatory notes for that work. James Buzard has observed the exploration in nineteenth-century British novels of difficulties in anthropological method that were not discussed theoretically in anthropological writings until decades later (Disorienting Fictions: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005]).

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Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 469. Wiktor Stoczkowski argues that modern conjectural and anthropological thought has repeated but added nothing new to the myths and speculations of the ancients concerning the prehistory of society: later conjectural, evolutionary, and anthropological accounts of the earliest human societies and their stages of development almost all conform to the paradigms established by traditional, common-sense anthropology, often traceable to ancient writers (Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination, and Conjecture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]). Although Stoczkowski’s provocative book pursues its thesis with unflagging determination, however, it unacceptably flattens out differences between ancient and modern authors by ignoring variations in meaning due to historical and cultural context over two and a half millennia, as well as the implications of the use of divergent forms and discourses. Arthur O. Lovejoy collects multifarious materials from antiquity to support a similar argument (Primitivism and Related Ideas [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935]). But he too elides differences, by grouping under the single term “primitivist” all passages that in any way assert the superiority of past periods of society over the author’s present, neglecting historical context, cultural resonance, supporting evidence, and the genre in which the passage was written. It does not suffice to assert that Anaximander and Darwin

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were evolutionists and that this single convergence outweighs the myriad relevant differences in their thought, their circumstances, what we can know about each man’s philosophy, and in what the evolutionism of each consisted. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 331–35. Samuel von Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books, trans. Basil Kennett, ed. Jean Barbeyrac (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2005 [1717]). Subsequent citations refer to this edition, by book, chapter, section, and page numbers. Istvan Hont traces the way that Pufendorf ’s revisions of Hobbes’s state of nature—incorporating commerce in the earliest stage, and distinguishing between the founding of society and of the state—prepared the way for the stadial narratives of the Scottish Enlightenment. (“The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory,’” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005], 159–84). Hont’s essay was originally published in a shorter form in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–76. I do not conceive of conjectural history as being limited to accounts that specify exactly four stages based on means of subsistence; this conception of the genre as “four-stage theory” owes much to Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). On the theological underpinnings of Pufendorf ’s natural jurisprudence and its role in histories of early society in the Scottish Enlightenment, see James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, “Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 73–87. In support of this picture of earliest man, Pufendorf cites Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, bk. 5, and refers as well to the similar account of Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, bk. 1, ch. 5. Pufendorf thus maintains a thesis that has only recently regained currency, as a result of work in contemporary evolutionary biology: that humans more often benefit from being honest and loyal than from cheating and lying (Of the Law of Nature, 4:4.2, 145). For a synthesis of work with this implication, from the final third of the twentieth century, see Frans de Waal,

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Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). In The Whole Duty of Man (1675), his condensation of the Law of Nature, Pufendorf further loosens the contractual framework in his account by ascribing the formation of societies larger than the family to an inherent sociability that prompts men to be on good terms with their neighbors instead of regarding them as enemies (bk. 2, ch. 1)(The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003], 168–74). Vico thus indicates the speculative nature of his history and the paucity of evidence on which it is based, consisting mostly of imaginative, often strained etymologies of Latin words and phrases. In this, his practice resembles that of Friedrich Nietzsche, in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1888), a later conjectural history; see chapter 5 in this book. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), para. 523–31. The early appearance in Vico’s account of the division between the strong and the weak parallels the originary status of this opposition in Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), essay 1. The concept of the cyclopean family is based on the isolated, primitive, cavedwelling single families of Cyclopes, as depicted, for example, in the Odyssey. The cyclopean family also figures as the first stage of human society in Henry Maine’s influential history of Roman law, Ancient Law (1861). See chapter 6. Mark Lilla argues that, from his earliest works through the final New Science, Vico is committed to a view of history in which providence exercises a directing hand, shaping human nature for beneficial results (G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]). On this account, New Science falls short of providing a naturalistic account of the genesis and course of human societies. Leon Pompa characterizes one of Vico’s many cryptic statements about the world of gentile history as a “strange mixture of claims,” which asserts that the historical world is created by man but also that it is the work of a superhuman mind that acts for human ends (Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 161). Karl Löwith argues that Vico “never intended to discard revelation,” but for Löwith this retention of providence somehow balances perfectly with a history of merely human actors, so that Vico combines theology and philosophy of history in a way that is not

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matched by any modern historical thinker (Meaning in History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949], 135). James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36) provides another instance, nearly contemporaneous with Vico’s, of the idea that societies develop from primitive beginnings through stages to a possible state of luxury and decline, after which the cycle begins again in another country (Liberty, part II: “Greece,” in Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], lines 3–85, 391–420). Bernard Mandeville’s narrative, in contrast, is notable for breaking the Polybian cyclical or helical return from luxury or corruption to a newly primitive state. I am in agreement with Mikko Tolonen, who considers Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, part 2, a conjectural history and discusses Mandeville’s account of the unintended, noncontractual development of society through stages over a lengthy period of time (Mandeville and Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013], 77–99). My emphasis here is on Mandeville as the first thinker to put together the elements of the form that we now recognize as conjectural history. Mark Salber Phillips stresses the importance of gradual change over long spans of time in conjectural history (Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 173–79). Malcolm Jack also draws attention to Mandeville’s emphasis on the extreme length of time required for the gradual processes of socialization of early humankind, and emphasizes the relation of Mandeville’s account of early men to European travel narratives of the preceding two centuries (Corruption and Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate [New York: AMS, 1989], 53–62). Jack’s analysis of Mandeville valuably places Fable of the Bees, part 2, in relation to a pair of later conjectural histories that see social development as a deeply ambiguous process of both progress and decline—Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F.  B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1988), 2:231. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Martin Otero Knott emphasizes Mandeville’s shift away from “theoretical stories” of social contracts to a “conjecturally speculative . . . history of society” in the Fable of the Bees, part 2 (“Mandeville on Governability,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12 no. 1 [2014]: 19–49, 40).

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J. A. W. Gunn argues that Mandeville does not deny the existence of providence as the ground for the “mysterious realm of origins” or the ultimate answer to the problem of good and evil in the world (“Mandeville and Wither: Individualism and the Workings of Providence,” in Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville, ed. Irwin Primer [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975], 98–118, 117). Even if granted, this is a very attenuated concept of providence, especially when compared with the prominence of the concept in thinkers such as Vico or, among later conjectural historians, Kames and Herder. E. J. Hundert argues for the naturalistic character of Mandeville’s analysis (The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 84, 113). For instance: “The origin of speech must have been to satisfy wants” (Mandeville, Fable, 2:289). On the idea of the “Norman yoke” as an imposition of feudal law on a more egalitarian regime of Anglo-Saxons, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). See the related passage from the Essay on the Origin of Language, a conjectural history that grew out of the Discourse on Inequality: “He who willed man to be sociable inclined the globe’s axis at an angle to the axis of the universe with a touch of the finger. With this slight motion I see the face of the earth change;  .  .  . I see Palaces and Cities raised; I see the birth of the arts, laws, commerce; . . . I see men clustered in a few points of their habitation in order there to devour one another” ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 273). With the inclining of the axis, season succeeded season and times began to unroll. It is difficult not to see this as the invisible finger of the divinity, determining that historical change will now occur and that the human world will progressively decline into civilization. Hume is one of the few conjectural historians who makes almost no use of proto-ethnographic material from travelers’ narratives but instead relies predominantly on ancient sources for his historical inferences. In doing so, he follows a satiric pattern I have analyzed in Satire in Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 154. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.

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This is the same position that E. B. Tylor will take in the conclusion of Primitive Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1958); see chapter 4 of this book. The skeptic Philo in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; London: Penguin, 1990) similarly implies that only by maintaining a distance from all theism, deism, and organized religion can one avoid the irrationalities and delusions of beliefs concerning powers beyond human ken. Just as Rousseau’s First Discourse, although not a conjectural history itself, provides a basis and rationale for the Discourse on Inequality, so too can Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, already written in the early 1750s but only published posthumously, serve as a basis and confirmation of the Natural History of Religion. Hume’s two works on natural religion converge on the same ironic positions. For discussion of an influential early Enlightenment work on the religions of the world, see Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book that Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The Treatise of the Three Imposters, an anonymous underground work (sometimes attributed to Spinoza) stands as a locus classicus of this kind of accusation; the imposters of the title are Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. On the complex history of this text, its attribution, and its influences, see Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, and Richard H. Popkin, eds., Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe: Studies on the Traité des trois imposteurs (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996). Martin Bell, introduction, in David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London: Penguin, 1990), 2. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 1:456. Hegel’s ruses of reason take the place of providence in a less figurative way than the hidden hand in Smith, because Hegel identifies reason with the real and the absolute (see appendix 2 below). Roger L. Emerson contends that between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, the role of religious revelation in the explanatory frameworks of Scottish intellectuals shifted from dominant and explicit to secondary and implicit (“The Religious, the Secular, and the Worldly: Scotland, 1680–1800,” in Religion, Secularization, and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill, ed. James E. Crimmons [New York: Routledge, 1989], 68–89). Mary Poovey also argues for a change from an explicit to an implicit

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acceptance of the workings of providence in the late eighteenth-century Scottish conjectural histories (A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]). Phillips observes that, in its effects, Kames’s theodicy resembles the functionalist assumptions of twentieth-century sociology (we might add, anthropology): in these theories, every social arrangement, including what appears most insignificant, serves a necessary purpose (Society and Sentiment, 129). Although Poovey considers Kames’s strong providentialism typical of conjectural history, it is actually unrepresentative and makes Kames an outlier among conjectural historians (History of the Modern Fact, 227–28). The positions of the conjectural historians do not entirely align with what is known of their religious positions from their biographies. Robertson was a moderate Presbyterian minister, but as a conjectural historian he kept his historical narratives apart from his religious commitments. On the Moderates in the Church of Scotland, see Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). A fact neglected by those who characterize conjectural history as “four-stage theory.” On Ferguson, see William Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930); David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965); Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); and Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: The Social, Political, and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 108–9. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. On the ethnocentrism of stadial history in the Scottish Enlightenment, including Ferguson’s, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages, and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4:174. We should note, however, that Ferguson’s position is not racist. For example, he makes an exception among Africans for the Hottentots, whom he considers to be virtuous barbarians, seeking a life of freedom and liberty. See Hume’s early essay “Of Luxury” (1742), renamed in later editions “Of Refinement in the Arts.” On the related shift in the eighteenth century from the pursuit of self-interest as an indulgence of the passions to the sanctioning

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of self-interest, see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). On the civic humanist argument that the whole skill of statecraft consists of preventing republican virtue from relaxing and degenerating into despotism and loss of self-rule, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Hume did not work with a concept of fetishism; that concept was developed by Charles de Brosses a few years after Hume’s Natural History of Religion. In The Cult of the Fetish Gods (1760), de Brosses assimilates the worship of manmade objects in African societies to the worship of material objects and powers in ancient Greece and Egypt. De Brosses’s book had the effect of establishing a previously unacknowledged affinity between ancestral forms of European religions and the religious practices of sub-Saharan Africans. The large stone fetishes worshipped by ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Africans are equivalent to the boetiles recognized a few years later by Pierre François d’Hancarville and Ottaviano di Guasco as the earliest artistic representations of divinities. Johann Gottfried von Herder groups together conjectural and philosophical historians when he exclaims, “Hume!, Voltaire!, Robertson!, model all centuries after the one form of their time” (“This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity,” in Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 272–359, 296). Rebukes of Hume, Robertson, and Voltaire become a refrain of the work, appearing at 307, 312, 328. On Herder, see Meineke, Historism, 322–61; F. M. Bernard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); and Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1976). David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), 465–87. On the unplanned nature of social development, see Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); and Istvan Hont, “Adam Smith and the Political Economy of the ‘Unnatural and Retrograde’ Order,” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 354–88.

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In this work, Rousseau does participate in the natural law tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Pufendorf, imagining a single historical contract that binds together the people of a society. It is not uncommon for an author to maintain divergent views in works cast in different genres. Genres help shape the meanings and implications of authors, who choose the genres and the uses they make of them. Social Contract is a work of social contract theory, natural law, and utopian imagination, while the Discourse on Inequality is a conjectural history. On Ferguson, see Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 6–7. On Robertson, see Jeffrey Smitten, “Impartiality in Robertson’s History of America,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985): 56–77; Nicholas Phillipson, introduction, in The Works of William Robertson, ed. Richard Sher (London: Routledge, 1996); and Stewart J. Brown, ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). James Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995), 151, 440–41. On ideas of progress, see J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Dover, 1955); Peter Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Gabriel Almond, Marvin Chodorow, and Roy Harvey Pearce, Progress and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994). Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, 174. On Millar, see Duncan Forbes, “ ‘Scientific’ Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal 7 (1954): 643–70; and Mark Salber Phillips, introduction, in John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, ed. Mark Salber Phillips and Dale R. Smith, 4 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 2006). Following Millar, William Alexander wrote The History of Women (1779), which possesses some features of a conjectural history; it collects information about women in societies around the world, and attempts to trace the different views of women, and their specific virtues in different periods. Lucy Aikins’s four Epistles on Women (1810) adopt a more polemical and ironic tone in a similar survey of women’s condition in different historical states. Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 111–37; originally published eight years before Turgot’s inaugural oration.

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Many of the dark corollaries of individualistic, commercial society are developed by Hegel, in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, and more emphatically by Marx, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Capital. On the relation between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the Scottish social thinkers, see Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of Civil Society (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). Such an oscillation might seem to resemble Vico’s cyclical history, except that in The New Science the recourse is inevitable; it cannot be held off by civic virtue. Moreover, the ricorso returns a society to the very beginning, the condition of human animals before entering on a new savagery, whereas Ferguson’s society would presumably regress merely to a condition of barbarism. Weber writes of the advent of a similar re-barbarization in his own time in the concluding paragraphs of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. On Kant’s view of history, see William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); and H. S. Reiss, introduction, in Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On his critical attitude toward empire, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Ironically, however, in Nietzsche’s middle period—the one least celebratory of barbarian violence—he did praise and identify his project with that of the Enlightenment, even going so far as to dedicate Human, All Too Human to Voltaire. See Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). The late Genealogy of Morality remains very close to the Enlightenment in its form, as a modern conjectural history. The essay in question was almost certainly written first by Horkheimer, but Adorno asserted that every sentence in their collaborative works was endorsed by both authors. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 221–24. Robert Norton makes a strong argument that Berlin’s idea of the CounterEnlightenment is an inaccurate caricature (“The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 [2007]: 635–58). On Diderot, Herder, and Kant as anticolonial thinkers, see Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire.

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In appendix 3, I examine in detail and contest the charge that the Enlightenment conjectural histories were racist and as such generated the “scientific” racism of the nineteenth century. This near omission was noted by Elena Russo and others on the panel on Radical Enlightenment at the 2013 MLA convention. In the final three pages of his book, Jonathan Israel discusses Rousseau as both radical and mainstream (Radical Enlightenment [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 718–20). It is also striking that American Enlightenment figures such as Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Paine make no appearance in Radical Enlightenment. In the last few years of his life, Michel Foucault felt that Jürgen Habermas was at that time demanding that one either explicitly accept certain doctrines of the Enlightenment or stand accused of being irrationalist, nihilist, or conservative. See James Tully, “To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Theory,” in Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999), 90–143. D’Hancarville’s first two volumes are dated 1766 and 1767 but actually appeared in 1767 and 1769; his last two volumes are dated 1767 but appeared in 1776. On Guasco and especially d’Hancarville, I am indebted to Noah Heringman, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapters 5 and 6. Ottaviano di Guasco, De l’usage des statues (Brussels, 1768), 135. Pierre François d’Hancarville, Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities, 2:24; see also 3:123, 3:130. Guasco, De l’usage, 483. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, History of Ancient Astronomy (1771), 61–96. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Les époques de la nature, in Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 1193–1342. Bailly would later identify the Hyperboreans as Atlanteans. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, essay 2, section 12.

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Adam Smith uses the phrase “the invisible hand” only once in The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), in book 4, chapter 2, 1:456.

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T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Patricia James, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1:315. Subsequent citations refer to this variorum edition, which is based on the 1803 second edition. Mary Poovey also observes that conjecture is the object of Malthus’s harshest condemnations (A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 285). Malthus considers the practice only once, briefly, in an appendix to the fifth edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1817): “I have never adverted to the check suggested by Condorcet without the most marked disapprobation. Indeed, I should always particularly reprobate any artificial and unnatural modes of checking population, both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry.” He specifies his reason for opposing family planning: “If it were possible for each married couple to limit by a wish the number of their children there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be greatly increased” (2:235). Malthus did not want to limit the number of children through contraception because he believed that human beings would not work hard unless they had to struggle to survive. Poovey has analyzed Malthus’s Principle of Population with an eye to both conjectural history and political economy; she draws attention to the extent to which, beginning with the second edition, Malthus appealed to numbers and tables, mostly in book 2, and gave reduced emphasis to or abandoned his theodicy. She ascribes the scandal provoked by the second and later editions of the Principle of Population to the implication that numbers could be used in a way divorced from theory or religion (History of the Modern Fact, 278–95). My focus is on Malthus’s use of historical evidence in book 1, and, in my understanding, Malthus’s passage condemning the use of birth control indicates that he did not entirely abandon his theodicy. This reading is confirmed by the contents of the Principle of Population, book 2, “Of the Checks to Population in the Different States of Modern Europe,” in which Malthus surveys the civilized societies of northern Europe, relying in these cases on written laws and other documents. This nonconjectural survey aims to show the same checks working against population growth in modern European societies as among savage and barbarian peoples. Karl Marx criticized Malthus on the ground that he merely “asserted” the fact of overpopulation in all societies but did not prove it, “for there is nothing more uncritical than his motley compilations from historians and travelers’ descriptions” (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus [New York: Penguin, 1973], 605).

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(Marx is another thinker who attacks the use of conjectural history by others, even though he makes use of the form himself.) Malthus rarely takes notice of the questionable nature of the authorities he cites (and often quotes verbatim without indicating that he is doing so). On one of those exceptional occasions, after acknowledging in a note inconsistencies between the accounts of Africa in Mungo Park and in Buffon, he asserts without explanation that Park’s observations in his Interior of Africa (1799) are more credible than those of any earlier travelers to that continent (Principle of Population, 1:88). “Although his illustrations and proofs have a first appearance of careful inductive work, the basis of all his ideas is the postulate of the geometrical ratio which he does not find in practice. Thus he does not go to work to test a hypothesis so much as to bolster up a theory. He uses his illustrations to show the existence of checks, but, since his classification of the checks is unscientific and defective, the method is neither useful nor instructive” (Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951], 331). Poovey considers that Malthus did not have the tools in his cultural repertoire that would enable him to make the numbers he used comprise more than ad hoc illustrations of an already formulated thesis; the connection between the numbers and the general point was not clear (History of the Modern Fact, 292). William Robertson, History of America (Paris, 1828), 167. Subsequent citations refer to this edition, which prints four volumes in one. Lafitau’s work also was a frequent source for Adam Ferguson, on the virtues of the barbarian peoples in diverse parts of the world and in different eras. In other ways, too, Malthus’s argument from authorities displays some peculiar features. For example, he places established and authoritative naturalists such as Peter Pallas (on Russia) and Paul Mallet (on Denmark), or accomplished and credible explorers such as Cook, the Comte de La Pérouse, and George Vancouver (concerning the South Seas and the Pacific) on the same level with voyagers who, even in their own time, were considered unreliable because of their exaggerations, self-promotion, and even fabrications, such as John Meares (on the Pacific), James Bruce (on Africa), and Father Louis Hennepin (on North America). For evidence of Roman women’s practice of abortion—and to support the charge of their promiscuity—Malthus cites Juvenal’s Satire 6, which charges Roman women with almost every conceivable vice. The luridly misogynous Juvenal is not usually considered a reliable source about the historical behavior of Roman women.

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Among the many ironies that attend the Principle of Population, one is that Malthus’s conjectural history of population in “savage” and “barbarian” societies may now be seen to have more validity than does the application of his principle of population, using numerical evidence, to European societies of his own day or later. According to Donald Winch, demographers are willing to grant that Malthus “provides a valuable guide to the behavior of population in preindustrial societies,” but, Winch points out, this adds (yet another) “historical irony to his career: his views were published just as they were about to be made irrelevant, first by the industrial revolution, the discovery of non-land-using raw materials, and the subsequent fall in the price of foodstuffs, . . . and later by the more widespread use of contraceptive methods. The Malthusian trap was escaped by two exits” (Malthus [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], 95). Poovey makes a parallel argument that Malthus’s method is a transitional one, between the abstract, generalizing reasoning of the eighteenth century and the statistical accounting of the nineteenth century (History of the Modern Fact, 288). Poovey also points out the role of conjectural history in offering hope for change in social institutions in the future (ibid., 270, 273). Mark Blaug points out Martineau’s lack of interest in distinguishing among the positions of various political economists (Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958], 131). The question of the genres in which Martineau’s tales participate has been the subject of some fruitful discussion. Catherine Gallagher considers that Martineau uses tragedy as a generic model for her tales, although it is a modified, optimistic kind of tragedy (The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 54). In Elaine Freedgood’s view, Martineau writes tragedy repackaged as error, making her Illustrations a series of “tranquilizing tales” (“Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” Victorian Studies 39 [1995], 33–53, 35). In “Banishing Panic,” Freedgood argues, by contrast, that the initial attack by the Bushmen calls into question the virtue of the Englishmen as well as the imperial project. Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy, ed. Deborah Anna Logan (Peterborough: Broadview, 2004), 159. Even if the number of people in workers’ families did implausibly double each year, the additional numbers would still be infants or children and not wage

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workers for at least seven or eight years, so the number of workers would not increase at the same rate as the number of births to workers. Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy, 169. Apparently it is only Adam’s workers who have to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, and not the first man himself, who actually ate of some forbidden fruit. Gallagher notes a similar discrepancy in Martineau’s tales between the often tragic events of the plot and the placid or even cheerful tone of the narrative (Industrial Reformation, 60). Freedgood argues that the tales in Illustrations have the paradoxical quality of “realist myths” (“Banishing Panic,” 35–36). As Gallagher points out, the outcome of the strike and its effect on Allen are not economically determined but are represented as necessary (Industrial Reformation, 59). Deirdre David argues that Martineau exhibits an interest in webs of social connection that anticipates George Eliot’s (Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987], 50). Catherine Gallagher analyzes the workings of Malthusian themes in important novels in this line (The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008]). For instance, Mill disagreed with Martineau’s condemnation of the Poor Laws. His review appeared in the Monthly Repository 8 (1834): 318–22; it is excerpted in Martineau, Illustrations, 430–31. John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, trans. and ed. Oscar A. Haac (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 35–69. John Stuart Mill, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1866), 59, 61, 75. Ibid., 99. On James Mill’s acquaintance with philosophical and conjectural history, see J. H. Burns, “The Light of Reason: Philosophical History in the Two Mills,” in James and John Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference, ed. J.  M. Robson and M. Laine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 3–20; and Jane Rendell, “Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 43–69. Burns notes that James Mill referred to John Millar’s philosophical history of all aspects of a culture as a pioneering effort that should serve as a model for later historians. Burns argues that, in his History of British India, James Mill aspired to write a philosophical history of Hindu

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culture and institutions. Both Burns and Rendell see the project as one that did not realize its ambitions because of Mill’s dogmatic anti-Hindu attitude. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 11. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Rousseau had associated metal working and the introduction of inequality with the slightly later stage of agriculture (A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston [New York: Penguin, 1984], 116). Although Mill disputes the inevitability of Malthus’s differential ratios of growth, he shows the influence of Malthus by echoing him in passages such as these. Unlike Malthus, Mill did not consider the use of birth control to be a vice, although after he was arrested for distributing literature on the subject when he was seventeen, he did not express his views in public. On Mill’s early activities in support of birth control, see W. W. Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 92. Abram Harris discusses Mill’s attitude toward a stationary state (“John Stuart Mill’s Theory of Progress,” Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 66 [1956]: 157–75, 163). See also Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth, 101, 116–17. “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for one to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology [New York: International Publishers, 1988], 53). See also Lewis Henry Morgan’s conclusion that “a mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind” (Ancient Society [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000], 552). See also the related passage from Chapters on Socialism: “There would be no ground for complaint against society if every one who was willing to undergo a fair share of this [necessary] labour and abstinence from enjoyments could attain a fair share of the fruits. But . . . the reward, instead of being proportioned to the labour and abstinence of the individual, is almost in an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labour and abstain the most.  .  .  . The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions

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of romance” ( John Stuart Mill, Chapters on Socialism, in On Liberty and Other Writings [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 231). On Mill’s views concerning workers’ associations, see Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 769–94; and Chapters on Socialism, 267–68; and Harris, “John Stuart Mill’s Theory of Progress,” 162. Mill’s attitude was not only conjectural or utopian. It had an empirical basis—in, for example, the descriptions of established workers’ cooperatives in the later editions of the Principles of Political Economy—and an experimental side as well: at the conclusion of one of the chapters on socialism, he maintains that socialism deserves to be studied and tested on a small scale and in various forms in order to ameliorate the injustices of the commercial system (Chapters on Socialism, 259). In Amos Witztum’s reading, Mill believes that the associations of laborers will eventually be realized because people will find others to be trustworthy and society will become less competitive and more cooperative (“Economic Sociology: The Recursive Economic System of J. S. Mill,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 27 [2005]: 251–81, 279). John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in On Liberty and Other Writings, 13–14. Marx does criticize Mill for separating production from distribution and for underestimating the human role in deciding the latter (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [Chicago: Kerr, 1904]); in the Grundrisse he calls Malthus a “baboon” (606). In the French translation of Capital (1872–75), Marx added a sentence to the section on primitive accumulation, confining to the societies of Western Europe his account of the transition to capitalism. He thus leaves open the possibility that he explores in the Ethnological Notebooks (written 1879–81) of another line of historical development and a different sequence of economic and social stages in non-European societies (The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972]). In such a historical vision, societies outside Europe need not be consigned to a condition of belatedness, and a slower pace of ascent up the single ladder of progress. On the condition of historical belatedness, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Marx, Contribution, 13. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 42–43. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:1.

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A focus on defining the modern and tracing its emergence persists in many conjecturalist works in the social sciences. This concentration is associated with the thesis that secularization is a constitutive and beneficial element of the modern world. This is not a thesis of the political economists, although a critique of religion constitutes an important part of Marx’s critique of ideology. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx criticizes Smith, Rousseau, and other eighteenth-century historians for having begun with an individual, although the individual is a product of a definite and late social form. This criticism applies to Rousseau, but it is not justified with regard to Smith, Ferguson, and the other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, in whose works humans are strongly social beings from the beginning. However, if Marx intends to criticize the individualistic but universalizing psychology of Hume, Smith, and many of the other Scots, the point is well taken. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:873. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Étienne Balibar makes an influential argument for the importance of a theory of transitions for a theory of periods (Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading “Capital ,” trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Verso, 1997], 300–301, 340–44). In Balibar’s reading, what constitutes a transition is a torsion or twisting, a lack of congruence or alignment between relations of production and institutions of society and culture. The objection could be made that every historical moment is transitional because each contains remnants of earlier forms alongside the most recent or emerging forms of production. Marx refers to a telling incident in the nineteenth century when a man thought that he could carry capitalist relations with workers to Australia, shipping three thousand workers, cash, tools, and machinery for a new factory in the colony. However, once they arrived, the workers discovered that they were not dependent on wages in the British colony; they could walk away and start small farms on their own land (appropriated from the indigenous peoples), and so they did. The would-be founding father was left with no hands to hire, no business, and no new community, because he did not realize that the poor English workers were not constrained in the new colony as they were in England, where there was no land to be had for free, and no way of living except by wages (Capital, 1:909). Marx, Grundrisse, 468. Subsequent citations refer to the Penguin edition. These parallels are especially strong with Ferguson, Smith, and Millar.

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For the importance of the pastoral stage for the stadial philosophical and natural historians of the Enlightenment, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages, and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 176. Engels will develop the characterization of this era of primitive communal ownership in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). The resemblance between this stage and the earliest stage of social life in Rousseau’s conjectural history is strong, especially considering that Rousseau ascribes the fall from this state of greater integrity to the institution of private property: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” (Discourse on Inequality, 109). Joseph de Guignes, General History of the Huns, Turks, Mongols, and Other Western Tartars (1756); Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, Oriental Despotism (1762). For examples of position statements in this controversy, see Anne M. Bailey and Josep R. Llobera, eds., The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). See also Lawrence Krader, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development, and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975); Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Stephen Dunn, The Rise and Fall of the Asiatic Mode of Production (London: Routledge, 1982). As we will see in chapter 4, in the Ethnological Notebooks, Marx revised and rejected the notion of an Asiatic mode of production linked to “Oriental despotism” in favor of seeing non-European—especially Native North American, Indian, and Russian—forms of communal ownership as alternate lines of development. Engels, however, in the penultimate chapter of Origin of the Family, does consider the Germanic form of social and political organization to be an expression of what will become the German nation. For a strong discussion of this point, see Hindess and Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, 54, 62. Unless one understands “historical materialism” as the chess player hidden in the machine, as Walter Benjamin does (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken, 1968], 253–64).

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One can argue that, in the Ethnological Notebooks, Marx uses the “Asiatic” mode to designate a diverse range of non-European modes of land ownership and social organization, including survivals or varieties of communal ownership that might have allowed for a transition to communism without the need to go through a full-blown capitalist phase as in Western Europe. The notable exception to this pattern was Alfred Marshall. Although he became the dominant British economist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he retained a concern with historical evidence and patterns of development, in both The Economics of Industry (1879) and Principles of Economics (1890). See Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth, 185–86.

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Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945); Donald MacRae, “Adam Ferguson,” in Founding Fathers of Sociology, ed. T. Raison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 17–36; Alan Swingewood, “Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment,” British Journal of Sociology 21 (1970): 164–80; and A Short History of Sociological Thought (London: Macmillan, 1984); Lynn McDonald, The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 1993); Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). William Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930). Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Robert Wokler, “Repatriating Modernity’s Alleged Debts to the Enlightenment: French Revolutionary Social Science and the Genesis of the Nation State,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2002), 62–80. Wokler also examines the French Revolution as a watershed in social and political thought (“Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 325–38). Henri de Saint-Simon, Social Organization, the Science of Man, and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Felix Markham (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), xliv. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Marx’s praise is quoted in Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (London: Marxist-Leninist Institute, 1943), 30.

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On the combination of a cyclical with a progressive movement in Saint-Simon’s philosophy of history, see Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri St. Simon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 219–20. “All sciences were originally conjectural; their destiny is to become positive” (Saint-Simon, Social Organization, 22). Almost fifty years later, in the concluding lines of Primitive Culture (1871), the founding text of social anthropology, E. B. Tylor will make the same claim concerning his new field. See chapter 4. On Comte’s bitter separation from Saint-Simon, see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 718. Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, ou traité de sociologie [System of Positive Polity], 4 vols. (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1967 [1881]), 4:48. Translations from this work are mine. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Comte also criticizes Condorcet for having considered the entire feudal and theological establishment only as an obstacle to the progress of science, rather than as an accomplishment in its own right. It is for this reason that I do not include Montesquieu among the Enlightenment conjectural historians. In fact, Comte proposes giving substantial property to men of scientific accomplishment or promise, to enfranchise them and give them a stake in the smooth and successful working of the system. Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy, in The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau, 3 vols. (1853), 3:133. Subsequent citations refer to this translation and condensation of the Course of Positive Philosophy, endorsed by Comte in his Library of Positivism. Quoted in Howard Becker and Harry Elmer Barnes, Social Thought from Lore to Science (New York: Dover, 1961 [1938]), 2:585. Becker and Barnes note Comte’s rejection of a founding contract (ibid., 2:577). On this point, see Peter Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 32–33. Logan points out that George Eliot places a comparable emphasis on the role of imagination in science in her novels (“Conceiving the Body: Realism and Medicine in Middlemarch,” History of the Human Sciences 4, no. 2 [1991]: 197–222). Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (New York: Noonday, 1955), 57–58.

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Kenneth Thompson, ed., Auguste Comte: The Foundation of Sociology (London: Nelson, 1976), 154, 156, and 163. Along with so many views that they held in common, Frank Manuel discusses this striking contrast between the attitudes of Comte and Condorcet toward religion in general and Christianity in particular (Prophets of Paris [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962], 282–83). Much of the material in the chapters on Condorcet and on Comte in Prophets of Paris also appears in Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 486–518, 717–34. One wonders about Martineau’s reactions when she was translating Comte’s condemnation of those who, like herself, insist on the inescapability of the laws of the market. Comte says that such thinkers write “as though the prospects of employment in the future are of any use to those unemployed now” (Course of Positive Philosophy, 2:209). Whatever her disagreements with it were, Martineau deserves credit for including the passage in her translation; she could easily have omitted it from her selections. The Natural History of Religion does not figure among the works in the library because Comte believes it is oxymoronic to speak of natural religion; all religion is based on the supernatural. Also, tellingly, Rousseau finds no place among the classics of Positivism; for Comte, his writings embody in a virulent form the anarchic thought of modern individualism. Auguste Comte, Catéchisme positiviste (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1909), 338–39. Thus, like de Brosses in On the Cult of the Fetish Gods (1760), Comte conceives of a convergence between primitive fetishism and civilized European culture—the myths of the Greeks, in de Brosses, and the coming age of Positivism, for Comte. Logan discusses the importance of fetishism for Comte, and the importance of Comte’s thoughts on fetishism for Victorian thinkers and writers (Victorian Fetishism, 34–35). See the conclusion of this book for a discussion of Robert Bellah’s recent writing on the importance of music and dance in the origins of religion and culture (Religion and Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011]). For a theory that also accords paramount importance to fetishistic and polytheistic forms of religion, although with a contrary evaluation of these religious varieties, see the discussion of Tylor’s Primitive Culture in chapter 4. George Eliot emphasized and valued this element in System of Positive Polity. See T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 57.

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The resemblance between Comte’s ideal polity and the gnostic traditions is strong. Later medieval sects such as the Cathars would provide instances of the elevation of a sexless life for all of the Pure. Although artificial insemination has not led to the elevation of women as objects of adoration, reproductive technologies, including birth control, have in most prosperous countries placed more of the decision about having children in the hands of women, and have contributed to a declining increase in population. Nongovernmental organizations argue that one of the most effective ways to alleviate poverty and slow population growth is to raise the status of women through education and to bring them an awareness of their reproductive choices. In his analysis of Comte’s thought, Manuel stresses that Comte’s system came more and more to adopt Catholic forms devoid of Christian content (Prophets of Paris, 249–96). Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, ed. Stanislav Andreski (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1969), 150. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Herbert Spencer, “The Great Political Superstition,” in The Man Versus the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168. By arguing for a continuity between the forces that have produced the stars and the earth and those that have shaped the history of life, and especially human social life, Spencer’s nonprovidential sociological vision bears a strong analogy with Herder’s ultimately providential understanding of the growth of all things to realize their inner nature. See Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind, trans. T. O. Churchill (London, 1800). However, Spencer argued that some “early” societies exhibited an “industrial”— that is, a peaceful and nonaggressive—type of organization. See John Offer, Herbert Spencer and Social Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 227, 233. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Appleton, 1882), 143–45. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Sidney Eisen analyzes the intense and even “neurotic” nature of Spencer’s denial of indebtedness to Comte (“Herbert Spencer and the Specter of Comte,” in Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, ed. John Offer, 4 vols. [London: Routledge, 2000], 2:227–45). Part of the problem was that Spencer had not read Comte’s works; when he thought he was distinguishing his position from Comte’s, he was often agreeing with him, as John Stuart Mill pointed out to Spencer. As will be discussed in chapter 5, Spencer’s relation to Comte—his agreement under claims of disagreement—rests on the same basis as Nietzsche’s relation to Darwin: Spencer had not read Comte and Nietzsche had not read Darwin.

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Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: Appleton, 1874), 308. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119. Herbert Spencer, “The Coming Slavery,” in Man Versus the State, 86. In a significant convergence, both Comte and Spencer agree with Condorcet that increasing population will not derail the continued progress of humankind, and both dispute Malthus’s contention that the majority of people will always have to live on the edge of starvation. See Thompson, ed., Auguste Comte, 156–58; and Herbert Spencer, On Social Evolution, ed. J.  D.  Y. Peel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 50. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) was one of the first narratives to grasp and illustrate the seeming paradox that the success of the prosperous would lead to the maladaptation of the species through their offspring, whereas the challenges faced by workers, the poor, and their offspring hone the intelligence, increase the strength, and harden the endurance of those who survive to reproductive age. Raymond Williams also makes this observation about Wells (“Social Darwinism,” in Herbert Spencer, ed. Offer, 2:195). As T. H. Huxley points out, Spencer’s vision of an evolution toward greater complexity and heterogeneity throughout the cosmos might consistently lead to a view of society as a highly and centrally organized unit rather than as a collection of atomized individuals. Offer discusses contemporaneous commentators, including Huxley, who believed that Spencer’s view of society as an organism did not cohere with his highly individualistic view (Herbert Spencer and Social Theory, 214–21). Charles Darwin wrote that Spencer’s “deductive manner of treating every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me: and over and over again I have said to myself after reading one of his discussions,—‘Here would be a fine subject for half-a-dozen years’ work’ ” (Autobiography [New York: Norton, 1958], 108–9). Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker, December 10, 1866, in Charles Darwin, Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (London, 1888), 55–56. Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” in Herbert Spencer, ed. Offer, 2:5–27. In letters to Darwin, Hooker referred to Spencer as he of “the awfully long words,” who was “not a small bore” (2:23).

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For discussion of this concept of survivals, see Margaret Hodgen, The Doctrine of Survivals (London: Allenson, 1936). Spencer maintained this anticolonial position throughout his career. See, for example, his condemnation of the colonial expeditions of the Americans, the French, and the British, for their “repulsive likeness to the doings of buccaneers” (Social Statics, 393). In a similar passage on the “diabolical” cruelties of the Europeans in America against their peaceful and friendly hosts, Spencer quotes Washington Irving, who confesses to “a momentary doubt whether the arbitrary appellation of savage is always applied to the right party” (Study of Sociology, 212). Spencer’s own doubts were more than momentary. In his persistent, sharp, and sometimes satiric condemnation of war and colonialism, Spencer echoes Kant’s judgment, and his anticipation of a peaceful future guaranteed by a nonaggression pact among nation-states echoes Kant’s vision of the future, in Kant’s conjectural “Perpetual Peace.” Offer notes this parallel in Herbert Spencer and Social Theory, 240. See also Frank Palmeri, Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665–1815 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 259–64. This thesis closely resembles Walter Bagehot’s argument for the importance of obedience to custom (Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society [Boston: Beacon, 1956]). George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 148. The following chapter in Principles of Sociology, which traces the development of polytheism and monotheism through conquest and the return of polytheism after the appearance of theism, bears affinities both to Hume’s Natural History of Religion and to Tylor’s anthropological Primitive Culture. On Spencer’s relation to ethnography and early anthropology, see Robert L. Carneiro, “Herbert Spencer as an Anthropologist,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 5 (1981): 153–210. Becker and Barnes observe that the work of the more critical anthropologists, such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, and Franz Boas, overthrew the “highly orderly and almost mechanically systematic anthropology,” of which Spencer was one of the chief exponents (Social Thought, 2:669). One might argue that the same contradiction characterizes the conjectural histories. However, the Enlightenment historians were writing a century before

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Spencer, a century during which the protocols of professional historical study were still developing. I include this list of shared principles despite Herbert Spencer’s statement of his disagreements with Comte (“Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte,” in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative [New York: Appleton, 1904], 2:118–44). Among the differences that Spencer mentions are that Comte would found a new religion on humanity, whereas, for Spencer, the only proper subject of religious sentiment is the unknown source of the universe (131–32). Spencer, of course, includes this difference in ibid., 131–32.

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George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), 113–15; and Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). On the role of the comparative method and conjectural history in the history of anthropology, see Frederick Teggart, Theory of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925), 86–93; Margaret Hodgen, The Doctrine of Survivals (London: Allenson, 1936), 9–35; John Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 11–23; and A. R. Evans-Pritchard, History of Anthropological Thought (New York: Basic, 1981), 13–40. Most historians of anthropology have traced the early history of the discipline back to a list of eighteenth-century forerunners that includes Montesquieu and Rousseau, occasionally John Millar or Herder. These histories typically devote a few pages to the steps taken by the eighteenth-century writers toward anthropological method. Among the histories of anthropology to which I am referring here are T. K. Penniman, One Hundred Years of Anthropology (1935; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Crowell, 1968); Murray J. Leaf, Man, Mind, and Science: A History of Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Evans-Pritchard, History of Anthropological Thought; Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2001). Although histories of anthropology imply that anthropology took on its recognizable modern identity by becoming more empirical and relying less on speculation, the role

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of speculation in nineteenth-century anthropology was problematic, and an irreducible element of speculative inference was required by the “comparative method,” which was employed in the absence of modern fieldwork. For such an argument, see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 181–90. On the shift in British anthropological work in this period, see George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Method in Social Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 3–13, 147–52. In the 1950s and 1960s, Leslie White argued for a return to historical, evolutionary anthropology (The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization [New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1949]; and The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959]). Burrow writes of the complex state of anthropological thought in the 1860s (Evolution and Society, 118–36). On the shift from the paradigms of ethnology and anthropology in midnineteenth-century Britain, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 74–77. On Prichard’s life and writings, especially the revisions of the Researches in later editions, see George W. Stocking Jr., ed., “From Chronology to Ethnology: James Cowles Prichard and British Anthropology, 1800–1850,” in James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), ix–cx. Burrow argues that conjectural history almost entirely disappears in this period (Evolution and Society, 17–18). Prichard, Researches, 233–39; Stocking, “From Chronology to Ethnology,” liv, lxx, lxxxii. The Ethnological Society was formed out of the Aborigines Protection Society, which was rooted in liberal, Quaker humanism. Ernest Dieffenbach, “The Study of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 1 (1848): 24–26. Thomas Hodgkin, “The Progress of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 1 (1848): 28, 37, 44. Ter Ellingson argues that Crawfurd helped James Hunt force a crisis in the Ethnological Society in 1858–1860, and then stepped in as Hunt’s candidate to

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take over from the former leadership (The Ignoble Savage [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001]). John Crawfurd, “On the Conditions Which Favour, Retard, or Obstruct the Early Civilization of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 1 (1861): 159; and “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the Negro,” Transactions 4 (1866): 223, 239. John Crawfurd, “On the Antiquity of Man from the Evidence of Language” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863): 171–79. Francis Galton, “The First Steps Towards the Domestication of Animals,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 3 (1865): 122–38. George Campbell, duke of Argyll, Primeval Man (New York: Routledge, 1871), 198–99. Burrow points out that many members of the Anthropological Society were medical men and that one of their chief interests was comparative anatomy (Evolution and Society, 129). James Hunt, “The Negro’s Place in Nature,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864): xv–lvi. Hunt’s title sarcastically parodies that of T. H. Huxley’s recent book, Man’s Place in Nature (1863), which stressed the anatomical resemblances between humans and apes, unlike most physical anthropology, which used measurements of bones to emphasize the distance between races and between species. Huxley was another comparative anatomist who, like Schaaffhausen, was not racist (see appendix 3). On the fixation with cranial measurements as a sign of intelligence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the conformity of the results to racist expectations, see Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 73–113. James Hunt, “Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropology,” Anthropological Review 1 (1863): 15–16. “Thoughts and Facts Contributing to the History of Man,” Anthropological Review 2 (1864): 173–91. See also Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches (Paris, 1988). Hodder Westropp, “On the Sequence of the Phases of Civilisation, and Contemporaneous Implements,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 5 (1867): cxci–cxcvii. Staniland Wake, “The Psychological Unity of Mankind,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 6 (1868): clxviii–clxx.

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Luke Owen Pike, “On the Psychical Elements in Religion,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 8 (1870): lvii–lxxviii, lxiv. On the “cannibals,” see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 252–53. Alfred Russel Wallace, at times, offered one of the few exceptions to such strong ethnocentrism. He argued, for example, that the members of other societies tried and succeeded about as well as Europeans did in living up to the moral codes of their own societies (The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise [1869; New York: Dover, 1962]). J. M. Allen, “The Ape Origin of Man,” Anthropological Review 4 (1866): 89–93; and review of Carl Vogt’s “Lectures on Man,” Anthropological Review 7 (1869): 177–84. Hermann Schaaffhausen, “Darwinism and Anthropology,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 7 (1869): cviii–cxi. Hermann Schaaffhausen, “On the Development of the Human Species and the Perfectibility of Its Races,” Anthropological Review 7 (1869): 366–75. Ibid., 373. See also Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality (New York: Basic, 1973); and Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genetics, Evolution, and Man (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976). Schaaffhausen, “On the Development of the Human Species,” 371–73. In her study of English writings on race in the seventeenth century, when “scientific racism” was taking shape, Cristina Malcolmson calls into question the linkage between polygenism and racism, on one hand, and monogenism and abolition, on the other (Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013], chapters 2 and 3). “The Willful Extinction of Aboriginal Races,” Anthropological Review 4 (1866): 10. J.  C. Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia, 1854). See appendix 3. This is the position taken by Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850). See appendix 3. James Hunt, “On the Acclimatisation of Europeans in the United States of America,” Anthropological Review 8 (1870), 109–37, 135. Nancy Stepan points out that such reasoning by polygenists could lead to their opposition to colonialism (The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 [London: Macmillan, 1982], 106).

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Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” in Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology (1870; London: Macmillan, 1891), 186–214. Wallace first laid out this argument in his review of the latest edition of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (“Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,” Quarterly Review 126 [1869]: 185–205). Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natural Selection,’” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864): clviii–clxx. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Natural Selection Applied to Anthropology,” Anthropological Review 5 (1867): 104. On the evolutionists’ coming to dominance in both societies following the deaths of Crawfurd and Hunt, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 254–57. In Burrow’s formulation, after the period of crisis in anthropology during the 1860s, those who had been most active in the Anthropological Society ended up being on the “losing side” (Evolution and Society, 133). In the Descent of Man, Darwin will construct an argument related to the monogenists’ that is racist because it is evolutionary, applying natural selection to the history of human societies (see chapter 5). John McLennan, Primitive Marriage (Edinburgh, 1865), 12, 17. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. A more nuanced and productive version of this doctrine—emphasizing the persistence of the original form even as its function or meaning changes—plays an important role both in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (1887); hence, it has been called the Nietzsche–Darwin principle by Stephen Jay Gould (see chapter 5). Hodgen emphasizes the importance of this methodological idea for Tylor (Doctrine of Survivals, especially chapter 2). Even in his own day McLennan’s argument was intensely controversial, and Darwin was among those writing about early human history who took issue with the stage of general promiscuity that McLennan postulated. Arguing from the evidence of those apes most closely related to humans, Darwin suggested, rather, that a form of bonding between individual males and females probably characterized even the earliest stages of human social life. On the controversy between McLennan and Darwin, and its implications for Victorian views of marriage and the nature of society and culture, see Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 156–70.

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J. F. McLennan, “The Worship of Animals and Plants: Totems and Totemism,” Fortnightly Review 6–7 (1869, 1870). John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (New York: Appleton, 1871), 114. Ibid., 119. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 1:1. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Ibid., 2:369–70; see also 1:17, 1:72, 2:449, 2:496). Tylor’s argument in such passages anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation of the devious ways that the meanings of institutions alter, even as their form may persist relatively unchanged (On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], essay 2, section 12). Tylor’s arguments also closely resemble Hume’s on the imposition of religious dogma on nascent science (Primitive Culture, 1:332), on the ebb and flow of belief in deities in polytheistic religious (2:334), and on the passage from polytheism to monotheism (2:418). On race and social evolutionism in the late nineteenth century, see Fred Voget, A History of Ethnology (New York: Holt McDougal, 1975), 174–79. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 498–99. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Claude Lévi-Strauss dedicated Elementary Structures of Kinship to Morgan for this reason, and saluted him for combining scientific precision and exact observation with “a frankly theoretical mode of thought and a bold philosophical taste” (Elementary Structures of Kinship [1949; Boston: Beacon, 1969], xxvi). The final phrase refers to Morgan’s willingness to engage in conjectural modes of thought. For the argument between McLennan and Morgan, see Morgan, “Note: Mr. J.  F. McLennan’s ‘Primitive Marriage,’ ” in Ancient Society, 509–21, which responds to McLennan’s attack in Studies in Ancient History: Comprising a Reprint of Primitive Marriage (1877). Even Morgan’s advocate, anthropologist Leslie White, concludes that Morgan’s theory of the evolution of the family was vitiated because a “better theory” of kinship terminologies was devised: “The words designate social relationships defined in terms of behavior and attitude rather than in terms of actual marriage and descent” (introduction, in Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964], xxv). It may be the case

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that kinship terms neither serve as “mere” terms of address nor convey beliefs about biological consanguinity. They are certainly more serious or loaded than the former position takes them to be, but they can do their work of dividing members of a tribe into preferred and prohibited marriage partners without having to engage a belief in a degree of biological relation, as Lévi-Strauss shows in Elementary Structures of Kinship. Marx believes that Morgan exaggerated the democracy and egalitarianism of the gentes, especially in their later history. Although Morgan maintained, for example, that the chiefs were always elected, Marx points out that the chieftainships were de facto transmissible. Similarly, Marx notes the beginnings of differentiations of rank within the ancient Greek gentes (The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972], 210, 306). Subsequent citations refer to this edition. “In fact, the monogamous family rests everywhere, in order to have an independent isolated existence, upon a domestic class which originally was everywhere direct slaves” (ibid., 120). Marx calls Maine a “blockhead” and Lubbock a “civilized jackass” for not being able to see that the categories in which they think and that they take to be natural are themselves conventional, historically and culturally conditioned (ibid., 329, 340). This purpose for Marx’s project in the Ethnological Notebooks has been advanced also by Christine Ward Gailey, “Community, State, and Questions of Social Evolution in Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks,” in The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice, ed. Jacqueline Solway (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 36–37; Thomas C. Patterson, Karl Marx, Anthropologist (New York: Berg, 2009), 131; and Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 229–33. Anderson emphasizes the importance of the passage Marx added to the French translation of Capital (1872–75), in which he specified that the process of primitive accumulation analyzed there was restricted to Western European societies, and implied that other societies could have different relations to capital. For example, capitalist forms might penetrate and transform some colonized societies less successfully than others. See Karl Marx, Le Capital, trans. J. Roy (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 169. The drafts of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich can be found in Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 99–123; see especially 109, 111.

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This is the letter in which he refers to seeing surviving communal institutions near his hometown of Trier. On late Marx’s concern with historical particulars of societies outside Europe and his openness to a multilinear view of history, see also Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan, “Late Marx: Continuity, Contradiction and Learning,” in ibid., 77–94. Morgan, Ancient Society, 552. Marx makes this point in relation to Maine’s Hobbesian argument about the necessity for locating sovereignty in the state: Maine ignores the much deeper point: that the seeming supreme independent existence of the State is itself only apparent and that it is in all its forms an excrescence of society; just as its appearance itself arises only at a certain stage of social development, it disappears again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained. First the tearing loose of the individuality from the originally not despotic chains (as blockhead Maine understands it), but rather satisfying and agreeable [befriedigenden u. gemüthlichen] bonds of the group, of the primitive community—and therewith the onesided elaboration of the individuality. (Ethnological Notebooks, 329; trans. Krader, 39, slightly modified)

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The bonds of the primitive community or the gens were fetters, but they may have been more satisfying than self-alienating, and the same may be conjectured of the poststate communal society of the future. Morgan, Ancient Society, 552. Johann Jakob Bachofen, Mutterrecht und Urreligion (1861), selections in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). Friedrich Engels attempts to distance himself from Bachofen’s term (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], 71–72). Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Eleanor Burke Leacock, introduction, in Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 35. On the accuracy of Engels’s thesis that women became more subordinate to men with the introduction of private property and the stratification of society, see Karen Sacks, “Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 211–23.

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Michèle Barrett discusses the inadequacies of Engels’s definitions of marriage among workers and the bourgeoisie (introduction, in Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 24; and Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis [London: Verso, 1980]). In Women’s Oppression Today, she points out that Engels’s theory does not explain why workers’ marriages did not disintegrate but took the same form as those of the bourgeoisie (222). Leacock, introduction, 30, 32, 41. Alys Weinbaum points out that the argument in this penultimate chapter contravenes the overarching thesis of the Origin of the Family (Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], 140). Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, 30. On this point, see Rosalind Delmar, “Looking Again at Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” in The Rights and Wrongs of Women, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 287. Leacock, introduction, 58. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Method in Social Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 3–13, 147–52.

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As I discussed in the previous chapter, in another instance of this pattern, Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State later proved generative for the field of materialist-feminist thought. Darwin’s correspondence in 1865 shows the strong interest he took in these philosophical histories, as well as the way he readily groups them with early anthropological works. In August, he reports that he and his family are reading aloud three books, which he recommends: “Lubbock Prehistoric Man—Tylor Early History of Civilization, which is admirable; and Lecky’s Rationalism, which also strikes me as well worth reading” (August 15, 1865, to Asa Gray, in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 13:223). The next month, he indicates his reservations about Lecky: “I enjoyed Tylor extremely and the first part of Lecky; but I think the latter is often vague and gives a false appearance of throwing light on his subject by such phrases as ‘spirit of the age,’ ‘spread of civilization’ &c” (September 27, 1865, to J. D. Hooker; 13:245). A month later

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still, the family is reading Buckle “& like it extremely though we disagree with him every other page” (October 22, 1865, to J. D. Hooker; 13:279). Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society (Boston: Beacon, 1956), 90. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. David Thatcher, “Nietzsche, Bagehot and the Morality of Custom,” Victorian Newsletter 62 (1982): 7–13. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10: “Morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they be.” Thomas Brobjer discusses Nietzsche’s opinions of all three of these historical writers (Nietzsche and the “English”: The Influence of British and American Thinking on His Philosophy [Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2008]: on Lecky, see 40–41; on Bagehot, see 63–64; on Buckle, see 149–52). Others could be added to this group of outsider historians, among them Winwood Reade, nephew of the novelist Charles Reade and author of The Martyrdom of Man (1872), a nonreligious history of mankind; and Henry George, the American author of the extremely popular Progress and Poverty (1879), which called for common ownership of land, in the tradition of Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1797). Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 488. Subsequent citations refer to this edition, unless otherwise noted. Hermann Schaaffhausen, whose writings figured in the previous chapter and will be discussed later in this one, was the first anatomist to conclude that the Neanderthal bones were those of a previously unknown, very early relative of man, and not the remains of a malformed member of the modern human species, as other anatomists were claiming. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1:206. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. The early notes on man, the M and N notebooks, have been published in Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). For a list of the passages in the notebooks that were included in the Descent of Man, see 652. Peter J. Vorzimmer, “The Darwin Reading Notebooks (1838–1860),” Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 107–53, 124.

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To the possible objection that, in Mandeville’s account, providence shows no more concern for the human species than for the spawn of fish, Darwin responds that we are so full of our own species that we take no time “seriously to consider the system of this earth” (Darwin Archive, DAR.80, B10, Cambridge University Library). Volumes 80–89 of the Cambridge archive comprise the preparatory notes for the Descent of Man. Subsequent references to this collection appear in the form: DAR volume, item number. On affinities between the Darwins and Hume, see Silvan Schweber, “Facteurs idéologiques et intellectuels dans la genèse de la théorie de la selection naturelle,” in De Darwin au Darwinisme: Science et idéologie, ed. Yvette Conry (Paris: Vrin, 1983), 128–30. On the convergence of Hume’s and Darwin’s theories of the origins of morality, which he calls the “Humean–Darwinian” view, see Owen Flanagan, “Ethical Expressions: Why Moralists Scowl, Frown, and Smile,” in Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 383–84. Vorzimmer, “Darwin Reading Notebooks,” 129. Darwin makes the same point in an exchange of letters with his cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood in the month after the publication of the Descent of Man (DAR.88). In this line of thought, Darwin was preceded to some extent by David Hume (“The Reason of Animals,” in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A Selby-Bigge [Oxford: Clarendon, 1888], bk. 1, section 3.16). Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 599. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1993), 61–62. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 2nd ed. (1794; New York: Garland, 1970), 469, 472. Jean-Jacques Rousseau also speculated that orangutans and humans might belong to the same species. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), he suggests in veiled terms (and then retreats from) the idea of experimentally mating an African woman with an orangutan to see if they would produce fertile offspring (Discourse on Inequality, note J). In his notes and his list of readings, Darwin does not mention Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality or his Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781), but his notebooks indicate that he knew about these works and about Rousseau’s argument concerning the origin of language from music, which closely anticipated

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one of his own cherished ideas. He does not mention Adam Ferguson, though he almost certainly knew about him, and a number of ideas in the Descent of Man, including the importance of the struggle for existence, parallel arguments made and phrasing used by Ferguson in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Early in his list of “Books to be Read 1838,” Darwin includes “Dug. Stewarts works. Lives of Reid [and] Smith and giving abstracts of their views” (DAR.119, 3). As we have seen, Stewart named and defined conjectural history in his “Account” of Smith’s life. Darwin did not score through this title or write “Read” after it, as he did with other titles that appear here and on the list of books he finished reading. Still, we know Darwin read carefully some of the books that were “to be read” and that were not scored through, including Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments and Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man. This entry suggests that Darwin may have knowingly worked with conjectural history as a model. Charles Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1896), 2:293 (dated February 22, [1869?]). See also 2:28 (dated July 1868). Gillian Beer has noted that Darwin’s ambivalence about evolutionary progress finds a parallel in Walter Scott’s ambivalence about progress in his novels (“Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], 543–88). David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), sections 1 and 2, 135–40; and section 6, 153–57. On Hume as an ironist, see John V. Price, Hume’s Irony (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965). Hume, Natural History, 184. In a note for the second edition of the Descent of Man that anticipates Freud, Darwin compares the religious believer with a child or a dog: “In as much as fear of God & of parents or guardian can fairly stay on in the feelings of a child who has transgressed, the state of a Dog is clearly analogous, especially as to strong desire by child & dog for reconciliation” (DAR.88, 16). Another version of this conclusion comes at the end of the passage in his Autobiography in which Darwin discusses the loss of his own religious beliefs, and the difficulty of attaining a rational understanding of our place in the universe. For most people, the inculcation of religious belief produces so strong an effect,

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he writes, that “it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in god, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake” (Autobiography, 93). According to this passage, the religious beliefs which lead Darwin’s opponents to assert that they are not related to monkeys demonstrate just such a kinship: their fear of god is like the monkeys’ fear of snakes. Frederic W. Farrar, “On the Universality of Belief in God, and in a Future State,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864), ccxvii–ccxxii; L. O. Pike, “On the Psychical Elements in Religion,” Journal of the Anthropological Society 8 (1870): lvii–lxxviii. “The Distinction Between Men and Animals,” Anthropological Review 2 (1864): 161. Darwin also does not acknowledge the similarity between his own position and that of several eighteenth-century conjectural historians on the origin of language from music. He suggests that the powerful effect of music follows from the use of song by early men and their animal ancestors to express longing during courtship (Descent of Man, 2:332–37). In the Descent, he expresses agreement with the views of some of his contemporaries on the early stages of languages, including those of his cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood and of August Schleicher, a German linguist who wrote Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language (1869). However, neither Schleicher nor Wedgwood makes an argument connecting the origins of speech with music and songs. In the first edition of the Descent of Man, Darwin included a footnote mentioning Herbert Spencer, who believed that speech predated music and song. In the second edition (1874), Darwin added that Diderot agreed with Spencer about music’s dependence on speech (actually, the nephew in Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew takes a position like Spencer’s, although he is discussing modern music, not the origins of language). In the second edition, as we have seen, Darwin observes that Thomas Blacklock agreed that melodic and passionate cries preceded articulate speech (The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. [London, 1901], 871–72). By citing Monboddo and Diderot, Darwin indicates his awareness that the topic was sharply debated in the eighteenth century, but he leaves unacknowledged the many eighteenth-century conjectural historians—Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, and Herder, as well as Monboddo—who maintained as he did that language is bound up in its early stages with music. Perhaps he was unacquainted with any of the conjectural works that made these arguments, or he may have been avoiding references to conjectural history, of which essays on

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the origins of language can be regarded as a subgenre. On writings in this field in the eighteenth century, see Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 146–224, 290. For a thorough discussion of the strategies Darwin adopted for dealing with the place of human beings in the presentation of his theory of evolution, see Sandra Herbert, “The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin’s Theory of Transmutation,” part 1, Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 217–58; and, especially, part 2, Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 155–227. Herbert makes the strong point that Darwin was much more of a theorist than his public statements indicate, and that there was no place for such theoretical investigations in the nascent natural sciences of mid-nineteenth-century England. Focusing on the M and N notebooks, she shows that, for decades before the writing of the Origin of Species, Darwin cultivated a strategy of public silence on the subject of man and the implications of his theory for our understanding of humans’ position in the world. I believe that a strategy of silence and avoidance on conjecture continued to shape his presentation of his ideas in the Descent of Man. In his notes for the Descent of Man, the usually dispassionate Darwin says of Spencer’s position that language preceded song: “I detest his view” (DAR.85, 8). On Darwin’s strategy in the Descent of Man, see Greta Jones, “The Social History of Darwin’s Descent of Man,” Economy and Society 7, no. 1 (1978): 1–23. Jones cites Spencer as a thinker whom Darwin did not want to antagonize, although he recognized that there were significant differences between his concept of natural selection and Spencer’s idea of evolution (18). Silvan Schweber, “Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of Character,” Journal of the History of Biology 13, no. 2 (1980): 195–289, especially 285–86. Darwin also sought to avoid the kind of outraged reception that had greeted the (anonymous) publication of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Although the Origin of Species stands in much the same relation to conjectural history as the Vestiges, the latter could not appeal to natural selection as a mechanism for the transformation of species. Darwin did not want the Descent of Man to be similarly accused of being purely speculative.

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On the tendency to racialize caused by developmentalism in the Descent of Man, see Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction Between Biological and Social Theory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), 23, 153. On Darwin’s ideas of race in the Descent of Man, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 59–67. On Darwin’s strong and consistent opposition to slavery, see Adrian Desmond and James Morris, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins (New York: Penguin, 2009). On the process by which subdivisions of humankind became virtually synonymous with racial categories, see George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), 121–32; and Stepan, Idea of Race, 1–47. On the attitudes toward race in the Enlightenment conjectural histories, and whether they were responsible for nineteenth-century “scientific” racism, see appendix 3. On the relation between Darwin’s theories and social and political thought, see especially Robert M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists,” Past and Present 43 (1969): 23–55; “Darwinism Is Social,” in Darwinian Heritage, ed. Kohn, 609– 38; and Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Silvan Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology 10, no. 2 (1977): 229–316; “Darwin and the Political Economists”; “Facteurs idéologiques”; and “The Wider British Context in Darwin’s Theorizing,” in Darwinian Heritage, ed. Kohn, 35–69. See also Peter Bowler, “Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1976): 631–50; and The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and Edward Manier, The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). Darwin subscribes to a racial hierarchy among Europeans, with Anglo-Saxons and other northern Europeans at the top and southern Europeans and Catholics near the bottom (Descent of Man, 1:174). On the use of such rhetoric, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Brantlinger discusses Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley on 164–88. Yvette Conry analyzes a similar doubleness in the Descent of Man, a contradiction or tension that results from its pursuit of what she considers an ideological and a scientific agenda, making use of the terms of Georges Canguilhem. She identifies the demystifying line of thought as his scientific program, and

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a Eurocentric laissez-faire racialism as his ideological program (“Le statut de La descendance de l’homme et La sélection sexuelle,” in De Darwin au Darwinisme, ed. Conry, 167–86. Thus, although the concept of sexual selection eventually helps Darwin account for aesthetics and culture, this use of the concept does not supersede its original purpose—to explain how different ideas of beauty arise and persist in different races. Near the end of Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor points out that early religious thought bears no necessary connection to moral ideas. But he maintains that an ethnographic history of morality could be written, exploring the emergence and transformation of ethical categories (Primitive Culture, 2 vols. [New York: Harper & Row, 1958], 2:446). Darwin was impressed with Tylor’s history of religious belief and encouraged him to pursue the early history of morals (Life and Letters, 2:331 [dated September 24, 1871]). The Descent of Man also looks forward to contemporary ethological studies that investigate the capacity of other intelligent social animals to possess morality, language, and culture. On these studies, see, for example, Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (New York: Basic, 2001). Darwin’s reflections concerning the mental abilities of animals, such as the proto-moral behavior or musical skills of baboons, did not give rise to a field of animal studies in the late nineteenth century; in their own time, his followers were somewhat isolated, as were others. See, for example, John Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of the Social Hymenoptera (London: Appleton, 1882); and George Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883). Young, “Darwinism Is Social.” Paul Franco traces the presence of Enlightenment thinking in Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science (1882, 1887) (Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]). Human, All Too Human, dedicated to Voltaire, moves away from a Romantic style and thought to a more skeptical, rationalist mode and the use of aphoristic form; however, it remains tied to a view of morality that emphasizes the utility of its early instances. It is only in Daybreak (59–66) that Nietzsche begins the course of investigations that will lead to the conjectural history of the irrational origins of morality in the Genealogy of Morality.

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We might note that Daybreak contains the following programmatic metaconjectural history: “How did rationality arrive in the world? Irrationally, as might be expected: by a chance accident. If we want to know what that chance accident was we shall have to guess it, as one guesses the answer to a riddle” (125). Robert Guay identifies seven stages in the Genealogy of Morality: the first three are prehistorical; the fourth consists of the defeat of the nobles and the ascendancy of the priests; the fifth of the creation of “bad conscience,” the consciousness of being guilty. The sixth marks the establishment of ascetic ideals, and the seventh will be defined by the perishing of these ideals and the triumph of nihilism (“The Philosophical Function of Genealogy,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009], 367–72). For his speculations about the early history of humankind—those “tremendous early eras” that were decisive for mankind (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 18)— Nietzsche seems to have relied for years on John Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation (1871), which he bought in 1875 and which he kept with him as he moved from place to place. See David S. Thatcher, “Nietzsche’s Debt to Lubbock,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 293–309, 295; and Brobjer, Nietzsche and the “English,” 143–44. Franco considers that, in using Lubbock for his speculations, Nietzsche is relying on “the most advanced anthropological knowledge of his time” (Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 63–66). This may be true, if we add, as Franco does, Bagehot and Tylor. But, as we have seen in chapter 4, Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation presents a formulaic, mechanical succession of the same stages of civilization in different cultures, based on a linear teleology that leads invariably to the customs and thoughts of the male British Protestant as the ne plus ultra of human progress. It would seem that Lubbock would have or must have served as an example of almost everything that Nietzsche opposed in historical thinking. See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.12. Subsequent citations refer to this edition, by essay and section. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Lubbock appears to have been confined to his middle period, in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak; he does not refer to Lubbock in his later works. In Franz Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” a captured ape who has tamed and disciplined himself so that he can perform a part in human society speaks to an academy of how he scraped himself raw as he proceeded through the narrowing passageway from animality to humanity (The Penal Colony [New York: Schocken, 1970], 173–83).

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It is worth mentioning the close congruence between Nietzsche’s view that the internalizing of aggression against oneself produces conscience and Freud’s speculations, in Civilization and its Discontents, concerning the development of the superego and conscience in the individual and the species. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), and chapter 6 of this book Keith Ansell-Pearson also observes that Nietzsche does not consider establishing political legitimacy on a social contract (Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 148). He notes a number of ways that Nietzsche inverts Rousseau’s thinking on social origins: for example, Nietzsche maintains that civilization deepens humanity by providing it with a knowledge of evil (119). However, Ansell-Pearson also singles out a telling similarity: both Nietzsche and Rousseau regard the social contract as a fraud—a triumph of the weak over the strong, in Nietzsche’s case, or of the strong over the weak, in Rousseau’s (112) (or, I would say, of the rich over the poor). However, Nietzsche does presume a rudimentary social contract in the Genealogy of Morality. Although he often treats the idea of a social contract with disdain, Maudemarie Clark notes that Nietzsche works with such an idea in the Genealogy of Morality (2.9, 2.10), in assuming that individuals owe a debt to society (“Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals,” ed. Richard Schacht [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 15–34, 28). Adam Ferguson writes with ambivalence and some approbation of earlier “ages of enterprise” in which European crusaders “invaded the East, to plunder a country, and to recover a sepulcher; . . . [and] having found means to cross the Atlantic, . . . the inhabitants of one half the world were let loose on the other, and parties from every quarter, wading in blood, and at the expence of every crime, and of every danger, traversed the earth in search of gold” (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 201). Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel writes in comparable terms of the blood and death produced throughout the ages on the “slaughter-bench of history” (introduction, in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], 69). On Hegel as a conjectural historian, see appendix 2. For Nietzsche’s typically sharp and ambivalent evaluation of Comte, see Daybreak, 131, 542.

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On the development from the royal menagerie to the zoo, see Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in EighteenthCentury Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 37–67. Moreover, what holds for human institutions also holds for organs and organic life; this is a principle of interpretation and development that Nietzsche shares with Darwin. On this point, I differ from Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, 47. See the earlier use of this formulation for the first stage of domestication and internalization in the Genealogy of Morality, 1.6. This argument coheres with Charles Taylor’s thesis that elements in Protestant Christianity led to the secularity of modern society (A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007]). In its efforts to muster speculative and fragmentary historical evidence in support of a philosophical argument about early human culture, the Genealogy of Morality participates in the project of philosophical anthropology, which has close methodological and formal affinities with conjectural history. Richard Schacht characterizes Nietzschean naturalistic philosophical anthropology as hypothetical, “provisional, . . . even experimental” (“Nietzsche and Philosophical Anthropology,” in Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Ansell-Pearson, 115–32, 120). According to this understanding of the form, the idea of a “pathos of distance” separating the nobles from the weak plebeians is a “conjecture” (121), and the argument concerning “bad conscience” and the internalization of instinct is a “hypothesis” (127). It is clear that Schacht here discusses the kind of hypothetical knowledge that Dugald Stewart characterized as more plausible and even more accurate than “what actually happened” (discussed in the introduction to this book). Schacht contends that, in the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche is “speculating” along lines inspired by recent evolutionary and biological thinking, because the way to conduct philosophical experiments was to produce ideas that seemed plausible and promising, and then to pursue them as far as possible (129–30). Schacht’s conclusion is thus as apt and accurate for the importance of conjectural history as for the history of philosophical anthropology: “Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropological interests and efforts . . . are among the most neglected (or else misunderstood) parts of his philosophical legacy” (131). Similarly, although he is concerned with contemporary phenomena, Christian Emden concludes that the quasi-anthropological investigation of European political moralities was a largely unacknowledged foundation of

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Nietzschean genealogies (Nietzsche and the Politics of History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 178). Although David Couzens Hoy contrasts the universal human sympathy that serves as the origin of morality in Hume’s account with more historical narratives of ressentiment in Nietzsche’s, he perceives the strong methodological parallel between these two: the method in each case is hypothetical, speculative, experimental, especially in the genealogies or the conjectural histories of religion they propose (“Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Schacht, 251–68, 253). Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow” in Human, All Too Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 338. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Such passages provide material for Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau. Paul Rée’s work displays many parallels with Human, All Too Human (Basic Writings, trans. and ed. Robin Small [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003]). On the relationship between Nietzsche and Rée, see Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Richard Schacht, introduction, in Rée, Basic Writings, xl. Nietzsche seems to have been aware of the principle in the organic realm without knowing that Darwin had formulated it. On Nietzsche’s lack of direct knowledge of Darwin’s major texts, either in English or in German, see Brobjer, Nietzsche and the “English,” 238. Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba proposed the term “exaptation” for the deployment of a feature to answer a different purpose than it had originally been developed for or had served earlier. (“Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology 8 [1981]: 4–15). Countering their proposal, Daniel Dennett argues that “according to orthodox Darwinism, every adaptation is one sort of exaptation or the other; this is trivial, since no function is eternal” (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995], 281). Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1215–18. Gould credits his (then) graduate student, Margaret Yacobucci, with noticing in 1998 the convergence between the methodological approaches of Darwin and Nietzsche. Darwin, Origin of Species, 186.

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Gould, Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 1224; Dennett also discusses this example, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 465. Gould, Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 1220. St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (London, 1871), 61. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (1872; New York: Signet, 2003), 209, 218–21. Dieter Henke, “Nietzsches Darwinismuskritik,” Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984): 189–210, especially 208–10; Werner Stegmaier, “Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche: Zum problem der evolution,” Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 264– 87; Gregory Moore, “Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory,” in Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Ansell-Pearson, 521–23. On the other hand, when Nietzsche criticizes the evolutionary doctrines of Spencer—such as the idea that humanity is inevitably moving to a state dominated by altruism rather than egoism—he is usually on target, even though he sometimes mistakes Spencer’s positions for Darwin’s. For specifics concerning the pervasive differences between Spencer’s Lamarckian idea of evolution and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, see Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” in Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, ed. John Offer, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2000), 2:5–69. Freeman and most other commentators emphasize Spencer’s commitment to the inheritance of acquired characteristics and his rejection of natural selection. Moore, “Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory,” 529–30. On Nietzsche’s reading around Darwin, see Brobjer, Nietzsche and the “English,” 258–62, 266–67. John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14. The point Nietzsche makes about the divergence between the origins and the present function of the eye is one he had already made in Human, All Too Human: “The impartial investigator who pursues the history of the eye and the forms it has assumed among the lowest creatures, who demonstrates the whole step-by-step evolution of the eye, must arrive at the great conclusion that vision was not the intention behind the creation of the eye, but that vision appeared, rather, after chance had put the apparatus together. A single instance of this kind—and ‘purposes’ fall away like scales from the eyes!” (Human, All Too Human, 122). In his late notebooks, Nietzsche insists that this constitutes a determinative difference between his theory and Darwin’s. Richardson examines

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Nietzsche’s assertions that Darwin’s principle of natural selection only favors traits that passively sustain life, whereas his own principle of a will to power favors an active, creative force (Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, 16–26, 57). It is hard to see how an organism could struggle for power or the blossoming of life if it is not alive. Dennett considers the argument in this section to be “Nietzsche’s most important contribution to sociobiology” (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 465). I would say, rather, that Nietzsche’s contribution here is to social knowledge. Richardson makes the point, in discussing the knot of meanings of punishment in the Genealogy of Morality (2.13), that it is comparable to the contemporary meaning of an organic drive, which is “a layering of the functions it was selected for,” which in turn often differ radically from one another (Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, 42). The doctrine of survivals does not have the conceptual reach of this Nietzsche– Darwin principle. In the studies of McLennan or Tylor, survivals indicate a direction of development, away from superstition. A belief or ritual moves to a more rational and adequate comprehension of the world, and from a more bloody or crude practice to one more sublimated and ethically defensible. In Nietzsche’s argument, no such progress is discernible; rather, one interpretation arises, struggles with, and partially displaces another, lending new meanings to old practices. The victory of the new is never absolute; the struggle goes on over every ritual, belief, practice, and institution. Darwin’s vision of the struggle for existence produces similar results. Tylor gives some indication of a similarly skeptical attitude toward progress in the final pages of Primitive Culture, where he urges his fellow laborers in the field to accomplish as much of the work of demystification as they can, because, in his terms, ages of darkness and faith often succeed ages of patient scientific inquiry.

6. the s oci a l psyc hology of r e li gi on 1

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Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 375. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 132. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. In the extensive literature on Weber’s relation to Marx, most commentators see both major revisions and significant continuities. According to Norman Birnbaum, Weber refined Marx’s observations of correlations between class

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position and ideology. For Birnbaum, Weber builds on Marx by introducing a psychological dimension in historical analysis (“Conflicting Interpretations of the Rise of Capitalism: Marx and Weber,” British Journal of Sociology 4 [1953]: 125–41). Anthony Giddens argues that much of Weber’s analysis of the complication of ideology is consistent with Marx’s, and he vindicates Marx against his own, more mechanical, followers (“Marx, Weber, and the Development of Capitalism,” Sociology 4 [1970]: 289–310). Carl Mayer observes that Weber rejects the necessity of developmental stages in history, which formed a basis of Marx’s system, yet he also points out that Joseph Schumpeter and George Lichtheim consider Weber’s analysis of capitalism to be largely consistent with Marx’s. Mayer also notes that, for Weber, Marx is like other speculative philosophers, and this judgment is not a dismissal (“Max Weber’s Interpretation of Karl Marx,” Social Research 42 [1975]: 701–19). Similarly, Wolfgang Mommsen argues that Weber sees Marx’s interpretation of history as a hypothesis or conjecture; all universal interpretations of history are hypothetical (“Weber as a Critic of Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 2 [1977]: 373–98, especially 375–77). However, being a hypothesis does not preclude the theory’s being accurate in many of its principal features, or at least pointing the way to more nearly accurate hypotheses. This is the point that Dugald Stewart made about conjectural or hypothetical history in his defining discussion of the form, analyzed in the introduction. Don Martindale argues that Weber rejected holistic and organic understandings of culture in his early methodological works because he did not believe that cultural phenomena could be encompassed by laws, unlike social phenomena, more central to his later work, which present generalized and lawlike uniformities (“Max Weber on the Sociology of Culture and Theory of Civilization,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 8 [1971]: 1–12). Wolfgang Mommsen also maintains that Weber opposed organicist philosophies of history (“Max Weber’s Political Sociology and His Philosophy of World History,” International Social Science Journal 17 [1965]: 23–45). Weber certainly avoids an organicism like Spencer’s, which takes a society to be analogous to an organism, but he is intensely concerned, both at the time of The Protestant Ethic and later, with the strong interrelations between different spheres such as individual psychology, economic behavior, and religious ideology. This continuing focus provides evidence of a holistic approach. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Norton, 2009), 55. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.

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For a strong account of the epistemological reasons for Weber’s adoption of a conjectural or hypothetical voice, see Peter Breiner: Weber’s ideal-typical description of this [radical Protestant] class, at once embodying the capitalist spirit and imposing the capitalist form of production, should be read as occupying a temporal place between an actual historical event and a hypothetical or imagined one—“At some point” and “what happened was,” says Weber. The reason for the hypothetical voice is that the event being referred to is one that we cannot precisely identify historically  .  .  .  ; nevertheless, from a theoretical viewpoint, this self-same description explains how a fundamental historical change has occurred. (“Weber’s The Protestant Ethic as Hypothetical Narrative of Original Accumulation,” in Weber, Protestant Ethic, 241–61, especially 247)

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Talcott Parsons makes the point that Weber’s ideal types—such as the Protestant ethic or Calvinist psychology, or bureaucracy, or even modern capitalism—are fictions, constructs made up of all the traits that characterize the concept of the phenomenon in its pure form. No historical individual or phenomenon will encompass all these traits in their ideal—theoretical—form. As contrary-to-fact constructions, ideal types, like conjectural histories, cannot be confirmed by historical evidence but, nevertheless, they may be accurate and may be useful instruments for understanding the past (“ ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber II,” Journal of Political Economy 37 [1929]: 31–51). Compare Dugald Stewart’s understanding that conjectural histories may not describe what “really happened” but may be more accurate than an account of the facts (even were that available). Similarly, David Gellner, a scholar of Indian religion, argues that “to ignore Weber’s book on Indian religion because many of its details are wrong, is to ignore also the virtues it conspicuously displays”—its comparative approach, historical depth, and sophisticated theoretical apparatus (“Max Weber, Capitalism, and the Religion of India,” Sociology 16 [1982]: 526–43, 541). On the benefits of this kind of reading in conjectural or hypothetical histories, not for the facts but for the form and theory, see the conclusion. Bryan Turner observes the parallel between Weber’s argument that an “iron cage” of consumption and production encloses all moderns and Michel Foucault’s argument that technologies of disciplinary surveillance pervade modern society. Both theses are concerned with calculating, rational processes of

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constraint (“Nietzsche, Weber, and the Devaluation of Politics: The Problem of State Legitimacy,” Sociological Review 30 [1982]: 367–91). On the working out of this process, see also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2007). On the disarticulation of purposes and ends in Weber’s thought, see Werner Stark, “Max Weber and the Heterogony of Purposes,” Social Research 34, no. 2 (1967): 249–64. On specific examples of the unforeseen consequences of the Reformers’ work, see Birnbaum, “Conflicting Interpretations,” 256–57. Friedrich Tenbruck points out that, in his method and practice, Weber does not reject history, even history of early periods of society; he shared with German historians of the time an interest in “anthropological” investigations. Tenbruck discusses, as an important predecessor in this area, Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des altertums (History of Ancient Times, 1884) because of its inclusion of classical and Oriental civilizations in a single framework (“Max Weber and Eduard Meyer,” in Max Weber and His Contemporaries [London: Allen and Unwin, 1987], 234–67). Commentators have adopted widely varying positions on Weber’s conception of history and his view of the relation between history and sociology. Gabriel Kolko charges Weber with having adopted a monistic determinism, an accusation that may be somewhat extreme (“A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of History,” Ethics 70 [1959]: 1–20). Against this view, Parsons (“ ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature”) argues that Weber advances a multilinear view of social evolution; and H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills claim that Weber’s account of historical development is not monocausal (From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948], 70). David Zaret makes the case that Weber was able to combine theory and history in his sociological method, although after him the two were separated, for example, in the practice of Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz (“From Weber to Parsons and Schutz: The Eclipse of History in Modern Social Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 85 [1980]: 1180–1201). Although Mayer (“Max Weber’s Interpretation of Marx”) claims that Weber rejected the use of historical stages, Giddens (“Marx, Weber, and the Development of Capitalism”) argues that Weber accepted the usefulness of stages, with reservations. In the view of Lelan McLemore, Weber believed that history could reach understanding of the past through causal explanations; however, Weber does not claim to be providing causal explanations, either in the Protestant Ethic or in the Sociology of Religion (“Max Weber’s Defense of

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Historical Inquiry,” History and Theory 23 [1984]: 277–95). This observation strengthens the argument of Guenther Roth that Weber advocated a new sociology, which differed from evolutionary sociology in being concerned with the construction of types or models, not causal explanations (“History and Sociology in the Work of Max Weber,” British Journal of Sociology 27 [1976]: 306–18). On this account, Weber’s sociology may best be seen as preliminary to history, as a preparatory contribution to historical inquiries such as religious or economic history. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), bk. 2, section 12. Mommsen has pointed out the parallel between Weber’s radical individualism and Nietzsche’s, and the need both saw for a strong leader—although, in Weber’s case, the leader would supposedly act in the interest of the masses (“Max Weber’s Political Sociology”). On Weber’s defense of the individual against the state, see also Turner, “Nietzsche, Weber, and the Devaluation of Politics.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. On Spencer and Gillen, see George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 87–98. Alexander Goldenweiser had already argued that this was the case, in Totemism: An Analytical Study (1910). Franz Boas agreed with this argument and, as we will see later, Claude Lévi-Strauss also contested the existence of totemism. Durkheim’s thesis has no place for a rational social contract; it depends entirely on a precontractual sociability, like most of the earlier conjectural histories. On the precontractual nature of society according to Durkheim, see Randall Collins, “The Durkheimian Movement in France and in World Sociology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101–35, 112, 123. David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184. Durkheim bases the “effervescence” that is the source of religious feeling and social cohesion on the totem. Yet the animal serves as totem only for a clan, not for the entire tribe. It would seem that his argument may explain the feelings

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that bind together those of the same totem or clan, but not the unity of all the other clans in the society, who have competing totems. H. G. Wells has a comparable passage on the twilight of the old gods at the conclusion of his nearly contemporaneous novel Tono-Bungay (discussed in chapter 7). A salient example that Durkheim does not mention, nationalism, has taken on associations in the last two centuries that extend and substitute for the kinds of identity-affirming rituals and observances that religions have otherwise and previously provided. On Durkheim’s recognition of the divergence between the origin (or form) and the function of an institution, see Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 91. Edward Tiryakian similarly observes the curious fact that neither Durkheim nor Weber is known to have made any reference to the other in his writings. (For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology [Burlington: Ashgate, 2009], 273–79). Henry Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas, ed. Frederick Pollock (New York: Holt,  1884), 166–67. Maine speculates about family life in prehistoric society based on the encounter with the Cyclops in the Odyssey. He later formulates part of his thesis in the form of a conjecture: a sovereign’s commands, which gave rise to civil law, were “probably only a developed form of the irresponsible commands which . . . the head of each isolated household may have addressed to his wives, his children, and his slaves” (ibid., 161; my emphases). Despite his strictures against them, Maine’s speculations are sometimes extremely productive. He notes, for example, that the early church had a strong motive for preserving the Roman law of wills, because most material support for ecclesiastical institutions came in the form of bequests. The churchmen preserved the form of the legal doctrine even while altering its function or meaning. Like Nietzsche, Maine points out the methodological “mistake” of believing “that those reasons which actuate us at the present moment, in the maintenance of an existing institution, have necessarily anything in common with the sentiment in which the institution originated” (ibid., 183). William Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (New York: Schocken, 1972), 136. Like other conjectural historians,

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Robertson Smith demarcates stages and argues that all Semitic peoples passed through a totemistic stage, in which the divinity of a locale was identified with the ancestor of the tribe. On this point, he cites James Frazer’s Totemism (1887), 124. On Robertson Smith as mentor to Frazer, see Stocking, After Tylor, 132–33. Robertson Smith also exerted an important influence on Durkheim, convincing him that rituals like the totemic feast could have served as the foundation of society. See Robert Alun Jones, “Practices and Presuppositions: Some Questions about Durkheim and Les formes élementaires de la vie religieuse,” in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 80–100, 94; and Tiryakian, For Durkheim, 163. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 338. Margaret Hodgen, The Doctrine of Survivals (London: Allenson, 1936). In common with other conjecturalist histories, Robertson Smith’s argument concerning sacrifice in The Religion of the Semites undermines providential accounts of history. The narrative is stadial, tracing a line back to the original form of the practice. The communal meal serves as the origin of sacrifice; sacrifice is at the root of ritual; ritual is the basis of religion. There is nothing rational or planned about the founding of religion; rather, religion results from a frenzied action in which all are required to participate so that the guilt of killing the sacred animal will be shared equally. Robertson Smith’s conjectural arguments parallel Nietzsche’s in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality (published only a year earlier) about the gruesome early punishments that instilled memory and a sense of guilt in humans. For Darwin’s characterization of these early human groups, see The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 2:370. On relations between Freud and Darwin, see Lucille Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 100. Ritvo suggests that Freud’s reading of the account of early human hordes in the Descent of Man had the kind of catalyzing effect on Freud that the reading of Malthus had on Darwin. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), 129. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Frazer would not have appreciated the mining of his famous work for this purpose; he once referred to Freud as “that creature” (Stocking, After Tylor, 147).

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He does mention a bear sacrifice among the Ainu in Japan, and the killing and eating of a buzzard by a tribe of Native Americans in California. Freud calls his idea a “hypothesis, or I would rather say, a vision.” He further stresses the speculative nature of the thesis by stating, “Whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father-complex” (An Autobiographical Study, trans. James Strachey [1935; New York: Norton, 1963], 129–30). Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 93–96. Judith Butler describes this process, in which the subject is formed by turning against itself, referring to Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and others (The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997]). Claude Lévi-Strauss contends, against Freud, that nothing is proved by ascribing the same impulses—to murder the father and sleep with the mother—to different individuals separated by centuries or millennia. In addition, LéviStrauss rejects the idea that totemism exists; he must deal with the history of a supposed subject, a phantom phenomenon. In his final chapter, Lévi-Strauss traces the lineage of his arguments back to two predecessors—Henri Bergson and, perhaps surprisingly, Rousseau and his Discourse on Inequality. He praises Rousseau’s “clairvoyance” in recapturing the way early man must have thought, and for arguing that language must have originated not in the needs of prehistoric humans but in their passions. Thus, even as Lévi-Strauss rejects the use of historical conjecture, he praises Rousseau’s speculations about what must have been the case (Le totémisme aujourd’hui [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962]). (As has already been noted, Lévi-Strauss dedicated Structural Anthropology to the conjectural anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan.) As Paul-Laurent Assoun points out, both Freud and Nietzsche argue that civilization is an illness and religion an illusion (Freud and Nietzsche [New York: Continuum, 2003], 159–71).

7. novels as c on j e c t u r a l hi stor i e s 1

Georg Lukács traces the emergence of the “classical” historical novel of Walter Scott to the aftermath of the French Revolution (The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962], chapter 1).

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On Scott’s ambivalence toward progress as analogous to and perhaps derived from Adam Ferguson’s, see Frank Palmeri, “The Capacity of Narrative: Scott and Macaulay on Scottish Highlanders,” Clio 22 (1992): 37–52. Among those who view Ferguson’s influence on Scott as extensive and determinative are Duncan Forbes, “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott,” Cambridge Journal (1953): 20–35; Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 37–50; and David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 179–202. Those who make somewhat more limited claims of influence include Peter D. Garside, “Scott and the Philosophical Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 495–512; Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and P. H. Scott, “The Politics of Walter Scott,” in Scott and his Influence, ed. J.  H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1982), 208–12. For a discussion of the role of accommodations and middle grounds as markers of a modern stage of social life in Scott’s historical novels, see Frank Palmeri, Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665–1815 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 145–52. Walter Scott, Waverley (New York: Penguin, 1985), 163, 172, 324. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. In grouping together as participants in the same stage of social development archaic Greeks and North American natives, Scott follows not only Ferguson but also one of Ferguson’s principal sources, Father J. F. Lafitau, a Jesuit who lived among the Iroquois for six years before writing Moeurs des sauvages Amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Savages, Compared to the Customs of the Earliest Times, 1724). James Buzard analyzes the important role of ethnographic observations of provincial societies or otherwise marginalized societies in British novels, beginning with Scott (Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of NineteenthCentury British Novels [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005]). Christopher Herbert studies a similar project of predisciplinary sociology in Henry Mayhew and Anthony Trollope (Culture and Anomie [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]). Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (New York: Penguin, 1986), 530. Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823) explores an earlier but comparable transition from a decentralized medieval period to an age in which a centralized, bureaucratic state is being formed in France.

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In focusing on the contrast between the wild and the civilized, Cooper’s novels more closely resemble Rob Roy than Scott’s other novels. On Cooper, Ferguson, and the “stadialist model of progress,” or the conjecturalist view of history, see George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 75–78. This pattern underlies the other novels in the series; in The Prairie (1827), the Pawnee serve as the helpful and honest Indians and the Sioux as the bloody and treacherous liars. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, part 2, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Not all historical novels follow this ambivalently stadialist pattern. Indeed, most do not. Subgenres such as the cloak-and-dagger novel set in an earlier period or the toga novels set in ancient Rome follow other conventions and pursue other concerns. Among cloak-and-dagger novels, one could cite most of Alexandre Dumas’s novels of the musketeers, and works such as Cooper’s The Spy (1821); examples of toga novels would include Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Similar exercises in Nietzschean antiquarian history include Flaubert’s novel of ancient Carthage, Salammbô (1862), and Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866). Like these novels, Victor Hugo’s historical fictions do not usually represent the transition from one epoch to another, nor do Dickens’s historical novels, Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The last of Dumas’s series on the musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask (1850), constitutes an exception here, as the fall of Nicolas Fouquet and the assumption of personal rule by Louis XIV signal the passing of an era of independence and adventure, honor and loyalty for the musketeers. Dumas’s own modern age, on the threshold of which the musketeers find themselves at the end of their lives, is marked as a more bureaucratic, impersonal, and ruthless order. On the opposition between bureaucracy and charisma, see Max Weber, Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Herbert Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 285, 277. Ibid., 642, 646. Near the end of A Harlot High and Low (1847), a sequel to Lost Illusions, the narrator observes that “magistrates don’t, as formerly, need to be men of fortune”

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(Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low [New York: Penguin, 1970], 413); they borrow their importance from the positions they attain in the magistracy. Such a passage asserts that the increasing strength of democratizing and capitalist tendencies leads to a decline in the operations of justice. However, the narrator later commends the new superintendents of police for their capacity, morals, and discretion: they are “the most effective auxiliaries of Justice; for if, by the march of events, Justice has lost some of its ancient pomp, . . . material gains have to be acknowledged. Particularly in Paris, the machinery has been admirably perfected” (545). Although the modern movement toward greater equality has reduced the majesty of the judiciary, it has also produced more effective forms of judicial investigation. Modernity leads not only to losses but to gains, even in Paris, the center of corruption and moral decline. One could argue that, with the dominant force of money, form dissolves, the distinction between parts and wholes disappears, and “all that is solid melts into air,” to use Marx’s words from the Communist Manifesto. For elaborations of this line of argument, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 1987); and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988). George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 260–95, especially 265, 284–85. Eliot read Comte’s works repeatedly and intently throughout her life. Her partner, George Lewes, wrote extensively about Comte and took positivism as the basis of his own philosophy. She was a close friend of Richard and, especially, Maria Congreve, both strong adherents of Comte and the religion of humanity, and she consulted Frederick Harrison, another active and public Comtean, on legal matters in Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). She consulted the Course of Positive Philosophy when she was writing Middlemarch. She annotated Comte’s Positivist Catechism (1852), and she wrote a number of articles on Comte, defending aspects of his thought, including his views on religion. See T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 173–80. However, biographical considerations are less important for this study than the question of how Eliot uses the form of conjectural history in which Comte wrote. Among other elements of the genre in Middlemarch, she advances the idea of intellectual and moral stages, the need

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for a nontheological religion of humanity, the importance of speculation in science, including social science, and the disproportion between the intentions and consequences of human action. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. The web of human relations in Eliot’s vision of society, as Gillian Beer points out, bears an affinity to the network of relations among forms of life in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Beer also notes that the expansion of possibilities at this time, through scientific instruments and hypothesis making, gave “fresh authority to the speculative and even the fictive” (Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction [New York: Ark, 1985], 167–80, 152). Eliot seems to have persuaded George Lewes to a less unfavorable opinion of Comte’s late System of Positive Polity (1851–54) by stressing its conjectural nature. Lewes wrote, “I have learnt (from the remark of one very dear to me) to regard it as an utopia, presenting hypotheses rather than doctrines, suggestions for future inquirers rather than dogmas for adepts” (Fortnightly Review 3 [1866]: 404–5, quoted in Wright, Religion of Humanity, 57). Wright observes that Middlemarch portrays one of the transitions that Comte specifies in his history of social stages—the transition from the medieval to the scientific. He also sees evidence of Comtean historical analysis throughout Eliot’s novels (Religion of Humanity, 180, 189). The critical literature has seen considerable disagreement over the extent to which Middlemarch turns away from public history or incorporates historically important moments in its plot and structure. Among those who judge that Eliot avoids engagement with significant historical developments are Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978); Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and David Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Among those who view the novel as actively integrating political, social, and economic developments with the domestic lives of the characters are Jerome Beaty, “History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in Middlemarch,” Victorian Studies 1 (1957): 173–79; Henry Staten, “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?,” PMLA 115 (2000): 991–1005; and Carolyn Steedman, “Going to Middlemarch: History and the Novel,” Michigan Quarterly Review 40 (2001): 531–52. I understand Eliot to be actively engaged in weaving a significant historical turning point into the texture of the novel.

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Michael Carignan similarly sees Eliot contributing to the Victorian historical imagination by working out in her historical novels “the various steps by which a political or social change was reached” (“Analogical Reasoning in Victorian Historical Epistemology,” Journal of the History of Ideas [2003]: 445–64). Carignan is quoting from Eliot’s “Historical Imagination,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). For discussion of Eliot’s ideological position as one that combines recognition of the need for reform with respect for the continuity of traditions, see Cherry Wilhelm, “Conservative Reform in Middlemarch,” in George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 2000), 597–605; and Thomas Pinney, “The Authority of the Past in George Eliot’s Novels,” in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George Creeger (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 37–54. Eliot, Natural History of German Life, 281. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). On this discrepancy and on the necessity of failure in the nineteenth-century novel, see Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, 123. H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Signet, 1988), 91. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (New York: Penguin, 2005), 66. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. As Christine DeVine points out, the class system inherited from the country house estates is a fiction, but the fiction is still at work even when the country house system has become, for all intents and purposes, powerless (Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy, and Wells [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005], 107). From this insight arises the importance of what Krishan Kumar calls Wells’s “Bladesover theory” of history—the idea that we must look to the past for a model of creative, civilizing agency. In an earlier period, this agency came from the gentry; in the future, it will come from the technocratic “samurai” of Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) (“Wells and the So-Called Science of Sociology,” in H. G. Wells Under Revision, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe [London: Associated University Presses, 1990], 192–217, 208). The parallels between Tono-Bungay and Coca-Cola are extensive: Edward develops the recipe for Tono-Bungay within a year or two of the date in 1886

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when pharmacist John Pemberton developed the secret recipe for Coca-Cola and began selling the product. The progress of Coca-Cola’s market penetration was explosive; by 1895, it was sold in every state and territory of the United States. Moreover, from the time of Coca-Cola’s first promotions by Frank Robinson, Pemberton’s partner, through the ownership of the company by Asa Candler beginning in 1887 and extending into the 1920s, the meteoric sales of Coca-Cola were fueled by innovative strategies and aggressive marketing campaigns. The tone of boosterism that characterized Coca-Cola for its first quarter century (and more) corresponds closely with the snappy, empty slogans with which Edward generates excitement about his product. Patrick Brantlinger argues that a shift toward viewing credit more positively in the late nineteenth century coheres with a shift toward greater realism in the novel, and corresponds as well with a shift from a stress on production to a stress on consumption. He focuses on the importance of credit and consumption in his analysis of Tono-Bungay (Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996], 207–11). Kumar observes the importance for Wells’s thought of philosophical history as it was practiced at midcentury by historians such as H. T. Buckle and W. E. H. Lecky, both of whom worked in the conjecturalist tradition (discussed in chapter 5). In addition, Kumar traces Wells’s “historical sociology,” his distinctive genre of speculative periodizing, back to Adam Ferguson and the conjectural historians (“Wells and the So-Called Science of Sociology,” 215). Wells comes closest to articulating a Comtean, positivist vision of history and society in A Modern Utopia. Martha S. Vogeler enumerates several significant parallels between Wells and Comte: an interest in the sequence of social states; insistence on a planned industrial order; support for a world state; a belief in the importance of science and great literature in education; and the depiction of history as a slow unfolding of the sense of human community (“Wells and Positivism,” in H. G. Wells Under Revision, ed. Parrinder and Rolfe, 181–91). On the reduced character of most of Scott’s protagonists, see Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). The novels of Scott and Eliot imply more progressive ideological positions than their nonfiction works. Lukács argued that Scott gives explicit consent to the ideology of the class to which he belongs, but that, as an artist, he sees more deeply into the nature of historical events and thus reaches an understanding that confirms the truths that Marx arrived at through his study of history (Historical Novel, chapter 1). But we do not have to adopt the notion of the great

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artist’s insights into the workings of history. We might accept an explanation more in line with the argument of Fredric Jameson that these works reveal the ideological tendency of the form (The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981]). The authors influenced by conjectural history and sociological approaches conceive of society as a whole that has changed by taking different forms in different epochs; these stages are neither the product of the conscious decisions of individuals nor the work of a providential cause, and the arc connecting them does not necessarily describe an upward sweep.

conclus i on 1

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The complications of this period, which involved many ambiguities and combinations of the two main paradigms, have been illuminated by George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). One could make a similar argument about Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1939; Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). Concerned, like Foucault, with a transition difficult if not impossible to document—the shift to modern civilization—Elias sees it as a process of self-disciplining, including especially the disciplining of the body and its products. A number of significant works of social and historical thought published between about 1920 and 1970 were strongly shaped by conjectural history, including Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–23), H. G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920), and Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History (1934–61). As examplars of these approaches, one can consult two collections: Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013). Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). Subsequent citations refer to this edition. Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Jared Diamond is in some sense the nearest antecedent of many of the conjecturalist histories that have been written in the past fifteen years, especially through the example of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1995).

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However, although this work stands in a proximate relation to conjectural history, it reveals the relations between the original form and the succeeding disciplines of social thought less clearly than, say, Morris’s work, which addresses a closely related question. More than conjectural history, Diamond’s takes the form of philosophical history, concerned with the causes of the rise and decline of empires and nations—like Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734) or Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). Morris, Why the West Rules, 72. Elman Service, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective (New York: Random House, 1962), 53. Henry Maine, in Ancient Law (1861), makes a similar argument: that the medieval church retained the Roman law on wills because it allowed benefices (mostly from women) to the church. See chapter 6. Robert Bellah, Religion and Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Subsequent citations refer to this edition. For the thesis that music and language evolved together as extreme points along a spectrum of behaviors that connected them, see Steven Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” in The Origins of Music, ed. Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and Stephen Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 271–301. Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Subsequent citations refer to this edition. The divinity in Genesis 4 evinces a similar preference for herders over farmers and urbanists, as noted in chapter 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, part 2, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161. Frank Palmeri, Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665–1815 (Newark: University of Delaware, 2003), 305, note 13. Ursula K. Le Guin, preface, in The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 1969). As I understand them, discursive forms or genres do not possess essential and unchanging features but closely resemble species, as Darwin characterizes them in chapter 2 of the Origin of Species. Forms and species, always in flux, can be defined by distinctive features and combinations of features that can be

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identified by experienced and accurate observers, but there is no essential difference between a species and a variety, nor between a genre and a subgenre. If a genre is like a species, a field or discipline is like a genus or family. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, 128, 132; Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 292. Talcott Parsons, “ ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber II,” Journal of Political Economy 37 (1929): 31–51, 32. This instance is offered as a response to Weber in Charles George and Katherine George, “Protestantism and Capitalism in Pre-Revolutionary England,” Church History 27, no. 4 (1958): 351–71. Robert Merton, “The Fallacy of the Latest Word: The Case of ‘Pietism and Science,’ ” American Journal of Sociology 89 (1984): 1091–1121, 1109.

appendi x 2 . he ge l, hi story, a n d c on j e c t ure 1

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Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.  V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), para. 87. Subsequent citations refer to this edition. On Hegel’s reliance on conjecture in his narrative of prehistory in The Phenomenology of Spirit, see Michael Forster, The Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 305–6, 423–24. John Smith discusses the parallel between the development of Spirit in history and the history of the individual mind (“Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman,” Michigan Germanic Studies 13 [1987]: 206–25). M. H. Abrams considers The Phenomenology of Spirit as a bildungsroman (Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature [New York: Norton, 1973], 229–35). The question of the structure of The Phenomenology of Spirit lies close to the heart of interpretive problems raised by the text. For approaches to the problem, see Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974); Forster, Idea of a Phenomenology, 501–43; and Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 127–231. Robert Pippin discusses the crucial difficulties of transitions between stages in the Phenomenology—from consciousness to self-consciousness and from there to Spirit (“You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in The Cambridge

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Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick Beiser [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 52–85). For a discussion of Hegel’s indebtedness to Herder in the Phenomenology, see Forster, Idea of a Phenomenology, 332–48. Taylor emphasizes the influence on Hegel of Herder’s view of language as expressive rather than ostensive (Hegel, 13–27, 81–84). Michel Foucault characterizes the phase of modernity as a period of organicism and historicism (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences [New York: Random House, 1970]). “Even as we look upon history as an altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask: to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrifices been made?” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], 69). Ibid., 22, 98.

appendi x 3 . w e r e c on j e c t u r a l hi stor i e s rac i s t ? 1

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Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 33–38, 182–90. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Judith Bulter, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 39–41. Immanuel Kant, “Reflexionen zur anthropologie,” in Kants gesammelte schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1923), 15: part 2, 878. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 106–107 (translation modified). I agree with Tsenay Serequeberhan that Kant’s conjectural histories can be Eurocentric (“Eurocentrism in Philosophy: The Case of Immanuel Kant,” Philosophical Forum 27, no. 4 [1996]: 333–56). However, they also criticize the arrogance, violence, and hypocrisy of European colonialism. On the opposition to colonialism among Enlightenment thinkers, especially Diderot, Kant,

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and Herder, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Francis Moran III, “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second Discourse,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 125–44. “In a thousand pages of The Wealth of Nations, ‘race’ is applied most often to European workers and monarchs, and never to their counterparts in West Africa, whether as slaves or sovereigns” (Seymour Drescher, “The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture” [review], Journal of Social History 35, no. 2 [2001]: 482–83). As Drescher points out, Smith’s original use of “four-stage theory,” which is not racially inflected, is not mentioned in Wheeler’s Complexion of Race. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, On the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (New York: Garland, 1970), 4.178–79; and Ancient Metaphysics, 6 vols. (New York: Garland, 1977), 3.238–50. See, for example, Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics, 5.251–62. Condorcet was an anticolonialist and a founder of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks; however, he does foresee that, in the final stage of society, when colonialism has been overcome, savage tribes will need to be civilized or removed “peacefully.” For an investigation of relations between Herder and Kant, and of their cultural and intellectual context, see John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. O. Churchill, 2 vols. (London, 1803), 1.164. Georg Forster, “Noch etwas über menschenrassen,” in Kant and Forster, ed. Robert Bernasconi, vol. 3, Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), 156 (originally published in Der teutsche merkur, October and November 1786, 57–86, 150–66). For plantocratic mythology, and an argument that racist ideas developed to justify slavery, see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 133–90. In a brief but important discussion, George W. Stocking also ascribes the development of “scientific” racism to comparative anatomy (Victorian Anthropology [New York: Free Press, 1987], 26–27).

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On Cuvier’s views of race, I am indebted to the discussion in Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 28–32. Georges Cuvier, The Animal Realm, Arranged in Conformity with its Organization (1797; New York: Carvill, 1833), 50–51. Following Cuvier in the 1820s, two Frenchmen pushed the comparative anatomy tradition in even more extreme polygenetic directions. L. A. Desmoulins, in his Histoire naturelle des races humaines (1826), argued that there were sixteen human species and thirty-three races of men; Julien-Joseph Virey, in his Histoire naturelle du genre humain (1824), narrowed the number of species to two—black and not-black. Stephen Jay Gould has argued that Morton systematically though unintentionally misreported the cranial capacities of the different races in line with his racial biases (The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1996], 82–104). The same charge of bias has, in turn, been raised against Gould’s work by Jason E. Lewis and colleagues, who remeasured the skulls that Morton used (“The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould Versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias,” Public Library of Science, Biology 9, no. 6 [2011]: e1001071). Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1850), 90. Stocking observes that Knox’s viewpoint was influential: “Nourished in the shadow of Cuvierian comparative anatomy and the phrenological movement, physical anthropology by the 1840s had begun to emerge as a distinct approach to the study of human variability” (Victorian Anthropology, 65). Knox, Races of Men, 313, 85. Stocking distinguishes between the “static, diversifying impulses” of the comparative anatomical orientation and the “historically unifying tendencies” of the comparative philological approach (Victorian Anthropology, 75). Two later comparative anatomists, Hermann Schaaffhausen and T. H. Huxley, constitute notable exceptions to the strong tendency toward racism in the field. On Schaaffhausen, see chapter 4. For a helpful argument about the possibility of combining universalism with respect for local particulars, see Sonia Sikka, “Enlightened Relativism: The Case of Herder,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (2005): 309–41, especially 329–32.

index

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 53–54 Africa and Africans, 20, 41, 45, 48; in anthropology, 129–31; in comparative anatomy, 285–86; in Comte, 106; Dahomans, 116, 118; and fetishism, 103 agriculture: beginnings of, 16, 102; improvements in, 61 Althusser, Louis, 1 Amongthas, 116 animal-men, 14, 172; in Nietzsche, 180; in Rousseau, 15; in Wells, 240 animals in captivity, 184 animism, 36 Anthropological Society of London, 128–30, 135–36 anthropology, 22, 121–62; and political economy, 23; and sociology, 23 anticolonialism: in Comte, 105; in Herder, 54; in Kant, 51, 54; in Spencer, 319n.47 apes and humans: in Darwin, 171; in Monboddo, 283 Arab society, 77; pre-Islamic, 216, 221 art history, 55 Arunta (Australian Aboriginals), 209–10 asceticism, 185, 204 Asia, as origin of humans: in Bailly and Buffon; 58, in Prichard, 125, 293n.32 “Asiatic” mode of production, 2, 313n.55; in Marx, 80, 85; in Mill, 75 astronomy, 57; in Comte, 98, 100; in SaintSimon, 91–92 atheists, 186; morality of, 187 Auel, Jean, Clan of the Cave Bear, 266 Australia (New Holland), 63

autocritique, 20, 45 axial age, 258, 260 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 139, 154–55 Bagehot, Walter, 163, 189; Physics and Politics, 164–65 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 57–58 Balzac, Honoré de, 231–34; and Comte, 231; money in, 232; public opinion in, 233; use of form by, 233 works of: History of the Thirteen, 234; Lost Illusions, 232 barbarians and barbarism, 63; in Cooper, 231; in Ferguson, 41–44; in Nietzsche, 181, 185; in Scott, 226; in Vico, 32 Barrett, Michèle, 156, 161 Beer, Gillian, 331n.24, 352n.19 Bellah, Robert, 258–60; and Comte, 259–60; and Darwin, 259; and Durkheim, 258–59; on music and language, 259; Religion and Human Evolution, 258–60 Bentley, Arthur, 250 Berlin, Isaiah, 54 birth control, 317n.29. See also Malthus, Thomas Robert; Mill, John Stuart Blumenbach, J. F., 285 Boas, Franz, 23, 123, 250; “On the Limits of the Comparative Method,” 161 Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine, 57, 75, 85 Brosses, Charles de, Cult of the Fetish Gods, 12, 92, 204 Bryson, Gladys, 291n.22, 314n.1 Buckle, H. T., History of Civilization in England, 163–64

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Buddhism: in Bellah, 260; in Weber, 201, 204, 207 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 57–58 bureaucracy and bureaucratization, 75, 108, 205 Burrow, John, 291n.22 Butler, Judith, 281, 337n.50 Buzard, James, 349n.6 Calvinism, 201–4 Carlyle, Thomas, 107 Çatalhöyük, agriculture as nightmare in, 263–64 Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 333n.36 Childe, V. Gordon, 251 China and Chinese society, 117, 133; in Ferguson, 41, 48; in Mill, 77; in Weber, 205 Christianity, 37; in Comte and SaintSimon, 93, 95, 99; in Freud, 218; in Nietzsche, 186; in Weber, 201, 204, 207 civilization and civilized society, 41–44; ambivalence toward, 222; excess of, 51 Coca-Cola, 242 colonialism, 53. See also anticolonialism commerce and commercial society, 8, 10, 51; Ferguson on, 41–44; Pufendorf on, 30; in Scott, 226–27 communal meal, 25 communal property: among barbarians, 154–55; in India and Russia, 151; primitive, 21, 150 comparative anatomy and anatomists, 129, 132–33; and race, 285–86 “comparative method” in early anthropology, 22, 121–22, 136 Comte, Auguste, 2, 12, 96–107; and Christianity, 99; and Condorcet, 21, 97; on fetishism, 102; on French Revolution, 96; importance of hypotheses in, 98; Library of Positivism of, 100; and Malthus, 105; Positivist calendar of, 12, 101; religion of humanity of, 101, 103; three-stage theory of, 96–98, 100

index

works of: Course of Positive Philosophy, 74, 98–102; System of Positive Polity, 74, 104–6 conditional necessary verb tense, 16, 30–33; in Bagehot, 165; in Bellah, 259; in Comte, 102; in Engels, 156, 159; in Malthus, 64–65; in McLennan, 137; in Nietzsche, 179, 185; in Tylor, 146; in Weber, 201 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, marquis de, 4, 12, 38; anticolonialism of, 359n.11; on birth control, 61; and history of the future, 45, 187; on priests and kings, 51; on science and technology, 47; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 19, 35; utopian thinking of, 19; conscience, origin of, 222 contract, social. See noncontractualism; social contract Cooper, James Fenimore: and Genesis, 230; The Pioneers, 230; and Rousseau, 231 craniometry, 128, 285–86 Crawfurd, John, 127 Cro-Magnon man, 17 Crusades, 42, 47, 211 cunning of reason, in Hegel, 278. See also hidden hand custom, morality of. See morality of custom Cuvier, Georges, 285 cyclopean family, 31, 297n.11 Darwin, Charles, 3, 4, 165–78; and anthropological writers, 174, 176; on emotions of animals, 158; and Hume, 167, 170, 174–75; M and N notebooks of, 169, 177; and Mandeville, 174–75; and Mill, 175; on morality, 166, 169, 172; and Nietzsche, 191–96; on origins of language, 169, 171; racializing in, 176– 77; on religion, 172–73; and Rousseau, 167; satire in, 173; on savages, 167; and Spencer, 175, 318n.43; suppression of conjectural sources by, 174–75 works of: Descent of Man, 13, 24, 165–78; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 165; Origin of Species, 14, 164–65, 191–96

index

decline and degeneration,15, 127; in French thought, 10; in Rousseau, 47, 48 deep time, 57, 58 Diamond, Jared, 355n.4 Diderot, Denis, 54, 275 disciplines, 13, 15; emergence of, 192 disease, 63–64, 67–68 disenchantment of the world, in Weber, 202, 204, 207 division of labor: in Engels, 159; in Ferguson and Smith, 50; in Marx, 81–82 documentary evidence, lack of, 35–36; in anthropology, 122; in Darwin, 172; in Hegel, 275; in Malthus, 65; in Mandeville, 33; in Marx, 84, 87; in Morgan, 147; in Nietzsche, 179, 181; in Pufendorf, 30; in Scott, 228 dogs: and believers in Darwin, 168, 173, 331n.28; self-domestication of, 256 domestication of animals, 102. See also selfdisciplining of humans Douglas, Mary, 17–18 Dumas, Alexandre, 350n.13 Dunbar, James: Essays on the History of Mankind, 46, 49; on Ferguson’s stages, 46; on savages and savagery, 51, 284 Durkheim, Émile, 3, 209–14, 224; and Comte, 213; Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 25, 199; and Freud, 214; and Nietzsche, 214; noncontractual, 345n.18; religion and mob violence in, 212; society as divinity in, 211–12; and Tylor, 209 economic development, theories of, 294n.35 Elias, Norbert, 355n.2 Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 26; and Comte, 234, 351n.18; and history, 352n.20; Middlemarch, 234–39, 249; reduced utopia in, 247; speculation in, 238; and Weber, 237; on women, 246– 47; on work and vocation, 236–37 Engels, Friedrich, 2, 3, 13; on German nation, 157–58; and Millar, 160; on progress, 156; on prostitution, 156, 159; and Rousseau, 157–58; utopian visions of, 158, 160

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works of: German Ideology, 157, 160; Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 21, 154–61 Enlightenment thought, 10, 55; demystifying, 123, 177; radical, 21 Eskimos (Inuit), 45, 227 ethnocentrism, 46, 52, 177; of conjectural histories, 281, 284, 301n.37; Herder on, 45 ethnography and ethnology, 22, 121–24, 169 Eurocentrism, 49–50, 53; of Marx, 86 Europe and Europeans, 79, 286; in Darwin, 177; in Marx, 153; in Nietzsche, 186; in Weber, 207 European federation, in Saint-Simon, 91 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 23, 320n.1 eye, evolution of: in Darwin, 192; in Nietzsche, 195, 340n.78 facts, 4, 5, 7, 14; of history, 15; as opposed to speculation, 128–29. See also positivism Falconer, William, 19, 67 false social contract. See social contract, false fear: in Bagehot, 165; of the father, 222; of ghosts, 118; in Hobbes, 29; in Mandeville, 32; of wild animals, 170. fear, as source of religion, 131, 264; in Darwin, 172–74; in Hume, 36; in Lucretius, 28; in Vico, 31; in Wells, 240. See also Göbekli Tepe feathers, evolution of, 194 Ferguson, Adam, 1, 50; on barbarians, 42; and Buckle, 164; Essay on the History of Civil Society, 21, 42–44; and Spencer, 110; three-stage theory of, 41–44 fetishism, 302n.40; in Comte, 102–3; in Tylor, 142 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 236 fiction: and history of the future, 266; as speculative thought, 228, 248–49 Forbes, Duncan, 290n.13 form, persistence of, with change of function: in McLennan, 115; in Spencer, 114–15; in Tylor, 141; in Weber, 206; in Wells, 242. See also Nietzsche–Darwin principle forms, cultural and organic, 195

3 64

Forster, Georg, 48, 54; on fixed races, 284; on savages, 51; on slavery, 284 works of: Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, 48; Voyage Round the World, 48 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 48, 54; Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, 48 Foucault, Michel, 14, 26, 305n.62; and Comte, 254; demystification in, 252; on Enlightenment, 55; and Kant, 251–52; and Weber, 343n.8 works of: Discipline and Punish, 253; History of Sexuality, 252–53; The Order of Things, 254;“What Is Critique?,” 251; “What Is Enlightenment?,” 251; “What Is Revolution?,” 251 four-stage theory, 5, 13, 281; in Smith, 7, 20 Frazer, James, 116, 205, 218; The Golden Bough, 161, 220, 221; satiric demystification in, 219–20 French historical thought, 46 French Revolution, 44, 90; in Comte, 96; in Durkheim, 211, 213; in Hegel, 276; in Morgan, 147, in Saint-Simon, 91 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 4, 199; and Durkheim, 221; and Enlightenment project, 222; and Hume, 222; and Maine, 218–19; and Nietzsche, 218–19; and Robertson Smith, 217, 219; satire in, 219; speculation in, 199, 221 works of: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 214; Civilization and Its Discontents, 222–23, 254; The Future of an Illusion, 222; Totem and Taboo, 25, 216–21 Fukuyama, Francis, The Origins of Political Order, 255–57 functionalism, 124, 161, 250 Gallagher, Catherine, 324n.48 genealogical history, 163; in Nietzsche, 179–96 Genesis, 39–40, 56–57 genetic analysis, 255–56, 271 genres, 5–6; Douglas on, 17–18; in Freud, 221; history of, 192; new, 269; Nietzsche on, 182–83, 188; in Rousseau, 39, 303n.45; and species, 356n.15

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geography, influence on society, 164 George, Henry, Progress and Poverty, 329n.5 German historical thinkers, 46 Germanic peoples and German nation, 42, 68; in Engels, 157, 159; in Hegel, 278; in Nietzsche, 179 Göbekli Tepe, and origin of religion in terror, 264. See also fear, as source of religion Godwin, William, 61 Gould, Stephen Jay: on Morton, 360n.20; on Nietzsche–Darwin principle, 192, 339nn.66–67 government, forms of: in Engels, 157–58; in Morgan, 147–48 Greece and Greeks, ancient, 63, 147; customs of, 23; in Hegel, 276, 278; in Morgan, 148; philosophers in, 68 Guasco, Ottaviano di, 56–57 Guignes, Joseph de, 313n.53 Hancarville, Pierre François d’, 56–57 hand: bones in, 193; evolution of, 195 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 18, 275–79, 304n.53; and Herder, 275; master and slave in, 276–77; teleology in, 277–78; theodicy in, 279. See also cunning of reason works of: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction, “Reason in History,” 277–79; Phenomenology of Spirit, 29, 275–77 Heidegger, Martin, 14–15 Henry VIII (king of England), 83–84, 96 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 5, 48, 126; anticolonialism of, 54; on ethnocentrism, 45; organicism of, 45, 48; providentialism of, 40; on savages, 51 works of: Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind, 21, 29, 257; This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, 45–46 Heringman, Noah, 305n.64 Hesiod, Works and Days, 27 hidden hand, 35, 60; in contemporary historians, 257; Marx on, 82; in Smith, 18;

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Spencer on, 110–11. See also cunning of reason; unintended consequences hierarchy, social, 102, 108; in Engels, 158; in Spencer, 116. See also Millar, John Highlanders, Scottish, 122, 149; and Catholicism, 227; in Scott, 226 Hinduism, 201, 204 historical temporality. See temporality, historical history: biblical, 4–5; Christian, 15; deep, 255; hypothetical, 270; nonprovidential, 28; philosophical, 164, 288n.8, 309n.29, 355n.4; possibility of, 45; as struggle between values, 183–87. See also genealogical history history of religion. See religion: history of history of the future: in Condorcet, 44– 45; in Engels, 159–60; fictional, 266; in Kant, 45; in Nietzsche, 185, 187; in Saint-Simon, 91; in Wells, 241 Hobbes, Thomas, 29–30 Hodgkin, Thomas, 126 holism of society, 21, 56; in Comte, 99; in Eliot, 233; in Millar, 23; in Saint-Simon, 91; in Scott, 227; in Weber, 206 Hont, Istvan, 296n.4 horde, Darwinian, 25; in Freud, 217 Huizinga, Johan, 258 human animal. See animal-men Hume, David, 35–39; and Darwin, 170; and early anthropology, 131; satire in, 37; stages in, 43–44; and Tylor, 142 works of: Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 170; Natural History of Religion, 7, 35–39, 102, 130; “Of the Original Contract,” 46; “On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” 50, 59, 100 Hunt, James, 128–30, 132, 134 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 135, 322n.21, 360n.24; Man’s Place in Nature, 166 hypothetical thinking, 29, 153; in Weber, 343n.6 ideal type, 199; not empirical, 224, 270; Parsons on, 270, 343n.7. See also Weber, Max

365

Incas, 42; Morgan on, 150; in Schaaffhausen, 133; in Spencer, 116, 117 incest taboo, 217, 221 India and Indian society: in Malthus, 68; in Mill, 133; in Prichard, 125 inequality, 16; Mandeville on, 33; Marx on, 85; Pufendorf on, 30. See also Rousseau, Jean-Jacques “iron cage”: and Foucault, 253; in Weber, 3, 203–4; 208–9, 263 Islam, 201, 204 Jack, Malcolm, 298n.15 Jameson, Fredric, 281, 292n.24 Jevons, W. S., 250 Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, 22, 128–31; satire in, 129–30 Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 126–27 Judaism, 45, 216, 221; in Nietzsche, 185; in Weber, 201, 204, 207 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 5; providentialism of, 39–40; Sketches of the History of Man, 12 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 12; anticolonialism of, 51, 54 works of: “Conjectural Origins of the Human Race,” 39; “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 251; “Perpetual Peace,” 45, 319n.48; “What Is Enlightenment?,” 222, 251; “Whether the Human Race Is Constantly Improving,” 251 killing of a god, myths of, 220 kinship relations and terms, 23, 39. See also McLennan, John; Morgan, Lewis Henry Knox, Robert, The Races of Man, 286 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 12, 67 language, origins and early history of, 16–17; in Herder, 125; in Prichard, 126; in Smith, 6 language and song: in Bellah, 259; in Darwin 169, 171; in Diderot, 332n.31; in Monboddo, 170, 289n.11, 332n.31; in Rousseau, 289n.11

366

Leacock, Eleanor Burke, 154–55, 161 Lecky, W. E. H., History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 163–64 Le Guin, Ursula, on speculative fiction, 268 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1, 17–18; on Durkheim, 212; on Morgan, 325n.57; on totemism, 348n.40 Lilla, Mark, 297n.12 Locke, John, 29–30 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 295n.2 Löwith, Karl, 293n.28, 298n.12 Lubbock, John, 21, 135, 139–40; in Mithen’s After the Ice, 262; on Paleolithic and Neolithic, 139 works of: Origin of Civilisation, 139– 40; Primitive Times, 139 Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, 27–28; and Rousseau, 28 Lukács, Georg, 90, 354n.35 Maine, Henry: Ancient Law, 25, 118, 164; and conjecture, 346n.27; on cyclopean family, 346n.26; on early Roman law, 215; from status to contract in, 165, 215 Malcolmson, Cristina, 323n.35 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 23, 161, 250 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 4, 61–69; on birth control, 306n.3; on Condorcet, 61–62; historical temporality in, 69; inferences of, 64, 68–69; Principle of Population, 18, 62–69; on speculation, 62 Mandeville, Bernard: and Darwin, 169; Fable of the Bees, 18, 28, 32–34, 38 marriage, forms and history of, 22–23; in Engels, 157; in McLennan, 138; in Morgan, 144 Marshall, Alfred, 250, 314n.60 Martineau, Harriet, 19; historical temporality of, 71; Illustrations of Political Economy, 19, 70–73; and Malthus, 73; Robinsonade in, 71–72 Marx, Karl, 2, 3, 201; and Ferguson, 86; on gens or clan, 327n.66; historical temporality of, 153; on hypotheses, 153–54; on Malthus and Mill, 79; on

index

Morgan and Maine, 150–54; multilinear historical development in, 151–52; on Smith, 86; speculation in, 85; stages and transitions in, 79–88 works of: Capital, 9, 83–84, 311n.40; Communist Manifesto, 80, 150; Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 80; Ethnological Notebooks, 150–54, 160; German Ideology, 20, 82–83; Grundrisse, 80, 84–87 mass marketing, 246, 248 materialist feminist thought, 160, 271 matrilineality, 155 Mayans, 42, 133 McLennan, John, 22; on endogamy and exogamy, 138; inferences of, 137–38; and Kames, 137; Primitive Marriage, 22, 136–39; speculation in, 139; on totems, 139 Meade, George Herbert, 251 Meek, Ronald, 296n.4 Merton, Robert, 270 metadisciplinary thought, 163 metals and metallurgy, 28, 33, 63 Mill, John Stuart, 3; on birth control, 310n.32; on inequality, 75; and Smith, 75, speculation in, 77; and workers’ cooperatives, 311nn.36–37 works of: Chapters on Socialism, 311n.36; Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 74; Principles of Political Economy, 20, 74–79 Millar, John, 5, 13, 50; and Eliot, 246; Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 35, 108 Mithen, Steven: After the Ice, 261–65; on Çatalhöyük, 263–64; on discontent in first cities, 263; and genealogical history, 265; on Göbekli Tepe, 264; and Martineau, 262; and Nietzsche, 264; and Rousseau, 263–64 Mivart, St. George, 193–94 modernity, ambivalent views of, 18, 25, 52; in Balzac, 233; in historical novels, 247; in Rousseau, 3; in Scott, 226; in Weber, 208 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 283; Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 170–71, 289n.11, 330n.31

index

367

monkeys, and believers: in Darwin, 168; in Hume, 38, 173 monogamy, and property, 156–57 monogenism, 123, 125, 132 monotheism, 35–38, 51; in Darwin, 169; in Hume, 37–38, 44; in Tylor, 142; in Weber, 205 Montaigne, Michel de, 168 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 207, 355n.4 morality, origins and history of: in animals, 167; in Darwin, 166, 169, 172, in Nietzsche, 181–82, 186 morality of custom, 165 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 21, 144–50; Ancient Society, 23, 144–49; on democracy, 149; on gens or clan, 146; on kinship terms, 145; on marriage forms, 145; on McLennan and Maine, 144; and Rousseau 148 Morris, Ian: and Condorcet, 257; technocratic utopia of, 258; Why the West Rules—For Now, 255–58 Morton, Samuel George, 285–86 Muthu, Sankar, 304n.55, 358n.6 myths, Greek and Roman, 218, 220, 221

organicism, 21, 45; in Comte, 99; in Spencer, 107, 113–14 Oriental despotism, 75, 85 origin vs. present function, in Nietzsche, 183, 186, 340n.78 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 27

Native Americans, 129; and ancient Greeks, 67; in Cooper, 230–31; Iroquois, 144– 46, 158; in Malthus, 63; in Prichard, 125; in Robertson, 19, 48, 66; in Scott, 226; in Smith, 41 natural history of society, 36, 57–58; in Balzac, 233; in Eliot, 234–35, 239; in Freud, 219; in Wells, 240; in Zola, 239. See also Hume, David: Natural History of Religion natural law theory, 32, 33, 47 natural selection, 165, 176; critique of, 193; and racializing, 176 Neanderthals, 16, 167; DNA of, 256; in prehistoric fiction, 266 necessary conditional tense. See conditional necessary verb tense Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 4 178–97; aristocrats and plebeians in, 182; and Bagehot, 165, 189; etymologies in, 181, 183; and Herder, 189–90; on historical

Pacific Island societies, 41, 48, 63 parody, 101 parricide, 218–19 Parsons, Talcott, 270, 343n.7 pastoral peoples, 64 patriarchalism, 25, 50; in Bagehot, 164; in Freud, 217; in Maine, 151; in Robertson Smith, 215 Pauw, Cornelius de, 67 Phillips, Mark Salber, 298n.15, 301n.32 philosophical anthropology, 338n.59 Pike, L. O., 174–75 Pocock, J. G. A., 290n.13, 302n.39 political economy, 18, 21, 59–88; and anthropology, 23 polygenism, 52, 123; and Darwin, 167; in early anthropology, 127, 132 polytheism, 35–38, 51; in Darwin, 169; in Hume, 37–38, 43; in Tylor, 142 Poovey, Mary, 300n.31, 306n.2, 307n.7

method, 183; historicizing in, 182; and Hume, 339n.60; and Lubbock, 336n.48; on origins, 183–84; and Rée, 190–91, 339n.63; on resentment, 181; and Rousseau, 190, 337n.51; speculation in, 181. See also Nietzsche–Darwin principle; origin vs. present function works of: Daybreak, 178; Human, All Too Human, 13, 190–91; On the Genealogy of Morality, 13, 24, 179–91; “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” 190 Nietzsche–Darwin principle, 191–97 noncontractualism, 34, 46–47, 53; in Durkheim, 345n.18 non-European peoples, 49, 63, 286 nonprovidentialism, 34, 36–41, 53. See also providentialism Nott, J. C., and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 286

368

positivism, 4, 13, 14; in Comte, 102–5 prehistoric fiction, 265–66 Prichard, James Cowles, 124–25; as monogenist, 125; Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 22; on skin color, 125. priests: in Condorcet, 51; emergence of, 103; in Nietzsche, 185; in Spencer, 117; and superstition, 99; in Weber, 205 progress, 3, 9, 15, 18; historiography of, 49– 53; Kames on, 49; lack of, in Nietzsche, 182, 188; unidirectional, 48, 122. See also decline and degeneration progress, ambivalent views of, 267; in Ferguson, 43; in Foucault, 255; in historical novels, 25, 231; in Morgan, 149; in Rousseau and Smith, 10; in Weber, 198, 208 property: Locke on, 29; Marx on, 20; Morgan on, 147; Rousseau on, 8, 47; Smith on, 8; and society, 8 providentialism, 7, 31. See also nonprovidentialism Pufendorf, Samuel von, 27, 180; Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 30–31 punishment, genealogy of, 195 Quakers, 202–3 race and racism, 49, 122; accusations of, 53, 55; and conjectural history, 281–86; in early anthropological journals, 128–32, 134–35 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 161, 250 radioactivity, 243 Reade, Winwood, The Martyrdom of Man, 329n.5 Reform Act of 1832, 235 religion, 23; and economics, 200–208; history of, 24, 37–38, 52; of humanity, in Comte, 101, 103, 106–7, 244; and ideals, 213; in need of renewal, 92; origin of, 16; persistence of, in modernity, 212. See also fear, as source of religion; religion, social psychology of religion, social psychology of, 23: in Durkheim, 211–13; in Freud, 216–23; in Weber, 199–208

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Richardson, John, 194, 341n.81 ritual sacrifice, 25 Robertson, William, 12 works of: History of America, 19, 48, 66; “View of the Progress of Society in Europe,” in History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 35, 49 Romantic irony, 276 Rome and Romans, ancient, 23, 42, 117; forms of property and government in, 148; in Hegel, 276 Ross, Dorothy, 291n.22 Rostow, Walt W., 251 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 4, 48; and historical decline, 47; on orangutans and humans, 330n.20; on origin of language, 330n.21. See also animal-men works of: Discourse on Inequality, 4–7, 15, 36; Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 289n.11; Social Contract, 47 sacrifice, prehistoric, 216, 220 sacrificial meal, 217, 221 Sade, Donatien Alphonse, marquis de, 54 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 90–95; and Comte, 90, 94; New Christianity, 92; on the poor, 93; stages in, 91; as transitional figure, 90 satire: in Darwin, 173; in Freud, 219; in Hume, 37; in Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, 129–30; in Spencer, 115; in Wells, 241, 242, 248 savages and savagery, 31, 41–44, 63; in civilization, 49, 178; in Darwin, 167 Schaaffhausen, Hermann, 132–33, 178, 360n.24 Schacht, Richard, 136 Schweber, Silvan, 178, 330n.12 science, 21, 57; in Comte, 97–99; in Condorcet, 44; in Enlightenment, 54; as new authority, 107. See also technology scientists, as new clergy: in Comte, 104; in Saint-Simon, 91, 95. See also technocracy Scott, Walter, 25, 73, 226–30; fanaticism in, 229; romance in, 227; transitions between stages in, 228–30

index

works of: The Antiquary, 229; Ivanhoe, 228–29; Old Mortality, 229; Redgauntlet, 229; Waverley, 226–28, 230 Scottish historical thought, 10, 46–47, 51 secularization, 3, 18, 53; inevitability of, 50; and modernity, 207; in Taylor, 260–61; in Weber, 200–204, 207 self-disciplining of humans, 267; in Foucault, 203, 253–54; in Kafka, 336n.49; in Mandeville, 203; in Mithen, 264; in Nietzsche, 179–80, 189; in Weber, 203; in Wells, 240 shopping, 243 Siberia, 58 slaves and slavery, 50–51, 81; in Comte 103; slave trade, 83 Smith, Adam, 3, 8–10, 201 works of: “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,” 6, 127, 130; “History of Astronomy,” 59, 101; Lectures on Jurisprudence, 7; Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 170; Wealth of Nations, 2, 6, 7 Smith, William Robertson, 23, 161; Religion of the Semites, 23–24, 216; speculation in, 216 social contract, 29–30 social contract, false: in Freud, 223; in Rousseau, 47; in Spencer, 109 sociology, 21, 89–120; and anthropology, 23, 117; and novel, 234–39; as science of society, 98 speculative thinking, 16, 259, 269; in Darwin, 167; turn away from, 250 Spencer, Herbert, 2–4, 107–20; anticolonialism of, 319n.47; Darwin on, 114; idea of evolution in, 119; and Malthus, 111; method of, 116–19; and Nietzsche, 119; on public education, 111; relation of, to predecessors, 21, 110; satire in, 115; stages in, 10; struggle for survival in, 111–14; utopian vision of, 112 works of: The Man Versus the State, 111; Principles of Sociology, 21, 110–19; Social Statics, 89, 109 Spengler, Oswald, 270, 355n.2 stages of society, 2, 18, 34, 41–46; in archaeology, 267; in the arts, 56;

369

in Comte, 97–98, 100–103; in Elman Service, 256; in Ferguson, 41–43; in Foucault, 253; in Herder, 40; in Mandeville, 33; in Marx, 79–86; in Morgan, 144, 147–48; in Nietzsche, 336n.47; progressive, 10; in Scott, 228–30; in Smith, 7; in Spencer, 109; stationary stage, 77; substages, 23; in Wells, 241–45 state of nature: in Cooper, 231; in Ferguson, 42; in Hobbes and Locke, 29; Spencer on, 109; in Vico, 31 statistics, 164 Statius, Thebaid, 36 “steel-hard shell.” See “iron cage” Stewart, Dugald, 6; definition of conjectural history of, 7, 331n.22 Stocking, George W., 22, 121, 135 Stoczkowski, Wiktor, 295n.2 Strauss, David, 236 struggle for existence, 194 Stuart, Gilbert, View of Society in Europe, 36, 49 survivals, doctrine of: contrast of, with Nietzsche–Darwin principle, 341n.82; in Lubbock, 139; in McLennan, 137; in Spencer, 115; in Tylor, 141 taboos, 205 taming of humans. See self-disciplining of humans Taylor, Charles, 236; and Nietzsche, 261; A Secular Age, 260–61; and Weber, 261 technocracy: in Comte, 95; in Condorcet, 28, 44; in Wells, 244. See also scientists, as new clergy technology, importance of: in Comte, 97; in Condorcet, 28, 44, 244; in Lucretius, 28; in Marx, 81, 84; in Morgan, 144 temporality, historical, 16; of Christianity, 15; in Freud, 223; in Hegel, 277; of inevitable progress, 140; in Malthus, 69; in Martineau, 71; in Nietzsche, 184; of progress and regression, 51, 156; of technological leaps, 149 theory, 15, 270 three-stage theory, 48, 144, 149; of Ferguson, 41–44

370

totemism: in Durkheim, 209–10; in Freud, 217, 221; Lévi-Strauss on, 348n.40 Toynbee, Arnold, 270, 355n.2 Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 127 transition to modernity: in Bellah, 260; in Foucault, 254; in historical novels, 225; in Marx, 84; in Smith, 14; in Weber, 201 transitions between periods, 9, 18, 34, 35; to capitalism, 24; in Maine, 215; in Marx and Marxism, 79–86, 311n.40; in Nietzsche, 24, 182; as ruptures, 254; in Scott, 228–30; in Smith, 25; in Spencer, 116; in Weber, 25, 203 travel narratives, 65, 285n.2 tribal society, 122 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 2, 22, 24; and Christianity, 142; and Condorcet, 142; definition of culture of, 141; and Mandeville, 142; on race, 142–43; and Spencer, 117; use of Hume and de Brosses by, 142; use of survivals by, 141 works of: Primitive Culture, 140–43, 222; Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 137 unintended consequences, 18, 34: in Comte, 97; in contemporary histories, 257; in Eliot, 237–38; in Foucault, 253; in Freud, 220; in Mandeville, 32; in Marx, 82, 87; in Smith, 9; in Spencer, 108–10; in Weber, 204 universalism, 7, 20, 47–49, 53; in Bellah, 260; in Comte, 101; in Freud, 220; in Herder, 45; and local identity, 48, 54; in Millar, 23; usefulness of, 48; in Weber, 208 unplanned development. See unintended consequences utopian thought, 4, 54; of Buffon, 58; of Comte, 74, 104–6; of Condorcet, 19, 240; of Marx, 20, 88; of Spencer, 112; of Wells, 245; of Zola, 239. Vico, Giambattista, 27; on marriage, 31; New Science, 31–32; and providence, 32

index

Waal, Frans de, 296n.6, 335n.44 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 134–35, 323n.29 Wallas, Graham, 250 Walras, Léon, 250 war: in Comte, 103, 105; in Ferguson, 42; in Lucretius, 28; in Malthus, 64, 67–68; in Spencer, 112 Weber, Max, 3, 196–209, 224; conception of history in, 344n.12; and Ferguson, 208; on form and meaning, 206; and Herder, 208; and Hume, 205; ideal types in, 201; and Marx, 201, 341n.3; and Nietzsche, 206–7; speculation in, 201, 203 works of: Economy and Society, 204; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 24, 199, 202–4; Sociology of Religion, 24, 200–201, 204–8 Wells, H. G., 26, 240–46, 248; and Comte, 354n.33; dystopia in, 245; satire in, 241, 242, 248; and technology, 240, 245, 248 works of: Island of Doctor Moreau, 240–41; A Modern Utopia, 245; Outline of History, 355n.2; Time Machine, 241, 169, 318n.41; TonoBungay, 241–45 Westermarck, Edward, 160 whale, baleen, 193 Wheeler, Roxan, The Complexion of Race, 281 White, Leslie, 162, 251, 325n.59 Winckelmann, Johann, 55–56 Wokler, Robert, 290n.13, 314n.3 women, status of, 35, 150: and class, 156; in Comte, 74; in Eliot, 246; in Engels, 155, 160; in Millar, 160; and utopia for, 105. See also Millar, John workers, 69; in Comte, 106; in Marx, 82–83, 84, 86 Zammito, John, 359n.12 Zola, Émile, as social scientist, 239 works of: Germinal, 239; The Ladies’ Paradise, 239