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

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.

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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.

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY DICK HOWARD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

   Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife

ONE

   Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form

TWO

   Political Economy and the Question of Progress

THREE

   Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society

FOUR

   The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology

FIVE

   Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human

SIX

   The Social Psychology of Religion

SEVEN

   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

FOREWORD

FRANK PALMERI’S STATE OF NATURE, 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 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.

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

______________

* 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).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT IS A PLEASURE TO REMEMBER 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 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.

INTRODUCTION

Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife

WHY CONJECTURAL HISTORY?

WHEN JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU composed his 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 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 ever-greater 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 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 open-ended 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.

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 national-cultural tradition, or even to a focus on a single characteristic, such as four-stage 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.

However, in most of the later works, the presence of the eighteenth-century 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.

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,