The Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” was a tumultuous period. It persisted, according to some, from the early 1600s to as late as the 1830s. It was marked by a series of processes that mutually shaped and reinforced one another. These included:
(1) the formation of merchant empires and overseas colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia established by Holland, Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Russia from the mid fifteenth century onward combined with the creation of increasingly large domestic markets in England and other parts of Europe (McNally 1988; Tracy 1990); (2) the rise of anti-authoritarian sentiment, skepticism, and the appeal to reason or rationality which challenged and ultimately eroded the divinely ordained authority claimed by the churches and the aristocracy during and after the Reformation (Israel 2001; Popkin 1979); (3) the “scientific revolution”—also characterized as the “conquest of nature” or the “death of nature”—which involved the assimilation of a new understanding of nature into the wider culture and society, because of the desire of the emerging commercial classes for technological innovations and the erosion of barriers separating intellectuals and artisans (Forbes 1968; Jacob 1988; Merchant 1980; Zilsel 2003); and (4) the rise of industrial capitalism, analyzed later by Marx in Capital, which involved the appearance of new forms of manufacture from about 1750 onward that were based on the continual adoption of technological innovations, the transformation of social relations, the construction of factories, and the growth of cities across northern Europe (Hobsbawm 1968).
The Enlightenment was also marked by continuous conflicts between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and various Protestant fringe movements from the 1520s onward. Some claim that this “war of the Churches constituted Europe’s prime engine of cultural and educational change” until the mid seventeenth century when “major intellectual turmoil developed first in the Dutch Republic and the Calvinist states of Germany” (Israel 2001: 23). Besides the ideological and political strife that formed the backdrop to everyday life, there were probably no more than a few decades between 1600 and 1830 when peace prevailed and battles or wars were not being waged somewhere in the world. The impact of the Enlightenment was not limited to the soldiers and sailors who died in these wars. It was felt by all layers of society. More than one aristocrat and preacher of the day lamented that “even the common people were susceptible to new ideas” (Israel 2001: 1, 8–9).
While Europe is often portrayed as its center of gravity, this is not precisely correct.
Enlightenment thought was discussed and deployed in the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. For example, the rhetoric of the American Revolution was rooted in the ideas of Enlightenment writers. The contents of Mercurio Peruano, published in Peru during the 1790s, included articles ranging from Newtonian science and natural history through commentaries on political economy to discussions of philosophy, the French Revolution, and the idea of the nation. Commercial minorities that connected the Ottoman state, India, China, and Japan to Europe were familiar with the scientific and social-theoretical contributions of the Enlightenment (e.g. Chatterjee 1986:
54; Gran 1979; Habib 1990; Mauro 1990; Rossabi 1990; Wang 1990). What the Enlightenment provided were analytical categories and a conceptual framework—a language, if you will—for discussing issues of the day. Political reformers and leaders of nationalist or revolutionary movements in areas as widely separated as Latin America, the eastern Mediterranean (including Egypt and Greece), and Japan used this language from the late eighteenth century onward to express and buttress their plans and goals. Moreover, virtually every nationalist movement of the last two centuries has made use of concepts originated by or derived from Enlightenment writers.
This chapter has three goals. The first is to comment briefly on early Enlightenment thought in order to provide a background to standpoints that appeared around 1750 and affected social commentators, including Marx, who wrote after that date.
The second goal is to examine both the philosophical and empirical foundations of the new anthropology of Enlightenment writers as well as the contexts in which it emerged in the mid eighteenth century. The third goal is to examine the subsequent development of anthropology and to consider the various manifestations of anthropological sensibilities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The standpoints of Enlightenment thinkers never constituted a unified, fixed body of ideas and arguments. The movement can be described as a spectrum of warring factions engaged in heated debate, whose perspectives, boundaries, centers of gravity, and even membership shifted as they developed through time. At one end were the traditionalists who argued for the divinely inspired authority of the existing aristocratic and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The other, radical end of the spectrum was occupied by a number of individuals, the most notable of whom were Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). The former, a Dutch lens grinder, challenged knowledge claims based on revealed religion and argued, among other things, that nature creates itself in accordance with rules which govern its operation, that the creations of nature are produced in a fixed order, and that human values (e.g. good and evil) do not exist in nature but are human creations instead (Allison 2005; Garrett 1995). The latter, a German mining engineer and civil servant, laid the foundations for seeing nature historically as a dynamic world in flux that had the capacity to change continually through time (Garber 2005; Glass 1959: 37–8; Sleigh 1995). Arrayed between the traditionalist and radical extremes were a series of intermediate, “moderate” standpoints—such as Cartesianism (rationalism) and empiricism. Each position had theological, scientific, political, and philosophical dimensions. The arguments among their advocates “rarely referred directly to the political and social conflict but did so in a mediated way. These conflicts were about the nature of fundamental boundaries, like that between mind and body, human and animal, living and non-living, male and female” (Jordanova 1986: 33). They also gave rise to enduring terms like “materialist,” “liberal,” “romantic,” “conservative,” and “socialist” not to mention the words “ideology” and “scientist.”
The most striking features shared by a majority of the factions of the Enlightenment, but not always the same ones, were arguments about the autonomy of the individual, the importance of rationality or the use of reason, the existence of a natural world constituted outside of human beings, and rather mechanistic views about what nature was like. It is also clear, however, that they did not always necessarily see or understand the individual, rationality, and nature in quite the same way. This was true as well of their views on the importance of toleration, equality, property, and contracts, which were also widely discussed. For our immediate purposes here, the debates about nature and history from about 1670 to 1750, fueled in significant ways by Spinoza and Leibniz, laid the foundations for the development of a new way of perceiving and understanding nature and the place of human beings in it. As Jacques Roger (1963/1997: 366) observed, “Like the thought it was combating, the new scientific philosophy was to rest upon a general conception of man, nature, and God.” This perspective emphasized the importance of observation and reasoning; it asserted that mechanistic explanations which viewed nature as a huge machine were too simple to account for its complexity; and it transformed God from a creator who intervened directly in nature into an artisan who either acted indirectly or not at all.1
The World Historicized
Both nature and human society were slowly historicized after the 1670s. By this, I mean that understanding the history of some thing was absolutely necessary for truly knowing that thing, regardless of whether it was nature, human society, or a commodity. Here, history involved the concepts of both process and succession.
This historicized perspective of the world and its inhabitants crystallized in the mid eighteenth century with the appearance in rapid succession of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, Buffon’s Natural History in 1749, and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755. Let us consider each writer in more detail.
The Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat (1689–1755), was an astute social commentator and critic who had read widely in the travel literature of the day and recognized the diversity of manners and customs that existed from one society to another. For our purposes, he wrote three books of note. The earliest was the Persian Letters (Montesquieu 1721/1973), in which two imaginary young princes from Persia travel throughout France and comment in letters they send home about the incomprehensibility of French mores and traditional values as they existed in the early eighteenth century around the time of Louis XIV’s death. In this work, Montesquieu saw “society as a reality that was external to the individual, constraining him to act and think in certain ways” and that “prevents him from evaluating his position in society with any degree of objectivity, . . . [since] his understanding of its values, norms and institutional structures are purely subjective”
(Baum 1979: 43).
In his second work, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734/1965), Montesquieu rejected theological arguments and began to work out the methodological foundations for a historical standpoint that would neither view human history as one accident or error after another nor see the diversity of manners and customs of peoples around the world as signs of human weakness or irrationality (Althusser 1959/1982: 20–1). He sought instead to discover the particularities of Roman history. With regard to the former, he wrote:
It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it. Maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if by chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish in a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents. (Montesquieu 1734/1965: 169)
Thus, as Raymond Aron (1965/1998: 15) put it: “behind the seemingly accidental course of events, we must grasp the underlying causes which account for them.”
Montesquieu distinguished two phases of Roman historical development: one when the government and the society were in harmony or equilibrium; the other when there were contradictions between the aims of the state, on the one hand, and values, principles, or spirit that unified the populace, on the other. These crises were the dialectic of history, its motor.
Montesquieu refined his concept of the underlying causes of development in his third work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748/1965). He argued that the diversity of laws and manners, i.e., forms of government, found in societies around the world could be reduced to a few types—republics, monarchies, and despotisms. Each type had its own distinctive nature, which was shaped by both the number of individuals who possessed sovereignty and the ways in which they exercised it; each type also had distinctive sentiments—such as morality, honor, or fear—that promoted harmony among its citizens. In other words, Montesquieu saw a connection between the form of government, on the one hand, and the style of interpersonal relations, on the other; he argued that social life is shaped by the way in which power is exercised. As he had shown earlier, when there were contradictions between the spirit (sentiments) of the people and the aims of the state, crises emerged which eroded the form of government. Montesquieu also considered the material or physical causes—like climate or soil—have on the customs, manners, and laws of diverse peoples. He argued that there was a correlation, for example, between the incidence of polygamy and warm climates, and that the laws and forms of government of nations reflect those material influences. Thus, there was a second dialectical relationship between the environment broadly defined and the customs and institutions of people. He was also adamant that the spirit or will of the people was determinant in the final instance. There is a continuous dialectic throughout The Spirit of the Laws “between absolute values which seem to correspond to the permanent interests of men as such, and those which depend upon time and place in a concrete situation” (Berlin 1955/2001: 157).
The project of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88)—superintendent of the royal botanical gardens in Paris—was more expansive than that of Montesquieu. In the first three volumes of his Natural History, which appeared under the imprimatur of the Royal Press in 1749,2 Buffon covered diverse topics ranging from the history and theory of the earth and the formation of planets through biological reproduction and embryonic development to the natural history of human beings. There was a ready audience for his work, which was composed of a curious, sophisticated, and politically influential public that wanted to be usefully entertained without having to invest too much effort as well as the savants and natural philosophers of the various royal societies and academies of science. This audience was fascinated with the steady stream of unknown plants and animals from the far reaches of the earth that arrived each year in Amsterdam, Paris, and the other commercial centers of Europe; its members flocked to lectures illustrated with various scientific experiments, anatomical dissections, and opportunities to peer at specimens through one of the new, powerful microscopes fashioned in the 1670s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723). As a result, Buffon’s theories were widely read and critically discussed almost from the moment they appeared (Roger 1989/1997: 68–78; Sloan 1979, 1995). “Buffon made the study of natural history everybody’s pastime” (Mayr 1982: 101).
The opening essay in the first volume, “Discourse on Method,” established a backdrop. Here, Buffon dealt with three issues: human reason, whether or not there is an order to nature, and man’s place in nature (Roger 1989/1997: 81–92).
With regard to the first, the two dominant views concerning reason were those of Descartes and Locke; the former argued rational thought would yield truth; the latter claimed that the mind combined ideas derived from sensory experience in new ways. Buffon merged the two perspectives. Science was more than the description of mere facts, since it also involved the use of reason—comparison, analogy, and generalization. With regard to the second question, he argued that there was indeed an order in nature, but that the mathematicians and taxonomists, like Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), had simply failed to capture its complexity, because it was too complicated for their equations (Sloan 1976). In this discussion, Buffon’s model of the natural historian was Aristotle, the naturalist of living systems, organic diversity, and internal, teleological processes. Like Aristotle, Buffon took human beings as his starting point; however, he also added Leibniz’s recently published views about continuous gradations, or chains of being, in nature.
In the next two essays, Buffon tackled the history and theory of the earth and the formation of planets (Roger 1989/1997: 93–115). Here, history meant a description of the present distribution of oceans, mountains, and strata, while theory was viewed as an attempt to explain the physical causes or past organization that produced the present distributions (Haber 1959; Porter 1972; Rossi 1984; Rudwick 1985). Buffon argued that the processes of planetary formation as well as the cyclical ones that operated on the earth’s surface after it formed erased virtually all traces of the original events. Thus, a proper theory of natural history had to combine natural causes with accidents. Jacques Roger (1989/1997: 114) described his theory in the following way: “The normal sequence of natural causes only generated an eternal repetition of the present, [while] chance alone could create the unique and irreversible event, after which nothing would remain as it was before.” The importance of Buffon’s theory was twofold. First it was a theory of transformation and change. Second, it freed studies of the history and formation of the earth as well as its antiquity from reliance on or even reference to the biblical account.
Buffon’s underlying concern in the second volume of Natural History was to change the direction of natural history as a field of inquiry (Roger 1989/1997:
116–50). To do so, he distinguished living beings, animals and plants, from nonliving matter—a classification that recognized animal, vegetable, and mineral. The focus of the new natural history would be the study of reproduction; he further argued that it was necessary to start at the simplest level—the living (organic) matter that was shared by both animals and plants. This argument seemed to combine the materialism of the Epicureans and Leibniz. Buffon argued that living beings reproduce; the question in his mind was how rather than why they did so. This materialist formulation of the question, which was quite similar to the way he wrote about the formation and subsequent history of the earth, stirred some controversy, because it seemed to talk about internal molding forces while excluding two forms of creationism—preformationism and pre-existence—that had been popular among religious traditionalists and the mechanists since the late seventeenth century.3 Buffon observed animal reproduction in a variety of species in order to establish regularities through comparison. The conclusions he drew were that the first development, the fetus at conception, was a production of parts that appeared for the first time, whereas subsequent embryonic development was merely growth of those parts.
In other words, living matter (organic molecules) was combined and recombined to produce successive generations of individuals of the same species.4
Buffon’s third volume of Natural History picked up where the first one began— with man. Its concern was the natural history of the human species (Blanckaert 1993; Roger 1989/1997: 151–83). Buffon clearly placed human beings in nature and argued that all of their propensities—their capacities for speech, intellectual activity, and creative innovation, which underpin the rise of civilization—were also natural.
Moreover, there was an unbridgeable gap between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, and Buffon simply refused to humanize the latter as some of his contemporaries did. Since human beings lived in the physical world, they had to appropriate the resources of that world in order to cope with the uncertainties of their own cultures and ultimately to survive. In the opening chapters, he examined the history of the individual and the different stages of human development—childhood, puberty, adulthood, and old age; he relied on differences in climate, environment, dietary regimes, and nationality to account for the physical and physiological differences noted in travel accounts. As Claude Blanckaert (1993: 33) remarked, it was necessary, after Buffon, to take account of the physiological demands and to consider the disruptive, initiating, or dynamic role played by customs, modes of subsistence, and education of peoples living in different climatic regions. Buffon also argued that the human species had been relatively uniform (and archetypically white-skinned) in its early stages, and that, as its members moved out from their mid-latitude homeland, their physical appearance, customs, and abilities were slowly altered (degenerated in his words) and diversified under the influence of climate into the varieties that are seen today.
While Buffon’s empirical anthropology was rooted in the travel literature, medico-anatomical investigations, and biases of his day, his philosophical anthropology was materialist. It put human beings in nature and attempted to account for changes in the species in terms of its concrete interactions and relationships with the rest of the natural world at particular times and places. This led him to consider in new ways factors like climate, geography, diet, reproduction, or customs. The long-term impact of Buffon’s work rests on his capacity to integrate studies that ranged from cosmology and the history of the earth to animal reproduction. His analyses cut across different levels ranging from the molecular to the cosmological, historicized nature in the process, and integrated seemingly disparate ideas and information into a more or less coherent whole. More importantly, they influenced later writers (e.g.
Reill 2005; Richards 2002; Sloan 1979).
Montesquieu and Buffon provided a “green light” to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and other commentators of the Scottish Enlightenment to write about the history of human society.5 Although Locke and the natural law theorists had written about the origins of the ownership of private property in the late seventeenth century, Rousseau and the Scots historicized discussions about the origins and expansion of property rights and relations after 1750.6 Their accounts were conjectural histories concerned with the development of human nature and the progress of society as reflected by changes in modes of subsistence. In spite of the fact that they drew from the same ethnographic and historical accounts, their philosophical anthropologies as well as their views about contemporary commercial society differed in significant ways. The aim of this section is to consider both their differences and some of their shared concerns.
Rousseau’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was critical of modern, civil society, which was based increasingly on commerce and industry. In A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, he charged that people were morally corrupted both by the civilizing process and by life in the commercial societies that were slowly crystallizing across the globe, as their elites steadily severed customary, mutually recognized obligations to the members of the lower classes and replaced them with social relations based on market exchange. He wrote that “the politicians of the ancient world were always talking about morality and virtue; ours speak of nothing but commerce and money” (Rousseau 1750/1973: 16). History, in his view, provided a corrective to what politicians said by focusing on what they actually did. It also furthered “people’s reflective self-identification and self-location within time, space, and a context of others,” and it had the potential of expanding their vision of human possibilities, of thinking of themselves not as “passive observers” but rather “as active participants” (Barnard 2003: 162).
Rousseau (1755/1973, 1755/1992a) outlined his critical, philosophical anthropology in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, published in 1755. Some of the distinctive features of his historical-dialectical perspective were: (1) human nature as a historical process associated with the emergence of human beings from nature through the creation of culture and their transformation of nature through social labor; (2) the interactions of human beings with one another and with their external (natural) world as shaped by successively different, historically specific sets of social relations; (3) a recognition of both the existence and anteriority of social forms other than modern bourgeois society; and (4) a historicized conception of “man” as a subject who was not always identical with “bourgeois man” of modern society.
Rousseau saw human beings as part of nature (Rousseau 1755/1973: 37–8).7 While he declined to speculate on whether the first human beings were “covered with hair,” or “walked upon all fours,” he was certain that successive transformations in the constitution of the human species had occurred since its inception: “changes which must have taken place in the internal as well as external conformation of man, as he applied his limbs to new uses, and fed himself on new kinds of food”
(Rousseau 1755/1973: 47). Rousseau (1775/1992a: 81–3) also believed that the great apes were a variety of human being, because they had similar biological and psychological dispositions;8 however, unlike savage and modern man, the ape had not “develop[ed] any of its potential faculties.” He inferred that there might be “a temporal and sequential relation” between apes and human beings, one reflecting “genetic continuity” (Frayling and Wokler 1982: 113–14; Wokler 1997a, 1997b).
In his view, the test for determining whether apes and human beings were varieties of the same species would take more than one generation to answer; it involved determining whether they could produce hybrids that could continue to reproduce.
Asher Horowitz (1987: 31) described this dimension of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology in historical-dialectical terms: “As a biological species, humanity is the product of a process of evolution. The evolution of the human species is inseparable from the inauguration of its own history, and humanity’s biological evolution is a result of its own historical activity.”
Let us consider more closely what was involved in emergence of history—i.e., the creation of culture—from nature. Rousseau began his historical account with “savage man” who initially was virtually indistinguishable from other animals, which he viewed as little more than “ingenious machines” whose demands were established and satisfied through “inherited repertoire[s] of instinctual behavior” (Horowitz 1987: 68). To the extent that proto-humans possessed an inherited repertoire, they were like other animals; what distinguished them, almost imperceptibly at first, from other animals was a capacity to learn from their experiences of and interactions with the external world. This process of free agency slowly released them from the constraints of their behavioral repertoire and laid the foundations for further learning and the development of truly social relations as opposed to the atomized, independent behaviors of animals like ants or bees. It also led gradually to what Rousseau called perfectibility or self-transformation: an increased consciousness of desires and needs, which in turn set the stage for the transformation of the external world through labor and the creation of new needs. Language and tool-making were early but essential steps in the process of perfectibility (Horowitz 1987: 60–76; Rousseau 1755/1973:
47–61). Thus, the development of both free agency and perfectibility was part and parcel of the sociohistorical development of human nature and of the transformation or mutilation of nature, both of which occurred within historically specific forms of social relations. This “self-constitutive practical activity” involved “the creation of a cultural, superorganic realm in the social process of labour” (Horowitz 1987:
86–7).
Rousseau recognized three successive forms of society in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, each with its own distinctive socioeconomic relations, internal contradictions, and incomplete realization of freedom and happiness. These were primitive society, traditional pre-capitalist society modeled after the Greek polis, and modern, civil society. Rousseau (1755/1973: 72) also believed that “many of the differences between men which are ascribed to nature stem rather from habit and the diverse modes of life of men in society.”
The historical development of primitive society rested on the growing importance in society, rather than in nature, of the bonds that were created by mutual affection, dependence, self-esteem, and self-interest; he called these sentiments amour propre and believed that the development of self-esteem and pride occurred as a result of public recognition of personal qualities of excellence that were valued by the community (Horowitz 1987: 92–4).9 Thus, amour propre played a crucial role in both the formation and control of behavior in primitive society, and primitive society itself was not entirely based on a system of needs, as the empiricists had claimed. In his view, communal life was an expression of the abilities of its members, who were further bound together by sharing. What internal differentiation existed in the community reflected a nascent division of labor based on age and sex, rather than a division in which the members of one or another group enforced order or monopolized the use of force. Life in primitive society was disrupted when production begins to be based on forms that the community could no longer replicate. The development of functionally differentiated forms of production was always historically contingent rather than necessary from Rousseau’s perspective.
When new divisions of labor appeared, they undermined and ultimately dissolved both communal life and the existing social relations of production. The motors driving this change were the adoption of agricultural and metallurgy as well as the consolidation of new forms of amour propre that increasingly emphasized vanity rather than pride, competition for public esteem, and the life of the individual as opposed to that of the community. What emerged in their wake was a society that was simultaneously structured by newly forged sets of needs, by exchange relations rather than generalized reciprocity, by internal social differentiation, and by the institutionalization of separate spheres of activity. In a phrase, the emergent society was no longer a unity (Rousseau 1755/1973: 76–85; Horowitz 1987: 89–107).
Rousseau’s second stage of sociohistorical development was constituted by the city-states of classical antiquity. Conceptually, they were midway between primitive society and the kind of commercial society that was emerging in the mid eighteenth century. The distinctive feature of Athens and the Roman Republic was that certain individuals had a new relationship with the community. They were citizens, because they fulfilled the obligations required of members of the community, such as serving in the army or as a state official. A right of citizenship was access to the productive resources of the community, which, while owned by the community, were held privately so long as the beneficiary discharged his duties to the state. These privately held resources were not worked by the citizen himself but rather by slaves or serfs who, as a result of their status, were not citizens. The goals of the productive activity of this servile class were neither production for the market nor the accumulation of profit; it was aimed instead at the production, maintenance, and reproduction of the citizen in his new relation to the community. This relationship was predicated on the organic unity of the citizen and his community. Amour propre was transformed in the process of forging this new relationship. Virtue came to be viewed increasingly in terms of “glory and public esteem in directly social endeavors,” and individuals strived for “the cultivation of personal qualities, so that communal virtue becomes the condition and occasion for personal virtue” (Horowitz 1987: 105). In sum, freedom and equality were realized only by individual citizens in the community, who cultivated virtue, on the one hand, and saw no distinction between the universality of their claims and the particularity of their social position, on the other.
These early civilizations were exceedingly fragile and contained the seeds not only for their own destruction but also for their own transcendence. The possibilities for destruction included enlightenment (the capacity to think and speak for oneself), the further growth of individualism based on the distinction between public and private, increasing conflicts between the individual citizen and the state-based community, the expansion of commercial relations, the emergence of despotism, militarism, and defeat in war. The road taken for transcendence involved a further metamorphosis of amour propre, increased individuation, and alienation (Horowitz 1987: 102–7; Rousseau 1755/1973: 85–105; 1755/1992b).
Civil society was Rousseau’s third stage of sociohistorical development. He viewed it as a vast system of needs, a form of society in which each man must now, therefore, have been perpetually employed in getting others to interest themselves in his lot, and in making them, apparently at least, if not really, find their advantage in promoting his own. Thus he must have been sly and artful in his behaviour to some, and imperious and cruel to others; being under a kind of necessity to ill-use all the persons of whom he stood in need, when he could not frighten them into compliance, and did not judge it his interest to be useful to them. Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. (Rousseau 1755/1973: 86–7)
Rousseau’s conceptualization of the “dynamic of civil society,” as Horowitz (1987: 109) noted, “compel[ed] all the actors to foster actively the proliferation of the needs of others.” This system of social relations constructed as exchange relations promoted a condition characterized by “universal disorder, competition, and exploitation” (Horowitz 1987: 116). The historically contingent tendencies that underwrote the development of civil society emerged from the increasing conflicts between the individual citizen and the state-based community and the consolidation of individualism. These were buttressed by the simultaneous liberation of property from the community and the assertion of exclusive property rights (rights of ownership, use, and disposal) by individuals, and by the formation of the state, which claimed to guarantee the safety, freedom, and equality of property owners— “the constituent elements of their being” (Rousseau 1755/1973: 92).
For Rousseau, money was one of the characteristic features of civil society. The use of money facilitated exchanges initially between property owners producing different goods and later between property owners and those who lacked property.
Its use was increasingly universalized. Not only was money equated with work itself, it was also pursued for itself, because it had became a sign of accumulated wealth. In civil society, “money was the prime necessity, and thus the immediate object of labour; and . . . in consequence all labour incapable of earning money was necessarily neglected” (Rousseau 1765/1986: 309–10). This impoverished everyday life and underwrote both the erosion of the last vestiges of community as well as the growing objectification, alienation, and repression of its members. In civil society, amour propre had become Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” one individual’s quest for power gained at the expense of others.
Rousseau’s focus in his historicized account of humanity was its rise in nature, its slow creation of nature as a category, and its subsequent sociohistorical development, which he viewed as the continuous, but always historically contingent, transformation of the individual in society and of the simultaneous, related transformation of society itself. From his perspective, the existence of human beings outside of society was simply unthinkable. The motors driving his account were agency and perfectibility. He was also aware of the significant differences that existed between primitive society and modern civil society.
The savage and the civilized man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness for the one would reduce the other to despair. The former breathes only peace and liberty; he desires only to live and be free from labour. . . . Civilized man, on the other hand, is always moving, sweating, toiling and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations. . . . He pays court to men in power, whom he hates, and to the wealthy, whom he despises; he stops at nothing to have the honour of serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on his own meanness and their protection; and, proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of those, who have not the honour of sharing it. . . . [T]he source of all these differences is . . . [that the civilized or bourgeois] man only knows how to live in the opinion of others. (Rousseau 1755/1973: 104)
Moreover, Rousseau knew that the political life of the city-states of ancient Greece was no longer a model for politicians in modern society. In 1764, he wrote the following to the citizens of Geneva:
The ancient peoples are no longer a model for the moderns; they are too foreign in every respect. You, especially, Genevans, stay in your place. . . . You are neither Romans nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians. Leave those great names alone; they do not become you. You are merchants, artisans, bourgeois, always occupied with your private interests, your work, commerce, profits; you are people for whom freedom itself is only a means toward untrammeled acquisition and secure possession. (Rousseau, 1764/1962: 284, quoted by Löwy and Sayres 2001: 47)
While the presuppositions of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology were fundamentally different from those of the Scots as well as those of German commentators from the 1770s onward, his influence on them was nonetheless substantial.
The Scottish Historical Philosophers
Through their travels, the Scots were acutely aware of what is now called uneven development. Their country was less prosperous than England, and there were significant differences within the country between the north and the south or between the Highlands and the Lowlands. In 1750, a day’s ride into the countryside from a commercial center like Glasgow with its shops and burgeoning factories must have seemed like a journey into a past era replete with clan chieftains, backwoods subsistence farmers, herders, and roving foragers on the margins, all of whom bartered the goods they owned. A sincerely felt moral concern among Scottish intellectuals, like Adam Smith (1723–90), was to determine how they could make a backward country prosper (Waszek 1988: 30–7). To accomplish this goal, they argued, it was necessary to have accurate empirical information derived from experiment and observation, comparison and analysis; they could then synthesize the information and use the results to formulate the natural laws of economic development (Forbes 1982). The methodology was Newton’s applied to human society rather than inanimate objects. To do so would be a virtuous act that would benefit the nation and meet with the approval of others; they knew the act was virtuous, because it involved sympathy (i.e., empathy), the capacity to put themselves imaginatively into the situation of others and to intuit what the others instinctively feel (Broackes 1995:
380). The concepts of spectatorship and sympathy played prominent roles in Smith’s (1759/1976) Theory of Moral Sentiments and guided the conjectural histories of society that Smith and his contemporaries wrote between 1757 and 1777.
The Scots did not believe, as Hobbes and Locke had, that society was constituted by a rational act, a social contract among individuals, in order to protect life, liberty, and property. They argued instead that the formation of society could not be predicated on reason. In their view, emotion preceded reason and reflection, and awareness of the advantages of life in a community only emerged later. David Hume (1711–76) argued that the sociability of human beings was natural and rested on sexual impulse and desires that linked generations together and shaped their habits regarding the distribution of beneficial but scarce goods. For him, protecting property rights to goods was the main condition for society and preceded notions of justice. Taking a slightly different tack, Smith argued that human sociability underpinned the development of morality, since individuals serve as mirrors for one another. The exchanges that occurred among individuals in the mirroring process were not only the means by which they gained the approval of others and satisfied their mutual needs, but they were also the way in which those individuals were constituted as individuals in the society. More importantly, they were the foundation of human sociability itself.
Hume, Smith, and the other Scots had a common perspective on human nature that was intimately linked with their views on sociability. Despite the diversity of human actions, institutions, and customs—reflecting variously the influence of education, government, and environment as well as peculiarities of particular cultures and individuals—there were also stable characteristics, motives, and instincts that were shared by all human beings. That is, human beings have in common certain predispositions, such as “the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition” or “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” that distinguish them from other species (Smith 1776/1976: 17). These dispositions were fixed characteristics of the species that were invariant from one society to another or from one individual to the next; this view, of course, contrasted markedly with Rousseau’s.
Besides their views about natural sociability of human beings, property, scarcity, exchange, and the immutability of human nature, the Scots also believed in progress, the idea that society was developing in a desirable direction. Smith and the others saw progressive development in areas of society as diverse as language, astronomy, jurisprudence, government, and, most importantly, the mode of subsistence. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–3/1982), Smith argued that the progress of society was a natural, law-driven process tied both to the natural dispositions shared by all human beings—e.g. to better their own circumstances—and to the increasing division of labor, which was associated with population growth and changes in their modes of subsistence. From his perspective, the first societies were composed of small numbers of individuals who provisioned themselves by hunting and foraging.
As their numbers increased, they domesticated animals and became pastoralists.
When their numbers increased even further, those in favorable environments domesticated plants and turned to agriculture. This was followed by a significant advance in the division of labor, as artisans—carpenters, weavers, tailors, and the like—ceased to produce their own food and settled instead in towns to pursue their crafts and to barter or exchange the goods they produced with other members of the community and then with the inhabitants of other nations. The Scots also recognized that the culture and values of a societies were linked to their modes of subsistence; hence, foraging societies were different from those whose economies were based on commerce and manufacturing. However, the sequence in which the different forms of society appeared followed from the nature of property, or as Smith (1776/1976: 405) put it, “according to the natural course of things.”
The materialist, conjectural histories of society constructed by Smith and his associates in Glasgow and Edinburgh with their emphasis on the natural development of the economy were merely part of a more general system of morality rooted in a discussion of imagination and sympathy. They described, and promoted, the development of commercial society in accordance with natural laws and the natural propensities that were shared by all human beings. They realized that manifestations of these natural laws and propensities varied from one time to another, even as basic human nature itself remained constant. They interpreted the variation as a series of gradations that reflected not only continuous and uninterrupted historical change but also the unfolding of some potential or force that was inherent in society itself.
While they historicized society, the Scots separated the study of history from the study of social dynamics; however, theirs were not the only attempts to historicize discussions of human nature and society in the mid eighteenth century.
Rousseau and the Scots were concerned with the development of a new kind of society—commercialized and later industrialized—that came to be called “civil society.” Their questions were: What was it? And, how did it develop? While the Scots advocated, with some uneasiness, the growth of civil society as a means to increase the wealth of nations, Rousseau was openly critical of the effects of modern civil society on individuals, their outlooks on life, and the social relations that structured their interactions. The views of Rousseau and the Scots on the trajectory of human historical development, as well as their philosophical anthropologies, also differed significantly. While Rousseau blurred the distinction we now make between the human and the natural realms, the Scots highlighted their differences.
For Rousseau, the motors driving human history were the interplay of free agency, perfectibility, and the transformation of the external world in contexts shaped by contingent rather than necessary forms of social relations. For Smith and the Scots, human history reflected the gradual, progressive development, in accordance with natural law, of propensities that were common to all human beings, even though they manifested themselves variously in societies with different modes of subsistence.
The problems addressed by Rousseau, Smith, and the others, as well as their philosophical anthropologies, both influenced and provoked successive generations of writers from the late eighteenth century onward. Kant, Herder, Hegel, Jefferson, Marx, and others wrestled with their views about humanity and how the world in which they lived came to be the way it was.
In the late eighteenth century the lines between disciplines were not as sharply drawn as they would become, nor were they even drawn in the same places as they are today. Instead, it was a time when a physiologist–comparative anatomist (Blumenbach) wrote about epistemology; when a naturalist (Buffon) discussed mathematics; when a philosopher (Kant) lectured on anthropology, astronomy, history, and laid the foundations for the modern concept of biological species; when a poet, novelist, and statesman (Goethe) discovered the intermaxillary bone of the human skull, collected botanical samples, and drew pictures of Roman ruins; and when a political revolutionary (Jefferson) conducted archaeological excavations in Virginia and collected vocabulary lists of American Indian languages. What united them were curiosity about the world and their quest for enlightenment, for understanding that world without necessarily having to rely solely or exclusively on the authority of others. What inspired them, among other things, were authors like Montesquieu, Buffon, Rousseau, and the Scots, whose writings provoked critical thought and practice.
The influence of Rousseau and others was already evident in the German principalities by the late 1750s. This was a time of massive foreign influence in Central Europe. East Prussia had been incorporated into the Russian Empire during the Seven Years War (1756–63), and the president of the Berlin Academy, French naturalist Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, actively sought to bring the issues of Enlightenment debate to the “center of German cultural discourse” by offering annual prize competitions on subjects selected by the Academy (Zammito 2002: 59). This was part of the cultural and political agenda of King Frederick II, who himself was a longtime friend of Voltaire. Another aspect of Frederick’s agenda was to reform the universities and remodel them after the curriculum at the University of Göttingen. A third aspect of Frederick’s plan was to undermine and displace academic philosophy, which he viewed as pedantic and out of touch with the real world. The king was supported in his effort to bring the ideas of the French and Scottish Enlightenments to the public, especially by that newly emerging layer of society, the “bourgeois intelligentsia,” whose members were concerned with education not only as a source of social mobility but more importantly as a sign of social identity (Zammito 2001, 2002: 16–35). Testimonials perhaps to the impact of these intellectual exchanges were Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1803) claims that “Hume awoke him [i.e., Kant] from his dogmatic slumbers” and that “Rousseau set him straight.” It was in this context that Kant and his student, Johann Gottlieb von Herder (1744–1803), began to grapple with Rousseau’s writings at the University of Königsberg in 1762, that Kant launched his annual course in anthropology in 1772, and that anthropology was institutionalized at Göttingen in the 1770s.
Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology
Kant’s early writings were concerned mainly with the natural sciences. Two additional themes appeared in his writings in the early 1760s. The first was an extended critique of Cartesian rationalism and the application of mathematical methods to metaphysical questions; his Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics (1762), which was runner-up for the Berlin Academy’s prize, shifted the study of human nature from metaphysics toward the natural world. It also gained him public recognition. The second theme dealt with human equality and education. By the time that Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) appeared, Kant was already working his way through Rousseau’s comments about human nature, culture, enlightenment, inequality, and the trajectory of history; at the same time, he was also forging his own critique of academic philosophy in the German states (Beiser 1992a). Terms like “freedom” and “equality” slowly crept into his writings. The alternative he proposed in the mid 1760s was a practical philosophy, which would not only study “natural phenomena that hinder or contribute to the development of morality in human life,” but also be useful by helping us distinguish natural from artificial feelings by stressing what human beings share (Louden 2000: 18). The natural phenomena he had in mind included the diverse experiences of natural and civilized man, categories clearly derived from Rousseau, that resulted from differences in sex, age, culture, education, and environment (Zammito 2002: 108–9). In a course description for the 1765–6 academic year, he wrote:
[It] considers man, throughout the world, from the point of view of the variety of his natural properties and the differences in that feature of man which is moral in character. Unless these matters are considered, general judgements about man would scarcely be possible. The comparison of human beings with each other, and the comparison of man today with the moral state of man in earlier times, furnishes us with a comprehensive map of the human species. Finally, there will be a consideration of . . . the condition of the states and nations throughout the world. (Kant 1765/1992: 289; emphasis in original)
This was one of the building blocks for the anthropology course that Kant taught each winter semester from 1772 to 1796 and for his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant 1798/1978; Louden 2000: 62–4; Stark 2003; Zammito 2002:
221–307); it was apparently paired with an ethics course that he also taught during that period. While the content of the anthropology course varied somewhat from year to year, he typically dealt with human beings as sensuous things of nature endowed with natural talents and temperaments in one part and, in another, considered them as ethical beings who acted from principles and reason instead impulse or inclination in social contexts molded by diverse factors. Thus, he distinguished the physical character of human beings from their moral character. The former was what nature made of human beings; the latter was an individual achievement formed through education, moral discourse, reflection, and the ability to think for oneself (Louden 2000: 76–85). For Kant, the formation of moral character was the more fundamental question, judging by his remark that the proper materials of anthropology were “to be found neither in metaphysics nor in a museum of natural history in which the skeleton of the human being can be compared with that of other animals . . . [but] rather these materials can be found only in human actions, in which the human character is revealed” (Kant 1785/1991: 211–12; emphasis in original).
For Kant, there was a linkage between the emotional temperaments and physical states of the human species. He posited psychological differences between men and women and argued that these were rooted in nature. In his view, women played the central role in the formation of moral character, because, besides ensuring the preservation of the species, they were a moralizing force in society that influenced men, legislated customs, and established how social intercourse should be structured. It was the natural duty of women to provide individuals with the skills and discipline required to become rational and ethical human beings.10 Skill and discipline collectively constituted culture. Skills allowed individuals to use the products of nature; discipline allowed them to free themselves from the dominance of natural needs and desires. While the process of enculturation was apparently asocial in Kant’s mind, culture could only unfold and progress in the context of social relations and could begin to achieve its full potential in a civil society (civilization), which was composed of free individuals whose actions were constrained by the lawful authority of the whole. The moralization of civilization represented another, higher stage of historical development as yet unachieved (Louden 2000: 79–87, 143–4).
The concepts of races and peoples also played roles in Kant’s philosophical anthropology. His concept of race, which built on Buffon’s work, was simultaneously historical, naturalistic, and teleological. Kant viewed race exclusively as skin color; it was hereditary, and involved the transmission of a latent set of natural predispositions manifest in all human beings that were activated differentially as human beings moved into different environmental settings.11 These predispositions helped the human species achieve its “collective destiny” (Louden 2000: 97). By a people, he meant the inhabitants of a region who viewed themselves as a civic whole because of their common descent, customs, and language (Kant 1798/1978: 225).
For Kant, the two were not the same. Races reflected the effects of environment, whereas peoples reflected culture and history. From his perspective, some peoples were racially mixed, and races often included numerous peoples. Moreover, some peoples, mostly Europeans, had developed their natural predispositions, while others, mostly non-European, had yet to do so, because they lacked culture and civilization, which, of course, could only emerge in civil society. In sum, Kant historicized the development of the human species and human society. Like the Scots, he believed in progress; however, he saw it as moral progress, rather than economic progress.
It was achieved through legal and political means and the “unsociable sociability” of individuals who simultaneously entered into social relations and fought with one another (Louden 2000: 146–53).
Kant (1784/1986), 1785/1991, 1786/1991) began to develop his theory of history in the mid 1780s, building on Rousseau and on the liberal political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and the Scots; his essays were also responses to Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784/1968). Kant understood history teleologically, as motion toward a goal. This movement was characteristic not only of the natural world viewed as lifeless matter in motion but also of humanity. In the former, the laws of nature were the motor driving change. In the latter, the underlying force was the increasing perfectibility of the natural capacity of human beings to reason. “Restless reason” induced by the constant tendency of human beings to move toward and away from one another was the initial impetus for movement away from animality (Galston 1975: 236). The threat of a war of all against all not only drove human beings into civil society with coercive laws but also promoted education, freedom, and commerce. Implicit in Kant’s notion of the perfectibility of reason were the ideas that someday, with freedom, there would be universal agreement and, hence, the “end of history”—ideas whose actualization he thought were a long way off. What he did sketch, however, was the kind of empirical information that the study of history would reveal and that could inform the enlightened peoples of his day: the advances of each civilization, the evils that led to their destruction, and the mechanisms of enlightenment that remained. As William Galston (1975: 265) noted, “morality participates in the universality of Reason, but Reason progresses. The content of morality is therefore everchanging. Moreover, this change corresponds to the actuality of history, for the universality of Reason manifests itself in concrete human affairs.”
As you will recall, Kant distinguished between pure reason, which was independent of experience, and practical reason, which used empirical data in relation to particular bodies of experience. In light of this distinction, Robert Louden (2000) described Kant’s pragmatic anthropology as the study of the “impure ethics” that result when purely “rational beings” become “human beings” embedded in society.
Herder’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology
In 1765, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Kant’s student at Königsberg only two years earlier, also began to write about the question of how philosophy could be made more universal and useful. Herder’s (1765/2002) essay, “How Can Philosophy Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People,” dealt with a theme that concerned his teacher as well. Kant’s inspiration was apparent both in the question itself and in how the essay was conceptualized; Herder also acknowledged the influence of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Scots. Nevertheless, he set forth an agenda whose developmental trajectory would increasingly diverge from the one pursued by his mentor. He argued that “if philosophy is to become useful for human beings, then let it make the human being its center;” later in the same essay, he suggested the “restriction of philosophy to anthropology” (Herder 1765/2002: 21, 27). Herder was critical of the views of Hume and Voltaire who saw humankind as pretty much the same in all times and places and who asserted that history has not provided us with any new insights. What Herder proposed instead was to allow history and philosophy to interact and mutually enliven each other in order to learn “about the spirit of the changes in various ages” (1766/2002: 255; emphasis in original).
In 1769, he stated this cultural relativism somewhat differently: “Human nature under diverse climates [i.e., the total physical, organic, and humanly constituted, cultural milieus] is never wholly the same” (quoted by Barnard 1969: 382). From his perspective, human nature was both malleable and variable. Moreover, each age and people had its own distinctive customs, ways of life, manners of thought, tastes, and forms of government; these changed; and what was considered true and useful for one might be false and useless for another. Moreover, there was less pronounced diversity among the individuals of the same age or people (culture). Herder would elaborate these themes for the rest of his life.
For our purposes, three of Herder’s works are important. The first is his essay “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” which won the Berlin Academy prize in 1771 and established him as a major intellectual force (Herder 1772/2002). The second is “This Too a Philosophy of the History for the Formation of Humanity” which appeared in 1774 (Herder 1774/2002). The third is Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, the first volume of which appeared in 1784 (Herder 1784/1968). In them, Herder laid the foundations for a philosophical anthropology concerned with language, culture, history, and their interconnections.
Herder used the word “culture” in both the singular and the plural. Briefly, the former referred to the patterns of language, thought, and behavior that were characteristic of a particular community in time and space; the latter acknowledged the diversity that existed between communities that were separated from one another in time and space. For Herder, culture was an integrated whole
a composite or complex configuration which, by virtue of its inherent relational characteristics, is something more than a mere sum total or aggregate. In an aggregate the parts are separate and unrelated, and their number can be increased or reduced without having this affect the nature of the total but merely the size. A whole, on the other hand, is something more than the sum of its constituent parts. The “more” is not contained in the parts considered in isolation, but rather arises from their inter-relation and the varying degree of their integration. Herder contrasted the holism characterizing culture with the atomism characterizing an aggregate, by comparing the former to an organism. In doing so, he wished to focus on two crucial qualities: functional inter-relatedness and self-generated activity. (Barnard 1969: 385)
Herder viewed the culture of a community as a complex of interacting organisms.
There were two reasons for this perspective. First, he believed that the different parts or segments of culture might develop at different rates, which could disturb its internal cohesion and lead to conflicts and contradictions within the whole. Thus, the cultural whole was not necessarily in “a state of blissful harmony” but rather was “a field of tension” (Barnard 1969: 385–6). Second, the diversity existing within the social and political culture of a community also had the capacity to produce the kinds of tensions that were characteristic of the human condition. This diversity and the tensions it produced were consequences of the fact that Herder viewed politics as human activity rather than a set of practices and institutions that were associated exclusively with the state. Thus, the coherence of a culture was contingent and dependent, at any given moment, on the relations that existed among the reciprocally interacting processes that constituted the whole and on the intrinsic capacity of the whole to forge new features and integrate them into the fabric of everyday life.
This provided a synchronic view of culture, which was situational and functional; however, it was clear to Herder that a historical, or diachronic, analysis was also needed in order to describe content or the purpose of particular cultural segments.
Herder’s notion of history, which involved both persistence and change, was an interactive, dialectical one that involved the interplay of two processes: Bildung and tradition. Bildung was a non-repetitive process that entailed the assimilation, evaluation, and addition of new materials to the distinctive heritage of the community.
Tradition was an ongoing, intergenerational process that entailed sifting through the stock of institutionalized beliefs and so forth in order to update them and to resolve the tensions and contradictions created by Bildung. Herder was less concerned with the antecedents of particular cultural segments or configurations than he was with their significance once they had been integrated into the heritage of the community (Barnard 1969: 389–90). He thought of historical development as motion in which what was already latent in a culture was actualized or made manifest; in other words, there was teleology in history. Herder’s views about teleology derived inspiration from both Spinoza and Leibniz.
For Herder, a shared or common language was the cement that held together the members of a community. To paraphrase Barnard (1965: 57), there was a relationship, an interaction, among the language shared by the members of a community and the habits of thought and modes of life of its members. It was the means by which they became conscious of themselves as individuals and of their social relations with other individuals both inside and outside of the community. Language not only linked them to the past by revealing the thoughts and sentiments of past generations, it also allowed them to enrich and perpetuate those views for future generations through the processes of Bildung and tradition. In his essay on the origins of language, Herder, in contrast to Rousseau, saw language as a uniquely human attribute that separated human beings from animals. In his view, human beings were fundamentally different from animals; they were not simply animals with reason added, but beings whose energies had developed in an entirely different direction. Language, in his view, marked the possession of a reflective mind.
At the time Herder was formulating his philosophical anthropology, the idea of race was being discussed increasingly by Enlightenment writers. Kant, for example, incorporated it into the core of his anthropological thought. Herder, however, did not find any utility in the concept. In 1784, he described his thoughts and reservations about its use in the following way:
Lastly, I could wish the distinction between the human species, that have been made from a laudable zeal for discriminating sciences, not be carried beyond due bounds. Some for instance [i.e., Kant] have thought fit, to employ the term races for four or five divisions, originally made in consequence of country or complexion; but I see no reason for this appellation. Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist, or in each of these countries, and under each of these complexions, comprise the most different races. For every nation is one people, having its own national form, as well as its own language: the climate it is true, stamps on each its mark, or spreads over it a slight veil, but not sufficient to destroy the original national character. This originality of character extends even to families, and its transitions are as variable as imperceptible. In short, there are neither four or five races, nor exclusive varieties, on this Earth, Complexions run into each other: forms follow the genetic character: and upon the whole, all are at last but shades of the same great picture, extending through all ages, and over all parts of the earth. They belong not, therefore, to proper systematic natural history, as to the physico-geographical [i.e., anthropological] history of man. (Herder 1784/1968: 7)
Herder’s historical-dialectical and critical anthropology built on Rousseau’s and consequently resembled it in important ways. Both, for example, distinguished culture from civilization—Herder explicitly and Rousseau more tentatively. For both, civilization was something mechanical that was associated with the state, and the civilizing process was one that muted or erased altogether people’s knowledge and experience of everyday life. Culture, in Herder’s view, was organic, and he situated it in activities and reflective thought of people who shared a language and resided in relatively unstratified communities. Culture emerged not from activities of intellectuals and officials supported by the state but rather from the creativity and spontaneity of people dealing with everyday issues in the worlds in which they lived. Herder was by no means an anarchist who advocated the end of the state.
He argued instead that the state should take responsibility for the humanization of its subjects, for ensuring that they enjoyed a certain level of welfare, and for providing education so that they might achieve their full potential, and he was openly critical of those that did not. Herder agreed with the Scots who also argued that history was an unconscious process rather than a consequence of great leaders or the result of “restless reason” as Kant would have it. What bothered Herder about the arguments of many of his contemporaries was their ethnocentrism, their claims that the commercial society emerging in Europe represented the highest stage of sociohistorical development, and their concomitant obfuscation of the cultural diversity that existed among communities in different regions, whose members had the same mode of subsistence.
Göttingen: Beyond “Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers”
The title of Ernst Platner’s (1744–1818) book, New Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers: With Special Consideration to Physiology, Pathology, Moral Philosophy, and Aesthetics, published in 1772, marked the acceptance of new ideas about the linkages between the human and natural realms that were proposed earlier in the century. Unlike Descartes who viewed mind and body as independent substances— the former concerned with the principles of thought or consciousness and the latter possessing bulk and physical properties—Platner emphasized the mutual interdependence of mind and body and the natural forces involved in the process (Allert 1991; Košenina 1989; Zammito 2002: 237–53). The title also signaled the end of an era, for it gave no indication that new ideas about the significance of historical understanding, of organized systems as opposed to aggregates of individuals, of change through time, of the contexts in which things occurred, and of cultural and physical diversity were already crystallizing and becoming conjoined with one another, or that anthropology would be infused with these new perspectives by the end of the century.
Montesquieu had linked the historical development of human society with nature (i.e., the environments in which different peoples lived). Buffon, Rousseau, and the Scots, in different ways, made human history part of nature: Buffon by looking primarily at the human species as a biological organism; Rousseau by seeing people, in the process of emerging from nature, as making their own history and transforming both themselves and the natural world through ongoing, reciprocal interactions with that world; the Scots by considering the historical development of humanity as the consequence of natural laws that were analogous to those of Newtonian physics. Their contemporaries and successors embroidered the fabric they had woven. The new historical understanding involved explanations of both the individual and individuality as well as of the development of society (Reill 1998). While Hume strove to develop a “science of human nature” that was applicable in all circumstances, Herder and others recognized the diversity of human societies and argued that the nature of individuals was shaped by the sociocultural and natural milieus of which they were a part. In a phrase, human nature was the result of socialization under historically specific and contingent social relations and circumstances, and it was imperative to take account of and to explain the diversity of both present and past societies. As Herder and others—like Johann Winckelmann (1717–68)—noted, there was uneven culture-historical development, and each era, each society had its own unique configuration of elements that underwrote its distinctive “spirit” or appearance. By the 1780s, Herder, Kant, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) were noting that sociohistorical and cultural development as well as the development of the human species itself was genetic in the sense that they involved both mechanical and teleological processes, and that the latter could not be reduced to the former.12 Their “fascinat[ion] about the idea of genetic development was that it assumed the dual existence of individuality and regular order, without collapsing one upon the other” (Reill 1998: 119). It also required a new form of explanation, one that relied on narrative rather than reference to some universally applicable law. History was no longer the chronicles of kings, lists of dates, or the highways traversed by generals and armies but rather the byways where everyday folk wandered silently.
An increasingly prevalent idea in the late eighteenth century was the notion that both the natural and human realms were constituted by more than mere aggregates of individual parts. Instead, they were organized wholes that resembled an organism.
Unlike aggregates, the distinctive features of such totalities were more than the sum of their parts and were constituted by the organization of those parts. Writers began to think of nature and human society, both synchronically and diachronically, as internally differentiated structures that not only developed through time but also metamorphosed in the process. Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), for example, viewed “nature as a dynamically shifting balance of forces,” while other Romantic writers were fascinated with the diversity manifested in tropical rainforests or the tangled banks beside English streams (Richards 2002: 295–306). The comparisons, analogies, and metaphors employed by Herder and others underwrote and supported new ways of conceptualizing organization, growth or change over time, and diversity at various levels: the natural world, human society, and the individual human being.
More importantly, they allowed commentators to articulate issues related to human organization, change, and diversity to their own experiences and to the sociocultural milieus in which they lived and worked.
The University of Göttingen was a focal point for the convergence of these ideas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. Beiser 1992b; Denby 2005; Fink 1993; Flavell 1979, Leventhal 1986; Stagl 1995; Vermeulen 1992, 1995). Here, individuals with diverse interests rubbed shoulders with one another on virtually a daily basis. For example, classical philologist and archaeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) was Blumenbach’s teacher, Herder’s close friend, and a colleague of August Schlözer (1735–1809) who wrote extensively about the history, linguistics, and ethnology of peoples on the margins of Europe and used statistics to develop the comparative study of states. Moreover, the philological seminar that Heyne taught for many years had shaping effects on the curricula of other universities, like Harvard and the Andover Theological Seminary in the United States. One of Heyne’s students in the seminar was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767– 1835), who is hailed as a founder of comparative philology and as the educational reformer who modeled the curriculum of the newly opened University of Berlin after that of Göttingen. Marx, as you recall, was exposed to that curriculum and to Humboldt’s plan for a historically informed, comparative anthropology when he attended the university in the late 1830s (Bunzl 1996; Leroux 1958). Through the courses he took, Marx was also exposed to the critical-historical anthropology of Georg F. W. Hegel, who was the most prominent philosopher and social theorist on the continent until his death in 1831.
Hegel’s Critical-Historical Anthropology
Georg F. W. Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophical anthropology sought to account for the actual (concrete) conditions of human existence and to explain how that social reality had been transformed by the collective (social) activity of human beings.
From the late 1790s onward, he wrote with the ideas of Kant, Herder, Rousseau, and the Scots as almost continual points of reference. While he addressed themes that they had already discussed, he was at the same time critical of some of the conclusions they had drawn. For example, like Kant, Hegel believed that philosophy should be critical as well as systematic (scientific), that the social problems of the day were ultimately ethical or moral, and that social change was the product of human activity; however, unlike Kant, he viewed change from the standpoint of the community rather than the individual. From Herder, he gained an appreciation of the importance of historical understanding and the significance of varied cultural configurations of different historical epochs and civilizations; he also developed concepts of history and the primacy of collective social activity that were inchoate in Herder’s writings. Like Rousseau and Herder, he viewed history in terms of uneven development and the resolution of conflicts and contradictions. Hegel agreed with Herder and the Scots, notably Adam Ferguson, that the members of a society were bound together by shared cultural practices and beliefs as well as by the political institutions under which these habits manifested themselves. Like Rousseau and the Scots, Hegel was deeply concerned with the development of both modern civil society and the state as well as with the kinds of transformations they wrought on human beings. As a result, Hegel’s philosophical anthropology shared important features with those of his predecessors and diverged in significant ways from them (Lukács 1966/1976; Rockmore 1992/1993). His empirical anthropology was rooted in his concern with history and with the formation of civil society (e.g. Berry 1982; Dickey and Nisbet 1999; Knox and Pelczynski 1964; Waszek 1988).
History, in Hegel’s (1822–30/1975: 11–151) view, simultaneously involved the interconnected development of the individual and the community in relation to the realization of a goal—the actualization of the human mind in all its potential and free subjectivity (Geist) in both. Thus, history was teleological; there was “a rationally discernible development in history, a development, which, once comprehended, would change the attitude of people toward their social environment” (Plant 1983: 57; emphasis in original). The clearest embodiment of this goal, which was inchoate in earlier stages of human history, was manifested most clearly in the latest historical stage—modern civil society—which was ushered in by the French Revolution.
What emerged in the wake of the revolution was an era in which the institutions and practices of the old regime, which limited freedom and the capacity of reason, had been dismantled and replaced by rampant individualism. This was the first time, according to Hegel, that human beings had the freedom to actualize themselves as rational, moral individuals; moreover, through their individuality, they could also actualize themselves as social members of a community. In this particular form of society, they could step back from their social roles in the community and conceive of themselves as autonomous, self-determining individuals who possessed rights as well as interests, ideas, and the capacity to make moral judgments that were distinct from those of other individuals in the community. They realized themselves as individuals in their social roles in the family, the market, and civil society and in their roles as citizens of a political state. States, in Hegel’s view, had evolved, embodying the positive values of earlier states, to ensure the actualization of the individuals and to promote the good of the community as opposed to the particular interests of its members (Hegel 1817–30/1978; 1821/1967).
For Hegel, human beings were social beings. They satisfied biological, social, and cultural needs in society and actualized their distinctly human capacities— thought, language, and reason—by virtue of their membership in historically specific communities (Hardimon 1994: 153–6). Most importantly, they developed their minds, intellect, and subjective spirit in the context of the social institutions, practices, and roles—the cultural configurations—that shaped everyday life in those communities and formed the backdrop to the processes of socialization and education that took place in them. They not only determined how biologically given drives and desires were satisfied but also how individuals expressed and developed their interests, talents, and skills. Another way of saying this is that the physical, psychic, cultural, and social dimensions of human beings interpenetrated and articulated with one another, and that how the whole individual was actualized varied in important ways from one historical stage to the next and even within the same historical-cultural people.
Hegel saw history as the progressive unfolding of reason and consciousness and the development of Spirit. As Robert D’Amico has noted, Hegel’s theory of history is based on
self-production [in which] Spirit (Geist) manifests itself . . . in objectifications, externalizations, and alienations that represent forms of consciousness. Spirit comes to understand itself through the history of these objectifications. Spirit is ultimately the reason inherent in history as a teleological process. Hegel calls objectification a power of negativity because the objectifications of Spirit transform and therefore negate what is given in reality [i.e., external nature]. Human labor is just such a manifestation of the power of Spirit. Labor modifies its world and thereby allows man to know it and free itself from the bonds of natural necessity. . . .
Hegel stresses two aspects of the role of labor as objectification. First, labor is defined as that which mediates the world. By the term mediation Hegel means that the human world becomes transformed (mediated by activity and purpose and therefore is no longer a world of natural objects. Culture or Spirit is precisely the objectification of this teleology or mediation. Second, practical activity, by giving meaning to its world, creates a “second nature” which conditions humanity. Since what is conditioning humanity is the externalization of its own purposive activity, it is conditioned by its own product and not by an external, natural object. . . . For example, law and morality condition and form human beings through a process of cultivation (Bildungsweise) or civilizing influence. (1981: 5–6)
As Hegel put it, “After the creation of the natural universe, man appears on the scene as the antithesis of nature; he is the being who raises himself up into a second world. The general consciousness of man includes two distinct provinces, that of nature and that of the spirit. The province of the spirit is created by man himself”
(1822–30/1975: 44; cf. 1837/1956: 52–3, 241–2). Thus, for Hegel, objectification is characterized exclusively by consciousness, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the kinds of determination that occur in the natural world.
History began with the rise of states and ended with the present. While Hegel acknowledged the existence of pre-state societies in the prehistoric period that had achieved “a significant development in certain directions” or even experienced “complications, wars, revolutions, declines,” these did not give rise to history (Hegel 1822–30/1975: 134–7). History progressed unevenly through fits and starts as the people of a historical era succeeded in resolving the contradictions of their time.
For example, Hegel argued that neither Abraham nor Jesus was able to reconcile his vision of the independence and freedom of the individual with those of the wider communities of which they were members; consequently, they felt a sense of profound estrangement from those societies. The male citizens of the Greek city-states were able to overcome this kind of estrangement even though they did not see themselves as independent individuals in the modern sense—i.e., as distinct from the customs of the city-state or as participants in the market exchange relations that characterized modern civil society. The separation of the individual from the community only occurred during the Protestant Reformation (Plant 1983: 55–75).
History was important, because it explained the present and ended in the present.
It accounted for the cultural configuration of modern civil society as well as the modern state. In civil society, individuals satisfied their needs by pursing their private interests in the market, where the purchase and sale of goods and services made them interdependent and connected them in an increasingly dense web of social relations. The modern state not only reaffirmed the unity of the nation, which was weakened as individuals pursued their own goals, but also provided the system of ethical life and social substance that would allow them to reconcile and overcome the conflicts and contradictions of civil society and thereby ensure that they could achieve their humanity (Rose 1981). For Hegel, “the rational end of man is life in the state” (1817–30/1978: 242).
Hegel was not the only theorist to comment on civil society and the state during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. His contemporary, Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825) made a slightly different argument about their connection. Saint-Simon was concerned with the appearance of industrial society, which, in his view, marked the both the internationalization of society and the end of the nation state.
While industrial society was built around the institutions of civil society, a point with which Hegel would have agreed, Saint-Simon viewed the state as opposed to the development of civil society because of the domination of society by incapable bureaucrats who were out of touch with the times. Unlike the Scots and Hegel who viewed the present as the end of history, Saint-Simon had a vision of what society could become in the future. Saint-Simon died in 1825, Hegel six years later in 1831, when the young Karl Marx had barely entered his teens. In the 1830s, Marx would absorb the ideas of both writers as well as those of Montesquieu and Rousseau among others. He would also absorb the importance of enlightenment, critical thought, and the difference between faith and reason.
In this chapter, we have viewed the Enlightenment as an ongoing conversation among individuals who held distinct, theoretically informed views about the world, about human beings, and about their place in that world. The conversation was often acrimonious, and it was always threatening to those whose privileged positions in society rested on the maintenance of tradition and the active repression of critical inquiry. At times, the conversation was public as when the Scots, Kant, Herder, and Hegel responded in different ways to Rousseau and to one another. At other times, it was more private—an exchange of words between friends (Spinoza) or a university lecture published only posthumously (Hegel). The conversation was fueled by the conquest of nature, exploration, commerce, colonization, and later industrialization, which provided the grist for the development of an empirical anthropology that increasingly took cognizance of the history and diversity of human beings as well as the world in which they lived. This realization paved the way for the development of new philosophical anthropologies that were distinguished from one another by the (ontological) beliefs that their advocates held about the nature of human beings, their relations with one another, and their place in the world. In one sense, the Enlightenment provided a set of questions that the proponents of different philosophical anthropologies felt they needed to address. In another sense, the conversation that ensued can be viewed as a work in progress.
Let us dwell for a moment on some of the issues and lessons that Marx’s predecessors raised for him. First, nature, human beings, and human society had been historicized and their diversity acknowledged. After Rousseau, it was no longer possible to argue effectively that individual human beings living in a state of nature entered into a social contract with the sovereign (Hobbes) or with one another (Locke) thereby creating society in the process; moreover, it was becoming increasingly difficult to argue that human beings were ontologically prior to human society. Second, while many of Marx’s predecessors believed in progress (Smith) or the dialectical unfolding of history (Hegel), others did not. For some of them, human nature was fixed and immutable and progress was a consequence of the passage of time; for others, however, human nature was culturally determined (Herder and Hegel) and progress, if it occurred at all, resulted from the resolution of contradictions. Third, Marx’s predecessors were collectively concerned with the inequalities and individualism that were characteristic of the commercial-industrial societies that shaped their everyday lives (Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Saint-Simon).
These civilizations, to use a term coined in response to Rousseau, were described as mechanical, associated with the state, and limited or muted the knowledge acquired in the course of everyday life in the community (Herder). Fourth, from the time of Rousseau onward, it was increasingly difficult to maintain that the profound individualism and kinds of unequal social relations developing in modern civil society were characteristic of all societies. Fifth, there also was a growing clamor about the meaning of freedom and the autonomous individual in the context of the class structure of modern civil society and the state (Hegel). Marx certainly learned from their writings and carried many of their arguments into his own work. In the chapters that follow, we will consider what he retained of their views and where he broke with them.