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.