Conjectural History and the Origins of Sociology

Palmeri, Frank

doi:10.1353/sec.0.0033

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As Buchan and Andersson Burnett argue in this issue, Europe’s Enlightenment gave rise to a concept of humanity defined by the capacity for reason and susceptibility to sensibility. The effort to understand the evident diversity with which reason and feeling were expressed underwrote the emergence of a new form of natural historical writing that took influential form in the work of Scottish Enlightenment authors Adam Smith (1723–90), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), and Lord Kames (1696–1782) (Palmeri, 2008). Often referred to as conjectural or stadial history, this was a genre of historiography emerging from Montesquieu’s universal, comparative method of analysing the variety and mutability of social mores, catalysed by Rousseau’s provocative positing of a benign original, natural human condition.…”

Section: Civilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history, ca. 1600–1840

Irving-Stonebraker

2019

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article is concerned with the relationship between British colonization and the intellectual underpinnings of natural history writing between the 17th and the early 19th centuries. During this period, I argue, a significant discursive shift reframed both natural history and the concept of humanity. In the early modern period, compiling natural histories was often conceived as an endeavour to understand God’s creation. Many of the natural historians involved in the early Royal Society of London were driven by a theological conviction that the New World contained the natural knowledge once possessed by Adam, but lost in the Fall from Eden. By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. No longer ontologically distinct from the rest of creation, the human became a subject of natural history writing in a new way. Encounters between colonizers and colonized thus became a touchstone for tensions between divine and natural historical knowledge. The resolution of these tensions lay in the emergence of a concept of savagery that imbibed both a rational account of historical progress towards civilization and a religious conviction that savage humanity needed rescue from its animal nature.

show abstract

Section: Civilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history, ca. 1600–1840

Irving-Stonebraker

2019

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It often lays emphasis on the earliest phases of human history, where no records exist, and tries to provide plausible narratives of what could or must have happened in order for humanity to develop language, religion, authority, etc. Not seldom is it used to criticize the existing order (Palmeri 2008(Palmeri , 2016.…”

Section: Pocock and Political Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Pure Teachings of Jesus”: On the Christian Language of Wilhelm Weitling’s Communism

Jansson

2019

10.14746/prt

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Relacja komunizmu i religii stanowi obszerne i budzące spory zagadnienie. W artykule odnoszę się do tej kwestii, przywołując specyficznego myśliciela, mianowicie: Wilhelma Weitlinga (1808-1871). Badacze jego idei interpretowali religię w różny sposób, traktując ją jako to, co stanowiło sam fundament jego poglądów, lub, dla odmiany, jako nieznaczący dodatek do jego świeckich teorii. W niniejszym studium argumentuję, że prace Weitlinga powinny być rozumiane jako wyrażające chrześcijański język polityczny w sensie, jaki nadał temu terminowi historyk J.G.A. Pocock. Wychodząc z tego założenia, artykuł zmierza ku ujawnieniu sposobów wyrazu chrześcijańskiego języka Weitlinga i do wskazania, w jaki sposób manifestował się on w jego trzech najważniejszych pracach.

show abstract

“…Two dominant models were provided by French and Scottish luminaries, respectively, each premised on a particular understanding of human development. While the French scholars tended to write ‘a history of the human mind’, the Scots framed mental development with a ‘more empirical, material, and stadial’ theory (Palmeri, 2008: 6). Stadial theory, on which we focus here, has aptly been described as an ‘Enlightenment theory of sociocultural evolution’ that imagined a progression in stages, generally four: from hunting and gathering to sedentary pastoralism, then to agriculture, and finally to commercial civilization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another common approach to social development subdivided humankind into three stages – savages, barbarians and civilized peoples – which corresponded, in turn, to hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and farming and commerce. Irrespective of the exact number of imagined stages, human societies were afforded different levels of material and cultural progress, defined by their modes of subsistence, and subjected to a singular, universal, and hierarchical pattern of advancement (Ellingson, 2001: 159; Palmeri, 2008: 6; Sebastiani, 2013; Wolloch, 2011: 252–4).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalizing the savage: From stadial theory to a theory of luxury in late-18th-century Swedish discussions of Africa

Hodacs

Persson

2019

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the effects of globalization on changing notions of the ‘savage’. We compare discussions taking place in different contexts in the late 18th century concerning two Swedish scholars and travellers to Africa: Anders Sparrman (1748–1820), a naturalist and Linnaean disciple, and Carl Bernhard Wadström (1746–99), an engineer and economist. Both moved in Swedish Swedenborgian circles, and both became involved in the British abolitionist movement. Nevertheless, their images of African ‘Others’ diverged in crucial respects, reflecting differences in their ideological outlooks, institutional affiliations, and understandings of how the world was changing. More specifically, we argue that the perception of global change brought about by a new economic framework of production and consumption provides a key for reading and comparing Wadström’s and Sparrman’s texts. Comparing their divergent uses of ‘savagery’, the article also highlights the versatility of the savage as a tool for presenting distant parts of the world to a domestic audience.

show abstract

Conjectural History and the Origins of Sociology

Cited by 10 publications

References 16 publications

From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history, ca. 1600–1840

From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history, ca. 1600–1840

“The Pure Teachings of Jesus”: On the Christian Language of Wilhelm Weitling’s Communism

Globalizing the savage: From stadial theory to a theory of luxury in late-18th-century Swedish discussions of Africa

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About