State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)

Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers, he argues, employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. Palmeri finds evidence of speculative frameworks in the political economy of Malthus, Martineau, Mill, and Marx. He traces the influence of speculative thought in the development of anthropology and ethnography in the 1860s, the foundational sociology of Comte and Spencer, and the sociology of religion pioneered by Weber, Durkheim, and Freud. Conjectural histories reveal a surprising ambivalence toward progress, modernity, and secularization among leading thinkers of the time, an attitude that affected texts as varied as Darwin's Descent of Man , Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality , and the novels of Walter Scott, George Eliot, and H.G. Wells. Establishing the critical value of conjectural thinking in the study of modern forms of knowledge, Palmeri concludes his investigation with its return in the work of Foucault and in recent histories on early religion, political organization, and material life. "Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers, he argues, employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. This approach can be traced in the work of political economists (Malthus, Martineau, Mill, Marx), anthropologists, sociologists (Comte, Spencer), and sociologists of religion (Weber, Durkheim, Freud), and its speculative framework creates a surprising ambivalence toward modernity in these disciplines. In addition, Palmeri shows that conjectural histories by Darwin and Nietzsche opened the way to new disciplines in the late twentieth century"--From publisher's website. Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. This approach informs the work of political economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and sociologists of religion, and its speculative framework creats a surprising ambivalence toward modernity Conjectural history : the Enlightenment form Political economy and the question of progress Comte, Spencer, and the science of society The origins of culture and of anthropology Darwin, Nietzsche, and the prehistory of the human The social psychology of religion Novels as conjectural histories Conclusion Appendix 1: Enlightenment conjectural histories Appendix 2: Hegel, history, and conjecture Appendix 3: Were conjectural histories racist? Frank Palmeri is a professor of English at the University of Miami. He is the author of Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, Pynchon (1990) and Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665-1815 (2003), and the editor of Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics (2006). PHI034000,Philosophy/Social,PHI016000,Philosophy/History & Surveys/Modern