State of Nature, Stages of Society

Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse

Frank Palmeri

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541282
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía social

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.

Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form

THE PREHISTORY OF CONJECTURAL HISTORY

TO TRACE THE HISTORY of the conjectural genre, it makes sense to go back, as the form itself did, to origins, and delineating the emergence of conjectural history requires taking into account late seventeenth-century natural law and social contract theories, especially those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Samuel von Pufendorf. Although Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1725; 3rd ed. 1744) bears a close relation to conjectural form, Pufendorf’s work constitutes more of a bridge from natural law theory to conjectural history. Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, part 2 (1729) has almost all the major features of the later conjectural histories and can thus be considered the first instance of the form.

However, long before these seventeenth-century writers, various classical works formulated accounts of the earliest stage or stages of human life. Hesiod’s Works and Days described a paradigmatic progression and decline, from the Golden Age through the Silver and Bronze ages to the Iron Age of the present. Ovid (in the Metamorphoses) and Juvenal (in the Satires) provided idyllic, somewhat ironic views of early humans eating acorns. The most detailed classical narrative of the passage from human animal to civilized human appears in book 5 (lines 925–1457) of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things; mid-first century B.C.E.). Lucretius’s narrative intersects with those of the Enlightenment in a number of striking ways.

In keeping with his Epicurean philosophy, Lucretius’s narrative of the emergence of human society is materialistic and nontheistic, and hence, like the later conjectural histories, nonprovidential: the poem attempts to show how human social institutions such as language, laws, and property could have developed without the help of providence or the intervention of supernatural agencies. It also is predocumentary, concerned with developments before written language, beginning, indeed, before spoken language, at a time when the human animal had no control of fire or even the ability to make clothes. The development of language, Lucretius asserts, was natural, as we can observe that other species of animals communicate among themselves, varying the sounds they make in accord with their emotions.

The invention of property and the discovery of the uses of metals—gold, silver, copper, lead, and iron—mark the emergence of distinctly human societies in Lucretius, as they do in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, with which Lucretius’s poem has more in common than with any other later conjectural work. Kings make their appearance early in Lucretius, but they are soon killed, and in the chaotic violence that ensues, men decide to form a compact among themselves to observe fixed laws, “of their own will to submit to statutes and strict rules of law.”¹ The basis of society, in Lucretius’s view, is contractual, although the agreement he describes does not coincide with the compact of any of the later contract theorists.

Lucretius’s history of humanity traces and laments the development of religion from fear of powerful forces, paralleling many of the later conjectural histories. In Lucretius, the stages of early society largely take shape through the emergence of new and more powerful technologies, and in this respect, his vision is closely related to Condorcet’s. In the earliest stage, one man might be carried off by a large predator; later, powerful weapons provided security from wild animals but also caused thousands of deaths in one day of battle. As his repeated attacks on war indicate, Lucretius considers social developments to be ambiguous and double, resulting in both regress and progress. His work thus bears comparison with both Rousseau’s and Adam Ferguson’s.

Lucretius’s account of the history of human society constitutes the most extensive and naturalistic proto-conjectural history before the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. However, the numerous and striking convergences between Lucretius’s narrative and those of later conjectural historians do not justify conflating the ancient poet with like-minded early modern figures. Crucially, the conjectural historians all write in revisionary response to the dominant Christian providential narrative. In addition, the later historians attempt to take into account empirical evidence based on encounters with non-European peoples to which the ancients did not have access. Moreover, none of the conjectural histories takes Lucretius’s form of a cosmological, philosophical epic poem, although J. G. von Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91) and G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) come close to modern prose versions of this form.²

Seventeen centuries after Lucretius, natural law theorists of the origins of human society, such as Hobbes and Locke, thinking outside the previously inescapable biblical paradigm, posited that, at some unspecified point in the past, humans emerged from a primitive condition and formed themselves into a society by means of a contract. According to Hobbes, solitary, asocial humans living in a natural condition entered into a compact among themselves, each man motivated by fear of his neighbors. Since no covenant could be enforced without a power over the contracting parties, the contract bound people to surrender most of their natural rights into the hands of a sovereign, who would guarantee the life and property of members of society but whose authority could not be questioned. Hobbes acknowledges that the condition of nature, the “war of each against all,” may never have existed, at least not over the whole world at the same time, but he contends that the only alternative to such a sovereign is the breakdown of society into civil war (Leviathan 1.13).

In Locke’s view, although free, propertied individuals in a natural condition did not live in fear, yet they decided to come together to form a community for the more “secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are not of it.” To do so, they entered into a compact among themselves to accept a power that would protect their property and security. Significantly, these “Freemen” compact both among themselves and with the authority they set up to protect themselves and their property; therefore, in the event that the governing authority fails to accomplish its purposes, they retain the right to overturn it and replace it with another. Although Locke calls his thought experiment a “conjecture” and a “hypothesis,” yet he defends it strongly. To the objection that history gives “very little account of Men, that lived together in the State of Nature,” he responds that we may as well suppose that the armies of Xerxes were never children because we do not hear of them in history until they were already grown men and soldiers.³

The theories of both Hobbes and Locke depend on speculation concerning the prehistory of human social life in times for which no documents, records, or remains survive, and they both avoid appealing to providence for an explanation of the earliest developments of society. However, they also adopt features that will prove to be incompatible with conjectural history. For instance, both depend on a foundational contract as a crucial explanatory hypothesis. Significantly, also, neither account represents a history of gradual changes taking place over hundreds of generations and proceeding through several stages to the modern era; rather, each describes only a conjectured historical moment—that is, not a narrative history at all.

Pufendorf makes a decisive break with such theorists, in Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), by providing a detailed and extensive discussion of the passage from a state of nature to society, revising Hobbes’s account of the natural state and the reason for government and positing multiple founding contracts.⁴ For Pufendorf, the original state of human life consists not of a war of each against all, but rather of a confluence of individuals and families who came together to protect themselves from wild beasts.⁵ In this state, government has not been formed but people are sociable and peaceful. If these early humans had really been at war with each other, he reasons, they would not have survived. But they did survive, and therefore must have lived on terms of friendship, bound together as reasonable creatures, not by an agreement or covenant among themselves (Law 2: 2.2–2.10, 104–15).⁶

The impetus for heads of families to form civil societies came from the growth of agriculture, trade, and urban life, which produced luxury, competition, and inequality, with the potential to lead to conflict. The fathers established government to provide against future evils that they could apprehend. According to Pufendorf, their founding actions did not consist of a single, all-encompassing compact, as in Hobbes or Locke, but of a series of agreements: first, the decision to set up a state and provision for how to proceed; then a decision on a particular form of government; and finally, a covenant with the one or the group who became sovereign, and who must have agreed to care for the well-being and safety of the new citizens in return for their obedience. In the absence of monuments and documents recording social foundations, this conjectural account, Pufendorf contends, takes us as close as possible to the succession of events. Such agreements must have taken place at least tacitly in the institution of commonwealths (Law 7: 2.6–2.10, 458–71). Pufendorf thus retains the language of contract, but he steps away from its earlier form by multiplying the founding agreements, and his delineation of a sequence of covenants moves in the direction of elaborating a set of stages of social development. Rather than basing his argument on a single founding moment, Pufendorf conceives of the development of institutions of exchange and of government over an extended period, following the emergence of human society. However, he presumes that goods were exchanged by the earliest men, and that trade persisted through all the intervening years.⁷

In the wake of the natural law theorists who draw together many elements of the conjectural genre, two works from the 1720s have a claim to be considered the first full-length conjectural history: Vico’s New Science (1st ed. 1725) and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, part 2 (1729). Part 2 of the Fable more closely realizes the form of conjectural history, even though Vico includes some important features, such as the use of the necessary conditional to designate what must have been the case in earliest times.⁸ Beginning with the giants who roamed the earth after the flood, in the “so-called state of nature,” Vico gives a naturalistic account of the original steps in the constitution of society: again, fear—this time, fear of thunder and other meteorological phenomena—gave savage men a conception of the gods and of religion. From a feeling of shame before the gods, which had been instilled by providence, men and women adopted regular unions, and marriage was born. With the contracting of marriages, families moved out of caves and settled near sacred springs and lands that would become burial sites.⁹ Settlements became permanent, trees were cleared by burning, and agriculture was established. Although an elaborate social life had developed, properly political institutions only appeared when families were divided into the strong and the weak, then into nobles and serfs.¹⁰ The struggle of the serfs to obtain just and equal treatment in the commonwealth determined the shape of the history of the prototypical people and republic of Rome, concerning which some documents and monuments survive—the earliest written laws. Here, Vico leaves behind speculative or conjectural history proper.

In Vico’s account, the savages who first become cyclopean families, and eventually republican patricians, did not rely on contracts or agreements for social development.¹¹ Perhaps most strikingly, each stage of human history—whether the age of gods, heroes, or men—possesses an organic unity, a holism that binds together all the institutions and forms of one culture. Thus, in the earliest age, the youth of the world, to which Vico devotes the greatest part of his attention, the gods ruled human affairs; theology was poetic; language was ritual, gestural, or onomatopoetic; and knowledge was concrete and sensory. These homologies, along with the other features just observed, bring the New Science into close relation with conjectural history.

On the other hand, Vico consistently appeals to providence to explain the course of the gentile nations. These appeals have a force and frequency greater than would be required of a pretense to disguise a naturalistic method. The title of book 2, chapter 5, for example, is typical: “It Is Divine Providence That Institutes Commonwealths and at the Same Time the Natural Law of the Gentes.”¹² Moreover, in Vico’s conception, history takes the form of a cycle through the course of the three ages, and then a recourse to a new age of reflective barbarism. It is difficult to see this cyclical structure as the expression of a naturalistic account of social development. Even if there were regressions in history as a result of excessive reason and philosophy, it is not clear why each of these declines would need to return the society to its beginnings and a new age of barbarism. Vico’s New Science is still committed to a view of history as the work of divine providence, which takes not an unpredictable, disorderly progressive course but reveals a neater, indefinitely and repetitively cyclical shape. It thus departs in significant ways from the essential features of conjectural history.¹³

In dialogues 5 and 6 of the Fable of the Bees, part 2, Mandeville provides a plausible reconstruction of the beginning and earliest development of social institutions, including language, religion, morals, kinship, poetry, and music.¹⁴ He is the first to expand the temporal dimension to take into account the hundreds of generations or more that must have elapsed from the tentative beginnings to the gradual consolidation of any social institution.¹⁵ He claims that fear—though not of each other, as in Hobbes—brought men together to establish a society and government. Cleomenes, Mandeville’s spokesman, calls this his “Conjecture, concerning the first Motive, that would make Savages associate in a society: It is not possible to know any thing, with Certainty, of Beginnings, where Men were destitute of Letters; but I think, that the Nature of the thing makes it highly probable, that it must have been their common Danger from Beasts of Prey” (emphasis added).¹⁶ When he imagines the institution of religion, it is again fear—of thunder, lightning, and unseen powers, as in Vico—that must have provoked its foundation among savage men striving to make sense of a threatening world.

Only after Cleomenes has laid down the original foundations of society in fear does he acknowledge that men formed contracts, and agreed in one of their contracts to institute a form of government. However, before there could be a compact to create a government, people must have had a concept and system of law; for there to have been laws, written language must have existed; before there could be writing, language must have been spoken for many generations; and spoken language itself must have developed extremely slowly from gestures and inarticulate sounds, again over generations (Fable, 2:269, 287–90). Thus, like the later conjectural histories, Mandeville traces back from the known end point of government the periods for which no documentation exists, but through which human societies must have proceeded in order to reach recognizable political institutions. Yet, after all these developments have occurred, two further steps must have taken place for a historically recognizable society to emerge: “No number of Men, when once they enjoy Quiet, and no Man needs to fear his Neighbour, will be long without learning to divide and subdivide their Labour” (2:284). In addition to this early recognition of the importance of the division of labor, which generates divisions among ranks and eventually classes, Mandeville argues that metallurgy would have contributed to the construction of a complete society by enabling the production of tools and weapons, after flint blades had been employed for centuries.

Although the Fable of the Bees, part 2, does not delineate a distinct set o...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife
• 1. Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form
• 2. Political Economy and the Question of Progress
• 3. Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society
• 4. The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology
• 5. Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human
• 6. The Social Psychology of Religion
• 7. Novels as Conjectural Histories
• Conclusion: Conjecturalism Now
• Appendix 1. Enlightenment Conjectural Histories
• Appendix 2. Hegel, History, and Conjecture
• Appendix 3. Were Conjectural Histories Racist?
• Notes
• Index