The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters by Anthony Pagden by Anthony Pagden

Author:Anthony Pagden [Pagden, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64531-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

II

Savages stood on the threshold of a complex history. They existed at the very beginning of human time. It was that, as we have seen, that made them so fascinating. The final phase of that history was civilization. The narrative that provided the basis for the new human science was measured in terms of stages, in a sequence of crucial and transformative moments.19 In the hands of the Scots, of Adam Smith and the historian William Robertson, of Lord Kames and the jurist John Millar and Adam Ferguson, this has been called the “Four-Stages Theory.” But the theory seems to have originated with Pufendorf and was far more broadly European.20 A history of humanity that went from hunter-gatherers to commerce, from savagery to civilization, provides the organizing principle behind Condorcet’s Sketch and the writings of the ancient historian and chancellor of the Paris parlement Antoine-Yves Goguet—one of the first to suggest that the origins of urban civilization were to be found in Egypt and Mesopotamia, not Greece—the Huguenot Antoine Court de Gébelin, author of The Primitive World Analysed and Compared with the Modern and a follower of Franz Anton Mesmer (who may have died while experimenting on himself with electricity); and the Milanese Gianrinaldo Carli—to name only a few.

In all of these works, much more was at stake than mere subsistence. For, at each stage of this conjectural or “philosophical” history, not only do humans become better organized (as well as better fed); they become increasingly able to communicate with each other and, as a consequence, their societies become increasingly complex, increasingly “civilized.” For the entire history of civilization, as the historians of humanity repeated again and again, was a progression from the simple to the complex. This basic insight was, like so many others about the identity of the species, an ancient one. But in its modern form it owed a great deal to Montesquieu.

In the Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu divided all the peoples of the world into three broad categories, in accordance with their ability to form civil societies or, as he put it, to “unite together” (se réunir). The simplest were the “savages”—a term that, in common with many eighteenth-century authors, he understood primarily in the botanical sense, as something as yet uncultivated. They are described as “small nations” that had “been unable to unite together.” For the most part they were hunter-gatherers—those, that is, who lived only off what the land provided for them. His examples were the Tupi peoples of Brazil, but the Polynesians belonged in the same category. Then came the “barbarians,” seminomadic pastoralists who, although they had been able to “unite together,” had not yet developed the capacity for civil association. (Montesquieu’s example is, somewhat puzzlingly, the Manchus.)21 Finally there is “civilized man,” who alone is capable of creating fully civil communities. It was a simple but compelling system of classification, to which nearly all the social theorists of the Enlightenment were ultimately indebted and around which Rousseau claimed that he had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.