State of Nature, Stages of Society

Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17516-6
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 384 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 660 g

Reihe: 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. 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Palmeri, Frank

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: Aufklärung
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Geschichte der Soziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 18. Jahrhundert

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Conjectural History, the Form, and Its Afterlife1. Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form2. Political Economy and the Question of Progress3. Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society4. The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology5. Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human6. The Social Psychology of Religion7. Novels as Conjectural HistoriesConclusion: Conjecturalism NowAppendix 1. Enlightenment Conjectural HistoriesAppendix 2. Hegel, History, and ConjectureAppendix 3. Were Conjectural Histories Racist?NotesIndex

Über Autor(innen)

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 and Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665-1815, and the editor of Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics.