5 Anthropology and the European Enlightenments

Introduction: MANY ENLIGHTENMENTS

This chapter examines the relationship between anthropological thinking and the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. We will refer to it as the European Enlightenment because, by most accounts, the movement we are interested in emerged in Europe around the middle of the eighteenth century. That Eurocentric reading is contested, as is the time frame. In fact, almost everything about the Enlightenment is debated: Why did it happen? What was it about? Where did it happen? What is its legacy? Should the legacy of the Enlightenment be celebrated today or set aside?

The present chapter should really be three chapters, but time and space are short. Traditionally, discussions of the Enlightenment start with the French Enlightenment, before expanding to the Scottish Enlightenment and concluding with scattered remarks about developments elsewhere. Because our interest is specifically on the relationship between the Enlightenment and anthropology, we will start instead with the German Enlightenment, before reversing the usual order and considering the Scottish and lastly the French Enlightenment. There is a reason for that. German thinkers had a powerful influence on anthropology, particularly American anthropology. Following this introductory overview of the Enlightenment, we will discuss the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment, a broad reaction against the Enlightenment that spread across Europe early in the 19th century. In concluding, we will examine recent work highlighting the curious absence of Black thinkers on European intellectual life in histories of the Enlightenment.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT SIMPLIFIED

The Enlightenment was a complicated affair. It was at once an intellectual and a cultural movement, advocating for broad changes that would alter European worldviews, economies, and political systems. It has had an enormous impact on the world we live in and the lives we lead, and for that reason it is difficult to discuss dispassionately. In this section we will reduce that complexity to a relatively simple list, addressing six core themes: Reason, Progress, Universalism, Materialism, Secularism, and Individualism. The list could be much longer, but this will suffice.

But first, let’s consider why the Enlightenment matters to anthropologists.

Most histories of anthropology begin with the Enlightenment. For example, one of the key studies that launched the history of anthropology as a field of inquiry – The Rise of Anthropology Theory by Marvin Harris – opens with an analysis of the Enlightenment (Harris, 1968). There is a reason for this. Most histories of anthropology identify the birth of modern science with the European Enlightenment. As the natural science of humanity, anthropology is a child of the Enlightenment. Identifying the beginning of anthropology with the Enlightenment also results in a chronology that is considerably shorter than one starting with Antiquity or the Renaissance, and a worldview that is more familiar.

In both language and perspective, Enlightenment thought is considerably closer to contemporary thinking than the work we have examined in Renaissance New Spain and New France. By 1800, maps of the globe were reasonably accurate, and there was general awareness of the major oceans and continental land masses, and the world was round. Enlightenment era travelers had no expectations of monsters, nor did explorers expect to find cities of gold – though they did continue to pursue riches. Reports of cannibalism persisted, but by the Enlightenment descriptions of peoples around the world had multiplied, and more detailed, nuanced, and accurate reports accumulated. Such reports continued to provoke prejudice, but followers of Montaigne were increasing.

Much would change over the 19th century, but during the Enlightenment the scholarly vocabulary of anthropology – a vocabulary that was broadly consistent across national languages – began to take shape (Vermeulen, 2015). A body of disciplinary key words came into use that would remain central in 20th century anthropology, with meanings that approximated later usages, including race, culture, ethnic, ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology itself.

Key terms including ethnic, ethnography and ethnology were developed from Greek roots by German scholars during the Enlightenment (Vermuelen, 2015). But aside from these terms, most of the key terms were not recent neologisms. As we have discussed earlier, culture has Latin roots that are 20 centuries old, deriving from colere, and the Greek root nomos is even older. Race derives from razza, which appears in Italian and the Romance languages during the 13th century. Anthropology first entered print within a decade following the first voyage of Columbus, at the dawn of the sixteenth century.

Until 1750, the use of these words was infrequent. It was during the Enlightenment that anthropology, race, and culture came into common use among scholars, laying a foundation for their role in the key debates of the 20th century.

The fact that this vocabulary was shared does not mean there was agreement on meanings. For example, in 1800, ethnography was used by German-speaking scholars to refer to the description of peoples and nations, while at least some English anthropologists understood ethnography as the description of human physical variation. Anthropology was defined in many ways, but it was increasingly understood to address fundamental questions about the relationship between the innate and the learned, body and soul, and the relationship between the physical form of human bodies and language, belief, and livelihood.

We should also note that – in the German-speaking lands – the institutional foundations of anthropology were laid during the Enlightenment. For the United States and most of Europe, the institutional history of anthropology stretches across the 19th century. Scholarly societies emerged around 1800, followed by museums at mid-century, with anthropologists appointed to academic chairs as the century ended. However, in German-speaking Europe this arc of development was completed during the eighteenth century, before the United States existed (Vermeulen, 2015).

Four Enlightened Propositions

Let’s start with a description of the Enlightenment that is too simple, but not wrong. Our first proposition is that Enlightenment thinkers developed the idea that we can know the world, and through the application of knowledge, change our world.

To this possibility of change they added an expectation of improvement: through developing better knowledge of the world, progress becomes possible. Better knowledge begets progress.

But not just any kind of knowledge. The third proposition is that the key to progress is the growth of scientific knowledge, understood as knowledge that combines systematic observation with mathematical reason. The key to that union lay in two innovations: the experimental method, and the collection of numerical data. Ideally, observation was mediated by instruments that expanded the scale and precision of human sense organs. The way was demonstrated by improvements in the telescope and the calculus across the seventeenth century, making possible a new, Newtonian physics.

The improvement of physics opened the door to a general confidence, which raised new questions: What if the scientific method could be applied more generally? What if the methods of science could drive improvement in all things? Not just better telescopes and predictions of planetary movements, but better looms? More productive farming techniques? Even better governments? Perhaps even better religions? The latter was more important than might seem. Immanuel Kant – who we will soon meet, offered a philosophy of : “religion within the limits of reason alone” (Kant, 1792), and during the French Revolution, a new State religion was proclaimed: Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being.

Those questions gave rise to our fourth proposition: the scientific method could be extended to the description, explanation, and improvement of social life. The natural sciences could give rise to social sciences. Out of this conviction, the modern social and behavioral sciences emerged (Olson, 1993). Alongside anthropology, sociology, psychology, and eventually economics and political science, all these fields are children of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, taking their places as university departments late in the 19th century.

We often imagine monarchs as the opponents of the Enlightenment, which generally favored democracy – a perception shaped by the French Revolution, which culminated in the beheading of the King, Queen, and many of the nobility. But in Prussia and Russia and elsewhere in Europe, enlightened monarchs  supported new academies and ministries, and governments  began to collect and tabulate statistical data that went beyond the traditional census of population (Scott, 1990). Across the eighteenth and into the 19th century the momentum of the Enlightenment grew, moving forward with each advance of scientific knowledge and each innovation that carried economic impact. With each tangible improvement, confidence in scientific progress increased. Better knowledge of the right kind – scientific knowledge – can produce tangible, actual miracles. Science can make humans the master of our fates.

Six Enlightened Themes

Now let’s expand on this description above, developing six key themes, and adding a few contextual notes.

1st theme: The Light of Reason

No metaphor is more closely associated with the Enlightenment than the equation of science with reason, and the equation of reason with light. The Enlightenment promised to illuminate the world, removing fear and suffering and replacing them with the confidence of sound knowledge.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that only philosophers writing in German used language that actually referred to “the Enlightenment ” during the period under discussion (circa 1750-1830). The Germans referred to die Aufklärung. French writers had no equivalent term until later in the 19th century, when les lumieres came into use. In lieu of having les lumieres, in eighteenth century France the new movement was known simply as philosophie, and its proponents were known as philosophes (“philosophers”). The philosophes represented a new kind of intellectual celebrity, whose work was widely circulated through the printing of inexpensive pamphlets.

Writers who relied on English had to wait even longer: the word Enlightenment came into use in English near the end of the 19th century. And as the historian John Robertson notes “the English word Enlightenment is itself a translation of … the French lumieres and the German Aufklärung” (Robertson, 2015:2).

There is an important lesson in this digression: when we speak of “the Enlightenment” – or indeed les lumieres – we are using labels developed by 19th century historians who are looking backward and trying to grasp a period of dramatic intellectual change.

2nd Theme: Progress

Expectations of improvement are built into the post-Enlightenment world, particularly where science is involved. And contemporary proponents of the Enlightenment stress that those expectations have been fulfilled many fold, particularly when the problems are technical (Pinker, 2018). From smartphones to the computational sciences, across applied fields from medicine to engineering, we live in a world of tangible, demonstrable miracles. In just over two centuries, the Enlightenment has delivered remarkable results. Two centuries ago, no one could imagine that the Milky Way galaxy alone consisted of 100 billion stars, and spanned 100 million light years, and no one could imagine nuclear power, or even the basics of contemporary material sciences.

3rd Theme: Universal Laws

To speak of the universal is to say that what holds in one place holds everywhere. Enlightenment thought powered a science seeking for the laws of nature, basic, fundamental rules that had general applicability. As the archaeologist Michael Schiffer argued, Benjamin Franklin connected heaven and earth by demonstrating that lightning and static electricity were the same phenomenon (Schiffer, 2006). A few decades later, cell theory, powered by the microscope, made it clear that humans, animals, and plants alike – and our organs as well – are all built of tiny structures called cells. Post-enlightenment anthropology has consistently pursued explanations of broad applicability – for example, applying behavioral models developed for the study of animal behavior to human behavior.

4th Theme: Material Causes

It has been rumored that Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy and astrology (a claim some contemporary physicists strongly deny; see van Gent, 2007), and Einstein initially reacted to  quantum physics by remarking that “God does not play dice with the universe” (although in his private letters he reversed himself; see Weisberger, 2019). But on the nature of what exists, what can be studied scientifically, and thus what can be improved, Enlightenment thinkers have been relentless materialists. Post-Enlightenment anthropology, insofar as it has embraced a scientific perspective, has consistently pursued materialist explanations of human behavior and social forms, from technological impacts on demography and social structures to the energetics of human bodies. However, not all anthropologists work within a scientific framework, and for many, the humanities have provided an alternate approach.

5th Theme: Secular Humanism

In our discussion of key Renaissance thinkers from Bartolomé de las Casas in New Spain, to Joseph-François Lafitau in New France, we noted two things: the early ethnographers were predominantly members of religious orders (e.g., Franciscans, Domenicans, Jesuits) – and their worldview was based on Biblical narratives. If one flips through the table of contents of Enlightenment readers (e.g., Kramnick, 1995) one does not find padres or monks listed, and very few essays address religion other than as an object needing explanation. Enlightenment thinkers were also overwhelmingly humanist, a perspective well captured by the archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe in his classic work Man Makes Himself (Childe, 1936).  Post-Enlightenment anthropology has likewise been a secular pursuit, in multiple ways. Most notably, anthropologists working in the Enlightenment tradition do not attribute material events to spiritual causes or moral deficiencies or behaviors that offend superordinary beings, and religion remains a phenomenon to be explained.

But that puts the matter too simply. In fact, 20th century anthropologists have often been very respectful and accepting of (non-western) religious traditions, and while some have been open atheists, others – such as the British social anthropologist Edward Evans-Prichard and his student Mary Douglas have been equally open believers.

6th Theme: Liberal Individualism

Introducing a political cast to the Enlightenment might seem unnecessary, but any idea or intellectual movement can be politicized, and they frequently have been: all six themes have been attacked and supported for political reasons. Consider the subtitle of psychologist Steven Pinker’s recent defense of the Enlightenment: “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” (Pinker, 2018). More pointedly, the political movements broadly identified with liberalism and individualism are evident in Enlightenment thinking, although liberalism, like conservatism, presents a moving target, enough so that any account must pay close attention to time and place.

In its eighteenth and 19th century meanings, liberalism was about political freedom, exemplified, for example, in the United States Constitution – and, as we will see, enlightened German philosophers. It was also about economic freedom, as articulated in Adam Smith’s manifesto for free exchange in competitive markets (Smith, 1776). In this political order, individuals – rather than groups – were the primary actors. Smith, however, clearly recognized that position in the social order was consequential, which led him to distinguish economic classes based on source of income: rent, wages, or profits.

More than most Enlightenment values, 20th century anthropologists have struggled to come to terms with liberal individualism.

Three Caveats

Before we move on, several caveats are in order.

First, it is unlikely that any Enlightenment thinker, read closely, would fully match the propositions and themes presented above. From my readings it is clear that not everyone was a champion of the suite of commitments listed above. In France, Turgot championed progress, while Rousseau opposed it. d’Holbach had no use for theology or religion in any form, and actively wrote against it, while David Hume maintained a private atheism to his last breath. Voltaire embraced Deism, while Immanuel Kant incorporated Biblical doctrine, including the story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood, into his anthropology..

If you find yourself rejecting or arguing with the four propositions and six themes described above, you have good company. The Counter-Enlightenment, or some part of it, rejected everything written. Know this: Anthropological thinking has been much broader than the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment has been a fundamental influence.

Thirdly, the Enlightenment looked differently to peoples experiencing imperial conquest and colonial rule, or enslavement on plantations. Many of the ideals of the Enlightenment were contradicted by events unfolding during the Age of Enlightenment.

PREAMBLE: INTRODUCING ENLIGHTENMENT GERMANY

Until fairly recently, discussions of Germany’s contribution to the Enlightenment were few and brief. Intellectual historians seemed to agree that there was no German Enlightenment, and this absence helped explain Germany’s peculiar path to modernity, which diverged wildly from the Anglo-French path, terminating in the disastrous rise of authoritarian fascism in the 20th century. But we cannot pass over Germany so lightly, because German thinkers have had an important impact on the development of anthropological thinking, including some of the most durable, celebrated concepts in the field.

Following the lead of the eminent historian and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in recent decades appraisals of the German Enlightenment have changed. Following Berlin’s lead, discussion now focuses on the German Counter-Enlightenment (also known as German Romanticism). Berlin insisted that the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment was equal in importance to the Enlightenment, and in important ways specifically German (Berlin, 1999; see also Beiser, 2003). From this perspective, German thinkers developed alternatives to the Enlightenment, contributing much more than a prelude to authoritarianism.

But German thinkers did more than oppose the Enlightenment. Or perhaps better put, before they opposed it, they embraced it and celebrated it. And they were not unique in this. Across Europe, initial celebrations of the Enlightenment gave way to doubt after the French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror. Among the German-speaking peoples, support for the Counter-Enlightenment was even greater following the invasion of Germany by Napoleon’s armies and French efforts to reorganize German society.

Prior to Napoleon’s invasion, the German-speaking lands were a welter of kingdoms and principalities. Ironically, French efforts to reorganize the German-speaking lands eventually led to the Unification of Germany in 1871. In the interim, the German world was pulled toward two competing centers. As part of a dual monarchy, Austria-Hungary swept southeast from Vienna, while  Prussia extended far to the east, taking in lands that today are part of Poland and Russia. And of major Prussian cities, none was more easterly than Königsberg.

Whew! That’s a long preamble. But at last we have arrived.

Vignette: Two Walks In Enlightened Königsberg

The Prussian city of Königsberg – today located in Russia and renamed Kaliningrad – is famous for many things, but we are going to share tales about  two fabled Enlightenment walks.

Euler and the Seven Bridges of Königsberg

The first walk is associated with the celebrated mathematician named Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). Born in Switzerland, Euler spent much time as a professor at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, an institution sponsored by the enlightened Russian monarch Peter the Great and shaped by the vision of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).

The connection between Euler, walking, and Königsberg stems from Euler’s demonstration in 1736 that the Seven Bridges Problem could not be solved. In brief, there were seven bridges across the Pregel River in Königsberg in the eighteenth century, and Euler showed that it was impossible to complete a continuous walk across all seven bridges without crossing at least one bridge twice. Ironically, Euler may have never set foot in Königsberg . Regardless, Euler’s work provided the foundation of the area of mathematics that became known as graph theory and later topology. In a broad sense, Euler’s work expressed the spirit of the Enlightenment because it applied mathematical reasoning to the solution of practical problems.

The Clock of  Königsberg 

The second famous Königsberg walk is connected with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant is perhaps the most famous person ever to reside in the city. He lived in Königsberg (or its close vicinity) for 79 years, from his birth to his death. Unlike Euler, it is certain that Kant walked in the streets of Königsberg, at least after his appointment to a sustaining professorship. Kant not only walked daily, but it is said that Kant left home at precisely eight in the morning, and always followed the same path, allowing people on his route to note the time by his passage. His walks had such regularity that he was nicknamed the “the clock of Königsberg” (Merrick, 2015).

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT

If a nickname like “the clock of Königsberg” makes Kant seem dull and predictable, dullness and predictability came to him late in life. Prior to his appointment as a paid, regular professor, Kant had, in fact, a reputation as a  partier. And prior to the French revolution – and particularly the Great Terror – he was also, like many other young German thinkers of the time, enamored with the Enlightenment as a political project, composing one of the most memorable statements in support political enfranchisement, learning, and freedom.

Was ist Aufklärung?

Purportedly inspired by reading the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1784), in 1784 Kant published a brief but bold Enlightenment manifesto, which posed the question: “What is Enlightenment?” (Was ist Aufklärung?)

Kant’s answer?

Sapere aude. Have the courage to use your own reason! That is the motto of enlightenment…. Enlightenment requires nothing but freedom.

In a few energetic pages, Kant issued a challenge to most authorities in Prussia: Pastors, military commanders, physicians, tax collectors – even arrogant princes – anyone who might impose tutelage and demand obedience. But Kant was also clear that enlightenment is not about childish defiance of authority. Thinking for oneself requires serious learning – self-tutelage is a responsibility that prepares you to become your own thinker. Without learning, it is impossible to take control, apply your own reason and achieve enlightenment.

Kant’s boldest statement is that freedom to think requires freedom to speak: enlightenment demands  “the public use of one’s reason.” It is not enough to think freely in private. Enlightenment cannot happen in the absence of the freedom to participate openly in debate and discussion in the public sphere. In a truly enlightened society, neither science, nor philosophy, nor works of literature, nor teaching, can be repressed. And any society where obedience to authority is demanded and debate is refused cannot become enlightened (Kant, 1784).

In the early twenty-first century, authoritarian states seem to be on the upswing. In the late eighteenth century, democracy was even more vulnerable. Kant was a subject of the Prussian state for his entire life, and most readers who are familiar with Prussia will associate it with the Junker elite, famed for ruthlessly exploiting peasants and serving as the officer class of the Prussian military. But in Prussia, and in many  European states, this was also an era when enlightened monarchs embraced efforts to modernize and liberalize their kingdoms in order to achieve prosperity and progress. Dissident scholars did have to flee occasionally. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, fled France, and when his Swiss hosts also expelled him he was offered asylum by an enlightened autocrat: Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Kant and Anthropology

Kant is not well known as the author of brief, arresting essays like “What is Enlightenment?” To the contrary. He is remembered for his weighty and difficult critiques of logic, religious faith, reason, metaphysics, and politics. He is also not well known to students of anthropology. But in addition to his lectures on critical thought that are studied by philosophy students, Kant also offered lectures on geography and anthropology. Indeed, these were his most popular courses. There are indications that his geography and anthropology lectures were intended to have a lightness to them – his course announcements promise entertainment. But in the last two decades, Kant specialists have been paying more attention to his works on anthropology. Some suggest that they provide an unexpected key to his system as a whole. Unraveling his massive conceptual system goes far beyond our scope, but his writings on anthropology are of interest.

In this context, Kant’s walks take on added significance. Kant would regularly walk down to the waterfront to visit with sailors about their experiences overseas. These conversations, combined with published reports he obtained and letters exchanged, provided the empirical content for his anthropology lectures.

Kant’s Pragmatic and Philosophical Anthropology

Kant’s lectures and writings on anthropology had two objectives. First, he described his lectures as anthropology from a pragmatic perspective. By pragmatic, Kant signaled an intent to impart knowledge that had value outside of academic contexts: anthropology for the real world. His anthropology was thus an applied anthropology in the broadest sense, meant to offer a guide to practical life challenges. But Kant also sought to develop a philosophical anthropology that contributed to grander anthropological questions, including the origin and nature of human physical variation, and the relationship between human nature and our capacity for learning.

Kant and the German Invention of Race

Race was not a uniquely German concept. The Enlightenment concept of race had many authors of many nationalities (Eigen and Larrimore, 2012). But among them was Immanuel Kant. Indeed, by his own account, Kant played a central role in giving shape to the German version of race (Shell, 2012). He credited himself with introducing the word race into German in his 1764 lectures on anthropology. He borrowed the Italian word razza – which dates back to the 13th century, referring to lines of descent – and changed the spelling to race (Vermeulen, 2015). An aside may be needed: Readers with a knowledge of German may protest that race is an English spelling, whereas in German Rasse is used. But the differentiation between German and English spellings is post-Kantian and thus post-Enlightenment. Note that the word culture was also introduced into German before English – it was only after culture gained currency among English writers that the German spelling was changed to Kultur (Williams, 1976).

But introducing the word race was not what made Kant’s contribution important. Kant also claimed to have developed the first philosophically rigorous concept of race. His final statement was published in 1785. Of course, long before Kant began giving his lectures on anthropology, awareness of the “varieties of mankind” was widespread in Europe, and during the Enlightenment discussions of human physical diversity became common. Linnaeus, for example, classified humanity into four varieties in 1735. But Linnaeus did not use the word race, and he did not add pejorative commentaries to his taxonomies until the 10th edition of 1766 (Linnean Society, 2023).

Kant was less interested in classification than solving the riddle of human physical variation: How had humanity come to differ in physical characteristics? And given that, what was the significance of these differences? Kant was particularly interested in these questions because – like Bartolomé de las Casas in New Spain, and Joseph-François Lafitau in New France, who we discussed in an earlier chapter in relation to the early and late Renaissance, respectively – Kant was a supporter of monogenesis: the argument that all humans had a single origin. But monogenism – although broadly consistent with the biblical account in Genesis – left many questions unanswered.

The fundamental challenge the thesis of monogenesis faced was accounting for human differences. Proposing that all humans had a single origin raised many questions: Why do humans differ? How (and when) did these differences arise? How important are these differences? How permanent are they? And looking beyond physical differences – which were very frequently remarked on – differences in livelihood, language, polity, and economy, raised yet more questions. If people live in many ways, are all ways of life of equal value? If they believe many things, are all beliefs worthy of faith? An answer of yes was a step few European thinkers – other than Montaigne – were willing to take before 1900.

Although proponents of a single creation narrative are celebrated today for their overwhelming opposition to racial slavery, defending human unity did not in itself prevent prejudicial beliefs nor exploitative practices. Asserting that all humans shared a common origin left open the question of whether all ways of life held equal value. The answer was often negative, and expressed in a doctrine of degenerationism.

The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) for example, argued that originally all people had European physical  characteristics. Varieties arose as a result of adaptation to different environments through a process of degeneration from the original form. This concept was not invented by Buffon, however. It has a long history in Christian theology, originating with the concept of the Fall following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The idea that humanity had fallen, and contemporary people were weaker, less moral, and led shorter lives was well established in Medieval religious orders (Noble, 1997). It is thus not surprising that the theme of degeneration is prominent in most monogenetic writings. It would remain prominent across the 19th century. In the United States and other settler societies, proponents of  degeneration developed policies of forced assimilation intended to “raise” indigenous peoples to a higher civilizational level by incorporating them into European ways of life. The concept of cultural relativism – that different ways of life could have equal value – was rarely entertained.

Solving the riddle of variation was important to Kant and other monogenists, because dissenting scholars were challenging the adequacy of Biblical narratives. In 1773, the Scottish philosopher / historian Henry Home (Lord Kames) published his lectures as Sketches of the Natural History of Man. Kames advanced the position that Buffon was wrong about the power of the environment and degeneration to produce the varieties of mankind. The only way to explain human variation was to accept that there had been multiple creations, a position that came to be called polygenism.

By 1800, polygenism was associated with more than claims for a plurality of creations. Proponents of polygenesis used their thesis to support racial slavery and colonial conquest. They held that human differences were innate, unchanging, and consequential. Human races were not just different, but inherently unequal, and it was impossible for members of different races to participate equally in the same society. Rather than assimilation, proponents of multiple creations favored either extermination or forcible subjugation, and both ethnic cleansing and enslavement were prominent practices in colonial societies.

Kant’s concept of race fell somewhere in between Buffon’s degenerationism and Lord Kames polygenism. On the one hand, Kant upheld unity: all humans were the product of a single act of creation, and in the beginning all were the same. In this Edenic time, all people had the potential to take any racial form. However, once differentiation had occurred – shortly after the creation – the differences between human races became permanent and innate. Out of one, many.

This left the fundamental question: Do these differences matter? Kant scholars have noted that in his published lectures, Kant did not address this question. However, his private notes suggest that he felt Europeans were potentially superior. But his later political writings dismissed claims of European racial superiority as a result of the unethical and inhumane practices that accompanied colonial conquest. Conquest itself was not the worst moral failure. The depravity of the European colonial powers was most evident in their failure to recognize that the violence and brutality they engaged in was unnecessary, and thus could not be justified (Shell, 2012).

Beyond Kant I: Ethnographers and Ethnologists in Siberia

Based on his research in the archives of the libraries of German universities established during the Enlightenment, Han Vermeulen has recently developed a new reading of Enlightenment anthropology (Vermeulen, 2015). Based on his research at the universities of Halle, Jena, Göttingen, and Leiden, Vermeulen argues that German researchers invented ethnography as the description of peoples, and ethnology as the comparative study of all nations during the eighteenth century, a fully century ahead of the Anglo-French world. But their contribution went beyond conceptualizing new fields of study. They also engaged in lengthy, systematic field research. They moved beyond “armchair ethnology” a century before similar developments occurred in American, English, French, and Dutch anthropology.

Like Kant taking his daily walks to lecture in Königsberg – far to the east of the contemporary borders of Germany – the German researchers who led the development of Enlightenment anthropology worked in the east, primarily in Siberia. Initially invited to join the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded by the enlightened monarch Peter the Great in 1725, a group of German researchers ended up spending most of their lives in Russia. They were well-supported, conducting exhaustive multi-year explorations of Siberia as members of multidisciplinary teams. Prior to Vermuelen’s research, their names – most prominently Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685-1735) and Gerhard Friedrich Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705-1783) –  have not been familiar.

In appraising the German Enlightenment, then, it is inaccurate to suggest its empirical basis amounted to Kant’s visits with sailors on the Königsberg waterfront. And beyond the research of Messerschmidt and Mueller in Siberia, another German born in the east – Georg Forster (1754-1794) – sailed with Captain Cook on his second voyage around the world (1772-1775). Forster is widely recognized for his detailed and careful descriptions of the peoples of Polynesia.

Beyond Kant II: Blumenbach’s Physical Anthropology

In retrospect, Kant raised questions about human physical variation that he could not answer, because in the late eighteenth century very little about biological inheritance and development was understood, much less human prehistory. The same point holds for all of his enlightened contemporaries. Working in advance of Darwin and Mendel, their efforts to support monogenesis had weak conceptual grounds.

But it is important to note that – beyond his concept of race – Kant contributed little to the empirical study of human physical variation. That work fell to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). Blumenbach studied medicine in the enlightened universities of Jena and Göttingen, and his specialty came to center on the detailed study of human anatomy. Spurred initially by Kant’s work, Blumenbach began amassing a rich collection of materials documenting human physical variation – ranging from a collection of skulls to careful sketches sent to him by artists, and his own excited encounters with people from beyond Europe in his travels around Europe.

Blumenbach first published on the natural varieties of man in 1775, and continued to refine and develop his work (Bendyshirw, 2020). After 1785 Kant stopped writing on race, recognizing that the empirical depth of Blumenbach’s work far surpassed his own. But although his work became empirically much richer than Kant’s, Blumenbach retained Kant’s basic conceptual framework, and relied on the concept of degeneration to explain the nature of human variation.

In his mature work, Blumenbach detailed human variation, describing in depth many aspects of human physical form, including skin color, hair color and type, stature, eye color, facial features, skull proportions, limb proportions, beauty, genitalia, and much else. He also placed human variation in a larger natural history perspective, noting that other species of animals also varied across these traits. This allowed him to make a case for degeneration as a general natural process: all animals had undergone parallel processes of degeneration.

Following and expanding on Kant, Blumenbach argued that the differences across varieties of animals, including humans, resulted from the unevenness of degenerative forces in different environments. The most important degenerative forces were climate and diet, which were variably harsh. All living things had declined since the Biblical events known as the Fall (or perhaps the Flood, see below); some had declined farther than others.

All living varieties of humans, Blumenbach insisted,were descendents of the same creation. In support of monogenesis, he developed several lines of evidence. The first related to the geography of human variation. Human variation was expressed in geographical gradients. In a memorable and oft-quoted phrase, Blumenbach insisted that human varieties “shade so insensibly into one another” that it was impossible to define where one variety ended and another began. In the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists would similarly point to geographic gradience in rejecting the concept of race (e.g.Livingstone, 1962).

Blumenbach was also prescient in noting that no single characteristic was unique to any one variety, nor even one nationality, thus stressing the significance of internal variation. Individuals of one variety might share some traits, while differing in others. Lastly, Blumenbach took great interest in the characteristics of creole populations, and individuals of mixed heritage. The study of people of mixed parentage supported human unity, as offspring were viable and well-formed. Creoles were the product of geographic mobility, not mixed parentage, and thus offered insights into environmental forces. For example, English people born and raised in New England were Creoles, as were French people born and raised in Haiti. In support of degeneration, Blumenbach suggested Creoles were diverging from their home nationalities.

In his history of the concept of race (Brace, 2005), the anthropologist C. Loring Brace somewhat dismissively argues that Blumenbach’s most enduring contribution was the use of Caucasian as a label for people of European descent. The Caucasus is a geographic region, centering on a mountain range of the same name, and today centering on the nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. It is also the region where, according to some Christian traditions, Noah’s Ark came to rest, and the world was repopulated after The Flood.

Following a degenerationist logic, Blumenbach reasoned that the least degenerate forms of life would be found proximal to where they disembarked. Sweeping out in all directions from that point of beginning, the impact of environment and climate, of food and livelihood, had led to degenerative outcomes of variable severity. In Blumenbach’s scheme, there were five varieties, and they reflected this history. Caucasians had undergone the least degeneration, owing to a benevolent setting.  Mongolians were the descendents of Caucasians who had moved eastward, spreading across the Eurasian landmass. Malays in their turn were the descendants of Mongolians. The fourth and fifth varieties were the Americans, indigenous to the New World, and the Ethiopians, occupying Africa to the south.

Contemporary usages of Caucasian as a racial category on census forms and other documents in the United States unwittingly reflects this Biblical narrative. Oddly, of Blumenbach’s five labels, only Caucasian remains in use.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT BEYOND GERMANY

As we noted in starting, most studies of the Enlightenment begin with France, collapse Britain into Scotland, and give short shrift to Germany and central and eastern Europe. Our narrative has reversed these imbalances for two reasons. First, most of our discussion of anthropology in the 19th century and the 20th century will highlight English writings. Secondly, Germany was disproportionately influential during the Enlightenment. This did not reflect German colonialism, which really only got started late in the 19th century. Instead, German proto-anthropologists traveled with English explorers – like Captain Cook – and were sponsored by enlightened monarchs like Peter the Great of Russia. This section will concisely examine the Scottish Enlightenment. A primary goal will be relating the Scottish idea to later anthropology.

The Scottish Enlightenment

The importance of the thinkers who powered the Scottish Enlightenment was evident to their French and German contemporaries, but long overlooked in intellectual history. Popular histories have been long in coming (Buchan, 2003). From the perspective of anthropology, the most significant contribution was the development of theories of political economy, and the formulation of a stage model mapping the growth of human industry. This model, and the economic materialism that accompanied it, would influence anthropological thinking across the full breadth of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Four Stages Theory in Eighteenth Century Scotland

The “four stage theory” is a dull but descriptive label applied by the economic historian Ronald Meek (1917-1978) to the work of a group of thinkers prominent in the Scottish Enlightenment.  thinkers who shared an interest in political economy. Political economy was the study of how to best organize economic and political organizations and practices given specific ends. Britain at the time was undergoing early industrialization, and questions of political economy included the ownership of property and the rights of workers, in a world where both free labor and slavery were rapidly growing. Prominent among them was Adam Smith (1723-1790) who in 1776 published an influential manifesto for defending a system based on private property, free markets, and free labor, that came to be called capitalism.

Smith’s proposal for capitalist institutions was supported in part by his reading of economic history, and alongside Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) and other contemporary thinkers, Smith also took an interest in what came to be known as conjectural history. Conjectural histories posited patterns of past development that were partly grounded in evidence, and partly hypothetical. They involved reasonable surmises, but lacked definite evidence. One of the most favored themes developed and shared by eighteenth century Enlightenment Scottish thinkers was a narrative based on four modes of subsistence, namely hunting, herding, agriculture, and commercial trade.  All human societies, according to this theory, began as hunting societies. Some remained in this stage, while others progressed to herding. Once again, herding was an end point for some societies, but others progressed to growing crops and raising animals in a more intentional manner. Lastly, in recent decades, some societies – including Britain – were transitioning to a new stage that Adam Smith described as opulent commercial societies.

Each form of subsistence, each way of producing food, had consequences for the size of the population, the permanence of abode, and the comforts and wealth of those who participated. Agricultural societies, for example, often involved tributary elites who extracted a surplus to support nobles and warriors who contributed little – their extraction amounted to unproductive labor. Smith’s capitalist model forced elites to risk their wealth in investments on competitive markets. As failing to compete would produce economic ruin, elites in the new economy were driven to innovate and produce commodities that buyers would freely choose to acquire.

The Four Stage Theory in the 19th and 20th century

The four stage theory was both simple and influential. In the 19th century an American anthropologist named Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) constructed an ethnological system for classifying all human societies that was based on the Scottish model. In Morgan’s scheme – which involved seven stages – each stage was anchored on technologies that shaped food production, and as the mode of subsistence changed, additional changes followed, related to property, kinship, and political organization.

Morgan’s work attracted the esteem of several influential readers. Karl Marx (1818-1881) and Friedrich Engles (1820-1895), who were famous for their critique of Smith’s political economy, and for political activism that included authoring the Communist Manifesto in 1848, became enamored with Morgan’s synthesis. Shortly after the death of Marx and Morgan, Engel authored a derivative work titled The Origin of Marriage, Private Property, and the State (1884) which introduced Morgan’s work to the 20th century communist movement.

In anthropology, Morgan’s work was largely abandoned until the 1930s, when it was adopted by Leslie White (1900-1975) and his students at the University of Michigan. Like Morgan’s work, and consonant with the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, White’s students centered their taxonomy of cultures on systems of food production, which consisted on hunting and gathering, horticulture, pastoralism, pre-industrial intensive agriculture, and industrial agriculture. Each food system had social ramifications, such that systems of economic exchange, political organization, and social inequality shifted across the categories of culture. At least at the level of introductory courses in cultural anthropology, the Four Stages Theory continues to structure instruction in the twenty-first century.

THE ROMANTIC COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT SIMPLIFIED

Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundation for the emergence of anthropology as an aspiring natural science of humanity. In doing that, they inspired reactions that gave rise to alternative visions of the anthropological project. The Enlightenment spawned conflicting commitments and gave rise to fundamental debates that continue to the present. In the late 20th century, one of the most fundamental divides in anthropology and the social sciences has been between proponents of the Enlightenment and those favoring the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment. In contemporary universities, this contest has often found expression as an opposition between the arts and humanities, on the one hand, and the natural sciences, on the other.

This dispute between the humanities and sciences gathered great force in Germany around in the late 19th and early 20th century. On one side were thinkers who felt the methods established by the natural sciences could be applied to the study of history, culture, and social life. This movement came to be called positivism. Opposing them were thinkers who felt humans were unique, and the search for “laws of culture” was futile. We can recognize in the former movement the influence of the Enlightenment, and in the latter the influence of the Romantic movement.

In terms of their initial interpretation by intellectual historians – the opposition between these movements became so strongly identified with France and Germany that we can substitute nations for movements. French thinkers presumably cherished Reason above all, while the German Romantics embraced spirituality and the imagination instead. In its turn, the French enthusiasm for Progress was countered by the German passion for Tradition, as French Universalism collided with German Particularism. But we know already that identifying Germany solely with Romanticism, and France with the Enlightenment is too simple, especially for understanding anthropology. For example, Kant and other German thinkers played key roles in articulating the values of the Enlightenment, and French religious leaders vigorously opposed the Enlightenment.

Like the Enlightenment, the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment was a complicated affair. It too was at once an intellectual and a cultural movement, advocating for broad changes that would alter European worldviews, economies, and political systems. It too has had an enormous impact on the world we live in and the lives we lead, and for that reason it is difficult to discuss dispassionately.

In this section we will reduce that complexity to a relatively simple list, addressing four core themes: Imagination, Tradition, Particularism, and Idealism.

Before continuing, let’s consider why the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment matters to anthropologists.

More than any other Western social or behavioral science, anthropology has questioned the Enlightenment, and the Romantic Counter – Enlightenment has provided a conceptual framework for articulating those challenges. Anthropologists may once have supported the “development” and “modernization” of ways of life around the world. Most now support approaches that value other traditions, and view Westernizing the world as a massive error. While most histories of anthropology still begin with the Enlightenment that is changing, and part of what has been introduced derives from German Romanticism (Stocking, 1996). Romantic thought is aligned with the relativism and localism that marks contemporary anthropology.

Romantic Propositions

Let’s start with a description of the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment that is too simple, but not wrong. Our first proposition is that Romantic thinkers embraced the idea that the world is mysterious, and our knowledge of it is limited. Overestimating our knowledge will lead to changes with disastrous outcomes. Rather than expectations of improvement, Romantics favored the preservation of the existing order.

In terms of knowing the world, Romantics favored unstructured, experiential knowledge that was impossible to quantify. The world was there to experience and feel rather than explain and control. The key to achieving knowledge of this kind was art and aesthetics, performance and engagement. New expressive media and new modes of delivering experience were celebrated.

Four Counter-Enlightenment Themes

Now let’s expand on this description above, developing four key themes, and adding a few contextual notes. I have avoided countering all six Enlightenment themes presented earlier, because relating Romanticism to secular humanism and liberal individualism in the context of anthropology requires more space than we have available.

1st theme: The Power of Imagination

Key terms closely associated with the Counter-Enlightenment include symbolism and imagination. Certainly light played a role in painting and later photography, but the power of what was revealed depended on a human response that exceeded words. Even words, in the context of literature, could generate insights that were felt more than verbalized.

2nd Theme: Conserving Tradition

Late 20th century philosophers have made the ironic observation that few things produce more change than efforts to resist change, or, even more, restore a lost past. That may be, and it may help explain the accelerated change that has characterized the post-Enlightenment world. But Romantic thought is anchored on the preservation of existing traditions. Although generally intended as a defense of local ways of life against state ordered or corporate driven change (and these things have been going on since the Enlightenment) this argument has also proven attractive to defenders of systems of oppression. Certainly Prussian Junkers and French nobles wanted to preserve their elevated position.

3rd Theme: Local Knowledge and Cultural Particularism

Romantic thinkers have often rejected the search for cultural universals and general laws, holding that both human beings and local communities are unique. Particularism refers to phenomena that have unique expressions, displaying enough irregularities that they must be grasped on their own terms. Cultural anthropologists who use ethnographic methods are particularly attracted to this position, perhaps because they spend enough time in communities to recognize local values. In any case, many anthropologists have come to perceive their role as centering on documenting, conserving, and defending the value and integrity of local ways of life.

4th Theme: Cultural Idealism and Interpretive Social Research

In general, anthropologists who have been drawn to the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment exhibit several commitments. First, they favor the arts and humanities over the sciences, and they are drawn to aesthetic expression and human creativity. They have also tended to define cultures as systems of symbolic meanings that are peculiar to particular communities, and to focus their research efforts on understanding the poetic use of language, expressive forms, spiritual values, ritual practices, and systems of belief. Echoing the debate between positivists and the human sciences a century ago – discussed above – they have argued that a different kind of research is needed to study human values and local cultural meanings.

NEW THINKING ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Because historical studies of the Enlightenment are much more extensive, offering a rich array of sources ranging from deep but narrow case studies to broad critical examinations we can develop the theme of excluded ancestors in more depth than was the case with the Renaissance. The critical literature is extensive, with many scholars pointing out the limits of the European Enlightenment as a universal ground for human advancement (Wallerstein, 2006). More recently, studies question whether the Enlightenment was a European monopoly, and some scholars argue that the Enlightenment  developed apart from the European mainland (e.g., Graeber, 2019). Additionally, for several decades the examination of counter Enlightenment movements have moved beyond European romanticism to include what Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993; see also Gates and Andrews, 1998).

Enlightenment AND COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE

Traditionally, the French enlightenment has been considered to be the very heart of the Enlightenment. And indeed, the four stages theory at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment (discussed above) was first formulated by Turgot. In the absence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is unlikely that the German Enlightenment would have unfolded, or, minimally, that Kant would have penned his influential enlightened manifesto. In the United States, the most active proponent of the Enlightenment was Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin spent a lot of time in France.

In the opinion of Marvin Harris, enlightened French thinkers embraced the idea that human behavior could be explained based on material principles of causal determination, making it possible for cultural anthropology to aspire to scientific standing. In 1968, Harris famously wrote: “for [scientific anthropologists] all that is new in anthropological theory begins with the Enlightenment” (Harris, 1968: 9). Unsurprisingly, Harris opens his work on the history of anthropology with a chapter on the Enlightenment. Harris finds much in the Enlightenment to admire, particularly any statements close in spirit to his own commitments.

Enlightened French thinkers wrote many things, and it is sometimes possible to to trace the ancestry of contemporary ideas back to enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century century – I have done that in the section above, where I traced the four stages theory from Turgot to Adam Smith and thence to Lewis Henry Morgan and Leslie White. But most ideas lack such definite histories, and drawing lines from eighteenth century France into the 20th century has real limits as an approach to intellectual history.

There is though a notable distinction between the French Enlightenment and the Enlightenment in Germany and Scotland, and that is the production of two revolutions, and, ancillary to and after that, the politicization of Enlightenment values and the social and behavioral sciences.

The French Counter-Enlightenment (1750-1790)

In the run up to the French Revolution, a networked community of French thinkers – who were widely known as the “philosophers” (philosophes) – composed and published inexpensive works that were distributed to a growing literate population. The philosophes were, as Darrin McMahon argues, celebrities and cultural influencers in their own time and context, with “the power to form and reflect public opinion” (McMahon, 2001:7).

In their works, which were often published under pseudonyms, the philosophes called into question the pillars of the French Ancien Régime: the King and the French Nobility, the repressive machinery and system of taxation, and the Catholic Church. Their critiques combined alternative visions of the future, carefully argued treatises, and the ironic humor we associate with contemporary comedians. They were, as Marvin Harris asserts, the founders of the modern social sciences. But they were also political provocateurs. And their persistent, ever bolder attacks on the established powers helped create the momentum that led to the French revolution and the end of the old order.

Their efforts and their influence did not go unnoticed, and it called into being a Counter-Enlightenment that was distinct from the German Romantics. As McMahon (2001: 9) notes, in intellectual history, the Counter-Enlightenment is interpreted in relation to major German thinkers who invert the themes of the (French) Enlightenment:

Relativist, historicist, vitalist, organic, and irrational, [German Romanticism] is the antithesis to the rationalism, universalism, and ahistorical mechanism of eighteenth century French thought.

The approach he critiques is not so different from my own narrative. But McMahon argues that there was another Counter-Enlightenment internal to France. This opposition consisted of religious leaders who mounted their own anti-Enlightenment in an effort to turn public opinion against the philosophes and their subversive philosophie. The French Counter-Enlightenment waged a 40 year campaign against the philosophes in sermons and in pamphlets, beginning around 1750 and persisting through the French revolution into Napoleon’s dictatorship. Contemporary French political discourse still echoes this great ideological contest.

Their core metaphor of the French Counter-Enlightenment was that philosophie was a disease that was “corrupting the body of France.” The attacks on philosophie did not endeavor for coherence: the goal was to demonize the opposition in a repetitive, persistent, unrelenting manner. Leaders of the French Counter-Enlightenment argued that Philosophie attacked faith and the Church, and in doing so, threatened the Crown. More worrisome, the philosophes undermined the special relationship between God and the French people. Because the philosophes attacked the traditional values and morality of the French people, the people of France were threatened by divine retribution and the future held unfathomable disasters.

The Enlightenment and the Haitian Revolution

Three revolutions shook the Atlantic world late in the Enlightenment: the American Revolution (1775-1783), the French Revolution (1789-1799), and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). All three revolutions were inspired by Enlightenment ideals, and particularly the ideals of the French Revolution.

Yet as Susan Buck-Morse notes, today the Haitian Revolution is largely forgotten, and in its own day advocates of enlightened ideologies failed to mention it. Neither Hegel, who edited a political newspaper prior to obtaining a position as a regular professor nor Kant, who wrote so poignantly of the meaning of enlightenment, nor even Rousseau (openly) supported the Haitian Revolution. (Buck-Morss, 2010). In the United States the achievement of sovereign independence, and a declaration of the universal rights of man, failed to end racial slavery. Whatever else this might point to, it makes visible a gap between the claim of intellectuals to be working for the greater good through the pursuit of knowledge – for example, Blumenbach’s painstaking efforts to describe patterns of human physical variation – and people for whom his work is consequential.

In the 1990s, Paul Gilroy introduced the concept of the Black Atlantic, and the need to add the voices of people who participated in the making of the modern world positioned such that philosophical debates are consequential. In response, Henry Louis Gates put together a collection of studies of five slaves who won their freedom, achieved literacy, and became writers and public speakers during the Age of Enlightenment (Gates and Andrews, 1998). They were charged not just with writing but with proving their own humanity through their writing, and in doing so proving the humanity of millions who were enslaved,

APPRAISING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Given its importance, you might be surprised to learn that there is a great deal of disagreement among intellectual historians concerning the Enlightenment, including quite basic questions like where, when, why, and how it developed, who contributed to it, and the ideas they advocated. This does not reflect a dearth of study. Many more scholars are today employed reading and writing about the Enlightenment than participated in it originally. Indeed, it is highly likely that more pages of commentary about the Enlightenment are published in any given year than were published during the century when it was happening. And there is much in the secondary, interpretive literature that is very good – indeed, some of it is much more compelling than the original (e.g., Berlin, 1999; Gellner, 1992; Israel, 2010). This situation – where contemporary commentary greatly exceeds the original works under study – is common in philosophy and the history of ideas when great thinkers or ideas are the object of study. And the Enlightenment is a grand topic.

We might expect outsized, sustained scholarly effort to produce clarity and agreement, but as more intellectual labor is invested into the study of ideas, our collective understanding becomes at once richer and more difficult to summarize. This is the case with the Enlightenment.

Like most movements discussed in intellectual history, the Enlightenment is primarily an interpretive framework constructed by later historians. It is true that awareness that something new was afoot was widely shared in European intellectual circles during the 18th century. But the conceptualization and interpretation was the work of decades, and indeed it continues two centuries later.

How does the Enlightenment matter?

This is a question, really, for the reader, not the author of this brief overview. I offer my own poorly formed thoughts.

It is difficult to dispute the proposition that the most important institutional forms and intellectual developments of the last two centuries originated in the European Enlightenment (Pinker, 2018). This includes many cultural, political, and economic forms that define the modern world, including the market driven economic system we call capitalism (articulated by Adam Smith, the foremost enlightened thinker in Scotland); the political institutions and vision of democratic liberalism (traceable back to John Locke – which stretches the Enlightenment into the 17th century); a secular worldview that cast aside organized religion (owing much to French philosophes); the rapid growth of new experimental, explanatory sciences; the bold expansion of the scientific method from the physical to the social world; and a general orientation celebrating and encouraging innovation and progress (Israel, 2010).

Yet today many feel the Enlightenment consists of unintended consequences and unrealized aspirations. True enough, scientific innovation leads to marvelous breakthroughs. Science has led to the development of computational science that is capable of modeling the global climate system and predicting what the future will look like across varied scenarios. Yet the reason for our intense interest and concern reflects the catastrophic outcomes of a relatively recent engineering marvel: the fossil fuel powered the combustion engine.

Additional Resources ON CHAPTER 5

The readings and resources below are provided as optional sources if you have an interest in following up some of the content discussed.

UNC Libraries. “Classification  · Race Deconstructed” · Accessed September 1, 2023.

Merrick, John. 2015. “Immanuel Kant the, Errrr, Walker?” Verso. Blog. April 30.

Linnean Society. 2023. “Linnaeus and Race.” The Linnean Society. 2023.

REFERENCES CITED – CHAPTER 5 – the enlightenment

Note: the references below are not required readings. They list the sources cited in the discussion above. You should also create a list of references cited for your reflections in this course.

Anonymous (German History Society). 2017. The German Enlightenment. German History 35(4): 588–602. https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghx104

Beiser, Frederick C. 2006. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Harvard University Press.

Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton University Press.

Bendysshirw, Thomas. Editor. 2020. The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Alpha Editions.

Broadie, Alexander. Editor. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press.

Buchan, James. 2003. Crowded with Genius – The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. HarperCollins.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. University of Pittsburgh Press. 

Childe, Vere Gordon. 1936. Man Makes Himself. Watts.

Eigen, Sara, and Mark Larrimore. Editors. 2012. The German Invention of Race. State University of New York Press.

Ferrone, Vincenzo, and Elisabetta Tarantino. 2015. The Enlightenment: History of an Idea. Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1287kqj.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1986. Truth and Method. Continuum.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and William L. Andrews. 1998. Pioneers Of The Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives, 1772-1815. Basic Books.

Gellner, Ernest. 1992. Reason and Culture. Wiley.

Gent, Robert van. 2007. “Isaac Newton and Astrology.” 2007. Personal academic web page. Last visited September 1, 2023.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press.

Graeber, David. 2019. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Israel, Jonathan. 2010. Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1784 [1995]. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick, 1–7. Viking Portable Library.

Kant, Immanuel. 1792 [1998]. Kant: Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings. Cambridge University Press.

Korzybski, Alfred. 1998. [1931]. A map is not territory. Prolegomena to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. Editions de L’Éclat.

Kramer, Fritz W. 1985. “Empathy — Reflections on the History of Ethnology in Pre-Fascist Germany: Herder, Creuzer, Bastian, Bachofen, and Frobenius.” Dialectical Anthropology 9 (1/4): 337–47.

Kramnick, Isaac. Editor. 1995. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Penguin Publishing Group. 

Livingstone, Frank. 1962. “On the Non-Existence of Human Races.” Current Anthropology 3(3):279.

McMahon, Darrin M. 2001. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford University Press.

Merrick, John. 2015. “Immanuel Kant the, Errrr, Walker?” Verso. Blog. April 30.

Noble, David F. 1997. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Olson, Richard. 1993. The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792. Twayne Publishers.

Pinker, Steven. 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking.

Robertson, John. 2015. The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Schiffer, Michael Brian. 2006. Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment. University of California Press.

Scott, H. M. 1990. Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Shell, Susan, 2012. “Kant’s Concept of Race.” In Eigen, Sara, and Mark Larrimore. Editors. The German Invention of Race. Pgs. 55-72. State University of New York Press.

Smith, Adam. 1776. [2000] The Wealth of Nations. Random House Publishing Group.

Stocking, George W. Editor. 1989. Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility University of Wisconsin Press.

Stocking, George W. Editor. 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition University of Wisconsin Press.

Vermeulen, Han F. 2015. Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. University of Nebraska Press.

Weisberger, Mindy. 2019. “‘God Plays Dice with the Universe,’ Einstein Writes in Letter About His Qualms with Quantum Theory.” Livescience.Com. 2019. Last accessed September 1, 2023.

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