The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany [159, 1 ed.] 0674026179, 9780674026179

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HARVARD HISTORICAL STUDIES • 159 Published under the auspices of the Department of History from the income of the Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest Robert Louis Stroock Fund Henry Warren Torrey Fund

The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany ◆

◆

◆

MICHAEL C. CARHART

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2007

Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carhart, Michael C. The science of culture in Enlightenment Germany / Michael C. Carhart. p. cm.—(Harvard historical studies ; 159) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–674–02617–9 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–674–02617–9 (alk. paper) 1. Culture—Historiography. 2. Social evolution. 3. Language and culture. 4. Philosophy, German—18th century. 5. Social sciences—Germany—History. 6. Enlightenment—Germany. 7. Germany—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. HM621.C374 2007 306.440943'09033—dc22 2007018767

To Elizabeth, who reminds me that the living are more interesting than the dead

Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix

xi

Introduction: Words and Things ONE

Orientalism and Reform

TWO

Culture and the Origin of Language

THREE FOUR FIVE SIX

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The Search for the Historical Plato

69 105

The Search for the Historical Homer The Search for the Historical Moses The Sociology of Ancient History

SEVEN

Three Anthropologies

222

EIGHT

A Scientific Revolution

248

135 161 193

Conclusion: Enlightenment Social Science

Notes

301

Index

353

277

Maps and Illustrations

Maps

Danish excursion to Mount Sinai Route of Niebuhr expedition

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38

Christoph Meiners’s route through Switzerland

196

Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand 250 Illustrations

Inscriptions at Gebel el Mokatteb in the Sinai Niebuhr’s sketches from Persepolis (1760s) Photographs of the same panels in the 1930s

30 40 41

Woodcut of “Lithuanian Bear-boy” 74 Venus de’ Medici 119 The ruins of Palmyra 138 Palmyran rosetta stone, depicting Palmyrene and Greek 188 Table of Near Eastern scripts 190 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Omai 226

Acknowledgments

IN PRIMITIVE ANTIQUITY they consulted the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. In the sixteenth century they consulted the stars. In the eighteenth century they looked to the past in order to divine the future. Had I

visited the palm reader on Virginia Street in Reno, and had she told me that it would take thirteen years to get this book into print (and had I believed her), I would never have had the courage to begin. Maybe the future is best left unknown. I first encountered this literature in the fall of 1994 at the New York Public Library as a student of Donald Kelley, who pointed me in the direction of Christoph Meiners’s comparative history. I found it extremely difficult reading, not because of the German but because of the very clearly articulated bigotry toward the inhabitants of the New World and, as I came to read later in a microfilmed copy of Meiners’s four-volume history of women, toward virtually everyone outside of northwestern Europe. How had European culture produced such hatred and fear, I wondered, especially in little Göttingen, so far from the centers of commerce and imperialism? I could not have known then that two years later I would be in Göttingen myself, still trying to understand what Meiners was up to by reading the literature that surrounded his Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit. It was here that I encountered his battle with Georg Forster, which now appears in Chapter 8. That battle led me to C. G. Heyne, Heyne led me to Michaelis, Michaelis to Eichhorn, Eichhorn to Robert Wood, and soon I was trying to reconstruct an entire world of learning that existed for a generation between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution. xi

xii

Acknowledgments

At several points along the way this research—and my career along with it—faltered, and if it were not for the intervention of several individuals and institutions this book would never have appeared, or at least would not have taken the shape that it has now. My greatest debts are to Donald Kelley and Tony Grafton, who have read drafts of chapters, sections, and the entire manuscript at different stages. Readers familiar with their work will see their imprint in this one. The year in Göttingen was supported by a Fulbright fellowship. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann offered crucial advice at several points. Hermann Wellenreuther invited me to attend his doctoral colloquium, where I floated my first attempts to grapple with this literature. Constance Blackwell offered support and encouragement through the Foundation for Intellectual History. I am particularly indebted to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Michael Hagner for bringing me to their department as the Lorenz Krüger Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The year 2001–2002 and the summer of 2003 transformed my work and the way that I think about it. Fernando Vidal has taught me much about the human sciences in particular. Once at the University of Nevada, Horst Lange, after a scathingly Teutonic critique of an earlier draft of the manuscript, which he read from front to back, asked me, “Where did you find all this stuff?” Much of the credit is due to Urs Schöpflin and his expert staff at the library of the MPIWG, particularly Ellen Garske and Ruth Kessentini, who might not have found the titles but did put the volumes into my hands. I must have ordered close to a thousand books over interlibrary loan that year. Not only was the staff extremely efficient and accommodating; they made it look like they were grateful that I was using their services. The manuscript came together as a whole for the first time while I taught in the Core Humanities program at the University of Nevada. Thanks are due to Phil Boardman for his encouragement, to Bernie Schopen for his mentoring, and to Jack Kelly, as well as to the members of the History Department, who let me teach a few courses for them. Final touches to the manuscript were supported by a summer research fellowship from the research foundation at Old Dominion University. My thanks to Annette Finley-Croswhite, Maura Hametz, and especially to Chandra de Silva, who provided research support as well as funding for most of the pictures here. Don Emminger drew the maps. I should also acknowledge Maude, whose ubiquitous furry presence on my keyboard and notebooks must have delayed the manuscript by at least a year.

The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany

Introduction: Words and Things

“I WOULD RATHER have chosen a German expression for the word ‘culture,’ but I know of none that creates the same conception. ‘Improvement,’ ‘enlightenment,’ ‘development of capabilities’ all say something, but not everything,” wrote the lexicographer Johann Christoph Adelung at the beginning of his Essay on the History of Human Culture in 1782.1 In a single volume Adelung surveyed the development of human society and the progress of the arts and sciences from darkest prehistory to modern Enlightenment. His purpose was to illustrate how all aspects of society developed simultaneously and in conjunction with each other. Fifteen years later D. G. Herzog wrote a book recounting the history of German culture in particular. By then Kulturgeschichte was well on its way to being established as a genre in its own right. Herzog credited Adelung as “the first who, in his Essay on the History of Human Culture, gave this science a fitting name.”2 In fact, Adelung’s was only one of many books that appeared nearly simultaneously in the late 1770s and early 1780s, each claiming to be the first of its kind. The present book is about those books and about how the human sciences were practiced in the last third of the eighteenth century. It explores how scholars, scientists, statesmen, educators, and pastors explained to themselves how their own society came to be and how one might guarantee its continued advancement in the future. Most of the people discussed here were Germans, but they were Germans in conversation with the rest of Europe.

1

2

Introduction

It is surprising to see a lexicographer apologizing for using a neologism, even if it was a foreign loan word, and especially surprising when the word is one with which we are entirely familiar. Culture—one of the most versatile, ambiguous, and frequently used words in the English language—is also one of the newer words, scarcely two centuries old. The concept of culture came into circulation only in the late 1770s. The concept cannot be traced to any single inventor because it burst onto the intellectual scene simultaneously in every major European language, including Latin. In fact, it was from Latin that the word was derived. Culture is the substantive form of the verb colere, meaning to cultivate, propagate, and perpetuate crops or a herd; more broadly, to live in or inhabit a place; to attend to one’s things, one’s person, one’s friendships, or even one’s religion or the laws. “Agriculture” means literally “the cultivation of the land” (ager). The ancients also employed it metaphorically as cultura animi, the cultivation of the mind. Cultivation of the mind referred to the educational process of the individual or the individual’s own work on the self in order to improve mental agility, the decorum with which one conducted oneself in daily affairs, and the individual’s acquisition of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding generally. Cultura animi implied the collection of external information or experience and the reflective ordering of those experiences in the mind. By contrast the dictum of the oracle at Delphi, “Know thyself,” referred to inward reflection or self-contemplation on the Socratic model of drawing out innate ideas embedded within the soul. From the Roman Republic to the eighteenth century, the Latin cultura was accompanied almost invariably by the genitive animi (whether express or implied), and it referred to one’s responsibility to oneself. With the advent of the vernacular “culture,” the concept assumed an entirely new dimension, referring to groups rather than the individual. It still indicated a process of evolution or development over time but the development of groups rather than of individuals. There will be more to say about the change from the individual (cultura animi) to the group (cultura) in a few paragraphs. For the moment I wish only to point out the novelty of the word and what it meant at its origin in the late eighteenth century. That culture came into use in about 1777 and not in 1772 indicates that in the 1770s Europeans began to understand society in a new way. (Readers impatient for that

Introduction

3

story may look ahead a few pages here or to the middle of Chapter 2.) This book is a study of how they viewed society, what “culture” meant, and why they needed a new word when several others already approximated its meaning. Franco Venturi termed the eight years from 1768 to 1776 as “the first crisis” of the Old Regime in Europe.3 From the point of view of Italian journals, Venturi described a wave of constitutional crises and popular revolts that swept through Geneva, Corsica and Sardinia, Greece and Turkey, Russia (the Pugachev revolt), Poland (the first partition), Sweden (a coup d’état perpetrated by the king himself ), Denmark (the failure of imposed reform), England (the Wilkes revolt), and the revolt of England’s colonies across the sea. Following the failure of Turgot’s desperate attempt to revitalize the French economy, all turned warily toward France, wondering what would come next. Germans, with whom most of this study is concerned, had a unique vantage point from the eye of the storm, and although the constitutional conflicts in their lands were limited in scope, they anxiously wished to avoid being swept into the vortex of revolts and revolutions surrounding them. This study concerns the period between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the French Revolution (1789 to the mid-1790s). Culture came into circulation in the middle of that period as a tool for several related disciplines that investigated human social development from different perspectives. In some cases, as in classical philology and biblical criticism, the concept itself brought little change because those disciplines were already deeply involved with the investigation of primitive society and its development. In other cases, as in the study of language, culture enabled linguists to pursue an entirely new line of thought, the collective development of language and the relationship between human cognition and society. Still others, anthropology, for example, were brought into being specifically for the purpose of applying the new category of inquiry to the comparative study of human history. Behind culture lay an international and interdisciplinary conversation about Europe: its development, progress, contemporary achievement, and what might lie ahead in the future. When Europeans investigated primitive antiquity or the primitive peoples they were encountering as they explored the globe, they were not really talking about the other

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Introduction

so much as they were talking about themselves. They believed that the “spirit” of a nation, or a nation’s character, emerged very early in the nation’s historical existence, and that while the nation’s spirit or character could be modified by social circumstances over time, it remained a constant factor in the nation’s cultural development. If one understood a nation’s character, then one had a clue as to the direction in which it might be headed in the future. The Göttingen School Interest in the formation of national character in primitive antiquity and the processes of human social development was peculiar to a specific set of scholars, to whom I shall refer collectively as the Göttingen School. This was a loosely allied set of scholars interested in the progress of the collective human mind as it developed in various national contexts over the course of history. Göttingen is a misnomer, however. Not all members of the school were on the faculty of the University of Göttingen. Not all of them were even German. Even “school” is a misnomer. There were no dues to pay, and no membership card was issued. Even a more or less formally constituted Society of the Observers of Man (French, 1799–1804) turns out to be a much looser association than was thought for much of the twentieth century.4 With no constitutional crisis to galvanize social theorists into institutions, German schools were even more nebulous than the French. I am not the first to use the phrase “Göttingen School.” In the German history of historiography in the 1970s and 1980s, the term was frequently employed in reference to the Universalhistorie and Weltgeschichte of Gatterer and Schlözer.5 But that story is not my story, even though the historians at the University of Göttingen (both in the strict sense) were active from the 1760s to the 1790s. My story is both smaller and larger than the history of historical science at Göttingen. Although I think the term Göttingen School makes up in convenience what it lacks in specificity, most instances of the term appear with a caveat not to take the term too literally. “Culture Club” might be a more suitable name, although this bears late-twentieth-century connotations of its own. I do not even claim that collectivist particularism originated in Göttingen. Rather, the faculty of the University of Göttingen, though the fullest institutional expression of collectivist particularism, were

Introduction

5

tapped into a deeper current that bubbled up in different manifestations across the continent. That current found its source in seventeenth-century erudite antiquarianism. Recent scholarship by Blandine Kriegel, Chantall Grell, J. G. A. Pocock, and Jacob Soll has shown how seventeenth— century practices of erudition were developed under royal patronage, first in France and then in other regions, for the purpose of bolstering the legitimacy of monarchy and church.6 Erudite scholarship, that is, was a tool for demonstrating the antiquity of laws, traditions, privileges, and existing institutions by means of a history firmly grounded on eyewitness sources that were read carefully, closely, precisely, interpreted critically, and reported accurately. Building on the humanistic techniques of Valla and Erasmus, seventeenth-century critics developed reading methods that enabled them to wring more information out of texts than the original authors ever knew they put there. Criticism was not the same as skepticism. In fact, it was an antidote for religious skepticism and historical pyrrhonism. The critic analyzed a text’s vocabulary, grammar, and extratextual references to demonstrate that the text was actually of the age and provenance that it purported to be. Fragmentary texts, vocabulary lists, material objects (coins, inscriptions, art)—all were assembled to construct a scholarly apparatus that bore tangible witness to the law, social forms, and manner of living of past nations. The deep study of text and context had several consequences. I will mention just three. First, scholars discovered very quickly that, by creatively juxtaposing one set of historical facts, another set of established facts could be subverted, such that the very institutions that had originally developed critical source-based history could be challenged by that same criticism. Text criticism, that is, was an intellectual tool. It had no inherent ideology but could be applied to a variety of purposes depending on the intentions and erudition of the critic who wielded it. In the 1950s Reinhart Koselleck showed how the most powerful weapon against the Old Regime was “the art of objective evaluation— particularly of ancient texts, but also of literature and art, as well as of nations and individuals.” All aspects of human knowledge and history were subject to rational critical judgment, even those that had been hitherto sacred and authoritative. Critics claimed that only by tracking down the contradictions of fact in the record of human history could

6

Introduction

one discover truth. Pierre Bayle showed how, in pursuing the truth, the critic must argue both for and against a given author, assuming successively the role of prosecutor and defender. Koselleck added that the critic was also the judge, a nonpartisan authority who was the advocate only of reason. Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695) “was the arsenal from which the next generation drew its arms.”7 The University of Göttingen (in the strict sense), engaged in educating the future nobility of Europe, also taught its students that same critical hermeneutic. The weapons of criticism could be employed with effect by all sides, and perhaps it was because of the university’s institutional position as an arm of the state that the Göttingen faculty were careful to limit their inquiry to descriptive accounts of human social development, rejecting as prejudicial partisanship any scholarship that conveyed an ideology even latently. When they did urge reform, it was with gentle rhetoric and on gradualist principles. Or so they said. By its very rejection of radical republicanism and revolution, the Göttingen School (in the broad sense) had a political agenda of its own. These scholars hoped to remove the worst abuses of despotic absolutism, including religious “superstition,” in order to permit the cultivation of reason. At the same time they opposed a onesize-fits-all approach to governance (this was the basic problem with absolutism in the first place), emphasizing instead continuity with indigenous local traditions, customs, practices, and procedures. Their scholarly inquiry was directed toward discovering the unique genius of a given nation or locality. A second consequence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century erudition was this: Text criticism could also be used for scholarly and scientific purposes, apart from political ideology. That is the story of these pages, even as they are set in the politically contentious decades at the end of the Old Regime. Political ideologies were certainly latent in much of the scientific work presented here, but it would be misleading to argue that politics were the primary goal of the late-eighteenthcentury science of human social development. Political conclusions, to the extent that they can be found at all, were moderate and very limited in scope, not at all what one would expect from combatants committed to political battle in an age of revolution. In this sense, the present book is closer to the antiquarianism described by Arnaldo Momigliano than to Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis.8

Introduction

7

The third consequence of erudition for the scholars of the Göttingen School was collectivist particularism. They considered texts of Moses, Homer, Plato, Cicero, and other major authors in the canon of Western civilization to be not the wisdom of an individual sage but the expression of a nation’s achievement at a particular stage in its cultural development. What made the individual sage was his success in exploiting the linguistic possibilities developed by the national tradition. But no matter how sage, he remained a product of that tradition, trapped in that tradition. Hence his poetic (or other) achievement represented the achievement of the whole nation, not of some timeless wisdom that existed autonomously. In this book the reader will find no radical conspiracy theories about political usurpation or repressed subjects; no extreme arguments about atheist-materialism, fatalism, determinism, or nihilism; no libertine apologies for what Voltaire called “gallantry.” All of those opinions were current in the late eighteenth century. And all of those opinions were rejected by the Göttingen School. Instead the reader will find a set of dusty-dry pedants spending long hours in libraries reading dead languages. Yet their patient scholarship laid the epistemological and methodological foundations of what would become the nineteenthcentury social sciences. But more than mere precursors, the Göttingen School also had a scientific program in its own right: to understand the collective development of the human mind in society, a process these scholars came to describe as “culture.” In the second half of the eighteenth century scholars began to augment the study of ancient texts with the scientific use of travel literature. Travel literature was nothing new by the 1760s. But by then there was enough of it that scholars could move beyond philosophical conjecture and investigate nations with a specificity not possible before. This was the innovation of the Göttingen School. Already in the 1720s Lafitau had compared the manners of primitive native Americans with those of primitives in antiquity. The juxtaposition of anthropology and philology flourished in mid-eighteenth-century France under the rubric of the “history of the human spirit,” and “conjectural history” was perfected in Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century. But to the members of the Göttingen School philosophical conjecture was not rigorous enough, and they began to use travel literature as scientific evidence of the uniqueness of nations around the globe.

8

Introduction

Organization of the Book Rather than treating those sources of information (data) as objective, value-free, or otherwise unproblematic, I have opened several of the chapters with vignettes that describe the processes by which such data was gathered. The longest of these is found in the opening to Chapter 1, which describes the Niebuhr expedition to Yemen in the 1760s. Chapter 1 is also the most complicated in terms of the range of disciplines discussed under a single heading. Organized by the orientalist Johann David Michaelis, the Niebuhr expedition began as a linguistic inquiry to aid the interpretation of the Old Testament, although by the time the expedition departed it had acquired botanical and geographic components as well. As for Michaelis himself, it would have made sense to place him in Chapter 6 with J. G. Eichhorn, whose teacher he was. Michaelis, after all, is known as an Old Testament scholar and an expert in Oriental languages. He was a member of the Faculty of Theology at Göttingen, not the Faculty of Law. But this is precisely the classification of knowledge that will lead us astray, obscuring our ability to see the world and scholarship as it was seen in the eighteenth century. For if the issues of the day transcended the ways the eighteenth century organized science and institutions, they also transcend the way we in the twenty-first century organize them. The purpose of Chapter 1 is to illustrate the ways in which erudition, law, and social reform were linked in the mid-eighteenth century. It was possible for a single individual to bear all these concerns (legal, social, theological, linguistic) in mind simultaneously and to direct his work toward more than one problem or discipline. Employing knowledge gained from the Niebuhr expedition, Michaelis undertook a critical inquiry into Old Testament law and the meaning of that law for modern European social and legal reform. Contrary to the popular assumption that the law of Moses, having descended from God on high, was timeless, eternal, and universally valid, Michaelis showed that even if it was God’s law, the law of Moses was the particular law of a specific nation in a unique historical configuration. Michaelis is paired with the legal scholar Johann Jakob Moser, whose work concerned not post-Pufendorfian natural law but the positive law of the hundreds of jurisdictions that comprised the Holy Roman Empire. Here was particularism on a very small scale, and Moser celebrated

Introduction

9

the local variations in practice and procedure, making no attempt to standardize German law or even to draw abstract principles from particular facts. The chapter then returns to Denmark in the 1770s in the famous episode in which Johann Friedrich Struensee, seeing a moment of opportunity, pushed through as many reforms as he could, only to discover (and to demonstrate to all of Europe) that legal reform, if it were to occur at all, must happen gradually, in the context of indigenous traditions, and could not be imposed from the top down. Struensee could not effect a revolution of manners and law in Denmark. Michaelis demonstrated how Moses was confined in his action to the historical context of the Hebrews. J. J. Moser recognized the practicalities of the hundreds of legal traditions in the Holy Roman Empire, each of which grew up in its own unique historical configuration. Chapter 2 opens with a vignette on the investigation of feral children, who acquired language (and hence the capacity for rational cognition) either relatively late in life or not at all. The chapter then outlines the origin of language discussion from the 1740s to the 1770s, just before “culture” became an intellectual tool for the analysis of the collective human mind. By the 1770s it had become clear that speculation and philosophical conjecture had yielded about as much information about the primitive human past and the origin of human language and cognition as it ever would. A child did not learn Language. A child was taught a specific language, and that language endowed the child with a whole set of identities on sublinguistic levels that marked that child more narrowly than a member of a nation. The child was also a member of a tribe, a clan, a region, that is, any of several categories more specific than nation. The smallest of those units, the family, was the real place where education took place, and it was Johann Gottfried von Herder’s emphasis on the individual’s learning of language within the family collective, and particularly his emphasis on the mutual hatred that drove families apart even as they shared a national language, that won him a prize from the Berlin Academy in 1772. Here was collectivist particularism on a very small scale, and yet even Herder in the early 1770s had little specific evidence to offer beyond philosophical speculation. To make further progress in uncovering the development of the human mind, scholars would have to investigate the specific languages of particular historical nations.

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Introduction

Herder was only one of a small host of scholars inquiring along several related paths about processes of human social development between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, on classical philology and Old Testament criticism, explore how eighteenth-century scholars investigated the first steps of the human mind. It was in these early stages of national existence that the national character was formed. Christian Gottlob Heyne studied myth to access the primitive mind in prehistoric Greece. Johann Joachim Winckelmann used art to a similar end. Both Heyne and Winckelmann were contributing to the origin of language discussion, or rather to the same project of which the origin of language discussion was a part: the history of the human mind and its collective development in society. The great discovery was the tremendous distance at which modern Europe stood from the ancient Mediterranean. Winckelmann initially called on modern Europeans to imitate the Greek aesthetic, but in the course of explicating the beauty of Greek sculpture he could only conclude that such imitation was impossible. The northern European climate, the Germanic character, and modern institutions were so far from ancient Greece that replication was not possible. Imitation was not even desirable. Europeans would have to cultivate their own aesthetic. Heyne wondered whether modern Europeans could understand ancient Greek literature any more than they could imitate Greek art. Only through a difficult act of hermeneutic empathy could philologists set aside their own categories of thought and enter into the mind of the classical Greeks. Even farther away than the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. were the primitive Greeks, to whose mind-set Heyne attempted to gain access through the careful reading of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and pseudo-Apollodorus. David Ruhnken found that the entire perception of classical Greece was a modern fabrication whose edifice stood atop successive layers of Platonic scholarship in the seventeenth, sixteenth, and fifteenth centuries, inherited from the Middle Ages and several successive Platonic movements in antiquity. Plato was no sage. He represented no eternal wisdom, no philosophia perennis. He was a mere skeptic, a compiler, a man trapped like any other man in a specific linguistic and (to use a handy anachronism) cultural configuration. Just as mythology, art history, and linguistics offered a window into the primitive past of a given nation, so were there other possibilities

Introduction

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for getting behind the received texts to see the primitives who produced them. One could go visit them. The ancients themselves were gone, of course. Nothing remained of Palmyra but deserted ruins, and Troy was so ruined that its location would remain unknown until the late nineteenth century. But the climate and geography in which the primitives lived remained. And more than climate, much of the mode of life described in the ancient epics remained evident in the peoples who still inhabited those regions. Travel and exploration become important at this point in the book. Chapter 4 examines the importance of eyewitness reports by modern travelers and the use of those travel reports by scholars back home in Europe who developed a comparative method for understanding the earliest stages of human social development. Even older than the earliest Greek texts were the Hebrew scriptures. Moses antedated Homer by half a millennium. Employing the same methods used by Heyne and Ruhnken to expose the oral traditions on which the written texts were based, J. S. Semler, J. A. Ernesti, and especially J. G. Eichhorn found that the canonical text of the Old Testament had been cobbled together from literary fragments, many of which antedated Moses. Eichhorn’s Old Testament scholarship was a narrative of defeat, the destruction of the Hebrew state. Yet the Hebrew national character was of such strength that the nation found a way to preserve its identity despite its political dissolution and the scattering of its population. Centuries before that political catastrophe, the Hebrews had been developing written methods of preserving an oral tradition that was passing away, in their case not heroic epics like the Greeks but the very pronunciation of the language itself. The canonical writings had been more or less fixed in tradition for generations before the canon was officially legislated. The written language itself became fixed through editorial practice. A lively tradition of interpretation of the ancient texts begun in the Masoretic schools of the ancient near east had endured for centuries in continuous tradition down to the modern diaspora. Eichhorn presented the Hebrews as a defeated and stateless nation whose identity was nevertheless preserved by language and text. Chapter 6 continues the theme of narratives of decline and fall. Here the principal representative is not the most famous historian who was writing during the 1770s and 1780s, Edward Gibbon, but Eichhorn’s

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Introduction

Göttingen colleague, Christoph Meiners. This is the first of three chapters in which Meiners plays a prominent role. In Chapter 6 he appears as a classical philologist in the late 1770s and early 1780s, just when “culture” emerged as a tool of historical analysis. In investigating several of the most famous figures of Greek and Roman history— Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero—Meiners consistently found the individual genius dwarfed by the national genius. Plato was less significant as a great thinker than as an expression of the Athenian achievement, of which he was merely a representative. Cicero was less a universal genius than an expression of the collective accomplishment that created the linguistic possibilities that the genius could exploit. It was no coincidence that Meiners, Gibbon, Eichhorn, and several others were writing narratives of decline and fall during the 1770s, when republican revolts and revolutions shook the absolutizing aspirations of governments across Europe, and in the 1780s, when it was widely perceived that the state of France was approaching shipwreck. Although he kept his ancient histories separate from modern political commentary, Meiners perceived similar cultural processes at work in ancient Athens and Rome as in modern Geneva and France. Chapter 7 describes the attempt to investigate the national genius of the myriad social forms existing around the globe in the eighteenth century. Here I describe the scientific use of travel reports and the various activities in the 1780s that went by the name of anthropology. No one in the eighteenth century made more exhaustive and systematic use of travel reports than Christoph Meiners. Chapter 8 examines Meiners’s use of travel literature as scientific data, by which he attempted to reconcile the two competing explanations of human social difference around the globe, the innate thesis and the environmental thesis. In reading travel reports, Meiners concluded that, owing to the overwhelming forces of society and environment, there was no such thing as human nature. There was only human culture. Christoph Meiners’s cultural hypothesis was put to the test by a direct challenge from Germany’s most celebrated naturalist and explorer before Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Forster. An egalitarian and advocate of universal human rights, Forster also used travel literature to develop an anthropology on cosmopolitan and universalist principles. The science itself was largely uncontested. Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster employed the same sources, used the same methods,

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and explored the same topics. Yet they came to opposite conclusions regarding human nature and the power of society to shape it. In defending himself in the face of Forster’s attack, a bigotry latent in Meiners’s science blossomed into full flower, and he found himself advocating extreme positions that he came to regret later in life. A concluding chapter assesses the meaning of these scholarly and scientific pursuits and focuses specifically on whether the collectivist particularism of the Göttingen School represents the foundation of the modern human and social sciences. The short answer is no, it does not. Despite many attempts to establish the invention of the human sciences in the eighteenth century, the premises, methods, and goals of these scholars’ endeavors were very different from the methods and purposes of the human sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although their scholarship did in some sense constitute a science of humanity and a science of society, what they were trying to accomplish must be interpreted in the context of their terminology, their methodology, and the scientific and scholarly foundations on which they in the eighteenth century built. One avenue into their methodology and manner of thinking is the term culture. But the reader beware: what we understand by culture is not what they meant. Culture: Some Begriffsgeschichte “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” wrote Raymond Williams in Keywords. “This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.”9 From the very beginning culture was a complicated concept, and those who used the term seldom agreed on what it meant. Generally it indicated “that which was created by the human mind,” but what it signified was very broadly construed. The arts and sciences, crafts, agriculture, property, commerce, government, warfare, religion, language, and even reason all were products of human cultural development. In addition to things intellectual and spiritual, culture also included what anthropologists refer to as “material culture.” Material culture refers to the artificial—that which is fashioned by human hands. Material culture is not the stone itself but the

14

Introduction

axe that the stone is shaped into. It is not the animal but the skin that is removed and serves as a cloak or blanket, although material culture would refer to animals that have been “domesticated.” The nomad’s herd is artificial, although the hunter’s deer is not.10 The definition of culture leads one to its antonym, nature. If culture ranked in the top two or three words for complexity by Raymond Williams’s reckoning, then “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.”11 Williams identified three senses in which “nature” is used: the essential character of something (e.g., human nature); the inherent force that directs the world (e.g., the laws of nature); and the material world itself (e.g., Mother Nature). Nature is normative. Nature is also good. If something occurs “naturally,” the implication is that it is right and proper that it should happen that way. To describe a behavior as “unnatural” is to vilify it. When the finite human mind could not explain some phenomenon, whether physical or moral, Alexander Pope said that one could always chalk it up to inscrutable nature: All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.12

A century later Tennyson questioned the back-to-nature movement in his Romantic era, citing evil as a natural as well as a human problem: Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law— Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—13

Was humanity a part of nature? What was meant by “human nature,” which apparently was an oxymoron? When Adelung wrote his book on the history of culture in 1782, he put the word “culture” in the title specifically to distinguish his study of human culture from the study of human nature. Already in Germany there was a genre called “the history of the human race” (in German die Geschichte des menschlichen Geschlechts, but written in English and French too), which Adelung

Introduction

15

understood to be the study of human nature in its social manifestation. In German the first to use the phrase “the history of the human race” was Isaac Iselin in 1764, and Herder and Meiners picked it up in the mid-1780s specifically to address human culture. Still, Adelung thought the distinction between human nature and human culture important enough that he inserted Cultur into the phrase at the expense of readability (I simplified the title above): Essay on the History of the Culture of the Human Race (Versuch über die Geschichte der Cultur des menschlichen Geschlechts). Defining what was meant in political discourse by “the People,” Edmund Burke acknowledged in 1791 that man’s very nature is culture, that is, polity or sociability; and furthermore that culture is a humanly constructed artifice. In a state of rude Nature there is no such thing as a people. A number of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial, and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. . . . Art is man’s nature. We are as much, at least, in a state of Nature in formed manhood as in immature and helpless infancy. Men, qualified in the manner I have just described, form in Nature, as she operates in the common modification of society, the leading, guiding, and governing part. It is as the soul to the body, without which the man does not exist. To give, therefore, no more importance, in the social order, to such descriptions of men than that of so many units is a horrible usurpation.

The whole of society was not just more than the sum of its parts; society was a whole new creature, fabricated by the creator, man. Man apart from society was not human at all, “For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated.”14 Definitions “The words enlightenment, culture, and education are newcomers to our language.” This was how Moses Mendelssohn began his answer to the Berlin Academy’s question “What is Enlightenment?”15 All three terms described the concerted and conscious effort of people to improve their social condition. Mendelssohn made both enlightenment and culture

16

Introduction

subsets of education. He saw education as the process of bringing a nation into harmony with the true ends of man (whatever these ends were—Mendelssohn left it vague). Culture, he maintained, was the practical aspect of education, and enlightenment the theoretical aspect. The practical matters of culture referred to refinement and beauty in the arts and crafts and to inclinations, drives, and habits in social mores. Mendelssohn compared the usage of culture to the way a piece of land was said to be more cultured and cultivated the more it had been improved by human industry for the production of useful things. Enlightenment, as noted, was the theoretical aspect of education. Enlightenment pertained to rational knowledge and mental agility in contemplating the matters of human life, and in weighing their significance to the true ends of man. Enlightenment was achieved through the sciences, whereas culture was achieved through the arts and social graces. Mendelssohn went on to distinguish between the ends of man-as-man and the ends of man-as-citizen, concluding that, as an individual, one could survive without culture but not without enlightenment. Herder thought Mendelssohn’s convoluted definition of culture amounted to splitting hairs. Semantic distinctions between enlightenment and culture, Herder said, were assigned at “random.” Culture, he proclaimed, was “the second Genesis of mankind,” and by his definition “the chain of culture and enlightenment” reached to the ends of the earth and encompassed even those most wretchedly primitive peoples of California and Tierra del Fuego. Even they had achieved at least a minimal degree of culture and enlightenment. The question was not whether a nation was cultivated. “The difference between enlightened and unenlightened, between cultivated and uncultivated,” Herder stated, “is therefore not specific but a matter of degree.”16 Noumenal discussions over which attributes pertained to culture and which to enlightenment accomplished little. One was better off staying down to earth and investigating the tangible manifestations of human culture and enlightenment in the histories of actual nations. Natural Law Implied in the term culture were several assumptions about human society that were taken over from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

Introduction

17

natural law. In exploring the growth and development of human culture, the cultural scientists were content to take the existence of society for granted without imagining human origins before the formation of society. To speak of culture was to reject contractual political theory. Classical social contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau speculated about a sharp break between the “state of nature” and the beginning of civil society. Part of the purpose of imagining a state of nature was to illustrate the essential moral character of human beings. Hobbes presented people as naturally evil, or if not morally evil then inevitably thrust into conflict with each other because of competing interests. The more moderate Locke believed that “the state of nature has a law to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”17 The sanguine Rousseau argued that “above all we shall not conclude with Hobbes that just because he has no idea of goodness, man must be naturally wicked; that he must be vicious because he does not know virtue; . . . nor that by virtue of the right he reasonably claims to the things he needs, he foolishly imagines himself to be the sole proprietor of the whole universe.”18 For Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau the state of nature ended when individuals, for whatever reason, contracted to renounce some of their “natural” rights and freedoms and to live together in society. The social contract was an artificial, that is, a human, invention that marked the beginning of social and political existence. One need not pretend that the social contract was an actual historical event. Its purpose was to establish a theoretical beginning of society for the purposes of argument. Whatever the theorist’s position, the social contract was a device that allowed the theorist to explore the conditions under which existing social arrangements could be modified, subverted, or outright rejected. Implicit in social contract discourse was rebellion: at what point did a tyrannical sovereign forfeit the support of the subjects, and under what circumstances were the subjects justified in overthrowing one sovereign and setting up another? Theories justifying the right to rebel were developed chiefly in western Europe. The Huguenots in France in the second half of the sixteenth century looked for legal bases on which to justify their resistance against the Catholic king. The Dutch altered French resistance

18

Introduction

theory in the early seventeenth century to justify their war of independence from the Spanish Habsburgs. In the mid-seventeenth century the English had to justify the execution of their king. The French, Dutch, and English rebellions all had Protestant religious components to them as well as political and constitutional bases. Germany was also Protestant, but relatively quickly (in 1555 after more than a quarter century of warfare) a compromise was reached such that the faith of the prince would be the faith of the realm, unless the prince should choose to tolerate minority groups as well (later formulated as cuius regio, eius religio). This was a functional solution for a nation that had never been unified under a single sovereign. Germany was a constellation of more or less independent principalities, some no larger than a city, where nothing could be more foreign than une foi, un loi, un roi. After the Thirty Years’ War the last thing Germans were interested in was civil war and rebellion. Instead, they emphasized legal institutions and traditions. Society would change over time, but change occurred in the context of the past. Germans, by large, were gradualists, preferring continuity and stability to sudden revolution. We must be careful here not to draw too sharp a line between central and western Europe. Both the French Huguenot resistance and the English parliamentary rebellion against Charles I were justified in terms of an unwritten constitution expressed in medieval custom and law. Appealing to the ancient constitution, to past practice, or to traditional rights and freedoms remained one of the most persuasive forms of political argumentation through the eighteenth century. Much of the motivation for studying the development of national and human culture was to recover forgotten customary practices and institutions that lay behind contemporary usage. Edmund Burke, for example, understood society as developing in history from specific political and social circumstances. For this reason he rejected both natural law and social contract theory as excessively rationalistic explanations. He believed the American Revolution was a justified struggle of free Englishmen attempting to reclaim their traditional rights, while he rejected the French Revolution as a rationalist experiment. Burke’s argument was one that resonated deeply with Germans also. With this consideration in mind, we are in a position to understand the dominant line of political theory in the eighteenth century, which was neither contractual nor conjectural (the state of nature) but rather

Introduction

19

was based on “sociability,” or human beings’ natural propensity for society. The principle of sociability was most clearly formulated in the late seventeenth century by Samuel Pufendorf, a Saxon born during the Thirty Years’ War who had studied at Leiden and taught at Heidelberg and Lund before becoming a royal courtier first in Sweden and then in Prussia.19 It was in Sweden, at the University of Lund in the 1670s, that he produced the large volume on natural law and international relations that placed “sociability” at the center of political and social discourse through the end of the eighteenth century. Pufendorf’s sociability thesis was a hybrid of the Dutch Grotius and the English Hobbes’s thesis: Grotius believed that what distinguished humans from animals was an inclination toward society or a “social appetite.” Hobbes held that human beings were essentially selfish, driven by the instinct of selfpreservation. What drove people into society was mutual insecurity. In the absence of a common arbiter in the state of nature, humanity quickly descended into a war of all against all. Pufendorf combined Hobbes’s self-interest with Grotius’s social appetite to conclude that the human social appetite was based on self-interest. Pufendorf did not believe that a state of nature, in which asocial individuals lived independently, could ever have existed. The human’s entire being was oriented toward social existence, physically, morally, and spiritually. Unlike animals, which were determinate beings whose needs matched their natural capabilities, people had needs and desires beyond the necessities of mere survival. When animals cooperated or acted together in society, they did so only to meet their immediate needs, and the needs of those individual animals were the same across the species. Human beings cooperated in society, and with only minimal effort they could acquire what they needed for survival.20 Yet human desires did not end with the satisfaction of only their most basic needs. A person wanted food that would not only “satisfy his Belly, but tickle his Palate.” With clothing a person turned “the Infirmity of his Nakedness into an Occasion of Vanity and Pride.”21 The persistence of desires beyond the barest self-preservation made human beings ambitious, competitive, covetous of power, and subject to “prodigious Corruption and Degeneracy.” The persistence of material desires beyond the necessities of bare survival placed humanity in a moral quandary analogous to nothing in the animal kingdom. That is, people’s physical indeterminacy was

20

Introduction

predicated on a moral indeterminacy. Human life was an ongoing process of self-improvement (or self-destruction) and moral development. Animals were morally complete as soon as they were physically complete (if it was correct to ascribe a moral purpose to animals at all), or as Herder put it, “the bee was a bee as soon as it created its first cell.” The human being strove for perfection from birth to death. That striving was what was meant by cultura animi, and only in society was it possible to cultivate the mind. Society fulfilled two basic human needs: physical survival and moral improvement. Society was not a result of a person’s innate desire to assist his or her fellow creatures (Grotius), nor did society avoid mutually assured destruction in a state of war (Hobbes). For Pufendorf sociability was founded on an individualistic premise: it was the individual’s needs that drove the search for society. A person sought not the other individual’s companionship but his or her goods. The exchange of goods between self-serving individuals was the purpose of society. Love of self, not altruism, was the basis of sociability. This was the principle that Kant would formulate in the late eighteenth century as “unsocial sociability.”22 Physical survival and moral improvement were two basic needs of human beings that were met in society. The mind was not cultivated by sitting alone on an island or in solitary prayer and meditation, although a person might retreat from society from time to time for spiritual reasons. But fundamentally cultura animi was something that occurred through praxis, that is, through participation in a network of social relationships. The natural law tradition, to which the discourse over sociability belonged, defined social relationships as a set of mutual duties owed between various social entities. To act as a moral agent meant to fulfill the duties imposed on one by natural law, social institutions, and tradition. Only in society did one learn what those duties were, and what those duties were depended on one’s station in life. A man had one set of duties as a father, another as a citizen, and so forth. Women, children, nobility, clergy, and soldiers each had different sets of duties to perform. Social duties governed all human relationships— between people as individuals, between the individual and the social units of which they were members (family, community, estate, etc.), and between the various social units themselves. Social duties were based ultimately on the authority of natural law. Through the fulfillment of social duties a person became a moral agent.

Introduction

21

In northern Germany in particular, natural law’s emphasis on duty was reinforced by the ethic of Lutheranism, which also defined the relationship between man and God in terms of duty. According to Lutheran theology, there was no possibility of spiritual regeneration through the performance of good works. Nothing a person did could justify him or her before God’s righteousness. Salvation was a gift of grace and the work of God alone. Consequently, one’s duty to God was infinite and could never be fulfilled. The German Protestant natural law tradition placed an overwhelming emphasis on duty. Duties linked God to humanity, man to man, estate to sovereign, territorial states to each other and to the empire, as well as the great states of Europe internationally through the law of nations (jus gentium). Natural law was more concerned with social relations, defined as a set of moral duties, than with individual human rights. Only in the context of this network of duties did rights emerge: one had the right to fulfill one’s duty. There was no real conception that moral agency might obtain in the individual’s assertion of subjective rights and freedoms against the rest of society. According to Knud Haakonssen, individual rights, like those expressed in the American and French Revolutions, were ways of thinking that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, and they were so alien to the framework of natural law that natural law was not equipped to encompass them. The new conception of social relationships, based on universal human rights inherent in all individuals by virtue of their being human, effectively inverted the older system based on the fulfillment of duties. As codified in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights, it became the duty of the state to support and defend the civil rights and civil liberties of individuals.23 The second half of the eighteenth century was precisely the period when the cultural sciences emerged, but those who were interested in cultural development and collective social progress by and large rejected the conception of individual rights based on abstract and universal principles. To the Göttingen School of social science, the system of universal human rights was not adequately grounded in the indigenous historical and legal tradition that had been the focus of a century and a half of natural law theory. The cosmopolitan and universal theories, advanced by the French philosophes and then put into practice in the revolutions, ignored the richness and depth of humanity’s many

22

Introduction

cultural traditions, each of which developed separately from the others. Those traditions were not necessarily reconcilable even within Europe (as we shall see in Chapter 1), much less between the indigenous society of one part of Europe and the equally valid, if less developed, indigenous society of a South Pacific island. The cultural scientists, at least those referred to as part of the Göttingen School in this book, were thoroughgoing particularists, as opposed to cosmopolitan universalists. They feared that radical social change, the abolition of the estates system that had developed over a thousand years of history, and the enforced equality of all citizens, risked the catastrophic ruin of all the hard-won progress of the past three hundred years. The story of the human sciences as described in these pages is not the “radical Enlightenment” of Jacob and Israel, even though many of the personalities presented here were members of the secret societies and clandestine networks that we are told (convincingly) were hothouses of radicalism.24 I must confess that I am unable to square Christoph Meiners, the bigot of Chapter 8, with Christoph Meiners, the Illuminatus.25 Although these scientists were traditionalists and cautious liberals if not outright conservatives, they, too, represent a break with natural law theories in the strict sense. They found natural law itself too abstract, too universal, too much a rational system deduced from the decrees of “nature.” Again in this context we see the consequences of their particularism. Each chapter in this book depicts a rejection of universal principles and a turn toward particularism in the study of real, historical, and unique nations. I began this project under the assumption that their goal was to develop a model of human social development applicable to all times and all places, but that was not the case at all. Such a model belongs to “conjectural history,” but repeatedly we will see conjectural history explicitly rejected. Such a model has a certain appeal if science is understood as the search for natural laws of causality or universal patterns of behavior. But the peculiar dilemma of the human sciences is that such laws do not exist. In that sense this book really is about the passing of the understanding of society from nature to culture, from the universal to the particular. The scientists described in these pages reveled in the particulars, the details, and the complexity of human history. There is no question about Pufendorf ’s importance for the understanding of civil society over the entire eighteenth century. Pufendorf is important for a second reason: he was the first to use the term

Introduction

23

cultura, minus the animi. Here we are on shakier ground. This much is known: In 1663, more than a century before the term became widely circulated in Europe, Pufendorf referred to cultura in an offhand comment in an unpublished letter.26 About twenty years later the term appeared in print.27 These are demonstrable facts. The question is what Pufendorf meant by cultura. The natural law conversation was focused on larger issues than a minor neologism, and nobody seems to have noticed Pufendorf ’s term in the seventeenth or even in the eighteenth century. Adelung, Mendelssohn, Herder, and others show no awareness of his use of it. Only in the twentieth century, in the Weimar Republic, was the concept traced back to Pufendorf. Emanuel Hirsch first credited Pufendorf as the creator of the modern concept, but in the early 1930s Heinrich Günter disagreed. Günter argued that only in the eighteenth century did culture acquire a deep meaning and a formal definition, but like Hirsch he emphasized Kultur as native to Germany, with particular reference to Herder’s usage.28 In the 1940s Joseph Niedermann reformulated Hirsch’s argument in an important but little known monograph tracing the course of cultura animi from the Roman Republic to the late eighteenth century. Niedermann argued that Pufendorf ’s conception of the term was essentially similar to Herder’s and that Herder’s conception was essentially similar to Niedermann’s own in the twentieth century. Pufendorf distinguished gentes cultae (peoples who possessed better manners, morals, and customs) from gentes barbarae (peoples who lacked cities, society, and law).29 That is, according to Niedermann it was Pufendorf who established a dichotomy between cultivated and barbaric societies. Barbarism was the state of nature. Culture was the opposite of nature: the arts and sciences, property, comforts, manners, the rule of reason, and civil institution of the state, all being the result of a collective effort of man helping man.30 More recently, in the close analysis of concepts under the rubric of the “history of concepts” (Begriffsgeschichte), it has generally been accepted that (contra Niedermann) what Pufendorf meant by cultura was not what Herder meant by Cultur.31 More Begriffsgeschichte One of the best clues that a change in the conception of society was occurring in the 1770s and 1780s is the absence of the term culture

24

Introduction

from where one would expect to find it. The inquiry into human social development was founded on the idea that a nation constituted a unified whole. That idea was closely related to the ancient metaphor of the state as an organism that was born, rose, flowered, faded, and passed away. Machiavelli, Bodin, Bacon, and many others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used the organic model of states and endowed them with personalities or spirits.32 Leibniz’s monadology was an organic metaphor that emphasized the unity and completeness of substances in the world and yet accounted for change within those substances. That combination of unity and change lay at the heart of the eighteenth-century understanding of cultural development.33 Giambattista Vico, too, although he was unknown to the Germans until after they had formulated their own version of cultural history, proposed an “ideal eternal history . . . of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall.”34 Montesquieu termed the relationship between geography, means of production, civil constitution, manners, and customs “the Spirit of the Laws.”35 When Voltaire attempted to explain how Europe had come to its present enlightened age in his Essai sur les moeurs and Siècle de Louis XIV, he wrote about the history of the moeurs et l’esprit des nations, of sociability, manners, politeness customs, that is, of broad structural changes in society, which were all parts of one great system. Voltaire understood society to be a human creation, a product of the human mind, but mind was shaped in turn by its own social creation. As manners (moeurs) developed, so did the capacity of mind itself. Turgot explained the apparent variety within humanity as the result of circumstance, while originally “Barbarism rendered all men the same.”36 Like Rousseau, Turgot doubted whether the progress of reason was accompanied by moral progress. He understood the passions as developing simultaneously with genius. Ambition influenced politics and therefore the course of wars, government, laws, and moeurs. “I have researched the progress of the human spirit,” he wrote, “and I have seen nothing but the history of their errors.”37 Writing a few years after Turgot, A.-Y. Goguet also understood the arts and sciences, government, commerce, and warfare as united aspects of a nation and all of humanity as a single unit. Goguet, Turgot, and Voltaire all called their approach “the history of the human spirit,” and Montesquieu’s fell under that rubric also, but none of them used the term culture.38

Introduction

25

Why did the concept of culture emerge so late? Within a generation, the concept had become so indispensable that it was almost inconceivable that there had been a time before it existed. “It is remarkable that the Greeks had no entirely exhaustive word for culture, . . . they the highly cultivated,” mused Friedrich August Carus in 1804.39 Civilization, an idea that emerged at the same time as culture and that held essentially the same meaning, contained the political implication that culture acquired. Civility described the inhabitants of cities, as opposed to the barbarians who lived outside them. Civility also referred to good manners and courtesy. Like cultura animi, the civis was an ancient idea. As a verb, civilize had existed since at least the mid-seventeenth century,40 but as late as 1772 Samuel Johnson resisted including the noun civilization in his Dictionary.41 All of these implications of meaning came together in the late eighteenth century in the new configuration of the idea of culture. Raymond Williams offers another clue about what culture meant when it emerged in the late eighteenth century. Williams credited Herder with pluralizing the word as “cultures,” which brought a new concept to the term, that of a static configuration (a snapshot) of a society bounded by time, space, and ethnicity. “It is then necessary, he [Herder] argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of ‘cultures’ in the plural: the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation.”42 Williams actually is in error when he credits Herder with pluralizing the term. What Williams describes is essentially what A. L. Kroeber, the American anthropologist, meant by the term. Kroeber tried to capture what was essential to Yana culture in northern California, omitting any change or individual contribution.43 Kroeber’s static definition of culture was closer to what people in the late eighteenth century called the spirit of an age. I do not mean to take Williams to task for a trifling error. Herder did say that every Volk has its own Cultur. Accordingly, it would seem logical to speak of a plurality of cultures. Significantly, Herder never did speak of a plurality of cultures, and neither did anyone else until the midnineteenth century.44 The absence of an expected usage teaches us something about what the concept represented. Culture pertained to all of humanity. Each nation shared in it, and each nation was linked to others. Much as

26

Introduction

Germans in the 1780s were interested in national “purity,” they were also adamant that there was a single human chain. Herder spoke repeatedly of die Kette der Cultur (the chain of culture), but he considered the chain to be more like a net or a web, with each person connected to others multilaterally, than a hierarchical and linear great chain of being. The progress of one nation was the progress of all. Europe’s eighteenthcentury achievement was an achievement for humanity, a sentiment Neil Armstrong echoed when he set foot on the moon in 1969. In the late eighteenth century we hear repeatedly that humanity would not achieve completion (Vollkommenheit, perfection) until all nations shared in it. Even Enlightened Europe, by its own admission, had a long way to go. For other nations completion did not mean all nations would follow the culture of Europe. Each group developed according to its own internal logic and possessed its own unique character. Enlightenment in China would look different from Enlightenment in Europe. It became the task of the human sciences to bring about that completion. In the 1930s, again with research rooted in the Weimar era, Werner Jaeger also universalized the idea of culture. Jaeger placed the cultivation of the mind at the root of the Greek word paideia, and he equated the Greek term with the English “culture.”45 But during most of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, education was understood primarily in individual terms. A person began the process of education as a child and continued this education through adolescence, maturity, and old age. A person might strive to achieve some standard of human character, but one’s striving was something that one did alone. One might find companions along the way, but ultimately the changes in moral character were personal. Closely connected to the individual idea of cultura animi was the concept of collective accomplishment. Jaeger called this concept “the ideal of culture,” and he credited the Sophists for making Greece conscious of its own culture. The Greeks’ collective accomplishment was what distinguished them from barbarians. Like the ancient paideia, culture emerged as an idea in a specific time and in response to a specific set of historical questions. On one level it suited Jaeger’s purpose to translate paideia as culture, but Jaeger presented the Greeks in modern categories. The idea of paideia is as old as Greece. The idea of cultura animi is as old as Rome. But the idea of culture is only as old as the Enlightenment.

ONE ◆

◆

◆

Orientalism and Reform

SEPTEMBER 16, 1762 —Sinai

Peninsula. Carsten Niebuhr stood about halfway up Mount Sinai surveying the summit on a ledge where Muslim and Christian shrines had been erected side by side. His guides would not take him to the summit. With him was a Danish theologian named F. C. von Haven and a group of local bedouin Arabs, including three sheiks who served as guides and escorts. The party had been climbing the sheer northwest face of the mountain up stairs cut into the rock by the Greek Orthodox monks of Saint Catherine whose monastery stood at the foot of the mountain below. Earlier in the day the Arabs had wanted to turn back when they had paused at another shrine, but Niebuhr had continued climbing alone until the others followed. Now, however, it was clear that the Arabs would go no farther, and Niebuhr was forced to descend with the rest.1 Niebuhr and von Haven had hoped to travel lighter. They had hired one sheik to show them the way, but two others, through whose territory they had traveled, insisted on coming along also. Although they had been hired formally as guides to Mount Sinai and Gebel el Mokatteb, the Mount of Inscriptions, the bedouins were not taking orders from the Europeans. When Niebuhr and von Haven crossed the Gulf of Suez to start their journey, in addition to the three sheiks they were joined by a number of the sheiks’ kinsmen who were returning from delivering drinking water to the town of Suez. To Niebuhr they seemed freeloaders seeking to live for a couple of weeks at the expense of wealthy Europeans. Still, Niebuhr did his best to get along with his 27

28

Orientalism and Reform

hosts. He had opted for a camel on this excursion rather than a horse, and he struggled with the Arabic dialect himself rather than speak through the Jewish interpreter they had hired. Von Haven took a horse and adopted a patrician air that on at least one occasion evoked a veiled death threat, although he managed to defuse the tension with humor.2 For their part the bedouins were suspicious. Europeans had passed through the Sinai before, but none had ever asked for such precise geographical information. Niebuhr stealthily consulted a small instrument as he rode. (It was a compass, widely used in the Near East by merchants; Niebuhr was surprised the bedouins had never seen one before.) He was working on a detailed map and counted camel steps to measure distances.3 Gebel el Mokatteb was an obscure destination. Two of the three sheiks did not know the name; they accompanied the party just to keep an eye on them. Why were two Europeans going to such expense to read ancient inscriptions in the desert? They must be grave robbers, they thought, in search of buried treasure. The bedouins confronted them on the matter. The Europeans denied it, and the two sides nearly stalemated before Niebuhr cut a deal:

lf Gu

of

Ak ab a

Mt. Sinai

Red Sea

Gebel el Mokatteb

Gulf

of

Suez

Bedea

Suez

Excursion from Suez to Mount Sinai by Frederik Christian von Haven and Carsten Niebuhr, September 1762

Orientalism and Reform

29

if any treasure was found, the bedouins would keep two-thirds. Still the bedouins were cautious. When they reached Gebel el Mokatteb several days later, they found dozens of Egyptian grave markers, displaying hieroglyphic inscriptions and busts of the dead. Niebuhr and von Haven took out pen and paper to begin copying, but as if on cue their escorts descended on them and forbade them to transcribe. In broken Arabic, Niebuhr tried to persuade them—forty years before the Rosetta Stone was discovered and sixty before it was deciphered—that he and von Haven could not even read the inscriptions. This must have puzzled the bedouins. Through bribes, gifts, camel rides, and persistence, Niebuhr eventually won leave from one sheik to copy three grave markers on the return trip. To copy them all would have required a month.4 Niebuhr and von Haven had not come to Sinai as pilgrims, nor had they come as tourists to see the sights. They were on a scholarly mission to clarify the history, customs, manners, law, and language of the Hebrews and other Semitic peoples described in the Old Testament. Theirs was a scientific expedition, funded at public expense and announced with fanfare across Europe. The expedition was the enduring legacy of King Frederick V of Denmark, whose epitaph on a statue of the mounted king in front of Amalienborg still acclaims his “generous support of science through the sending of learned men to the Orient.”5 The expedition was several years in the making and, despite the Seven Years’ War, an international endeavor. In the 1750s the Göttingen orientalist and Old Testament scholar Johann David Michaelis began musing about how much could be learned about the Hebrew language and customs from an overland expedition to Arabia. He tentatively proposed the idea to J. H. E. von Bernstorff, a Mecklenburg nobleman who chaired the Danish privy council and ran the Danish foreign ministry. Michaelis reminded him of the Danish crown’s past support of scientific expeditions. In the seventeenth century the duke of Holstein had sent Adam Olearius through Russia and Persia in search of a northern silk route via Schleswig to western Europe. The trade route failed, but Olearius reported on a myriad of flora, fauna, and people groups and mapped the entire Volga River. More recently, King Christian VI had sent F. L. Norden to Egypt and the Red Sea in a bid to establish a trading relationship with the emperor of Ethiopia. Norden’s Voyage d’Égypte et de

One of three panels of inscriptions copied by Carsten Niebuhr at Gebel el Mokatteb in the Sinai. (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen.)

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Nubie appeared posthumously in 1755, and to Michaelis the Danes seemed a plausible source of funding. Michaelis proposed an expedition to “Arabia felix,” that is, Yemen, recognized since antiquity as the most cultivated region of Arabia due to foreign trade. Its history was truly ancient. Its geography, flora, and fauna were still unknown to Europeans in the eighteenth century. Its dialects originated from the eastern branch of Arabic. The western Arabic dialects, already known to orientalists, had been useful in clarifying obscure Hebrew terms in the Old Testament. Knowledge of the eastern Arabic dialects certainly shed more light on the biblical text by giving scholars new clues about the development of the Semitic languages.6 Best of all, Yemen in the eighteenth century was as safe a place to travel in as any region of Europe. Soldiers regularly policed the roads. At the same time, for Europeans it was largely terra incognita, particularly the interior parts that were not visited by European merchants. Michaelis illustrated just how unknown southern Arabia was to Europeans in a set of one hundred questions he posed to the expedition prior to its departure in 1761. The Old Testament is a book that compels us, so to speak, to enter into the natural history and manners of the Orientals if we wish to understand it. Nearly three hundred names from the plant kingdom; I do not even know how many from the animal kingdom; and quite a few names of gemstones are mentioned there. It is completely intertwined with oriental manners and geography. The ancient oriental translations, through their errors, offer an occasion to ponder still more animals or plants than the Bible actually mentions. Anyone who makes the slightest inquiry into such things in order to understand this most ancient of books is unwittingly led into natural history and the manners of Orientals. Nor would he have considered these questions if these extraordinary remains of oriental antiquity had not been conducted to him [via the Bible]. Truly I can name no other book that is so profitable to this part of scholarship, certainly none of any moral content.7

Initially, von Haven, a theologian studying with Michaelis at Göttingen, was to have traveled alone. During preparations, the German geographer Niebuhr and a Swedish botanist, Peter Forskål, were added. The king himself suggested a painter and a physician, the Bavarian Georg Bauernfeind and the Dane Christian Cramer, respectively. A

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retired Swedish dragoon called Berggren volunteered to cook, making a party of six. All had studied oriental languages, Hebrew and Arabic, in comparison with the structure of Ethiopian, Syriac, Chaldean, and Samaritan. It was hoped that knowledge of the written languages would enable them to pick up conversational Arabic on the way to Yemen. Just to be certain, the king sent von Haven to Rome for a few months to learn conversational Arabic from Maronite Christians there.8 Danish merchants traveled frequently to the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century, and they advised the best route of travel: first to Cairo and Suez, then by ship to Jiddah, and further over land to Sana’a. At Mocca they would wait for a European merchant ship to take them to the Danish post at Tranquebar on India’s east coast, then through the Persian Gulf to Basra and back home via Aleppo, Smyrna, and Istanbul.9 The information they were to collect would be of three kinds: language, natural history, and chronology. Michaelis organized the agenda in consultation with scholars across Europe. He held private discussions with members of the Göttingen faculty. He issued a call for questions in the late 1750s, receiving responses from London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and from scholars and pastors across Germany. Correspondence was facilitated by the Danish crown. The Seven Years’ War had begun, and although Denmark was neutral, Michaelis, in Hanoverian Göttingen— which was united with Great Britain through the person of the king/elector—lived under French occupation. He was careful to credit two French garrison commanders for permitting communication with the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in Paris. Michaelis collated the responses into a set of one hundred questions, many of them very specific and detailed, that set the agenda of the expedition. The travelers were given an allowance for the purchase of manuscripts for the royal library. An order was placed with the travelers that they were not to seek out rare or valuable manuscripts, nor were they to look for copies of the Koran, ascetic books, or prayer books—the king had plenty of these. Instead, they should find useful books on natural history, geography, and human history. The naturalist was to collect seeds and minerals and ship them back to Copenhagen. If the party could not bring back animals, then the naturalist should sketch them and the painter work up a more complete picture. The physician (Cramer) should inquire into the history of disease in the Near East and into healing and herbal remedies. They should all

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listen for Arabic provincialisms that did not appear in books or lexica that might shed light on Hebrew terms. They should learn Arabic palaeography and record variant readings they came across in any Hebrew and Greek codices. Most of the questions were extraordinarily specific, like this one about the Red Sea tides: Question 2: Concerning the tidal ebbs on the outermost arm of the Red Sea; their time, strength, and depth, as well as the floor of the Sea at the location where the Israelites crossed; and of the corals. One would understand this entire question, which pertains to the crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea, more fully if he has read my preface and notes to the treatise, Physical Essay on the Red Sea Tides. Its entire purpose is to determine with certainty whether through an ebb-upon-ebb, which is caused by a flood of opposing north-northwest wind, the Sea could have been sufficiently dried out that a street [Straße] might have been opened for the Israelites. The location where the observations should be made by the travellers is the Bedea Valley near Suez, which is taken to be the site of the crossing. Namely it is known that the Red Sea in this its outermost reach by Bedea has an ebb and flood. However the time at which these occur has not been noted by any traveller, and since this is not an ocean but the most elongated point of a long gulf scattered with islands, one cannot determine them a priori by the course of the moon. Therefore we request the hour and minute of the highest and lowest water when the ebb and flood have their beginning to be recorded, with precise recording of the day on which the observation is made. It would be most preferable if the observations were repeated over several consecutive days and included some days between the 17th and 24th of the moon (not days of the month but from the new moon).10

Passports were procured through the Danish embassy at Istanbul, and safe passage was guaranteed. The six departed Copenhagen at the beginning of 1761, stopping in Malta, Cyprus, and Istanbul before sailing for Egypt with a Turkish merchant and his cargo of slave girls. The party visited Alexandria, Damietta, and Rashid, then headed upstream to Cairo. At Cairo they discovered that Turkish control over Egypt was at best nominal. Travel from Cairo to the Delta was limited to the Nile, as local feuds made robbery almost inevitable on the land routes. At one point the botanist Forskål was

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robbed of everything he had, including his pants. Pirates on the Nile had to be fended off with musket fire. The party found itself hunkered down in Cairo for a full year, unable to make the short trip to Suez due to a feud between Cairo merchants and Sinai bedouins over imported water. Nevertheless, the members of the party made productive use of the delay. They described merchant culture in the major cities, all of which were well known to Europeans, including several with French consulates. Niebuhr compiled gazetteers of place-names in Arabic and European languages and drew city maps and views of skylines, as well as a detailed map of the Nile Delta from Rashid to Cairo to Damietta. He reported on harbor conditions, fortifications, customs houses, and shipping lanes in the Nile. He compiled notes on the smallest villages along the way, the languages spoken and the facility of locals in European languages, their perceptions of Europeans (the French had recently been expelled from Damietta under suspicion of seducing local women), the weather at different times of the year, astronomical observations and latitude measurements, navigation equipment on Turkish ships, and sources of potable water—all matters of interest to merchants. He studied Cairo’s export market, chiefly leather, saffron, rubber, coffee, and sugar. Niebuhr described matters of interest to politicians such as forms of government, the pace of commerce, and city inhabitants, classes of merchants and artisans, as well as the Beys, Turkish Christians sold into slavery as children and brought to Egypt. Emancipated as adults, the Beys formed a powerful sector of Cairo. He commented on irrigation methods, on oriental clothing (whose fashions changed as quickly as they did in Europe), on leisure activities, and on antiquities such as the pyramids and hieroglyphics. Finally, in August 1762, the countryside settled down enough to allow the expedition to proceed. The party was to travel from Cairo to Suez and then by sea to Jiddah and on to Sana’a, making an excursion through the Sinai per Michaelis’s Questions. No sooner had they departed Cairo than the painter, Bauernfeind, became violently ill. He convalesced in Suez, attended by Cramer, the physician, and Berggren, the Swedish chef. Forskål, the botanist, also elected to remain in Suez, leaving von Haven and Niebuhr to travel into the Sinai Desert alone.

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Their excursion into the Sinai followed royal mandate. European scholars apparently knew of the inscriptions at Gebel el Mokatteb better than the local bedouins: Also we request that on the way out accurate copies be taken of the inscriptions on the Gebel el Mocatab and, if the quality permits, plaster casts also. Professor von Haven in particular, with assistance from the painter, should take greatest care in this.11

Neither Bauernfeind’s health nor the bedouins cooperated in this request. In addition, von Haven had been explicitly instructed to purchase manuscripts from Saint Catherine’s at the foot of Mount Sinai. On the morning of September 15, 1762, the party approached the gate of the monastery and presented a letter from the patriarch of Cairo requesting that the Protestants be granted entrance. The monks lived under strict orders not to open the gate for anyone without a letter from the bishop of Mount Sinai. The bishop lived in Cairo, and during their year’s delay Niebuhr and von Haven received his permission, only to have him rush away to Istanbul before the letter was written. Through the British embassy in Istanbul, they procured an ersatz letter from a deposed patriarch who had once spent three years at Saint Catherine’s and had recently returned. That letter was handed to a monk, and after some delay passed back through a small hole in the wall. Access denied. The monks would not open the gate without a letter from the bishop of Mount Sinai himself. Had the bishop been in Cairo in 1762, the Codex Sinaiticus might be in Copenhagen rather than the British Museum.12 The party camped outside the monastery that night and began the abortive ascent of the mountain the next morning. Question 65: Views from high mountains, particularly from Sinai: It is known to the Lord Lieutenant Niebuhr what an advantage the prospect from certain high mountains can give to the geographic description of a land through which one is prevented from travelling completely. One discovers from there other distant peaks of mountains, and, to the practiced eye, visual measurement is sufficient to judge the approximate distance between two mountains. At the very least one can tell the respective location of the mountains if one knows simply when it is midday. If one is lucky enough [to see] from the mountain where one takes the prospect two points that lie not too far from one another

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nor too close to the prospect point, then one can use these to form the side of a triangle and measure the distance of both mountains from each other. What would it bring to light for us concerning the geography of Palestine, if in this manner one used (or could use) the peak of Lebanon, from which the Jordan flows and then on the east [sic] side of the Jordan Jericho, lying opposite Nebo? According to Deuteronomy 34:1–3 from the latter position one could see the peak of Lebanon, hitherto completely unknown to us; the land of Gilead, the little-visited meridian (southern) part of the tribe of Judah bordering Idumea . . . and indicated on maps almost only according to conjecture; and the southern point of the Dead Sea by Zoar. . . . I offer this only as an example . . . I want only to suggest that the Lord Lieutenant take advantage of this on any Arabian mountaintops that he should climb, and in doing so indicate for us the names of other mountains that he sees as they are commonly called in the local language. I would consider it most excellent to receive a geographical report of Mount Sinai, should his journey take him there. From Deuteronomy 33:2 and Habakkuk 3:3 it seems somewhat probable to me that from Sinai one could see the two famous mountains of ancient geography, Seir and Pharan, well enough that it might be observable how the clouds gather around these two mountains and then move to Sinai. If this were possible, it would do much to correct ancient geography. For these two mountains also, as with nearly everything on the eastern side of Palestine, are placed on maps more arbitrarily than following historical reports, and measurement is almost inconceivable. For on Mount Sinai live monks whose custom is to dole out biblical names randomly. One must remember that the names they give the mountain peaks, are not authentic, and one must learn either from them or from others what these mountain peaks are called in the common language of the tribes.13

This is why it would have been pointless for Niebuhr to climb to the top of the mountain leaving the others behind. He needed his bedouin guides to point out the names of the peaks and valleys visible from the top of Sinai. But the bedouins would go no farther. Worse, it was not even clear that they were on the mountain where Moses had received the law. The monks believed the mountain was Sinai, but there was no material evidence to support it. And which was the cor-

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rect peak? The mountain was actually a complex or a range of several mountains, which the bedouins called Gebel Musa (Mount Moses). Michaelis, Europe’s foremost orientalist at the time, was in desperate need of an atlas of the Holy Land, as can be seen in his question quoted earlier. He had no conception of the distance from Sinai to Seir and Paran in Edom (or did he mean the Wadi Feiran, near the Rock of Inscriptions?), some 250 kilometers away. The failure at Sinai was a frustrating beginning to an expedition already delayed a year, fraught with illness and unmet objectives. By the time Niebuhr and von Haven returned to Suez, Bauernfeind had recovered. Eager to get on with their work, they departed for Jiddah without delay. Not until they were at sail on the Red Sea did Niebuhr realize that he had forgotten to record the tides at Suez. The trip to Jiddah went smoothly, the travelers taking periodic depth soundings and bottom samples on the way. From Jiddah they sailed to Loheia, and then their work began in earnest. They established a base at Beit el Fakih and fanned out alone or in pairs attending to their own work. Forskål took an extended excursion into the coffee mountains, commenting on agriculture and collecting and pressing specimens of numerous wild plants, many now extinct or endangered.14 He learned the highland dialect and soon emerged as the most talented linguist of the group and served as its spokesman.15 Von Haven examined the manuscripts in the possession of notables in the region. Niebuhr explored the villages of the arid Tehama coastal plain—many of them showing signs of former greatness now in decline—until the heat drove him into the hills. They all drank a lot of coffee. Then disaster struck. As the monsoons approached in the spring of 1763, the party regrouped and traveled slowly south to Mocca. The heat of the Tehama was insufferable. By the time the travelers reached Mocca in May, all were ill. Niebuhr contracted dysentery. Von Haven caught a tropical fever and began sleeping out of doors for relief from the heat. When the heat wave broke on May 9, von Haven fell into a chill and had to be carried inside. By morning his pulse was virtually gone. Cramer had to bleed him to revive him, and although von Haven began to recover, he drew up a will in the event the worst happened. In the evening he began babbling deliriously in Arabic,

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French, Italian, German, and Danish. An hour later von Haven was dead.16 Niebuhr believed von Haven’s illness was heat stroke. More likely, it was malaria contracted from mosquitoes that proliferated during the first of Yemen’s two rainy seasons that occur annually in April–May and again in July–September. It was probably malaria that struck them again a few weeks later as they ascended from the Tehama through the temperate Jibal to the high plateau on their way to Sana’a, although Niebuhr never seems to have made the connection between the rains and disease. Niebuhr himself contracted a fever on July 4, becoming violently ill and dehydrated. Forskål also became feverish and had to be lashed to a camel to make it to the next village. The botanist died on July 11 in Ierim. There was little choice but to press on to the capital, and the party, harried and aggrieved, passed through Damar, home to a famous Muslim academy of the Zeidi sect, which then had five hundred students, without inquiry. By the time they reached Sana’a, Niebuhr, Cramer, Bauernfeind, and Berggren were little interested in research.

Black Sea Constantinople

N

Caspian Sea

Smyrna Aleppo

Mosul

Mediterranean Sea Alexandria

Bagdad

Jerusalem Cairo

Basra

Persepolis

Muscat Jiddah

Surat Arabian Sea

Loheia Sana'a Mocca

Route of the Niebuhr expedition, 1761–1767

Bombay

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At the end of July with two members of the party dead, the survivors opted to run for Mocca and travel to Bombay to ensure that their notes and collections made it back to Europe. They descended the Jibal in early August, during the height of the second monsoon season. On August 23, 1763, they boarded an English ship bound for India—but it was too late. All four contracted malaria as they crossed the Tehama. At sea they were engulfed by symptoms that were now all too familiar—fever, nausea, vomiting. Bauernfeind and Berggren both succumbed before they reached Bombay and were buried at sea. Cramer and Niebuhr were badly ill for months, and despite treatment by an English physician in Bombay, another disease contracted in India killed Cramer in February. Now only Niebuhr remained. Desperate to make it home, he sailed with an English merchant to Surat, but even that short passage nearly killed him. For the rest of the year he lived quietly among the merchant communities there and nursed himself back to health. Finally, in 1765 he reemerged, a new man; while he had not gone native, he now dressed in loose clothing appropriate for the heat and was determined to complete the expedition. Alone, he boarded a British East India Company ship bound for Muscat and the Persian Gulf and began the long overland journey home. In January 1765 Niebuhr was in Muscat. In February he disembarked at Abuscher where silk from Jezd, Kashan, and Ghilan, rugs from Isfahan, wool and mohair from Kerman, rhubarb from Uzbeck, and other herbs from Persia, plus cotton, fruit, rosewater, and much wine from Shiraz all flowed through the hands of a single English merchant named Jervis. Despite Niebuhr’s hurry to return home, the opportunity to see the ruins of Persepolis—just two days beyond Shiraz—was too much to resist. He joined a caravan of Sunnis, Shiites, Armenian refugees trying to return to Persia after unrest, Georgians, a Catholic, and some Jews. A single Arab served as his assistant and translator. What should have been a six-day trip instead required eighteen days became of the Muslims fasting for Ramadan, the Catholic and Orthodox Christians fasting for Lent, and the Jews fasting for a lack of kosher meat, but he arrived in Shiraz safely and apparently healthy. There he paid particular attention to geography, fortifications, artillery, local feuds, and the conquests of Karim Kahn, who was then consolidating his rule over Persia. Niebuhr commented on viticulture and the many

Niebuhr’s sketches from Persepolis, 1760s. (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen.)

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Photographs of the same panels, excavated in the 1930s. A: Persian Emperor Ardashir I receives diadem of sovereignty from god Hormizd. B: Captured Roman Emperor Valerian begs for clementia from Shapur I of Persia. (Both courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.) 41

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varieties of grapes, dried to raisins by Persians and vinted to wine by Armenians.17 In March he reached Persepolis.18 He knew that the city dated from pre-Hellenistic Persia and that it had been destroyed by Alexander the Great in 331–330 b.c. He did not know that it had been the royal city of the Persians, begun by Darius I in 518 b.c. and completed a century later by Xerxes. What had not been carried off as building material centuries earlier lay buried. He did some excavating of the north wall of the Apadana (he called it the Colonnade and could not determine whether it was a palace or a temple) to reveal the lower row of a frieze of figures bearing tribute. Then he moved on to Naqshi-Rustam, which he knew was a grave site, although he did not know that just behind the stone lay Darius and Xerxes themselves. At Naqsh-i-Rustam both Niebuhr and his servant became ill. Within days the servant died. Taking the event as an omen, Niebuhr hustled back to Shiraz. He returned to the Gulf in the summer, spent the fall at Basra, and in the winter of 1766 began traveling up the Euphrates through multicultural Mesopotamia, visiting Baghdad, Nineveh, and Aleppo. By now he had perfected his travel arrangements. My entire kitchen was packed in a single bag. It consisted of two pots with lids one set inside the other, a couple of bowls and plates and a coffee pot, all of pewtered copper. . . . For salt, pepper and spices I had a wooden case with separate compartments that could be screwed into each other. . . . Tables and chairs do not exist here. My table cloth was a round piece of leather with iron rings around the edge, through which one pulls a line and hangs on the saddle by means of a hook. I had a half dozen coffee cups, but only the upper part [no saucers] all in a wooden case covered with leather that one can toss around without having to worry about broken cups. For yellow wax candles I had a similar case that fit in a leather bag. On the underside of the lid was a tube for holding the candle, so one doesn’t need a separate sconce. My lampshade was of canvas (even the same shape as the small paper lanterns that boys in Europe make) with a tin base above and below. When collapsed it doesn’t take much space in the travel bag. . . . My food supply consisted chiefly of rice and butter. The latter is melted and was stored in a leather crock. In addition I had Zwieback [biscuits like melba toast] and also flour for baking fresh bread on the road, dried fruit, sun-dried meat, coffee, and so forth. Before departing from a city one commonly

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provisions oneself with thick milk. This is poured in a bag, and as the water leeches out more and more milk is congealed until one has as much cheese as he needs for his purposes. If one later mixes it with water again he has a pleasant thirst-quenching drink; and eaten with Zwieback it makes a good bowl of food for the hungry. In general on such a trip one must not eat richly lest he become very nauseous. My Persian pipe I had in a leather sack hung on the front of the saddle. . . . My bed consisted of a mattress, and thin blanket and a pillow. The orientals always sleep in their clothes. Nevertheless they are no less clean than Europeans who change their clothes often, since they wash and bathe more often. A rug is a necessary item on such trips. For wherever one camps, be it in a house or in the open field, one spreads it out and has a clean place to sit. My clothes, books and so forth I had in two travel bags and the instruments in their own boxes. For all this baggage, for myself and my servant, I rented only three horses.19

Frederick V of Denmark had counted on funding an expedition lasting a year and a half or at most two years. But even he did not survive the expedition, being succeeded by Christian VII in 1766. Carsten Niebuhr returned to Copenhagen in November 1767, concluding a journey of seven years. As noted earlier, the purpose of the Niebuhr expedition was to bring back specific information about oriental languages in order to better understand the textual and editorial history of the Old Testament. Michaelis’s premise was that the Pentateuch was written not in autograph by Moses but instead was spliced together from early oral and written traditions by later editors. One of the clues to the history of the text was the introduction of new words to the Hebrew language. Names pertaining to natural history, for instance, animals, plants, and minerals, were particularly revealing because their introduction could be localized and dated relatively easily. Before they encountered the cedars of Mount Lebanon, for example, the Hebrews could not have had a name for them. The cedars of Lebanon were not known to the Hebrews in Egypt, so any text naming the tree, or more significantly using it as a metaphor for stability and longevity, must necessarily have been composed after the Hebrews entered the promised land. Moreover, most new words such as “cedar” were loan words from neighboring nations.

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It was known that the oriental languages—Arabic, Syriac, Phoenician, Canaanite, and Aramaic—were related to each other. It was Michaelis’s sometime student and then colleague, A. L. Schlözer, who in the 1770s first described the Near Eastern nations as “Semitic” and another Michaelis student, J. G. Eichhorn, who extended the “Semitic” designation to that set of Near Eastern languages.20 Michaelis had a good reading knowledge of the western oriental languages, of which Hebrew was one, but the eastern dialects were less well known. Michaelis’s star student von Haven was dispatched for the purpose of learning eastern Arabic in Yemen, where the language had been preserved relatively free from outside influence since antiquity. The botanist Forskål was to assist von Haven in compiling a glossary of names of plants, animals, and minerals. In addition to that linguistic assistance, Forskål had the mandate of collecting and classifying plants as part of his mentor Carl Linnaeus’s larger project. Niebuhr was also an assistant to von Haven in that he was charged with collecting geographic information that would enable Michaelis to plot the course of the Exodus and to understand precisely what territory the Hebrews occupied once they settled in Palestine. Granted the expedition was specifically not hierarchical in its command structure. Von Haven was not the captain, with Forskål and Niebuhr as his lieutenants. But the purpose of the mission was primarily—or at least as it was initially conceived—to support biblical scholarship. Following the debacle in Yemen, it became simply a mission of survival, and after Niebuhr felt confident of his recovery from malaria, he was able to follow his own agenda in Persia and Mesopotamia. Only then did it become the Niebuhr expedition. One reviewer of Niebuhr’s first published account of the expedition commented that most of Michaelis’s original one hundred questions remained unanswered. Michaelis himself found that much of what had been learned was truly useful, but the reviewer was correct in pointing out that the mission had not gone as planned. Mosaic Law and European Reform The Old Testament was central to European scholarship, science, and society in the eighteenth century. As the inspired word of God, it was the source of revealed religion, the basis of spiritual life, and the foundation

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of European morality. At the same time, its interpretation and claim to authority were highly contested, and the Old Testament presented the scholar with many other insights beyond the spiritual. As a document or collection of documents even older than the Homeric epics, it was a window into the darkest human past and a chronicle of early social development. As a code of law, it was authoritative in Europe’s Jewish communities, but, because of its canonicity in Christian writings, it carried considerable legal weight for Christians as well. European kings and princes commonly looked to King David as the model of rulership, even if they did not consider themselves latter-day Davids at the head of a theocracy. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) established in law that the sovereign prince of a region determined which religious traditions would be promoted and tolerated in that region. This gave the prince substantial authority in religious matters, even if it did not necessarily make him or her the head of the church as in England. Finally, Old Testament law was understood as being normative. As law codes were revised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, frequently parts or even all of the law of Moses were incorporated into local legal systems, and most regions of Europe at least rendered the Ten Commandments as a basic part of the regional law. If Moses had received the tablets containing the Decalogue directly from the hand of God, that indicated that the Decalogue was universally applicable. God was the creator of all things. The Decalogue was his gift to his creatures, instructing them on the basics of their relationships with each other. It also established the relationship between God and His creatures. The Hebrews, as God’s chosen people, had been the immediate recipients of the law, but being divine, the law was universally applicable. In the sixteenth century Jean Bodin had written that “if justice be the end of the law, the law is the work of the prince, and the prince is the lively image of almighty God, it must needs follow that the law of the prince should be framed unto the model of the law of God.”21 In addition to serving as the core of national law codes, the Old Testament was also employed to justify claims to unlimited and absolute monarchy. Michaelis held that absolutist claims were based on a misreading of the Old Testament and a misunderstanding of the law of Moses generally. In six volumes entitled Mosaic Law published from 1770 to 1775, Johann David Michaelis argued that Old Testament law was not an

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appropriate model for European legislators. Law, he argued, was neither natural nor divine nor universal. No law was applicable to all times and places, not even the law of God Himself. Law was particular. It was the indigenous invention of each separate nation. Montesquieu had shown that each nation had its own spirit to which its law must conform. Michaelis supported that thesis through an inquiry into the spirit of Mosaic law, which was necessarily different from European law. Where Montesquieu had written comparative law at a conjectural level, using examples from specific positive national laws to illustrate his argument, Michaelis offered a rigorous analysis of one particular national law far removed in time and place from modern Europe.22 The circumstances of the Israelites—their geography, fertility, topography, relations with neighboring nations, mode of life (agricultural, not nomadic or commercial), the origin of the state, ideas of honor and shame, expectations regarding punishment, other customs, typical forms of misbehavior, typical diseases, and existing customary law—all had to be considered by Moses as he reformed and promulgated the law. It was a Swedish jurist who suggested to Michaelis how his biblical scholarship might address social reform in contemporary Europe. Early in the Seven Years’ War, Olaf Rabenius of the University of Uppsala traveled to Göttingen while Michaelis’s town was under French occupation, just before Michaelis organized the Niebuhr expedition. Rabenius pointed out to Michaelis the inappropriate way the Old Testament was used as a legal authority in Europe. Gustavus I had taken the first measures to bring Swedish customary law into conformity with biblical principles in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, Mosaic law was further established in Sweden when Charles XI legislated against perjury, blasphemy, execration, homicide, adultery, incest, usury, false testimony, and the like—all on the authority of the Old Testament.23 That code remained in effect until 1734, and the code of 1743 still referred to Dei Sveciaeque leges.24 Sweden was a constitutional monarchy in the mid-eighteenth century. Defeated in the Great Northern War in 1720, the formerly absolutist crown ceded much of its sovereign authority to the estates. For fifty years the story of Swedish politics was the battle for control of the parliamentary agenda between nobility and commons, referred to as the parties of the Hats and the Caps, respectively. When Michaelis began putting the volumes

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on Mosaic law together for publication in the late 1760s, the Swedish Riksdag was increasing in power and was debating ways it might reform the Swedish constitution, laws, and economy. Ever with his eyes to the north, Michaelis dedicated the work to his now-aged mentor and exhorted the Swedes to search their own indigenous heritage as the source of constitutional authority. Before Michaelis could finish the work, however, the king staged a coup d’état of his own government, suppressed the Riksdag, and set himself up as an absolute (if Enlightened) monarch in 1772. It was specifically against biblical justifications of absolute monarchy that Michaelis directed the opening volumes of Mosaic Law. In reality, the kings of Israel had not had such unlimited powers as they seemed to have in 1 Samuel 8. In fact, Joshua probably wielded more actual power, first as general and then as judge, than did any king. Moses never required a king in the first place, but only permitted one. Deuteronomy 17:14–20 provided that the king be elected by the nation, and as such the king was a creature of the nation (ein Geschöpf des Volks).25 Saul, however, did not come to power through popular election as mandated by Moses but was chosen by God and revealed to Samuel (1 Sam. 9:15–17). Neither in theory nor in practice was Saul an absolute monarch. The Israelite king was bound by a written constitution collected in a book (long since lost) that spelled out the rights and duties of both king and subject (1 Sam. 10:25). Once in power Saul was little more than a farmer in command of an army. At 1 Samuel 11:5 he was shown still working a plow. David lacked the power to enter the gates of a fortified city in pursuit of a rebel. Instead of sacking the city that harbored the rebel, the army withdrew upon seeing the rebel’s severed head (2 Sam. 20:20–22). Centuries later, from Hezekiah onward, Michaelis said that the Israelite kings were further limited by a “privy council” of advisers.26 Hebrew kingship had a history, and so did Hebrew law. As the needs and circumstances of the nation changed, like any other nation its law was altered and transformed accordingly. Here was a simple principle but one with deep theological implications. Michaelis wanted to show that even if the law of Moses had been received under divine inspiration, it remained the positive law of a specific nation in a specific cultural and geographic setting. Mosaic law was not natural law. Neither was it timeless, eternal, or universally applicable. Michaelis acknowledged Moses as

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“a lawgiver sent from Divinity itself ” but denied that Moses created an eternal and unchangeable law.27 Law was never timeless, eternal, or universal. Rather, law was always specific to a nation and its historical context. Laws appropriate to the second millennium b.c. Hebrews were not suitable models for eighteenth-century Europe because laws changed over time. Even the Old Testament did not present Mosaic law as immutable: Moses decreed that thieves should repay double what they had stolen; by Solomon’s era the penalty was sevenfold (Exod. 21:37; Prov. 6:31). Ezekiel modified the laws of Moses on the naturalization of foreigners and gave priests stricter rules of conduct than Moses had (Ezek. 47:22; 44:21–22). Exceptions were made in some cases, mercy was shown where justice mandated a more severe penalty, and certain laws fell into disuse entirely. A few of Moses’s laws were never put into effect, such as the law mandating that in every seventh year all land should lay fallow. Prima facie, that practice would have been a recipe for famine. Pietist theologians interpreted the sabbatical year as evidence not only of Moses’s divine inspiration but also of the nearness of the Mosaic Hebrews to God generally: Had the nation not known divinely that every sixth year would produce a bumper crop, they reasoned, the law would never have been accepted. On the contrary, Michaelis could find no trace of the law being put into effect before the first destruction of Jerusalem (in 586 b.c.). “Moses promulgated [the law] without a view of its consequences, and the inconsistency of the law is to me the clearest evidence that he had no divine inspiration.”28 Even if the Mosaic laws originated from God, they were not the best of all possible laws, and their specific historical purpose was the reason they were not binding on Christians. Even St. Paul had said as much, said Michaelis.29 Moses had to take into account the existing legal structure; he could not just invent new laws midway through history. Legislation was a subset of a nation’s constitution, political practice, and manners or customs (Staats-Klugheit and Sittenlehre). Culture, that is, was bigger than the lawgiver. “Even if God himself were to give the civil law, the highest power on earth charged with its administration would receive the right from God to depart from these laws in extraordinary cases, to dispense [with the punishment], and to show mercy.”30 The same principle, that culture was greater than law, held true of legislation no matter who the lawgiver was. In any case, the

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legislator must “seek to promote the greatest happiness” for the nation. “Prudence [Klugheit] in law-giving is manifestly a part of politics, and in fact one of the most important and most difficult. Can anyone wonder, if the civil laws given by God . . . have in time fallen into disuse, or, when they remained in effect, in certain cases could be departed from?”31 One must be careful here. To deny divine inspiration was not to deny God or Christianity or Lutheranism, but only to modify one’s stance with regard to interpretation of the text and its claim to authority. Michaelis’s position was not one of irreligion, atheism, or of the Radical Enlightenment. His was an ambiguous position, but it remained far to the right of philosophes like Helvetius, d’Holbach, or La Mettrie. Reforming, liberal, but in no way seeking to upset the social order, Michaelis gently urged legal and constitutional reforms through rigorous scholarship and restrained language. He politely rejected the divine legation of Moses by pointing out the human constraints within which Moses acted. Nor was that rejection of divine inspiration categorical. Repeatedly, he granted the opposite premise, that the Word was indeed inspired, but then he pointed out how Inspiration limited itself to existing human structures. For example, even if Moses’s law was divine in origin or inspiration, still it was an amalgam of two preexisting human legal sources. One was an ancient customary law (jus consuetudinarium). This was Hebrew nomadic law or custom from the patriarchal age of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Much insight into this law could be gained by studying neighboring Arabs both in antiquity and in the present. The customary law was not to be scorned because it revealed “traces of a very prudent policy” and of long-established legislative wisdom tested by experience. Whether or not divinely instructed, Moses confirmed this ancient customary law, strengthening it in some aspects, weakening it in others, and it formed the basis of his new legal code.32 The other ancient legal source was Egyptian agrarian law. Following the Exodus, agriculture became the foundation of the Hebrew state, distinguishing it from its neighbors in the hills and deserts.33 Moses’s genius as a lawgiver lay in his integration of these two disparate codes, the Hebrew nomadic and the Egyptian agrarian codes. To accomplish that integration, Moses established two basic principles: monotheism and separation from other nations. Monotheism,

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the recognition of a single invisible, all-powerful God, was not only an anomaly in the ancient Near East but obnoxious. Relative to their polytheistic neighbors, the Israelites were intolerant and exclusive beyond the typical folk identity of Us versus Them. This invited hostility from neighboring nations and sorely tempted the Israelites to succumb to peer pressure and become like everyone else.34 Consequently, the second basic principle of Mosaic law established the cultural and political separation of Israel from other nations.35 Regarding certain nations, specifically the hill-dwellers who were most culturally similar to the Hebrews—the Ammonites, Moabites, and Canaanites—that separation was unequivocal. Genocide was declared against the Canaanites (Exod. 23:31–33, 34:12–113; Num. 33:51–56; Deut. 7:1–5, 20:16–18). Alliances were permitted with other nations, notably, the Edomites in the south (“they are your brothers”) and Egypt (“where you sojourned”) (Deut. 23:4–9).36 The Mosaic law was not everything Moses had hoped to achieve, but it was the best law the Hebrews could follow given their stage of development. In a sense the status of the Hebrews on the four-stage scheme of production (hunter-gatherer, nomadic, agricultural, commercial) was one of the easier aspects of Hebrew society to change. Moses successfully elevated the nation from nomadic to agricultural. Working the fields without private ownership of the land for four centuries in Egypt had accustomed the Hebrews to an agricultural economy. Moses cultivated that condition, privatizing land, legislating against the alienation of real estate, and reinforcing land ownership with the sabbatical and jubilee years. He relegated most of the remaining shepherds to the region east of the Jordan. More difficult to change was the customary law. Moses managed to minimize socially destructive behaviors like divorce, polygamy, and the blood feud, even if he could not expunge them. But—and here again Michaelis echoed Montesquieu—Moses was wise enough to recognize that he could not restructure the whole of Hebrew manners through law. The blood feud, in which the duty of avenging murder fell to the deceased’s next of kin, was deeply embedded in Near Eastern culture. Michaelis illuminated the ancient Hebrew custom by comparing it to modern Arabia and by comparing attempts to reform the practice in the Old Testament from Moses to David and Jonathan to the Koran. He concluded that both the modern Arabian practice of feud and the

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European duel were remnants of the state of nature; it was virtually impossible to outlaw either practice because both involved a point d’honneur. “The one who fears death more than the loss of honor will not duel in any case. But the one who prizes honor higher than life will not be deterred by Louis XIV’s law.”37 In two volumes in 1774 and 1775, Michaelis worked his way through the Decalogue, comparing the Mosaic penal law with modern legal practice at every step in an effort to show that ancient Israelite law was unsuitable for modern Europe. The Israelite theocracy, the relationship between God and His chosen people, was no basis for defining crime and meting out punishment in modern Europe. Nevertheless, the principles of Mosaic justice were a useful teaching device. Liberal, secular, and humanist, Michaelis argued on the basis of Mosaic jurisprudence that punishment was not an end in itself, as if it were the expression of God’s hatred of sin founded in His holiness and an inevitable consequence of moral evil. Nor could punishment be the basis of human law. Punishment was not justice. Punishment as an end in itself would only increase the amount of evil in the world.38 The purpose of punishment was deterrence—to improve the conduct of others through fear by making an example of the perpetrator. Physical punishment should equal the crime committed. Pecuniary damages, such as toll evasion, should be tenfold the expected gain, so that the perpetrator played a game of inverse lottery. Michaelis considered death an inappropriate penalty for nonphysical offenses such as theft and constituted merely a “senseless multiplication of evil.”39 In Exodus 21:37 and 22:3 Moses’s punishment for theft was restitution of twice the amount stolen or, if the thief did not have that much, to be sold into slavery. Enslavement was a much more suitable punishment because potential thieves would fear that misery more than the European law of summary death. To the thief, death was so foreign to the crime that it was incomprehensible and hence no deterrent. To the judge, death often seemed so excessively harsh a sentence that it was frequently not executed, mercy being shown instead. A monetary fine, backed up by hard labor, was more appropriate in a commercial society such as modern Europe. The craftsman-turnedpotential-thief, for example, could comprehend and fear temporary slavery until he had worked to repay the stolen object three- or fourfold. On the contrary, the English law of exiling thieves to America and

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indenturing them as slaves (Leibeigenschaft) for seven years if they could not pay the transportation left too much hope for potential thieves: they might eventually prosper in America. The better punishment would be to indenture them for seven years in England.40 Many of Michaelis’s recommendations for penal reform echoed the famous treatise that had been published only a few years earlier by Cesare Beccaria, but there is no need to trace Michaelis’s ideas to Beccaria specifically. More than ten years before Beccaria published On Crimes and Punishments (1764), Samuel Johnson wrote that “to equate robbery with murder is to reduce murder to robbery,” commenting that “the frequency of capital punishment rarely hinders the commission of a crime.”41 Michaelis himself cited the deterrence argument of his university prorector, the physician and naturalist Johann Andreas Segner. Reform was being discussed all across Europe, and much of the reason Beccaria’s little volume was so well received is that it synthesized many of the arguments that his readers were already using. Michaelis’s use of the law of Moses as a platform for constitutional and penal reform was unique, but in calling for legal reform in general his voice was simply one among many. It is in no way intuitive that a German orientalist and Old Testament scholar should be writing a thinly veiled treatise on Scandinavian penal reform in six volumes. In the age of the Four Faculties (law, medicine, theology, and philosophy), before the disciplines were compartmentalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a scholar could easily follow his interests from biblical scholarship to law or from medicine to macroeconomics or again from medicine to the philosophy of mind. Society was taken to be a whole, and every part was connected to the whole. Scholarship that we would call profoundly interdisciplinary was merely an expression of a cultural holism that existed before 1800. Legal Particularism in the Holy Roman Empire Michaelis was but one voice in a chorus that called for reform in the 1770s. It required no stretch of his imagination to see many practical uses of Old Testament scholarship in modern Europe, from hermeneutics to botany to law. His volumes on the law of Moses were full of bright ideas, but how did one translate those ideas into practice? More

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to the point, how did one implement legal reform in Germany? It was one thing to speak of the laws of Sweden, France, or England, all of which were territorial states circumscribed by defined boundaries in which sovereign authority was centralized in a king or parliament located in a specific capital city. Germany was a different matter: it was strewn with autonomous states, some no larger than a city, each of which existed under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire but exercised territorial sovereignty (Landeshoheit) in its own right. Each sovereign state passed its own legislation, administered its own justice, raised its own military, pursued its own foreign policy, and imposed and collected its own taxes according to local tradition and constitution. Within these general parameters existed as many variations as sovereign principalities, which were almost too many to count.42 In some states (as in Prussia) the prince’s authority was nearly absolute, while in others (as in Hanover), the prince could rule only in consultation with a representative parliament. In Hamburg there was no prince at all but instead a city council. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the Holy Roman Empire seems byzantine and obscure, but to Michaelis and his contemporaries it was the world in which they lived and walked from day to day and was to them no more confusing than we find in any modern federal system.43 It was a messy system that governed the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire, a mess that was compounded by a millennium of evolving customary practice, edicts, and jurisprudence. It was easier, and in many ways more satisfying, to theorize about the nature of sovereignty, the attributes of the state, or the universal duties that bound subject and state than it was to investigate the particulars of law and practice that defied all systematization. The successors of Pufendorf and Thomasius, for example, J. G. Heineccius and Heinrich and Samuel Coccejus, continued to write and teach natural law in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. At this time, a more practically oriented jurist, Johann Jakob Moser, undertook—and actually completed—a massive project: the collection and annotation of the actual laws and jurisprudence of the Holy Roman Empire and its many parts. Johann Jakob Moser (1701–1785) was not a legal theorist. His fame, rather, lay in his work as a compiler of positive law. In the 1730s and 1740s he collected, cross-referenced, and published in some fifty

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volumes a reference work entitled Teutsches Staats-Recht. “German public law” regulated relations between the empire and the individual states of which the Holy Roman Empire was composed and between those independent states multilaterally. Intended to be exhaustive, the Teusches Staats-Recht became the starting point for all legal research. Moser designed the set to be useful—brauchbar was his term—and he hoped it would become essential to any law library in the Holy Roman Empire. The project was a money-making venture as much as it was scholarship, and after the first few volumes he stopped contracting with a publisher and instead published and sold it himself. He earned enough as an independent scholar in the 1740s that he was able to support a growing family for nearly ten years on his publishing activity alone.44 The Teusches Staats-Recht was a compilation of passages of existing jurisprudence that Moser took to be authoritative. Compiling the work was akin to building a house from scattered stones, Moser said. He filled in gaps, transitions, and prefaces with his own writing and made no effort to be systematic. The Teutsches Staats-Recht was merely a storehouse of information. It contained no theoretical discussions on either the location of sovereignty or the definition of the state, on whether a law was natural or divine, or on what ultimate authority it depended. To Moser these questions were merely academic. Indeed, he found natural law to be totally irrelevant to what was significant about law, politics, and the relations between individuals, estates, and rulers. Law was not derived from nature. Law was simply a set of social arrangements cobbled together on a more or less ad hoc basis. Law had nothing to do with nature and little to do with God. Mack Walker, one of Moser’s biographers, explained Moser’s approach this way: “Law was cumulative artifact, a collection of imperfect, incomplete, piecemeal, sometimes arbitrary arrangements and procedures reached by men to get out of difficulties they were prone to get themselves into, to regulate affairs of theirs that God was really not seriously interested in—nor were reason or logic either.”45 And yet Moser was anything but apathetic toward spiritual things. A committed Pietist, Moser had personally experienced God’s grace and forgiveness and had been spiritually born again.46 Midstream in his career he resigned a chair on the Law Faculty at Frankfurt an der Oder and retreated to a Herrenhüter community at Ebersdorf in Saxony

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where he lived for ten years, and it was among religious separatists that he compiled most of the Teutsches Staats-Recht. Like Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke, early Pietists in whose tradition he saw himself, Moser was deeply engaged in worldly matters through praxis pietatis (the practice of piety) in order to bring about the Kingdom of God. Another of Moser’s biographers, Reinhard Rürup, arguing that Moser’s effort to transform the world stemmed from his religiosity, subtitled his life “Pietismus und Reform.”47 What Spener and Francke had done in reforming theology—to make it practical and relevant to the pious Christian—Moser did for public law and the state (or states that he worked for).48 He brought the Spener-Francke reform of schools and churches to his own field of territorial politics, public law, and the education of jurists. Where Pietist theologians and pastors educated children and laymen, Moser educated rulers, counselors, and citizens. The key to social and legal reform, Moser believed, was the education of individuals. His plan was to improve jurists themselves. A good “Politik” was more important than a good constitution because good advisers could accomplish more good even with a system of bad laws than an ill-willed council could with good laws. All reform for Moser was praxis; it was never solely theoretical, institutional, or formal. God, religion, and personal piety were at the center of his being, just as law was at the center of his career, and in his mind personal spirituality and political prudence were closely linked. “How happy would be the land whose regent himself, in addition to his advisors, servants, and subjects, were all true Christians!” he wrote in 1774. “That would be a kind of Paradise in this world.”49 Spirituality and prudence were linked in Moser’s mind on a personal, but not a systematic, level. Spiritual regeneration was the work of God. Law, on the other hand, was the work of man. There was nothing universal, natural, or supernatural about it. Moser’s interest, then, was political practice, not political theory. Rürup claimed that Moser had a completely unspeculative mind.50 Moser took no part in the philosophical debates of his age, had no interest in deductive systems, and apparently never read the most important German philosopher of his age (also a lawyer), Christian Wolff.51 Moser was more concerned with “is” than with “ought,” and hence with the particularity of specific laws and states rather than with theory.52

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Just as Michaelis’s Mosaic Law was only one of many calls for legal reform in the eighteenth century, Moser was not unique in his emphasis on practical reform in law. Praxis was coming to be emphasized everywhere in the second half of the eighteenth century, and at Göttingen, Halle, Würzburg, Bamberg, and Vienna, curricula in the faculties of law were being restructured to reflect that interest. Moser was simply among the first of many to work toward practical reform, although he was probably the most adamant in rejecting natural law as a relevant part of the law curriculum. In 1732 he piloted the first course in Germany on the actual practice of European public law and diplomacy.53 In 1736 the university at Frankfurt an der Oder hired him to bring his course and expertise to Frederick I’s Prussia. In his inaugural address at Frankfurt, one of the leading institutions for the study of natural law, which boasted both Samuel von Coccejus and Heineccius on the faculty in 1730s, Moser called for law education to dispense with theory and become “nützlich und brauchbar” (useful and practical). Students should be educated as “nützliche Gelehrte” (useful scholars) not “nur bloße Gelehrte” ( just scholars). They should study the tangibles of regional economics in particular: “Cameral, Economic-, Business-, Manufacturing-, and Policy-Matters.” Moreover it was incumbent upon the university to guarantee that students made it through the program in addition to learning content. Moser challenged the faculty to attend to students’ “minds, health, studies, morals and finances” in addition to their academic progress.54 Moser’s address set the tone for a confrontational relationship with his more theoretically oriented colleagues in Prussia, and he remained at Frankfurt an der Oder only three years. However, his published address caught the attention of G. A. Münchhausen, King George II of England’s principal administrator in Hanover. Münchhausen had just opened the doors of a new university at Göttingen that would become Europe’s leading institution of administrative practice by the end of the eighteenth century. It was Moser who organized the Law Faculty at Göttingen in the 1740s. In the 1740s Münchhausen hired two young jurists in their mid-twenties, Johann Stephan Pütter and Gottfried Achenwall, who had been sharing houses and taking courses together at Jena and Halle. Most recently, they had taught law together at Marburg as Privatdozenten, and Münchhausen brought them up to Göttingen as nontenured extraordinary faculty members a few months

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apart. Here, too, they rented a house together kitty-corner from the library and shared the large room downstairs for their lectures. Shortly after arriving, Pütter sent Münchhausen a proposal for his teaching program at the university, and Münchhausen blind-copied it to Moser for his review. Moser responded with a proposal for a political academy at Göttingen in which Pütter would specialize in German law, teaching courses on public policy, imperial law, judicial procedure, and contemporary politics at the major German courts. Achenwall would specialize in the rest of Europe, offering courses on comparative constitutions, political history, and jus gentium (international relations) based on actual practice (i.e., not universal abstract principles). Moser proposed that a third faculty member be hired to teach chancellery practice. That final suggestion was rejected, but Achenwall’s and Pütter’s early teaching careers followed Moser’s recommendations very closely.55 Moser continued to work on the draft proposal for a political academy that he sent Münchhausen until he had a full-scale curriculum. He founded and administered an academy of practical administration himself. By 1749 he found a patron in the landgrave of Hesse-Hanau, who donated a building in the capital city (Hanau) for the academy. Moser hired faculty to teach the topics he had organized for Pütter and Achenwall (German and European law and policy), chancellery practice, which Münchhausen had not followed, and he added two other sections on military affairs and cameral or economic administration. In the 1740s Moser was becoming increasingly aware of the importance of economic development, and these concerns began to rival his interest in German public law. He billed the Hanau Academy itself as a kind of academic mercantilism that would enrich his patron the landgrave. The Academy would attract young noblemen as students, and they would bring their wealth to Hanau for a few years. The Academy would also cultivate local talent and would give the landgrave the pick of the crop for employment as ministers in his own government. Münchhausen used the same logic at Göttingen with respect to the electorate of Hanover. The economic benefit to Hanover of making his university the one place in all of Europe where the nobility would receive a useful republican education was one of the chief factors motivating Münchhausen to emphasize political prudence in the Göttingen curriculum. Münchhausen even tried to lure Moser and his academy to

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Göttingen. Although Moser demurred, Moser kept his communication channel with the Göttingen Law Faculty open. In 1755 he sent his daughter, Luise, to become the wife of Gottfried Achenwall. In the 1750s, Moser finally returned home to Stuttgart, having enjoyed a career that criss-crossed the Holy Roman Empire from Stuttgart to Vienna to Frankfurt an der Oder to Hanover via correspondence as a consultant on several levels. (Moser was legal counsel to the Hanoverian delegation at an imperial election in 1745). He left academia for good and devoted his energy to administrative and economic affairs in Württemberg, working simultaneously in the executive and legislative branches of the Württemberg government. He was a member of the duke’s privy council and served on the departmental boards for commerce, budget, excise, and justice, as well as the Widows and Orphans Funds. He also worked as legal adviser to the Württemberg Estates. Moser saw no conflict of interest in these various affairs. He viewed his principal task as one of consciousness-raising. The relationship between the duke and the Estates should be cooperative, not adversarial, he said, and he repeatedly pointed out that all of Württemberg shared a common economic and political destiny. He increasingly used “Statistik,” or tabular economic and demographic data, to determine how Württemberg’s resources could be developed and exploited. The basic purpose of Statistik was simple arithmetic: to calculate how much wealth the land in one’s domain could produce; then to determine how much of that produce was needed to enable the urban and rural populace to exist at a reasonably comfortable (or happy) level. The difference between produce and subsistence needs was surplus. That surplus was the sovereign’s tax base. The amount of wealth derived from taxation determined how much military force the land could muster. In a very direct way wealth was power. Through a logistically complicated but theoretically simple compilation of data about one’s own domain, the sovereign could calculate how much power was available to him. In 1790, for example, the statistician L. T. Spittler published a table comparing the armies of France and Prussia. France could field an army of 181,359 men at a cost of 125 million livres. Prussia could field an army of 207,224 men at a cost of 69,722,200 livres.56 That is, France’s disadvantage of 26,000 cost some 55 million livres more. Clearly, Prussia had a more efficient technology of administration in

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1790. This is one reason Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia fifteen years later came as a complete shock to the Germans. Once the current state of his wealth was known, the sovereign could see where production could be made more efficient so that more wealth might be squeezed out of the land. But there was a limit to how much wealth the land could produce. Whether one’s territory was the kingdom of France or the tiny North Sea principality of Hadeln, even in the best of years only a finite amount of wealth could be produced. If a sovereign needed more wealth to keep up with or to best his military rivals, then one had to generate wealth from outside the land. This was the motivation for overseas plantations. New World colonies promised virtually an infinite amount of wealth, if one could only figure out a way to exploit their resources. When England and France went head to head in the rush to explore the South Pacific in the 1760s, their ultimate interest was not in Polynesia or the Spice Islands but the superiority of Dover over Calais. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, France suffered colonial losses from the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean to Niagara and Arcadia in North America. The expedition of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1766–1769), who shadowed the British captains Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret around the world, was both an offensive and a defensive tactic: to prevent the British from making further colonial gains and to replace some of the resources France had lost in 1763. (There will be more discussion of Bougainville and Wallis in Chapter 7.) The Seven Years’ War was a world war, as for that matter the Thirty Years’ War had been in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Great War of 1914–1918 was only one in what had become a long tradition of warfare waged on every economic level and in every global venue in which the real goal was not the slaughter of as many enemy combatants as possible but the bankrupting of one’s opponent. There were precedents for eighteenth-century Statistik. One could make a case that the eleventh-century Domesday Book might be considered a kind of statistical inquiry into the productive capacity of medieval England. Once churches started habitually recording baptisms, marriages, and deaths in the sixteenth century, enough data was available to compute the demographics of a region, the ratio of female to male births, and so forth. Sir William Petty performed just such a calculation in his Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic in

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mid-seventeenth-century England, but Statistik was first put to use systematically in the Holy Roman Empire after the Seven Years’ War. It was Moser’s son-in-law, Gottfried Achenwall, who taught students like A. L. Schlözer and L. T. Spittler how to collect and methodically analyze tabular data to produce knowledge of a local region that might increase efficiency in government. Statistik was the analysis of states and their individual parts: demographics, law, the sovereign, the military, confessional boundaries, administration of justice, manufacturing and commerce, finance, credit, and economics.57 Statistik, though perhaps he had not yet given it that name, was Moser’s project for Württemberg on the eve of the Seven Years’ War. An analysis of economic and geographic data revealed that almost all of Württemberg’s population was occupied in agri- and viticulture, and almost all arable land was under cultivation. Population was as high as could be sustained, and any further increase would result in emigration and dissatisfaction.58 Dependency on imports meant that more money was leaving Württemberg than was flowing in; Moser projected bankruptcy in twenty-five years. He argued that Württemberg’s best strategy was to become self-sufficient by producing all necessities domestically. Surplus could be exported in order to bring currency into Württemberg. The middling classes should be given incentives to enter manufacturing and wholesale trade because these areas were crucial to economic health via the circulation of goods and services. Much as he was concerned with economic reform, Moser was even more strongly committed to working within the traditional constitutional framework. He was neither a radical nor a revolutionary. He saw political agitation as neither necessary nor inevitable, and it was certainly not desirable. Even as he pursued a progressive (i.e., efficient) territorial politic, he also sought to secure the traditional freedoms, liberties, and privileges of the ancient constitution.59 He embraced tradition while encouraging the Estates to relax their grip on privileges and to seek the common good. The Ständesstaat, or government of the Estates, in which power was divided between the prince and the Estates (nobles, clergy, commons), was the best of all possible constitutional systems in Moser’s opinion. The Estates served as the bulwark against the regent’s encroaching absolutism. They guaranteed that the regent did not abuse the privileges of territorial sovereignty. They also guaranteed the right and freedom of subjects to live in security and to have

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their grievances aired and conflicts resolved through the nonpartisan administration of justice. All estates are sworn—and even if they were not sworn they would have the duty—to promote the common wealth [Landes Bestes] and to guard against or mitigate damage to it. They do not fulfill that duty adequately if they only look after those things taliter qualiter that are specifically or expressly charged to them or for which they receive specific funding. It is not enough simply to present the Landesherr with their complaints and desires, but rather they should bear in mind particularly and make it their main concern that the realm attains an ever more flourishing condition and the subjects are provided with everincreasing nourishment; that money does not leave the realm but remains there and circulates and that foreign money is drawn in; that the natural resources of the realm are ever better known, developed, and exploited, and that what is lacking is augmented by artifice and industry [Kunst und Fleiß]. To that end they must initiate good programs themselves, investigate those that are placed before them, promote the good found in them. They must bring aid and support to accomplish [such initiatives] and not dismiss everything out of hand on account of weak and silly prejudice against all imagined innovation, nor to let themselves remain indifferent to whether produce and power increase or decrease.60

The Estates had to see their common destiny and work together. They should not leave all initiative to the prince but should pursue their own programs of efficiency and prosperity in the land. Above all, the Estates must subordinate their particular interests to the common good of the whole land: Landesreform was an educational process involving both collective and individual education. None of this required the passage of new legislation, to say nothing of rewriting the constitution. Economic reform could succeed within the existing constitutional framework if the ancient laws were interpreted to serve the day’s challenges. Living under old laws did not mean following old practices. Customs could be reformed without violating the ancient constitution. The nobility in particular had to see past their individual privileges and recognize that their well-being would best be served by developing the commonwealth. The state’s future was also their future. The states were bound to tradition, but

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they were not enslaved by it. “Were the legislators [Pariscenten, negotiators] omniscient, and could they foresee everything that would happen in future times?” Moser asked rhetorically. “They judged according to the character of their times, and we must judge according to ours.”61 The laws were not sacred. If necessary, old laws could be abolished and new laws written. “That we live by ancient laws is good, so long as the ancient laws are serviceable. When not, it is more reasonable to make new ones that address current times. This is particularly the case when new constitutional laws would place old and ambiguous freedoms in a better light.”62 The key to reform in Württemberg, as Moser understood it, was not the reform of institutions but of people. His emphasis on people was consistent with his Pietist beliefs, and his consciousness-raising activities were almost a kind of evangelism. Individuals had to see their common destiny and the common wealth. To raise the consciousness of the citizens, Moser proposed the establishment of a Patriotic Society, a sort of cross between an academy of science and a chamber of commerce, devoted to Landesgeschichte (local history of Württemberg and Swabia), Landesrecht (the law of the land), and Statistik.63 Patriotic societies were springing up in various parts of Europe, including neighboring Basel, where Isaac Iselin would write his Geschichte der Menschheit (1764) as we shall see in Chapter 7. The Württemberg Patriotic Society never actually got off the ground, but Moser himself started a short-lived journal called Schwäbische Nachrichten in 1756. He proposed that the duke donate a library of economics and suggested 300 titles for the core collection, also without effect, although in 1765 a Herzoglich-Württembergische Land-Bibliothek was opened without his involvement. All of these efforts were intended to educate the citizens in business practice and to get them to see their common destiny.64 Moser’s vigorous efforts to reform the Württemberg economy in the 1750s were the opposite of Adam Smith’s relaxed reliance on an “invisible hand.” It bears recollection that Turgot was in Limoges in the 1760s, implementing the same kind of economic reform Moser attempted to introduce in Württemberg. There is no need to speculate about contact or influence between them. It is enough to know that Moser was not unique in Europe or even in Germany, where all across

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the empire lawyers and bureaucrats with practical training were in high demand. Württemberg was not France, and Moser was not Turgot. Germany defied Great Britain and France’s centralizing tendencies, asserting instead its regionalism and local custom. At the same time, German princes looked with envy on the splendor of the French court or the power and discipline of their own Prussia, and they attempted to consolidate territorial authority in their own hands even as they asserted regional autonomy against the empire. At the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, these competing agendas came to a head when the duke of Württemberg committed a detachment of Württemberg regulars to the French army without first consulting the Estates, as was constitutionally required. The Estates considered the duke’s unilateral action an affront and dug in, refusing both authorization to place their fellows under foreign command and funds to pay for it. The duke ordered a company to seize the public treasury, which was technically the domain of the Estates. When Moser argued forcefully on behalf of the Estates and their constitutional rights, the duke retaliated. Counselor Moser was arrested and imprisoned. In a mountaintop keep Moser sat out the Seven Years’ War in solitary confinement. His consciousnessraising and economic programs had come to a swift and sudden end. The Liberalization of Danish Law Moser understood that he could not reform the Württemberg economy alone. Nor could the Estates legislate reform, nor the duke decree it from on high. Reform could come only from the citizens of Württemberg themselves. For that reason Moser devoted his energy to educating them with regard to their common interest. Let us illustrate this point by looking once more at Denmark at about the time Carsten Niebuhr returned (1767) and Michaelis wrote the Mosaisches Recht (1770–1775). Like Württemberg and Sweden, Denmark was in urgent in need of reform. King Frederick V had left Denmark in a rotten state at his death at the age of forty-two in 1766, leaving his seventeen-year-old son Christian VII the head of a country saddled with enormous debt. Christian’s prime motivation for reform was to restore solvency rather than to improve economic efficiency. Christian’s ministers blamed the previous administration for frivolous

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expenses, but Frederick had been caught up in forces beyond his control. The Seven Years’ War had been costly to everyone in Europe, including countries like Denmark that had remained neutral. Frederick had done what he could to bring money and talent to Denmark. Few had the talent and patience to pore over legal briefs, economic data, tax records, and diplomatic dispatches as Philip II of Spain had done long before, so the mark of a good king was the quality of his help. Here Frederick V of Denmark was commendable. He promoted longdistance trade and shipping on the English mercantile model. He built up the University of Copenhagen by hiring talented faculty from France, Geneva, and Germany, many of whom truly devoted themselves to things Danish.65 In addition, Frederick hired the best ministers he could find in all of Europe, including the extraordinarily competent Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff, a Mecklenburg nobleman who spent his entire career in Danish service and with whom Michaelis had organized the Niebuhr expedition. Bernstorff had served as Danish envoy at Dresden, Regensburg, and Paris, before Frederick appointed him chairman of the privy council, the highest ranking minister in the administration. He would hold this position until 1770. Bernstorff directed Danish foreign policy, and it was largely his strategic negotiating that kept Denmark out of the Seven Years’ War and made the Danish crown the most respected arbiter of international disputes in the mid-eighteenth century. His policy was to fight only defensive wars, and those only as a last resort when negotiations failed. He won neutrality in the Seven Years’ War by negotiating a separate peace first with each of its neighbors—Hanover (united to Great Britain through the person of the king), Sweden, Prussia—then with France, and finally by placing a standing militia of 24,000 men in Holstein to deter invasion. When Peter III of Russia (Peter was Danish, duke of Holstein-Gottorp in addition to tsar of Russia) threatened war in 1761 despite Bernstorff ’s efforts, the French general Charles-Louis de Saint-Germain was brought in to restructure the military and to build a disciplined officer corps of educated Germans.66 The Russian threat was nullified by the murder of Peter III by his tsarina, Catherine (she was Saxon nobility, heiress of the house of Anhalt-Zerbst before she adopted Russia as her homeland), but SaintGermain’s attempt to modernize the army opened the lid on a pandora’s box of needed agrarian reforms in the Danish countryside. At

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that time the Danish army was not even centralized under a single commander, but each major member of the nobility still held the right to levy soldiers from his own lands. While the king could not revoke the traditional privileges of the nobility outright, military officers and public servants like Bernstorff and A. G. von Moltke began experimenting privately with various changes on their own domains. They privatized open fields, threw out the traditional triennial rotation of crops, increased the number of cattle, and modernized agricultural equipment. Work service and military obligations owed by their tenants were replaced with cash payment. Through private initiative they ended the communal system, and the landlords invited the crown to abolish it outright.67 In 1766 Bernstorff wrote to his French counterpart, Choiseul: We have taken stock of ourselves; we know that heaven has not given us a great deal of power or a position that permits us to influence others beyond the North; and thus we limit ourselves to that, giving all the rest of our attention to taking care of the interior arrangements of the state, the restoration of its finances, and the increase of its commerce and industry.68

This was precisely the kind of reform and common-mindedness that Moser hoped to achieve in Württemberg. In fact, Bernstorff cultivated a correspondence with Moser by making him an honorary court councillor to the Danish crown in 1759.69 Moser and Bernstorff understood that reform was best accomplished gradually, and that in Denmark even these modest steps in agricultural, economic, and military organization would be met with resistance by much of the Danish nobility. When Frederick V died in 1766, Bernstorff found himself facing a resurgence of Danish patriotism. He was accused, quite correctly, of promoting foreigners and foreign interests at the Danish court and of being callously ignorant of indigenous Danish custom, tradition, and practice. In forty years of Danish service, Bernstorff never bothered to learn the Danish language. Following the accession of Christian VII, the old guard was purged, Bernstorff was dismissed, and a new set of ministers rose to prominence led by the king’s physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee. In 1770, the public treasury was near bankruptcy, poverty was rampant throughout Denmark, shortages had arisen in the capital city, and

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the young king was rapidly slipping into dementia—impulsive, maladjusted, possibly schizophrenic—at any rate incompetent to govern. The need for a thorough overhaul of Danish society was evident to all, and Struensee saw an opportunity to effect the kind of reforms Moser called for in economics and Michaelis in penal law. In 1771 Struensee issued over a thousand edicts in the name of the king aimed at reforming Danish society in every sector.70 In the agricultural sector, he regularized the service schedules for peasants, removing them from the control of the nobles. In economics his goals were to rid the state of debt and to stimulate circulation of money and goods through freedom of trade. He dismantled the mercantile monopolies held by privileged companies for trade with Africa, Asia, Iceland, and Greenland. He lowered import tariffs, abolished the tea tax, and reduced the stamp tax on rum. To merchants Struensee granted the freedom to sell food as market conditions permitted, encouraging the free circulation of domestic butter, herring, meat as well as English salt and Swedish cattle. In Danish Norway, where famine and grain shortage constantly threatened, he permitted the import of grain from anywhere. He released Altona as a free commercial city, with all sects and all nationalities welcome. In the judicial sector Struensee abolished the death penalty for theft: instead, convicted thieves would be publicly whipped, branded, and condemned to forced labor for life; the wife of a condemned criminal was considered a widow, her husband now being dead to society, though not executed in body. Struensee abolished use of torture in judicial proceedings, and he published a list of prisoners held in Copenhagen in order to encourage judges to bring them to trial quickly.71 In the church Struensee lifted restrictions on religious practice even for Quakers, and he invited a group of Moravian Brethren to settle in Jutland. Catholic baptisms would henceforth be recognized publicly, and laws on marriage, divorce, and illegitimacy were relaxed.72 He abolished nine religious festivals on the calendar and moved two others to Sunday on the principle that they were burdensome to the peasantry. The construction of a large church in Copenhagen was suspended as unnecessarily costly. Finally, in the social sector he established orphanages, abolished censorship, and established absolute freedom of the press.

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These were liberal reforms with which any “enlightened” individual might agree in principle, but at every step of the way Struensee encountered opposition. He hoped the lifting of censorship would win public opinion over to his reforms, but instead of being directed against the restrictions of the immediate past, criticism turned against the minister currently in power.73 Within a year the three Estates turned against him. The nobles were offended by the abolition of privileges pertaining to their domains. The clergy, traditionally subordinate to the crown, became suspicious and hostile. Among the commons, the abolition of the mercantile monopolies and sudden changes in the military and the bureaucracy turned those groups against him too. An affair between Struensee and the twenty-year-old Queen Matilda was widely reported. (It was rumored that the princess Louise Auguste, born in the summer of 1771, bore a striking resemblance to Struensee.)74 Opposition organized around the Queen Dowager Juliana Maria, and in January 1772 Christian VII ordered the arrest of Struensee and his circle, including Queen Matilda.75 A reaction against Struensee’s reforms followed. The abolition of torture was revoked, and censorship was partially reinstated. An edict was published to police public conduct in the inns and pubs and to curb vandalism in the streets. Struensee and his circle came to trial in April 1772. Accused of gross usurpation of royal authority, he was convicted of lèse-majesté in a high degree, an offense punishable by death even under Beccaria’s system, for subversion of the social contract. On April 25, 1772, Struensee and one other associate were sentenced to be drawn and quartered: “while alive he will have his right hand and head cut off; then his body will be rendered into quarters, his limbs displayed on wheels, his head and hand [displayed] on a stake.”76 Three days later the sentence was carried out. Again we see a parallel between Central Europe and the project of economic reform in France. The example of Struensee reminds one of another physician-turned-economist who advocated the development and circulation of domestic resources, particularly agriculture, rather than the international commerce of mercantilism. In France during the 1760s, the “physiocrat” François Quesnay wrote and advised more than he actually implemented in practice. But at the moment Struensee was railroading his reforms through in Denmark, another

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physiocrat, Turgot, attempted to restore France’s solvency by reforming the economy as fast as possible. Public opinion turned against Turgot, too, and, like Struensee’s, many of his reforms were reversed within a few years. The examples of France and Denmark illustrated Moser’s point: reform, if it was to come at all, must come from the tacit cooperation of all levels of society. No matter how well-intentioned a reformer was, one could not impose Enlightenment on a state from the top down because the individuals who composed society would reject it. Michaelis showed that not even Moses, not even God Himself, could bring the Hebrews to a higher level of culture through economic and legal reform. Cultural development could only be indigenous—the broad, subtle, almost unconscious development of the nation as a whole. Enlightenment, or “culture” as it would be called by the end of the 1770s, was an educational process, a process that had to encompass the whole of society, and not just princes and their ministers.77 By the 1780s and 1790s, moderate Germans would begin to affirm that “true Enlightenment” was Volksaufklärung, an educational process that must permeate all layers of society. Culture was a gradual process. Radical reform, or worse, revolution, would only jeopardize the slow progress of European society that had taken centuries to accomplish. If we turn to the later stages of the origin of language discussion in the 1770s, we can watch the concept of culture emerge. This will be the object of the next chapter. Culture was a process much deeper than mere politics. Culture was embedded in language itself, that is, in the very mechanism with which people thought. Culture referred to the collective development of mind in society, and language was a shared medium in which all members of a nation participated.

TWO ◆

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Culture and the Origin of Language

IN 1785 JAMES BOSWELL REFLECTED ON an excursion to Scotland and the Hebrides that he had taken with Samuel Johnson twelve years earlier. On the leg from Montrose to Aberdeen, Boswell proposed they detour to Monboddo to pay a visit to the barrister James Burnett, now Lord Monboddo. Johnson was sour on the idea. He and Monboddo had met in London and had not gotten along despite—or perhaps because of—their similarity of temperament. Boswell was fond of his countryman, though, and he persuaded his companion that it was worth a two-mile detour to visit Monboddo. Lord Monboddo greeted them at the entrance to the estate, and the trio made small-talk as they walked up to the house. Monboddo made self-deprecating jokes about his own cash-poor condition despite his inherited landed wealth. Johnson quizzed Monboddo’s son in Latin. Monboddo commented on the decline of Latin and learning generally in his homeland (what we call the Scottish Enlightenment notwithstanding). There was conflict from the beginning. Johnson picked the fight. As they approached the house, Monboddo pointed to the Douglas coat of arms that graced the entrance, a relic of his greatgrandmother who had been of that prestigious and wealthy family, and said,

“In such houses our ancestors lived, who were better men than we.” “No, No, my lord,” said Dr. Johnson. “We are as strong as they, and a great deal wiser.” This was an assault upon one of Lord Monboddo’s 69

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capital dogmas. I was afraid there would have been a violent altercation in the very close, before we got into the house. But his lordship is distinguished not only for “ancient metaphysicks,” but for ancient politeness, la vieille cour, and he made no reply.1

Over lunch they debated the misery of the modern condition and whether the savage or the London shopkeeper led the better existence. Monboddo took the side of the savage “as usual,” Boswell commented. Monboddo had intimate knowledge of savages. His own estate in the eastern Highlands was “a wretched place, wild and naked, completely devoid of trees” in Boswell’s estimation. He also studied savages—feral children specifically—as part of his long-term research on the origin of language and what he called “the history of man.” In September 1731, outside the village of Songi near Châlons in Champagne, France, a thief was spotted stealing apples from an orchard. The villagers set a pitbull on the thief, but armed with a club the thief stood her ground and killed the animal with a single blow. The thief howled, climbed a tree, and, swinging from branch to branch, escaped into the forest. The villagers appealed to the local nobleman, and the nobleman commissioned the village shepherd to organize a hunting party to catch the thief. They treed her, and after several hours lured her down with some apples and an eel. The thief appeared to be a small female, perhaps a child of ten or twelve, clothed in rags and skins, and wearing a bottle-gourd as a hat. They made little progress trying to ascertain her identity. Her language consisted of wild howls. With chirps and whistles she could imitate any bird in the forest. She was so small and light that she could climb to the tops of trees and leap from branch to branch like a squirrel. But by no means was she frail. She was apparently impervious to cold and swam frequently in the Marne where she subsisted on fish and game caught with her bare hands. These she supplemented with frog-and-leaf sandwiches, roots, and the occasional stolen apple. Her hands were deformed (or perhaps “adapted,” in the Lamarckian sense) by life in the trees, her thumbs large and widely separated from her gnarled fingers, marked by thick nails. Shortly after she was captured, one of the villagers offered her a rabbit, which she seized, skinned with her fingers and a skill that indicated thorough familiarity with the process, and devoured raw and uncleaned.2

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For a few months the nobleman housed her in the castle, where she was permitted to fish in the moot, dig for roots, and catch frogs. Later she was moved to the hôpital in Châlons, then to a convent, and the civilizing process began. She had no name, so they gave her one, MarieAngelique Leblanc, nicknamed Memmie. They replaced her diet of roots, leaves, and raw meat with more civilized fare of bread and cooked meat. These made her first violently ill, then soft—she lost her thick nails and her teeth—and eventually she gained weight so that she became clumsy and heavy and lost the ability to climb trees like the squirrels. They discouraged her from swimming. They taught her French, and to their surprise she picked it up with relative ease, given her solitary existence. But she also lost the ability to whistle like the birds. They baptized her, and after several years she considered taking the veil. Fifteen years after her capture, having long forsaken her savage past, the geographer and physicist Condamine, who had studied savage societies in the Amazon in the 1730s and 1740s, came to study her. In the 1750s a friend of Condamine, a certain Mme. Hecquet, wrote a biography of her that was sensational enough to be translated into German and English. In 1765 it was Condamine also who introduced her to Monboddo and his clerk William Robertson (the historian). Monboddo was then in the early stages of his research into the origin of language and the history of humanity that he would publish serially and under two different titles in the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s. In 1765 Monboddo and Robertson were in France gathering evidence to prove the identity of Monboddo’s client, who was implicated as an impostor in the largest probate dispute in Scottish history (the Douglas cause).3 At their leisure they interviewed Leblanc several times about her life in the forest and her assimilation into civilized society. Monboddo and Robertson traveled to Châlons and Songi where they verified her statements by interviewing the now-aged villagers who remembered her from the 1730s. The evidence seemed to indicate that she was not French at all. By the color of her skin the villagers had initially believed she was African or perhaps Caribbean, but after several washings her apparent blackness faded and she turned out to be white. Hecquet concluded in her biography that she was of North American origin, possibly Eskimo, and that she had been captured in the north and sent to the Antilles where she was painted black and marked for sale as a slave. Leblanc told Monboddo that she was bound for Europe

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when her ship was wrecked in a storm off Flanders. She and an African companion had swum ashore and lived by foraging in the forest for several years. On the evidence of her white skin and her continuing inability to pronounce lingual and labial consonants (b, g, m, p), he guessed she was not Eskimo but Huron.4 This was impossible: the Huron were annihilated in 1649 by the Iroquois. Still, the linguistic basis of his conclusion is interesting in itself, and Monboddo may have been close to the mark. Leblanc herself told Monboddo that she remembered living in a northern country, bitterly cold with long nights and snow. She remembered her mother teaching her to swim and a funeral song, which she sang for Monboddo in her native tongue.5 It was with her mother that she learned to sing like the birds, to hunt with bow and arrow, to climb trees, and to fish with her bare hands. The initial guess of the Songi villagers as to her age was probably correct, that she was about eighteen years old when captured. She was not nine or ten years old, as Condamine, Monboddo, and probably even Leblanc herself thought.6 Although she had been reduced to an isolated existence in the French forest, for the first formative years of her life she had been a member of society. This explains why she was able to learn (or relearn) to speak when others like Peter of Hanover and Victor of Aveyron were not.7 Leblanc was one of about a dozen feral children whom Linnaeus excluded from the species of Homo sapiens and placed in a category unto themselves, Homo ferus, the wild man of the woods, described generically as four-footed, mute, and hairy. Her savage childhood made her a rarity but not unique. At the end of the seventeenth century the Irishman Bernard Connor, who had been the court physician for King Jan III Sobieski of Poland (r. 1674–1696), reported having seen a feral child in Lithuania in 1694. Here is his description of the experience: It was assur’d me often at Court, and it is certainly believ’d all over the Kingdom, that Children have been frequently nurtur’d by Bears, who are very numerous in these Woods. There was one kept in a Convent in my time who was taken among them, as I have describ’d in my Latin Treatise, Of the Suspensions of the Laws of Nature.8 He was about ten Years of Age (which might be guess’d only by his stature and Aspect) of a hideous Countenance, and had neither the use of Reason, nor Speech:

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He went upon all four, and had nothing in him like a Man, except his Human Structure: But seeing he resembled a Rational Creature, he was admitted to the Font, and christen’d; yet still he was restless and uneasy, and often inclin’d to flight. But at length, being taught to stand upright, by clapping up his Body against a Wall, and holding him after the manner that Dogs are taught to beg; and being by little and little accustom’d to eat at Table, he after some time became indifferently tame, and began to express his Mind with a hoarse and unhuman Tone; but being ask’d concerning his course of Life in the Woods, he could not give much better account of it, than we can do of our Actions in the Cradle.9

Connor is the only source of information on this nameless child, who is now referred to as “the second Lithuanian bear-boy.” A bit more information is known of “the first Lithuanian bear-boy,” described by a Dutch envoy in London named Cleverskerk, with whom Connor corresponded. Cleverskerk had seen the boy in 1669. Here is the description he gave Connor: There was in the Suburbs of this City [Warsaw] . . . in a Nunnery, a certain Male Child, who had been brought up among Bears, and who had been taken some time before at a Bear-hunting. . . . His Age, as well as I remember, I guess’d to be about twelve or thirteen. As soon as I came near him he leap’d towards me as if surpriz’d and pleas’d with my Habit. First, he caught one of my Silver Buttons in his hand with a great deal of eagerness, which he held up to his Nose to smell; Afterwards he leap’d all of a sudden into a Corner, where he made a strange sort of Noise not unlike to Howling. I went into the House, where a Maidservant informed me more particularly of his Manner of being taken. . . . This Maid call’d the Boy in, and show’d him a good large piece of Bread; which when he saw, he immediately leap’d upon a Bench that was joyn’d to the Wall of the Room, where he walk’d about upon allfour: After which, he rais’d himself upright with a great Spring, and took the Bread in his two Hands, put it up to his Nose, and afterwards Leap’d off from the Bench upon the Ground, making the same odd sort of Noise as before. I was told that he was not yet brought to speak, but that they hop’d in a short time he would, having his Hearing good. He had some Scars on his Face, which were commonly thought to be Scratches of the Bears.10

Woodcut of “Lithuanian Bear-boy” nursed by a she-bear. In Bernard Connor, History of Poland, vol. 1 (London, 1698), 342. (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen.)

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Cleverskerk’s report was confirmed by a German eyewitness, Christopher Hartknoch, who reported that at his baptism the first Lithuanian bear-boy had been christened Joseph. He had been one of two boys found by soldiers in the forest near Grodna (now in Belarus), the other of whom eluded capture. Joseph appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old. He walked on all fours and ate raw meat, wild honey, crab apples, “and such like Dainties which Bears are us’d to feast with.” With great effort he was taught to stand erect, but efforts to teach him to speak were unsuccessful.11 How was it possible that a child should be nurtured rather than devoured by bears? Connor at first did not believe the evidence before his own eyes. Polish courtiers told him that, while a hungry male bear would indeed tear an abandoned child to pieces, females were known to nurse human infants and carry them off to their dens where they raised them like one of their own cubs. Cleverskerk explained further: I have been inform’d in this Country, that when as the Tartars make frequent Incursions there, which they perform with such extraordinary Swiftness, that they can over-run great part of the Country in a very short time, their Horses being able to Travel a whole Day together without drawing Bit; being arriv’d at the propos’d Place, they immediately quarter themselves in a great Circle, whereby, as it were in a Net, they take all that come within their Clutches, and carry them into Slavery. So that either the Men or Women finding themselves thus ensnar’d, and endeavouring to escape, have oftentimes not leisure to take care of their Infants, and therefore probably this Boy might have been left behind after the like manner, and found and born away by the Bears.

Romulus and Remus were not so fabulous as they seemed.12 The Lithuanian bear-boys were obscure. Connor and Hartknoch are the only known surviving sources of information about them, and although Monboddo knew of Connor’s report, there was no way he could investigate their cases. Of particular interest was the bear-boys’ chronic muteness. While they could express basic emotions by howling, they were entirely incapable of expressing rational thought. In 1724, however, just seven years before Leblanc was captured in Champagne, a feral child about fifteen years old was found near the Hanoverian village of Hamelin, in the German domain of King George I. The

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Hanoverians named him Peter and kept him for a few months at the prison in Celle before sending him to Hanover where he was a guest at the king’s table, George I himself insisting he sample all the royal dishes.13 Upon returning to Great Britain, George summoned him to the royal court at London where Peter was treated briefly as a sort of pet. When Peter’s novelty wore off, he was turned over to John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), a Scottish physician, mathematician, and author of the John Bull satires. Arbuthnot tested Peter’s mental faculties to determine whether John Locke was correct, that the human mind was a tabula rasa at birth, possessing no innate ideas.14 Not only did Arbuthnot find no evidence of innate ideas, he found no evidence of ideas at all. Despite his having lived in human society for two years, Peter seemed nearly as feral as he had been the day he was captured. Arbuthnot managed to teach him to fetch and carry and to greet people with a bow, but little else.15 Eventually he was sent to live out his days on a farm in Herefordshire. And live he did. In 1782 Peter was nearly seventy years old and still vigorous when Monboddo visited him on the Herefordshire farm.16 Despite half a century on the farm, Peter had learned little. The only words Monboddo heard him pronounce were his own name and King George, although an Oxford scholar who visited him shortly before found that he could repeat two syllables if prompted. He could chant out the tunes of a couple of folk songs without the words. Otherwise he led an entirely sensory existence. He enjoyed hearing music, feeling the warmth of a fire, looking at the stars on a clear night, and he would eat an onion like an apple.17 Monboddo’s comment to Johnson that “our ancestors . . . were better men than we” betrayed a conservatism that linked the decline of language to the decline of society in general. It was that conservatism that Johnson reacted to when he disagreed, “No, No, my lord. We are as strong as they, and a great deal wiser.” Their disagreement was more of temperament and politics than of philosophy. In another context Monboddo could have agreed with Johnson, for he acknowledged in The Origin and Progress of Language, published that same year, 1773, “It is by language that we trace, with greatest certainty, the natural history of man.” A decade later he would restate that developmental principle in the context of his visit to Peter of Hanover:

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As to the philosopher who knows that we are compounded of two substances quite distinct, the Animal and the Intellectual Mind, he cannot have the least doubt that there is a progress of the species as well as in the individual; and that the animal must at first predominate in both, and the Intellectual Nature be produced only at last, slowly even in the individuals among us, who learn both by imitation, but infinitely more slowly among perfect Savages, who must invent and teach themselves every thing.18

Johnson and Monboddo were reconciled on that August afternoon in 1773. Monboddo directed his African servant, Gory, to lead Johnson and Boswell back to the road to Aberdeen. (Johnson employed an African servant too.) Boswell commented: I observed how curious it was to see an African in the north of Scotland, with little or no difference in manners from those of the natives. Dr Johnson laughed to see Gory and Joseph [Boswell’s servant] riding together most cordially. “Those two fellows,” said he, “one from Africa, the other from Bohemia, seem quite at home.” . . . “And as to the savage and the London shopkeeper,” said he, “I don’t know but I might have taken the side of the savage equally, had any body else taken the side of the shopkeeper.”19

Monboddo’s life’s work was a late contribution to a conversation that occupied European scholars for half of the eighteenth century. Beginning with Condillac in 1746 and continuing down through Herder in 1772, the origin of language discussion attracted the attention of philosophers, physicians, pastors, and educators across Europe. It was generally agreed that language was the mechanism of human cognition. That is, language was the vehicle through which raw perceptions were transformed into knowledge, thoughts, or ideas in the mind. After Herder, that is, in the 1770s, language theorists concluded that they had exhausted the avenues of inquiry that speculated about cognitive processes in the abstract and universal individual. Shortly before 1780, a new line of inquiry opened—that of the simultaneous development of language and society. Instead of a universal attribute of humanity, language came to be understood as a product of society. As societies were different, so, too, were languages different. If language was the vehicle of human cognition, that is, the medium that conveyed

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reason, and if languages differed, then so also must reason differ from one society to the next. Moreover, since languages changed over time, so must reason also change. The timing of the origin of language discussion is significant. It was in the 1770s, precisely at the moment when the concept of culture came into circulation, that the origin of language discussion shifted from the individual to the collective and from the universal to the particular. The Origin of Language Discussion, 1740s–1770s The most thorough and significant work on the origin of language in the eighteenth century was Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746).20 Condillac wanted to know precisely how the human mind worked, how it acquired and ordered knowledge. In the process he launched a sustained attack on the rationalism of Descartes and Malebranche, rejecting the dualism of mind and body. That dualism he considered to be a linguistic construct, not an ontological condition (II.1.§103). He also rejected both the Cartesian doctrine that innate ideas were clear and distinct and the propensity of the senses to be deceived. On the contrary, he considered sensory perception itself to be clear and distinct (I.1.§13), and he believed that even geometrical ideas like point, line, and plane derived from sense experience (I.3.§12). He concluded with a brief section on “method” (II.2), a clear and strong attack intended to destroy Cartesian epistemology and replace it with a holistic theory of knowledge that linked the operation of the mind with the senses via the medium of language. The position that all knowledge was derived from the senses was of course Lockean in origin, and throughout the Essay Condillac engaged Locke on that point. The Essay should not be taken as simply derivative of Locke, however, for Condillac also set forth a significant critique and expansion of Locke. The centerpiece of the Essay is an explanation of the origin of language, an explanation that was widely used, though seldom acknowledged, for the rest of the eighteenth century, particularly in Germany. Published in 1746, the Essay remained on the cutting edge of linguistic and cognitive philosophy at least through the 1770s, until the conjectural method gave way to the inquiry into specific human languages and societies under the cultural explanation of human nature.

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Condillac argued that the vehicle of human cognition was language, specifically the intentional use of arbitrary signs and the linking of those signs together through the “rational faculty” of the mind. “Reason” was neither a clear nor a distinct idea. To bring critical rigor to the process of cognition, he divided reason into nine separate functions in order to account for the development of human knowledge. Knowledge, he argued, was acquired in the following order. The first operation of the mind was perception, which was triggered by an impression made through the senses. Second, consciousness indicated an awareness of the perception, and certain perceptions became so lively in the consciousness that they took center stage in the mind via attention. Now a critical third step occurred, the connection of ideas. Fourth, reminiscence was the awareness of repeated perceptions. The connection of ideas also opened the possibility of steps five, six, and seven: imagination revived the perceptions themselves, and tagged them with signs, which attention then linked to ideas; memory recalled the signs and perhaps the circumstances of the perceptions, but not the perceptions themselves; and contemplation preserved without interruption either the perception, the name, or the circumstances of an object that was no longer there. Now came the tricky part. To revive an idea (as opposed to recalling the perception itself ) required another operation, step eight, reflection. At this level a person acquired the first slightest degree of memory and the ability to control the imagination. A reciprocal relationship between the operations of the mind was developing. The ability to control the imagination and memory through reflection indicated the utility of the sign, and soon the person learned to invent new signs. Condillac said: By this means it will increase the exercise of memory and imagination; at the same time reflection may also be improved, and by acting on the imagination and memory that first produced it, it will in turn give them a new exercise. Thus by the mutual aid that these operations give each other, they reciprocally contribute to their progress. (I.2.§49)

There is a chicken and egg dilemma here. Without a first sign to set reflection in motion, the human mind could make very little progress. But how could the first sign be invented without the power of reflection? Even following the invention of the first sign, linguistic progress

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remained very slow. “Think for example of how much reflection it has taken to form languages, and the assistance that these languages give to reflection!” (I.2.§49). Condillac acknowledged the difficulty here. “It seems that one would not know how to make use of instituted signs if one was not already capable of reflection to choose them and attach ideas to them: how then, so goes the objection, is it that the exercise of reflection can only be acquired by the use of signs?” A concerted effort of the will was required: one must “take an interest in the objects that, by their preeminent hold on attention, connect the largest number of signs and ideas; everything depends on that.” Finally, signs had begun to emerge, but still the mind had not reached the level of reason. A final operation was required, step nine, judgment. Reason was the product of judging between “is” and “is not,” that is, the “linking together of judgments that are interdependent.” Later, Condillac said that “to reason is to express the relations between different propositions” (II.1. §105). His point made, Condillac decided not to belabor the issue, saying, “There is no need to dwell on these operations.” But in fact he had demolished Descartes’s idea of innate reason by reducing it to its component parts, nine in total.21 These nine aspects of the single faculty of reason would be picked up in the 1770s, first by Herder, later by Irwing, although without acknowledgment to Condillac by either. Not unlike Descartes and his seventeenth-century successors such as Pufendorf, Condillac searched for a single principle that would explain the human mind. That principle, he concluded, was the connection of ideas. The principal benefit of the way in which I have envisaged the operations of the soul is that we clearly see how good sense, intellect, reason, and their contraries are all equally the product of a single principle, namely the connection of ideas with one another; and that we see how on a higher level this connection is produced by the use of signs. This is the principle. (I.2.§107)

But the aspect of his Essay that would excite the attention of his successors later in the eighteenth century was not the connection of ideas but the importance of arbitrary signs in human cognition. Condillac identified three kinds of signs: accidental, natural (similar to what others referred to as “cries of nature”), and instituted. As

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animals possessed the first two kinds, Condillac was interested primarily in the third, instituted arbitrary signs. Like the operations of the mind, the development of signs followed a specific progression from sensation to abstraction to the connection of ideas and finally to the audible signification of abstract ideas. That is to say, first man received fleeting impressions, next he expressed cries of nature, and then he gained the use of memory and imagination until the signs were refined. Condillac called the first communication between people the “language of action,” that is, gestures or charades. Hans Aarsleff refers to the language of action as an “expressive” theory of language. That is, according to Condillac the first function of language was not to reason abstractly but simply to communicate or to express ideas to one another. If the principle of human cognition was the connection of ideas, crucial to the connection of ideas and the formation of language was society. Condillac cited two sensational cases that illustrated the complete inability of human beings to make mental progress—indeed, to become characteristically human—without society and hence without the use of signs. In 1703 Fontenelle reported the case of a young man in his early twenties who had been deaf and mute from birth, so deaf that he had been apparently unable to perceive church bells. After a fluid was drained from his left ear, he began to hear for the first time, and also for the first time he began to acquire language. For a few months he remained mute until he learned to form words. When quizzed by theologians who apparently hoped to find he had an innate understanding of God, the young man revealed that, although he had attended mass, kneeled when praying, and made the sign of the cross, he never understood any of it. He barely knew what death was, and he never thought about it. He led a mere animal life, wholly occupied with sensible and present objects and the few ideas he received by the eyes. From these ideas he did not even draw what he would have seemed able to draw from them. It is not that he did not naturally have a mind, but the mind of a person who is deprived of human intercourse is so little exercised and cultivated that he does not think except when he is absolutely forced to do so by external objects. The principal fund of the ideas of mankind, [concluded Fontenelle], is their mutual converse. (I.4.§13)

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Indeed, argued Condillac, without society a person would be unable to invent that crucial first sign. But wait, someone will say, would the necessity of providing for his needs and satisfying his passions not be sufficient to develop all the operations of his mind? I answer no; for as long as he lived without any social intercourse, he would not have occasion to connect his ideas with arbitrary signs. He would be without memory. (I.4.§20)

In modern psychology this lack of memory is referred to as “childhood amnesia” or the inability of people to remember their earliest childhood experiences before they learned to speak. Condillac used Bernard Connor’s report of the second Lithuanian bear-boy to confirm his speculation that without the ability to manipulate signs, a person was even without memory. “As soon as he could speak,” Condillac quoted Connor, “he was asked about his former state. But he could not remember any more than we can recall what happened to us in the cradle” (I.4.§20). Without signs to organize his perceptions in a chronological sequence, his perceptions must have been jumbled together in an eternal present. Although the boy was supposedly raised by bears, he probably even made a poor animal, unable to communicate in the animal fashion using accidental signs and signs of nature. Since human beings cannot make signs for themselves except when living together, it follows that the fund of their ideas, when their mind begins to be formed, consists entirely in their mutual intercourse. . . . It is pointless to object that before this social converse, the mind already had ideas because it has perceptions, for perceptions that have never been the object of reflection are not properly speaking ideas. (I.4.§25)

As a product of mutual converse, language developed as society developed, and here Condillac found another reciprocal relationship. Language emerged in conformity with what he called “national character,” and in turn the “genius of language” modified the character of nations and its individual members. For anyone who knows languages well, they are like a painting of the character of each nation’s genius. He will see how the imagination has combined the ideas in accordance with the preconceptions and passions; he will see how each nation formed a different mind in propor-

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tion to its degree of isolation from other nations. But if customs have influenced the language, the language in turn has influenced customs and for a long time preserved the character of the people. (II.1.§162)

Once the principles of the language were fixed and a certain complexity of language was achieved, eminent writers emerged, who completed the genius of the nation’s language. Poets in particular gave the genius of the language its strongest expression. “Strictly speaking, one can even say that it is impossible to give good translations of poetry, for the reasons that prove that two languages cannot have the same character also prove that the same thoughts can rarely be expressed in both with the same beauties.” (II.1.§161) Condillac apparently took his two examples of speechless children from the German philospher Christian Wolff, who in his 1734 Psychologia Rationalis cited both the examples of Fontenelle (the deaf-mute of Chartres) and Connor (the second Lithuanian bear-boy).22 Condillac’s elaboration of reason into several subfaculties also might have come from Wolff. Wolff believed it was possible to hold intuitions without the use of signs, but any deeper reasoning required signs. Intuitive thought could not distinguish universal ideas from particular ideas. Just how far was the bear-child of the Lithuanian forest from rational thought? He would not even have been able to recognize the most common of objects, a tree. To form the universal idea of a tree required an abstract idea. That abstract idea could only be formed by tagging the memory of the perception with a signifier. When a person perceived a tree, for example, and when he was conscious of those things that were comprehended visually in it, he acquired an intuitive idea of the tree. But if he fixed his full attention on the whole tree, his cognition became confused. His cognition became “distinct” only when he reflected on the idea of the tree rather than the tree itself. If I reflect further on the attributes of the tree idea, leaves, branches, trunk, then I get a “distinct intuitive idea” of the tree. In other words, distinct intuitive ideas occurred when a person turned his attention successively to the different attributes or qualities the tree. To form an abstract idea of “tree” required the mind to signify the characteristic attributes of the tree with words. Lacking the use of abstract signs, the bear-child trying to understand even his basic surroundings found himself stymied. This was why, once he learned to speak, he had no memory of life in the forest.

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In the process of naming those abstract ideas they became retained in the memory, and they became clear and distinct. Wolff called this process of bringing back the idea of the tree from memory by means of the word “symbolic cognition.” Using symbolic cognition (“That is a tree!”) and judgment (“That is not a tree.”), a person formed universal ideas. All the higher operations of the mind occurred through the manipulation of signs. Wolff organized his explanation of the operations of the mind hierarchically. That is, he discussed the operations of the mind according to their complexity. Although Condillac appropriated Wolff ’s example and his analysis of reason, Condillac went far beyond Wolff. In Wolff there was no linguistic state of nature, no development of the individual or society, and no comparison between the mental faculties of people and animals. The wild children lacked the higher use of reason, but they were not inhuman. Another Frenchman inspired by Wolff served as the bridge between Condillac and the German discussion of the origin of language. In 1746, the year of Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Frederick the Great hired Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) to preside over the newly reorganized Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The academy had lost much of its prestige in the years after Leibniz’s death, and Frederick himself had rewritten the new by-laws. A mathematician and member of the Royal Societies of London and Paris, Maupertuis was famous for an expedition he had made to Lapland in 1736 in which his astronomical measurements confirmed Newton’s prediction that the earth was slightly flattened at the poles. He was invited to Prussia by Frederick the Great in 1741 and that year was appointed to the Berlin Academy. In 1742 his book describing the measurements taken in Lapland, already published in French and English, was translated into Latin and published in Leipzig.23 At the time Maupertuis assumed the presidency of the Berlin Academy, the Academy was entering a protracted political dispute over how much of Christian Wolff ’s philosophy would be taken as authoritative.24 Wolff had returned to the Prussian University of Halle in 1740, following a twenty-year exile in Marburg. Wolff had held the philosophy chair at Halle in the 1710s, but in 1723—following a lecture in which he articulated clearly, on the evidence of Confucian ethics, the ability of human reason to achieve moral truth apart from divine revelation—he was fired from the university and was ordered to pack

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his bags and leave Prussia within twenty-four hours on pain of death. For two decades he lived in quasi-exile at Marburg, where he worked out his comprehensive and systematic philosophy, including his ideas on language and epistemology. In 1740 he was invited back to his chair at Halle and returned in triumph as Germany’s most influential living philosopher. “Most influential” was not the same as infallible, nor even as authoritative, and under Maupertuis’s direction Wolff ’s standing as the Academy’s guiding light was diminished in favor of independent and critical inquiry. Maupertuis himself challenged Wolff ’s doctrines, and one of the venues in which he did so was the origin of language discussion. Maupertuis was not satisfied with Wolff ’s description of the mental processes from perception to the recognition of an object. Perhaps Maupertuis was influenced by Condillac’s developmental account of language and cognition (Maupertuis had visited France in the summer of 1746), but the evidence that Maupertuis had actually read Condillac’s Essay in the 1740s is only circumstantial. But he did take Wolff ’s tree example and transform it from a hierarchical discussion of the faculties of reason into a developmental account of reason acquired in the prelinguistic individual.25 With considerable analytical rigor, he showed just how much mental and linguistic work was required to advance from the perception, “I see a tree,” to the recognition, “That is a tree.” Far more radical than Wolff, Maupertuis concluded that language was the mediator between the world and the mind. Only through language could the world be made intelligible, and, since language was a construction of the mind, so, too, was the external world. A person’s understanding of the world was shaped by his language. Languages were profoundly different, the ideas they conveyed having been established in the beginning of the nation’s history. It followed then that the world must appear differently to people from different nations. That conclusion reflected a distinctly Berkeleyan understanding of language, perception, and the world. It placed in doubt the ability of people to communicate. Considering the different ideas that people even from the same region who had long reasoned together could reach concerning their perceptions, how was it possible for scholars and travelers to communicate with people far away who

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have not even had the same perceptions, to say nothing of the same signs? “I am persuaded that even if we suddenly came to speak a common language in which each could communicate his ideas, one would still find the reasoning of the other foreign, or rather that one would not hear it quite right.”26 That is, even if the speaker perceived correctly (whatever that would mean) and managed to convey orally his ideas about his perceptions, the listener was doomed to fail to comprehend precisely what the speaker was trying to communicate. One can almost see the native French speaker living in the furthest reaches of Germany presiding over a debating society whose members were struggling to communicate precisely in Latin, a language that was foreign to all of them. Yet they were all highly educated Europeans. What would happen if Voltaire’s Huron entered the discussion? Maupertuis concluded: Accordingly I do not believe that the difference in their philosophy comes from a difference in their first perceptions. Rather I believe it comes from the language to which each nation is accustomed; from that designation of signs for different parts of perception, a designation in which much is arbitrary and which the first people could make in many different ways. [In fact such designations] are made in this way or that way, with this or that proposition, and with a continual influence on all our knowledge.27

The arbitrary signification made in the initial construction of language had long-term consequences. When he returned to language a few years later, this time having read Condillac, Maupertuis considered in more detail the evolutionary development of language from a hypothetical linguistic state of nature to sophisticated reasoning.28 Following Condillac, he discussed stages through which language might have developed, including the language of action, music, grammar and articulation, and writing. Still he was left with the dilemma of how to account for the diversity of human language. Maupertuis, too, saw the chicken-and-egg dilemma in Condillac’s system: The first sign required a cognitive idea, but that idea was impossible without a sign. Condillac attempted to surmount the dilemma of formulating the first sign by ascribing it to a concerted effort of the will. It seemed unlikely that the first signification could occur spontaneously more than once—all human languages must therefore

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be related to each other. Maupertuis agreed that, given the difficulty of inventing the first signs, it seemed more plausible to consider all of humanity to be descended from a single pair and all modern languages from a single primordial source. He could solve the question of the diversity of languages only by retreating to Genesis chapter eleven. Maupertuis presented these thoughts as a lecture to the Berlin Academy in 1754. Among those in the audience was the Berlin pastor and amateur demographer Johann Peter Süßmilch (1707–1767). Unconvinced by the gradualism explicit in the development of language from cries and gestures to abstract reason, Süßmilch responded with a lecture to the Academy two years later entitled “The Divine Origin of Language.”29 Süßmilch’s main point was not that the creator of language was God, only that the creator of language could not have been man. Süßmilch accepted the premise that language was the medium of reason. The question was whether that first arbitrary sign could have been invented without reason already present. Although he had not read Condillac, Süßmilch found the weak point of Condillac’s argument, a weakness that Condillac himself had acknowledged. A “concerted effort of the will” was not a convincing foundation for language, reason, and that most human of characteristics, cognition. The use of audible signs was a work of the understanding, he said. In fact, a highly developed faculty of understanding was required even to invent the first sign. If man was taken as the inventor of language, then one had two alternatives: either man must have possessed some kind of prior system of signification that enabled him to invent the first sign; or he must have been clever and rational without language. The first required a nonhuman origin of language; the second alternative contradicted the premise that language was the medium of reason. Süßmilch considered implausible Maupertuis’s description of language progressing gradually from cries and gestures to clearly expressed speech. The difference between cries of nature and reasoned speech was qualitative, not a change in degree that could occur over time. Had Süßmilch taken Condillac to task, it would have been on this point: there could be no connection of ideas without the use of signs; but no sign could be invented without the connection of ideas. Süßmilch argued exclusively from the internal structure of language itself. He did not look to history to a time before language existed or to

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a place where primitives were so rude that they were without speech and reason. Neither did he consider whether the original pair possessed language in Eden, whether their language was different after the fall, nor what might have occurred at Babel. His essay was “philosophical” only, not linguistic or historical. It was not about how God created language and other human faculties like reason, only that God did. This relegated language and reason, like the rest of creation—which Süßmilch considered incomprehensible to weak human minds—to miracle. Miracle is too strong. God is too strong a term also. All Süßmilch meant was that language could not have been a human invention. The origin of language remained a black box, locked away in the human past and inaccessible under the available methods and technologies. But to the eighteenth-century mind the divine explanation of language was immensely unsatisfying. In fact, it was no explanation at all. Herder Could language have been invented by humanity alone? Maupertuis had imported Condillac’s argument to Germany. When the Berlin Academy announced its annual essay competition in 1770, the origin of language discussion had already reached a high level. The next step was to resolve the debate between those like Süßmilch who considered language to be of divine origin and those who considered it to be a human creation. Already the scales were tipped toward the latter, and one can see the antidivine leaning in the phrasing of the question, particularly in the second part: “Are men, left to their natural faculties, in a position to invent language, and by what means do they, by themselves, accomplish that invention?” The competition of course was won by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Herder would not resolve the dilemma (at least not in 1772), but a few years after his essay, “culture” would. At the time the competition was announced, Herder was in Strasbourg undergoing eye surgery (it failed), and it was there that he met the young and notyet-famous Goethe for the first time. He decided to enter the competition at the last minute, in December 1770, and hastily set to work on what would become his Essay on the Origin of Language, ahead of a January 1, 1771 deadline. The thesis of his essay was that language made the difference between man and animal. Language was the vehicle of

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cognition, that is, the power of the human mind to form concepts and to manipulate them freely apart in time and space from what they represent. Speech was only the audible manifestation of the cognitive power of mind. In the process, Herder also asserted against Süßmilch that language was a human creation, not divine. Language, wrote Herder, formed the distinctive character of man. Language was what made man human and was the sine qua non of humanity. Without language man was inhuman, a kind of beast. “It is the unique positive power of thought which, associated with a particular organization of the body, is called reason in man.” Reason was the source of human freedom, whose analogous power in animals was instinct. Human reason was the consequence of a qualitative difference between man and animal. “The difference lies not in quantity nor in the enhancement of powers but in a completely different orientation and evolution of all powers.”30 Animals, too, had a language, consisting of grunts, whines, and the cries of nature. Because animal language expressed instinctive drives, not rational cognition, animal language was not analogous to human language. Herder found it useful, despite the categorical distinction, to compare the languages of animals and humans through what he called the “language of sensation” (Sprache der Empfindung). This was the expression of cries of alarm, pain, surprise, and exultation and, by extension, the sort of communication that occurred between the Arab and the camel, his only companion in the desert; between the hunter of the woods and the deer or the Laplander and the reindeer; or with Hector, who in the Iliad could speak with his horse. But these were exceptions. The “languages of nature” were a kind of Volkssprache or common language, each species possessing its own. Man had his own also. If human cries of nature sounded like those of animals, and if remnants of those sounds were preserved in primitive languages, nevertheless they were not the chief characteristic of human language. The cries of nature were not the origin of human language—that was qualitatively different. Herder launched a vigorous attack against Condillac, although only in name. In fact, much of the argumentation Herder attributed to Condillac is not to be found in Condillac at all.31 At the beginning of the section on language in the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Condillac had posed a hypothetical situation in which two postdiluvian children, lacking any use of signs, encountered one another in the

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desert. Alone these people were limited to perception and consciousness, but once they came together they began to communicate via the language of action, using gestures to emphasize and connect the cries of their passions. Condillac imagined that the combination of gestures and cries might have been the origin of the first human languages (Condillac, Essay, II.1.§1–3). Herder disagreed. Why, he wondered, would children in the desert immediately enter into commerce? And why was it necessary to assume that language could only have been developed as an exchange between two persons in society?32 When Rousseau had considered the origin of language in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he had rejected the sociability thesis that man was by nature and had in fact always been a social creature,33 thus, according to Herder, refuting Condillac. Herder claimed that both Rousseau and Condillac had erred by attributing the origin of language to the cries of nature. Condillac actually had said exactly the opposite. (Condillac’s rejection of gradualism and of the difference between human language and the cries of nature as merely quantitative had led him straight to his chicken-andegg dilemma over the invention of the first sign.) But Herder was building a case for the categorical separation of man and animal, in terms not only of classification but also of teleology. The purposes of man were different from the purposes of animals. “The bee was a bee as soon as it built its first cell,” but a person was not human until he had achieved completeness (Vervollkommnung): “We continue to grow from childhood as long as we continue to live. We are always in process, unsettled, unsatiated (incomplete—ungesättigt). The essence of our life is never satisfaction, rather always progression, and we have never been human until we have lived to the end.”34 Where animals had instinct, man had reason, or more properly speaking, reflection (Besonnenheit), a sort of grace under pressure that permitted man to step back from the immediacy of experience and to view his circumstances objectively. It was Besonnenheit that enabled the formation of universals, that is, of words, that could be juxtaposed and manipulated. Herder used Besonnenheit as a shorthand term for all the powers of the mind just as Locke had used “reflection.” When people attributed sensation and instinct to human beings, or when they described the imagination or reason, they were describing aspects of the mind that really operated as one. Mental powers could not be sepa-

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rated, and if man had sensation in his original condition, then he also had the power of reason. “If he is man, then he must have had them in the first condition.”35 But what kind of explanation was this? Besonnenheit served the same purpose as “reason”—a black box characteristic of human beings—but the whole purpose of the origin of language discussion was to inquire into human reason. This was circular reasoning, tautological: man had language because he had Besonnenheit.36 Besonnenheit was a murky concept. It begged many questions. Herder was aware of this problem, and in fact the muddle was part of his rhetorical strategy. Gradually, in the course of his argument, new, clearer concepts emerged. He progressively refined and redefined Besonnenheit until it no longer conveyed its initial meaning. More than simply reviewing the origin of language, Herder’s Essay on the Origin of Language functioned as a symbol of the development of language, the development of mind, the development of society and learning. The Essay began in darkness and obscurity and gradually, through the refinement of concepts, emerged into the clarity of enlightenment. There was not a single origin of language but a progression of stages built upon one another. Herder’s brilliance was to construct the Essay in the same way, changing the terms of his discussion and the meanings of his terminology as he proceeded. In the words of Paul Gaier, Herder’s text is governed by a “progressive systematic,” or as Herder himself put it, “one day does not simply teach the next; rather every minute of the day informs the next, every thought the others.”37 That is, there was a reciprocal development of language, learning, and mind, which within a few years would come to be called “culture.”38 In later texts, Herder would call this rhetorical strategy “ein Fortgebäude,” or an argument that progressively clarified itself. Under the progressive development of language, Gaier counts not one but six origins of language in Herder’s text.39 Although man had the capacity for reason “in the first condition,” that did not mean that all the powers of mind were fully developed from birth. Herder saw the objection coming: “But was this reason not more a capacity for reason (reflexion en puissance) than a real power?” He answered that mere capacity with no power was no capacity at all. If no true power was implied in the idea of capacity, then the word “capacity” was an empty scholastic abstraction. “The positive unique power of the soul” was in effect from the very beginning. “Man in the

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most sense-oriented condition was still human, and therefore reflection functioned in him already, only to a limited degree. And the least sense-oriented animal was still an animal.”40 From the beginning, placed in the condition of reflection that was unique to him, “The first person placed in the condition of reflection that was unique to him, who willfully employed this power of reflection, invented language. But what was reflection? What was language?”41 Herder sketched the process of the discovery of language. What required eight chapters in Condillac Herder accomplished in a single paragraph. The invention of language was as natural as being human, he said. (1) First the mind swam in an ocean of perceptions. (2) Suddenly the power of the soul separated (absondern) a wave, (3) fixed its attention (Aufmerksamkeit) on it, and (4) was aware (bewußt) that he noticed (aufmerkte) it. (5) Reflection was employed when, from the entire dreamscape of images before the senses, the observer willfully (freywillig) dwelt upon a single image and noticed that this one object was not another. The first act of recognizing results in a clear concept; it is the first judgment of the soul—and— where did the recognition come from? From a distinguishing characteristic that he must have abstracted (absondern) and which as a distinguishing characteristic seemed clear to him. Voilà! let’s call out eureka to him. This first conscious distinction was the word of the soul! With it human language is invented!42

Herder used a sheep as an example, tagged with a distinguishing characteristic that separated it from all other objects. He imagined that the distinguishing characteristic might have been the sheep’s bleet. Although later in the essay Herder gave sound the central role in the five senses, here he was emphatic that language did not consist initially in audible signification. Language was not the product of any physical organization, since the Orangutang had speech organs also. The seat of language was not the mouth but the soul. It was neither the cries of nature nor a breathing machine that invented language but a thoughtful creature (ein besinnendes Geschöpf ). The wild man of the forest would invent language qua cognition, even if he never spoke it.43 “Is the whole nature of man like an oyster only dimly aware of sensation?” he asked. F. M. Barnard brilliantly glossed this question, “As soon as we perceive these sensations we do so by means of a word.”44 Herder, too, commented on

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Connor’s Lithuanian feral child at this point.45 The bear-boy, though lacking speech, was nevertheless human, but human in an unnatural state. His reason lay suppressed by his sensation, buried under some bear-like instinct. But, though suppressed, there always remained a human reason because the child’s instincts were never fully those of a bear. Again, Herder emphasized, such a case was an exception. Herder’s real interest was not in whether the isolated individual was capable of inventing language alone but in language as a social phenomenon. To an even greater degree than Condillac, Herder emphasized the role of society in shaping the human mind. Could men, left to their natural abilities, invent language for themselves? Yes, Herder said in answer to the first part of the Berlin Academy question, and indeed they necessarily must. J. G. Hamann, “the magus of the north” and an acquaintance of Herder from his student days in Königsberg, objected specifically to this conclusion by Herder. Retreating to the position of Aristotle, Hamann asserted that only in society could there be communication and language. The man outside of the polis was either beast or god— but he was not human.46 Herder himself teetered on the brink of individual and society. His first section discussed the abstract individual Man, and had he stopped writing there, he would not have won the prize. It was his second section, on language in society, that, though not entirely innovative, articulated a view that was gaining widespread currency in the 1770s: that concepts like reason, freedom, language, communication, humanity, were meaningful only in the context of society and history. Moreover, the individual participated only in a particular society and in a particular history. His language was the language of a particular tribe, and his notion of truth was a particular truth. It was commonly held that, in contrast to animals, babies were helpless at birth. Actually, babies were far from helpless. From the first moment of sensation, the cognitive power began to form. If it was true that without signs (Merkwort) the understanding could not accomplish the simplest operation, it was also the case that from the first moment the power of reflection began to operate, and the person’s internal dialogue began. From his first moment the child was human, not animal, and everything in his nature impelled him toward language. The chain of thoughts was a chain of words. Herder declared that there was no distinction between thought and word. Words were not merely the

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traces or symbols of thought but were the medium of thought itself.47 The reader will see a contradiction here in the equation of language and thought. How could an infant possess that characteristically human power, cognition, without language? Earlier, Herder said that an infant’s cries were not human language but animal, yet he insisted that humans and animals were categorically different. Is this mere sloppiness, caused perhaps by Herder’s composing the essay in haste, or were his thoughts on the subject of language not fully developed? And how much of his argument depended on Condillac, whom he attempted to refute? Some of these objections can be addressed by looking at his argument further. It was true, certainly, that the infant at birth was weak. That weakness was by design. Because of their weakness, children were compelled to learn to speak, and the family was charged with educating children in the most basic and essential of all human capacities, language. The family gave the child much more than language, imparting also the individual’s identity and making him or her part of the group. Herder took it as a natural law that “man is by destiny a creature of the herd, of society” the family being the most basic social unit.48 Rousseau had said that the child had more to say to his mother than the mother to the child.49 Herder countered that by teaching children language the family’s manner of thinking and set of values were developed and preserved. The education of the human race occurred in the bosom of the family. “Why does the mute child so weakly and unwittingly depend on his mother’s breasts and his father’s knee? So that he might be hungry for learning and learn language. He is weak so that his race may be strong.”50 The treasury of the family heritage was preserved through the family language. As the clan expanded into a tribe, it celebrated the deeds of its forefathers. All heroic poetry, Germanic, Ossian, and Homer, Herder wrote, was tribal in origin, that is, familial. Herder liked to think of the human race as a progressive whole sharing a common origin, with all languages linked through the “chain of culture.”51 Each person was a link between two others, parent to child. In this way humanity formed a single unit. This extraordinary plan provided for the education of the human race. If language were innate, the great house of humanity would crumble into rubble. Humanity would be pitiable indeed if each individual brought his own little language into the world and then took it to the grave. Like the

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animals, nothing would be invented. Humanity would have no plan, no history.52 In this manner, one could conceive of all languages as being related, in their purpose if not in their structure. Herder distrusted linguists who created genealogies of language, saying they missed the point: “Languages plant and cultivate themselves along with the human race,” or as Barnard translated it, “Language transmission is inseparable from the general development of human society.” Humanity was bound into a whole according to its purpose, even if the existence of an original human pair could not be empirically verified. One could think of human language, in its purpose, as essentially constructed in a single manner also. In insisting on the unity of humanity, Herder did not have any utopian vision of world peace. A myriad of factors drove families apart: environment, climate, social customs, and practices. Tribal rivalries did not begin as territorial disputes or quarrels over hunger or thirst. They were ignited by a much hotter spark, jealousy, a sense of honor, and pride. Some family trait when turned inward strengthened the unity of the tribe; when turned outward against another group, it sharpened competition and fostered the opinion that “whoever is not of us is beneath us.” One could observe this in the languages of Rome, the ancient Near East, and Ossian. The eleventh chapter of Genesis preserved the memory of discord among the nations as the cause of language confusion. The scattering of the nations was due not to slow migration or other environmental or developmental factors but violence. Barnard translated this passage as: In short, variations in language among nations are not wholly, or even mainly, attributable to such external circumstances as climate or geographical distance, but largely to internal factors such as dispositions and attitudes arising from relations between families and nations. Conflict and mutual aversion, in particular, have greatly favoured the emergence of language differentiation.53

Barnard’s translation is very clear and appealing, but it is not what Herder said. Herder’s language is strong, short, and sharp: Briefly [put]! the basis for the difference [between] such small, neighboring peoples in language, manner of thinking, and mode of life is— mutual family and national hatred.54

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Linguists and etymologists, wrote Herder, would do well to remember the deep discord between nations before relating the languages too closely to one another. The brief history of humanity that Herder presented in the Essay on the Origin of Language was a thought experiment, conjectural history.55 He acknowledged that he had only plausibility on his side, not real data. Already, however, as we shall see in the next few chapters, Herder and like-minded scholars had begun to collect that data. Language, Cognition, and Culture, 1770s–1780s Shortly after Herder’s essay, in the late 1770s, the ideas of culture and cultural history transformed the origin of language discussion. On this point, the publication history of Karl Franz von Irwing’s Knowledge and Inquiries on Man is instructive.56 Not only can we observe the development of Irwing’s own thought, but his four-volume work documents the changing agenda of linguistics and the emergence of a cultural approach to the philosophy of mind between 1772 and 1785. Although he was an educator and a civil servant for the Prussian court in Berlin, Irwing initially approached his topic as if he were a physician, paying particular attention to physical processes and anatomy.57 His approach was similar to that of a more famous work by Ernst Platner published in the same year as Irwing’s work, 1772. Platner will be discussed in terms of anthropology in Chapter 7, but linguistics and anthropology were so closely linked in the eighteenth century that the two (from our perspective) sciences were investigated by the same individual and, moreover, in the same work. Platner’s anthropology fused together body and mind in order to investigate the two-way exchange between physical perceptions and mental cognition (in one direction) and the will or emotional affects and physical response (in the other). On this basis, Platner, too, discussed the origin of language. But because Platner’s model of the human being was abstracted into an ideal Man, of which all particular men and women were specimen exemplars, we in the twenty-first century would consider the topic neither linguistics nor anthropology but psychology. Irwing is of interest here because, although he started out along the same lines as Platner, discussing the inseparability of body and mind,

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Irwing made a sharp and demonstrable turn toward culture in the late 1770s while Platner did not. Even more radical in his epistemology than Hume, Irwing argued that all mental activity began with physical stimulation. The most basic information entered the mind through the five senses. Of a slightly higher order were those sensations that were internally generated, such as hunger, thirst, and fear. There was nothing particularly human about these kinds of thoughts since animals experienced all these sensations and more. Irwing acknowledged the long history of the philosophical problem of the differences between humans and animals. New information about the world from explorers and naturalists did not yield an obvious answer as to exactly why the line should fall between the orangutan and the wild man of Borneo. Philosophically and theologically the answer was obvious, but to an empiricist taking a hard look things were murkier than one might expect. At the conclusion of the first edition in 1772, Irwing punted and followed Reimarus’s massive Thoughts on Animal Instincts, concluding that man was a rational animal.58 But he was not satisfied with that answer. When Irwing took up the work again a few years later, he devoted half of the second volume to the differences between humans and animals. In 1777 it was still not clear whether the difference lay in the human mind or in the organization of the body. Helvetius had attributed the difference to the human hand (opposable thumb), which was particularly well suited to sense perception, whereas others had traced the difference to the brain and nerves, or to the intentional will. Still others had claimed that the difference lay in consciousness and apperception. Irwing even briefly toyed with the notion of reincarnation, since some had contended that the souls of animals, like those of humans, progressed toward ever more perfect stages.59 He concluded that will and understanding, not physical formation, were probably the root of the difference.60 Ultimately, Irwing landed on the side of mental activity as the defining characteristic of humanity. “Reason” was not precise enough, however. Just as he organized sensation under different categories, Irwing also considered the different types of mental activity in order of complexity: the role of language, consciousness, attention, thought, memory, imagination, and understanding. Once again, animals experienced these mental activities, at least in some rudimentary level. The

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capacity to produce abstract concepts, generated by the mind’s own internal activity, he decided, was what separated a person from an animal. Yet, abstract concepts themselves were not innate to human beings. A person had to learn to think. By nature, human beings possessed the potential to work with abstract concepts, but the concepts themselves developed only slowly over time and in society. Unless a person actually developed the mental abilities of which he or she was capable, the person remained little different from an animal. Through 1777 Irwing was hardly on the cutting edge of European anatomy, psychology, or philosophy. His method was to explore human nature using the model of the abstract individual. His work was derivative of numerous scholars whom he opted not to cite, and even then it barely reflected the state of the art. In 1779, however, Irwing achieved a breakthrough by linking the development of mind to the development of culture. Now he shifted his exploration to the reciprocal relationship between individual cognition and society. By the time he completed the final volume in 1785, the individual had faded to the background, subordinated to society. The individual was predicated on society; his capabilities reflected the achievement of society. Irwing saw culture to be the product of mind in the collective, but the individual mind was a product of culture. Irwing transformed his inquiry into human nature into an inquiry into human culture. In the 1779 volume, Irwing took a major step in his work on human cognition when he linked individual cognition with social development. In that volume he also began to use the term Kultur for the first time. In developing his concept of culture, Irwing established some principles of human social development. First, social life, which characterized human existence, could only occur through many people working toward a common goal (the commonwealth). Culture was therefore something that could be spoken of only in terms of whole nations or the entire human race. Individual people only received an education commensurate with the stage of culture of the nation in which they lived and were raised. And education only rarely reached even this level. Usually, the education of an individual lagged somewhere behind the degree of culture that the nation as a whole had achieved.61 Second, as human culture developed, humanity acquired greater knowledge and insight into the relationships between things. Deeper

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knowledge and understanding in turn enabled humanity to experience the world with greater sensitivity. Increased sensitivity aided the acquisition of knowledge and allowed a fuller enjoyment of the present. By Irwing’s definition, culture had two purposes: the development and perfection of human mental abilities in themselves; and the use of those mental abilities to improve the human condition in both the present and the future, that is to say, to increase human comfort and pleasure.62 Human cognition and feelings, Irwing argued, worked in tandem. As one developed, so did the other, and until one developed, the other remained at a primitive, animal-like stage. Once cultural development began, it progressed at an increasingly rapid rate, but until it began, humanity remained trapped in the vicious circle, language and cognition each lacking the other as Condillac and Herder agreed. Accordingly, Irwing divided human progress into four stages. The first stage he considered to be precultural, in which humanity led an existence hardly different from that of the animals and was dominated by the physical environment. Culture itself began when humanity became selfconscious (Selbstgefühl), discovering abstract concepts such as time and developing language. That was stage two. Stage three was marked by the emergence of private property, and stage four by the flowering of the arts and sciences.63 The term culture emerged in the late 1770s. As already noted, it was in 1779 that Irwing used the term Kultur for the first time. In 1777 he did not know the word. Also in 1777 J. N. Tetens, a philosopher who had also written on the origin of language, discussed human social development, cognition, and language in conjunction with the history of philosophy.64 He badly needed the concept of culture in that volume, but he did not have it. In 1777 Michael Denis defined Literaturgeschicht as “the history of the human spirit, the depiction of the origin of human knowledge.”65 Had he written two years later, he probably would have described Literaturgeschicht as Culturgeschicht. In 1782, Adelung used the term Cultur precisely in this context. When Irwing first used the term in 1779, he limited it to human cognition, that is, to mental activity. Most of that third volume of 1779 was a long essay on human culture, which functioned as a preface to an explanation of abstract concepts planned for the fourth volume. Irwing defined culture as the sum of all improvements of human capabilities and

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powers. Culture, that is, was the perfection of humanity, the highest degree to which humankind could be elevated above its original primitive condition. The more human capabilities were developed through culture, the more distance humanity put between itself and the animals. Culture was both the goal and the means by which humanity was raised ever more above the animals. The term culture was therefore limited to the improvement of those capabilities that separated humans from animals and that contributed to human progress; that is, culture could only be attributed to mental abilities (Geisteskräfte). “Every other kind of development which does not contribute directly to human understanding and mental abilities, I do not consider to be culture, even though they have their own importance,” wrote Irwing.66 The proximate goal of any kind of human culture consisted of the expansion, improvement, and perfection of human mental abilities. For Irwing culture was human perfection itself and the process toward that perfection. Adelung By 1780, the approach to the origin of language had changed. No longer was the cognitive process in the abstract individual the focus of inquiry, but rather the emphasis now lay on the development of society and the mental ability of the nation as a whole. Already in 1772, Herder was less interested in the original formation of language than in its social manifestation, and the next wave of research in language was even less concerned with individual processes. When J. C. Adelung developed his comparative linguistics from 1780 to the turn of the century, he emphasized the external influences on actual linguistic forms more than the internal processes of thought.67 He paid only lip service to the question of cognition, acknowledging that to speak was to express ideas, that ideas came from sensations either internal or external, that animals and humans alike could express internal sensations, but only people could express ideas about the world around them. Expression of external sensations required reflection (Besonnenheit), and with that he dismissed the matter, referring the reader to Herder. Adelung’s real interest was in society.68 Linguistic structure suggested to Adelung that language was a human creation, not divine. Contrary to what Süßmilch and Henry Home Lord Kames maintained, it would require a whole series of mir-

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acles to explain a divine origin of language and innate ideas.69 But miracles explained nothing—neither what man was nor how his mind and understanding developed. Without language man would not be human, and without some degree of developed language he would not be rational man. Did that mean that before man had language he was inhuman? As animal this son of nature had the capacity for willful movement, and even with out clear concepts he instinctively cared for his needs. But even more, as animal he also had the capacity to discover language and therefore also the ability to develop the bud of reason that lay within him.70

Man was created with the capability and organization (Fähigkeit und Anlage) for all things, but in no way was he created with any amount of education or development. Herder is frequently credited with forming the idea of “national character,” but he was only one of a group of scholars who explored national identity, culture, and language. Maupertuis had noted that “the study of language is important not only for the influence of language on human knowledge, but also because in the construction of languages one can recover traces of the first steps of the human spirit.”71 By examining the jargon of savage peoples, modern eloquent nations could better understand the history of their own spirit. Many of the signs moderns continued to use were unwittingly derived from ancient prejudices. Once an idea was attached to such a sign, it was fixed for life. Signs might have been arbitrary, but they bore lasting consequences. Adelung agreed. The key to understanding humanity in its earliest stages was the history of language, particularly of those languages that were more or less “pure,” unaltered by words and ideas borrowed from neighboring nations. “Unless it is fortunate enough to have preserved its language from the beginning pure and uncorrupted, a nation has nothing to show from these levels of its education and knowledge other than the raw components of its words.”72 Adelung and Maupertuis agreed that initially a nation’s language was simple, governed by the primitive, sensate condition in which the nation lived. Maupertuis would have agreed when Adelung said that a nation in the primitive, sensate condition could only with difficulty transcend the boundary of sensory objects. It could not inquire into fine concepts and abstract ways of thinking. Maupertuis believed the first ideas that were linked

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to signs in the primitive state remained in the language and in the nation’s spirit. New expressions depended heavily on the first ideas that served as its foundation.73 Adelung went a step further, saying that language was the expression of a nation’s ideas and that the nation could express only those ideas found in its language.74 Modern scholars lived in a highly refined civil society, but the first beginnings of culture lay shrouded in a dark age. Little was known of that stage. Only fable and allegory remained of the prehistoric past, and even these already indicated a certain degree of culture.75 Clearly, knowledge and language increased in step with each other, but the conundrum of origins made it very difficult to understand the first stages of humanity. Natural man was trapped in a vicious circle, lacking language without organized knowledge and lacking clear concepts without language. Because of the difficulty of inventing that first sign, Condillac had suggested that all human languages were descended from a single source. That argument was gradually replaced by the idea that indigenous languages were formed in the nation’s earliest stages and were inextricably tied to the land, environment, and original character of the nation. Language was not created intentionally or at leisure, but the need for language was tied to human nature and the tendency toward social life.76 It was not invented by insightful or knowledgeable people but by the simple, raw, sensate “son of nature” as he came from the hands of the Creator. Rather than speculating about what life was like for the “son of nature,” Adelung rejected conjectural history in favor of real historical data. No model language existed on which others were based. There were only particular languages, rooted in the natural environment and in a nation’s customs and culture.77 For the rest of his career Adelung collected grammar books, lexica, and travel reports about world languages, compiling them in a massive four-volume work that compared the Lord’s Prayer in 500 world languages.78 To be sure, some nations were related to each other, but from the oldest times the nations had been so thoroughly mixed that there was little point in inquiring into their common origin. Language was the most important symbol of a nation’s uniqueness. One could alter a nation’s customs, manners, even its religion, and the nation would remain the same. Remove its language, though, and everything changed. The Wends, for example, the Slavic tribe that lived between the Elbe and Oder rivers, had

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ceased to exist as soon as they assimilated the German language. They became indistinguishable from the Germans. A common language did not necessarily indicate a common national origin, but language was the chief means by which a nation preserved its ideas and identity.79 English, for example, was a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Briton, modified by Norman and French. Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian all were combinations of indigenous languages with Latin, and Latin itself was an amalgam of Ligurian, Pelasgoi, Hellenic, Etruscan, and Trojan, a family he would later call “Thracian.”80 To dig into the prehistoric past toward a nation’s origins using the study of language, one needed a language that was unencumbered by loan-words and retained much of its original character. The Saxon Adelung argued that German was one such fortunate language. The German language was one of the few that had managed to retain its ancient “purity.” “At least in the time since the Germanic peoples left the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas it has been mixed with no other language. German therefore is one of the most fruitful for inquiring into the first seeds of our knowledge.”81 It had managed to enrich its treasures internally rather than “begging” from outside. That fact made the German language interesting for study and also explained why the Germans’ neighbors was considered the language barbarous. Most German scholars also thought that Hebrew, the oldest language of which traces were accessible to eighteenth-century scholars, was another pure language. Adelung pointed out that Moses wrote a good three thousand years after the origin of language, even by traditional reckoning. Given that in the single millennium from Moses to Ezra, the Hebrew nation went through all the stages of culture—from nomadic migrants to a blossoming monarchy to destruction—the distance from the beginning to Moses was unfathomable. Digging through the linguistic past to uncover the original character of nations was arduous in the extreme. Nevertheless, it was by uncovering the nation’s linguistic and cultural origins that one could understand most clearly the nation’s character and the reason its development had followed the path it did.82 By the 1770s, it had become clear that speculation and philosophical conjecture had yielded as much information about the primitive human past and the origin of human language and cognition as it ever

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would. To make further progress in uncovering the development of the human mind, scholars would have to investigate the specific languages of particular historical nations. Already by the 1770s and the advent of the term culture as a tool for social analysis, philologists had begun that investigation. Indeed, under the rubric of philology and humanism, they had been inquiring into the mind of the ancients for centuries. They had developed a battery of techniques for wringing out of ancient texts more information than their authors had ever intended to put there. In the next three chapters, we will look in greater depth at how the eighteenth century imagined the first steps of the human mind. It was in these early stages of national existence that the national character was formed. National character was another black box in which the essence of a people group was forged. Could this black box be opened? Philologists employed a variety of new methods and ancient texts to attempt just that.

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scholars could discover the original character of a nation through the history of language, another set of scholars believed they could accomplish the same task through the study of myth. C. G. Heyne (1729–1812) was a principal representative of mythology as a cultural expression and for half a century ran the premier philological seminar in Europe, educating dozens of students who spread his methods to schools and universities throughout Germany. Heyne believed that scholars could discover the conditions of life and thought of the earliest stages of human society through rigorous study of ancient texts, augmented by the observations of contemporary travelers. Heyne’s chief interest was a better understanding of Homer, but he intended his method to be applied in other fields as well, especially to Old Testament scholarship. His gateway to the mind-set of primitive humanity was mythology.

IF ADELUNG THOUGHT

Art and Myth as the Gateway to the Primitive Mind In the attempt to make antiquity live again, Europeans in the early modern period surrounded themselves with ancient mythology. They placed statues of gods and goddesses in their gardens and on public monuments; their walls they adorned with paintings featuring nymphs and satyrs; their architecture they modeled on ancient temples. None of this meant that anyone actually believed in the ancient deities any more. Humanism was about the veneration of antiquity, not of the 105

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gods themselves. The early Church Fathers had once contended that pagan oracles possessed real power to heal and to foretell the future, a power imparted by the devil, but even this power had passed away with the coming of Christ. To Neoplatonists and Christian Stoics, the myths stood as allegories that conveyed ancient wisdom and examples of virtue. To Neo-Epicureans, who acknowledged the existence of only material things, myths stood as tragic evidence of the ignorance of the masses. In The History of Oracles (1686), Fontenelle presented the thesis that the appearance of healing and divining was not of the devil but of conniving priests who conspired to deceive the masses in order to promote their own authority. The oracles were entirely fraudulent. They did not die with the advent of Christ, but people continued to believe in them until Constantine’s edict of toleration and Theodosius’s destruction of the temples. The ignorance of the masses was a powerful social force, wrote Fontenelle, and their tendency to superstition was easily exploited by impostors. Only the action of civil authorities curbed priestly excess. Fontenelle did not pretend that these ideas were his own. He derived his History of Oracles from a much weightier book by Anthony van Dale, De oraculis veterum ethnicorum (Amsterdam, 1683), which included descriptions of specific oracles and concluded that all were fake. Van Dale claimed that evil spirits, demons, and the devil could have no influence in the material world. Human beings could not be possessed, either in antiquity or in modernity, and modern medicine had disproved all recent cases of demon possession. There was no such thing as magic. Witch trials were a sham. And while there had been rational philosophers in antiquity—Cynics, Epicureans, Skeptics, Academics, Peripatetics—ultimately, they were overwhelmed by the force of popular superstition. It was a thesis drawn from contemporary experience.1 The Epicurean theory of myth as imposture was the most fashionable school of thought through the middle of the eighteenth century, not least owing to its scandalous exposure of authority. By the late eighteenth century, much of the luster associated with the imposture thesis had worn off. Certainly, one could still run afoul of the censors by espousing such a view, but the skeptical explanation had never been very satisfying. Was humanity really so stupid, so easily duped, that the entire edifice of pagan mythology was concocted and perpetuated by

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priests and rulers? If so, how could one explain the current age of light in Europe, and what prospects did that leave for the future? As travel reports continued to arrive from around the world, over the course of the century it had become clear that reverence for the supernatural was a universal feature of humanity. Myth existed even among societies that lacked priests and rulers to concoct it. It must have served some other purpose. Even Fontenelle retreated to a more intellectually tenable position later in life. In The Origin of Fables (1724), he offered a psychological explanation of myth. Myths, fables, and belief in miracles, he stated, were due to the ignorance of people in the primitive state. “The more ignorant one is and the less experience one has, the more miracles one will see. The first men saw plenty of them.”2 The Greeks originally lived in a condition as savage as that of native Americans, and he believed that moderns erred in their “blind respect for antiquity.”3 Although “the first men had given birth to fables more or less innocently,” eventually those falsehoods were built into a system, and Fontenelle tried to show how people had “taken pleasure in deceiving themselves. . . . So let us not look for anything in the fables except the history of the errors of the human mind,” he concluded.4 Skeptics like Fontenelle and stricter philologists like Heyne shared certain assumptions about the nature and function of myth, but the purposes behind the two groups’ study of myth were different. The skeptics aimed at a social critique of the role played by Christianity in European society. They pointed out the detrimental aspects of myth, paganism, and superstition. The philologists were also concerned with superstition in European beliefs, and they tried to elevate their students toward enlightenment through the study of antiquity. But their approach to myth was governed by a deeper interest in human nature generally than that of the skeptics and therefore the role that myth—a universal feature of humanity—played in the development of society and national identity. Much of the philological tradition, carried on by serious and patient (if pedantic) scholars, working deeply with texts and hermeneutics, was opposed to the left wing of the Enlightenment, what Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel call the “Radical Enlightenment.” The Cambridge classicist Richard Bentley specifically opposed Deists and “free thinkers” in England. The Amsterdam classicists Tiberius Hemsterhuys, L. C. Valckenaer, and David Ruhnken remained aloof

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from the politicized religious debates in the Netherlands. At the University of Göttingen, where many of the students were the very nobility against whom the radicals vented their critiques, C. G. Heyne taught his students to read myths for the insight they revealed into the emergence of human societies from the primitive condition. Heyne undertook a revisionist critique of the radical view that dismissed myth as mere fable. Modern authors such as van Dale and Fontenelle treated myths with contempt—at best as pagan superstition and ignorance, or at worst as premeditated fictions and intentional falsehoods. Heyne understood myth to be more complicated than that. Myths were not chiefly about the supernatural and inciting fear in the masses. Rather, they were “sayings” (Sage) that conveyed the wisdom of a nation. They contained all kinds of knowledge. Through his career of more than forty-five years, Heyne repeated to his audiences and students that the history and the philosophy of the first people were contained in their mythology. “I keep pointing out,” he wrote in two languages in the 1780s, “that all philosophy and history of ancient peoples proceeds from myths.”5 Through myth a people remembered events or ideas in a form that was historical and at the same time characterized by a rich pictorial and imaginative manner of thought and expression.6 If one wanted to reconstruct the history of humanity, said Heyne, he could only do so—for the prehistoric periods— by studying myth. Mythology was relevant to two areas of study that Heyne believed scholars had overlooked. First, myths preserved remnants of the expressions and figures of speech of a nation in its preliterate, prehistoric stages. By the time myths were written down in the form received by posterity through Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and pseudo-Apollodorus, the myths were already in a late form. Myths emerged long before writing, and for generations, perhaps centuries, they were handed down through the oral medium of song and poetry. By studying figures of speech, one could learn about the literary and linguistic style of the early Greek poets before the development of writing. Second, mythology embodied the oldest sayings of wisdom in the national memory. Heyne believed the study of mythic sayings and fables would reveal the mind-set of a nation in its earliest stages. To emphasize the breadth of knowledge preserved in myth, Heyne classified myths into two broad categories: historical and philosophical.

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Historical myths recalled the origin of a nation and the events that constituted its collective experience. Philosophical myths expressed the nation’s identity and its relationship to nature and the gods. In both cases, their purpose was to preserve memory and wisdom. “It has just been shown how dissimilar and diverse those things are that fall under the category of myth. Some are of a philosophical type, others historical. They are the judgments and opinions of the human mind. They are the activity [ludibria] of the mind and the senses.”7 Myths concealed (or, better, carried) the judgments, opinions, ideas, and sensibility of ancient peoples. The task of the philologist was to uncover the hidden core of mythology in order to discover the character of the nation that produced the mythology. Each nation or people (Volk) had its own body of mythology that existed from the earliest beginnings of the nation. Contained within the national mythology were stories about the birth of the world or the origin of the nation, that is, the ideas that gave the nation a sense of unity and identity. The story of Romulus and Remus raised by a she-wolf, for example, was a typical myth of national origin. So, too, the book of Genesis described the creation of the world by an almighty God and the beginning of the nation of Israel in the covenant between that same almighty God and Abraham. Heyne hoped that through the study of literature and the humanities scholars could come to understand the ancients with greater subtlety, which might result in a better interpretation of ancient sacred scripture.8 Why did myths emerge in the first place? Heyne believed the answer lay in early social institutions, religions, and literature. First, one must look to their notion of the divine sources of natural phenomena: neither their minds nor their explanations of natural phenomena were sophisticated.9 The foundation of the causes of all mythology, Heyne believed, was ignorance: “Ignorance of nature and its causes must be understood as the basis of all mythology. . . . And the nature of the gods and heroes, as we see them in fables, was born of necessity.” That is, their construction was a direct result of the physical environment and the experiences of the first peoples.10 This conception of myth was closely allied to the understanding of human nature and cultural development used by the language theorists described in Chapter 2. Like Condillac and Maupertuis, Adelung and Herder, Heyne assumed that the earliest human condition was a

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sort of linguistic state of nature. In that primitive state, human beings possessed no abstract ideas but assimilated all information through the senses. Heyne believed that the origins of mythology were to be found in this linguistic state of nature, in the “infancy of the human race, when the force of mind had not yet achieved subtle thought and contemplation.” Human cognition in this very early stage was limited to what was perceived through the senses. Moreover, capable of considering only one thing at a time, primitive humans responded only to the strongest sensations. Heyne believed that myths developed as the result of three factors: “partly in human nature, partly in the instrument by which the human mind is formed and shaped (that is, in the nature and ratio of speech), and partly in the nature of external things, which had the greatest force in shaping them.”11 Of the three the physical environment exerted the greatest force, he thought, evoking the strongest sensations in primitive humanity. Heyne wrote that stimuli from the environment “floated before the senses of the people.” Elsewhere he described “nature pounding the senses.”12 The attention of primitive humanity was thus directed primarily at the physical world. As a result, Heyne believed that the origin of mythology must be sought in the physical environment. The ideas that a people developed concerning religion, philosophy, divinity, and morality ultimately could be traced to “caussis physicis.” “Among wild peoples and those who live a pastoral manner of life, there can be hardly any cognition except of what passes through the senses.”13 A primitive society’s first ideas referred to objects perceived by the senses. Initially, a society’s speech was limited to the physical environment that surrounded it. The sun, the elements, natural features like rivers, deserts, mountains, or forests determined the conditions of life for the earliest peoples, so it would have been natural for their vocabulary to have first described these things. Primitive man’s response to nature, said Heyne, reiterating the psychological theory of myth, consisted of two things: fear and wonder—fear of dangers from nature, wild animals, and perhaps other people, and wonder at the power of natural phenomena, particularly those that came from the sky—the sun, storms, the wind. The basic principle of primitive thought was fear and wonder at natural phenomena, and above all wonder at motion. Heyne was not sure of the exact mechanism, but he supposed

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that these qualities of nature were the source of what eventually developed into a kind of religious sense. Thus, primitive peoples developed a religion of fear and terror. In the words of Virgil, “Fear brought the first gods into the world.”14 Heyne noted that it was a European commonplace to suppose piously that the first religion proceeded from star gazing or worship of fire or the sun. But that assumption referred not to the sensibility of rude and uncultured people but to Europeans’ own sensibility. Kant might have been inspired by the starry heavens above and the moral law within, but he built on millennia of culture. Rude minds could not contemplate the heavens except for sudden eclipses of the sun and moon.15 Instead, the initial reaction of primitive peoples to nature was on a much lower level. All primitive religions were dependent on sense perception. The senses were concerned only with the effect of natural phenomena, not with the causes.16 Primitive people could only name the phenomenon, not the force that caused it. Struck by admiration and terror, people described the effects of nature in stories and wonder-filled fables. As a result, the titans, giants, and typhons were born and given names. The Greeks personified the phenomena of nature. When they philosophized about natural events, they described nature with the names of gods rather than naming nature itself.17 The language of the first peoples was grounded in the earliest circumstances of life, which became the first elements of their literature. Lacking a vocabulary that would enable them to make sophisticated abstractions, the first Greeks used a single name or word to refer to several things at once. For example, Heyne wrote that Jove originated among the Pelasgoi as a fertility fetish, but the idea of Jove could refer to many different things depending on the context.18 “Jove” meant the force of life, the annual cycle of seasons, any weather phenomenon, the sky, or any of a number of other effects of nature. Aeschylus defined Jove/Zeus as Zeus is the air, Zeus earth, and Zeus the sky, Zeus everything, and all that’s more than these.19

That is, language—abstraction in primitive language—was built not by forming new words, at least initially, but by applying existing words (in this case a name, Jove) to natural phenomena. Zeus/Jove therefore was much more than a character in mythological cycles as described by the

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poets, that is, the slinger of thunderbolts, the philandering spouse of Hera, and the victor over the titans. These specific tales were relatively late developments. Earlier, Zeus/Jove had been the explanation and description of the sky and natural phenomena coming from the sky at a time when the Pelasgoi language lacked other terms for meteorological effects. In this plurality of meanings, Heyne found that Zeus was comparable to the deities of other peoples, such as the Libyan Amon and the Egyptian Serapis. Other peoples adopted the idea of Jove, most notably the Cretans. Poets eventually turned the popular idea of Jove into the god Jupiter. Thus, a spiritual idea could alternately refer to a fetish, an object, a force of nature, and a personality within the classical pantheon. Heyne’s goal was to take what had been written down by Homer, Hesiod, pseudo-Apollodorus, Pindar, and other poets and determine what ideas, like “Jove,” ultimately lay behind the stories that became the poetic mythology of the ancient Greeks. Mythical ideas emerged long before writing, and the most effective way for a nation to remember its sayings was through song. Myths strung together in songs were passed down from one generation to the next. These songs acted as the nation’s first literature, which were composed in a “mythic style.”20 Lacking the vocabulary to speak abstractly in their poems, people in a mythic stage compensated by using allegories and imagery in their songs. Hence, many stories were filled with references to physical and natural events. [The mythic age] did not possess an adequate vocabulary. Lacking suitable words, mythology took refuge in metaphors and similes. It readily accepted allegories and figures of speech, and it was outfitted with all kinds of magnificent and outrageous ornamentation. It even changed into fable and myth those things that seem easy and accessible when they are considered by composed and sober minds.21

The only way the confused minds of the first people could explain the sensations they experienced was through speech (sermo), and their minds labored to find new words to express their sensations more precisely. Because of their limited vocabulary and limited cognitive ability, their expressions were more forceful (less subtle) than those of the present. Relying on the eye of the mind, they augmented the meanings of their few words with physical gestures. One could still observe people in this stage in North America. Explorers reported that some

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primitive societies encountered since the sixteenth century used the same kind of overstated metaphoric language in place of nuanced abstraction. Lacking suitable vocabulary, native Americans used emphasis rather than abstraction, action rather than contemplation. Only as a language developed over time did a nation invent an increasingly sophisticated vocabulary to express abstract ideas. From these very principles and elements, as the life of men was cultivated, speech became more polished. They became accustomed to allegory, tropes, the first metaphors, and figures of speech. Stories (apologi), the Aesop’s fables, and parables had their place here. Other kinds of simile and comparison were invented as well.22

Their lives dominated by sensory experience, the first peoples developed myths that were inextricably bound to the place in which they lived. Myths were tied to the land, and they reflected the collective experience of the tribe or nation in that land. How nature manifested itself to the nation—through fire, famine, floods, or consistently bountiful land and mild climate—played a large role in determining the national mind-set (what Herder would later call the national character) and as a result the national memory that was preserved in the national mythology. The Greeks, for example, had joyous festivals, in contrast to the Phoenicians and Syrians who developed religions of fear and severity, with evil demons in their public cults.23 The sources of a people’s mythology, which preserved its collective experience and mind-set, was bound up with the physical place the people occupied in its earliest days. From these myths a people derived its national identity, its sense of patriotism, its understanding of who it had been and where it had come from. The mythological origins of ancient religion were the work of neither God nor any specific human genius. Human genius was a result, not a cause, of mythology and early religion. The structures of and influences on human life shaped religion, but the initial shaping was not the result of any conscious human activity. To find the unconscious, yet human, forces that produced first myth, then religion, and finally the national genius was the goal of Heyne’s philology. In his search for those forces, the philologist could not limit his study to the Homers, Hesiods, or Pindars of antiquity— that is, the best of the poets. Rather, one had to understand the

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common mind-set, the audience to which the poets addressed themselves. One had to know the body of fables possessed by the common memory and the common, nonpoetic speech to which the poets constantly alluded in their figures of speech and metaphors. One could not see clearly unless one understood the manner of ancient common speech and of making fables. It was not easy to understand Oedipus, for example, unless one knew the other poets in Sophocles’s age and the body of fables they had to draw upon. “If we hold that fables are merely mind games,” Heyne taught, “then ours is a wretched lot, having lost a good part of that age by fleeing ‘trifles.’ ”24 Literary scholars had to develop a new approach to the mental power of imagination. To learn to read deeply required training far beyond linguistic virtuosity. The good reader had to develop his sense of good taste, which increased his sensitivity to the subtleties of myth and language.25 For Heyne the stories that Homer and Hesiod told were not simply fictitious fables invented by the poets for the amusement or edification of their audiences. Rather, myths were the archives of national memory, the vehicle by which historical events and philosophic truths were handed down from one generation to the next. Myths were the necessary vehicle of expression for the first efforts of the human mind. Gaining access to the primitive Greek mind was no simple task. It required a thorough and precise command of the Greek language, which was not easy to acquire in the first half of the eighteenth century. It required reliable texts, free from scribal errors and as complete as possible; as late as the 1770s, two crucial additions to Homer, hymns to Dionysus and Demeter, were discovered in Moscow.26 In addition to the rules and structure of Greek poetry, one needed a knowledge of the body of myths poets had to draw on in order to understand what the poets changed and what they left unsaid. They had to know in what form the poems were presented; Homer after all was illiterate, and the stories were passed down orally, although this was still a contentious proposition in the eighteenth century. More generally, one needed a basic understanding of Greek history, laws, customs, and manners, all of which differed from one polis to the next. In short, to gain access to the primitive Greek mind meant that one had to reconstruct the whole of Greek culture. This was the task philology set for itself in the eighteenth century, and it was the goal F. A. Wolf had in mind when he coined the term

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Altertumswissenschaft. The reconstruction of ancient culture was still the goal of classical philology in the twentieth century. In 1921 Wilamowitz described Greco-Roman culture as a unit and said that the task of philology was to make that past life live again through the power of science: “the song of the poet, the thoughts of the philosophers and lawgivers, the sacredness of the temples and the feelings of believers and unbelievers, the colorful bustle in the markets, at the harbor on land and sea, and the people at work and play.”27 Just as ancient life was a unit, so were the subdisciplines that contributed to its reconstruction, philology, archaeology, history, epigraphy, numismatics, and papyrology. All worked together to bring the ancient world back to life. Such a project, even if it had been ongoing in the two centuries since Joseph Scaliger would require an enormous amount of intellectual energy. It would require facility in two difficult languages that were not one’s own, to say nothing of collecting, cataloging, and interpreting the broken pieces, lost coins, and crumbling manuscripts scattered around the northern Mediterranean and across Europe. Why the effort? To understand what philologists in the eighteenth century—as well as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—were trying to accomplish, one needs to glimpse the importance placed on aesthetics. Aesthetics referred to the cultivation of good taste, the evidence of which was not limited to appreciation of art but included even the polite manners with which one carried oneself in daily life. Good taste—that is, the ability to recognize fine distinctions whether in visual art or in moral judgment—required a sensitivity of mind. When Irwing spoke about cultivating the feelings (see Chapter 2), he was talking about sensitivity and aesthetic taste. When Monboddo referred to the linguistic virtuosity required to draw fine distinctions between objects or ideas, he was talking about aesthetics. Aesthetics, sensitivity, the ability to perceive fine differences and to communicate them to others—this is what primitives lacked in the linguistic state of nature. This is what made modern people modern. Enlightenment was achieved when a nation reached a certain level of culture that enabled the people to recognize and appreciate the fine things in life—not just luxury but ideas, values, literature, and art. This is what distinguished cultivated people from primitives and barbarians. This is what made people human, or at any rate what brought them closer to the ultimate goal of Vollkommenheit.

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Winckelmann and the Greek Aesthetic Ever since his murder in Trieste in 1768, Johann Joachim Winckelmann has been credited with reawakening the humanistic spirit in Germany and founding the ideal of Altertumswissenschaft (the science of antiquity) that lay at the base of nineteenth-century German Bildung (education). Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller all celebrated Winckelmann’s description of Greek art as the height of human aesthetic achievement. F. A. Wolf also acknowledged Winckelmann’s contribution to aesthetics, partly as a way to pull credit from Heyne with whom Wolf had feuded. There were periodic Winckelmann revivals through the nineteenth century, and another revival in Weimar Germany that promoted classicism over decadent art and celebrated sport, fitness, health, and beauty.28 Heyne had argued that because a nation’s first experiences were derived from the geographical location in which it found itself, a nation’s earliest mythology was necessarily indigenous. This explanation of myth excluded the idea that mythology or paganism was translated to Greece from the Near East or Egypt, at least early on. Certainly, specific deities were translated in the course of commerce and other cultural exchange later in Greek history, and clearly the bulk of Roman mythology was demonstrably Greek or Near Eastern in origin, with the arrival of some cults that could be dated back to a specific moment. A generation later Gottfried Hermann and Friedrich Creuzer would engage in a public exchange of letters debating this very point, with Creuzer arguing in favor of translation and Hermann the indigenous perspective.29 But Heyne was interested in the earliest expressions of the Greek mind in order to learn what was characteristically Greek before that nation was laminated by influences from other people groups. If some stories or deities were foreign, Heyne tried to get behind those stories to see only the Greek ones. In doing so, the land and climate were important clues in determining what was Greek and what was barbarian. Winckelmann applied the same reasoning to art. Like myth, art emerged prior to writing, and also like myth it was closely connected to the gods. Greek art was often attributed to Egyptian origins, but if such were the case then an exact investigation of the relationship of Egyptian to Greek mythology would be required. The Greek gods, though in

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many ways similar to the Egyptian, took different names and different forms than their supposed forebears in Egypt. A plausible case could be made for the translation of art from Egypt to Greece, but Winckelmann did not buy it. The Greeks’ first monuments were not Egyptian-styled reliefs but unfinished stumps, logs, or square-cut stones. Pausanias related that a set of thirty such stones still stood in Phera in Achaia in the second century a.d. These simple columns were the initial representations of deities, such as Hera in Thespia and Artemis at Nas (Icaria), described by Clement of Alexandria (Exhortation to the Heathens), and the Artemis Patroa and Zeus Meilichios (a pyramid) that Pausanias had seen at Sicyon. Bacchus was worshipped in the form of a column, and Eros and the Graces were symbolized as stones. According to Plutarch, in Sparta Castor and Pollux were two parallel logs joined by a crossbar. This very ancient image was preserved in the zodiac symbol of Gemini (II). In time, heads were set on top of the columns, and again Pausanias (among others) attested to many still standing, including a Neptune at Tricoloni and a Zeus in Tegea (both in Achaia) and the Venus Urania at Athens. While the erecting of columns was widely attested to in the ancient Near East, the placing of heads atop columns seemed to have been a Greek innovation. Originally designed only to indicate gender, gradually the heads were given a youthful countenance, and later the columns took on human shape. Greek sculpture was born. Only after this indigenous art form was developed did the Greeks apply Egyptian techniques to their own. Like their art, the Greek aesthetic was indigenous. The beauty of Greek art consisted of the human form, and the models of physical beauty were the Greek people themselves—fit, slim, strong, and often seen nude. Their physical characteristics came from the land where they lived; even their facial structure was to a great extent shaped by the environment. The climate was on the warm side of temperate and sunny. The terrain of the Balkans, Asia, and the Aegean Islands, the air they breathed, the water they drank, and the food they ate all contributed to the shape of the Greek countenance.30 The Greeks cultivated their native beauty with physical exercise. Women placed statues of Apollo or Bacchus, Nereus, Narcissus, or Hyacinthus in their bedrooms so they might produce beautiful children. Even more important to the Greek aesthetic achievement than cultivation of their own beauty was their social constitution, their freedom.

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It was in the independent cities that art took hold and flourished. The earliest advances in Greek art were in Asia, where the climate was even more accommodating than the Balkans, but Lydian and Ionian art and culture declined following those tribes’ capture by the Persians. The Greek character resulted from their physical health and freedom, and especially their self-conscious appreciation of both. To Winckelmann the human figure, and particularly the human face, were the keys to developing aesthetic taste. It required beautiful faces on real people, awareness of that particular beauty and of the ideal, as well as execution of craft. Appreciation of the unclothed body and the clear depiction of joints and muscle represented evidence of aesthetic sensitivity as well, and again it required living models together with taste and execution.31 The artists’ “schools” were the arenas and gymnasia where young men wrestled, competed, and exercised nude. In Sparta the young women also played sports nude, or nearly so. To see this beautiful nudity daily heated the artists’ imagination, enabling them to appropriate the beauty of form as their own.32 One reason that fine art did not advance far in the ancient Near East, by contrast, was the cultural implications of nudity. Men did not go unclothed in the Near East, nor were they so represented in art—and women were never depicted in public monuments.33 Idolatry, the worshipping or honoring of statues, was an important factor in artistic development. The oldest statues were believed to have fallen from the gods themselves. Later, statues also honored heroes and victors of wars or the games. Near Eastern mythology never represented the gods in human form. Although some representations of Mithras were known from Rome, Winckelmann believed these were probably made in the imperial age by Greek or Roman artists.34 Even among the Greeks the only one of the goddesses—aside from the Graces and the personified Seasons—to be portrayed nude was the goddess of beauty, Venus. In the Medici Venus she stood as a delicate girl, postpubescent, her breasts and hips just developing. She displayed her breast with a hand but covered her groin. Winckelmann liked to imagine her undressing before the artist for the first time. Heyne preferred a literary explanation, Venus standing before Paris in the beauty pageant with Hera and Athena.35 Beauty was the highest purpose of art—not allegory, not the illustration of political power, not the commemoration of men or deeds, but beauty. Beauty consisted in form (the execution of individual parts)

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and proportion (the relationship between the parts). The beauty in Greek art lay in the definition of faces, muscles, and joints that depicted youth, strength, and health. The nude body was the most beautiful because it showed form and proportion. Aesthetic appreciation required awareness of beauty in addition to being surrounded by it.

Venus de’ Medici. (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photograph by Nicolò Orsi Battaglini. By permission of the Ministerio dei Beni e le Attività Culturali.)

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“Beauty is discovered through the senses,” wrote Winckelmann, “but it is recognized and grasped through the understanding.”36 Although different nations understood the ideal form differently, all agreed that beauty consisted of form. Ideal beauty was achieved when perfect agreement was reached between the creature and the end for which it was created—that is, the parts in perfect harmony with the whole. Such perfection was not attainable in any living individual. Each human body lacked something or was blemished in some way, but here was the source of idealization in Greek art: even if perfect beauty could not be achieved, at least people could conceive of that beauty in general. Beauty was like water, Winckelmann wrote, which tastes better the less it tastes. Like collecting fragmentary texts or shards of pottery, individual examples of beauty could be gathered and assembled that might supply one with the highest idea of human beauty.37 Greek art brought together unity and plurality and joined them in harmony. The form of the beautiful youth was like the unity of the sea surface, from a distance still and even like a mirror, though constantly in motion, the waves dancing.38 When Winckelmann spoke of imitating Greek art, he meant not just Greek sculpture but the whole of Greek life on which it was based, its health, strength, freedom, and beauty. Imitation was not about art; it was about culture. Historians of philology in the twentieth century credited Winckelmann as the first to appreciate fully Scaliger’s program of reconstructing ancient civilization. But Winckelmann was not a loner in the eighteenth century, and he certainly was not the first to discover Scaliger. Others had the same vision of bringing antiquity back to life through the study of texts. Winckelmann wanted to fulfill that vision through the study of art, but he was not the first to understand the importance of art for understanding antiquity. J. F. Christ had written on antiquities already in the 1720s, and from the 1730s onward he lectured on them at Leipzig, displaying items from his own cabinet that he had picked up in his travels to Italy, Holland, and England. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote Laokoon (1766) just after Winckelmann published his History of Ancient Art (1764), and no one doubts that Winckelmann inspired Lessing. But the juxtaposition of visual art and literature that is the heart of Lessing’s work was learned from Christ. It was Christ who, long before Weitzmann, taught art historians to look for the textual source of ancient iconography. It was Christ who sug-

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gested to Heyne that he imitate Scaliger and read the entire Greek and Latin corpus in chronological order, a challenge Heyne accepted so enthusiastically that for a year and a half he read day and night, sleeping only two nights a week before collapsing in a fever. Winckelmann’s nineteenth-century biographer acknowledged that it was Christ who introduced archaeology to the German university curriculum, combining philological, technical, and aesthetic analysis.39 Emphasizing the cultivation of good taste in the reading of both texts and art, Christ taught his students to recognize patterns of beauty in ancient art and literature, urging modern artists to emulate the ancients. That Christ apparently had no direct influence on Winckelmann, either personally or through his writing, is a clue that both were tapped into a deeper current in European society. Altertumswissenschaft, or the Reconstruction of Classical Antiquity Winckelmann argued that without thorough knowledge of the whole of ancient art and literature one could not hope to gain a correct understanding of individual monuments. Heyne taught that myth could be understood only when one grasped the whole of Greek poetry, thereby comprehending the various meanings and implications of any given myth. So, too, in the strict study of texts did one require a thorough grounding in the whole of Greek literature, philosophy, history, and law in order to understand a figure as central to Greco-Roman and European culture as Plato. In the early 1750s, the professor of Greek at the University of Leiden, Tiberius Hemsterhuys, gave a German expatriate and student of his, David Ruhnken, the assignment of editing a short and obscure text purportedly by the Sophist Timaeus.40 This was not the famous Platonic dialogue of Timaeus that served as the basis of Platonic cosmology, but a glossary of Platonic terms and phrases. Montfaucon had edited it before. A transcript of the Paris manuscript was procured through a canon in Norwich, and Ruhnken set to work. Earlier, Hemsterhuys had given L. C. Valckenaer a similar exercise of editing the early second-century a.d. Alexandrian grammarian Ammonius (not to be confused with the third-century Ammonius Saccas), a short work On the Differences of Synonymous Expressions. Ruhnken produced an edition of such astonishing

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learning that in the mid-1750s Hemsterhuys applied the same pedagogical technique to his other advanced students. Johann Pierson and J. S. Bernard edited lexica of the Attic dialect, and Gisbert Koen edited Gregory of Corinth’s De dialectis.41 In each case the Greek language was not considered to be monolithic; that is, it varied from one location to the next, and it developed over time. Hemsterhuys figured the exercise would be a good way for his students to showcase their knowledge of Greek and their erudition in the classics, in addition to making a minor contribution to scholarship. And if the completed product was worthy, perhaps it might bring the editor a little bit of notoriety. Ruhnken had been a virtuoso student ever since his days at the Königsberg gymnasium where he had organized a reading group with some classmates, including Immanuel Kant and G. D. Kypke. J. A. Ernesti, the great classicist of Leipzig, had been so impressed with Ruhnken’s Latin work that he sent Ruhnken to study Greek with Hemsterhuys. Hemsterhuys was as impressed with Ruhnken as he was with his other star student, L. C. Valckenaer, and so the three worked closely together until Hemsterhuys’s death in 1766. Ruhnken’s Platonic Lexicon of Timaeus was not a philosophical work.42 Like the lexica edited by Hemsterhuys’s other students, it was a brief glossary of vocabulary whose entries were explained purely in terms of grammar. Not a work of erudition in itself, the Lexicon did not refer to other texts but simply explained the usage of words and phrases. As a reference work, it was very useful for understanding many commonplaces in Plato. As leisurely reading for the untrained eye, it had the potential to be deathly boring. Latin authors of the imperial age could not be fully understood unless one had read Cicero, who exerted a profound impact on subsequent Latin literature. Nor could one understand the Church Fathers unless one had read the sacred Scripture that informed the basis of their ideas. So with Plato and other Greek literature: one could not correctly grasp their ideas—whether philosophy or mythic stories— unless one knew the corpus of texts that educated Greeks learned as children and read at home. The way those authors were read and understood, the significance implicit in specific terms and turns of phrase—these one learned by reading the scholia of grammarians and rhetoricians, who explained the words and idioms of the classical authors that became customary in speaking and writing.

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Ruhnken offered a chronological history of the text, showing what was originally written by Timaeus and what was retained, omitted, or added by later editors. He figured that the lexicon indeed likely was originally compiled by the Sophist Timaeus in the fourth century b.c., though in an expanded form that was condensed by later Academics in the third and second centuries. Ruhnken illustrated how a given passage could be augmented, interpreted, or even corrected by another passage. In addition to the history of the text itself, he sketched the development of the science of editing in the third and second centuries b.c. by describing the editorial methods of the Alexandrian editors of Homer, Zenodotus, Aristophanes Byzantius, Aristarchus, and the Stoic Crates of Pergamon, although the work of these figures was known only from fragmentary scholia on Homer. These were not great authors in themselves but literary critics who ranked among the most learned men of antiquity. They were the ones who understood the teachings of the great authors like Homer, Hesiod, and Euripides as well as Plato, and their witness was the means to reconstruct the historical Plato. Other rhetoricians, some of whom were known through writings that survived more or less intact, offered tremendous insight. Among these writings were Theon of Smyrna’s Essay on Mathematics of Use in Reading Plato (second century b.c.) or Hermogenes’s On Style. Other scholars compiled lexica similar to Timaeus’s, such as the second-century a.d. lexicon of Julius Pollux or the fifth-century lexicon of Hesychius, which Ruhnken had edited in the 1740s, Harpocratio’s lexicon of ten Attic orations, and others. Ruhnken brought all of this scholarship to bear on the Platonic Lexicon of Timaeus, and it was to honor such erudition that F. A. Wolf dedicated his Prolegomena to Homer to David Ruhnken, princeps criticorum. In two hundred pages of text and commentary, Ruhnken built a case that the Plato of the eighteenth century was not the Plato of antiquity. Even the Plato of antiquity was not the historical Plato but rather a construction built over generations, first by the Middle Academics and later by Neoplatonists. It was this digested Plato that was perpetuated over centuries in the form of a philosophical system. Although Neoplatonism was central to Christian cosmology through the Middle Ages, Plato himself was not read in the original until Marsilio Ficino. Ficino, too, was interested at least as much in Neoplatonic systematic philosophy as he was in Plato himself. The Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created yet another systematic

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Plato. The problem in all of this was that Plato himself was not systematic. The character Socrates rarely, if ever, affirmed philosophical truth, leaving that to the students and Sophists engaged in the dialogues. Plato himself was a Skeptic, not a systematizer. The system was constructed later, by younger generations trying to make sense of the positions held in the dialogues. A few years before Ruhnken, J. J. Brucker had made the same points when he separated the dialogues from the later treatises that interpreted and systematized them. Brucker concluded that Plato himself was remarkably unsystematic, having cobbled together a hodge-podge of Heraclitan and Pythagorean philosophy that was mutually contradictory on important notions such as permanence (Pythagoras’s eternal numbers, whence, e.g., the forms) and flux (Heraclitus’s fire). Instead of using a philosophical method like Brucker, Ruhnken approached Plato as one would any other piece of literature, and his entry point was the little manual compiled by Timaeus.43 In Chapter 6 we will see how Christoph Meiners approached the historical Plato using historical methods, setting the pre-Socratics, Pythagoras, and then Plato in historical and cultural context. The same approach was being applied to Homer and the Old Testament as well. The search for the historical Plato, the historical Homer, and the historical Moses would inspire D. F. Strauss’s search for the historical Jesus in the nineteenth century. Strauss employed the literary method of Ruhnken and the mythological method of Heyne and Eichhorn with the goal of reconstructing the society and context in which the life and teaching of Jesus occurred. The Jesus Seminar continues this project today, searching for the unique sayings of Jesus, echoes of which appear in no other ancient text. In his approach to Plato, Ruhnken was traveling the same road as Heyne, Winckelmann, and Christ. All were trying to understand, if not to reconstruct, the ancient world in its entirety—not only literature and art but all aspects of society: religion, law, military science, customs, morality, and daily life. Bildung, or Aesthetic Education Ruhnken’s detailed inquiry led to the conclusion that the ancients could not be imitated by the moderns. If the Greek aesthetic was the

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product of the cultural milieu described by Winckelmann—a product of place as well as constitution—then on Winckelmann’s terms alone Germans could not successfully imitate the Greeks simply by reason of being in cold Germany rather than in warm Greece. Even if the geographic difference could be overcome, Ruhnken showed that the ancients could be known in such detail that replicating their customs and art was impossible. To Ruhnken the aesthetic ideal of classical Bildung was misguided and unattainable. Still, that did not diminish the value of Homer or of aesthetic education in general, and the argument for imitation was as powerful an educational ideology in the eighteenth century as it had been in Petrarch’s age. For Ruhnken, as for Gesner and Heyne, the goal was to understand the ancients, not to imitate them. The eighteenth-century scholarship of antiquity was not the wasteland that modern classicists generally portray. Certainly, it did not rise to the level of the mid- or even the early nineteenth century, but neither was it desolate. The modern view is a product of early nineteenth-century figures like F. A. Wolf as he tried to distance himself from predecessors like Heyne, whose work was very close to his own. The eighteenth-century scholars were also very critical of their own age—not unlike Petrarch— and called for educational reform, even as they themselves produced the building blocks that would renovate the edifice of German education. The heavy erudition involved in the recovery of classical antiquity was not a pursuit limited to the ivory tower of research. Eighteenth-century philologists were significant not just for their scholarship and approach to texts, or their criticism of textual traditions and publication of critical editions of Greek and Latin authors, but also for their work as secondary school administrators. For three hundred years humanist educational ideology had revolved around the assertion that education, particularly education in the classics, made people better—not just smarter or with certain linguistic skills but better in a qualitative, even in a moral sense.44 In the eighteenth century that improvement was seen in terms of aesthetics, producing an increased capacity to manipulate abstract ideas; to recognize and articulate fine distinctions whether in art, literature, or moral judgment; to express oneself with precision and good taste; and to move through society with polite manners. One way to awaken and refine aesthetic sensitivity in boys and young men was through literature.

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Heyne’s predecessor at Göttingen, J. M. Gesner (1691–1761), had a twenty-year career as a school administrator in Weimar, Ansbach, and Leipzig, before Münchhausen hired him to teach the classics when the University of Göttingen opened its doors in 1734 and thereafter Münchhausen appointed him inspector of Hanoverian schools. In twenty years as a school teacher and administrator, Gesner concluded that students learned well only what they learned willingly and happily. He tried to instill a love of learning in his students by both holding them to high standards and reforming antiquated teaching methods. Gesner replaced rote learning such as spelling and recitation with extemporaneous writing and speaking exercises in Latin. Rather than beginning Latin study by memorizing grammatical tables, students should learn it by reading, and specifically by reading a text with which they were already familiar, the Latin New Testament. Latin should also be learned conversationally, the teacher speaking to his students in Latin and encouraging them to respond in kind, mistakes notwithstanding. Once the rudiments were mastered, students should then learn to read large amounts of Latin in a cursory way rather than parsing sentences. Gesner would cover the whole of Terence in a few months so that his students might appreciate the classics as literature. For twenty-five years his seminar at Göttingen turned out graduates he hoped would be intelligent teachers more than erudite scholars, who would spread the new humanism to the gymnasia of Germany.45 J. A. Ernesti (1707–1781) worked beside Gesner for four years in the 1730s, helping him turn around the unruly St. Thomas School in Leipzig. He succeeded Gesner as rector when Gesner went to Göttingen. Ernesti held that position for twenty-eight years, living at the opposite end of the house he shared with St. Thomas School’s choirmaster, J. S. Bach. Here was aesthetic education at its height. Ernesti was eighteenth-century Germany’s great Ciceronian Latinist, for which he was as admired early in his career as he was resented for it later.46 Through his administrative position and scholarly reputation, he became one of the major power brokers of eighteenth-century German academia. Ernesti nominated Ruhnken to succeed Gesner at Göttingen, and when Ruhnken turned the Hanoverians down and suggested Heyne as an alternative, it was Ernesti who tracked Heyne down and offered him the job. Ernesti wrote the Saxon school curriculum that remained in effect until 1847. He considered the Latin classics to be a

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bottomless well for geistliche Bildung (spiritual or intellectual education), worthy in content and beautiful in form; the combination of classics and aesthetics governed his curriculum. The curriculum codified Winckelmann’s principle that in antiquity, particularly in ancient Greece, humanity had discovered the first, most perfect patterns of beauty and that modern Germans should seek to emulate the ancients.47 The flaw in this program was that the curriculum was Latin and the most perfect aesthetic Greek. This was a technical difficulty. What was lacking was not an understanding of Greece so much as enough competent teachers to establish a Greek curriculum and then enough textbooks to place in students’ hands. The editing of texts therefore became a major enterprise in the eighteenth century, with many educators producing elementary texts for their own students. Ernesti reworked Samuel Clarke’s Homer, as well as textbook editions of Tacitus, Suetonius, and a host of other Greek and Latin authors. Gesner produced anthologies, textbooks, and a couple of dictionaries.48 Much of the credit in this enterprise goes to Gesner, who insisted on competent Greek as well as Latin. He forbade Greek-Latin facingpage translations in his schools, and his seminar at Göttingen was geared toward producing teachers competent to teach Greek. Gesner, more than anyone, was responsible for putting Greek in the German schools. It was not his idea that Greek should be taught. But he did create the logistical system of educating teachers capable of teaching Homer and of producing texts of Herodotus, Xenophon, and others for students. Without Gesner there could have been no Werther. Gesner founded the philological seminar at Göttingen, but Heyne made it famous. Heyne limited enrollment to nine students, who committed to work with him for one or two years. Applicants auditioned their speaking and writing skills a semester in advance. Heyne divided the course into two parts, interpretation and disputation. The interpretation section consisted of the grammatical parsing of sentences and the interpretation of poems, concentrating on a single Greek or Latin author at a time. For the disputation section students took opposing sides of a question, writing essays that were turned in before class. All conversation and writing in the seminar was in Latin.49

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Through reconstruction of the poetic world in antiquity, Heyne believed he could come to a better understanding of humanity, both past and present. “Philosophy of humanity is an important part of the knowledge in which our current age has made a few steps forward,” Heyne wrote in the preface to a textbook of mythology produced by a former student. “We must credit these steps to the attention we have given to the ancient world, language and manner of thinking and to the recently awakened study of foreign people groups.” For most aspects of social relationships, it was sufficient to be familiar with only one’s own age and region; but for philosophy and religion, such a limited perspective was inadequate. “A religious liberal-mindedness is produced by the study of primitive humanity in the earliest time and in distant lands.” Past and present were linked together in a chain. “Our contemporary condition, in all things, be it political, moral, religious, or physical, is grounded in the past.”50 All the insights and knowledge of Europeans had sprung from past times, and even the best of them were packed full of ancient prejudices. Modern European culture was linked to the past by an invisible chain that extended back to the original condition of humanity. Thus for Heyne, there was an enlightened purpose to teaching mythology, so that young scholars could see the origin of their own religion and philosophy. They acquired a rational understanding of the earlier conditions of the peoples, of the first steps of culture, of the manner of thinking in the ancient world. Students also acquired skills for interpreting ancient and sacred texts. Misunderstanding these texts had had tragic consequences in the past. To Heyne, and to most professed champions of Enlightenment, education of the young could indisputably bring the human race nearer to perfection. As the amount of knowledge grew through the ages, the awareness of the value of that knowledge also increased. Through that awareness, said Heyne, came “true Enlightenment.”51 Heyne’s methods and ideas had a tremendous impact on historical, philological, and biblical scholarship in the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries. About three hundred students passed through the seminar, in addition to those who attended Heyne’s lecture courses.52 Among his students numbered Meiners, Eichhorn, both Schlegels, both Humboldts, K. O. Müller, Schelling, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge. F. A. Wolf thought along lines very similar to Heyne, even if

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Wolf claimed his ideas were his own. Herder called Heyne “the finest researcher of Greek history.” Goethe wished that he could have studied classical literature with him.53 Heyne’s methods of mythological interpretation, drawing comparisons from modern travel literature and seeking the common mind-set in an effort to understand a complete culture, were learned and perpetuated by dozens of students who came through Göttingen. They would take Heyne’s methods with them to the gymnasia and civil service throughout Germany. On the basis of his hermeneutics of mythology, Heyne began to ask whether the ancient stories of Homer could even be intelligible to Europeans in the late eighteenth century. Certainly, a lot of work was required of the student before he could understand an idea as fundamental to prehistoric Greek thought as Jove, to say nothing of the plays of Sophocles or Euripides. A modern reader of the Greek poets had to be familiar not only with the texts themselves but with the assumptions and the very mind-set of the audience for whom the plays or poems were written.54 Heyne believed that it was possible to acquire such familiarity, but he warned his students of the dangers of ignorant interpretations of ancient texts. “It is often said, but seldom followed,” he admonished, “that one must read Homer as a poet from an age entirely foreign to our own.”55 Human society in Homer’s Ionia had made only the first steps toward Cultur and away from the first raw state of nature in terms of its political, civil, and domestic constitution. One could not read Homer—or at least could not pass judgment—if one knew no people other than one’s own Europeans. Thus in order to understand them, it was necessary for the scholar to return to the mind-set of the people he studied. He had to set aside his own categories and try to reconstruct the thought patterns, the imagination, the genius of the ancients in the time and place in which their texts were produced. The beginning of all interpretation was a thorough understanding of the mind-set of the ancients, argued Heyne. Scholars could not interpret the sounds and words that the writer spelled out unless they knew and recognized the common opinions hidden in the mind. But we must return to the sensibility of ancient people and to the manner of speaking of the first ages; above all, the first authors must be

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looked for in myths, however much is possible; but this is impossible in many cases, and it must be pursued in those traces toward which the progress of investigation led us. But from these very first traces, if you have followed through the various means of discussing myth through the various kinds and times of poets, it is possible to arrive at what the geniuses of the succeeding poets shaped; there is much pleasure and utility in such study.56

To Heyne, an individual’s mind-set—his assumptions, his categories of thought, even the questions he thought to ask—were shaped by his cultural heritage. European scholars had to keep their own cultural assumptions in mind when studying the ancients or contemporary peoples outside of Christian Europe. When people attributed religion to barbarians, whether ancient or modern, they were talking more about themselves than about the barbarians. Primitive people possessed no capacity for mental or metaphysical reasoning except what was exercised within the confines of sense perception. They could know only what the senses could perceive, not abstract speculation about the origin of things.57 If a scholar understood myth to be “pagan religion,” he was doomed to a poor interpretation of his subject, whether he studied pre-Homeric Greeks, Mosaic Hebrews, contemporary Arab bedouins, or native Americans. Religion itself was a European category, developed within the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman-European tradition. “Greek religion” was so different that even the category of “religion”—to say nothing of “spirituality”—was highly misleading. Greek religion consisted of a set of sects that had formed around the names given to the effects of nature, which carried philosophic, natural, and theistic significance. There was not a single Greek religion. Such diversity was unique to the Greeks, a result of their progress from the earliest barbarism, their first ideas, judgments, and stories, and the mixing of the wisest Greeks with the most ignorant.58 That said, Heyne admitted that a kind of progressive “religious sense” appeared to have developed along with other aspects of human society. The difficulty in discussing the origins of religion and philosophy lay in determining the boundary between religion and divine cult.59 The most primitive belief in a power or powers that governed the heavens and the earth was fetishism, which still existed in African and some Arab societies. Predicting the future was another early develop-

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ment related to religious sensibility.60 Based on “innate inclinations,” a people in its earliest beginnings assigned features to nature or God. The people created and cultivated these features until they became beliefs about higher forces and dignities.61 The development of the religious sense was the result of the repetition of rites.62 A rite was an act that recalled an early myth. A concept of divine nature emerged much later than the myth being remembered in the rite. Even the best recent authors continued to be led astray by the quest for evidence of native monotheism among primitive peoples, said Heyne. In his History of America, William Robertson had found that religion was an exception to the general principle that in stages of “wildness” human thought consisted only of immediate necessities. Other authors suggested that native Americans represented “genies” when they wore skins while dancing at feasts or while holding large snakes that were tamed by human body heat. Some American travelers described native belief in a supreme God; others described beliefs in good and evil deities. Heyne considered all these conclusions to be erroneous analogies based on customs and rites known among Christians and Europeans. One could not even ask directly about the existence of a Supreme Being, because what Europeans meant by that term was not the same thing that non-Europeans meant. It was not credible testimony when native Americans indicated with a word and a nod that some God resides in heaven. Christian ideas of divinity, spirituality, metaphysics, or revealed doctrine were utterly foreign to people who lacked the vocabulary to think in such abstract categories. Just as they had no access to European ideas, Europeans had no access to theirs, except what could be observed concerning what produced fear and wonder in them. Assigning gods to their belief represented our customs and opinions, argued Heyne, not theirs. The same error was often made when looking at the European past, such as attributing to the early Germans a subtle religion comparable to current philosophy. Like native Americans, barbaric Germans were limited to what they perceived through the senses. In the same way, a more attentive comparison of the ideas, religion, and cult of the ancient Greeks was needed. We should be more careful with our inquiries, Heyne warned.63 The question of to what extent people of different cultures could truly communicate with each other had been open since antiquity. Heyne admitted he had no answer either.64

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Like Heyne, with whom he corresponded, Herder found that foreign systems of thought were very difficult for outsiders to understand. If, for example, said Herder, the Icelandic Völuspá were read and expounded to a Brahmin, the Brahmin would hardly be able to grasp a single idea from it. The Vedas would be equally unintelligible to the Icelander. Each nation adapted its own manner of thinking, which was suited to its own earth and sky, was sprung from its own mode of living, and was handed down from generation to generation. Herder illustrated the point with a passage from a History of Greenland by the Moravian Brethren missionary David Cranz. Cranz asked an indigenous Greenlander about his religious beliefs: Q. Do you have a soul? A. O yes. It can increase and decrease; our angekoks can mend and repair it; when one has lost it, they can bring it back again; and they can exchange a sick one for a fresh healthy soul from a hare, reindeer, bird, or young child. When we go on a long journey, our soul often stays at home. At night while we sleep it wanders out of the body: it goes hunting, dancing, or visiting, while the body lies there soundly. . . . Q. How do you believe that the human race came into being? A. The first man, Kallak, came out of the earth, and soon after his wife came out of his thumb. She gave birth to a Greenlander, and the Greenlander gave birth to Kablunät, that is, foreigners and dogs; thus both dogs and foreigners are horny and prolific.65

Cranz’s questions themselves were informed by his own European perspective on Christian theology in which the central questions about “religion” revolved around the nature of God, the origin of the world, the immortality of the soul, a dualism between mind and body, and so on. In the process of establishing communal identity, language excluded foreigners from the group. Within a nation there were many smaller groups and families, each of which developed its own subcommunity joined by a common mind-set that colored the meanings of words. Herder’s acquaintance J. G. Hamann said that “every court, every school, every profession, every sect has its own language which can be grasped only by the passion of a lover, a friend, an intimate.”66 Herder observed that the experience, language, literature, and mindset of another group could only be understood through a process of empathy. Rational analysis, classification, or dissection of parts could

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not impart an understanding of another society. Only through a combination of historical scholarship and imaginative, responsive sensitivity could one find the path into the labyrinth of values and aspirations of others, be they individuals, groups, or nations. Each nation (Volk) could be understood only in terms of its own scale of values. One could not judge one culture by the criteria of another. Eighteenthcentury Germans could not become Hebrew shepherds, Greeks, or Romans. Different cultures grew like different organisms. They had different goals and different ways of life. “Not a man, not a country, not a people, not a natural history, not a state are like one another. Hence the True, the Good, the Beautiful in them are not similar either.”67 One could only understand another culture through a process of imaginative empathy (Einfühlen), by seeing them from within, through their own eyes, and according to their own standards and circumstances.68 C. G. Heyne developed a method of reading myth that could reveal the earliest concepts in a nation’s prehistoric past, even before the invention of writing. Winckelmann found that art also offered a gateway to the primitive mind. Sculpture was the indigenous invention of the Greeks, later modified by Egyptian style and technique. But the art remained essentially Greek: like myth, art was an expression of the earliest concepts in the national vocabulary. The Greek conception of beauty was the direct product of the physical environment. As the most perfect expression of beauty, Winckelmann called on his fellow Europeans to imitate the Greek aesthetic. A much more careful scholar than Winckelmann was David Ruhnken, who made no attempt to claim a broader significance for his study of texts. Ruhnken granted that imitation of the Greeks was an attractive ideal, but he showed that there was no way to accomplish it. Northern Europeans were temperamentally different, climatologically different, and linguistically different. Moreover, even the category of “Greek” lacked precision, as the ancients themselves were linguistically divided. Through a close study of the Attic dialect, Ruhnken effectively reduced Plato from the status of universal sage with a systematic philosophy to a particular human being embedded in a specific linguistic and literary context. Yet even if modern Europeans could not imitate the Greeks, they could at least attempt to understand them. Gesner, Ernesti, and Heyne

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attempted to cultivate their students’ aesthetic sensitivities through the study of ancient literature. By establishing the importance of Greek in the German curriculum and producing the tools necessary for teaching and learning it (dictionaries, editions of classical texts), Gesner and Ernesti laid the foundation for Heyne’s philological seminar at Göttingen, which ran for half a century, from 1762 to 1812. Mythology, philology, and art history all offered access to the ancient Greek mind that was more specific and that could delve deeper into the prehistoric past than philosophical or linguistic speculation. But these were not the only ways to understand the culture of antiquity. One could also visit it.

FOUR ◆

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The Search for the Historical Homer

IN THE SPRING OF 1751 , three English gentlemen set out into the Syrian desert 130 miles northeast of Damascus, accompanied by a party of nearly two hundred local porters, guards, and as many pack mules, horses, and camels. Robert Wood, James Dawkins, and John Bouverie, all connoisseurs of antiquities, had encountered one another several times while exploring Roman ruins in Italy and France. In 1750 they had formed a society to explore the literary sites of the coasts and interior of Egypt, Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. They spent the winter together in Rome reading the Greek classics and modern treatises on antiquities. They chartered a ship from England, which met them at Naples outfitted with a crew, a library, tools for digging, and gifts for oriental despots. They sailed for the eastern Mediterranean in late winter, and by early spring they were crossing the desert. On the way, the Arab guard took turns thundering ahead of the party in pairs, armed with guns and pikes, to scout for latter-day Saracens. None were encountered. During rests, the Arab guards sat in a circle sharing coffee and tobacco while one entertained the rest with a song or story of love or war, sometimes extemporaneously. A final march of twenty-six hours with neither water nor shade nor breeze brought them to their destination, an uninhabited desert plain still a hundred miles from the Euphrates. Passing through a narrow vale between two cliffs, the view opened to reveal the greatest field of ruins they had ever seen: Corinthian columns, all in white marble, bleached by a millennium and a half of desert sunshine.

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There were no roofs or walls, only the columns marking the locations of buildings, and beyond the ruins the vast expanse of the desert with no sign of life or motion as far as the Euphrates. These were the ruins of Palmyra. Twice in antiquity Palmyra had been a flourishing oasis in the middle of the desert. Nourished by constantly flowing springs, Palmyra was the only source of refreshment between the Euphrates and Phoenicia, and its fortunes rose and fell with overland trade between India and the Mediterranean. Inhabited since the age of Moses, Solomon had turned it into a city that thrived for nearly five centuries before being ruined by Nebuchadnezzar. Ruins from that age were still visible, although so decayed that little could be known from them. In the Hellenistic period the Greeks rebuilt it as Palmyra, and although it was almost unattested in Greek and Republican histories, by the time of Pliny it had long been a thriving city. Palmyra had won glory during the dark days of the Roman Empire in the second half of the third century a.d. Caught between Persia and Rome, though traditionally independent from both, Palmyra’s king Odenathus came to the assistance of the shattered remains of the Roman army following the defeat and capture of Valerian at the hands of Persia. Odenathus routed the Persians and pursued them back to their capital at Ctesiphon. Palmyra nominally entered the Roman Empire as an autonomous region comprising Syria, western Armenia, and northwestern Mesopotamia. Whether Odenathus’s second wife was involved in his murder was unclear, but Zenobia came to power, renounced allegiance to Rome, and defeated a Roman army on its way to battle Persia. As a descendant of Cleopatra, she declared herself the rightful ruler of Egypt and sent an army seize it. The Palmyrenes staged a surprise invasion, then feigned defeat only to regroup and capture the Roman prefect. A series of victories over Rome and Persia followed, and Zenobia declared she would take Rome itself. She named one of her sons emperor and launched an invasion of Asia Minor before the emperor Aurelian put a stop to her. Her fortunes changed quickly. Aurelian besieged Palmyra, bought off the Armenians and Saracens sent to assist her, and offered her terms of surrender. Zenobia reminded him that Cleopatra preferred death to defeat. She personally ran the blockade of the town and headed for Persia for reinforcements. The Romans, tipped off to her flight,

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chased her down before she reached the Euphrates. Palmyra was sacked, the queen’s ministers (including Longinus) executed, and Zenobia herself was brought back to Rome and displayed as a trophy in Aurelian’s triumph. A Roman garrison town and trading post for several centuries thereafter, Palmyra faded from history about the time of Mohammad. The Arabs who accompanied the English adventurers had never heard of Zenobia. They remembered Palmyra’s Solomonic name, the name still associated with the Syrian village that now stands near the site, Tudmur. Apparently abandoned since about the seventh century, even the springs that flowed constantly into riverbeds still lined with ancient stone simply disappeared into the sand without producing any vegetation. The Greeks had named the city for its palms. A merchant expedition that passed through the site in the late seventeenth century reported fig trees at Palmyra. In the mid-eighteenth century there were no trees at all. The English party remained at Palmyra for a few weeks, mapping the plain, sketching the layout of the town, measuring the ruins, copying the inscriptions, and drafting pictures of the columns and remaining capitals. They paid their porters to dig into the soil, still rich from irrigation centuries past, where they found artifacts of daily life, commerce, and warfare. The ruins seemed to show that Palmyra had suffered violence shortly before its abandonment. From Palmyra Wood, Dawkins, and Bouverie traveled to the mountains of Lebanon where they explored the ruins of Ba’albek in the Beqa’a Valley, and from there they set out to sea, exploring the Aegean coast. They sailed through the Hellespont and Bosporus as far as the Black Sea, stopping several times along the way to make forays inland to both the European and Asiatic sides. They followed the Scamander River to its source, finding ruined bridges and aqueducts. For two weeks they mapped the Scamandrian plain, looking for traces of Troy. Here, too, much had changed from the glory of antiquity. In Greece, Wood read Homer aloud with a schoolmaster, but the ancient poetry was so inaccessible that neither could bear the other’s pronunciation. Yet much also remained the same. Homer’s geographic descriptions, the winds, the setting sun, the Aegean storms, the way Homer set his scenes and surveyed the horizon—all took on added depth and color for Wood as he held Homer in his hands looking to the west from a

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promontory on the Ionian coast. He imagined himself to be in the very places Homer knew, perhaps even in the city Homer called home. The life of Miltiades or Leonidas could never be read with so much pleasure, as on the plains of Marathon or at the streights of Thermopylae; the Iliad has new beauties on the banks of the Scamander, and the Odysse[y] is most pleasing in the countries where Ulysses travelled and Homer sung.1

Wood called it “poetical geography.” Just as mythology, art history, and linguistics offered a window into the primitive past of a given nation, so did travel offer the possibility of getting behind the received text to see the primitive who produced it. This chapter examines the importance of eyewitness reports by modern travelers and the use of those travel reports by scholars back home in Europe who developed a comparative method for understanding the earliest stages of human social development. The Original Genius of Homer Wood had been impressed by two features of Greece and the Near East that had remained constant from the Homeric age to the present: the Aegean geography and the Arab bedouins’ manner of living. Certainly, much of ancient Near Eastern and Greek customs had been lost over time, but Wood was surprised at how much of the Greeks he recognized in the Arabs. “That so many of the customs of Homer’s age, and still more of the antient Jews, should be continued down to present times, in countries, which have undergone such a variety of political revolutions, is extraordinary.”2 The similarity of manners was due to the “heroic” stage of cultivation in which the Arabs persisted for centuries. The endurance of that stage was due to the climate and geography, to the Arabs’ nomadic economy, and to the purity of heritage, which derived from the first two factors. The Arabs Wood met boasted that they possessed a heritage purer and more unmixed than that of any other nation, and the

The monumental arch, looking west toward the grand colonnade. In Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the Desart (London, 1753). (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen.)

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geography and history of their country seemed to support that claim. Many nations had claimed to rule Arabia, but none had ever conquered its interior regions. In Wood’s day the Turks claimed dominion, but in reality the annual gifts they bestowed on the sheiks during the Hajj were not signs of their generosity but protection money, without which no passage to Mecca would have been granted. The sheiks only pretended to be subject to the sultan, as was confirmed by the bloody fights over the amount due. “The Turks complain of robbery, and the Arabs of invasion.”3 The vast expanses of desert, the inhospitable terrain, and the Arabs’ preference of the nomadic life to farming all contributed to their isolation. These bedouins were happier in the liberty of the nomadic life where all was movable than in the ease, security, and luxury of regular society. As Wood concluded, “The Hottentot or Cherokee is not fonder of his native woods than the wandering Arab is of his sandy domain.” Agriculture and architecture were not matters of mere indifference to the bedouin but objects of contempt. The bedouin prided himself on his poor tent, despising tillage as a mean occupation. “This aversion to the husbandman is reciprocal, and a shepherd has ever been an abomination to an Egyptian.”4 Wood found that the interior of Arabia offered “a perpetual and inexhaustible store of the aboriginal modes and customs of primeval life. These are inaccessible to the varieties and fluctuations, which conquest, commerce, arts, or agriculture, introduce in other places.”5 The Arab’s life was “strangely divided between deeds of cruelty, violence, and injustice, on the one hand; and the most generous acts of humanity on the other.” The two tendencies, he said, were linked. In the heroic stage of development, treachery both political and private was the norm. There was no mechanism of public justice to rectify private injury. Instead, the disputants resorted to legal self-help, the blood feud, to avenge their wrongs. Murder was followed by flight, not from the law but from vengeful relatives. “Some of the favourite personages of the Iliad and Odyssey had fled their country for this crime; and most of Homer’s heroes would, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country in Europe, on the Poet’s evidence.”6 As Heyne paraphrased it, what to the modern age were brutality and viciousness were to that age heroics and wisdom. A consequence of such lawlessness was hospitality. Hospitality stood in lieu of positive law, mo-

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tivated by “that generous sympathizing principle in the social constitution of our nature.”7 Wood noted among the Arabs friendships as close as Achilles and Patroclus or David and Jonathan. The similarities Wood observed in Greek, Hebrew, and Arab societies suggested that they were “not the capricious singularities of a particular age or country; but that they may be traced up to some common causes: perhaps to the nature of soil and climate, and to the spirit of that unequal legislation, to which Oriental timidity has hitherto indolently submitted; not daring to assert the natural rights of mankind.”8 Homer’s “lively delineations of national character” convinced Wood that Homer himself had traveled widely. The world he knew extended from the Black Sea in the north to the Red Sea, Arabia, and Ethiopia in the south, and into the Adriatic in the west, although not all the way up to Venice. Ithaca seemed to be at the edge of his world, and Corcyra, not much farther north, was in the realm of fantasy. Based on descriptions within the Iliad and Odyssey and on the geography of the Aegean coast he observed, Wood concluded that Homer was from the west coast of Asia, likely from Ionia, and, based on descriptions of the sun and winds, perhaps even from the city of Chios. Many of Homer’s descriptions of sea passages were minutely accurate. At one point, Wood replicated the four-day journey from Troy to Greece of Meneleus, Nestor, and Diomede recorded in Odyssey, Book 3, finding the details of time, distance, and geography so accurate that Homer must have made the passage himself. Even the deliberations of the ancient Greeks at Lesbos, over whether to take the shorter route over the open sea or the safer but tedious coastal route, were genuine. On a previous Mediterranean voyage as a merchant escort in 1742, Wood’s shipmates had faced the same choice as the ancients as they approached the island of Chios in a stiff northwest gale. The hired Greek pilot recommended the shorter route between the island and mainland, but the English officers opted for the open sea. Homer’s and Wood’s parties each had to choose between the shortest route and the safest. “They ventured to sea, though it was most dangerous,” wrote Wood. “We chose it because it was most safe; and this constitutes one of the great differences between ancient and modern navigation.”9 Wood’s characterization of Homer as a primitive was intended to refute the claim, left over from the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns,

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that Homer had written his poems as compendia of the arts and sciences “designed for eternity to please and instruct mankind.” Anthony Collins had advanced that view in his 1707 Discourse on Freethinking, which prompted Richard Bentley’s famous rebuttal: Take my word for it, poor Homer had never such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment. The Iliad he made for the men and the Odyssey for the other sex. These loose songs were not collected in the form of an epic poem till Pisistratus’ time, above 500 years after.10

Wood argued that Homer was no sage but a man of his primitive times, well-traveled, skilled at sea, and an outstanding poet. However, he was illiterate and possessed no more knowledge than was commonly available in his day. He had no knowledge of sculpture, architecture, or painting (Achilles’s shield notwithstanding), nor of medicine or astronomy. His manners were rude, and even his language itself lacked the flexibility of later centuries. Consider the role the winds play in setting the scenes in the epics. Of the four winds, Wood pointed out the dominant roles of Zephyrus, the west wind, and Boreas, the north wind. Unlike modern European poetry that portrayed the west wind as a playful character, Homer’s Zephyrus was violent, charged with whipping up storms on the Aegean that battered the Asian shore and wrecked ships. Like Aeschylus’s Zeus who was simultaneously a force of nature and a personality, Zephyrus and Boreas appeared as characters. Zephyrus was even supposed to have impregnated horses.11 Such a presentation of natural phenomena could only be the product of a primitive individual sitting in a specific geographic location. Despite his illiteracy and primitive mode of life, Homer’s poetry had attained a degree of perfection that would never again be achieved. It seemed odd that such an aspect of culture would be out of proportion from the rest. Wood attributed Homer’s success as a poet to the proposition that he was illiterate. Moderns, with their written aids to memory, could not conceive of the power of memory in preliterate societies, where the whole of law, history, and national identity was entrusted to verse and music. A more sophisticated language, such as what would suit the philosopher or the craftsman, would actually have

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impeded the poet. “His business is entirely with nature; and the language, which belongs to the imperfect arts, simple manners, and unlettered society, best suits his purpose.”12 In oral societies, when the meaning of a word was caught by the ear in a fleeting instant not collected deliberately from paper, simplicity and clarity were more necessary. “Involved periods and an embarrassed style were not introduced, till writing became more an art, and labour supplied the place of genius.”13 The repetition of whole passages—the bane of students and for which Homer was frequently chastised—was less noticeable when the verses were sung, and they aided the dramatic effect. Articulation, tone, and pronunciation were more important. Homer’s language was a language of action as much as of speech, said Wood, conveyed also by voice, countenance, and gesture. Lacking modern powers of articulation such as abstraction, the ancients inflected the language to convey a variety of meanings, in both their poetry and daily life. Homer’s language was a “passionate expression of Nature, which, incapable of misrepresentation, appeals directly to our feelings, and finds the shortest road to the heart.”14 Wood concluded, “It was therefore an advantage to the Father of Poetry, that he lived before the language of Compact and Art had so much prevailed over that of Nature and Truth.”15 Wood’s essay revolutionized Heyne’s approach to Homer, antiquity, and mythology.16 Wood illustrated the kinds of insight that could be gained from travel literature regarding the manners and customs of the ancient near east and Greece, prompting Heyne to conclude that “from travel and local reports about savages and other peoples who live in an uncultivated society and state constitution, one learns the most about Homer.”17 To a traveler like Wood, the richness and accuracy of the descriptions in the Homeric epics made it obvious that the Poet himself was widely traveled. He was a real man possessing real experience and knowledge, even if Wood demoted him from a sage to a primitive. A generation later, F. A. Wolf would suggest that there was no single individual Homer at all. Bentley had supposed that Homer himself recited his songs, but Wolf noted that even if they were composed by a single Homer, consider the poor audience, captive for a fortnight just to hear (to say nothing of to understand) the whole Iliad and Odyssey recited. It makes Wagner’s Ring seem like a preview. Even more damning than

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plausibility was the textual evidence. The scholia on Homer compiled by grammarians in the Hellenistic period revealed that the complete texts of the Iliad and Odyssey had been put together centuries after Homer had supposedly lived. That is, the Homeric text as it had been received in the eighteenth century was the product of literary scholars who had edited shorter tales that had been composed by several hands, not by an individual Homer. “By several hands” is not quite correct—the texts themselves were composed orally and handed down by memory for some time before they were committed to writing. The idea that Homer was illiterate belonged to Wood. But Wood would have been horrified at the step Wolf took—that “Homer” did not exist at all. To literary scholars, questions of Homer’s identity were the stuff of intellectual war. To historians and scholars interested in the spirit of nations and the development of culture, the who or whether of Homer missed the whole point of the epics attributed to him. The questions of the 1760s, whether Homer’s epics were fact or fiction, and of the 1790s, whether there even was a Homer at all, were irrelevant to Herder. Nor was Herder particularly bothered by the rumors that James MacPherson had forged or otherwise invented or embellished the poems of Ossian.18 He supposed MacPherson could have saved himself a lot of trouble had he published a critical edition of his sources, but to make such a suggestion missed the point. There was no Urtext. Searching for the Urtext of Homer or Ossian was like searching for the source of the Nile. Poetry was often attributed to a symbolic figure even when it was not necessarily by him. Just as the late Psalms were attributed to David, and the Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean philosophies of the Roman imperial age had little to do with either Plato or Pythagoras, so were the songs of Homer and Ossian not necessarily composed by those authors. The important point was that those poems were created by someone. That someone was Tradition. Nor was it particularly important whether the characters depicted were real. Fingal and Temora would not recognize themselves in Ossian’s songs any more than Achilles and Ajax would have in Homer’s. It was absurd to attempt to associate Fingal and Ossian with historical figures as some Irish scholars were attempting to do. The importance of those figures was not in their real-life, historical accomplishments but in their literary personae. They were characters, not people; they represented ideas, not historical deeds. Even the deeds depicted in the

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songs were simply the masks of the real treasures of Gaelic culture, the spirit of the place, of the language, of their ancestors. Even if MacPherson put the songs in their present form and corrupted the original sense by translating and putting them in meter and rhyme, the songs still reflected the spirit of the nation. In the Scottish Highlands there did exist ancient historical ballads, if only in fragmentary form and not as ancient as MacPherson purported. Still they contained “many marks of wild genius” that reflected the primitive condition of the Scots, regardless of how old the songs might have been.19 “Every language has its own specific national character,” Herder had written at the other end of his career.20 This national character was the treasure that was preserved in the poems of Ossian and Homer. What Ossian really showed were scenes of innocence and virtue that characterized the Gaelic nation. The songs commemorated the end of an era and were marked with a sadness that reflected the dreary North Sea climate in which they were set. These he contrasted with Homer, who depicted the beginning of a nation, the first show of unity in the Hellas against Troy, which would inspire the Greek resistance to the Persian invasion centuries later. Homer and Ossian were different in every way. Homer’s action was set in the Aegean sunshine, and Ossian’s in the murky fog of Scotland; Homer described external events, and Ossian internal lamentations; Homer wrote in even hexameters that produced thoughtful reflection, while Ossian expressed sentiment and emotion; Homer was about victory, Ossian defeat. The differences between the poets reflected the deep differences in national character, some of which were generated by the fatherland, some simply reflecting the internal nature of the nation. Attributing Ossian and Homer to “tradition” was pretty vague. It was certainly not up to the scholarly standards of Herder’s day. The identity of the persons who assembled the Iliad, Odyssey, as well as the Pentateuch and Psalter, was knowable. After Ruhnken, Eichhorn, and Wolf, the critic’s task was to find out how the received text was assembled. But Herder was a popularizer, not a scholar. Goguet’s Comparative History of the Human Spirit Accounts by moderns like Wood who visited the sites of ancient history provided valuable information on climate, geography, customs, and

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manners that contributed to a new reading of ancient texts. Once such information was gathered and published—and by the late eighteenth century it was coming off the presses in truck loads—the next task was to collate the various observations and put them all together. Ideally, primitives both ancient and modern would be compared in order to view human behavior at any stage of culture. In the 1750s, the French lawyer and amateur scholar, Anton-Yves Goguet, offered a virtuoso comparison of the customs, manners, and laws of primitive humanity, comparing accounts from the ancient Near East with recent observations of native Americans, Arab bedouins, and Pacific Islanders who existed in similar stages of cultural development. When discussing political transactions in societies that had not yet developed writing, for example, Goguet found that treaties were often sealed or ratified with blood. Here is a bit of sacred history: St. Paul writing to the Hebrews. Explaining the significance of Christ’s death in the establishment of the New Covenant, Paul noted that even the first covenant was not put into effect without blood. When Moses had proclaimed every commandment of the law to all the people, he took the blood of calves, together with water, scarlet wool and branches of hyssop [mint], and sprinkled the scroll and all the people. He said, “This is the blood of the covenant which God has commanded you to keep.”21

Blood was used in profane history as well, said Goguet. Herodotus told of a peace treaty concluded between the Medes and the Lydians that was commemorated in blood.22 Modern primitives used the same custom. In 1643 the Spanish and the natives of Peru made a peace treaty that the Peruvians formally ratified by slaughtering several sheep. A branch of a certain tree was dipped in the blood and then placed in the hands of the Spanish general as a sign of peace and alliance.23 Goguet’s brilliance in marshaling sources was unmatched. In this next example, Goguet took the commonplace that the life of primitive humanity was little different from that of beasts and proved it on the witness of more than thirty ancient and modern reports. He organized these reports in three categories: ancient tradition, ancient eyewitnesses, and modern travelers. He wrote, All the ancient traditions report that the first people lived a life little different from that of the animals.24

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As confirmation, he cited Plato’s Protagoras, Aristotle’s Republic, Euripides, Berosus, Sallust, Cicero, Strabo, Horace, and several others. Goguet continued, It is not difficult to add credibility to these citations when one turns the eyes to the ancient historians, who state that several regions were still in that condition,

citing Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, Pausanius, Sextus Empiricus, and others. And in the third sentence he wrote: The reality they report can be confirmed by modern historians as well. Travellers tell us that today in some parts of the world people are still cruel and ferocious, without society or commerce; they live in a state of perpetual war, they hunt, only to be killed and eaten by each other. Devoid of all principles of humanity, these people are without law, without police, without any form of government; little different from brute beasts, they have only caves for shelter.25

Here he cited Johann Anderson’s Natural History of Iceland (1746), Charles le Gobien’s History of the Mariana Islands (1700), the Jesuits’ Lettres Edificantes from China, Frezier’s Voyage to South America (1717), and a couple of other compilations of travel literature. Could there be any stronger historical proof? Goguet’s three volumes were filled with comparisons like these. Scholars throughout Europe held Goguet’s De l’origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences in the highest regard. Within four years of its publication in 1758, it was translated into every major European language (except Latin), and it was cited by historians, philosophers, lawyers, and theologians well into the nineteenth century. Orphaned as a child, Goguet had received only a shabby education but through family connections had acquired a position as a legislative assistant to the Parlement of Paris. While in his twenties, and together with another orphan-turned-lawyer named Alexandre Fugere, Goguet developed an interest in the history of law. Although both Fugere and Goguet became competent Latinists, their real gift was conversation. Like a modern Pylades and Orestes, Goguet and Fugere collaborated from beginning to end on the project. Goguet had a knack for drawing information out of people, and Fugere remembered and recorded it for him. Goguet envisioned writing two works, one on the

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progress of the arts and sciences in the earliest times, and a second on the progress of law, the arts, and the sciences in France from the Capetian monarchy to the present. Their promising careers were cut short, however. Within weeks of the publication of the first work in the spring of 1758 Goguet contracted small pox and died. Fugere, who had been battling illness for the past several years, died three days later of grief.26 In the mid-nineteenth century, one could still write of Goguet that “the eighteenth century produced in France few books of an erudition more skillful, of a critique more trustworthy, more enlightened.”27 Yet one can watch Goguet’s reputation decline as the nineteenth century wore on. By the 1880s, his memory in French national biographies faded to a couple of sentences. By the twentieth century, he and his work had been completely forgotten.28 Dagen dismissed Goguet’s work in half a paragraph as “without much originality,”29 and from a perspective 250 years distant there are good reasons for this dismissal. Goguet was not the first to apply information about modern primitive cultures to antiquity. Lafitau had done the same thing a generation earlier.30 The chronological scope of Goguet’s work, sixteen centuries from the Flood to Cyrus of Persia, was standard. His periodization followed d’Aubignac and Banier, among others, who earlier in the century had covered the same period from the Flood to about 500 b.c. in three periods labeled “unknown,” “heroic,” and “historical.”31 Even Goguet’s approach to history was out of step with intellectual fashion in France. He wrote in an antiquarian fashion, laboriously citing obscure authorities and leaving it to the reader to puzzle out what it all meant. In comparison to the tart, quotable writing of Voltaire’s Essay on Manners and Age of Louis XIV or Turgot’s Tableau philosophique, which also appeared in the 1750s, Goguet’s volumes seem dull indeed. But our perspective deceives us. In the eighteenth century, Goguet’s was perhaps the most influential work on the history of the human spirit. Cited not only by Heyne, Michaelis, Meiners, Forster, Iselin, Eichhorn, and Winckelmann, but also Gibbon, Ferguson, and Hume, Goguet was innovative in moving beyond simple comparison of cultures past and present. He used information from modern travel narratives to paint a more complete picture of the most ancient past of humanity. More than a compilation of previous studies on the ancient Near East, Goguet’s work was not based on conjecture but instead em-

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ployed the earliest and most obscure primary sources he could find. He maintained that the essential facts about the origin and formation of peoples, their laws, arts, and sciences, were knowable. He considered his to be a factual history, one that presented a more faithful picture of the first steps of the human spirit than those offered by his predecessors and philosophe rivals. No amount of metaphysical reasoning could overcome historical proof. I believe that the manners of those [savage] peoples can provide a very certain guide to the manners of the first peoples. . . . By comparing what the first Voyageurs to America had to say with Ancient reports about early Europe, one finds striking similarities. The same is true for the first age of the world. It is therefore to support the testimony of Ancient writers, and to test certain facts and possibilities that I have used the reports of modern travellers.32

Goguet’s work stood prominently within an eighteenth-century genre of historical literature that sought to describe the development of the arts and sciences, that is, of the human mind. Goguet called it l’histoire de l’Esprit humain; the Germans called it die Geschichte des menschlichen Geistes. The history of the human spirit was intended to account for what Europe was and how its nations had risen from the primitive condition to modern Enlightenment. We would call Goguet’s topic “culture” or “cultural development,” but in the 1750s of course, Goguet did not know that term. He called his topic “esprit,” but “the history of the human spirit” was very close to what would be called cultural history, or die Geschichte der menschlichen Kultur, a generation later. Culture was the product of mind, that is, a human creation, and mind was shaped reciprocally by its own creation, culture. As culture became more sophisticated, so did the capacity of mind itself. Goguet, like most people who were writing in this genre, was interested not only in the particularities of ancient culture, but in discovering universal principles of cultural development. The assumption was that the lessons of history could be applied to contemporary society, especially through good government. It was therefore assumed that what was known of one culture could be applied to another. Not only could the lessons of Persia, Greece, and Rome be useful to modern France, but what was known of primitive cultures in the

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eighteenth century could be applied to primitive antiquity, in order to fill in the gaps left by ancient authors. Two generations later J.-M. Degérando would express this idea as follows: The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age. Those unknown islands that he reaches are for him the cradle of human society. Those peoples whom our ignorant vanity scorns are displayed to him as ancient and majestic monuments of the origin of ages: monuments infinitely more worthy of our admiration and respect than those famous pyramids vaunted by the banks of the Nile. They witness only the frivolous ambition and the passing power of some individuals whose names have scarcely come down to us; but the others recreate for us the state of our own ancestors, and the earliest history of the world.33

Dozens of accounts of the arts and sciences were written, following the progress of humanity from the Flood down to the eighteenth century. These ranged from exacting studies like the Maurists’ Histoire littéraire de la France 34 to more schematic works that surveyed the history of human knowledge with broad strokes. One of the earliest such works in France was A. F. Bourreau-Deslandres’s Histoire critique de la philosophie (1737), of which Fontenelle’s histories of the Royal Academy of Sciences (1699 and 1741) and Préface des Elémens de la Géométrie de l’infiniti were important forerunners. In his Essai sur les moeurs and Siècle de Louis XIV, for example, Voltaire recounted the decline of moeurs [manners] in late antiquity when Roman Christians fell into superstition and succumbed to religious authority. The Germanic chieftains who conquered the Romans were no more conducive to enlightenment than superstitious Christians, and moeurs, together with the arts and sciences, languished for a thousand years. Finally, in the Renaissance, sociability, toleration, and politeness began to surmount barbaric sectarian fighting as the Europeans began to cultivate the arts and sciences. Voltaire said in his supplementary remarks (1763) to his Essai sur les moeurs that he wished he had entitled it an Essai sur l’histoire de l’esprit humain.35 This was philosophical history; it was not the res gestae of great men and events. Interested in broad structural changes in society, historians working in this genre wrote the history of sociability, manners, polite-

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ness, and total ways of living. Philosophical history is not to be confused with philosophy. It had nothing to do with metaphysics, epistemology, or logic. Philosophical history offered a broad view of humanity as it developed through specific stages in its journey from the savage state to enlightenment and ultimately (hopefully) to perfection. David Hume explained the purpose of philosophical history as well as anyone in a short essay “On the Study of History” (1741). Philosophical history enabled one to observe human society, in its infancy, making the first faint essays towards the arts and sciences: To see the polity of government and the civility of conversation refining by degrees, and every thing which is ornamental to human life advancing towards its perfection. To remark the rise, progress, declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing empires: The virtues, which contributed to their greatness, and the vices, which drew upon their ruin. In short to see all [the] human race, from the beginning of time pass, as it were, in review before us.36

The effort here was to understand causality in history. If like causes produced like effects, then philosophical history could explain what circumstances were conducive to the progress of the arts and sciences. Modern Europe could then replicate those circumstances and perpetuate the age of Enlightenment. In philosophical history the story was the progress of the human spirit, not the deeds of men. The philosophes like Voltaire, Turgot, and Montesquieu wrote a kind of conjectural history similar to what in Britain reached its fullest expression in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man was also conjectural history, as was John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. In each case human conduct was understood to be subject to general laws, and neither accidental circumstances nor individual exertion could significantly alter a person’s condition or the course of human events. Social conditions occurred by necessity, according to a uniform and natural process that could be neither resisted nor accelerated. On this basis the philosophes believed the histories of individual nations could be deduced, just as Millar deduced the process by which humanity (particularly England) advanced from barbarism to refinement. The purpose in conjectural history was less to record authentic historical facts than “ingenious argument, and plausible theory.”37

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Consider this highly programmatic statement from the preface to The Spirit of the Laws: I have proposed principles and have seen individual instances submit themselves to these principles; [I have found that] the history of all nations has been merely the consequence [of these principles].38

Montesquieu advanced a thoroughgoing historical determinism that left no room for accident and little room for great men to maneuver. What appeared to be a catastrophe at close range turned out to be necessity when viewed from a more distant perspective. In The Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734) he wrote: It is not chance that rules the world. . . . And if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents.39

And in the same work: If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato, others would have thought like Caesar and Pompey; and the Republic, destined to perish, would have been dragged to the precipice by another hand.40

He confirmed the same principle in The Spirit of the Laws (1748): It was not Poltava that ruined Charles [XII of Sweden]; if he had not been destroyed at that place, he would have been destroyed at another. Accidents of fortune are easily rectified; one cannot avert events that continuously arise from the nature of things.41

In the next section Montesquieu presented Alexander the Great’s success against Persia as equally the product of necessity. The prudent ruler was the one able to act within the limitations of history. That is, “Alexander’s project succeeded only because it was sensible,” in contrast to Charles XII’s. Alexander knew that the Persians were beyond correcting themselves, that the Greeks had a better war machine, and that Greece could not be weakened by dividing the army. “It is almost in spite of himself that he captures and destroys Thebes.”42 Well-reasoned, pithy, and above all clear statements about historical causality make Montesquieu very appealing to modern readers, and he appealed to the cultural historians in the 1780s and 1790s as well. Mon-

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tesquieu’s statements about the spirit of a nation found particular resonance among the Germans. In many ways Montesquieu was working on the same problem as the cultural historians of the 1780s and 1790s. He, too, was trying to find the original character, or as he put it, “the spirit of the nation.” “Many things govern man: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores and manners; a general spirit is formed as a result.”43 Elsewhere he explained, “I understand by the genius of a nation the moeurs and mental character of different peoples influenced by a single court and a single capital.”44 Montesquieu was especially concerned with the circumstances that caused laws to be instituted in a certain way. What was the character of the nation at the time of its formation? What was the intent of the legislators in shaping the activities of the inhabitants? Montesquieu generally considered the laws to be perfect (or flawed) at this initial point. Thereafter he took a static view of laws. The laws did not so much evolve and develop, as in Goguet’s view, as they decayed or failed to keep pace with changes (usually for the worse) in custom. His general concern was to delay the inevitable, that is, to avoid ruining the laws and the spirit of the nation, and he concluded that those who tried to alter institutions after their foundation usually wrecked rather than improved them. Every society is a spiritual union [union d’esprit], and in it a common character is formed. The universal soul comes to express its thoughts in a particular manner—a manner which results from a chain of an infinite number of causes multiplying and combining from age to age. As soon as this tone is generally accepted it is it alone which governs, and all that sovereigns, magistrates, and peoples can do or imagine, whether seeming to follow or to violate this tone is forever relative to it; it dominates until the total destruction of the society.45

This was a different kind of history from Goguet’s. In Goguet’s mind, his own contribution to scholarship lay in his avoiding conjecture and relying on historical sources alone. But to the German historians of humanity, Goguet’s importance resided less in his rigorous use of sources than in the way he found them. When Goguet was unable to find any facts about a topic, as happened frequently in his discussions of the earliest times, he consulted authors both ancient and modern

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who described the customs of savage peoples. Goguet believed that the conduct of those nations could furnish very certain and precise information about the first populations immediately after the confusion of languages and dispersion of families. From both ancient and modern relations, one could draw points of comparison that made plausible testimony of extraordinary facts from writers that, when seen in isolation, would have appeared dubious. He found reports from America to be particularly useful in the sections on the “Unknown Age.” He wrote, “One may judge the state of the ancient world some time after the Flood by what happened again in much of the new world at the time it was discovered.”46 Like Montesquieu, Goguet’s interest in antiquity came from his legal work. His purpose was to examine the emergence of political bodies within human society and to derive principles that would account for the different forms of government to which the peoples of humanity were subject. His method, that is, was inductive. He began with historical observations, collected exhaustively and compared. At the end, he drew modest conclusions that he hoped would allow the discovery of principles of human social development. In explaining government, he described the birth of society, the establishment of knowledge in all its forms. Goguet wanted to present a complete picture of human social development, emphasizing the way different aspects of society influenced each other through the centuries. Goguet worked in an older tradition of “erudition” that in the 1750s was losing ground to the philosophes. Erudition was closely allied to monarchical and ecclesiastical authority in France, sponsored in the Academies of Science and of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, as well as in the Benedictine congregation of St. Maur. Established in the seventeenth century, these institutions were charged with confirming the legal privileges of the Church and the glory of the monarchy by investigating the laws, documents, and other evidence from medieval French and ancient Roman history. In the process, scholars from these institutions developed rigorous methods of verifying the legitimacy of documents, and they edited enormous collections of historical sources. Jean Mabillon established the modern historical science of diplomatics. Bernard de Montfaucon brought Greek scholarship in France to a much higher level in the first half of the eighteenth century than Gesner even hoped to do for Germany. Nicolas Freret

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took on problems of ancient chronology and made creative use of the Jesuit reports from China.47 The Mémoires of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres contained a wealth of information on the ancient world, while Martin Bouquet’s Recueil des historiens des Gaules and Denys de Sainte-Marthe’s Gallia Christiana are still today among the basic documentary resources of modern medievalism.48 By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the academies were in decline and the Congregation of St. Maur was beset by internal crises over Jansenism. Internal instability left the institutions of French erudition vulnerable to external challenge, and that challenge came from the philosophes. To the philosophes, the relationship between erudition and authority was an obstacle to free inquiry and the progress of the sciences. Scholars in their own right, though excluded from the privileges of academic membership at least initially, the philosophes made extensive use of erudite scholarship even as they advanced a new intellectual and historical agenda exemplified by the historical essays of Voltaire and Montesquieu and ultimately by the Encyclopédie that appeared serially in the 1760s. The challenge posed by the philosophes was so great that Blandine Kriegel describes “the defeat of erudition” at the hands of d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse.49 Though embattled, the erudites did not simply yield the floor to the philosophes. Darrin McMahon describes a Catholic “CounterEnlightenment” that was opposed to the “High Enlightenment” of the philosophes.50 A reference to the movement Isaiah Berlin identified in central Europe, McMahon’s Counter-Enlightenment was composed chiefly of displaced Jesuits and other clergymen jealous of their lost status and worried about the political future of France. Venerable journals such as the Journal des savants and Journal ecclésiastique steadfastly denounced the materialism, atheism, and republicanism of the philosophes from the 1750s down to the Revolution. The Journal des savants even took Montesquieu to task over The Spirit of the Laws for its relativistic claim that different religions were better suited to different climates. The Journal des savants, to which Goguet and Fugere were closely allied (Fugere contributed regularly as an editor in the 1750s and wrote the lengthy notice of Goguet’s volumes), strongly supported Goguet’s work because of his respect for religion, zeal for government, and love of order, in addition to his good taste in scholarship.51

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In addition to structural reasons such as academic membership and programmatic reasons such as theology and materialist-atheism, there was a reason of content that philosophical history sought to satisfy. Erudition developed the minute contexts of the history of the human mind and its social manifestation, culture. Erudition offered enough detailed information that one could envision reconstructing the spirit of a past age and nation like Greece. Erudition became so detailed, so involved, and so thoroughly acquainted with past societies that it became less the history than the archaeology of the human mind. But deciding what it all meant was left to the reader. Erudition did not intend to explain how or even whether the different human contexts were linked to each other. Needed was a macronarrative that explained how the different times and places of human experience hung together. This is what philosophical history was intended to explain. Along with differences between erudition and philosophical history in terms of structure, program, and content, there was also a difference in method. Galvanized in the early Enlightenment quarrel over historical pyrrhonism, erudition was concerned above all with evidence. Erudite scholarship was assembled from fragments of texts and material objects that bore tangible witness to the law, social forms, and manner of living of past nations. Philosophy, by contrast, employed reason to interpret the past, its causes and consequences. Facts and detail were encumbrances that obscured the big picture of human history. No wonder the erudits viewed the philosophes as “a fanatic gang of philosophers who travelled very light.”52 The Historical Particularism of the “Göttingen School” Neither German politics nor German scholarship was as polarized as the French in the eighteenth century. When the Germans outright rejected the conclusions of the French philosophes, they usually did so not on grounds of incompetence but because of the latent political agendas cloaked in scholarship. Consider the perceived partisanship of Montesquieu, for example. In 1788 A. L. Schlözer hailed a republican Montesquieu as the one who awakened the middle-class insistence on assemblies that represented their interests in Brabant and Austria as well as in France. A year later Schlözer accused Montesquieu of bearing much of the responsibility for the Revolution.53 (In Chaper 8

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we will take up the matter of “partisanship” in German anthropology directly.) In addition to the political implications, the German cultural historians read philosophical history skeptically. Because of the broad strokes in which they painted, philosophical historians used evidence selectively, arraying it to support an argument that was initially conceived by reason. That is, they formed a hypothesis and then found historical evidence to support it. Montesquieu developed a deductive method, confirmed by experience. He used historical facts to prove a rational system. He believed that if one discovered the spirit of the nation, then one could understand, that is, deduce, the course of that nation’s history. Certainly, empiricism played a prominent role in his work, especially in Part III on climate and the environment. But a rational system derived from a priori principles and confirmed by historical experience was not what the Göttingen School was after. These cultural historians wanted facts, pure and simple. They had little interest in theory, systems, even method, specifically eschewing those as misleading and rarely able to withstand close empirical scrutiny. Justus Möser marveled that Montesquieu’s system was like “the most beautiful flower that I know; but if one examines it under a microscope it loses its beauty. He can’t stand up to anatomy.”54 This is not to say that cultural historians out-and-out rejected philosophical historians such as Montesquieu or conjectural historians such as Ferguson and Kames. But neither did they imitate them. Instead they read them selectively, approaching those authors both appreciatively and critically. Hans Aarsleff scolds Herder for intentionally misrepresenting Condillac in the Essay on the Origin of Language.55 Fania Oz-Salzberger discusses the misreading of Ferguson and other Scottish authors by Germans. However, C. D. Beck acknowledged on the title page that his adaptation of Ferguson’s History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic was only “loosely translated.”56 A. H. L. Heeren was only half-joking when he wrote that C. G. Heyne’s German version of Guthrie and Gray’s World History was more a paraphrased revision of Heyne’s own ideas than a translation.57 Rather than misunderstanding or misrepresenting their French and British colleagues, though, the Germans adopted an approach of critical engagement. Christoph Meiners chastised Montesquieu and Ferguson for their lack of data, which undermined the authority of their programmatic statements. But “chastised” is perhaps too strong a word.

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Meiners did not hate Montesquieu and Ferguson, nor did he reject their history. On the contrary, he recommended both to his readers in a highly selective list of works that he considered to be close to his own, and he told them that Montesquieu was worth reading carefully and more than once.58 But more remained to be said on the topic of social development. When it came to defining the specific spirits of real historical nations, Montesquieu was less reliable, and the reason was the lack of data Montesquieu brought to his work. In Robert Wood’s opinion, Montesquieu’s explanation of “the singular stability of Eastern manners” due to climate, government, and national spirit was “not at all satisfactory.”59 Wood believed government was a result, not a cause, of manners. It was the stage of development, in which Arabs had persisted for centuries, that dictated their manners and also their governmental form. Their stage of development was one factor in making them unconquerable from outside and ununifiable from within. Montesquieu’s reliance on a preconceived hypothesis and his lack of interest in empirical inquiry misled him. This was where Goguet came in. Goguet was a historian’s historian, an empiricist who mined the sources for facts that he could string together in a narrative showing the slow progress of the arts and sciences. Montesquieu was more of a philosopher (a philosophe), a rationalist who constructed a logical system in the tradition of natural law. Isaac Iselin drew the same distinction between the philosophe and the historian in his Geschichte der Menschheit in 1764. Iselin called for an exact and a correct knowledge of people and their multifaceted relationships. He called philosophers “simplistic” (einfach) when it came to psychology, whereas to the attentive observer the different shapes of history were endless, a rich, bottomless well of reflection. Iselin wrote the first German contribution to the history of the human spirit in order to test whether Montesquieu’s three forces of constitution, climate, and strength or weakness of a nation explained states any better than Rousseau had explained individuals. So, too, did Boulanger’s Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental (1761) sacrifice historical truth to systematic thought.60 Iselin set out “to determine whether Montesquieu has portrayed states more truly and analyzed their driving mechanisms more correctly than Rousseau has done for people as individuals; or whether both instead of true images have presented us only the spawn of their fantasy.”61 In fact, Montesquieu and Rousseau had

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human behavior in reverse: the determining factors regarding social development and history were not external factors such as climate; the determining factor was human nature itself. “Nothing has had a greater influence on Man,” Iselin wrote, “than Man himself.”62 Scottish conjectural history—also systematic—had not yet emerged in the early 1760s when Iselin wrote, and although Iselin tried to be empirical, his History of Humanity had much in common with conjectural history. In deed, it was the leader of the Scottish conjectural history movement, Henry Home, Lord Kames, who put Iselin up to the task. In the mid-1750s, Kames wrote to Iselin’s local literary society, suggesting that someone refute Rousseau’s thesis that humans were naturally good and had been corrupted by the arts and sciences. A few years later, in 1763, Kames wrote a letter to the Bernese jurist and professor Daniel Fellenberg, objecting that “human nature itself has a greater influence on the introduction of laws and customs than all the other causes that Montesquieu describes.” Here is an excellent example of the international Republic of Letters at work: a Scot inciting a Swiss to write against the French. Kames presented humanity as a unique species gradually progressing toward greater refinement and prosperity socially, economically, and politically. Human nature was, therefore, a moving target, varying according to time, place, and nation. Uncovering human nature was the goal of the history of the human spirit. And the only way to arrive at the truth about humanity was to learn exactly where humanity had come from. No rational system could accomplish this task; this was a job for history. Iselin thought his method—psychology supported by travel literature—and global scope were unique. Actually, his was only one of four very similar works that appeared in the five years from 1759 to 1764. One of these works was Goguet’s—Iselin knew this one, of course. In 1760, two years before Iselin began work on the project, Charles de Brosses combined ancient authors and travel literature in his comparison of modern African fetishism with ancient Egyptian cults; and an obscure Danish work by Jens Kraft compared the manners and thought of primitive peoples historically and around the world. Iselin did not become aware of these works until later.63 That works similar in method and intent should appear simultaneously and without influence on each other is a clue to the interests that were emerging in Europe in the wake of the Seven Years’ War.

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The cultural history that emerged in Germany in the 1780s and 1790s was similar in intent to that of French philosophical history and Scottish conjectural history. All were trying to explain society by studying the rise of the arts and sciences, language and the philosophy of mind, and the idea of collective human development from the primitive condition to Enlightenment. Yet how many differences were there in approach, method, and assumption? Politically, philosophically, religiously, and even professionally, the constellations of scholarship in Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland were different. Those differences cannot be explained, however, strictly in terms of geography when Germans felt themselves allied to Englishmen like Wood and Frenchmen like Goguet. The difference between philosophical and conjectural history on the one hand and cultural history on the other lay in method, that is, inductive and deductive historical reasoning. These methodological differences in turn began from different premises about what human beings were. Philosophical historians who reasoned deductively began with universal human nature and deduced laws from it. The deductive method assumed that human nature was the same in all times and all places. The differences between the ancient Greek and the modern European were merely circumstantial or accidental. The historians I have been calling “cultural historians” reasoned inductively. Accordingly, they made no assumptions about human nature. As we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8, some of them did not even assume that there was such a thing as human nature. There was only human culture. There were only the particular manifestations of human experience in real human history. This consideration is the source of their interest in the historical Homer. Homer was not a sage, not an idea, but a real man. This is why someone like Robert Wood was so intent on finding the original genius of Homer, even if it meant demoting him from sage to savage. This is why in the same effort Wood took a swipe at Montesquieu’s principles as being inadequate. Even as the real historical Homer, Plato, and Moses were being discovered in the 1760s and 1770s, other developments were occurring in the study of texts that would make those sage savages disappear altogether. Only culture, devoid of founding individuals, would remain.

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went to Arabia to learn what he could about Moses by visiting the site of the Exodus, just as Robert Wood had learned a great deal about Homer by touring the Aegean and searching for Troy. David Ruhnken had brought Plato down to earth by showing how systematic Platonism had been constructed by philosophers and Sophists after the great one’s death. What von Haven and Wood accomplished through travel Ruhnken accomplished through the study of texts. But in each case the result was the same: a founder of national poetry, philosophy, or religion diminished in status from inspired sage to primitive man. Robert Wood represents this process most clearly. He considered Homer to be a real flesh-and-blood individual, no more and no less than a man of his time. Ultimately, by the end of the eighteenth century, even the primitive man would be reduced to a shade, a mere name that represented an imagined origin, which in fact was constructed centuries later through the redaction of texts. In this chapter we shall see how the Old Testament text was demoted from the inspired word of God to a human document subject to the vicissitudes of time, changes in language, and the fortune of the Hebrew nation. Our principal subject will be Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), a student of Heyne and Michaelis, professor of oriental languages in the Theology Faculty at Jena in the 1770s and at Göttingen from the 1780s onward. Eichhorn’s method, which he called “the higher criticism” of the Old Testament, was directed not so

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much at understanding the relationship between God and humanity as at the understanding of the development of human culture. To Eichhorn the Old Testament was the most ancient and most complete collection of texts documenting a nation’s memory of human society, its rise and progress, its decline and fall, and then, most importantly, the nation’s survival in diaspora via a common identity revolving around the Old Testament text. The Bible as Literature When J. A. Ernesti was finally promoted to the ordinary faculty at Leipzig in 1756, the university required that he step down from the rectorship of the St. Thomas School, which he had directed for more than twenty years. Although he had been lecturing at the university part-time for decades on Greek and Latin literature in the Faculty of Philosophy, he had never earned a doctorate. That summer he hastily defended a disputation in advance of taking his new chair. But Ernesti’s academic chair was in the Faculty of Theology, not Philosophy where the Greek (Poetry) and Latin (Eloquence) chairs were housed. Nevertheless, Ernesti brought the philological methods with which he was thoroughly familiar to the Faculty of Theology. He read the Greek New Testament like any other piece of classical literature—as a document of its age, comparable to secular literature contemporary with it. The University of Leipzig had been on the defensive for half a century. Once the premier university of Lutheran Germany whose theological faculty wielded the same kind of doctrinal authority as the theological faculty at Paris did in France, around 1700 it was directly challenged by a new university at Halle, only two days’ ride away in southern Brandenburg. The founding of Halle coincided with the rise of Lutheran Pietism, a movement that emphasized the Christian’s personal relationship with God and the experience of being spiritually born again. Against the lay piety of the new movement, the Lutherans of Saxony fashioned themselves as the true heirs of Luther and as orthodox in their belief and practice, marking the Pietists as approaching heterodoxy if not already over the line. The Electors had managed to keep the Pietist movement out of Saxony in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, forcing them to contend with the Catholic

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Habsburgs in neighboring Silesia. Brandenburg, which neighbored Saxony to the north and Silesia to the west, was underpopulated and had a policy of welcoming religious refugees in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and the persecution the Pietists were facing. The Fredericks of Brandenburg also had a policy of competing with Saxony on every level. Halle, founded to compete with the Saxon universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig, enjoyed tremendous success in the first half of the eighteenth century. At Halle, philosophy and natural law were transformed by Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff, both of whom Halle stole away from Leipzig. Ernesti had all these considerations in mind when he applied the methods of classical philology to the New Testament, in conscious opposition to the Pietist theologians at Halle.1 Pietist theology in the mid-eighteenth century took the biblical text to be the inspired word of God. In a popular book that went through four editions in the mid-eighteenth century, the Halle theologian Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten (brother of A. G. Baumgarten of aesthetic reknown) explained to Lutherans the nature of the Bible and the task of the reader.2 One should read the Bible in order to discover its truths, and through prayer and meditation the Christian should learn to apply those truths and teachings to the moral improvement of one’s everyday conduct. Any passage of holy scripture, he taught, could be made to yield both a rational principle (doctrine) and practical application. To more critically minded scholars such as Ernesti, J. S. Semler, J. D. Michaelis, and J. G. Eichhorn, this reading of the Bible was uncritical and as schwärmerisch (fanatical) as the Pietism on which it was founded. In his autobiography of 1781, Semler reported that as a young theology instructor lecturing with the imprimatur of S. J. Baumgarten, Semler had been uneasy following the Pietist method of exegesis and practical application. As a student, he had read the seventeenthcentury Old Testament critics of western Europe, notably, Isaac Vossius, Brian Walton, Richard Simon, and Jean Le Clerc, names his mentors at Halle had blacklisted as evil and unchristian “antiscriptorios.”3 Vossius had presented the Hebrew Bible as a forgery, conceived by remnants of the Pharisee sect after the Romans had destroyed all the ancient Hebrew writings in a.d. 70. A version this thesis would become the imposture thesis of the “radical Enlightenment.”4 Walton had compiled the London Polyglot Bible, using two Masoretic Hebrew codices

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that he compared with other Semitic translations in Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, and Ethiopic.5 Publishing descriptions of changes in the text over time in the Prolegomena, Walton had provoked the ire of the great Puritan scholar John Owen who warned that his conclusions stood atop a slippery slope leading to a rejection of the text as authoritative and possibly even to atheism. Bossuet had ordered Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament (1678) cast into the flames for its description of the Pentateuch as consisting of documents older than Moses and having been edited into its present form by scribes centuries after Moses. Jean Le Clerc had developed a historical-critical method of biblical exegesis from which he derived a rational core of Christian doctrines tested by human reason. In doing so, he reduced Christ from a divine presence whom the believer experienced to an idea subject to debate and discussion. To historicize the text was to subvert the entire enterprise of Pietist Lutheran biblical interpretation, which rested on the authority of sacred scripture. The Bible embodied the divine word of God revealed to chosen prophets and apostles, and Providence had ensured that the Hebrew text had been transmitted to the present in essentially the form in which it was originally revealed. J. S. Semler was expected to teach that the original text had been composed autograph, that is, written (or perhaps dictated) by the human vessel of divine revelation, and that the process of recording the divine oracle was inspired. To emphasize the authority of the text, Pietist doctrine took the text to be immutable: Moses had written in the same square-shaped calligraphy that characterizes Hebrew writing now, including using points to indicate the vowels. Lutheran theologians, Pietist and orthodox alike, went so far as to insist that emendations like the Qere and Kethib notices in the margins of the Old Testament text had been given to Ezra in a separate revelation.6 The young Semler found teaching under this regimen stifling. With Pietist doctrine cast in a tradition as immutable as the text, he saw little room for scholarly inquiry. Instead of examining biblical manuscripts comparatively and critically, Pietist theologians directed their energies toward systematic theology. This approach presented several problems for Semler. For one, it was bad policy. The emphasis on doctrine doomed Protestant-Catholic relations to perpetual polemicizing over dogma.7 For another, it was bad doctrine. The immutability of the text

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confused the inspiration the prophets and apostles received at the moment of revelation with the human activity of writing the revelation down. Worst of all, the Pietist approach to the text was arrogant. It rendered all previous human work on the text (i.e., scholarship) unreliable, while the present exegete retained his own claim to truth through his individual reading.8 Although the Pietist movement within Lutheranism was supposed to recover the original ideals behind the Reformation, Semler found that eighteenth-century theology was far from the original intent of the humanist reformers, Erasmus, Conrad Pellican, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.9 Semler decided to suspend his belief in the inspired transmission of the text and to begin working in a humanist mode, much as Ernesti was doing at the Orthodox Lutheran university in Leipzig. Semler took the production of the text to be a human activity. St. John the Divine, for example, received his revelation while exiled late in life on the island of Patmos in the Aegean. The heavens opened above him, he witnessed the breaking of the seals, and he was commanded to write to seven churches in Asia Minor. That revelation was received under divine inspiration. But the actual writing of the letters and the New Testament book of Revelation was performed by John himself, including the description of the heavenly creatures. One could still see the author grasping for imagery that would describe the vision he saw. The process of divine inspiration and human recording was similar for all prophets and apostles, from St. Paul dictating his letters in the first century a.d. all the way back to illiterate Old Testament prophets whose words were committed to writing by disciples some time after the original event. The transmission of the written text, argued Semler, was exclusively human. That is to say, Christian theology was not necessarily the same as divine truth. Semler and other German scholars, including Ernesti, Michaelis, and Eichhorn, did not abandon the doctrine of divine inspiration, but they did historicize the texts by reading them comparatively, with other biblical texts and with extra-biblical secular literature. Instead of reading the text in terms of established doctrine, they began with the text and tested the doctrine that was founded on it (later in time). That is, they inverted the Pietist procedure. Their goal was not practical application but simply to understand the text, in the same way one would understand Homer, searching for the original intent of the

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author. Their method required abandoning, or at least leaving open to inspection, the “gothic edifice” of Church doctrine: revelation, inspiration, and the integrity and completeness of the canon—that is, the assumptions about the text that formed the basis of Protestant orthodoxy. Instead they brought secular and ecclesiastical history to bear on the text to see how, when, and under what circumstances the biblical canon was formed. Late-eighteenth-century scholars claimed that the historical contingency of the Bible in no way undermined its universal validity. But to Pietists like Baumgarten and Chladenius, these were dangerous intellectual games. It wasn’t theology—it was something new. Baumgarten called it “neology” and its crypto-atheistic practitioners “neologians.” What the Pietists objected to was the historicization of the Bible. Semler emphasized that both the New Testament canon and Christian doctrine had been formed at specific times, by specific people, and under specific circumstances. Like the texts of Plato and Homer, the New Testament was a human work. The hierarchy of the Church and its doctrine were erected later; they were not to be found in the biblical text itself, just as no systematic Platonism existed in the Platonic dialogues nor any systematic Greek mythology existed in the works by Homer and Hesiod. Semler began to do what English, French, and Italian scholars had been doing: collecting and comparing the texts of printed Bibles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just as Michaelis had instructed von Haven to search for variant readings in Hebrew manuscripts during his travels through Egypt and Arabia, Semler began to look for the same in Germany, using any Hebrew manuscripts he could get his hands on. More importantly, Semler began comparing style and vocabulary between secular Greek and sacred Greek. The Septuagint, whose authority in antiquity was so great that both Jews and Christians had taken that translation to have been divinely inspired, served as his standard text. He compared the Septuagint to secular Greek texts from throughout the Hellenistic world, as well as the other Greek translations of the Old Testament by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion (preserved in fragments only); Apocryphal writings from the intertestamental period; and finally the Greek New Testament. To take the Septuagint as comparable to other Greek literature was to deny the tradition (both Jewish and Christian) that the Septuagint

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was inspired. This was a risk Semler was willing to take. Once the Septuagint translation was reduced from a divine to a human activity, other doctrines began to crumble as well. He found the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, for example, to be a product of the Septuagint translation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Greek word “create” (ktizein) was a translation of the Hebrew bara. The term was used several times in the last half of the book of Isaiah, and St. Paul referred to God as (ktidavta) (“he who created,” Rom. 1:25). But in his reading of Hebrew Masorah and the Samaritan Pentateuch, Semler found that while the Greek term carried the implication of ex nihilo, the Hebrew term on which it was based did not. Creation from nothing and the consequent doctrine that matter was not eternal were Greek ideas, not necessarily Hebrew in origin. To Semler this meant that some Hebrew concepts took a Greek turn as a result of the intersection of cultures in the Hellenistic and Roman period. On the other hand, much of Hebrew style had been retained in the Greek versions, and that Hebrew manner of expression was carried into the Christian New Testament as well. Semler wrote of the “Hebraism of the New Testament.”10 The task of the critic was to sort out the various cultural influences on the sacred texts of the Old and New Testaments. What, for example, did the Hebrew bara originally mean? More importantly, how could one come to understand the original meaning of the Hebrew Bible? Urgeschichte—The Genesis Creation Although Ernesti and Semler were working in a humanist mode, they were not practicing cultural history. Their energies were directed toward text and criticism; that is, they were coming to a precise understanding of the meaning of the text by comparing it with other Greek literature. In the 1770s, the textual criticism of Ernesti and Semler, and the hermeneutic methods (national character, spirit of the nation) of Heyne and Michaelis, came together in the work of Heyne’s and Michaelis’s student, J. G. Eichhorn (1752–1827). In the second half of the 1770s, Eichhorn produced two works that offered a history of the Old Testament text and a history of Jewish cultural identity, inaugurating the methods of Old Testament criticism that have

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remained in place into the twenty-first century. His importance to biblical criticism and to the old cultural history of the eighteenth century lies in two areas. First, the text: Eichhorn approached the Old Testament not as a theologian but as a comparative linguist of oriental languages. He looked for similarities between the ancient Near Eastern languages then known—Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic. In addition to similarities between the different languages, he was taught to find differences between dialects within a single language, particularly the addition of new words, usually borrowed from neighboring languages, and changes to a word’s meaning, spelling, and pronunciation over time. Eichhorn’s second innovation pertained to Geist, what Herder at the same time, and at least partially under the young Eichhorn’s influence, would call “the spirit of Hebrew poetry.” Both innovations were motivated by the rising idea of culture, and both contributed to the definition and importance of culture as a category of scientific inquiry. Through a close reading of the Old Testament, Eichhorn watched ancient Israel create a national identity, a national history, and a religious-social tradition from darkest prehistory to the destruction of the state in the Greco-Roman age. Eichhorn, said his student J. P. Gabler, “blazed the trail. He showed a completely new, previously unseen way of how one could explain faithfully . . . the nature and thought of the ancient world.”11 Eichhorn published two works in 1779 and 1780, just as the concept of culture was gaining widespread circulation: his doctoral dissertation Urgeschichte and his Introduction to the Old Testament (1780). The Urgeschichte, completed in 1775 when Eichhorn was twenty-three years old and published four years later in his own journal, was a close reading of the opening chapters of Genesis. Eichhorn noticed that there were actually two separate creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis: Genesis 1:1–2:4 and Genesis 2:4 through Chapter 3. The first document told the story of the creation of the world. The style of the account, argued Eichhorn, was thoroughly mythical. Genesis 1:1–2:4 was written by a poet, not a historian. Eichhorn found the story to be balanced and composed in “gutem Stil” (good style), with the individual phases of creation showing the hand of the poet. The poet arranged the creation story from the most fundamental aspects of creation to the most complex, in seven scenes, each parallel in structure

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to the others: God spoke; something was created; morning and night, the nth day. The story was carefully composed, not made up in an impromptu fashion. Written as an organic whole, it was not amenable to a literal translation that proceeded word by word. Instead, the poetic form of the creation conveyed a single, simple truth: “God is the source of all things.” The rest was ornamentation to make that truth accessible to a raw and wild people. Eichhorn considered Genesis 1:1–2:4 to be an independent document. Genesis was not composed as a single work but rather was a compilation of many documents spliced together by the editors of the Pentateuch at various times after about 1000 b.c. It was distinguishable not only by the break in the narrative after the day of rest, but also from 2:4ff. by terminology (in the first document God’s name was Elohim, whereas in the second his name was Jehovah Elohim) and by style. The first story used more poetic images, whereas the second was a “more rational story from the childhood of the human race.” Eichhorn—and to an even greater extent Gabler—emphasized that in order to understand these stories correctly, one had to set aside one’s own philosophical ideas about the nature of God. “Instead one should bear in mind that one is looking at the history of the early age of humankind and that these are reasoned stories and poems from that early age. As a result, one ought to expect more sensory images and language, more pictures and poems than pure history, abstract images, and language.”12 A different problem faced the scholar when he looked at the second and third chapters of Genesis, which described the creation of Adam and Eve and the Fall. These two chapters were also a single, complete document, though distinct from the creation story that preceded it. The imagery, stories, and different kinds of ideas in just these few first pages of the Bible made a satisfactory interpretation very difficult. Eichhorn argued that scholars, philologists, and theologians had to select a point of view from which to approach the source. Eichhorn emphasized the selection of a point of view canonically: A single point of view and a single method of interpretation must be employed for both chapters. Genesis 2 is inexplicable if one explains Genesis 3 as allegorical or non-factual (uneigentlich) or if he explains the one as historical and the other as mythical and different. In other words, one cannot interpret some verses metaphorically and allegorically and take

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the rest as factual and historical. Rather a unified viewpoint and method of exposition must govern both chapters of the source before us.

This was because both Chapters 2 and 3 were a single whole. They were governed by the same language, the same manner of representation, and the same spirit. Chapter 2 prepared the reader (or originally hearer) for the Fall in Chapter 3. As one understood one part, so one had to understand the whole. Once again, this story was an ancient monument of the early age of humanity. As with the first chapter of Genesis, the researcher had to set aside his modern convictions and assumptions and assume the mind-set of the ancients.13 Fragments—The Construction of Genesis Eichhorn was not the first to see two distinct documents in the opening three chapters of Genesis. The French physician and amateur Hebraist Jean Astruc had published some Conjectures on Genesis in 1753 in which he speculated that Genesis was an amalgam of a dozen source documents spliced into a single narrative. Astruc’s fame lies in his discovery of two separate accounts of creation in Genesis 1–3 and the use of different names for God in the two accounts, Elohim (God) in Genesis 1:1–2:4 and Jehovah-Elohim (God the Eternal) in Genesis 2:4–3:24. Astruc called them “memoirs,” and although the documentary hypothesis (that the Pentateuch was an amalgam of Jehovist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly texts—expressed formulaically by Julius Wellhausen as JEDP) was still a century and a half away, the technique of carving the Old Testament into fragments developed side-by-side with classical philology. It was not that Astruc’s discovery of the J and E documents was new. Six hundred fifty years earlier the twelfth-century Talmudist Rashi had acknowledged a problem to be faced in the two different names of God in the Creation stories. He suggested that the two accounts differed in theological emphasis, although he did not claim that they came from different sources. Astruc’s innovation was to collate the pre-Mosaic memoirs and to classify them into different columns, indicating the verses that came from each source. Whereas philologists collected fragments of lost literature in the hope of reconstructing classical antiquity, Astruc took an intact text and carved it into fragments.

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Astruc identified not two pre-Mosaic memoirs in Genesis, J and E, but twelve.14 The first two he called Memoirs A and B. A third memoir C appeared in the Flood story at Genesis 7:20, 23. C was recognizable as not identifying God by name at all, instead telling the deeds of the patriarchs. Memoir D also did not mention the name of God, nor did it address the patriarchs directly, but it described the deeds of foreigners that were directly relevant to the Israelites. Memoir E presented Abram as a military hero, rescuing Lot and the Sodomites during the Pentapolis War in Genesis 14. In all, Astruc found a dozen source documents, including four uncharacteristically detailed genealogies of foreign families. Moses incorporated extracts from these genealogies into the Genesis narrative to explain the origin of Rebecca (Gen. 22) and the descendants of Ishmael (Gen. 25:12–19) and of Esau (Gen. 36:1–34 and 38:6–10). Astruc believed that of the twelve sources only the first two—A and B—were complete. They were also identified through Hebrew words. The other ten were fragmentary only and were distinguishable by their content alone, which added detail and color to Moses’s master narrative. The E and J creation accounts were of Hebrew origin, while the other ten originated in different Canaanite nations before being incorporated by Moses. Linguistically, all twelve memoirs were in the Canaanite language, broadly defined, which was the language also spoken by the Hebrew patriarchs.15 Astruc emphasized that the pre-Mosaic memoirs, particularly the neat round number of them, were speculations only. Maybe the last ten could be reduced to a smaller number; maybe the first two could be further divided, although Astruc found the E and J evidence compelling. Eichhorn found the evidence so compelling that he reduced the number of pre-Mosaic memoirs in Genesis to two, E and J only, and in his Introduction to the Old Testament he collated the source documents in two different ways and then separated them exhaustively.16 Regardless of the number, Astruc had made an important point: Moses drew on a number of longer memoirs from which he extracted segments relevant to the history of the Israelites.17 The hypothesis enabled Astruc to account for several problems in the Genesis text. It explained the use of different names of God, although Astruc acknowledged that there were exceptions to his J and E rule. The use of pre-Mosaic memoirs explained repetitions in the text—the two creation stories, the three flood stories, and references

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to Dinah, the subject of Genesis 34 but who was mentioned also in Chapters 30 and 46, for example.18 More importantly, anachronisms in Genesis—episodes that appeared in the wrong chronological order— disappeared.19 The anachronisms were apparent only, the memoirs being parenthetical additions that interrupted the Mosaic narrative. Moses therefore was released from fault for errors or negligence in the historical accuracy of the text.20 Best of all, Astruc believed he refuted Spinoza’s assertion that Moses was not the author of Genesis.21 For his efforts—and his acknowledgment that these were speculations only—Astruc received the imprimatur from the Church of the Madeleine in Paris. But preserving Mosaic authorship of Genesis came at a high price to orthodoxy. No longer did Moses create the Pentateuch ex nihilo under the guidance of divine inspiration. Now Genesis was demoted to a human document, with Moses the editor trying to teach the Hebrews their collective identity. Just as Ruhnken reduced Plato from a systematic philosopher to a human inquirer, and as Wood and Heyne relieved Homer of any claim to esoteric or universal wisdom, so Astruc and Lowth, and later Michaelis and Eichhorn, reduced Moses from inspired sage to primitive nomad, vainly trying to enlighten a nation of slaves. Like the Socratic dialogues and the Homeric epics, the Old Testament lost its transcendent, universal, and timeless status and became the creation of a specific human nation located in a specific place and time, its message directed not to all of humanity but to a historically contingent set of people in the early stages of cultural development. The demotion of Plato, Homer, and Moses did not diminish the importance of the texts associated with them. It did change their significance however. The Old Testament—or rather the source documents preserved in the canonized Old Testament library—remained a triumph of the human spirit and a testimony of its first childish stages. Eichhorn on Hebrew Mythic Style Eichhorn contended that initially the Urgeschichte was preserved in oral tradition which, he noted following Heyne, was a sure and exact archive in antiquity. However, by the time Genesis was compiled as a book, those oral traditions had been written down in some form. That is, Genesis was not composed directly from oral tradition but was assembled from already existing written texts. Eichhorn speculated about possible

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sources of those texts in Chaldean or Babylonian, Egyptian, and Phoenician literature, whose languages were closely linked to Hebrew.22 He would not have been surprised by the Gilgamesh Epic, translated half a century after his death by George Smith.23 Clearly, the contents of the two sources that comprised Genesis were known in Moses’s time. Moses’s blessing of the Israelites in Deuteronomy 33 was based on Jacob’s blessing; Joseph’s will (Gen. 50:25) was cited verbatim at Exodus 13:19; the Sabbath, to be kept holy, at Exodus 20:11 was based on the seven-day creation sequence in Genesis 1.24 That Genesis consisted of pre-Mosaic documents did not make it a forgery or compromise its authenticity—quite the opposite. Neither the style of the language, the complex editing of the J and E documents, nor the essential message of Genesis that “God is the creator of all that is,” that is, monotheism, was susceptible of being forged. On the contrary, the style of the Urgeschichte was appropriate to the youth of the world. A forgery would have gods and demigods, and would be filled with names and empires. Instead, the genealogies contained only ten names, just enough to make the point. The tone of the narrative of the patriarchs could only be that of a nomad, a shepherd. Through a careful reading of the text, Eichhorn described how the nomadic customs of the patriarchs changed as they encountered the Canaanites, who were more cosmopolitan than Mesopotamian nomads. Abraham was thoroughly nomadic in his customs. Like Patroclus in Homer, when guests arrived, he slaughtered a calf and prepared it himself. Although he was acquainted with wine (Gen. 14:18) he served his guests milk (Gen. 18). Isaac, by contrast, had adopted more of the Canaanite customs and drank wine (Gen. 27:25). Although he had cattle, he developed a taste for game (Gen. 27:4). He preferred the more settled life of farming to herding, acquired a farm from the Philistine Abimalech, king of Gerar, and settled there, advancing from the second stage of cultural development (herding) toward the third (agriculture). Esau followed his father’s path toward cultural development—not because he hunted but because he remained near the more cultivated Canaanites and bound himself to them by marriage. In Esau’s brother though, the family’s cultural development regressed: Jacob returned to the ways of his grandfather, working for twenty years as a shepherd in upper Mesopotamia (Gen. 28–29).25

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Cultural development in the early second millennium b.c. was not limited to Abraham and his descendants. Eichhorn noted the absence of a grain trade between Egypt and Palestine in Abraham’s day. Within two generations Palestine had become dependent on foreign grain, apparently imported by Ishmaelite and Midianite caravans who purchased it with spices, balsam, myrrh, and slaves (Gen. 37:25). The Canaanites, who were in close contact with their Phoenician neighbors on the coast, profited from the long-distance trade of the sea peoples. They used precious metals for trade, not barter. In Abraham’s day, gold and silver were valued by weight (Gen. 23:16); by Jacob’s time, it had been minted into coinage (Gen. 33:19). Mesopotamian nomads, who had no contact with Canaanite traders, rarely saw gold and silver. Their only means of exchange was barter, a custom that did not change from the time of Abraham to the time of Jacob. In Jacob’s case, twenty years’ labor purchased a pair of wives, a number of slaves, and herds. Egypt was the source of many developments in Canaan. One of the earliest political states, Egypt also had the most advanced culture and the greatest luxury. In Abraham’s day, the Philistine Abimalech ruled as the governor of an Egyptian colony; he was a pharoah in miniature, complete with court servants in the Egyptian mode (Gen. 21:22; 26:26). Between Abraham and Jacob, Egypt’s luxury increased dramatically so that by Joseph’s time a royal court had formed complete with a hierarchical household staff and official ceremony.26 Variations in style and content like these disproved the thesis that Genesis was the product of an impostor.27 They also showed the human origin of Genesis. Nowhere did Genesis claim to be divinely inspired. That claim only appeared in extra-biblical literature, in Philo, Josephus, and the Talmud.28 The Mosaic writings were human documents handed down orally and in writing. “They emerged from humanity, that is they must have flowed from human sources, from oral or written tradition.”29 Given the movement of the nation and the changes in language and writing forms in the very earliest stages of human culture, Genesis could only be a human document composed of fragments. If Moses composed Genesis out of a set of preexisting sources, that made him more an editor than a prophet. It also made him similar to Homer, the bard who strung together a set of ancient heroic tales to compile his epics. There were yet other analogies between Homer and Moses. Like the deeds of the gods in Homer, the two creation stories and

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much of the rest of Genesis were myths. Although there were different kinds of myths in the Urgeschichte of Genesis, still each part was written from a broad point of view that could be characterized as mythical. “Myths in general are ‘sayings’ of the ancient world,” wrote Eichhorn, echoing Heyne, “recorded after the ancient manner of thought and language.”30 In these myths one should not expect an event to be precisely recorded as it actually happened but rather in the manner that the minds of the time must have thought and concluded that it happened. This meant events were recorded in the imaginative, “optical,” and dramatic language and form in which an event could only have been presented. “All stories from the Urwelt, including the first origins of every nation, must necessarily be myths. And the older a book is, the more myths it must contain.”31 Over the course of time, these myths were retold through poetic fiction and artistic genius, even with some modifications by way of philosophical speculation. Every age altered them according to its own taste (Geschmack). From these alterations came new fables, which in turn became recognized as myth because of their similarity to the older myths, even though they were the later products of human poetics and not really ancient Volkssagen. Doubtless, therefore, newer stories entered the Urgeschichte that the nation accepted as genuine. Determining those myths that were of earlier and later origin was no easy task, wrote Eichhorn. In mixing up the chronology of myths, people often confused myths with fables and Mythologie with Fabellehre.32 To Eichhorn, that the stories of the Old Testament, especially in Genesis and Judges, were myths rather than fables was unmistakable. When Spinoza and Hobbes said that Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad were impostors used by religious and governmental authorities to terrorize the masses into submission, what they meant was that the stories of the Bible and Koran were made up, pious frauds (or perhaps impiously cynical). That is, they were fables. Fables were purely fiction, though they carried a moral purpose. Myths were more complex in origin. Myth originated further in the past to convey some truth or to commemorate some historical event. In his commentary on Eichhorn’s essay, Johann Philipp Gabler directly linked Eichhorn’s reading of the Old Testament to Heyne’s hermeneutics of myth. Myths, as Heyne pointed out in his edition of Apollodorus, were not fables or Märchen but rather ancient sayings, the oldest history and the oldest philosophy, the embodiment of ancient

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Volks- and Stammsagen composed in the raw, sensible language of early antiquity. They represented, therefore, the oldest literature and opinions of nations. In the preface to Hermann’s Handbuch, Heyne wrote that myths had come down to modernity in many different forms on account of alterations by different ages, poets, and historians.33 Many had lost their original form and were entirely unknowable. Nevertheless, enough of them remained that scholars hoped they might reconstruct the mode of life and the manner of thought in the very earliest stages of human cultural existence.34 This task was not as straightforward as it might seem. Humanity was different in eighteenth-century Europe from what it had been in the ancient Near East. Its literature was as different as its logic, language, and manner of expression. Only through a difficult hermeneutic act could one hope to understand the mind of the primitive Hebrew who reflected on the stories that Lutherans identified as the Creation and the Fall. The doctrines of Creation and the Fall had to be jettisoned if one hoped to understand Genesis 1–3 as it was originally intended. In 1780, Eichhorn urged readers of Genesis to “breathe the air of its age and nation.” Forget, therefore, the age in which you live and the knowledge it offers you. If you cannot do that, then do not dream that you can enjoy the book in the spirit of its origin. The youthful age of the world that it describes requires a spirit immersed in its depth. The first ray of the dawning light of reason cannot endure the bright light of day. The shepherd speaks only of his flocks and the ancient Oriental only to the soul of another Oriental. Without confident familiarity with the customs of nomadic life, without exact knowledge of the Orient and its ways, without familiarity with the manner of thinking and expression of the uncultivated world acquired through the study of the ancient world, especially of earliest Greece, and the undeveloped nations of more recent times, one can easily become a traitor to the book when he seeks to be its rescuer and interpreter.35

That is, one had to understand the style of Hebrew poetry. Lowth on Hebrew Mythic Style The reader was not adrift in the sea of criticism. The second half of the eighteenth century had produced guides who could bring one

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into the sure harbors of hermeneutics. In 1753, the same year that Astruc published his Conjectures on Genesis, the Clarendon Press at Oxford brought out a collection of lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews by Robert Lowth, professor of poetry at Oxford and later also bishop of London. Where Astruc accounted for repetitions in prose via multiple source documents spliced into a single narrative, Lowth accounted for repetitions in poetry via sententious style and primitive expression. Although he held the Greek chair at Oxford, in his inaugural lecture of 1741 he lectured on Hebrew literature rather than Greek. Over the next twelve years he developed a method of reading Old Testament literature that would have a profound effect on German scholarship in the 1770s. Michaelis actually studied at Oxford in the 1740s when Lowth was developing his ideas. Twelve years of annual lectures were collected and published in 1753, and in 1770, at the same time Robert Wood was making such a splash at Göttingen, Michaelis produced an edition of Lowth adding his own Latin notes and extensive commentary.36 Lowth’s most enduring contribution was the notion that Hebrew poetry was metrical. Some years earlier, Richard Bentley had made important discoveries on poetic meter in Greek and Latin drama, and it was on Bentley’s recommendation that Tiberius Hemsterhuys mastered Greek metrics and began reading the lexicographers of the Hellenistic period. Lowth also began studying metrics, but instead of working on Greek he turned to Hebrew. Just as Bentley’s expositions of anapestic dimeter in Eurypides and of Terence’s metrics allowed a better reading of those and other classical authors, Lowth’s discovery of parallelism in Hebrew poetry changed the reading of numerous passages in the Old Testament. Lowth explained that in Genesis Chapter 4, for example, Lamech killed only one man, not two as contemporary scholars generally (mis)read the text: Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.” (Gen. 4:23–24, NIV)

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This was an example of sententious style. A blunt, terse point was made in the first line, and color was added in the second line that repeated the first. This fragment was organized as a set of three couplets, in each case the second line echoing and elaborating on the first. Most Hebrew poetry was written in the same sententious style, organized as couplets, tercets, or quatrains. Lowth believed that Hebrew poetry originated as hymns for collective worship, with songs sung responsively by different choirs. The custom was documented in Exodus 15:20–21 when in celebration of the crossing of the Red Sea, Miriam led a choir of women who sang a refrain responsively.37 Certain Psalms, for example, 88 and 136, seemed to be organized to accommodate the same custom, with a call issued by the leader and a response by the choir. According to Ezra and Nehemiah after the Babylonian exile, the Hebrews practiced the same custom as they returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple.38 Pliny reported that Christians “chant verses alternately among themselves in honor of Christ, as if to a god,” and in a vision Isaiah saw Seraphim doing the same.39 Lowth believed that the origin and first use of poetic speech could be traced to the “vehement affections of the mind.” He pointed out that the Greeks referred to divine inspiration as “enthusiasmon,” which indicated the style and expression of a violently agitated mind prompted directly by nature. Primitive poetry threw open the secret avenues and the interior recesses of the soul, the inmost conceptions of the mind displayed “rushing together in a turbid stream without order or connection.”40 The poet burst out with sudden exclamations and apostrophes directed at even inanimate objects. Lowth’s speculations resemble Condillac’s thesis about the “language of action” discussed in Chapter 3 of the present volume. To minds so violently agitated, nature itself seemed to share in their emotions. Such ecstasy was experienced with the whole being, body, mind, and spirit. Words alone were not adequate to express it, so the language of action (song and dance) was an integral part of primitive poetry. Regardless of whether the Oxford scholar was directly indebted to Condillac, it cannot be coincidental that he linked poetry with primitive ecstatic visions during the 1740s when the origin of language discussion on the Continent was heating up. The major question regarding the sacred poetry of the Hebrews and the origin of language generally was whether language was divine or

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human in origin. Three years after Lowth published his lectures, Süßmilch, even less aware of Lowth than he was of Condillac, advanced his strong argument that human language was a gift of God. Lowth came up with a hybrid of the divine and human origin theories. Ecstatic poetry was “not so much the offspring of human genius,” Lowth said, “as an emanation from heaven; not increasing by small accessions, but from its birth, possessing a certain maturity both of beauty and strength.”41 Two ideas here reveal that Lowth was working in an earlier mode of thought characteristic of the first half of the eighteenth century. First, the sacred poetry of the Hebrews was divine. It represented a repertory of sacred wisdom from an age when humanity was closer to the gods, just as Homer was commonly understood in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Richard Bentley being the notable exception). At one point, Lowth toyed with a divine origin of Greek poetry. Whether it was truly divine was immaterial, he concluded—the Greeks themselves thought it was divine. Second, on account of its divinity that poetry was originally mature, perfect, and complete, not primitive. This view of poetry resembles Winckelmann’s and Lessing’s presentation of Greek art as mature, the highest expression of aesthetics in human history, something to be imitated. By 1770, Michaelis disagreed with the original maturity of Hebrew poetry. Nor was it necessarily divinely inspired, as Moses had preserved a Moabite victory song.42 In the 1740s, Lowth took sacred Hebrew poetry to be inspired and mature from the beginning; nevertheless, he could account for development in poetic style. “Poetry, in this its rude origin and commencement, being derived from nature, was in time improved by art, and applied to the purposes of utility and delight.”43 That utility consisted in its ability to stimulate the emotions and exert a stronger impact on the mind than abstract reasoning. Here Lowth employed the theory of divine accommodation. It was not the poetry that was rude in origin. The inspired poetry was divine and therefore perfect. The rudeness came from the language, the human aspect, which was primitive. The inspired source of the poetry and its immediate purpose were divine. The memory and organization of the divine oracle were human. Like Heyne and Wood after him, and like those involved in the origin of language discussion that was just getting under way on the continent

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as he was working, Lowth explained that poetry served as the national archive of memory, law, and identity in lieu of writing. Whatever therefore deserved to be generally known and accurately remembered was . . . adorned with a jocund and captivating style, illuminated with the varied and splendid colouring of language, and moulded into sentences comprehensive, pointed, and harmonious. It became the peculiar province of poetry to depict the great, the beautiful, the becoming, the virtuous; to embellish and recommend the precepts of religion and virtue; to transmit to posterity excellent and sublime actions and sayings; to celebrate the works of the Deity, his beneficence, his wisdom; to record the memorials of the past and the predictions of the future.44

Poetic meter, and its being cast in song and music, stabilized ideas that might otherwise have been altered in the process of oral transmission. In each of these departments poetry was of singular utility, since, before any characters expressive of sound were invented, at least before they were commonly received and applied to general use, it seems to have afforded the only means of preserving the rude science of the early times, and in this respect, to have rendered the want of letters more tolerable: it seems also to have acted the part of a public herald, by whose voice each memorable transaction of antiquity was proclaimed and transmitted through different ages and nations.45

It was well established that poetry was the medium of the national memory in preliterate times. In addition to their epics, the Greeks preserved their laws in song and music, and these were sung at banquets in Athens and memorized by Cretan youths. Aristotle (Problemata S.19, Q. 28) said the practice continued in his own day among the Agathyrsi in Thrace. Strabo noted that the Turdetani of Iberia kept their laws in verse. And of course Tacitus stated that the Germans had only heroic epics for records. Michaelis observed that the Swedes had promulgated laws in verse as recently as 1748.46 Eichhorn’s “Higher Criticism” Because language was the foundation of a nation’s identity, if one understood the history of its language, one would be in a good position

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to understand the development of its concepts and mind-set. In the case of the Hebrews, by studying the history of their sacred book and the institutions that brought it from its earliest expression as oral songs to its present canonized form, one could watch the development of Hebrew culture over time. This was Eichhorn’s project. He combined the critical, philological, and historical techniques then being applied to secular literature and brought the full force of humanism to bear on the Old Testament.47 He called his method “the higher criticism” (die hohere Kritik). “I have been obliged to bestow the greatest amount of labor on a hitherto entirely unworked field, the investigation of the inner constitution of the individual books of the Old Testament by the aid of the higher criticism—a new name to no humanist.”48 Eichhorn credited Richard Simon and Jean Le Clerc in the seventeenth century for the foundational work of his studies. In the eighteenth century, Albert Schultens had developed a more scientific linguistics, while J. D. Michaelis studied “Wortkritik und reiche Sachkunde.” Eichhorn cited himself as developing “die Höhere Kritik” of age, authenticity, integrity, and origin and knowledge of the ancient world. Through these methods, the interpreter of the Old Testament was equipped with everything needed for “glücklichen Ausübung.”49 Eichhorn’s innovation was as much a product of his own age as the Old Testament was of primitive antiquity. He had studied at Göttingen in the late 1760s and early 1770s with Heyne and Michaelis, and he was thoroughly steeped in the methods they were developing at the time. Carsten Niebuhr had returned from Arabia in 1767. Robert Wood published his essay on Homer in 1768. As a linguistic exercise Michaelis assigned his son the task of translating Wood’s essay into German. Michaelis himself edited a Latin edition of Lowth’s lectures with extensive annotations of his own in footnotes. Michaelis also began long-term projects on Mosaic law and a new German translation of the Old Testament.50 Although centered around the Old Testament, Michaelis directed his research toward the ancient Near East more broadly. He was interested in the first emergence of national identity following the origin of humanity. In tracing the development of Near Eastern languages, he acquired a reading knowledge of Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, and Arabic. He read the literature of these languages comparatively to see what ideas they shared and what constituted the unique spirit of each nation. His study of Mosaic law

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(1770–75), as we saw in Chapter 1, showed that Hebrew customs, institutions, and law were peculiar to the ancient Israelites and suitable to them alone.51 Through the development of language, law, and the social constitution, one could trace the emergence of coherent national identities. Like the scholars discussed in Chapter 4, Michaelis believed that nations developed in stages. His goal was to understand the intention of an individual author, to see the spirit of the age, and to access the ideas then current in the nation. Like Goguet and like Heyne, Eichhorn understood the Old Testament age to be the childhood of humanity, a period in which humanity lived in ignorance, responsive only to the senses. Like Heyne, Eichhorn maintained that one had to enter the mind-set of antiquity if one were to understand ancient texts. What Heyne would write in 1783—“we must return to the sensibility of ancient people and to the manner of speaking of the first ages”—Eichhorn stated even more strongly in 1780, asking readers of Genesis to “breathe the air of its age and nation.” Sooner or later, however, as one investigated the context of the text, one reached the point of diminishing returns and had to dig into the text itself. Eichhorn is usually credited with the historical criticism of the Old Testament. In fact, his real innovation was in the lower order of textual criticism and the history of the Hebrew language. These were the technical tools that enabled one to interpret the text in historical terms. The term historical criticism referred to the attempt to understand the text as it was originally understood by the original audience. In many cases, this meant that the message was originally delivered orally and not in writing at all. This is what Herder meant when he referred to the “spirit of Hebrew poetry,” and it was what Lowth was searching for when he emphasized that much of the Old Testament was ancient pastoral poetry, the songs of nomads, close to the origin of language and therefore expressed through the language of action, in vivid and metaphorical terms. Historical criticism also had a more specific sense. When employed by Eichhorn, it meant recovering the exact mind-set of particular ages: Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, all lived in different ages, and for each figure in Hebrew history one had to reassess the meaning and implication of the language used in the texts associated with them. This reassessment was accomplished through the history of language.

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One noted the use of an unusual word and asked, When did the word first enter the language? What did it mean originally? Did the meaning change over time? To use Semler’s example of bara, did it mean the same thing in Genesis 1:1, Isaiah 40, and Romans 1:25? One asked the same questions of phrases, ideas, styles, and so forth. Finally, these questions lead to the history of the text itself: the age, date, provenance, original author of a given text, and then subsequent editorial work on that text over time. Eichhorn understood Genesis, for example, to have been a collection of ancient documents first brought together in a single narrative by Moses and edited later by others down to Ezra, who more or less put it in the form in which it stands today. These three critical techniques—historical criticism, history of language, and history of the text—operated in conjunction as “the higher criticism.” Eichhorn’s method was new and yet old. The first aspect, historical criticism, was a long-standing aspect of the humanist tradition—in fact it was the humanist tradition. Eichhorn merely applied the humanist method to the Old Testament text. The same was true of his approach to the historical development of the Hebrew language and of the biblical text. Eichhorn did not invent the study of the history of language. He was drawing on methods well known to philologists such as Ruhnken and Heyne. His innovation lay in his ability to apply these methods to the Old Testament. However, the convergence of the history of the text, the history of the language, and the historical criticism all brought to bear on a single text—whether Hebrew or Greek—was indeed something new. In 1795 Friedrich August Wolf dedicated his Prolegomena ad Homerum to David Ruhnken, “prince of critics,” in gratitude for Ruhnken’s work on the history of the Athenian dialect. But Wolf derived his method—in essence the higher criticism applied to Homer—more directly from Eichhorn.52 The method went from philology to biblical criticism and back to philology, refined and transformed at each step. In the process of describing the development of the Old Testament, a view of the development of Hebrew culture as a whole emerged. This is not coincidental. Eichhorn’s method of higher criticism was not intended to bring a fuller understanding of the relationship between man and God. Rather, his intention was to see the process of human cultural development on the model of the Hebrew nation.

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Culture, Language, and Text When Adelung said the nation that loses its language also loses its identity, as the Wends did, he virtually equated language with culture.53 Although language was important to a nation’s identity and cultural autonomy, Eichhorn did not believe the two were synonymous. As the everyday language or mother tongue of the Israelites, the Hebrew language had an active lifespan somewhere in excess of 1,200 years. Hebrew culture and identity emerged before the Hebrew language and survived the language’s demise. Eichhorn knew that Abraham did not speak Hebrew. Abraham would have spoken an ancient dialect of Aramaic when he left Ur of the Chaldees. Upon settling on the Mediterranean coast, he must have learned the Canaanite language, which Eichhorn equated with Phoenician (the name is Greek). On the evidence of archaeology, modern scholars distinguish between the coastal Phoenician and the inland Canaanite, but in any case Canaanite, Aramaic, and Phoenician were closely related to each other, as well as to Hebrew. Perhaps Hebrew began to emerge in its own right already during the patriarchal period—in the three generations after Abraham. By the age of Moses five centuries later, which Eichhorn reckoned to be around 1500 b.c., the Hebrew language was fully developed and possessed a lettered alphabet (in contrast to Egyptian hieroglyphs). The age of Moses represented the golden age of the Hebrew language, said Eichhorn.54 The Mosaic writings standardized Hebrew orthography, just as Homer did for Greek and the Koran (two millennia later) did for Arabic. When the Hebrews entered Palestine, both their language and culture underwent tremendous change. New words were added to the language, mostly pertaining to nature like “cedar” and “pine” and different kinds of snakes. Most of those would have been loan words from neighboring Semitic languages. Already in the period of the judges, separate dialects within Hebrew were emerging, as the Ephraimites were recognizable by their pronunciation of “Sibboleth” (Judg. 12:6).55 During this period, Hebrew was still related closely enough to the Arabic of the Midianites that for several centuries after Moses Israelites and Midianites understood each other without translators, as when Gideon spied on the Midianites and understood what was being said in their camp (Judg. 7:9).56 The relationship between Hebrew and Arabic was

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the reason for sending von Haven and his colleagues to Arabia in 1761. Michaelis had mandated that von Haven, as linguist, collaborate with the botanist Forskål on compiling a glossary of Arabic nature vocabulary in order to help Old Testament scholars deduce the precise meanings of Hebrew words that came into use after the Exodus. As he expanded the Introduction to the Old Testament from the first edition of 1780 through the fourth edition in 1823, Eichhorn offered more and more examples of changes in the language from Moses and Job to Malachi and Esther. Those last two books—Malachi and Esther—marked both the end of the Old Testament era and the beginning of the end of the Hebrew language. The destruction of the Temple and the annihilation of the Kingdom of Judah by Babylon were catastrophic enough. But the halfcentury exile of the leading families at Babylon had an even more profound effect on language and culture than just the disruption of religious practice and political autonomy. The Temple could be rebuilt. More permanent was the decline of Hebrew as the daily language of transaction. Under the administration of Nehemiah, Ezra oversaw the collection and editing of all the sacred Hebrew writings into a single collection that was deposited in the rebuilt Temple. Hebrew was still used as a ceremonial language but little else. Even the sacred scriptures were translated into the new vernacular languages, first Aramaic in the Persian period, then Greek in the Hellenistic period. Eichhorn took Ezra’s edition to be a response to a growing number of competing “versions” of the Hebrew Bible. Ever since the divided kingdom, the Samaritans had their own Pentateuch. The Aramaic translation was completed at Babylon; a separate “Chaldean” paraphrase was composed; and in the early third century the Greek translation of the Septuagint became the most authoritative version of the Old Testament. As these “versions” were used more and more, Hebrew was used less and less. By the time of Christ, Hebrew was a foreign language to the Jews themselves. From the entry of the Hebrews into Palestine under Joshua to the destruction of the Second Temple by Rome in a.d. 70—less a fifty-year hiatus in the sixth century in Babylon—Israel existed as a political state. After the catastrophe of 70, the Hebrews still existed as a coherent cultural group, just as they had in Egypt and before that in the age of the patriarchs. But now they faced a real crisis: they were threatened

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with extinction via loss of identity and assimilation. Already they had lost their language. Scholars could make their way through the Hebrew text, but no one else could. There were at least three competing traditions in first-century Judaism: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Worse, the synagogues were deeply divided over the question of the Messiah. In the face of the events of 70, how could they preserve their identity and their culture? They did it by reviving and preserving an authoritative text. According to Eichhorn, what the Jews had to reconstruct was the language, not the text; the text was already established. Josephus reported that there was general agreement in the first century a.d. on which spiritual books were of sufficient value to merit reading in collective worship, with Esther being the latest canonical book.57 In about a.d. 135, perhaps in response to the schism over the Messiah, the canon of the Hebrew Bible was formally established exactly as Josephus had described it half a century earlier. An authoritative text was not the same thing as “the original text.” Restoring the Old Testament to the form it was in when the original authors put pen to paper was not something the Masoretes (the Hebrew equivalent of the Hellenistic Greek grammarians) were interested in. Neither was Eichhorn. Eichhorn did not believe that an original text (or Urtext) had ever even existed. The Old Testament was not a single text but something more like a library, composed over the course of perhaps a thousand years by several different authors. Many of those books had never existed “in the original.” Prophets, for example, delivered their oracles orally. Prophetic “writings” were a textual problem similar to the Homeric songs. Those oracles were remembered orally for some time by the prophets’ disciples and successors, and when they were eventually written down, they assumed a form different from their original delivery.58 “Of all the books that now constitute the canon of the OT,” he wrote, “on its journey through time, none has retained the external form that its author originally gave it.”59 If in fact there had been a “Temple Exemplar” or an “Ezra Codex,” a complete collection of the Hebrew Bible from Genesis to Esther and Malachi, that would have been only an edited collection of documents, not the originals from the hand of the author. The Christian Fathers assumed they were lost in the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps the codex had even been captured by the Romans and displayed

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in Titus’s triumph, but Eichhorn doubted it had lasted even that long.60 Pliny reported that a well-used codex had a shelf-life of no more than two hundred years before it was in tatters.61 That observation explained to Eichhorn how an ancient codex or roll could have been “lost” in the Temple and then rediscovered some five centuries later in Josiah’s time, ca. 640 b.c. It probably sat there unused but had not been destroyed as was the custom with old rolls. If the Temple Exemplar was more than a museum piece, that is, a book that was actually used, then by Pliny’s rule that manuscript, too, would have been gone by the time of Christ. The problem for Jewish scholars after a.d. 70, then, was not to establish the text or to recover lost fragments. The challenge, rather, was simply to understand it. The consensus today is that Hebrew was not so foreign to first-century Jews as Eichhorn supposed it was. But whether Hebrew training was a regular part of boys’ education or something reserved for scholars, the point remained that the Old Testament texts in the original made for difficult reading. Vocabulary was one problem. The meaning of some words was unclear owing to the historical changes in the language, in the same way that few English speakers can read Chaucer in Middle English. Interpretation was another problem. Words were often obscure in their meaning, carrying different meanings in different contexts, and some passages (like the famous one at Job 19:25–26) were written in an abstract and minimalist style that defied all interpretation. A third problem was palaeography. Sometimes a reader could not even determine what the word was. Recent manuscripts were composed in the square-shaped calligraphy that now characterizes Hebrew writing, but that script had only come into use around 100 b.c., apparently modeled, Eichhorn believed, on the Palmyran script. Wood had copied thirteen inscriptions in Palmyran (read right to left like Hebrew), which appeared to be translations of Greek inscriptions (or vice versa).62 Older manuscripts used letters of a different shape, traces of which Eichhorn knew from Hasmonean coins.63 Still, the ancient Hebrew reader was not hapless. He had the knowledge of his teacher as a resource. “Just as the comments of the Greek and Latin grammarians were transmitted orally for a long time before they were collected in written commentaries, so also for several centuries the paleographic, critical, exegetical, and grammatical

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annotations of the Jews were transmitted from mouth to mouth,” wrote Eichhorn.64 This oral wisdom, handed down from teacher to student, became as integral a part of the textual tradition as the text itself. In the margins a few scholia indicated variant readings between different manuscripts, and very early Midrashim offered allegorical

Two panels from Palmyran rosetta stone, depicting Palmyrene and Greek. The Arabic numeral 9 on the Palmyrene inscription corresponds to the Roman numeral IX of the Greek. Note the erased word on Palmyrene number 9, which corresponds to a word erased in Greek number IX. In Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the Desart (London, 1753). (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen.)

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explanations of certain words.65 Talmudic commentaries as old as 220 b.c. mentioned the comparison of manuscripts, indicating a “spirit of criticism” already at that time. Eventually, this traditional wisdom came to be written down over the course of the centuries and acquired the name Masorah—tradition. Once written down, the Masorah were attached to the text itself, in the margins or at the beginnings and ends of the books. A few of these notices were truly old, older than the Talmud, but none as ancient as Ezra, to say nothing of Moses.66 Most dated from the third to sixth century a.d. These Masorah included notes on Hebrew palaeography pointing out uncommon forms of consonants. They also counted the verses in each book of the Old Testament, indicating—to ensure accurate copying— the verse and the word that stood at the exact center of the book. Initially, the Masorah were appended to the individual Old Testament books, not collected as a single treatise. Later on, selections from these notes were excerpted and placed in the margins of the text in a highly abbreviated form.67 Gradually, the Masoretes inserted additional aids to the reader. Chief among these aids was the addition of vowel points. Here was something unique to Hebrew, something not at all analogous to the redaction of Homeric texts by Greek grammarians. Here also was positive refutation of the claim that the Old Testament was composed by an impostor. Even if Moses could have written of his own death and burial, he could not have added the vocalization.68 In the early centuries after a.d. 70, several vocalization systems emerged. Origen was reported to have transcribed a Hebrew manuscript phonetically in Greek letters in the Hexapla. Jerome’s Hebrew manuscript was only partly pointed, which caused him difficulty in explaining certain words. Even some of the Talmudic treaties disputed different punctations when fully pointed manuscripts were at hand. Eichhorn found that the present system of punctation was invented only after the fifth century a.d., a process that lasted some six hundred years.69 On a more mundane level, Jewish editors added simple features to the text such as line breaks in poetry. Ancient Hebrew poetry was recorded continua serie, with only accent marks indicating the division between verses. It was converted to verse by later scribes, just as Homer was versified by grammarians in the Hellenistic period. When one copied an ancient continua serie manuscript from Hebrew to Hebrew,

Table of Near Eastern Scripts, depicting Palmyrene and Hebrew among others. In J. G. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament, vol. 1, 4th ed. (Göttingen, 1823). (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen.)

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using separate lines for verses did not dramatically alter the sense. In the translations, however, the line accents were not preserved, so in the translations the meaning often was changed. The Latin Vulgate occasionally differed markedly from the Hebrew because Jerome used primarily Greek and Latin manuscripts, not Hebrew.70 Even simple innovations such as spaces between the words, could assist the reader. In the ancient world, whether in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Palmyran, the custom was to runwordstogetherwithoutanyspaces. Look again at Wood’s transcription of the Palmyran inscriptions: Both the Greek and the Palmyran inscriptions show the words run together. Separating words by spaces was not necessary when the language was one’s mother tongue. But for Jewish readers coming to Hebrew as a second language, even simple devices like this were helpful. The modern interpreter’s task was similar to that of the ancient Masoretes: to attempt to understand the author’s original meaning and intent. In preserving the manner of reading very old manuscripts, the Masorah could transport the critic back in time some 2,000 years, enabling him to understand how the text was understood in the time of Christ or even earlier. Yet to Eichhorn the Masoretic notes were frustratingly unsystematic; in any event they addressed the text at most as far back as Ezra.71 To see back in time farther than that, one had to go to the versions, which preserved older forms of the text before the pointed Masoretic manuscripts. By comparing a given passage in several Old Testament versions, one could use the variations in word and meaning to locate something closer to the original meaning through triangulation. By the early 1820s when he brought out the fourth edition of the Introduction to the Old Testament, Eichhorn devoted a volume and a half to the versions alone. Now that we have described the search for the historical Plato, the historical Homer, and the historical Moses, the obvious direction to head in next would be the search for the historical Jesus. But we are not going there. True, Strauss’s Life of Jesus was built on Eichhorn and Heyne, and Strauss gave due credit for the sources of his method. Without Heyne and Eichhorn, Strauss could not have presented the first century a.d. as an age that understood the Messiah, history, and creation itself in mythic terms. Nor could he have concluded that to distinguish fact from myth regarding the historical Jesus was to miss

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the point about the significance of Jesus. But the search for the historical Jesus, the cultural context of the man and the literary context of the gospels, occurred after 1800 in an age when Kulturgeschichte was firmly established and therefore beyond the scope of this book. Significantly, Eichhorn did not participate in that enterprise. He did continue to publish in theology, bringing out expanded editions of his Introduction to the Old Testament in 1787, 1803, and 1823. But by the 1790s he ceded leadership in biblical criticism to a younger generation— Gabler, Bauer, J. S. Vater, and W. M. L. de Wette, as well as eventually to Strauss. Instead, Eichhorn took his research and his teaching in a new direction. He began to write cultural history in the form of historia literaria.72 In the early 1790s when the Terror was raging in France and the Hanoverian peasantry revolted in the absence of the army that was putting down a revolt in the Netherlands, Eichhorn turned to the rise and progress of European culture in hopes of seeing that it was not headed in the direction of ancient Israel, into decline and fall. Eichhorn’s new direction in scholarship was less abrupt than it seems. He went from the history of Hebrew culture to the history of European culture. The change in direction reflects the change in the concerns of German scientists of humanity. In the 1770s and 1780s, the interest was in the origin and progress of ancient culture. In the late 1780s and 1790s, the interest was in the direction of Europe itself in the face of the revolutions not only in France but all across Europe, from Russia and Scandinavia to Geneva and British North America. As Europe became a more dangerous place in the 1780s, the interest also shifted from rise-and-progress to decline-and-fall. This we shall see in the next chapter.

SIX ◆

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The Sociology of Ancient History

AT THE END OF MAY 1782 ,

Christoph Meiners departed Göttingen with his wife, heading south by carriage toward the Alps and Switzerland. It was summer vacation, and although the philosopher’s teaching load at the university was relatively light—a lecture and a proseminar being his only courses—he had been writing at a furious rate. No fewer than five titles on the cultural history of classical antiquity had appeared under his name in the three years between 1780 and 1782, two of them with multiple volumes. Now, though, he was tired. Tired of the library and tired of the clouds that always seemed to enshroud southern Hanover. He looked forward to walking in the sunshine and breathing the mountain air of Zürich and Geneva, of Bern and Basel. They made good time following the postal road exchanging horses every 15 or 20 kilometers, covering upwards of 75 kilometers in a day. Meiners traveled like he wrote, in haste. His mentor and lifelong friend J. G. H. Feder, who often traveled with him, although not on this vacation, recalled an occasion when Meiners sped toward home almost to the detriment of Feder’s frail health. Only later did Feder realize that it was love calling the young man back to his fiancée in Göttingen.1 Still Meiners was capable of slowing down. He reveled in the detail of a small place, a village, a house, a person. On this vacation he had to keep reminding himself to travel slowly, with courtesy and pleasure, lest one cover half the world and see nothing. Everyone seemed to hurry through Switzerland, especially through the smaller cantons. 193

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In 1777 Christoph Meiners and Luise Friedrike Achenwall were married, and now five years later they rode together, childless as they would remain, spending several days in Stuttgart visiting relatives on her mother’s side before continuing south to Tübingen. On the way they detoured through Echterdingen to visit a pastor they had heard of—supposedly one of the greatest mechanical geniuses in all Europe, who built clocks and an adding machine, and had a small textile factory in his house. They spent a day hiking in the Neckar Valley above Tübingen. From Tübingen they drove past the gothic ruins of the abandoned Schloß Hohenzollern and into the Swabian Alps, stopping at stations in Hechingen, Balingen, and Aldigen to refresh their horses. By evening they were in Tuttlingen where Meiners still had enough daylight to write a nine-page letter. The next day was the big day. On June 7 they were already on the road by 3:45 a.m., watching the morning dusk turn to dawn, driving 21 kilometers to Engen and another 13 to Singen by midmorning. Just short of Singen they got out and sent the carriage with their baggage on ahead. The Meinerses themselves surveyed the magnificent view of the snow-covered Alps to the south and before them the face of a sheer mountain with a formidable fortress some 250 meters above. This was the Hohentwiel, the ancient keep of the house of Württemberg and their pilgrimage destination for the day. Built atop the volcanic Mount Hegau in the early tenth century, it was acquired by the house of Württemberg in the sixteenth century and had survived five sieges in the Thirty Years’ War. Twenty years after the Meinerses’ visit, in 1801, it would be destroyed in the second war of the Napoleonic Coalition, but for now it served its eighteenth-century function as the Württemberg state penitentiary. Luise’s grandfather had spent several years there, imprisoned. Frau Meiners was the granddaughter of Johann Jakob Moser, the most important and most prolific legal scholar and statesman in eighteenth-century Germany. Moser had married his daughter Wilhelmina Luise to Gottfried Achenwall, one of his protégés on the new Göttingen legal faculty in 1755. Luise Friedrike was the offspring of that union. Christoph Meiners, the son of a lowly postmaster in a very small town on the Friesian coast, had married up. At Stuttgart the octogenarian Moser had written them a letter of introduction, which got them into the fortress. A soldier escorted them to the cell block. Chains still hung from the walls of the prison

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chamber, where the Württemberg princes, sometimes personally and with relish, shackled their political prisoners.2 Johann Jakob Moser had not received such royal treatment. At the outset of the Seven Years’ War, Duke Karl had offered a detachment of Württembergisch troops to the French for use against Prussia, without legislative approval and therefore in violation of the constitution. Württemberg was not an absolutist state despite the duke’s efforts. Anonymously, Moser had written a position paper on behalf of the Landesstände (Estates), but the style and argumentation had betrayed his authorship. Summoned by the duke and left standing for three hours in the cloakroom at Ludwigsburg before his condemnation, Moser had been hustled into a locked wagon guarded by three bayoneted soldiers and taken on a slow thirty-hour ride to the Hohentwiel. There he was placed in solitary confinement, forbidden conversation, books, pen, and paper other than a Halle edition of the Bible and a hymnal.3 The greatest danger in such circumstances was the loss of one’s sanity, Moser had told his granddaughter. In 1782 Hohentwiel housed only one prisoner, a certain Herr von Knobelsdorf, formerly a Prussian servant who twelve years earlier had attempted to corrupt (verführen) some young people in the ducal guard. He now was reduced to shouting loud obscenities at the duke as if possessed.4 Moser, a very serious Pietist, had whiled away the time by composing spiritual songs, more than a thousand of which he had etched in the white chalk walls of his cell with the sharpened point of a lamp wick trimmer. He had written a series of humorous fables and some of his thoughts on law. In the Bible he had scratched annotations between the lines and in the margins in palimpsest. Moser presented that bible to his granddaughter, who toward the end of her life donated it to the Göttingen Library where it remains to this day.5 The spectacular view from his window, from which one could pick out the peaks of the entire Swiss and Tyrolean ranges, offered some consolation, as did the singing he could hear from the churches below in Singen.6 Moser had charmed over to his cause the prison warden, reputed to be very harsh. The warden had been sympathetic to the pious man and offered him conversation as well as wine, coffee, and tea at lunch every day.7 Frau Meiners expressed her gratitude to the warden, still on duty twenty years later, and he was delighted to meet the daughter of Moser’s daughter, Luise Achenwall, who had died suddenly in 1762 while Moser was in prison.8 Only following the

Göttingen Kassel

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Stuttgart Echterdingen Tübingen Hechingen Balingen Aldingen Stein Constance Lake of Constance Zürich

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Itinerary of Christoph and Luise Friedrike Meiners through Switzerland, Summer 1782

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formal conclusion of hostilities, and at the motion of Frederick of Prussia, seconded by the Hanoverian court in London and the court of Christian of Denmark, was Moser finally released in 1764 after more than five years in the fortress. Although Duke Karl occasionally sought his opinion, it was not until 1770 that Moser was fully rehabilitated. Throughout the ordeal Moser had remained firm in his position: absolutism, Enlightened or not, was not Württembergisch. “Each state has its own form of government,” he told the duke. “England must be English, Germany German, and so must also Württemberg be ruled according to its ancient constitution; the latter is structured such that a duke has sufficient authority and income. If one tries to overstep the bounds, then he violates it.”9 Herr and Frau Meiners hiked from Hohentwiel down to Singen where they caught up with their carriage and rented a set of emaciated and broken-down horses that took a full eight hours to travel to that night’s destination in Constance. This gave them ample time to observe the countryside along the south bank of the Rhine from Stein to the Lake of Constance. The bank, lined with fruit trees in the subtropical microclimate attested to “the highest culture of the land and the rural industry of its inhabitants.”10 The term culture generally brings cities to mind, but as Meiners used the term when it was still new it encompassed all aspects of a community, town and country alike. “Under and beside these trees one sees either cute little lawns or vineyards or fruit orchards that run down to the outermost walled top of the bank.”11 The town was different. Notwithstanding excursions to Meinau and Reichenau, two days in the town was enough to conclude that “Constance is among the dreariest cities in Germany, and perhaps in Europe.”12 This was all the more sad because its climate and location should have placed it above the wealthy commercial cities, St. Gallen, Zürich, and Schaffhausen. The housing market was flat and food prices were ridiculously low, which was good for tourists but left the local economy stagnant. This was not a case of recent cultural decline or depression. The city simply had not advanced much beyond its glory days some three and a half centuries earlier when it hosted an ecumenical church council. Constance’s cultural achievement was reflected in the opportunities it afforded young people. The expectations of students at a girls’ school they visited were depressingly low. Clearly, Constance would need some help were it not to fall behind the rest of Catholic Germany.13

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Meiners was content at this point in the journey simply to observe the state of the city without considering the reasons for its condition. Later in the summer, when he had seen the social and political life of Schaffhausen, Zürich, Bern, Lausanne, Nyon, and Geneva, the differences between the cantons and between the French and German areas would give him pause for reflection on the causes of cultural rise and decline in eighteenth-century Europe. His scholarship in the late 1770s and early 1780s was directed precisely at that question—how nations rose to greatness and fell into decay, and more importantly why. Why did ancient Athens and ancient Rome rise to regional and Mediterranean superiority? What were the causes of their greatness? Was it simply because of a favorable location, or was it because of the industry of their citizens? What marked the peak of their achievement, and what was the turning point? What became of the nation after the demise of the state? The Cultural History of Antiquity Just days before departing on the trip, Meiners had completed a second volume on the Origin, Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Arts and Sciences in Ancient Greece. The work would be hailed by its French translator, who said that “of all the modern works on Greece, none are so informative as those of C. Meiners in terms of discernment, sagacity and true philosophy.”14 John Gillies considered the same work “one of the most valuable and accurate treasures of Greek learning contained in every modern tongue.”15 The English translator of a four-volume history of women that Meiners wrote in the 1790s praised his breadth of reading of ancient sources. His cultural history of luxury in ancient Athens would be translated into Italian and French as late as 1820. When Thomas Beddoes lamented the Bodleian Library’s failure to acquire the most important books from the continent in the 1790s, Meiners’s was among the few names he mentioned.16 Meiners represented antiquarian research at the highest levels in the 1770s and 1780s. He constructed his narrative on the testimony of original authors, not “derivative” secondary authorities whether ancient or modern.17 He would later apply the same method to modern travel literature in the construction of a global comparative anthropology, as we shall see in the next two chapters.

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At first glance, Meiners’s History of the Origin, Rise, and Fall of the Sciences in Greece and Rome appears to be a standard account of the history of philosophy similar to the four-volume work published in the 1740s by J. J. Brucker.18 Meiners began with Thales of Miletus and proceeded chronologically through the pre-Socratic philosophers: Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Zeno, and so forth. He then turned to Athens in its Golden Age and discussed the philosophy of Socrates and the Sophists. He wrote a lengthy section on the death of Socrates and then discussed his students, culminating in Plato. By the time he reached Plato, Meiners had filled over 1,500 pages in two volumes. Yet on closer inspection, one sees that the work is not the traditional philosophical history that traces the handing down of the torch of reason through Western civilization. His approach to philosophy was external rather than internal. Rather than discussing philosophers and their texts solely on their own terms, as if abstracted from their broader context, Meiners’s chief interest was in the context itself. Philosophy was not eternal and objective Truth but an expression of a given nation. When the subject was Thales of Miletus (624–546), Meiners did not address Thales’s ideas directly but instead discussed intellectual life in Greece during the age of the Seven Sages generally and the rise of “scientific knowledge” in Ionia ca. 600 b.c. He compared the development of philosophy to older modes of acquiring wisdom, such as through the Delphic Oracle. Instead of describing specific philosophical doctrines, such as the problem of the One and the Many, Meiners wrote about the political and social world that produced Ionian philosophy. Above all, his concern was to determine what was characteristic of Greek thought in a given time and place, “its spirit and its age” (ihres Geistes und ihres Zeitalters). In his own words, Meiners wrote “a history, not a collection of disputations and philosophical programs.”19 These two themes—the eternal philosophical truths and the historical contingency of the human philosophers—had been kept isolated from each other by historians of philosophy from Diogenes Laertius all the way down to Brucker. Meiners was careful to distinguish his own approach from Brucker’s. Brucker approached the history of philosophy internally. That is, he attempted to reconstruct a thinker’s philosophical system based on extant writings and fragments. Brucker endowed the philosopher with a

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more or less coherent and single-minded view of the world and of truth, with an emphasis on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Brucker established the method and chronology used in most histories of philosophy to the present day.20 As noted in Chapter 3 in the context of David Ruhnken’s work on Greek dialects, Brucker encountered difficulty in working Plato’s dialogues into a coherent system. He was careful to read Plato on his own terms, using the dialogues alone without any of the “Platonic” doctrine developed later by his students and successors. Instead, he was especially attentive to pre-Socratic sources of Plato’s thought. To Brucker’s surprise, he found that Plato was not a Platonist at all, and there was no system hidden in the dialogues.21 Meiners also was trying to sort out the sources of Plato’s thought, but his method was history, not the history of ideas. In fact Meiners considered Brucker to be of “weak and uncertain help” to his own project. In the two volumes, Meiners dug into only two philosophers, Pythagoras (active ca. 525–500) and Socrates (470–399). Of the 425 pages on Pythagoras, fewer than fifty were devoted to the philosophy of Pythagoras himself. The rest described the rise and fall of the Pythagorean society and its context in colonial Greece. Meiners was concerned less with the ideas of the society and its leader than with the way the society functioned: the emigration of a band of men led by a quasireligious warlord from Samos to Croton in southern Italy; the society’s rules and lifestyle; its secrets and symbols; what changed after the society dissolved; and the eventual effect of Pythagorean ideas on later thought, especially Plato’s. This overwhelming emphasis on context at the expense of philosophic doctrine was a result of the broad definition Meiners gave to Weltweisheit and Wissenschaft. Included were all kinds of knowledge, not simply those that conformed to a modern definition of philosophy. Weltweisheit—the Germanized form of sapientia saeculoris or secular wisdom—emphasized practical, more than theoretical, forms of knowledge, so a complete picture of the Pythagorean lifestyle, its goals and means to reaching those goals, were more interesting to Meiners than the ideas themselves. So, too, when he discussed Socrates, Meiners situated his life and ideas deeply in the context of the fifth century b.c. Athenian social life, including the social and constitutional role of the Sophists and the effects of the Peloponnesian War (431–404), the

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plague that brought Athens to its knees, and the need for ideological conformity in a direct democracy that executed its most creative thinker. Meiners’s view of Athenian culture was as phlegmatic as any in Germany before Jacob Burckhardt’s in the nineteenth century.22 Meiners had not always worked in this hermeneutical and contextualizing mode. It was only in the late 1770s when that crucial shift in inquiry from the abstract “Man” to the concrete collective, marked by the advent of the term culture, that Meiners found his method. In fact, we can watch Meiners learn. In the early 1770s, he had lectured on Cicero, finding him to be less the philosopher than one might expect. Meiners portrayed Cicero as a symbol of the weakness of the Republic in its last days, an effeminate man and a senator, a friend of the despicable, faithful to no one, a mercenary lawyer prepared to switch sides if the price were right. Meiners concluded that “in Cicero human frailty must rightly be deplored. Neither the magnitude of divine genius nor the force of the most careful learning could save him from the depravity and folly of the human mind.”23 In preparing a subsequent essay on Cicero, Meiners came across Conyers Middleton’s 1741 Life of Cicero. Middleton warned his readers of prejudices they might bring to their understanding of Cicero. In the course of their studies, literate boys across Europe became well acquainted with all the characters of the late Republic, often associating or identifying with specific Romans according to their personalities. Their motives for selecting various Romans as their personal mascots were completely unjustified historically, but boys often maintained their opinions through their adult lives anyway. Middleton proposed objectivity, not hagiography, in biography, although he admitted that he began work with “a very favorable opinion of Cicero, which, after the strictest scrutiny, has been greatly confirmed and heightened in me.”24 Cicero was not as flashy as some others, such as Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, or Cato. Boys tended to look upon the glory of the great generals without considering the evils that they did. Those who were peaceful, civil, law-abiding, “whose sole ambition is, to support the laws, the rights and liberties of his citizens, is looked upon as humble and contemptible in comparison.”25 When Meiners read Middleton, he stood convicted. He had believed all of Cicero’s enemies— Caesar, Antonius, Brutus, Sallust, and even Montesquieu, who in the twelfth chapter of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans compared

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Cicero unfavorably to Cato. Middleton’s preface might have been full of commonplaces, but that did not mean the commonplaces were untrue or could not be taken seriously by readers, even forty years after they were written. Middleton taught Meiners that a person did not forfeit virtue simply because he also had a few weaknesses. “Therefore,” Meiners wrote, “I, too, have become a warm admirer of the extraordinary excellence of Cicero’s spirit and heart.”26 So Meiners cut his project short and published his essay on the decline of the Roman constitution and morality. Rather than repeating the work of Middleton, Meiners focused on the age of Cicero rather than on the great man himself. The result was a short book, The History of the Decline of Roman Morals and Civil Constitution, completed a year before the Swiss vacation, in 1781. This became his style: to emphasize overwhelmingly the cultural contexts in which individuals acted. In his works on ancient Greece and Rome from the early 1780s, individuals still played a role, however truncated. Within a few years, as we shall see in the next chapter, individuals disappeared almost completely from Meiners’s work, leaving only the processes of human social development. Meiners’s confusion over how to interpret Cicero is instructive. It was a confusion that lay not in the historical sources but in the modern perception of civil society and the duties owed to it by the individual. Meiners admired Cicero as a literary man and as a philosopher and an orator. Meiners disliked Cicero as a politician and as a lawyer and consul deeply involved in the intrigues of the late Republic. Only by placing Cicero in the moral context of the first century b.c. was Meiners able to reconcile those two aspects of Cicero. J. G. A. Pocock has made a useful distinction between two kinds of virtue in early-modern England, which might be applied to Meiners’s interpretation of Cicero.27 The two kinds of virtue are civic and sociable. Civic virtue was the virtue of Thucydides, Tacitus, and the Machiavelli of the Discourses on Livy, embodied in the Roman vir, the manly man capable of taking up arms in common cause. He was the citizen-soldier, who by holding private property was entitled (and obligated) to wield the power of the state in his own hands through the use of military arms. Virtue was republican. It meant to participate in government. This was the Cicero of politics, but it was a model of virtue that was passing away in the eighteenth century. Two factors con-

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verged to render this model of virtue obsolete. First, what happened if the armed vir became a religious fanatic? Answer: the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion. Second, the methods of war changed. New weapons, logistics, and tactics using heavy arms, artillery, and gunpowder rendered the citizen militia obsolete. Military service was no longer a source of liberty but was now an arm of the state. The end of the wars of religion marks the beginning of polite or civil or commercial society, or as Pocock puts it, the triumph of sociability over both barbarism and religion. The age of Enlightenment begins with the redefinition of virtue as sociability. The second kind of virtue was the virtue of commerce: the exchange of money for goods and services, the exchange of ideas through conversation. Behavior—manners and politeness—replaced military prowess as the standard of virtue. Rather than exercising personal autonomy in the right to keep and bear arms, the citizen who paid someone to bear arms for him was freer to pursue wealth, leisure, and enlightenment. This is what Meiners understood by virtue, and it corresponded to the Cicero of philosophy and rhetoric. The rise of polite learning and polite society marked a renewal of the humanist enterprise, as we have seen amply in preceding chapters. Its goal was to wrest control of letters from the old clerical elites—churchmen, but also lawyers and antiquarians—and to place them in the hands of “an urban and urbane leisured gentry, who would transfer ‘philosophy’ from the disputation of the schools to the conversation of the drawingroom and the club.”28 Virtue now became the cultivation of critical faculties and especially the refinement of taste. Good taste referred to the cultivation of sensitivities and the ability to draw fine distinctions—in the arts, but also in reasoning, ethics, and experience generally. To have good taste meant to conduct oneself well in all aspects of life. Courtesy and politeness pointed toward a person’s aesthetic sensitivity in general, and one could tell much about a person’s cultivation by observing his or her comportment in daily life. Aesthetics was all-consuming, and as Pocock writes, “ ‘Taste’ and ‘science’, important terms in [Gibbon’s] vocabulary, meant the exercise of a judgment that called on all the powers of the intellect.”29 Pocock’s definitions of civic and commercial virtue are specific to England, but they can be generalized—at least provisionally—to Germany.

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One could view the project of popular philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century as transferring philosophy from scholastic disputation to the educated Bürger class. Taste and science were as prominent in German discussions as they were in England. The cultivation of aesthetic sensitivity was the premise behind the eighteenthcentury German philological education, the kind advocated by Ernesti, Gesner, Winckelmann, and Heyne. But the aesthetic ability to draw distinctions, even to perceive at all, was predicated on language. As Meiners saw it, virtue, aesthetics, and language were collective accomplishments, and a nation rose or fell on their merits in common. No individual, no matter how sage, could exceed the limits imposed by language on thought and expression. If a poetic genius like Cicero emerged, that fact said less about the poet as an individual than about the collective accomplishment that created the linguistic possibilities that the poet could exploit. In a very real sense, poetry and the arts were expressions of an entire nation. Poetics displayed a nation’s eloquence, its virtuosity in manipulating language to draw fine distinctions. Poetry was the canary in the coal mine of culture. That canary was beginning to swoon in the second half of the eighteenth century. Across Europe people of all political persuasions lamented a noticeable decline in taste, both in the way people conducted themselves and in the fine arts. Nowhere was the decline clearer than in France, where there was widespread concern that the decline in aesthetic judgment and taste was a symptom of a broader disease afflicting society. The concern was not quite universal, as Condorcet sitting on death row in 1794 could write: Endlessly we have heard them complaining of the decadence of knowledge even when actually it was progressing. They deplored the misery of the human race while at the same instant men were recalling their rights and beginning to use their reason; they predicted the immanent advent of one of those oscillations which must bring men back to barbarism, ignorance and slavery, and this at the very moment when everything concurred to prove that humanity had nothing more to fear.30

Nevertheless, Rousseau’s iconoclastic contention in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that the arts and sciences corrupted moral conduct when everyone else assumed the opposite struck both a chord and a nerve. Most drew a direct link between virtue, ethics, and the arts and

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sciences. Maupertuis, Rigolet de Juvigny, and Marmontel all tied moral corruption to aesthetic decadence, and in the second half of the eighteenth century in France philosophes and anti-philosophes alike perceived a broad and rapid decline in aesthetic taste since the classical age of Louis XIV.31 The “enemies of the Enlightenment” blamed decadence on the atheistic and libertine philosophes who were disrespectful of religious and political authority, offering destructive social criticism with nothing positive to replace it.32 Philosophes blamed religious and political authorities for creating the situation in the first place. Both sides looked to the decline and fall of Rome with increasing interest.33 “Why did Rome fall?” is a peculiar question. It is an Enlightenment question, predicated on a macronarrative of European history that viewed antiquity as a good age, modernity as a good age (with qualifications), and the middle period in between as bad. Even the phrasing of the question is pejorative, with “fall” indicating the wreck of civilization due to either external invasion or internal decadence. The question was never asked in the twelfth century, when universal historians divided world chronology into specific periods corresponding to successive dominant empires: Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and the coming Christian millennium. Otto of Freising understood his age as a seamless continuation of the Roman era, and as late as the sixteenth century the Italian humanist Carlo Sigonio did as well.34 Petrarch was not so proud as to think that he and his small literary movement were the conveyors of light to a dark world. It was his own age that was dark. Renaissance humanists aimed to restore the Latin language, corrupted by “barbarisms,” to its primitive glory, but the division of the world into Romans and barbarians did not spark a historiographic question like “Why did Rome fall?” in the Renaissance, even if antiquity needed to be reborn. That rebirth, visible only in hindsight, was a consequence of refugees from Byzantium, who brought the Greek language and texts with them after 1453. On the scale of human history, which spanned a mere 5,000 years in writing, or perhaps 6,000 years if one placed creation in 4004 b.c. as was still common in the eighteenth century, must not an empire that endured 40 percent of that time be considered extraordinarily successful? Rome, founded in 753 b.c. and persisting until the Turkish capture of Byzantium 2,100 years later—why should its “decline and fall” even occur to a historian?

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Pocock describes “the humanist construction of decline and fall” in fifteenth-century Italy, but he also contends that there were no decline and fall narratives in England before Gibbon.35 By Gibbon’s reckoning, that process began in the late second century a.d. following the reign of Marcus Aurelius and took 1,200 years to work its course out. To Meiners, who followed a more traditional reckoning of Rome’s fall symbolized by its first sack at the hands of the Visigoths in 410, the process still required six hundred years, from the end of the Second Punic War. No, decline and fall is not an obvious question to ask. It is a question that betrays the anxiety of a specific historical configuration, that of Europe in the age of Enlightenment, an age of rise and progress, an age of turmoil, and an age that feared its own decadence, decline, and fall. Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), written precisely during the period when the discourse on culture emerged, is only the most famous inquiry into cultural decadence. Gibbon was hardly alone. In 1783 Adam Ferguson published three volumes on the same topic as Meiners’s little book historicizing Cicero.36 The French were equally interested in topics of decline and fall. Montesquieu’s Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans marked only the beginning of what, in the second half of the eighteenth century, would become a morbid fascination with cultural decline and fall in France. Rigolet de Juvigny, Chamfort, and Volney all cited moral decadence in the fall of Rome and warned that Europe too was in danger. Whereas Robert Wood’s journey to Palmyra in the 1750s had been for purely antiquarian interest, Volney’s encounter with the ruins of Palmyra in 1784 made him think of contemporary Europe. Tyre, Sidon, Damascus, Idumea, Jerusalem, Samaria, Ba’albec, Persepolis— all lay in ruins. The Russians and Turks were at war again, each claiming God on their side. Great river civilizations rose and fell on the Nile, Euphrates, and Tiber, as well as on the Thames and the Seine. “The caprice of which man complains is not the caprice of fate,” wrote Volney. “The darkness that misleads his reason is not the darkness of God; the source of his calamities is not the distant heavens, it is beside him on earth; it is not concealed in the bosom of divinity; it dwells within himself, he bears it in his own heart.”37 Meiners operated in a context different from France, neither philosophe nor anti-philosophe, but he, too, decried the decline of poetics

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at the expense of new forms like the English novel. He deplored in particular the insipidity and sentiment in “light reading,” like Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, that put the worst notions into young women’s heads.38 Meiners himself set out to write edifying essays for a German audience both male and female. As he made his way through Greek history, Meiners became convinced that virtue was the basis of human happiness and that vice made people unhappy. But what did he mean by virtue? There was no schematic distinction like Pocock’s between civic and polite virtue in the eighteenth century, or at least none that Meiners developed. Meiners perceived an older Germanic virtue, which he gleaned from his reading of Tacitus (Germania) and Salvian, defined by hard work, monogamy, and moderation in all things, especially religion. Human history, he wrote, taught that fairness and justice were the pillars of public order and of individual well-being. Oppression and violence against outsiders, symptoms of internal decay, led to the decline and fall of states as surely as excessive behavior caused sickness and death in individuals. Here was a moral law to govern the fates of humans and nations as unchangeable and with as few exceptions as the laws governing the movement of the starry heavens above. The ancient Stoics were right: the person who desired happiness ought to follow virtue; a person who followed anything else was like an unbridled horse.39 With these principles in mind, Meiners began what became a serial discussion of virtue, spread over several books covering topics of Greek,40 Roman,41 medieval,42 and modern history.43 In each of the three historical periods, Greece, Rome, and medieval Christendom, Meiners identified a tragic flaw evident at the time of the nation’s greatest virtue. In Athens already at the time of Pericles, in Rome during the Second Punic War, and in the Neoplatonism of third-century Rome, which entered Christian doctrine at the moment monotheism triumphed over ancient polytheism, each nation sowed the seeds of its own demise. The Decline and Fall of Ancient Athens Ancient authors were virtually unanimous in harkening back to an earlier period in the nation’s history when its citizens had been purer and more virtuous than they were at present. Mythical sayings and

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epic dramas all set the period of virtue and happiness before the discovery of agriculture, when the happy innocent person obtained all that he needed from nature or the beneficence of the gods. Meiners placed the period of greatest virtue among the Greeks, Romans, and Germans a bit later—the happiest and most virtuous period in Athenian history was the age leading up to Pericles; in Roman history, the age between the struggle of the Orders and the Second Punic War; and in Germanic, the early age of migrations as the Germanic tribes were just coming into contact with the Roman frontiers. In each case there was very little wealth and no luxury to speak of. The arts and sciences were hardly cultivated. The society relied more on agriculture than on commerce. Most and the best citizens spent the bulk of the year on the land where they had larger and more beautiful homes than in the cities. The early history of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans showed that nations without the arts and sciences could construct wise laws, good constitutions, a high degree of virtue, security within the community and honor to those observing them from outside, and a considerable degree of domestic and public happiness. In the modern age, travelers reported similar societies, uncultivated yet virtuous and happy. One described a happy, healthy, and strong people entirely devoid of the arts and sciences living in the mideighteenth century beyond the Hebrides.44 A similar report came from Nantucket where the people were literate, yet simple, and avoided all religious fighting despite a population that was two-thirds Quaker and one-third Presbyterian.45 In every case—Greece, Rome, Germania, the Hebrides, and North America—an uncultivated people found happiness without wealth or luxury, without the arts or sciences. The source of their happiness, Meiners believed, was virtue. The progress of the human spirit, if there should be any lasting progress at all, could only be had by a virtuous nation. The problem was in achieving both virtue and culture without falling into decadence. For both Athens and Rome wealth came too quickly and too easily. Decay did not set in immediately, or at least it was not apparent. The men and women who won the victory maintained their love of liberty even as they enjoyed the spoils of their victory. But they neglected to raise their children with the same strength of character. Decadence was insidious, infecting the second or third generation.

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It was a commonplace in the eighteenth century that luxury led to moral decadence. The problem was that luxury was necessary to the progress of the arts and sciences. The question was how to find a balance between poverty and excess such that European culture might continue to advance without succumbing to the fate of Greece and Rome. Meiners found an answer in distinguishing between two kinds of luxury, public and private, or “the luxury of whole states from the luxury of private persons.”46 That distinction won him a prize from the Hesse-Kassel Society of Antiquities in 1781, which, like other scientific academies, sponsored an annual essay contest. Meiners found that before the sixth century b.c. there was no luxury in Greece. Sparta could not even find enough gold to gild a statue in the early period, and although Athens brought in some theater from Thespis, it was very primitive and could hardly be considered real art. Through the avoidance of war, the Athenians were the first to develop manners (Sitten) that enabled them to rise above the rudeness of wild warriors. Living on land ill suited to farming, the Athenians instead planted olive orchards and mined the hills, becoming a merchant city. They still lacked any real manufacturing industry, and they had to import grain. Nevertheless, by the early sixth century enough wealth circulated among the Athenian population that Solon could create a hierarchy of classes on the basis of wealth. At the same time, not even the most wealthy could be said to have lived in luxury.47 Monuments, like the temple of the Olympian Zeus, began to be built in the later sixth century, and although the city was destroyed in the Persian wars, Athens emerged from that crisis at the head of a maritime empire powered by shipping and colonization. Wealth flowed to the city, and by the time of Pericles, Athens was the center of the arts, sciences, and commerce, reaching the pinnacle of its power and population. Statues, public baths, gymnasiums, temples, and the Acropolis all were built with public funds. Pericles sponsored entertainments at public expense. Yet at the very height of its power, the seeds of destruction were sown, and Pericles himself instituted the laws that would bring ruin to Athens. Chief among them was the transfer of judicial duties to judges elected from the people. The problem was not the naming of popular judges; it was compensation for their duties that altered the Athenian mind-set. Pericles instituted a system of pay-for-service on the juries. The money was not compensation for time served (i.e., the wages of

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labor); rather, it was a gift from the public treasury to private citizens. Xenophon, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Pericles’s own contemporary opponents all pointed to the deleterious consequences of monetary compensation for civic duty. The entire judicial system was compromised as jurors became increasingly tempted to accept bribes. Meiners accepted his sources’ judgment, but to him the law did not so much cause moral and civic decay as reveal the public’s willingness to accept something for nothing. Jury service was a civic duty, a matter of personal prestige and a public good, not a means to private wealth.48 Once the state became so wealthy that it could dole out public funds to private citizens, decay set in. Money poured into Athens in the second half of the fifth century b.c., much of it ending up in the hands of private families. The true causes of social change, especially of decline, were to be found not in political events but in families. Increased private wealth led to changes in taste, and Meiners distinguished between factors that altered the behavior of men, of women, and of children. Each group had its own set of duties that contributed to the nation. In Athens wealthy parents produced spoiled children, and the second generation, which inherited its wealth rather than earning it, was of weaker moral character than its predecessors. The Athenians introduced temple prostitution. The renting and selling of young girls brought Athens more shame than did starting the Peloponnesian War, which brought Athens to complete ruin. Generational analysis was not completely original in the eighteenth century. Polybius described the corruption of government over generations; Machiavelli lifted much of Polybius’s discussion into his Discourses on Livy; Montesquieu addressed the gradual corruption of nations from an originally pure and virtuous beginning. Meiners explained that under Spartan hegemony Athens managed to rebuild and once again became a commercial center. Again, earning their wealth gainfully improved the virtue of the Athenians. The last forty years before its fall to Philip of Macedon were, in fact, years of greatest virtue in Athens. But for a second time a rapid increase in personal wealth spoiled the second generation, as the reappearance of temple prostitution and homosexuality attested. Meiners ended with the conquest of Philip, noting that despite military defeat Athens maintained some of its power and virtue.

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The Cultural History of Roman Decadence The example of Rome was even more striking. Here, too, the ultimate cause of Roman decadence was unearned wealth, hoarded by a few families while the rest of the citizenry fell into poverty. Gibbon fixed the second century a.d. as the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was happiest and most prosperous.49 Meiners gave that designation to the other end of Roman conquest, on the eve of the Second Punic War.50 The Roman Senate never acted with more wisdom than during that crisis. Roman generals were never more clever, and the army of free farmer-soldiers was never so willing and obedient even in the face of almost certain death. Roman morals, fear of the gods, and fidelity to oaths were at their pinnacle. Yet already in the victory over Carthage one could see the seeds of Roman decay. Now master of the western Mediterranean, Rome became instantly wealthy from the spoils of war. Wealth brought luxury, and luxury brought decadence. Describing Rome’s subsequent conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, Meiners wrote, “Every step the Romans took in Greece and Asia was a step toward their own destruction. And every glorious expansion of their power brought them closer to their downfall, as the conquered nations contributed both their wealth and their vices or awakened new unbridled desires and yearnings in [the Romans].”51 These were “commercial” and “sociable” vices. Compare Montesquieu who in Chapter 9 of The Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans cited two “civic” causes of Roman decadence: first, territorial expansion beyond Italy and allowing landless men to serve in the army; second, the corruption of the Roman people by their Tribunes and by foreigners, who became first citizens, then generals, then emperors.52 Adam Ferguson also explained the wreck of the Roman Republic in terms of corrupted civic virtue. Meiners returned from Switzerland at the end of the summer to find Ferguson’s three volumes on the wreck of the Roman Republic on his desk, and he reviewed them for the Göttingen Gelehrten Anzeigen. Although he ranked Ferguson “without doubt among the first historians of his people,” he leveled the same criticism against Ferguson as Germans used against Montesquieu (see Chapter 4 of the present volume), that the system erected by the author was not supported by the real historical evidence. Ferguson neglected primary

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sources from nonhistorians; consequently, his depiction of “the history of the manners and enlightenment of the Romans is too incomplete.” Meiners accused Ferguson of being politically partisan in his discussion of Rome, calling “the description of the old Roman constitution and many of its particular changes . . . too forced or fragmented.”53 C. G. Heyne reviewed the German version of Ferguson’s history of Rome the next year, and he criticized Ferguson for being “dazzled time and again by the beautiful side of the Romans’ character: for, basically, the Romans were nothing more than a rude people of barbarians, devastators of the globe to their own ruin. They made little contribution to the well-being of mankind, though this cannot be expected from any military state.”54 That last remark was a jab at Prussia. Whereas Ferguson had served as chaplain of the Black Watch (and Gibbon had been captain of his local Hampshire militia), neither Meiners nor Heyne, the sons of a postmaster and an impoverished weaver, respectively, had ever worn a uniform. Militarism made them think of Prussia, the still-unforgiven enemy of Hanover in the Seven Years’ War. Heyne had lost all his papers and was nearly killed in the Prussian bombardment of Dresden, and he lost his job when Frederick the Great settled a score with the Graf von Brühl by destroying his 70,000-volume library.55 The Hanoverians saw no glory or virtue in warfare. Instead virtue, or in the case of Rome, vice, came down to money. Like Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., private luxury was the cause of Roman decline. The chief causes of this great decline of morals were the rapid increase not only of the fortune and the income of the state but also of many individual families and individual persons which the successful war had enriched. The treasures and luxuries [Kostbarkeiten] that Aemilius Paulus brought to Rome were greater than what the Romans had won in all their previous victories combined.56

Some resisted the tendency to acquire grotesque sums. Meiners cited the elder Cato and the younger Pliny as examples, although whereas Cato claimed to have earned his wealth through frugality and agriculture, Plutarch impeached that claim citing his merchant activity, slave trading, and accusations by his contemporaries of inhumanity. The decline of Roman virtue ultimately concerned private greed and especially to the unequal distribution of wealth in the Republic. Some were fabu-

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lously rich and willing to kill to maintain their status. The Gracchi brothers were the first victims: in 132 b.c. Tiberius was killed in a riot as he attempted to limit the size of farms a person could hold and to redistribute the leftovers. A decade later free grain and fruit handouts to the city-dwellers led to the assassination of Gaius. Thereafter, fighting over money broke out into the civil war of Marius and Sulla. Meiners wrote that during those wars Although Rome and Italy suffered terribly on account of the many myriads that died in battles, the many thousands who were executed by the courts, the extinction of the great houses, the destruction of the most splendid cities and the devastation of the most fertile regions, yet in my judgment one can consider all of these losses still only the least of the evils that resulted from Sulla’s proscription. Rather much greater damage was done through the destruction of the happiness of innumerable families and the accumulation of more-than-royal riches in the hands of a few mostly unworthy and thievish people; through the henceforth incredible inequality of property among citizens and the nearly unending expansion of estates; through unstoppable rapaciousness in the provinces on account of lawlessness; through the complete destruction of military discipline and boundless moral decadence especially gluttony, avarice, and wastefulness which occurred among all ages, classes, and sexes. These vices spread on account of the Sertorian War and the Cataline conspiracy, and they paved the road to the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.57

Over the course of several volumes, Meiners wrote the cultural history of Roman decadence.58 Captive Greece took captive her savage captor and introduced to Rome games, singers, dancers, pantomime actors, delicate food, banquets, art, mystery religions, homosexuality, and general sexual license. The spoils of war made Rome so wealthy that at one point the Senate could offer the payment of tribute to the entire nation. With the growth in material wealth came other forms of decadence. Rome had so many slaves that they outnumbered free Romans, and Meiners pointed out the effect of their sheer numbers on Roman morality and virtue. Still, there was not enough honest agriculture in Italy, so Rome developed a dependency on foreign grain. Romans spent their wealth even faster than they plundered it from the provinces. Patrons put on public entertainments, games, and

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banquets, and handed out food to the poor. The result was “enormous debt.” By the first century b.c. both men and women were deeply implicated in Roman decadence. A result of the depravity of both sexes was the neglect of childrearing. Lacking male role models, young men grew up weak and cowardly. Eloquence and legal aptitude declined, as did the ability of Romans to fight. Meiners described the rise of mercenary armies, recruited from the provinces, where many soldiers never saw the city they were defending. The Roman constitution was ruined by the decadence of the rich, the poor, the citizens, the military, women, men, and children alike. In his Roman histories, Meiners did not say a word about contemporary Europe. He could have drawn many analogies concerning the influx of wealth, the inequality between rich and poor, excessive luxury, standing armies with no stake in what they were defending, decline of morals, the acquisition of colonies, the morality of slavery, and the price of grain, the result of which was civil war, chaos, and the seizure of power by a few. Instead, he left it to his readers to make these connections for themselves. Yet in the 1780s and 1790s the study of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not value-free. Decline and Fall in Modern Europe The Meinerses toured Switzerland slowly that summer, visiting major centers such as Schaffhausen, Bern, and Lausanne as well as smaller towns in between. In the cities they sought the company of the leaders of the Swiss Enlightenment; they spent three of their days in Zurich spent with Johann Kaspar Lavater. The professor and the pastor took long walks together, although Meiners admitted to a certain awkwardness in their conversations. Lavater had authored a systematic physiognomy that linked personality traits to facial features. Physiognomy had swept through salons and polite circles across Europe in the late 1770s but recently had been discredited and dismissed as so much superstition. Lavater remained a believer, and Meiners found him good company in any case.59 Traveling between the cities, the Meinerses detoured to see waterfalls, lakes, and other natural sites, and they amused themselves by bringing the snowy peaks of the Alps closer with their telescope. Now in August they approached their final stop on the tour, Geneva.

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Following the road along the north shore of Lake Geneva, they were disappointed with the views. Nature was as majestic as ever, but the culture was shocking. Gardens, fields, and vineyards were rundown and overgrown. The citizens of Versoix were clothed in torn rags, and the houses and farms were little better. Broken windows were papered over or curtained with the same rags the peasants wore. Huts with collapsed walls were still inhabited; other huts had collapsed entirely. There were clear economic reasons for the contrast between rich and poor. The tax burden owed to Bern in the Pays de Vaud was relatively light, much less than had been paid to France or Savoy when under their dominion, but still the levy was a hardship. A greater problem was the number of chatelaines and barons compared to the small number of villages and free farmers. Most peasants were tenants, owing their landlords goods and services. Only a few free farmers owed taxes directly to the state. Although this explained “why the Swiss-French farmers were not so rich and well-off as their German counterparts, it did not explain why the general degree of culture in French Switzerland was less than in the German regions.”60 Meiners paused to ponder the meaning of culture. Culture was not the same as wealth. If culture was something achieved by a Volk as a whole, then here was proof of that; if the nobility lived high on the backs of an exploited and impoverished peasantry, then there was little culture among them either. Meiners had read his Adam Smith. He knew that town and country shared an economic destiny; they shared a cultural destiny as well. The region was a single unit, encompassing both rich and poor, and if the poor were oppressed and ragged, then one would find little culture or virtue among the rich. Throughout the Pays de Vaud, the nobility mismanaged the land, increasing the pressure on the peasantry. But if like causes produced like effects, then one would expect to see an impoverished peasantry from Versoix all the way to Lausanne. Instead, the dividing point seemed to be the town of Morges. Meiners rejected the explanation that the French farmer was naturally indolent, although he noted, “It is a fact that the French farmer is a less industrious farmer and a less careful house master than the German, and in Switzerland this is generally recognized.” But innate tendencies seemed an inadequate explanation. Neither did the excuse of poor soil, suggested by an acquaintance they met in their travels. If one did not know the Pays de Vaud, one

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might assume that factories were responsible for depopulating the countryside, as in the valleys of Neufchâtel. But there was little manufacturing industry in the Pays de Vaud aside from a new porcelain factory in Nyon and perhaps a few cotton factories. Rousseau offered a more convincing explanation. He had remarked that the inhabitants of the Vaud had the greatest tendency among all Europeans to leave for adventure as soldiers, workers, courtiers, or servants. It was estimated that in Geneva alone some 7,000 servants were emigrants from the Vaud. The problem with the countryside was simply a lack of people. The temptation to emigrate to nearby Geneva was strong. The sons of the landed gentry were unlikely to find suitable positions at home, so it was natural for them to move abroad, but why also the sons and daughters of common citizens and farmers? The answer: Proximity to Geneva. Geneva offered the possibility of a better life in the military, commerce, and even marriage. The Genevan factories were robbing the farms and vineyards of workers.61 The emigrants were leaving one oppression for another. The class of immigrants to Geneva known as habitants had no rights of representation in the Republic. Although the economy was booming in the 1770s, habitants and even the descendants of immigrants born in the city, called natifs, were limited in the kinds of business they could conduct. An oligarchy of patrician families played the natifs and habitants against the bourgeois members of the Republic who did have rights as citizens. In the late 1760s the natifs had begun to develop a common consciousness as a class, spurred in part by philosophes like Voltaire and Geneva’s printing industry.62 Meeting in social clubs called cercles, the natifs began to agitate for political, legal, and economic status. On that occasion the citizens (bourgeois) allied with the patricians, and as tensions rose during a famine and grain shortage in the winter of 1770, a natif provoked the ire of the authorities by singing a lewd song insulting the bourgeoisie. Arrested and sentenced to a relatively light six months of house arrest, he was carried home as a hero on the shoulders of his comrades. A few days later he was arrested again for violating house arrest. A riot broke out. A few thousand natifs, armed privately with pistols, marched to the city hall. The General Council called up the militia, and in the ensuing chaos three natifs were killed. Their leaders were arrested, tried, and banished from Geneva, the cercles disbanded and their members prohibited from forming new ones.

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Meager concessions were granted to appease the natifs, but nothing really changed. In the late 1770s, Geneva’s economy boomed, and with the artisan classes gaining economic power, it became clear that reforms were needed. The bourgeoisie took the initiative now, calling for a new constitution based on egalitarian principles, a written code of civil and criminal law guaranteeing the rights of individuals, and an elective and rotating governorship on the model of similar small republics like Ragusa, Venice, and Hamburg. Called Représentants, the reforming bourgeois party was opposed by the patrician oligarchy, who refused to undertake any serious reform, earning the label Négatifs. Both sides, recognizing that the natifs would tip the balance, tried to win them over. The Négatifs offered the natifs citizenship and courted them with “money, clothes, banquets, caresses.”63 The Représentants offered them even more. Although the Représentants gradually won control of the lesser councils, they were repeatedly stymied in their reform attempts by the General Council still controlled by the Négatifs. By 1781 the Représentants and natifs had lost all confidence in the General Council, and once again began carrying pistols for their own protection, men and women alike. On April 8, 1782, insurrection broke out, and the leaders of the Négatifs who did not escape in time were arrested and imprisoned. The Old Regime fell and a new republican government was formed. The irony did not pass unnoticed that the same France, which for six years had championed the republican cause in North America against the British, now formed a coalition to invade the reformed republic on its eastern doorstep. The French approached Zurich, but, saddled by its own protracted constitutional crisis, Zurich declined to intervene. Bern, also rocked by egalitarian agitation but fearing the spread of the revolution to the Pays de Vaud, did join with France. The king of Sardinia agreed to place a unit of Piedmontese troops at the head of the coalition. The Genevans restored the ramparts, stockpiled gunpowder in the churches, and the men and women carried their side-arms, vowing liberty or death. A Genevan Security Council was formed and appealed to Prussia, Britain, and the Netherlands for aid. It was rebuffed on all sides. By June an army of French (actually Dutch mercenaries in French employ),64 Sardinian, and Bernese troops stood before the gates of the city. The Genevans faced glory

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and certain death. A single artillery shot to a powder-laden church would devastate the entire city. The Genevans held a fierce debate over whether to fight. In good republican fashion, they delegated the decision to an elected special commission of one hundred men. A slim majority opted to capitulate, but then overnight dozens of members of the commission slipped out of town by boat. At the beginning of July Piedmontese forces entered the city. Their commander, the marquis of Marmora, would win praise on all sides for his moderation, pledging “to enforce the most exact discipline, and to employ our forces only to procure public tranquility.”65 The Old Regime was restored without bloodshed, but the Genevan republicans became the laughing stock of Switzerland and Europe for surrendering without a fight. Six weeks behind the Piedmontese, the Meinerses entered the city, still under occupation. Meiners reflected on the causes of revolution. As in Greece and Rome in the past and France in the future, the cause of revolution in Geneva was moral depravity (Sittenverderbniß) resulting from the easy and rapid accumulation of private, rather than public, wealth. If the beauty of a city were measured by the number of rich houses, then Geneva would certainly have been the most beautiful in all of Switzerland. But the houses of the wealthy were completely different from the houses of the poor, and there were few middling houses between rich and poor. Geneva had no public monuments, no public buildings or public squares, no wide, beautiful, and regular streets. Even in the upper part of the city, among the wealthiest houses, the streets were narrow and uneven. Outside the city there were no walking paths, and inside the city there were no promenades with benches that the Meinerses found so pleasant in Bern and Zurich.66 Meiners traced the origin of the revolutions to a 1737 edict that opened the guilds, allowing any Genevan to practice any trade or craft. Prima facie this was a good thing as it enabled people to open manufacturing companies and factories, which increased population, prosperity, and also culture. Very quickly one of the smallest states in Europe became one of the most Enlightened. The works of Geneva’s great authors were accessible not just to scholars and the upper class but also to workers, who acquired good and useful knowledge. But

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among the fruits of the edict were the seeds of decay. The Genevans’ extraordinary industry soon generated what Meiners called “an antirepublican inequity of wealth and the accumulation of millions in individual hands and families.”67 The envious masses began to mimic the wealthy, who were also the least moral, and the whole city was engulfed by “immeasurable greed and lust for wealth, virtue-killing unbelief, and a relentless hatred for the ancient constitution that entitled the rich to no more rights than the poor.” The root causes of the revolution in Geneva were not political events or even ideology but the loss of morality due to a change in mind-set, due in turn to the rapid influx of wealth.68 Unearned wealth and an accompanying taste for luxury, which is characterized by selfishness, that is, by seeking one’s own personal good ahead of the commonwealth—this was the cause of decline and fall in both Athens and Rome, in Geneva, and, Meiners warned already in 1782, probably also in France. Meiners discussed the number of splendid houses, virtually palaces, owned by the wealthy in one section of Geneva, which contrasted with the squalor in which the poor lived. He described the speculation in rents by Genevans who owned investment property in their own city and as far away as Paris. Poor wageearners looked with envy on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and they did their best to imitate them—but to their own detriment. Textile workers and watch manufacturers dressed well beyond their means, and changing fashions in the burgeoning cotton industry encouraged them to neglect even their own nutrition for new clothes. The new prosperity made even the clergy self-seeking. The youth grew up in such splendid houses that they were no longer willing to make the sacrifice of joining the clergy, and the rare person who tried to uphold the old Calvinist discipline looked like a character from a Voltaire novel. Through splendor and moral decay the clergy had lost its influence, and, lacking honorable men in the clergy, religion and good morals declined. Meiners pointed to disorderliness in church services and the ease of divorce as examples. And always underlying the moral decay was unearned wealth: too many millionaires, too many splendid houses, huge amounts of money flowing into Geneva. “The more industry grows and wealth increases, the more also luxury and moral decay also increase, and one is tempted to draw a maxim that trade and industriousness are disgraceful [!] and that only a gradual increase

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beyond the . . . things possessed by ones forefathers is honorable and decent.”69 With summer waning and the new semester approaching, the Meinerses departed Geneva at the beginning of September, making their way over Lausanne, Yverden, Neuchâtel, Nidau, Basel, and then back to Germany. In his final diary entry of that summer, Meiners reflected on the cultural achievement of the Swiss cantons and the relations between the Germans and the French. The French acknowledged that Germans possessed as much genius and even more Fleiß and Wissenschaft than themselves, but the idea of the German also brought to mind uncouthness and bumbling. Still he was convinced that when considering sustainable cultural achievement, no nation could surpass his own decentralized, disunified Germany. In terms that sounded less ominous to his intended audience than to modern ears, Meiners wrote that “currently [the Germans] are indisputably the most powerful of all nations, capable of conquering the entire world, if like the Romans they wanted to unify their powers to destroy.”70 We tend to characterize eighteenth-century Germany as backward when compared to western Europe, its political landscape a chaos of hundreds of principalities that would not be unified until the 1870s. Or were these the features of backwardness? Meiners pointed to a certain resilience in the German spirit that enabled the Germanic peoples to persist where other civilizations had been decimated. He considered that greatest form of social instability, warfare. Since the Ottonian age, Germany had been repeatedly ruined by war, yet it recovered from each of these wars, including the worst of them, the Thirty Years’ War, within a lifetime. It almost seemed that these constant trials increased the Germans’ internal strength, where all other peoples (Persians, Greeks, Romans) were brought down not by defeat but by their own victories—and in a short span of time. Or consider finances, which were also necessary for social stability. Meiners believed that Germany possessed more real wealth than any other nation when assets and debts were considered together. No other land could support so many lords, so many brilliant courts, so many fortresses and colleges, and such a numerous nobility and rich clergy. Germany appeared not to suffer under this weight but blossomed more brightly every day. “The great advantage of Germany,” Meiners wrote,

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is that it is not subject to a single ruler, that it has no capital city, no navy, and no possessions in the two Indies. If we had a Paris or a London perhaps we would have a more brilliant opera or comedy and possess even greater riches in silver and gold. But then we would have sold ourselves out. The riches of the nation would already be collected in the hands of a few resulting in enormous luxury and depraved morals. The general project (of which at the moment only the Germans are capable without selfish intent) would not succeed: the promotion of truth and virtue.71

If Germany had colonies like the French and English, they too would be busy dividing up the spoils of those New World nations that they should be trying to improve (beglücken). Meiners believed that very soon other nations would begin to look toward Germany as the example of Enlightenment. “Perhaps even within our own lifetime,” he wrote, Germany will be come the school and teacher of the nations from whom we thus far have learned and which now appear to fall inexorably . . . When one considers the advantages of our nation in this way, one must needs thank Providence that one was born a German and in this era, when the nation was quickly and boldly approaching its greatest glory.72

Perhaps patriotic statements like these reassured Germans that they would not be drawn into the vortex of constitutional crises that swirled around them. Friedrich Nicolai concurred with Meiners’s judgment in a rival travelogue of Germany and Switzerland also published in the 1780s. Germany’s lack of a metropole, its regional diversity with many smaller urban centers, raised the degree of culture throughout all of Germany and prevented what he called “intellectual tyranny.”73 France was sinking into decadence. But Germany, in the eyes of men like Meiners and Nicolai as well as Möser, Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and Schiller, was advancing toward Enlightenment.

SEVEN ◆

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ON JUNE 25, 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis dropped anchor at Matavai Bay on the north shore of the big island of Tahiti. A tall mountain and coconut palms promised fresh water and fruit. He had been seventyseven days at sea and had lost contact with his partner ship the Swallow, commanded by Philip Carteret. Wallis’s crew tried to stave off scurvy with a diet of mustard and vinegar, but many had fallen ill, including Wallis himself and his first lieutenant. Supplies of food, water, and wood had become critically low. Command devolved to Second Lieutenant Tobias Furneaux, who organized the provisioning and watering of the ship and oversaw the convalescence of the ill in a secured tent on the beach. Furneaux raised a staff, hung a pendant, turned a clod of turf, and took possession of the island, which he named King George III. The natives were initially hostile, but after killing several Tahitians and wild ducks in a display of force peace was made, and a lively intercourse was struck between the British and Pacific Islanders. Wallis himself was cared for by a chief and several of her young attendants. Given the beauty of the island, the abundance of produce, and the newly won friendliness of its inhabitants, Wallis concluded that this land would be an ideal observatory for the passage of Venus across the sun in 1769.1 Forty-one weeks later, on April 6, 1768, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, already under sail for eight months before Wallis’s discovery, anchored in the Hitiaa lagoon on the east shore of Tahiti. His crew had sailed seventy-two days since their last port of call at Cape

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Gallant in Patagonia. Wood and provisions were low, and they had been drinking distilled sea water for three weeks. Thirty of his crew suffered from scurvy. Bougainville went ashore, tacked up a sign, and buried a message in a bottle indicating French possession of the island. To Bougainville this was not only the ideal observatory for the planet of Venus, it was the birthplace of Venus herself. He named it New Cythera, after the Aegean island where the goddess washed ashore.2 Bougainville managed to pacify the Tahitians at the cost of a mere four native lives, but as tensions rose he decided to depart before there was further escalation. As he prepared to leave, he was persuaded to take along with him a native of the island named Ahutoru (Aotourou). Upon arrival in France, Bougainville presented this noble savage to the king, and Ahutoru became a principal topic of gossip in literary society. The French were astonished at the frailty of Ahutoru’s mind. He was entirely incapable of learning French, and he had difficulty communicating at all. Diderot explained that he was physically incapable of pronouncing French, because in Tahitian there were no sounds of b, c, d, f, g, x, y, and z. In a dialogue that Diderot wrote in 1772 as a Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage but never published in his own lifetime, one of his interlocutors asked: A: O Ahutoru, when you return to see your father, your mother, your brothers, your sisters, your mistresses, your compatriots, what will you tell them about us? B: Not much, and they won’t believe it. A: Why not much? B: Because he has understood little, and because he can’t find any corresponding term in his own language that correspond to these ideas. A: And why won’t they believe it? B: Because when comparing their manners to ours, they are more likely to consider Ahutoru a liar than to believe that we are insane. A: Really? B: No doubt. The savage life is simple, and our societies are complicated machines! The Tahitian is near the origin of the world, and the European is near its senility. The interval that separates him from us is greater than the distance between a newborn infant and a decrepit

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man. He has no understanding of our customs and laws, and he sees only impediments [to his freedom] disguised under a hundred diverse forms; impediments that could only arouse the indignation and the scorn of a creature in whom the sentiment of liberty is the most profound of sentiments.3

Diderot drew that final statement on cultural distance from Bougainville’s account of the voyage. Bougainville noted that it was difficult enough for English, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians to build a passable vocabulary in French, and those visitors already shared the same ideas as the French. Their native grammars were parallel, their moral, physical, and social ideas were the same, and everything that could be expressed in their own language could be translated into French. The Tahitian, on the other hand, had no conception of modern civil society because his own society was much simpler. The Tahitian would need to create a whole world of primary ideas before he would have any ability to express his ideas in French, and this was doubly difficult when his mind was as indolent as his body. In Ahutoru’s defense, however, no matter how handicapped he was by his language difficulties, he went out on the town every day, and he never got lost. He often went shopping, and he rarely paid more for something than it was worth. The one part of European society he truly understood was opera. He passionately loved the opera, especially the dances, and frequently attended alone, purchasing a cheap ticket at the door and standing in the promenade. He was infinitely sensitive to the favors showered on him by Mme. de Choiseul, who showed him off in polite circles, and he expressed his gratitude to her to everyone he knew in Paris.4 Nevertheless, loneliness and ennui set in after only a few months in Paris, and he asked to return home. He departed after eleven months, sailing first to Mauritius and then a year later further to Tahiti. At Mauritius he contracted smallpox, and he died at sea on November 6, 1771, before reaching his homeland. Furneaux returned to the south Pacific a few years later, now promoted to captain, and in answer to Ahutoru in 1774 he arrived in London with his own noble savage, a Tahitian (from Raiatea, northwest of Tahiti near Bora Bora) named Omai. Omai’s reception was similar to Ahutoru’s. “Never was savage more patronized and petted by

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the nobility and gentry, talked over by the polite and learned, entertained at the best tables,” wrote J. C. Beaglehole of Omai.5 Omai quickly learned to move through polite society. They made him a gentleman, dressing him in a velvet suit (Manchester, not Genoa) with a top hat and sword. Early in his visit Fanny Burney compared him favorably to the Chesterfield heir who, despite every advantage of a polite education from infancy, remained “a meer pedantic booby.” Omai, “with no tutor but Nature . . . appears in a new world like a man who had all his life studied the Graces.” He makes remarkable good bows—not for him, but for anybody, however long under a Dancing Master’s care. Indeed he seems to shame Education, for his manners are so extremely graceful, and he is so polite, attentive, and easy that you would have thought he came from some foreign Court. . . . Indeed he appears to be a perfectly rational and intelligent man, with an understanding far superior to the common race of us cultivated gentry. He could not else have borne so well the way of Life into which he is thrown, without some practice.6

Omai learned some amount of English but had difficulty expressing himself through a thick accent. He learned to skate, but he could not learn to ride. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait. King George III gave him a stipend and a flat on Warwick Street in London, but after two years he wore out his welcome, and both the king and the head of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, told him, “Omai, you go home.” There were rumors that Omai wanted to stay in England. He cheerfully departed on Cook’s third voyage in 1776, but Cook had a plan to deposit him back in Tahiti and then depart before Omai could change his mind and request to be taken again to England. The admiralty issued strict orders to Cook and their other captains not to bring any other of these people back. Omai himself, apparently enjoying his novelty as the world-traveling Polynesian, became the enforcer of that policy among his kinsmen. Omai was not English, nor could he ever be. Two years among them convinced the English that Pacific Islanders belonged in the Pacific. His assimilation to English culture was out of the question. “The British people behaved shamefully over Omai,” said Beaglehole. Many thought he had wasted his time, should have learned a trade or brought back items that “would have made him a means of national

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improvement.” Instead he spent his days being feted by polite society and his nights at the opera, which he enjoyed as much as Ahutoru. The only items he brought back were Port wine, gunpowder along with muskets and bullets as fireworks, a globe, a hand organ, and a suit of armor. The British also supplied him with some livestock in hope of beefing up the food supply, but those died out before they could be-

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Omai. (Courtesy Guy Morrison, photograph courtesy Tate, London, 2006.)

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come established. In Beaglehole’s judgment, “It is not clear what trade Omai could have been taught, for he was really a very foolish inattentive fellow.”7 Cook found him pleasant and with a heart always grateful of the favors shown him by the English. He had a tolerable share of understanding, but wanted application and perseverance to exert it, so that his knowledge of things was very general and in many instances imperfect. He was not a man of much observation, there were many little arts as well as amusements amongst the people of the Friendly islands which he might have adopted, as being so much in their own way, but I never found that he used the least endeavours to make himself master of any one. This kind of indifferency is the true Character of his Nation, Europeans have visited them at times for these ten years past, yet we find neither new arts nor improvements in the old, nor have they copied after us in any one thing.8

Both Cook and Beaglehole assigned Omai’s failures to personal flaws. They assumed the universality of human nature and turned their criticism ad hominem. Bougainville and Diderot, by contrast, said Ahutoru could not learn or even understand because he had no access to European ideas. Translation depended on corresponding ideas that were merely signified by different words. Where there are no corresponding ideas, there could be no communication nor comprehension. Who were these people? Were they like Europeans, or were they essentially different? Was their failure to adapt to European norms and even to learn European languages due simply to cultural distance, or was there something innate that made them incapable? If the savage could not surmount the cultural difference that separated Them from Us, then could he be noble? What were the prospects of improving the conditions of savage society if they were incapable of understanding civility? These questions were among the many that Europeans pondered as their experiences deepened in the colonies of the Americas and as they encountered dozens of previously unknown societies in the South Pacific over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ship captains and science officers described their observations in narratives of their travel. Scholars at home compared their observations systematically and invented a new science of humanity.

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The Scientific Use of Travel Reports If the contours of the globe were largely known by the late eighteenth century, there remained sizable gaps in European knowledge concerning regions both exotic and familiar. In addition to merchant shipping, each year several expeditions were dispatched from Europe to the South Pacific, the Americas, Arabia, Siberia, and even to Europe itself. Naval expeditions generally included a naturalist charged with making scientific observations, and the sole aim of many expeditions was scientific. In addition to the prestige associated with world or regional travel, the publication of a report of one’s journey could be very lucrative, and the rights to publish travel reports generated more than one lawsuit over intellectual property. The more glamorous journeys were carried out by nations possessing large navies, chiefly England, France, and Russia. Germans occasionally traveled with them, often famously as in the cases of Dobrizhofer, Cornelius De Pauw, Georg Forster, and, in the nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt. Germans more often organized or participated in expeditions over land, such as Gmelin’s decade-long botanical study of Siberia, Reinhold Forster’s survey of the German colonies in the Volga region, and the Danish expedition to Arabia, for which the Old Testament scholar J. D. Michaelis set much of the agenda. Christoph Meiners considered his observations made during his vacations to Switzerland, the Harz Mountains, and other places in Germany to be contributions to the genre of travel literature.9 But Meiners’s real contribution to travel literature was not as a writer but as a reader. When he returned from his Swiss vacation in September 1782, he set himself a new research agenda centered around travel reports like Cook’s and Bougainville’s. Meiners began to take a serious look at the collection of travel literature that Heyne was acquiring for the Göttingen library as fast as it came off the presses. In the 1770s he had dabbled in travel literature, presenting lectures to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences on exotic topics such as human sacrifices and cannibalism. Heyne enlisted him as a reviewer of the most important travel reports for the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen. By 1784 Meiners had built up enough intellectual momentum to offer a winter semester course on the origin and progress of the human race and the natural and cultural variety in the human race.10

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In Meiners’s anthropology—or as he called it, Geschichte der Menschheit (the history of humanity)—we see the convergence of several themes that have been addressed in previous chapters: the emergence of nations from the natural state to a more cultured one, and occasionally, in dramatic instances, their corruption, decline, and fall; a comparative method that enabled the observer to extrapolate missing information regarding one nation from what had been observed in another; the progress of mind in its collective, social manifestation; and the reciprocal effects of the progress of the arts and sciences. Now we see travel literature applied to an explicitly scientific purpose, with a clear method and with clear goals. All of these themes were implied in the new anthropology that emerged in the wake of the neologism “culture” in the 1780s and into the early nineteenth century. If Meiners’s comparative method was not new, he did have the virtuosity of being able to work with a range of sources as broad as Goguet. The bibliography of the Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, a short textbook that established his comparative method in 1786, filled over seventy pages and included only the sources that Meiners cited directly. The sources in the bibliography were mostly from the second half of the eighteenth century, and some were published as recently as the year before the Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit was published. Despite the number of sources, Meiners knew them well, or at least well enough to annotate most of the entries to inform the reader about the judgment of the author and how useful the entry was for further reading on human history. Most of the reports were in French or English, with a significant minority in German and Latin, one or two in Italian, and several others translated from other European languages. The reports covered every part of the globe and reflected the most recent information on the South Pacific, the coasts and interior of Africa, the Caribbean, Patagonia, North America, the source of the Nile and even “little known” parts of Europe such as Dalmatia and the Crimea. Apropos of human variety, let us consider again Ahutoru and Omai. Aside from the Europeans’ unwillingness to accommodate them on a permanent basis, there were two possible explanations for the inability of the Tahitians to adopt European manners and language. The feature that impressed Europeans the most about the new worlds they continued to encounter in the late eighteenth century was the diversity of

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the people. They came in all shades of brown, from the palest of Scandinavians to the darkest of Africans. They were tall like the Ethiopians and short like the Hottentots. They were strong like the Congolese and weak like the Malays. Patagonians lived in poverty and hardship, while Polynesians lived in indolent comfort. And even more varied than their physical attributes were their customs and manners. Meiners remarked once that of all the creatures on earth none exhibited such variety in size, shape, color, and character as human beings, with the possible exception of domesticated dogs.11 There were two possible explanations for human variety: environment and nature. The environmental thesis was fairly straightforward: climate especially, but other factors as well, effected specific changes in color, stature, social forms, and even morals.12 The effects of heat and cold on plants, animals, and people had been known since antiquity.13 Cold air had been shown to cause fibers to contract, while heat lengthened fibers. In human beings tightened fibers were thought to cause the blood to return to the heart more freely. Circulation in colder regions was thus more vigorous. As a result, people in colder climates were believed to be more energetic, while people in warmer regions were perceived as more relaxed, slower, and perhaps lazy. The most famous eighteenth-century statements about the influence of the environment on humanity were Montesquieu’s. In Chapters 14 through 18 of The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu discussed the effects of climate on the passions and temperament in order to show why laws were necessarily different among different nations. Buffon also was thoroughly convinced of the sun’s efficacy in producing changes in skin color.14 In 1781 William Falconer tried to define principles of human behavior and development based on environment. Using travel literature and ancient authors as his sources, Falconer followed a rigidly thematic organization, exploring the characteristics of social life as they were shaped by climate, geography, and means of production. Empirical observation seemed to confirm the traditional conclusions regarding human temperament. People living in cold regions tended to be brave, active, benevolent, and staid; people living in hot regions tended to be timid, lazy, vindictive, and passionate. Climate affected a nation’s morals, customs, government, and religion, but climate was not omnipotent. Other external or circumstantial factors could modify

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or outweigh climate, such as population density or stage of development. A nation had more control over its destiny as it developed the arts and sciences, yet as the level of culture increased, so did the tendency toward luxury. A vice often associated with hot climates, luxury had different effects under different forms of government.15 A democratic government could not survive long amid excessive luxury,16 while despotic societies were well-suited to luxury and its accompanying idleness.17 The geographic and social environment also affected the role of women in society. Falconer found evidence that “savages” (i.e., hunter-gatherers) tended to be indifferent to women, while “barbarians” (pastoralists) were fond of them. Women had the greatest influence in societies with moderate climates, where their beauty accompanied their understanding and they were simultaneously objects of passion and esteem.18 Excessive luxury ruined the “delicate discrimination of their character” and divested from women their “soft and amiable attractions.”19 Certainly much of human behavior could be explained by environment, both geographic and social. Those like Falconer who accounted for the differences within humanity through the environmental thesis had tradition on their side. Authors both ancient and modern offered volumes of evidence on the effects of climate and geography on the human body, mind, and character. At the same time, the environmental thesis failed to explain some of the most obvious characteristics of human nature. Henry Home, Lord Kames, doubted the causal relationship between environment and human differences, and he pointed out a number of instances in which empirical evidence contradicted what was traditionally accepted. An amateur scholar and a judge by profession, Kames stood at the center of the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith, at the height of his literary fame, commented that “We must every one of us acknowledge Kames as our master.”20 Interested in philosophical matters throughout his life, Kames published about a dozen books on various subjects, including British antiquities, principles of morality and natural religion, principles of equity, aesthetics, education, agriculture, and human history. His Elements of Criticism (1762) was immediately translated into German by J. N. Meinhard. Kames was a friend and mentor of David Hume (a distant relative), Benjamin Franklin, and James Boswell, among others. Boswell, who had an affair with Kames’s daughter Jean

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in Kames’s own house, considered writing a biography of Kames before he took up the project on Samuel Johnson. Kames fell into obscurity in the nineteenth century but was rediscovered by German scholars in the 1890s, mostly because of his work on aesthetics. After 1940, English scholars began to look at his work again, and in the 1990s his works were reprinted. Kames noted that when displaced, members of a race did not in fact adapt to environmental conditions. True, a European might turn brown as a result of exposure to the sun, but the European’s children would be born with color as if in Europe. After four generations in Pennsylvania, Africans remained just as black as they had been in Africa. Jews, who had lived on India’s Malabar coast since the Babylonian Captivity, had the same complexion as European Jews. Nor did extreme cold explain the color of Samoyeds, Lapps, and Greenlanders; Finns and Norwegians lived in a climate equally cold “and yet are fair beyond other Europeans.”21 Kames could not believe that the sun was the cause of pigmentation. Nor was the commonplace true that hotter climes induced lethargy. That might be true of displaced Europeans, as, for example, in Charleston where Europeans “die so fast that they have not time to degenerate.” Even with the benefit of a cooling sea-breeze, the English in Jamaica could keep their population stable only by recruiting new colonists. The heat made the English lethargic to the point that the Jamaican slave revolt in 1760 had to be quelled by free Africans, because the English could not do it themselves. In New England by contrast, where the climate was more similar to Europe’s, Kames pointed out that “population goes on rapidly.”22 “Thus it appears,” Kames concluded, “that there are different races of men fitted by nature for different climates.”23 Some merit could be found in both Kames’s and Falconer’s positions. Rather than polemically attempting to advance one argument or the other, Meiners attempted to synthesize the innate and environmental theses. To do so, he organized his science of humanity under a rigidly topical scheme. Through his new science of the “history of humanity,” Meiners endeavored to account for all aspects of humanity in a single system. He surveyed the nations of the globe and organized them not according to the chronological model of universal history but themati-

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cally and comparatively. His method was thematic in that he organized the history of humanity into three categories: the history of the human body; the human spirit (or mind) and its products; and customs and cultural character (Sitten und Gemüthsart). He discussed each category in turn, and he always proceeded in that order: body, spirit, character. Under the history of the human body he discussed a people’s relative physical size, shape, and strength; the many varieties produced by unions between different peoples; and the further influences on these varieties by differences in geography, climate, soil, and other physical factors. Environment dictated not only a nation’s physical characteristics but also much of its material culture. Hence under the theme of the human body, Meiners compared the food, clothing, and shelter of different societies. The second category, the human spirit (Geist) and its products, included the power of understanding, the arts, sciences, and literature, and everything that made life more comfortable and bearable. Finally, under the category of the human character he discussed the social constitution, including law, property, government, social organization, morality, concepts of honor and shame, pleasure and the good life, and opinions and beliefs concerning the world, God, and the supernatural. The sweeping scope and comparative method of Meiners’s new science of Geschichte der Menschheit, together with his mastery of the bodies of literature in philosophy, ancient philology, and modern travel literature, led Friedrich Lotter to describe him as the last of the polyhistors.24 Robert Lowie and T. K. Penniman called him the first modern ethnologist.25 Rudolf Martin, in his inaugural address as chair of physical anthropology at Zürich, would identify precisely the same three aspects of anthropology as Meiners: physical anthropology (including disease); and ethnology, which he subdivided into two parts, the human spirit and its products, and specific forms of social life produced by environmental factors.26 Anthropology Like all of the human sciences, as a methodological discipline in its own right, anthropology did not exist before the nineteenth century, and not until the second half of that century did it achieve its modern

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configuration. However, there was something that went by the name of anthropology long before the 1780s.27 Aristotle referred to the “science of man” when addressing the mutual working of human physiology and psychology. That is, the human being was taken to be a single or whole or unitary organism endowed with twin dimensions of body and mind. Anthropology was the attempt to reconcile those two human aspects, body and mind. At the end of the sixteenth century, Otto Casmann composed a two-volume work dedicating one volume to each aspect.28 Descartes employed the traditional distinction of body and mind in his division of human beings into two distinct entities, res extensa and res cogitans. Descartes understood the body as a machine, material and subject to physical laws, while the mind was a “thinking thing” whose faculties of volition and imagination operated beyond physics in the realm of metaphysics. Each was subject to a different set of laws. Anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany represented a rejection of Cartesian dualism in favor of a more holistic view of persons, still retaining the traditional twin dimensions of body and mind but directed toward their mutual influences on each other.29 Much of the recent work in German literary studies has focused on an “anthropological turn” that occurred in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In 2002, two books on the “origins” of anthropology were published, apparently without mutual influence. Carsten Zelle describes a flourishing of interdisciplinary work in the faculties of Philosophy, Theology, and Medicine at the University of Halle just before 1750. The “psychomedical circle” of J. G. Krüger (1715–1759), E. A. Nicolai (1722–1802), J. C. Bolten (1727–1757), and J. A. Unzer (1727–1799), all physicians, understood the individual person as a whole or a “transaction between mind and body.” Interested in influences that flowed in the direction of mind to body, they published several books on “practical” anthropology for physicians, dedicating large sections to psychosomatic disorders, mental health as the basis of physical health, sleep and dreams, tears as generated by weeping, and other conjunctions of body and mind. This was eighteenth-century holistic medicine. Directed toward the maintenance of health as much as the cure of disease, their goal was personal self-sufficiency and selfcare. The volumes that appeared from the 1740s to the 1770s, though directed specifically to physicians, were intended to be read by the general public and especially by women.30

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Like Carsten Zelle, John Zammito traces the origins of anthropology to the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Where Zelle investigates anthropology as practiced in German medical faculties, Zammito approaches anthropology through an entirely different line of thought, namely, the discipline of philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany. Investigating the genesis of Kant’s critical philosophy, Zammito contends that Herder was what Kant would have been had he not taken his critical turn in the 1770s. In the 1760s Kant was a “popular philosopher,” and he continued to work like one through 1772 when he piloted a course on anthropology at the University of Königsberg. Like Zelle’s “rational physicians,” the popular philosophers were trying to understand the relationship between the physical world and the faculties of mind. Lockean epistemology taught that all knowledge was derived from sense perception. Condillac and others working on the origin of language and psychology knew that sense perceptions could be recalled and manipulated only through the medium of language, and that therefore logic and human reason were dependent on language. From here it was a short step to say that just as languages differed from one nation to the next, so must also reason differ. Meiners embraced that position in 1772 when he wrote: Once one can show that no philosophical opinion in the tradition has any advantage over any other, that all of philosophy can be transformed into the relativism of history, the only conclusion one can reach for oneself is: The great advantage of this method, transforming all of philosophy into mere philosophical histories, would be without question the healthiest imposition that one could make on one’s audience to think for themselves.31

To suggest that reason and truth were neither universal nor absolute was to bring the entire project of Enlightenment into question. It was on this basis that Isaiah Berlin separated Herder from the mainstream of the Enlightenment along with Vico, Hamann, and Kant. The possibility that truth and reason were relative was also the fear that Rousseau exploited in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in which he argued that the progress of human knowledge, and even human reason generally, had done nothing to improve the moral condition of humanity. In fact, human reason was the very cause of the violence, persecutions, and inequalities that continued to afflict Europe.

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This was the same fear that Hume articulated in his Treatise on Human Nature and Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he pointed out that there was no necessary connection between the two sources of truth, experience and reason. Worse, the activity of the mind—reason, the faculty that defines us as human—was founded on cause and effect. We observe effects. We explain those effects by inferring their causes, and to understand a natural phenomenon or an event is to know its causes. Hume demonstrated, however, that just as the link between physical experience and mental thought was broken, so was there no logically necessary or certain link between effects and causes. Causes could only be assumed, and those assumptions acquired weight through repetition. What we thought was logically necessary was in fact nothing more than an inference drawn from experience. Natural laws were not laws at all but were merely assumed to be true on the basis of custom or habit. In other words, the laws to which we ascribe a universal and necessary character are really contingent on our particular circumstances. Hume’s dilemma was the one that Kant tried to resolve in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant determined that even if the objects of human knowledge were known only a posteriori through sense experience, it was still possible to investigate a priori the basis of knowledge in general. That is, Kant envisioned two separate cognitive faculties, sensibility and understanding. Kant tried to find the cognitive faculties that made cognition possible in the first place. He was looking for the faculties of the mind that governed human experience. Kant took these faculties to be universal to human cognition, even if the individual learned to employ them only in the context of experience. For Meiners, however, and more famously for Herder, there was no such thing as Pure Reason; there was only human reason. Truth was not abstract and universal but was developed only in social discourse, in specific historical and cultural configurations. Herder explicitly rejected Kant’s examination of understanding bracketed away from sensibility in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Man was an organic whole, and just as he must learn to employ his rational faculty, so must he also learn to employ the senses. The child must learn to see and hear, just as he learned to speak. “Man is an artificial machine,” Herder wrote. He has a genetic disposition, but each individual must learn to exercise his own faculties.

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Reason is an aggregate of the perceptions and practice of our souls, a summation of the education of our race, which, following given alien examples, the adult finally perfects in himself as if an alien artist. Thus herein lies the principle of the History of Humanity, without which there could be no such History. If man received everything from outside of himself and developed it in isolation from external circumstances, then it would be possible to write the history of Man but not the history of Mankind, not the history of his entire race. For our specific character lies precisely in this: that we are born practically without instinct; only through a lifelong practice do we become cultivated toward humanness [Menschheit], and just as the perfectibility of our race touches on [is close to] its corruptibility, so also is the history of humanity by necessity a whole, that is, a chain of sociability and cultivated tradition from the first link to the last. There is an Education of the Human Race, therefore, if for no other reason than that each person becomes human only through education, and the entire race consists of nothing other than this chain of individuals.32

Here was a view of the mind as tabula rasa at a level far deeper than the classical Lockean rejection of innate ideas. Perception itself, and even instinct, was learned. From the very beginning of his career, Meiners was interested in these anthropological questions. Already in his first published essay of 1767 while a student at Göttingen he argued, like Herder would later, that perception, the passions, and instinct were learned. In 1767 the Berlin Academy’s prize essay question was posed along precisely these lines: whether innate human predispositions (Neigungen) could be improved. The question touched on genius, passion, instinct, character or personality, and all innate qualities that endowed human nature. “Natural,” “innate,” “genetic,” as well as “genius,” all descend from a common Indo-European root “*gen-,” that which is in-born. Meiners stated flatly that there were no innate predispositions. He did not win the competition, but his argument was of sufficient novelty that the Academy printed his essay and a runner-up essay by another scholarly debutant, Christian Garve, as an appendix to the winning essay.33 All the characteristics of individual uniqueness, including personality, genius, and talent, were acquired through interpersonal commerce, argued Meiners. Even the passions and emotions were learned.

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Pascal, for example, was frequently cited as having some natural or innate or genetic aptitude for mathematics. Meiners argued that in another context, where mathematics was not as developed as it was in seventeenth-century France, Pascal’s attention would have been directed toward some other object. Here was the key point: Genius required an object. An object was something perceived as external to the subject or the self. Human beings were not born with any self-awareness but developed it only in the course of education. A person learned to perceive in the process of becoming self-aware. Meiners contended that the first glimmer of self-awareness occurred when one could distinguish between what was oneself and what was other. Gradually, the self-conscious Ego emerged as a child learned the linguistic tenses of past and present. These afforded the individual a notion of continuity (Yesterday I was, today I am, tomorrow I will be). Motivations or desires, which were generally understood to be instinctive, emerged when the past-present self-consciousness was directed toward a future good. Only in the context of family and society did the individual develop interests and motivations in the different roles of father/mother/child or, more broadly, as citizen. Human motivations, along with all human faculties, were generated by society, and they were limited by society. “Society dictates the needs and these in turn the knowledge of people. Both vary according to different societies.”34 Even the conception of beauty varied from one nation to the next, and virtue was particular, not universal, “the daughter of necessity, derived from a thousand competing interests.”35 Herder commented that “we are born practically without instinct.”36 As for the two instinctive drives that were generally taken to be universal, self-preservation and procreation, Meiners denied that even these were native to human beings. Lust was not simply the animal instinct to procreate. Lust emerged as a drive when the self-conscious ego, inflamed by the imagination, possessing aesthetic sensitivity, formed a clear and distinct desire to possess Beauty. It was Plato’s Symposium psychologized with all the lucidity of a twenty-year-old. Platner’s Holistic Medicine It is not coincidental that physicians and philosophers should be talking about the same intellectual problems and employing the same

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vocabulary. Physicians were interested in the influence of mental states on the body, whereas philosophers wanted to know the precise connection between physical sensation and mental activity. Both were looking for the connections between mind and body, and both understood human beings as unitary organisms that could not be divided into separate spheres. Both were trying to create a science of humanity that could explain simultaneously the physical and mental realms. Anthropologists, whether philosophers or physicians, were examining the same faculties of mind, searching for the precise connections between the nouminal activity of the mind and the phenomenal world of brain matter, nerves, and sensory perception. Central to the arguments of both Zelle and Zammito is Ernst Platner’s Anthropology for Physicians and Philosophers of 1772. For Zelle, Platner marks the completion of the anthropological turn. For Zammito, Platner’s is the work that reoriented Kant’s definition of anthropology from the study of the mind to the practical philosophy of daily living, a topic completely separate from Kant’s critical philosophy. Platner’s book, a disjointed collection of aphorisms that he later rejected as the “sins of my youth,” was an attempt to explain the interaction between physical sensations, whether generated in the external environment or internally in the body, and mental activity including reason, memory, imagination as well as moods, emotions, values, and judgments.37 As a treatise on human nature, it had much in common with Karl Franz Irwing’s work written in Berlin the same year. Neither author was satisfied with his effort. Both had intended to write multivolume works but bogged down in the complexity of human cognition and gave up after a single volume. Yet both remained interested in the topic and continued work on it. Irwing produced a second volume in the mid-1770s, as bad as the first. With the advent of “culture” in the late 1770s, however, he redirected his attention to the role of language in cognition and from language moved outward to society. By 1785 he was writing about social conditions that shaped the individual’s mental faculties. Platner never made that cultural turn. He published a revised edition eighteen years later, this time highly sectionalized and systematic like Irwing’s. The book’s topic was the empirical acquisition of knowledge, but its method was purely rational speculation about the relationships between the senses, intellectual faculties, and states of mind. Platner

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addressed ethics and moral philosophy, but nowhere did he discuss society, historical development, or any development of the faculties at all. Platner offered a static view of the universal, uniform, abstract individual. Irwing learned to become interested in the individual’s historical or cultural contingency. By the time Irwing finished, his subject was Menschengeschichte; today we might call it anthropology. Platner called his subject Anthropologie; today we would call it psychology. In the mid-1770s this anthropological enterprise split in three directions: Kant took his critical turn; Platner’s anthropology continued to investigate the abstract and universal individual, or what we might today call cognitive psychology; and popular philosophers like Herder and Meiners began to investigate the contexts in which the faculties of mind were shaped (i.e., in society). Isaac Iselin’s History of Humanity Irwing’s term Menschengeschichte or die Geschichte der Menschheit is the same term Meiners used in formulating his study of human societies in global perspective. The term is a clue to where Meiners derived his enterprise more specifically. Die Geschichte der Menschheit was the title of a book written in 1764 by Isaac Iselin, a civil servant and amateur scholar from Basel. At the risk of imposing a teleological interpretation (if not a whiggish one) on the history of anthropology in the eighteenth century, we can place Isaac Iselin’s work as the middle point between anthropology as the study of the individual and anthropology as the study of the group. Iselin did both. In a single volume, he offered a purely systematic psychology, completely ahistorical, examining the cognitive faculties of the individual and social influences that acted on him. Then in a second volume he applied the psychology of the individual to society, interpreting human history as a process of psychological development. Using travel reports and historical sources—a method with which we are now familiar—he constructed a universal view of the origin and progress of society based solely on observed facts and ancient authors. Iselin offered a model of human social development applicable to all times and all places. Iselin was part of the generation that became active during the Seven Years’ War. He was of the generation of Winckelmann, Heyne, and Michaelis, ahead of Herder, Eichhorn, and Meiners. Born in Basel

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in 1728, he studied philosophy and history at Göttingen before earning a law degree there. He returned home in 1756 to spend a career in the Basel civil service. At his leisure he wrote essays of philosophical and political interest, including the two-volume History of Humanity that went through four editions and three reprintings. He died in June 1782, while not far away Geneva still celebrated its revolution. It might not be correct to place Iselin in the anthropological lineage of the Halle physicians. Iselin speculated about the mind, not the body. The only body Iselin was interested in was the body politic, and that he understood as a product of the human mind. Where Montesquieu had emphasized the external factors (like climate) that shaped a nation and its laws, Iselin viewed history (as Kames did) as the process of individual human beings affecting each other. History, he believed, was governed by laws, not natural or physical or mechanical laws but psychological laws. Die Geschichte der Menschheit was the search for those laws. The history of humanity was the history of man and his social organization. It was the history of sociability (Geselligkeit). Iselin therefore began with a profile of human psychology. Book I was highly speculative and systematic, surveying human mental faculties in terms of the soul, observation, understanding, sensation, thought, and then social concepts such as honor, religion, virtue, sources of error, freedom, and happiness. Like a latter-day Newton, he attempted to derive scientific laws that governed the individual and society. Iselin’s First Law of Sociability stated that society was the means to the individual’s well-being.38 He then transferred the individual’s drive toward perfection to the group, stating in a Second Law of Sociability that we are all in this together; each individual affected both other individuals and society as a whole, and society exerted a reciprocal influence on the individual.39 In his profile of individual and social psychology, he presented few footnotes (although some) and no travel literature as supporting evidence.40 The remaining seven books were ethnological in emphasis. In four books Iselin traced the stages through which a society developed, from the state of nature, to a primitive stage (Stand der Wildheit), and then to a civilized stage (Gesitteter Stand). There was no stage in which people existed as isolated individuals; human beings were social from the very beginning.

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What marked the first stage, the state of nature, was the lack of social organization, but not the lack of any society whatsoever. Natural man was not isolated, free, and happy, but ignorant, aware only of his fleeting sensations, and so innocent that he was capable of neither virtue nor vice. His psychological faculties were completely undeveloped, existing in potentiality only. Lacking all ability, and even desire, to defend themselves against exploitation by stronger or more developed people, people in the state of nature were doomed to slavery or use as beasts of burden. To Iselin the state of nature was a state of vulnerability.41 Iselin stated his conclusions tentatively, acknowledging the lack of complete historical records for the state of nature.42 Instead he extrapolated from travel reports like the Spanish discovery of a people in the Mariana Islands without even fire and reports of society in Greenland.43 Still Moses Mendelssohn called his characterization of the state of nature “the most foundational refutation of the Rousseauian opinion.”44 In contrast to the state of nature, society’s second stage, the primitive, barbaric stage, was all too well known. At this stage the psychological faculties had developed enough to allow primitive social organization and institutions like the household (the barbarian’s first slave was his wife) and laws. Primitive man was driven by the faculty of the imagination, not yet by reason. Still this was an improvement over pure sensation in the state of nature. He had no ability to perceive beauty, had no conception of virtue, and perpetrated “barbarisms” including cannibalism, superstition, and fetishism. A third, “civilized stage” emerged as the faculty of reason developed. The communal extended household (or clan) was established, and along with it arose unique customs, religion (or mythology), and family identity. Commerce was initiated with neighboring families, who began to see their mutual interest in exchanging agricultural products and crafts. Religion served as a kind of social glue, and the first arts and sciences began to emerge. Finally, society became organized on a large scale under a common religion, language, and customs (Denkart). Iselin cited the Bronze Age civilizations (not by that name) of Egypt and Babylon as examples. All of these stages, from the state of nature to the civilized stage, were prehistoric. Iselin’s only access to them was through the observations of outsiders, either modern travelers or ancient authors. Written

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history began after the civilized stage was perfected, and Iselin concluded by applying his psychological principles to the history of Western civilization in Books Seven and Eight—Greece, Rome, medieval and modern Europe. As human nature increasingly came to be defined in social, rather than individual, terms, Iselin’s work gained in popularity and influence. Conjectural history under the title of Geschichte der Menschheit became a genre of historical writing in its own right.45 Herder wrote Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit in 1774, and ten years later Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Like Iselin’s work, Herder’s work remained conjectural history, merely “another philosophy” of history and “ideas” for a philosophy of history, not the actual history itself. Even Meiners’s first effort at composing a truly empirical and comprehensive history of humanity was only an Outline. He began to work out the details first haphazardly, then systematically, in his Göttingisches Historisches Magazin in the late 1780s, but it would not be until the nineteenth century that scholars began to assemble a truly exhaustive and comprehensive Kulturgeschichte.46 Meiners’s Geschichte der Menschheit Let us briefly reinsert Ahutoru and Omai here. Independently, the French and English agreed on two characteristics of their Tahitian guests. First, they were lazy. They were incapable of understanding even the rudiments of European society, unable to learn the language, and generally inattentive. Second, they were aesthetically accomplished. They possessed an intuitive understanding of the opera, were well-mannered, and expressed due gratitude for their patrons’ generosity.47 Bougainville said that in order to learn French Ahutoru would have had to create a whole world of ideas. Even conceptions of what was right, necessary, desirable, and beautiful were created, informed, and limited by culture. Human beings were defined by culture in every way. They were confined by language and reason. They were further confined by perception, sensibility, capability, and genius, all of which were generated by the individual’s transactions with society. Removed from his native context, Ahutoru was profoundly alone in France. The abyss that separated Polynesians from Europeans did not bode well for cross-cultural understanding.

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Christoph Meiners was a student in Göttingen when Ahutoru and Omai were in Paris and London. He did not meet them, nor did he refer to them in his work more than in passing. He did, however, discuss the context from which they came at some length in the 1780s, so I shall conclude this chapter by illustrating what his version of anthropology looked like. I will juxtapose the theoretical Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit with a more specific article “On the Nature of South Asians and Pacific Islanders.”48 One of seven essays that taken together surveyed the entire globe, this was a tremendous geographic area to cover in a single essay, encompassing China, India, southeast Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands. The immediate context of the essay was to defend a thesis that, though a single species, humanity originated as two branches in central Asia and spread across the globe. Although Meiners devoted the bulk of the essay to a comparison of physical and cultural features of the inhabitants of Asia, America, and Africa, my purpose here is to discuss Meiners’s cultural theory, not his racial theory. In describing contemporary nations, whether individually or comparatively, Meiners proceeded thematically, discussing the different environmental and social influences on humanity. Meiners began with “the history of the human body.” His purpose was to inquire into the nature of the body and the extent to which it could be altered, improved, or harmed through external causes. Since humanity was a part of natural history, he discussed geological evidence for the evolution of the planet, the types of rock, oceans, and a taxonomy of plants and animals.49 Meiners posited that humanity consisted of a single species. Early in human history, that species had divided into two principal stocks, black and white, whose ancestral locations Meiners traced to the Altai and Caucasus mountains, respectively. He developed a taxonomy of humanity, descended from a single species, divided into two stocks (Stämme), then numerous races, varieties, and finally a “great plurality of types” that resulted from the mixing of varieties, races, and stocks.50 Among south Asians, argued Meiners, European colonists and travelers distinguished between two types of people, traditionally designated black and white. The black (Altaic in Meiners’s terminology) stock (Stamm) arrived first and included three subsets: the Chinese who occupied China, part of Java, Sumatra, and the Philippines; the Malays who populated nearly all of the East Indies and South Seas islands; and

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the Tamils of the “Indian peninsula,” who had also populated the Pacific islands before the arrival of the Malays.51 The white (Caucasian in Meiners’s terminology) stock (Stamm) arrived later and included two subsets, Hindus and Arabs. First, the higher castes of Hindostan occupied India and the more desirable islands of the South Seas, Bali, and Java, where their customs, religion, and language remained in almost “pure” form. The second subset of Caucasians, the Arabs, arrived later than the Hindus, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The empires they established on the south Asian mainland, the East Indies, Moluccas (Maluku, Indonesia), and the Philippines remained in place to Meiners’s day. The unions of the original Altaic inhabitants with the two groups of Caucasian newcomers had resulted in a plethora of varieties of people.52 In addition to genetic heritage, environmental factors such as climate, food, water, and air contributed to the physical differences between, say, a Sherpa and a Tahitian.53 Migration and heredity accounted for the physical characteristics of Ahutoru and Omai, but what contributed to their perceived indolence? Meiners found explanations in both nature and culture. Of nature, the chief characteristic was the heat, which made south Asians and Pacific Islanders physically weak. Europeans felt their strength sapped by the heat, and they assumed the same must happen to the Pacific Islanders, and there was evidence for that effect. For one thing, they were susceptible to the same tropical diseases that afflicted European travelers.54 For another, they were demonstrably weak. Their weakness and laziness made them more of a burden than an asset when they were taken onboard European ships that ran low on sailors. The Malays of Sumatra and Madagascar were reportedly so weak that even enslaved Africans mistreated them.55 Americans, whom Meiners considered related to Malays, were similarly incapable of heavy labor. The Spanish and others had tried to enslave the native Americans but were unable to force them to produce. Europeans instead turned to the more sturdy Africans for slave labor in America.56 The second factor contributing to the Pacific Islanders’ characteristic indolence was the bounty of the land itself. In a land where coconuts and breadfruit fell into one’s hands faster than they could be eaten, one had to prepare for few necessities. Winter, which in Europe meant cold and hunger, was indistinguishable from summer in Polynesia. Because there was no need for systematic agriculture, there

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was no conception of private property, and without private property there was no basis for civil society on the model of Europe. In effect, the plenty of the land guaranteed the persistence of the primitive condition. In a place where there were few necessities, there were also few inventions, and throughout the Pacific Islands the arts and sciences were virtually nonexistent. European attempts to instruct the Pacific Islanders in the arts and sciences had failed without exception. Without trained eyes and ears, they had so far been incapable of inventing mathematical instruments that might aid in commerce, navigation, architecture, and music. Families were only loosely organized, and internally they were governed by brute force. Women were treated like slaves who provided food, clothing and shelter, only to be repaid in violence and contempt. From an early age boys were taught to mistreat their mothers, sometimes hitting them while their fathers looked on lest she should attempt to punish or retaliate.57 Meiners concluded that one could learn much about a nation’s degree of culture by observing the status and treatment of women. Travelers reported that the purchasing of wives was common throughout south Asia, and occasionally a family sold its children into slavery. Because family units were only loosely woven, only a rudimentary social hierarchy existed. Europeans had not been in the South Pacific long enough to determine precisely what social and legal institutions existed or how they functioned. Taking his cue from acquisitive merchants and explorers, Meiners took ambition to be an important indicator of a people’s capacity for cultural development. Of the south Asians the Chinese and Japanese were the most industrious. The Chinese had established colonies on Java, Amboina (Ambon, Indonesia), and the Philippines. It was primarily Chinese goods from those islands that appeared in European markets. Pacific Islanders, though eager to trade for nails, beads, and feathers when European explorers arrived, showed little commercial interest. The laziness of south Asians was reflected in their concept of the good life, which was achieved “by the death of all senses, powers, and suffering . . . and the disappearance into God or into Nothingness (Nichts).”58 “Nothingness” is not a bad description of Meiners’s conception of human nature. He went to considerable length to show that the

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human essence was a tabula rasa imprinted by a variety of factors, including genetics and heredity, the physical environment, and especially the social environment in which the individual participated. “Tabula rasa” and “human nature” might be misleading metaphors, however. The human essence—in the sense of innate capacities or drives—did not exist at all. Leibniz already had identified the inadequacy of “faculties” or “drives” as explanatory devices for human nature. “Race” was no explanation either. To explain the semantics of race in the 1780s, which was nearly as contested a term as culture and Enlightenment, or even to establish the scientific context of Meiners’s racial taxonomy, what he drew from other scientists and where exactly he was novel, would require another entire book. The best that can be done is to describe some of the implications of Meiners’s Geschichte der Menschheit and the importance of the processes of human social development for Europeans’ own understanding of Europe in the 1790s. (In the final chapter we shall examine the use of anthropology in the politics of the French Revolution.) It would take Meiners the rest of his life to work out a systematic Kulturgeschichte of the human race, but in the 1780s he was collecting the information that would lead to a complete picture of humanity. He described the division of humanity into two principal stocks and the successive waves of migration that brought them to their present homelands. New racial varieties were formed by intermarriage, and these were modified by environmental factors. Environmental factors also influenced social structures, and social structures in turn created the context in which individuals were born and shaped, in which they lived and acted. Cultural characteristics were even more varied than physical characteristics. Given such variety, Meiners concluded that there were no natural human tendencies in the sense of an essential human nature that was fixed, universal, and ineffable. If there was any essence to humanity, it was that humanity was malleable. Human beings were products of many factors and consequently could be varied to their very core. Now, twenty years later, Meiners had empirical proof of what he had supposed as a student: human nature was culture.

EIGHT ◆

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N O V E M B E R 2 3 , 1 7 7 3 — Ship Cove, New Zealand. Captain Cook returned to the Resolution to find the quarter deck crowded with native Maori and his English crew in an uproar. Some had vomited. Others were joking. Most were simply aghast. At issue was a human head mounted on the stern of the ship, badly mutilated. The lower jaw was missing. It was bruised and the skull fractured above the left temple by a blow from a blunt object. One of the cheeks had been cut away. Enough of it remained to reveal the face of a boy about the age of fifteen. Two of the officers stood at the center of the commotion, Second Lieutenant Charles Clerke and Third Lieutenant Richard Pickersgill. They explained that while ashore at Indian Cove they encountered the entrails of a human being in a heap on the beach. Nearby they found a group of natives with part of the body gutted and butchered. With words and gestures the natives indicated that they had eaten the rest. Ever since Montaigne, European explorers had suspected that savages practiced cannibalism, and although they had occasionally seen circumstantial evidence and heard savages themselves describe the practice, never had they witnessed it with their own eyes.1 Today that changed. As a souvenir of human savagery, Pickersgill purchased the head for a nail, brought it back to the ship, and mounted it on the tafferel. While the crew gawked at the gruesome sight and listened to the officers relate what they had seen ashore, a group of natives canoed out

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to the Resolution and came aboard. Upon seeing the head, they too became excited and indicated with gestures that it tasted delicious and that they wished to purchase it. Pickersgill refused to part with his property but offered them a taste of the cheek. Clerke produced a knife, carved a steak, and offered it to them. They would not eat it raw, so Clerke broiled it over the fire. Before the entire crew the natives devoured it rapturously. The spectacle had just concluded when Cook returned. Since he had missed it, the event was reproduced so that he, too, could witness it. There are several surviving accounts of this event. Each of the crew members who kept a journal reported the episode, and three revised narratives were prepared for publication back in England in 1776. All are in substantial agreement on the details of the event: that the victim was killed in battle a day or two before and his body carried away by the cannibals; that the head was purchased by an English officer and brought aboard the Resolution; that one or more New Zealanders ate a piece of the cheek having requested that it be cooked; that the scene evoked strong reactions in the crew, including vomiting, anger, and laughter; and that the Tahitian Hiti-Hiti who sailed with the Resolution for nearly a year was so repulsed by the scene that he burst into sobs and thereafter refused to associate with either the New Zealanders or the officer who served them.2 Where the accounts differ is in their interpretation of both the causes of the episode and the significance of the resulting behavior of the crew. Let us examine two of the journal accounts, one by Cook himself and the other by his naturalist, Johann Reinhold Forster. The cannibals aboard the Resolution were apparently from a group of Maori whom the English had not seen before. The astronomer William Wales clarified that the shipboard cannibals were a different group from those who killed the victim and sold the head to Pickersgill.3 Cook referred to them vaguely as “strangers,” although he suspected they were of the same family or tribe as the “Indians” with whom they regularly conducted business. These strangers had approached the English the previous day (Monday, November 22) to trade “various curiosities” for white Tahitian cloth and red woolen baize. A certain “old man” appeared while they were bartering, encouraged the Maori not to sell their goods short, and “in a moment turned the exchanges above a thousand percent in their favor.” Apparently,

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they had been on a war expedition a day before. Indeed, the English remembered seeing a canoe full of women and children fleeing the shore at dawn on Sunday, although at the time they had taken little notice of it, not understanding what was being said. Cook learned that there had been a battle in Admiralty Bay in which both sides had taken casualties. The strangers claimed to have killed fifty of their enemy, although Cook doubted this given their small number and their managing to carry off the body of only this one youth. The cause

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Cannibal Cove Ship Cove

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Gilbert Bay

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Fannin Bay

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Grass Cove

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Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand

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Bay of Many Coves

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Endeavour Inlet

Motuara I.

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of the conflict remained unclear. What was clear, however, was that cannibalism was not a ritualized practice. It was committed only against those killed in battle. Victims were neither hunted nor murdered cold-bloodedly nor ceremonially sacrificed. The practice was followed because the victors believed their enemies would have perpetrated the same atrocity against them had they lost the battle and been killed. Cook deduced that a sort of inverse Golden Rule was in effect in New Zealand: not treat “other men as they themselves would wish to be treated, but treat them as they think they should be treated under the same circumstances.”4 J. Reinhold Forster was at Cook’s side during the entire cannibalism episode. He and the astronomer William Wales had accompanied Cook to their plantation on Motuara Island where they gathered greens for the ship. Forster had a minor triumph in discovering two new plant species he had not noticed before. He returned to the Resolution with Cook and witnessed the second instance of cannibalism. Forster did not share Cook’s skepticism about the cause of the battle. “I am afraid we are the innocent causes of this war,” he wrote. For having bought up all the Curiosities & green Stones [jade], the Natives in the Sound were possessed of, & hearing us constantly ask for more & offering various things, which tempted their desires; They went I believe in quest of them among their neighbors, who they knew had a great many left, & killed several of them in order to possess themselves of these things which are so much coveted by the Europeans.5

Forster blamed the Europeans for the raid in this passage, but not for the cannibalism. But whereas Cook inquired at length about the practice of cannibalism in his journal, Forster instead observed the behavior of the English, classifying them in three categories: the coarsest laughed, saying the natives had gone a-hunting and got a buck; the squeamish vomited; and the “more sensible ones” felt sorrow first for the victim, then for the debased brutality of human nature, and finally “for the depravity of a part of the Creation, whom we must acknowledge to be our brethren.” But the most appropriate response of all came from the Tahitian Hiti-Hiti, “whose tender soul was so much struck with horror that he hardly could see the cruel Scene, & went immediately into the Cabbin & shed a flood of tears.” Forster considered

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his response “natural” and more appropriate than the reaction of any European, a proof that all our artificial Education, our boasted civilization, our parade of humanity & Social virtues, was in this case outdone by the tender tears & feelings of the innocent, goodnatured boy, who was born under the benign influence of the Sun within the Tropics, had the Education suitable to a Man of Quality in his country, where it seems cruelty & ferociousness have not so much gained ground, as to destroy the principles of humanity.6

When Georg Forster penned a narrative of the three-year voyage from his father’s journal, he raised the indictment against the English to an even higher level. Not only were the English responsible for the economic demand that caused the raid, but the reaction of the English sailors was rendered even more reprehensible than Maori cannibalism. The truly atrocious behavior was on the part of Cook’s crew, some of whom “did not seem greatly disinclined to feast with them.” Others “were so unreasonably incensed” that they suggested shooting the cannibals then and there. “They were ready to become the most detestable butchers, in order to punish the imaginary crime of a people whom they had no right to condemn.”7 Georg Forster saw no crime in cannibalism. As a form of vengeance it made a certain sense, particularly among barbarians whose passions ran strong. Georg Forster acknowledged no debt to Montaigne, but his logic followed similar lines. To consume one’s enemies was in effect to annihilate even their inanimate remains. When in the heat of passionate vengeance, one ate one’s enemy and found the flesh palatable, it was a short step to making cannibalism a cultural practice, “since the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself.”8 Georg Forster was less concerned with what became of the body after death than in the killing. The atrocity was not the cannibalism but the battle. As in his father’s account, the hero of the story was Mahine, and Georg added that the Tahitian’s first lament was for the victim’s parents.9 Although Europeans were “too much polished to be canibals, we do not find it unnaturally and savagely cruel to take the field, and to cut one another’s throats by thousands, without a single motive, besides the ambition of a prince, or the caprice of his

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mistress!” When they felt little compunction about the taking of life, the only thing that separated Europeans from cannibals was prejudice. Indeed, “A New Zeelander, who kills and eats his enemy, is a very different being from an European, who, for his amusement, tears an infant from the mother’s breast, in cool blood, and throws it on the earth to feed his hounds.”10 Not only was the raid provoked by European acquisitiveness in the first place, but Forster understood the entire shipboard display as having been performed for the benefit of the crew. If Europeans were not the perpetrators of the cannibalism, they at least served as enablers. Statements of the crew themselves confirm their role in the deed. Cook was very clear that his motive for asking the Maori to perform the deed a second time was to enhance his own credibility at home: The account I gave of [cannibalism] in my former Voyage was partly founded on circumstances and was, as I afterwards found, discredited by many people. I have often been asked, after relateing all the circumstance, if I had actualy seen them eat human flesh my self.

And: Being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about, I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter deck where one of these Canibals eat it with a seeming good relish before the whole ships Company.11

Both Clerke and Cook were careful to note that they were the instigators of the episode. Of the second performance Cook himself wrote, “I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter deck.” But it was Clerke who claimed to have instigated it in the first place before Cook returned. Clerke relates: I ask’d him if he’d eat a peice there directly to which he very chearfully gave his assent. I then cut a peice of carry’d [it] to the fire by his desire and gave it a little broil upon the Grid Iron then deliver’d it to him—he not only eat it but devour’d it most ravenously, and suck’d his fingers 1/2 dozen times over in raptures: the Captain was at this time absent,

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he soon after came on board, when I cut & dress’s my friend the other steak which he Eat upon the Quarter Deck before Capt. Cook and both were before the Ships Crew.12

Clerke claimed to have carved and cooked the second piece also. As evidence of the event and their role in it, both Cook and Clerke invoked the witness of the entire crew. A few years later, Cook had occasion to reflect on Hiti-Hiti’s effusive reaction to the events aboard the Resolution. In 1777 a tribal king in Hiti-Hiti’s own Society Islands invited Cook to witness a ceremony of that other great taboo, human sacrifice. Beaglehole comments that Hiti-Hiti had such a strong reaction, because his society had only recently shed that most depraved of savage practices. It was his proximity to cannibalism, his implicit familiarity with it, that evoked such a strong reaction.13 To Europeans the spectacle was merely a grotesque curiosity but not threatening. In Contrast, just three weeks after the cannibalism episode on the Resolution, Furneaux’s crew in the Adventure would find Maori cannibalism particularly threatening. Separated from Cook in the Resolution during a storm at the end of October 1773, the Adventure pulled into Queen Charlotte Sound just days after the Resolution gave up on them and departed. While ashore across the sound from Ship Cove where Cook had met his cannibals, a boatload of Furneaux’s crew was massacred on December 18, 1773, and fell victim to the cannibals themselves. James Burney led the search-and-rescue team that found only shoes, severed hands, the earthen oven in which the crew was cooked, and some twenty baskets of smoked meat.14 The Forsters had a completely different view of human nature from the scholars and scientists we have seen in previous chapters. As the study of Man came increasingly to be the study of society in the 1770s and 1780s, the notion that human nature was fixed and universal was increasingly called into question. At the end of the last chapter, we saw how Christoph Meiners concluded that there was no human nature at all. Instead, the human essence or character was formed in the context of society. Meiners was not alone but represents the conclusion reached by most of the subjects of this book. But not the Forsters. Both Reinhold and Georg were firm believers in the universality of human

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nature. Even an outrageous episode of cannibalism only confirmed what they already believed: that people were people wherever they may be found, that the modifications to their custom and character were accidental only and could not alter their moral essence as human beings. If the Maori were savages, then Europeans were indicted by the same charge—both Reinhold and Georg emphasized in their accounts of the cannibalism that the Maori were the Europeans’ brethren. Georg assembled a host of evidence to support his belief that Europeans in fact had little claim to moral superiority over the cannibals. His argument echoed Rousseau’s, just as Rousseau’s echoed Montaigne’s. These two views of human nature—one as fixed and universal, the other as variable according to culture—lie at the basis of the distinction made thirty years ago by Isaiah Berlin between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. In this case, the Forsters represent the mainstream of the Enlightenment, and Meiners represents the Counter-Enlightenment. But what happens when Enlightenment confronts Counter-Enlightenment head-on? That is the purpose of this chapter. In the Conclusion to this book I will complicate this binary distinction, but for the purposes of this chapter, the two positions are instructive in themselves. Meiners and Forster clashed in the 1770s. They met in 1779, and for a few years they collaborated. In the late 1780s they clashed again, and in the volatile period of the French Revolution their conflict ranged from ethnology to politics, from Jewish emancipation to the Atlantic slave trade. On every level their science was virtually identical. They read the same authors, addressed the same topics, and employed the same logic. But they reached opposite conclusions. The reason they drew opposite conclusions about humanity, society, and politics was specifically because of their views of human nature and the efficacy of culture in shaping it. Meiners’s opinions are positively ugly, certainly bigoted, probably racist. Forster’s opinions are those of a republican and familiar to us. I would suggest, however, that in the ensuing debate Meiners was the optimist. He argued that human nature could improve through cultural development as technological efficiency reduced hardship, political freedoms were gradually gained, and aesthetic education improved people’s moral sensibilities. Forster would not agree with the charge that he was implicitly pessimistic (or perhaps in his final miserable months he would have). Forster tried to be a

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good Rousseauan who saw the natural benevolence of the human heart, but at every turn he was confronted by depraved human nature. His universalistic moral egalitarianism precluded the possibility that human nature could be improved through culture. As he implied in his comments on the cannibals, technological progress only increased human efficiency in doing evil. In Forster’s system, familiar as it seems to modern readers, there was little hope of overcoming human depravity. A Voyage around the World German by birth, the Forsters were actually English by ancestry.15 The family had emigrated from Yorkshire to the Prussian town of Nassenhuben near Gdansk sometime before 1642. Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) came to natural history as an amateur. A pastor by profession, he took up the avocation of reading ancient and natural history and learning languages. (He would learn the rudiments of seventeen languages before his death in 1798.) In the 1760s he grew impatient with the ministry and took a position as a natural historian in the German colonies in Russia. Georg (1754–1794) accompanied him at the age of twelve. On behalf of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences they surveyed the geology, geography, flora, and fauna of the Volga region. In 1766 Reinhold joined the losing side of a dispute with the Russian government and left St. Petersburg without pay. He arrived in London in October of that year and began teaching languages and natural history at the Dissenters’ Academy in Warrington. Around 1770 both Reinhold and Georg, by then a teenager, began publishing essays on natural history and translations of travel reports from France and Russia. In 1771 Reinhold was admitted to the Royal Society, and a year later he and Georg found themselves on a ship bound for the southern hemisphere. Reinhold Forster was the naturalist on what is now called Cook’s Second Voyage (1772–1775). The replacement of Joseph Banks, who backed out late in preparations for the voyage, Forster led a small scientific team hired to observe and record the geography, flora, fauna, and people of the exotic places they visited. Georg, eighteen years old at departure, accompanied the expedition as a sketch artist. The chief task of the voyage was to settle once and for all the question of whether

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there was a southern continent around the South Pole that might be habitable. The question was geostrategic; in the 1760s both Bougainville and Wallis had been searching for the terra australis incognita, an unknown landmass thought necessary to balance the Northern Hemisphere, and the English were eager to get there first. During the next three winters, Cook made three forays as far south as he could safely go, turning back each time, his way blocked by icebergs. In a sense the mission failed in that the expedition was unable to determine for certain what lay beyond the ice, although frequent encounters with penguins, albatross, and petrels seemed to indicate that land lay not much farther ahead. During the other three seasons of these years, Cook made large loops through the South Pacific and spent several months each in New Zealand, Tahiti, and Easter Island. When he returned to England in the summer of 1775, Cook was a national hero.16 Georg Forster’s published account of the expedition, A Voyage Round the World (1777), was an international success. It established Forster as an authoritative naturalist and provided the foundation for his career as a natural philosopher. At the age of twenty-two he was accepted as a full member of the Royal Society. His book won him admittance to societies in Berlin, Göttingen, and Madrid as well, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences translated and published some of his observations on the natural history of New Zealand. Although the Forsters complained initially that they were robbed of book sales due to the artificially low price of Cook’s competing account of the voyage, their book eventually sold well enough to be widely available today in British, German, and American libraries. The book is becoming increasingly recognized as a classic of travel literature today, especially by German anthropologists. The Göttingen anthropological museum, founded by Heyne, Blumenbach, and Heeren around 1800, displayed artifacts brought back by the Forsters for several years before they were packed away for a century and a half. Recently, the museum has begun to market those artifacts for use in precontact historical anthropology.17 (In 2006 the collection was temporarily shipped back to Hawaii as part of a special exhibit.) The largest display of artifacts from the voyage is on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, and others are housed in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. While touring the South Pacific, Georg Forster fell in love with Tahiti. He wrote as if the ship had landed in El Dorado. The streets were not

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lined with gold, but the island healed sailors suffering from advanced stages of scurvy at a miraculous rate, almost at the moment they set foot on the beach.18 Although it was Tahitian winter (August), there was an abundance of fresh fruit. The temperature was about 90 degrees under brilliant sunshine, but the heat was tempered by a soft breeze and trees that provided such luxurious shade that they seemed to cooperate with each other. The soil was moist, but there were no mosquitoes or other insects. The trees were filled with colorful birds, the sea with tropical fish, and the interior of the island with plants never before seen or classified by Europeans.19 It was a naturalist’s paradise. The Tahitians were no less charming than the island itself. To Forster they were beautiful and well proportioned with fair skin, fine hair, lively eyes, and ceaseless smiles. Their clothing was becoming, especially the women’s dresses, which Forster found to be as attractive as those of Europeans, though simpler in design. They were graceful and agile swimmers. Their language was a stream of soft vowels, as beautiful to listen to as it was difficult to learn. The Tahitians were enthusiastic, eager to please, open to trade, and above all friendly. From Forster’s point of view, the illusion of having found “at least one little spot of the world, where a whole nation, without being lawless barbarians, aimed at a certain frugal equality in their way of living, and whose hours of enjoyment were justly proportioned to those of labour and rest” was broken only by his encounter with one gluttonous Tahitian who reclined while being fed fish and fermented breadfruit by his wife. Indeed, Forster hoped that the intercourse which has lately subsisted between Europeans and the natives of the South Sea islands may be broken off in time, before the corruption of manners which unhappily characterises civilized regions, may reach that innocent race of men, who live here fortunate in their ignorance and simplicity. But it is a melancholy truth, that the dictates of philanthropy do not harmonize with the political systems of Europe!

For Forster, the kindness of the Tahitians was “undeniable proof of the original excellence of the human heart.”20 Meiners Reviews Forster Christoph Meiners was not convinced.21 Reviewing Cook’s and Forster’s independent accounts of the voyage simultaneously, Meiners acknowl-

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edged that Forster offered greater detail than Cook in many scenes. In fact, both accounts of the expedition were extraordinarily dependable, in that each confirmed the other’s observations on all but the smallest of points. Meiners found it hard to believe that the authors had not collaborated. Yet there was a partisan aspect to Forster’s version when it should have been a strictly naturalistic account. Forster’s descriptions consisted “largely of outpourings of sentimentality and panegyrics of foreign—and not always unsuspect—virtues.” These descriptions, Meiners said, would have made a greater impression on his readers if they appeared more sparingly and were not so often “linked to bitter insinuations about the cruelty, violence, and rudeness of the Europeans (or at least of his fellow travellers).”22 Forster elevated the good and simple Tahitians above the more advanced but decadent Europeans. Meiners’s chief criticism was that Forster used incomplete information to exalt the primitive Tahitians “at the expense of Europe.” Something in Forster’s presentation seemed amiss for Meiners. That something was the characterization of the Pacific Islanders as virtuous in their savage condition. Forster’s account seemed to embody an error of proportionality. The Pacific Islanders had achieved little in the arts and sciences. Even the defenders of the more advanced Chinese admitted that south Asians and Pacific Islanders had developed little aesthetic taste. Without trained eyes and ears they were incapable of making mathematical instruments, nor could they be taught. At the same time, they could do wondrous things with only rudimentary tools. They could work with textiles as no European could, and through practice at a young age they could travel for days on boats with only light rudders. Aside from that, however, they were incapable of sustained work. They were of heavy stature and largely useless when taken aboard European ships.23 If all aspects of a culture were informed by each other, then it was implausible that one aspect should stand out of proportion from the rest. Meiners doubted whether the Tahitians’ primitive condition was proof of “the original excellence of the human heart,” as Forster had said. For Meiners the “noble savage” was an oxymoron. Forster did not take criticism lightly. The Forsters had been on the defensive from the moment they returned to England at the end of the voyage in the summer of 1775. While still in the Thames estuary,

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even before disembarking, Reinhold Forster had a run-in with John Montagu, earl of Sandwich and head of the British Admiralty. At issue was the disposal of two live exotic birds Reinhold Forster wanted to present personally to Queen Charlotte. Having mixed his labor with the birds for months by keeping them alive, Forster thought they were his to give. Having funded the expedition in the first place, the Admiralty considered everything on the ship theirs, including the journals and observations made by all participants, officers as well as crew. In August 1775 the family house was burglarized, and Reinhold found himself embroiled in a protracted dispute with the Admiralty and Cook over the rights to publish an account of the voyage.24 Contrary to the agreement reached before departure three years earlier, Montagu and Cook declared that Reinhold was contractually forbidden to publish the official account of the expedition. Son Georg, however, was under no such limitation, so Reinhold gave him full access to his journals. Georg Forster and James Cook raced to publish the first account, and their works came off the presses nearly simultaneously. Consequently, they were commonly reviewed together, and Meiners’s joint review was no exception. Georg adopted a policy of leaving no criticism of the family unanswered. Twenty-three days after Meiners’s anonymous review appeared in Göttingen, Georg Forster (in London) had written a point-by-point refutation of Meiners’s criticism, which was mailed to Göttingen and published as a separate pamphlet.25 In the late 1770s the Forsters returned to Germany. Reinhold published his scientific observations in the summer of 1778 and took a position teaching natural history at the University of Halle, where he remained until his death in 1798.26 Georg’s return was triumphant. He toured northwestern Germany, meeting the leaders of the Enlightenment there. Before he reached his intended destination of Berlin, he was offered a position teaching natural history at the gymnasium in Kassel.27 He quickly became a favorite of the nearby Göttingen faculty. When Forster and Meiners met for the first time in Göttingen at a Christmas party at the publisher Dieterich’s home, Meiners apologized for the criticisms in his review.28 For the next several years Forster and Meiners cooperated. Forster and the physicist C. G. Lichtenberg—then one of Meiners’s closest friends29—edited an annual calendar with engravings showing the physiognomies of different primitive groups, one for each month of the

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year. Meiners helped them locate the pictures.30 Forster cultivated relationships with the Göttingen faculty and courted their eligible daughters. In 1785 he married Therese, the eldest daughter of C. G. Heyne. Forster Reviews Meiners In the late 1780s, the latent dispute between Meiners and Forster over human nature and culture reemerged. Georg Forster had left Kassel in 1784 to teach natural history at the university in Vilnius but found himself exiled “in the interior of these Sarmatian woods”31 where journals arrived six months later than in Germany. His research languished under a heavy teaching load and a paucity of sources. “Of all the new books on America—Clavigero, Dobrizhofer, etc.—I have nothing,” he lamented. “When I consider what Meiners had for research tools, I reckon happy the one who sits on the source in Göttingen.”32 Instead, he was condemned to translating the history of Cook’s last voyage while supplementing his meager teacher’s income with public lectures on tropical plants in the dead of a Lithuanian winter.33 He envisioned a comparative physiognomy of American and Indian faces, but without a research account to fund trips to England and Berlin it was impossible. When he read Meiners’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit at the end of 1786, he described it in a letter to Herder as “Göttingen erudition applied to an untenable hypothesis.”34 But scholarly envy, bad mood, and a seven-week cold aside, Forster did have a substantive complaint against Meiners’s method of writing anthropology. Meiners’s anthropological essays were reviewed publicly for the first time in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in 1789.35 The review was not favorable. The reviewer examined simultaneously the Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit (1786) and the topical essays Meiners was publishing in the Göttingen Historical Magazine (1787–1789), a journal he co-edited with his colleague L. T. Spittler. The anonymous reviewer attacked Meiners’s scholarly judgment by criticizing the travel literature he used as sources, which put him in the hands of “very uncertain guides.” The chief criticism was the quantity of information Meiners presented and his manner of organizing it. The reviewer found misattributed footnotes, disagreed with Meiners’s reading of his sources, and accused him of snowing his readers with too many examples. It was difficult to draw conclusions from Meiners’s essays, which seemed

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to discuss topics at random. The reviewer suggested that Meiners become more systematic in his approach to the history of humanity. Meiners obliged. He spent the rest of 1789 organizing his sources, and in 1790 he offered his readers an armchair tour of global humanity. He divided the globe into seven ethnogeographic regions, publishing one lengthy article on each: North and South Asia, America, Africa, the Near East, Slavic Europe, and Germanic (or “Celtic”) Europe. In 1791 the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung published a second review of Meiners, this one taking aim not at Meiners’s sources and organization but at his conclusions. The second review, like the first, appeared anonymously, but it has been attributed to Georg Forster.36 Forster’s criticism did not change much from the charge he had leveled against Meiners in his letter to Herder four years earlier—that Meiners’s anthropology amounted to “Göttingen erudition applied to an untenable hypothesis.” Yet what Forster then labeled “an untenable hypothesis” was the very conclusion that Meiners held to be incontrovertible. In his attempt to explain “Why Europe?” Meiners found that “No other conclusion is so well-supported by facts and evidence as this: that humanity was descended from two original groups of people, Caucasian and Altaic [or Mongolic]; and that the Altaic peoples are less capable in terms of both body and spirit.”37 This was a strong and clear statement. Did it make Meiners a polygenist? Technically, yes, it did. But in 1790 his was a different sort of polygenism than that of Kames, whom we encountered in Chapter 4. Kames believed that each of the thousands of people groups distributed around the globe was autochthonously indigenous to its specific location. Meiners would reach a similar position by the end of his life. But at this point, in 1790, he was more interested in migration, the mixing of types, and the characteristics of hybrid groups.38 Forster rejected Meiners’s entire project, on the one hand, stating flatly that the premises were false. Europeans were not superior to the other peoples of the world. If Meiners had used travel reports to describe the nature of contemporary Europeans, Europeans would appear as ugly and unenlightened as anyone else. Not all of Europe was enlightened, Forster pointed out. Only in specific pockets did enlightenment shine while the rest of Europe remained shrouded in ignorance and superstition. Nor, claimed Forster, were the Altaic nations as depraved as Meiners portrayed them.

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On the other hand, Forster conceded almost every major philosophical and scientific point to Meiners. Forster accepted Meiners’s hypothesis of two chief stocks (Stämme) of humanity, Caucasian and Altaic.39 He also accepted the notions that three-fourths of the earth was populated by Altaic/Mongolic peoples and that among the two (in a later classification, three) varieties of Caucasians only a small part of the world belonged to the Celtic nations, who were the most cultivated.40 Forster even agreed with the fundamental parts of Meiners’s thesis: although he did not like Meiners’s labels of AltaicMongolic-häßlich (ugly) and Caucasian-Celtic-schön (beautiful), nevertheless he admitted that there were certainly different levels (Stufen) of morals (Sitten) among human peoples (Völker);41 that the lower levels of people occupied most of the earth; and that there seemed to be some “divine preference” for the European peoples Meiners labeled Celtic.42 “Whether the Celts owe their superiority to something innate or to circumstances of climate, geography, history, etc.,” Forster conceded, “is not likely to be resolved soon.” That, however, was the very question Meiners was trying to answer through the history of humanity. When Meiners went down his checklist of body, spirit, and character of a Volk, he created a view of the Volk that was complete. One aspect led to another: from climate, food and shelter, and physique to bodily strength and disease resistance (body); to the arts and sciences (spirit); and to social structure, government, customs, and morality (character). One aspect could not be separated from the other. Just as there were physical differences among human beings, so were there cultural, spiritual, and characteristic differences as well. Logically, Forster’s Tahitians could only be inferior to Europeans. But Forster remained convinced that were Meiners to visit his primitives he would create a fairer picture of them.43 Forster agreed that Europeans were superior.44 He even conceded that “inner capabilities stand in indissoluble harmony with external form.”45 The question was whether that superiority was innate, as Meiners contended, or circumstantial.46 He questioned Meiners’s “innate” thesis, pointing out contributions to European culture from the ancient Near East (e.g., writing), the cultural achievement of the Aztecs and Incas, and the spiritual advances of the Buddha and Confucius.47 But at what point did the features of a people become “innate?”

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Forster argued that there was nothing inherent in Tahitians or Africans that made them inferior to Europeans. The difficulties they developed were all circumstantial, due to climate, manner of living, and social organization, which in turn made them “dumm” and “indolent.”48 Meiners countered that those circumstances were so basic to the makeup of an individual and his society that for all practical purposes that made them “innate.”49 They were innate in the sense that no individual Tahitian or African could possibly overcome the forces of both nature and culture and become as cultivated as a European. Here was the source of the dispute that had existed openly or latently since Meiners and Forster had first encountered each other. The problem of Anlage (predisposition) versus Umstände (circumstances) was a kind of chicken-and-egg question. Did the Umstände create the Anlage and Natur, as Meiners believed?50 Or were the Umstände something secondary and coincidental that caused characteristics but could not touch the basic nature of all human beings, as Forster thought?51 The question was important, because if Forster was right, Meiners was prepared to admit that all humans were by nature equal and entitled to the same rights. Forster held that truth to be self-evident. Meiners said that Forster begged the question. Let us split hairs. How is it possible that Meiners asserted the existence of an “innate” “nature” to specific nations when at the end of Chapter 7 we saw him denying the existence of any fixed and universal human nature, seeing instead only variable human culture? In his series of essays “On the Nature of . . .” the peoples of the different world regions, he did not assert that all Völker of, say, south Asia shared a common Natur. No, in south Asia there were obvious differences between Völker who lived practically next door to each other, differences that he traced to the original black and white stocks of humanity. Later, migration brought the two stocks into geographic proximity, but what was interesting to him was the persistence of the original Natur where one would expect a homogenized hybrid group to form. In arguing this way, Meiners was staking a claim that nations possessed a character or nature or genius—some immaterial (and physical) quality imparted to all members of the Volk. Yet this very statement “imparted to all members” raises a series of problems. Meiners did not think in individualistic terms like this. The Volk did not consist of an aggregate of free and equal individuals but

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had an existence of its own. Hence, he was not interested in hypothetical exercises such as taking an African slave boy, raising him within the household, and offering all the advantages of a domestic and even an Oxford education to see whether that African could become like an Englishman.52 Such an experiment presented two problems. First, individuals varied. Second, this individual was no longer a member of an indigenous Volk, but had mutated. Functionally, he was no longer African. This raised a third problem: that the individual was now isolated. Meiners was interested in what an individual could possibly accomplish as a member of a nation. What boundaries defined the realm in which Cicero could maneuver? or better, in which Gaius the Roman could maneuver? Meiners had no real interest in extraordinary individuals or in exceptions. He had no real interest in hypotheticals either; instead, he focused on what had actually been accomplished by real historical people groups. When viewed from a distance, it appeared to Meiners—and to almost everyone else in eighteenth-century Germany, including Herder and Forster—that nations did exhibit certain features that one could analyze usefully under the rubric of the human spirit or national character. Meiners and Forster found the root of their differences in the definition of human nature. Their inquiry falls into the traditional philosophical question, To what extent was man a political animal? Was he so political that without reference to his cultural context the category of man was meaningless (Meiners)? Or was there some essence in man that lay behind the accident of culture, some (Platonic) Form of man that was everywhere universal (Forster)? The Politics of Ethnology: Meiners Meiners and Forster disagreed fundamentally on the implications of their ethnology. As early as 1778, when Meiners reviewed Forster’s first book, A Voyage Round the World, he criticized Forster for exalting some of the peoples he wrote about “at the expense of Europe.”53 Being a staunch proponent of the idea of Enlightenment, Meiners found Forster’s portrayal of Europe to be offensive. Only in the last couple of centuries had Europeans raised themselves out of a millennium-old quagmire of superstition and religious fanaticism. There was still much work to be done, and Meiners feared that Europe could wind up

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like other civilizations, such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, and even Easter Island, falling back into a more primitive stage of development. Meiners and Forster shared a goal of advancing the European Enlightenment and bringing Enlightenment to all of humanity, but they disagreed on how to get there. Forster was an egalitarian. He saw a great inequality in Europe itself and said that except for a few, mostly urban, pockets, most of Europe remained as unenlightened and superstitious as ever. As a result, he thought it was fair to point out the characteristics of some societies that he found preferable to much of Europe.54 Meiners was anti-egalitarian. He understood egalitarianism as a radical and subversive ideology. He also proved egalitarianism, at least to his own satisfaction, to be scientifically fallacious. Meiners agreed that much of Europe remained unenlightened, and throughout his career he poured his energy into extending the Enlightenment to literate Germans through his studies of culture and education. Meiners thought that Europe had to cling to what progress it had made, and egalitarianism threatened to ruin that progress. Meiners and his co-editor and Göttingen colleague, the statistician L. T. Spittler, employed the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin to advance a two-pronged attack against egalitarianism.55 From the left Spittler showed how different segments of society handled a poll tax in southern Hanover. The wealthy and middling classes bore the relatively light tax burden with ease, but farmers and artisans with lower incomes suffered tremendously. Equality of social duty, in this case taxation, had a demonstrably ruinous effect on the Hanoverian health, economy, and culture. Even Heyne, who appreciated his son-in-law’s spirited nature, wrote against the revolutionary principles of freedom and equality.56 Heyne cloaked his politically motivated essays in Latin and obscured them behind the shroud of antiquity. Meiners, who had only recently entered university administration, could afford to be bolder. From the right he used the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin as a platform from which to advance a strong anti-egalitarian agenda. In the early 1790s, the ethnological dispute between Forster and Meiners opened up two fronts: the Atlantic slave trade and human equality. They reviewed each other’s work, published book reviews of others in which they could showcase their own arguments, and rebutted each other in counter-reviews. Commenting on a book by Dominique l’Amiral, which purported to be a study of the African people,

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Forster said that the book was not really about the African people at all and that most of the observations about the Africans came from sources already well known in Europe. Instead, said Forster, the book was a polemic written to the Estates-General defending the practice of slavery while complaining about a monopoly recently acquired by the Compagnie de Senegal. Following French practice, Amiral distinguished between Moors and black Africans. Forster pointed out that something must have made the blacks “worthy” of being enslaved. It was not merely the manner of living, the climate, or social organization, but rather a vicious circle of a modified character due to millennia under a despotic social constitution that produced “Dummheit, Aberglauben [superstition], Indolenz” which in turn tolerated despotism. Forster wrote, “It is correct when the author says the blacks have no real moral character; that is true of 999/1000 parts of humanity.” Amiral’s work was filled with contradictions and false commonplaces, and Forster lamented logic that ran “just as the Germans are cold and phlegmatic (?), and the French are carefree and flighty, so the blacks are and must always be combative and slavish.”57 Amiral knew perfectly well that the blacks had been dealt with too harshly, wrote Forster, but he blamed it on the observation that “the black becomes malicious as soon as he feels like he is the master. As if there is no middle way between barbarian severity and foolish weakness!”58 Amiral continued that, even if Europeans were far from the point of perfection, at least the enslaved blacks were receiving the first beginnings of civil and political freedom. A few months later Meiners wrote a counter-review of Amiral.59 Contra Forster, Meiners said that Amiral’s judgments were on target and that Forster was the partisan agitator. Forster in fact inverted Africans and Europeans in the same way he had done in his account of the Tahitians fifteen years earlier, placing blacks over whites. Meiners accused Forster of using the same arguments as the (in his opinion) highly partisan abolitionist societies in France and England. Now Meiners began to strengthen his position. He might have begun his inquiry into the history of humanity with purely scientific intentions in 1786, but very quickly science was put to work to prove a social theory. “None of all the many false or half-true commonplaces . . . has caused me such wonder as the commonplace: that all men are born equal and therefore have the same original rights and duties.”60 Meiners wrote

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his anthropological essays specifically to prove that all men were not created equal. He was not trying to fool anybody when he wrote them. He stated openly that the result will be . . . to show unprejudiced readers that these inquiries are not purely scholarly or idle speculation, rather . . . that only through such inquiries can the question be answered: whether and to what extent one must improve the condition of peoples inside and outside of Europe who thus far have had fewer rights than their rulers.61

Meiners understood equality in a very literal sense. When he heard the term Gleichheit, he did not think of equality before the law or of equality in some civil sense. For Meiners, “equal” [gleich] meant “the same.” And one could see simply by looking that black Africans were not the same as white Europeans. The differences were not only skin deep, but extended to bone structure, susceptibility to disease, moral sensibility, intellectual capability, and social organization. Given these myriad differences, it followed that the races were unequal. Just as subjects will not receive the same rights and freedoms as their rulers, children as their parents, women as men, servants as their masters, lazy and dim-witted people as the capable and educated, convicted criminals as innocent and commendable citizens; so Jews and blacks, as long as they remain Jews and blacks, cannot demand the same rights and freedoms as the Christians and whites under whom they live or whom they obey.62

Meiners was clear when he explained to his readers that the races of humanity were not the same. At the end of his article on native Americans, Meiners asked: So I ask all unbiased readers . . . whether they believe these people to be capable of all the works and undertakings that we in Europe regard as works and undertakings by complete people, and if they cannot do these things, whether they would grant such people, who are and can achieve much less, rights and freedoms equal to their own.63

These statements did not, by any means, make Meiners a champion of slavery for inferior people. Slavery in his mind remained immoral, the cruelest of human institutions. Nor was the Atlantic slave trade the only one in the eighteenth century. He wrote:

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The slave trade has long found both defenders and condemners among right-thinking authors. However it is impossible, with all the weapons of reason and all the magic of eloquence to put a pretty face on the hideous cruelty, immorality, and depopulation that the slave trade has produced and extended. The slave trade has had similar effects in the Crimea and the other Caucasian regions, in Bukhara, in the East Indies and in many regions of America.64

Unfortunately, Meiners doubted that the immediate abolition of the slave trade, which many people in Europe were calling for in the 1790s, would improve the condition of Africans, either in Africa or in America. Slavery remained an economic necessity in the European colonies. Governments recognized that fact. In the early 1790s, both the British Parliament and the French National Assembly rejected proposals to abolish the slave trade and to emancipate the slaves. Even the constitution of the new United States of America, founded on the idea of human equality, acknowledged the inferiority of Africans, Meiners wrote. Despite widespread public outcry that human rights had been sacrificed to the interests of slave traders, merchants, and West Indies planters, to Meiners it did not appear that slavery would go away soon. Even if the French and British were to abolish the slave trade, Meiners warned that a black market would develop. In the absence of legal controls over how masters could treat their slaves, abolition would likely worsen the condition of slavery rather than improve it.65 For Meiners, the basic question in the debate over the Atlantic slave trade was not whether “the blacks are capable of no improvement in their nature and condition” or whether in general one human being had the right to sell another as a slave. Even if slavery was unjust and immoral, Meiners pointed out that it had existed through the entire span of human history. Instead, the question was whether through the slave trade the “happiness [Glück] of the slaves themselves can be improved.” Wise laws and “expanded Enlightenment,” he thought, could mitigate many of the abuses associated with West Indies servitude.66 In Meiners’s opinion equality was impossible not only in the American colonies. The case of the Africans was only the clearest example of human differences. Meiners was not really even talking about global humanity; he was talking about Europe. The current crisis in France unequivocally revealed to all of Europe the dangers of liberty, equality,

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fraternity. His understanding of human culture put him at odds with a rising movement in what was rapidly becoming post-Enlightenment Europe. Even before the storming of the Bastille, Meiners had begun to warn that egalitarians who agitated for structural change in European society were dangerous. Black Africans were not the only ones who enjoyed fewer capabilities, rights, and duties than enlightened Europeans. Rather, thought Meiners, the Other was also among us. Europeans themselves were not equally enlightened, equally noble, or equally capable. In all times and under all circumstances, there had been an inequality of rights, Meiners said. Those endowed with strength, industry, and intelligence had always enjoyed privileges denied to lesser people. “That is: inequality of natures has brought forth, without fail in all times, inequality of rights.” People can only have equal rights insofar as they are equal to one another, or possess equal innate and acquired advantages. Equal are all men in their purpose, that is, in the right to enjoy so much good and in the duty to do so much good as their natures make them capable.67

Meiners showed that from the very beginning the Germanic peoples of Europe recognized at least four different kinds of people among themselves: slaves, freed, free, and nobility. Just like the races of people outside of Europe, Europeans themselves possessed, by nature, different capabilities. If a person were born of higher ability and virtue than his status would indicate, then he could move up and earn the rights of a higher class. In Meiners’s argument, there was room for social mobility, but until people possessed the same physical and intellectual capabilities, they could not possess the same rights.68 This is the direction Meiners was taking when he set aside his ancient history for his anthropological project on the nature of peoples around the globe. His intention was to demonstrate that people were different, that difference indicated inequality, and that inequality meant there was no basis for equal rights. Ugly as his opinions were, Meiners was the social conservative in the debates over slavery and human equality. The radical partisan was not Meiners but Georg Forster. The Politics of Ethnology: Forster Forster did not set down a system of human moral evolution, nor did he write comparative anthropology in the formal way that Christoph

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Meiners did, yet we can glean the rudiments of a theory of human social development from Forster’s writings between 1791 and 1793. Like Meiners, Forster believed in the collective progress of human culture. But the emphasis of Forster’s understanding of progress differed in an important way from Meiners’s. Forster emphasized the individual over the group. He pointed out that within Europe there were enlightened individuals only, while most Europeans remained ignorant. With Cook he had found enlightened individuals in primitive societies also, and those individuals he found the most interesting. To them he devoted most of his comments about Polynesian society. Meiners, to the contrary, emphasized groups. He acknowledged that enlightened individuals could be found in primitive societies, but unlike Forster he was not primarily interested in them. Those individuals were limited in what they could accomplish by the level of culture that their society had reached. He also acknowledged that most European individuals remained unenlightened. The captains of slave ships might act cruelly, but who built the ships? Who knew how to navigate them? That Europeans sailed to Tahiti rather than vice versa was indisputable evidence that Europe had achieved a higher level of culture and enlightenment. The immorality of the Atlantic slave trade did not change that fact. For Meiners culture was greater than morality. If Europeans remained immoral, nevertheless, through the development of the arts and sciences, they had accomplished more than anyone previously. Meiners hoped that European morality would improve; he acknowledged that Europe still had progress to make. To Forster, by contrast, progress was simultaneously an individual and a collective enterprise. One could speak of the development of human reason, which separated humans from animals. Forster understood powers of reason to be potential, but not complete, in the individual.69 Until a person began to exercise his powers of reason, he was no different from an animal. Social and environmental circumstances certainly assisted (or hindered) a person in his development of reason, but the real impetus toward perfection must come from the individual himself.70 In a sense, the history of humanity was replayed within the moral and rational development of each individual human being. Even Forster’s understanding of society emphasized the development of the individual. The purpose of the state was to allow individuals to strive toward moral perfection. For Forster, unlike Meiners, the role of government was fundamentally negative. At best, government

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could only prevent violent conflict between individuals. No government could be positively responsible for the happiness and virtue of its citizens.71 All too often, however, rulers actively suppressed the moral development of their subjects. When Forster visited Liège with the young Alexander von Humboldt in 1790, for example, he found the citizens philosophizing in bars and coffeehouses about the rights of man without knowing the first thing about “Freedom (which is unintelligible without metaphysics).” They could not distinguish between the different kinds of rights, such as which were transferable and which inalienable (unveräußerlich). They were so uncultivated that they did not even understand “the right to perfect their spiritual capabilities through development, practice, and cultivation.” The problem was that they were kept in this state by their equally uncultivated rulers, judges, nobles, and priests.72 Even when a master owned a slave, his possession of the body did not entitle him to deny the existence of the slave as a person or the slave’s inalienable right to rational development.73 Combining social contract theory with his model of human social development, Forster acknowledged that when people banded together in society, they (unfortunately) gave up certain external freedoms in order to be united in the state. United, secure, and equal within the state, individuals could then make unhindered progress toward moral perfection. Forster declared, however, that a (social) contract was void when it injured morality (Sittlichkeit); a civil constitution had no valid existence if it robbed its members of the possibility of moral perfection. Furthermore, moral perfection presupposed the unlimited use of reason and of the entire power of knowledge. It demanded freedom of the will, which might only be sacrificed in instances when foreign despotism (Willkür) subverted the common good, that is, the progress of common perfection.74 Every limitation of the will that was not necessary to the preservation of the state became a danger to its members. Thus Enlightened monarchs (Forster was thinking of Frederick the Great and Joseph II) were careful to preserve unlimited freedom of religion, of conscience (Gewissen), of speech (Unterredung), and of the press. Everywhere Forster saw reason in conflict with pure animalistic force, and in most cases lawless immorality emerged victorious. Yet a moral sense remained, wrote Forster, which enabled the individual to distinguish good from evil, the beautiful

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from the ugly. “We have already won great progress from raw animalness to the recognition of the majesty of reason.”75 Forster believed that the next step in the progress of human morality and the rule of reason was occurring in France. Even under despotism people advanced toward moral perfection, if slowly. Eventually, all of humanity would reach that cultural stage where it had to cast off despotism. For Forster that occurred first in France in 1789. The French Revolution was a moral earthquake, a natural catastrophe in the progress of humanity. The Revolution was motivated not by an enlightened class of propagandists but by a whole people aroused by the sight of injustice and treachery by their rulers, now united in determination to set things aright. The Revolution was a fever, he wrote, burning out a virus and causing destruction in the process. Forster had little sympathy for those who had suffered as a result of the violence, especially for the clergy.76 Revolution could not be considered moral or immoral, since it was a natural force. Only the actions of individuals had moral predicates, wrote Forster.77 Forster declined to comment on the theodicy of whether the Revolution, as a work of Providence, stood squarely in the plan of humanity’s upbringing. From the French point of view, however, Forster believed the Revolution was “the greatest, most important, and most astonishing revolution of moral education and development of the entire human race.”78 If it was the most important revolution in the moral development of humanity, it remained an event in France alone. In Mainz Forster hoped to change that. By 1792 the coalition army of Austria, Prussia, and England was having little success against the revolutionary government in France. That summer the French took the offensive and invaded central Germany as far as the Rhine. Mainz, a haven for exiles of the Revolution, was besieged and soon capitulated. Forster took the French attempt to revolutionize the city seriously. He served as vice president of the Mainz Jacobin Club, co-chair of the revolutionary government of Mainz, and deputy of the Rhenish-German National Assembly, and became a citizen of France.79 His actions cost him his reputation in Germany. He was expelled from every German society of which he was a member, including the Society of Antiquities in Kassel and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen.80 Although his action was unpopular, Forster believed his defection was the right decision. He began a short career as a revolutionary essayist, explaining

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that the revolution was natural and necessary to the progress of human culture. But Forster soon discovered that the French alone had reached that point of human development that enabled the Revolution. He become increasingly frustrated with the citizens of Mainz in 1792 and early 1793 when they failed to embrace the opportunity for freedom. Disgusted, he wrote to his wife Therese: The lethargy and apathy of the Germans makes me want to vomit. They still don’t move and people keep coming to us with suggestions about how soon freedom for all would be declared if only one would release them from all taxation. Mistreatment, deceit, repression—there is nothing that can move a person to shake off the yoke except the promise that they will have to do nothing and have no duties at all! In the end we will have to offer it to them graciously, . . . then it will work.81

Forster acknowledged that other places where the Revolution was spreading were “more French than we are” (französischer als wir). “The people in Liège are French in spirit, character, and language. It is all very different among us.”82 The citizens of Liège had made great progress since he had visited them two years earlier. Forster became more philosophical about the Germans. He came to realize that the Revolution could not be successful in Germany because no public opinion yet existed there. A year later he wrote that only an “enemy of mankind” would wish the revolution on Germany.83 Instead, the French had offered themselves as a sacrifice for the improvement of all humanity. In the late spring of 1793, the Prussian army besieged Mainz, and toward the end of July the French garrison surrendered. News of the recapture of Mainz reached Göttingen quickly, and Christoph Meiners leapt at the opportunity to see the city in defeat just as he had seen Geneva under foreign occupation eleven years earlier. Within the week Meiners arrived in the city, still on fire, but so filled with curiosityseekers like himself that he had difficulty finding an inn. Most citizens had fled the city before the bombardment began, so that fewer than a score lost their lives, although military casualties were much higher. Loss of property was also limited, and Meiners credited the French with leaving the city intact and the hospitals clean, although several

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farms outside the city were looted during the retreat. For Meiners Mainz stood as an example that Enlightenment and cultural progress—if that was what freedom and equality were—could not be imposed on a people. As the French retreated, so did a number of Mainz citizens who had joined the Jacobin Club. They were pulled from the ranks and beaten severely by their fellow citizens who recognized them. Meiners placed the responsibility for the worst abuses not on the Jacobin Club but on the Committee of Surveillance, erected after the French occupation and to which the citizens were compelled to swear allegiance on the principle that people had to be forced to be free and happy “in the French manner” (nach Französischer Art).84 The citizens, and even the French occupiers, despised the Committee members so intensely that General d’Oyré excluded them from the capitulation agreement and abandoned them to the justice of their fellow citizens. Forster was not among the Mainz Jacobins. He had left the Rhine earlier that spring as part of a delegation to petition the formal annexation of the Rhenish-German Republic as an integral part of France before the National Assembly in Paris. Upon Mainz’s recapture, he found himself exiled in France. Unemployed and short on money, he turned to the Grub Street work of essay writing and translating. He considered translating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France into German, but after reading it determined it was not worth the effort. Instead he translated Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. On December 11, 1793, Forster wrote to Therese complaining of chest pains. “It was my own fault,” he explained. “I was walking around in a nasty Parisian fog one evening without an overcoat. Don’t you do the same.” He improved considerably after a dose of opium and continued to work on some Parisian Sketches in bed. He tried going out a few times, but each time his pneumonia advanced. By the end of the month he was considerably weakened “und skeletirt.” On January 4, 1794, he wrote that although he was suffering from stomach and intestinal pain, there was (emphatically) “no danger.” He died the next Friday. “Many German writings discuss morality: few are moral. Fewer still in a higher measure than Forster’s, and certainly none within his genre,” wrote Friedrich Schlegel three years later. Schlegel said that Forster’s writings exhibited a living conception of human value.

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Forster combined French elegance and ease of style, English social utility, and German depth of feeling and spirit. Forster’s writings ranked among a very few German prose classics, argued Schlegel.85 But few responded to his attempt to rehabilitate Forster, who for a century and a half remained a villain of German political history. Forster himself had lamented that he had “no home, no fatherland, and no more friends.” “To live among a heartless people,” he wrote of the French in 1793, “is almost as difficult as the loneliness of Robinson Crusoe.”86 Christoph Meiners, too, gave up his comparative approach to human culture after 1793. The Göttingen Historical Magazin closed in 1794. It is unclear whether the editors closed it voluntarily or whether the Hanoverian government suppressed it along with many others that year, fearing the spread of revolution. Meiners returned to his historical approach to the history of Enlightenment. In 1793 and 1794 he published a three-volume work on the Enlightenment in the form of a history of medieval Europe.87 He opened the work with a long argument disproving Rousseau’s anticultural thesis, and he concluded it with an even longer excursus on “What is true Enlightenment?” Although it was a persuasive piece, the “historical comparison of the middle ages with the eighteenth century” lacked the combative nature of his recent anthropological essays on race and human capability. By 1794 the stakes simply had become too high.

Conclusion: Enlightenment Social Science

CHRISTOPH MEINERS FOUND his way to France too—not in person, although he did visit Strasbourg in 1801 and wrote a history of the Terror emphasizing the general manners of the city and its factions as he had in his histories of Geneva, Mainz, and Rome.1 Instead, he found his way there through his ethnographic writings in the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin. Britta Rupp-Eisenreich found notes and translations of thirtyfive of Meiners’s Göttingisches Historiches Magazin articles made by L.-F. Jauffret.2 A.-L. Millin published French translations of other essays by Meiners in 1796/1797.3 J.-M. Degérando’s instructions to the Baudin expedition to Australia (1800–1802) read as though they were lifted, if not word for word, then topic for topic from Meiners’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit. Degérando employed the same tripartite analytic that Meiners used, starting with the human body (climate, food, physical strength and needs, clothing, illness and its moral effects whether instilling courage, fear of death, or apathy); next the human mind (sensation, the generation of ideas, the association of ideas, savage conceptions of the Beautiful and the Good, God, existence, immortality); and finally society (family structure, the status of women [“consideration for the female sex is an effect of civilization,” wrote Degérando, echoing Meiners’s Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts], marriage, divorce, the education of children, political structures, crime and justice, warfare and diplomacy, industry, the arts and crafts, commerce, religion, and burial).4 Jauffret, Degérando, and Millin were part of a short-lived society founded by the abbé Sicard, whose object was to study empirically the

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physical, intellectual, and moral dimensions of man. From 1799 to 1804, the Société des Observateurs de l’homme won both political and scientific legitimacy through its official participation in the Baudin expedition, its investigation of Jean Massieu, deaf-mute from birth, and its guardianship of the feral child Victor of Aveyron. Coopted by the Institut National de France, the Société des Observateurs de l’homme has been celebrated as the first institution of anthropology in France as well as marking the origin of anthropological fieldwork.5 Many of the Observateurs’ goals and methods demonstrably were derived from German science. The Société appropriated not only Meiners but the other varieties of anthropology in 1790s Germany (i.e., Kant’s pragmatic anthropology, Platner’s holistic medicine).6 And the Institut National and the Société des Observateurs de l’homme investigated not only anthropology, but also medicine and natural history, classical philology, and universal language, and launched a statistical and anthropological inquiry into the local populations of the French départements. If the Société des Observateurs de l’homme marks the advent of the modern human sciences, then one could argue plausibly that late-eighteenthcentury German cultural science also represents such a beginning. Of Degérando’s Considerations, E. E. Evans-Prichard wrote, “The paper reads as though it might have been written yesterday.”7 What are we to say? Does the Göttingen School, with its work on ethno-anthropology, philology, and language, represent the beginning of modern social science? We are situated squarely in the moment in which Foucault identified the rupture between early modern and modern ways of thinking about humanity. According to Foucault, the 1770s witnessed a transformation in how Europeans thought about property, natural history, and language. Adam Smith’s labor theory of value led to the science of economics. Lamarck’s investigation of organic structure separated biology from natural history by drawing a sharp distinction between the organic and the inorganic. William Jones’s comparative study of Latin and Sanskrit led to the discovery that language was not simply endowed with a core vocabulary of root words that were altered over time due to external historical factors but rather that languages evolved according to an internal mechanism of inflection common to all human language. These discoveries of common forces to which all human beings were subject, said Foucault, led Europeans to create the universal category

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of “Man,” as that creature who was subject to the forces of life, labor, and language. “Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist.”8 Granted there was a study of human nature in the eighteenth century, wrote Foucault, but the very concept of human nature precluded the possibility of a science of man and even a generalized concept of man itself. The invention of biology, economics, and philology at the end of the eighteenth century did not mark the origin of the human sciences per se. The human sciences, said Foucault, are the methods by which man represents to himself these forces, that is, how man reflects on the forces that define his existence. The human sciences are metasciences of representation: of economics, sociology; of biology, psychology; of language, cultural history. Only after about 1800 did Europeans make the discovery that man was “trapped . . . within the positive contents of language, labour and life,” that is, by the predicament of his finite existence.9 Once the discovery of human finitude occurred, the classical thought of the eighteenth century was “completely abolished” and “ceased to exist.”10 This is the rupture between early modern and modern, after which the human sciences could come into being. One could argue plausibly that the invention of “culture” was one part of this Foucauldian upheaval. Foucault emphasized ruptures in The Order of Things in part to refute the thesis of Georges Gusdorf, who had announced a program that would show continuities in social thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In fifteen volumes over twenty-eight years, Gusdorf emphasized the unity of man, the unity of knowledge, and the essential unity of thought in the history of consciousness. Cabanis’s Encyclopédie vivante, sponsored by the Institut National, was one very self-conscious expression of the tendency toward a singular unified science of man. Degérando’s empirical study of the development of humanity drew on methods of social mathematics that were then being developed in the Institut National class for moral and political science. Gusdorf ’s method was to highlight the discoveries of great ages and to follow the history of ideas in the writings of great men that gradually led to the creation of a science of man that did not conform to modern disciplinary boundaries. Both Gusdorf and Foucault were responding to a perception that emerged after World War II in France that the sciences—and in fact all human knowledge—served one purpose only: domination. In the

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1950s, Jacques Ellul argued that the essential feature of European society was technology. By technology Ellul meant not material gadgets—machines, electronics, industry—but a whole attitude whose goal was to render all aspects of life efficient. “Technique” is a better word, or perhaps know-how. Material technology was only the product of this attitude. The defining feature of modernity, said Ellul, was that our whole society is driven by efficiency and technique. Initially (conjecturally speaking), technique was humanity’s response to finding itself thrown into a world that was not made for humanity, what Hans Blumenberg called “the absolutism of reality.”11 In many ways—fires, famines, floods, earthquakes—Mother Nature seemed to be arrayed against humanity. Out of self-defense, humanity developed methods of dividing up the forces of nature so that they could be confronted one at a time. Technique was a divide-and-conquer strategy to overcome the forces of hostile nature and to enlist nature in humanity’s service—in a word, domination. To Ellul, the natural sciences were about the domination of nature. The human sciences were about social control, or as Gusdorf put it in 1960, “the desire to unify human science is the technician’s desire to dominate.”12 Ellul found that efficiency in society requires conformity, that is, a social system in which one individual is interchangeable with others. It does not matter who flies the airplane or who directs the airplane along its route because pilots and air traffic controllers are interchangeable by conforming to established procedures. The effect of such procedures—and they have been developed at all levels of society, whether childbirth techniques, matriculation in a university, or air traffic control—was the homogenization of individuals. Technologies of domination are not the result of some conspiracy to control society by impostors at the highest levels of government. Even presidents are simply cogs in the service of a run-amok drive for efficiency and technique, which in the modern world are pursued for their own sakes. “Man will continue to steer the machine,” Ellul predicted, “but only at the price of his individuality.”13 The nexus between domination and rational technique was one side of what Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s called the dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno even saw improvisational jazz music as homogenizing, subordinated to a style that generalized all particulars.14 Ellul, Horkheimer, and Adorno all called on their readers to resist the dehumanizing forces of domination and technique that were so se-

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ductive and insidious. Both Foucault and Gusdorf wrote the history of human science as self-conscious forms of resistance. Gusdorf emphasized the ways in which great individuals transcended modern disciplinary boundaries, because the divide-and-conquer strategy of technique requires compartmentalizing knowledge and procedures into disciplines. Foucault’s ruptures and inventions were designed to delegitimize the sciences that threatened to render all individuals the same. Though polemically opposed to each other, Claude Blanckaert finds that Gusdorf and Foucault were joined at the hip for twenty-five years, writing essentially the same history, albeit from different poles.15 In the 1970s and 1980s, historians writing in the wake of Gusdorf and Foucault searched for the origins of anthropology, psychology, and other human sciences, frequently finding antecedents of modernity in the eighteenth century. On the authority of Gusdorf ’s work, Sergio Moravia asserted that “the human and the social sciences, or at least a certain number of them, were born during the eighteenth century.”16 Setting up a “critical confrontation with the episteme of the preceding century,” Moravia argued that the rationalist, mathematical, and deductive method of the Scientific Revolution was challenged by “new cognitive principles” and “new anthropological views” that established the “theoretical conditions” under which the human sciences could be created. Moravia described how deductive, mathematical methods were augmented by the collection of empirical data and the arrival at general principles through a process of comparison. “Comparaison is one of the principal cognitive acts of the modern human sciences,” he wrote. “It is quite significant that it was worked out during the Enlightenment.”17 In addition to the comparison of isolated facts that led to the discovery of general structures, Moravia named several other theoretical conditions that had to be in place before the human sciences could achieve their modern configurations. These theoretical conditions included the efforts to understand the human being as a unity of body and mind and a dynamic living organism, the effects of the natural and social environment on the human spirit, and the variety of human physical and social forms around the globe. One could plausibly support Moravia’s thesis with themes that we have seen throughout the preceding chapters: the challenge to Cartesian rationalism; Condillac’s demonstration that ideas were neither clear nor distinct; the comparative method described in Chapter 4; the holism in eighteenth-century

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medical anthropology described in Chapter 7. Moravia is just one representative of a narrative of eighteenth-century origins that dominated the history of the human sciences from the 1970s to the early 1990s.18 By about 1993, however, that narrative began to come apart. That year the new English-language journal, The History of the Human Sciences, devoted an entire issue to eighteenth-century origins of the human sciences, only to receive a half-dozen submissions that called that very premise into question. John Christie held out the possibility of writing a history of the origins of the modern human sciences, but despite the efforts of the French and Italians in the preceding twenty years, such a history had not yet satisfactorily been written.19 Claude Blanckaert went even further, saying that “the notion of foundation is of very little relevance and of little instrumental value in the history of the human sciences.”20 To say that Buffon was the founder of anthropology meant simply that Buffon was the earliest anthropologist read by modern anthropologists. Buffon’s reputation as founder rested largely on the nineteenth-century reading of the chapter on “Varieties Among the Human Species” in Buffon’s Natural History, even though in the eighteenth century, says Blanckaert, that chapter was widely rejected or ignored. Robert Wokler in particular struggled with whether the late eighteenth century represented the origin of anthropology, first in conference papers, then revising that thesis for the History of the Human Sciences issue and revising it a second time under “trenchant observations” by Christopher Fox.21 Maybe it was not science per se, conceded Wokler, but he maintained nevertheless that the eighteenth century developed “some deep structural explanations of human nature and behavior.”22 Meanwhile, Fox acknowledged, “we cannot visit the eighteenth century with a modern campus map.”23 Fox and Wokler published their comments in a collection of essays entitled Inventing Human Science. Although it was clear that something was invented in the eighteeenth century, the editors seemed to agree that it was not modern human science. With the expansion of the eighteenth-century canon since the 1970s, historians have discovered that late-eighteenth-century science, politics, and social theory were much more complicated than indicated by tidy narratives of Enlightenment and Revolution that characterized much of twentieth-century scholarship. Through a close reading of Jauffret, Degérando, and other members of the Société des

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Observateurs de l’homme, Jean-Luc Chappey has demonstrated that the intellectual and scientific configuration of postrevolutionary France was much more complicated than even Moravia and Gusdorf had shown. Moravia and Gusdorf both emphasized Idéologie as evidence of the rising prestige of savants and academicians at the turn of the nineteenth century during the early years of Napoleon. Idéologie was literally the science of ideas: how ideas were formed through perception, memory, and language; how they were associated, manipulated by the individual, expressed to the group; and how society should be organized to permit the individual to develop his faculties. From Locke’s sensation through Condillac’s cognition to the reorganization of society in the French Revolution, there was a single thread tying it all together, a monism that united body and mind, individual and society. The ideology of Idéologie was the unification of all science into a single, interconnected circle of learning. Medicine, as the holistic science of man, figured prominently, as did natural history, which explained man’s place in the order of things. Linguistics and the history of the human spirit were components as well. Carrying on the work of the philosophes, whose first generation of Voltaire, d’Alembert, Helvetius, Rousseau, and others, passed away in the 1770s, a second generation including Suard and Morellet saw the philosophe project through the Revolution. Now aging and enshrined in the new Institut National, they were joined by a third generation, including the physician Cabanis, the antiquarian Volney, the natural historian Virey, and the linguist Destutt de Tracy. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Tracy wrote a three-volume textbook codifying the tenets and methods of Idéologie, whose translation into English was supervised by Thomas Jefferson.24 It was in Tracy’s work that the term social science first appeared in print and was introduced to English, although it might have already been in oral circulation in the 1790s.25 At first glance, it seems that the Société des Observateurs de l’homme had much in common with Idéologie. The Société, too, formulated an all-encompassing science of man and found political favor in the early years of the Consulate of Napoleon. J. M. Degérondo was elected to the Institut National in 1802. In fact, however, the Société des Observateurs de l’homme was diametrically opposed to the Idéologues and philosophes. Where Idéologie presented a monistic vision of man, the Observateurs retreated to a Cartesian dualism that separated

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mind from body, a position affirmed by no less an authority than Buffon. Of all the creatures on earth, wrote Jauffret, the Society’s secretary, only man had spread across the globe to occupy every latitude except for the poles. Man could adapt to the most extreme climates, from the Amazon to the Sahara to Siberia, and in consequence of climate, man could alter his diet in extreme ways as well. Whereas every other creature could only respond passively to nature, man had the capacity to alter it. Domesticated animals for example, said Jauffret, were hybrid entities, partly natural and partly of human manufacture. Nature, that is, could be harnessed for the well-being of man. This adaptive flexibility and the capacity to control and dominate nature, rather than simply living in fear and wonder, was not parcel to man’s physiological makeup. It was due to reason. Buffon said there was an infinite distance between the most perfect animal and man; that is, there was a qualitative difference between human and animal.26 Jauffret saw no reason to force the study of man into the model of natural history. The human spirit was completely separate from natural history. Instead of a monistic general science of man, he called for a juxtaposition of the different human faculties, to be studied under different disciplines. If it was Homo duplex, then there should be science multiplex. These are subtle distinctions, but it is important that they be made because it was the premise of human nature, whether monistic or dualistic, that launched the most important social discussions. One’s view of human nature informed one’s opinion regarding the role of government, the role of religion, of the family, and of tradition, and the definition of moral behavior. In constructing a unified general science of man that privileged physiology, Idéologues like Cabanis presented man as a material being, part of nature and natural history, different from animals only by degree. To the Observateurs, a materialistic view of man implied atheism. Atheism threatened to subvert morality, which might lead to the demise of the family, to anarchy and violence. If France subscribed to the moral standards of the philosophes, all hell would break loose, as indeed it had during the Revolution. Consequently, the opponents of the philosophes advanced a program reaffirming the importance of religion, the patriarchal family, custom and tradition, and the moral and political lessons of history.27 In journals like La décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, Le citoyen français, and

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Journal de Paris on one side and Annales philosophiques, morales et littéraires (edited by Jauffret’s brother, the abbé Boulogne), Journal des débats, and Chateaubriand’s Mercure on the other, the two camps squared off in polemical articles and book reviews in which they formulated their political platforms and scientific programs, latter-day philosophes and Idéologues on one side, “anti-philosophe” Catholics, royalists, and Observateurs on the other. If their respective scientific positions were most clearly formulated in the first years of the nineteenth century, Darrin McMahon has shown that the political debates themselves extended back to the 1750s, when Catholic scholars opposed the rationalism, materialism, and atheism of the philosophes from the very beginning. Just as the philosophe banner was taken up by later generations, so was that of their opponents. During the Napoleonic era anti-philosophie was transformed into a positive platform of the political right, which McMahon sees as the beginning of modern conservatism. McMahon’s and Chappey’s books were published in 2001 and 2002, each completely independent and unaware of the other. It would be interesting to know whether Chappey’s Société des Observateurs de l’homme was a subset of McMahon’s anti-philosophes. What we are witnessing between the Idéologues and the Société des Observateurs de l’homme is the aftermath of yet another division in an already fractured understanding of the Enlightenment. Like the history of the human sciences, the historical narrative of the Enlightenment has been thoroughly reinterpreted in the past forty years. The Enlightenment was once taken to be both monolithic and avantgarde—that is, a movement with a coherent ideology advanced by a small number of thinkers who championed individual liberty, toleration, and cosmopolitanism, and who urged social reform through the rational investigation of universal laws that governed nature and society. From Ernst Cassirer to Peter Gay, the Enlightenment was said to have begun in the England of Locke and Newton and reached its high point in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland and Paris, while the German and Italian Enlightenment, “though distinguished by outstanding contributors,” as Helmut O. Pappe put it in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, “was derivative.”28 But in 1973 Pappe’s characterization of the Enlightenment was becoming difficult to maintain, and that same Dictionary published a

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rejoinder by Isaiah Berlin, categorized out of alphabetical order, that focused specifically on those “derivative” countries as bearing their own indigenous agendas, alternative to the main current of Enlightenment in France and Britain. Berlin’s “Counter-Enlightenment” was not the reactionary or conservative movement that McMahon discovered in France, but it was as liberal, tolerant, and cosmopolitan a movement as any described in twentieth-century historiography. Vico represented the idea that each nation developed its own standards of beauty, truth, and goodness. There was no universal standard to which some individuals and nations measured up more than others. Different nations asked different questions of the universe, and consequently they found different answers. Hamann represented the antirational strain of Berlin’s CounterEnlightenment, insisting that truth was particular only, never general or universal. Reason was an instrument for arranging and classifying data, but in fact nothing in reality corresponded to any human rational system. Herder represented empathy: to understand anything was to understand it in its individuality and development, and it was only through a difficult act of empathy that one could gain access to another nation’s character at all. “Herder was no rationalist,” wrote Berlin. “He supposed that different cultures could and should flourish fruitfully side by side like so many flowers in the great human garden.”29 Finally, Kant’s autonomy of the will stood against social determinism, which negated all human morality. Once Berlin had fractured the monolithic view of the Enlightenment, other cracks soon appeared. Porter and Teich’s Enlightenment in National Context (1981) still presented the Enlightenment as a single cultural movement, but thirteen European nations expressed enlightened values differently according to their own indigenous traditions and concerns. The editors acknowledged that even this number was inadequate.30 By the end of the 1990s, J. G. A. Pocock declared it “a premise . . . that we can no longer write satisfactorily of ‘The Enlightenment’ as a unified and universal intellectual movement.”31 In The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (notice the plural in the title), Pocock separated the French and Scottish Enlightenments into two separate and discrete movements, neither of which Gibbon was a member although he was in contact with both. In order to find an Enlightenment

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in which Gibbon did participate, Pocock invented a third transnational “Arminian Enlightenment” in the old Calvinist heartland that ran from Lake Geneva down the Rhine to the Netherlands and across the Channel to Oxford. But in such a national or regional scheme, how would one classify Germany? Among the Protestants, alone one would have to identify at least three separate Enlightenments: a Pietist and eclectic Enlightenment, centered at the University of Halle after its founding in 1690 and later at Berlin; an orthodox Lutheran Enlightenment at Dresden and Leipzig from which the Halle Pietists had seceded; and a postPietist Enlightenment at Göttingen which defined itself in opposition to both Saxony and the Brandenburg of Frederick the Great. What about the Scandinavians, also Lutheran? Did Sweden and Denmark constitute a unit? What was their relationship to the Germans? Regional designations of the Enlightenment are not adequate, because within any given region there was a spectrum of ideological positions ranging from Radical Enlightenment to Enlightened Absolutism, with moderate positions in between. In each region, the specific parameters of the debate were marked by local concerns and local social configurations. The question is whether these debates were essentially similar at their core across the European continent and its New World colonies. If (and perhaps only if ) such an interregional coherence can be demonstrated, then perhaps a unified designation of the eighteenth century as the Age of Enlightenment can be meaningfully preserved. While my purpose in this book has not been to reconstruct the intellectual war that pitted liberty-seeking secularist individualist radicals against efficiency-seeking bureaucrats, this book does show that the conversation about human social development in the second half of the eighteenth century was international in scope.32 In the original “Enlightenment” article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Pappe explicitly declared the Enlightenment to be an elite movement. In a parenthetical digression he acknowledged that side-by-side with these productions, the period witnessed the growth of a new cheap entertainment literature as well as a greater diffusion of writings in the old tradition, which aimed at the new enlarged reading public. Although popular reading habits and crowd behavior have come to fascinate some modern historians, such publications are ignored

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here, as they hardly contributed to the march of ideas, that is to the incivilimento due to man’s creative liberty.33

It is precisely the study of reading habits and crowd behavior that have fueled the redefinition of the Enlightenment in the past thirty years. Robert Darnton examined not just the ideas of the Enlightenment but the “business” of it as well in a publishing history of the Encyclopédie in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), he looked beyond the successes of Voltaire, d’Alembert, Condillac, and Rousseau to the failure of a host of would-be philosophes who lacked the patronage, money, and access to the presses enjoyed by the encyclopedists and members of learned academies. This, too, in effect split the Enlightenment into two parts, high and low—or those who got published by presses on Fleet Street and the Strand versus hacks living on Grub Street who were lucky if they got published at all.34 In the 1980s and 1990s Roger Chartier showed that even Darnton’s high/low distinction was too blunt. Rather than taking “popular culture” to be monolithic, Roger Chartier emphasized the different uses of print by different segments of society. One audience might interpret a given text in one way, a different audience in another way, but each appropriated the text for its own purposes, regardless of what the author might have intended. Chartier is interested less in the creation of ideas than in the reception of ideas once those ideas left the author’s desk, or how ideas walked around in society.35 The most glaring example of how ideas walked around in eighteenth-century society was the French Revolution. Were ideas responsible for the collapse of the Old Regime? Was there a necessary and causal connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution? Were ideas really that effective in producing constitutional change and touching off events like the Terror? Assuming that Daniel Mornet was at least partially correct in Les origines intellectual de la Revolution francaise (1933), that ideas bore at least some responsibility for the Revolution, Chartier wanted to know, how, exactly? “Is it certain that the Enlightenment must be characterized exclusively or principally as a corpus of self-contained, transparent ideas or as a set of clear and distinct propositions?” Chartier asked. “Should not the century’s novelty be read elsewhere—in the multiple practices guided by

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an interest in utility and service that aimed at the management of spaces and populations and whose mechanisms (intellectual or institutional) imposed a profound reorganization of the systems of perception and of the order of the social world?”36 Jonathan Israel maintains that a corpus of ideas and values did lie at the core of the Enlightenment. Those values included the liberty, toleration, and cosmopolitanism of the twentieth-century view of the Enlightenment. Rather than seeing them as articulated by Locke and Newton following the Glorious Revolution from whom they were received on the Continent, Israel emphasizes a more thoroughgoing reform effort emanating from Spinoza and the Huguenot diaspora in the Netherlands. The degree to which one was committed to such liberal values determined where one fell on the ideological spectrum of the eighteenth century. Extreme champions of individual liberties and freedoms, including the rejection of all religious and much political authority in favor of democratic republicanism, belong to what Israel (following Jacob) calls Radical Enlightenment. The mainstream of Enlightenment, at least as represented in the canon of twentieth-century historiography—including Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu— tended to be more moderate in its call for reform. Israel sees Locke’s defense of toleration to be weak and conservative when compared to radical liberty for the individual; comprehensive tolerance; equality of all persons whether male or female, European or not; Spinozist atheism, materialism, determinism; and contempt for repressive political and ecclesiastical authority. The Radical Enlightenment sought to demolish the foundations of Revelation, authority, and tradition, while at the same time consciously undermining the legitimacy of monarchy and aristocracy. The ultimate goal of its endeavours, its very raison d’être, was to emancipate society and the individual from bogus bonds of authority and by doing so reinstate human liberty.37

Voltaire, who derived many of his ideas from Locke and Newton, was essentially conservative in Israel’s interpretation. On the extreme right wing was Enlightened Absolutism. Israel (following McMahon) calls it Counter-Enlightenment, but his understanding has little in common with Berlin’s usage of the term. Public servants and privy counselors appropriated the language of Enlightenment, employing it for reasons

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of state, centralization, and efficiency in government, not for extending individual liberties. The Counter-Enlightenment, by Israel’s definition, was the desire to rationalize society; to move political power to a center from which it could be effectively deployed for military, commercial, and scientific ends; to assimilate the various populations into a single political and religious system. From the 1660s onwards, right down to the early nineteenth century, there were always three competing ideological camps which vied with each other, never two: namely Radical Enlightenment (including Diderot and d’Holbach), conservative Enlightenment (including Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu), and Counter-Enlightenment while, secondly, both the philosophes and their adversaries always had a perfectly clear sense of what each ideologically warring grouping stood for even if they sometimes spoke to each other and all three camps, to an extent, had a common problem with Rousseau.38

Absolutist reforms of efficiency and reason in administration, education, economy, and the Church may have been far-reaching, and they may have advanced secularization. But to the extent that they were vehicles for advancing autocracy at the expense of individual liberty, at crushing opposition, suppressing criticism, and furthering colonial and economic exploitation, they were not enlightened. The Enlightenment ended in Prussia at the beginning of the reign of Frederick the Great, not at the end.39 In Göttingen Heyne certainly agreed that militarized Prussia was in no way enlightened, the fawning of salaried civil servants like Kant notwithstanding.40 But then what else would one expect? Meiners historicized even himself when he acknowledged that in Germany, “most authors are salaried teachers or else men who have much to hope for or much to fear. Such men will very rarely go farther than their superiors wish, even if they are not restricted through press limitations or censorship regulations, nor even if they had an unlimited freedom of the press.”41 This is why an unlimited freedom of the press was not necessary, or even desirable, Meiners argued, in Germany, although it was so in England.42 Israel thinks that by paying close attention to the radicals, two things will happen: radicalism will be found to be far more extensive than has been previously assumed; and many of the supposed champions of lib-

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erty and toleration (like Locke and Voltaire) will come to be seen as downright conservative. This is certainly the case with the Göttingen School, which, though advancing a broadly liberal and reforming agenda, defined itself in opposition to both the extremes of Radical Enlightenment and Enlightened Absolutism. Most of the dozen or so philosophes who make up the canon of the French Enlightenment actively sought the demise of religious authority in France. This is one reason that through the middle of the twentieth century (Carl Becker notwithstanding) the story of the French Enlightenment was in fact “the rise of modern paganism.” But Meiners believed that the rejection of all religion was incompatible with true Enlightenment. Meiners named many prominent Enlightenment figures as not Enlightened at all: Spinoza the pantheist was not truly Enlightened, nor were the atheists Hobbes, Helvetius, d’Alembert, Hume, or Frederick II. For that matter, the Averroists of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries had not been Enlightened either, and nor were the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century.43 The list reads like a roll call of Radical Enlightenment. And so it was. Meiners called not only for religious moderation, but for political moderation as well, explicitly rejecting Radical democratic republicanism that asserted that all men are equal to each other and possess equal rights; that true sovereignty, and the privileges of the highest power rests solely in the People as a whole and that princes and authorities are no more than servants of the people; that one should use violence to defend himself against every random act of violence; that at any moment the People may recall all delegated authority and exercise its right to revolution.44

These moderates were not chiefly interested in political questions, at least not theoretical ones. Michaelis offered reasoned and gentle arguments, perhaps derived from Beccaria, as he worked his way through the Mosaic law. But he was primarily a scholar, not an activist. Nor were these moderates chiefly concerned with theological questions. Beyond paying lip service to the importance of religion as the basis of morality, they had little to say on the matter. Even Eichhorn, the Old Testament scholar, used the Hebrew scriptures to discover knowledge of man, not knowledge of God.

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In making the case for the Enlightenment, John Robertson has proposed that it was precisely the concern with the improvement of society in this life (not in the hereafter) that defined the Enlightenment. What characterized the Enlightenment from the 1740s onwards was a new focus on betterment in this world, without regard for the existence or non-existence of the next. . . . Intellectual effort was now concentrated on understanding the means of progress in human society, not on demolishing a belief in a divine counterpart.45

Robertson still considers the Enlightenment to have been an elite movement, one that was motivated by intellectual concerns as much as by actual social reform. The intellectual coherence of the Enlightenment may still be found . . . in the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world. The first part of this formula is as important as the second: The Enlightenment was committed to understanding, that is, to analysis on the basis of good argument, leading to reasoned conclusions. There was a core of original thinking in the Enlightenment: it was not simply a matter of common aspirations and values. Within that core the understanding of human betterment was pursued across a number of independent lines of inquiry. . . . Although individual Enlightenment thinkers had a variety of interests, the focus of their enquiries, and subject of their most original contributions, was human society and the physical and moral wellbeing of individuals in this world.46

Enlightened aspirations might have begun among the educated elite, but the intention of German moderates was to reach all levels of society. For a decade, from the late 1780s to the mid-1790s, the moderate camp produced a series of essays, in response to both the Berlin Academy’s famous question and the French Revolution, under the rubric of “true Enlightenment.” These scholars articulated an ideal of social reform that distinguished them from both the radicals and the absolutists. “True Enlightenment” consisted of good and useful knowledge that could be applied by citizens at all levels of society. Of what that knowledge consisted depended on one’s station in life. The farmer required one kind of practical knowledge, the university professor a different kind. Here is Christoph Meiners again:

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Enlightenment means in the most general sense of the word a certain mass of beautiful and useful knowledge through which the human spirit is educated or the heart of man is ennobled.47

One did not require a university education to be Enlightened. One could know only one language and still be Enlightened. This was especially true of women. Responding to Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument that girls should receive the same education as boys, Meiners believed that frankly women had better things to do with their time than to learn Latin.48 It was a matter of social roles, not intellectual capability. Meiners agreed that women ought to be literate and to be formally educated, but for the majority of them destined to become wives and mothers, Latin would be of little use. Enlightened knowledge was not limited to literacy, although literacy certainly helped. But handicrafts, mechanical arts, farming, and trade were all contributions to Enlightenment since they, too, constituted useful knowledge. True Enlightenment was less a positive program of ideology than a middle way between extremes like superstition (Catholic), enthusiasm (Pietist), ignorance, and revolutionary republicanism. Long before McMahon, Karl Mannheim argued that German conservatism was forged during the 1790s in response to the revolutionary ideology being worked out in France. German conservatives were not just reactionaries but had a program of their own. Mannheim characterized revolutionary liberalism and conservatism as two “styles” of thought, analogous to artistic styles according to which art historians classify artists. Revolutionary liberalism understood by liberty in the economic sphere the release of the individual from his medieval connections with state and guild. In the individual sphere they understood by it the right of the individual to do as he wishes and thinks fit, and especially his right to the fullest exercise of the inalienable Rights of Man. Only when it encroaches on the liberty of his fellow citizens does man’s freedom know any bounds according to this concept. Equality, then, is the logical corollary of this kind of liberty—without the assumption of political equality for all men, it is meaningless. Actually, however, revolutionary liberalism never thought of equality as anything more than a postulate. It certainly never took it as a matter of empirical fact, and indeed never demanded equality in practice for all men, except in the course of economic

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and political struggles. Yet conservative thought twisted this postulate into a statement of positive fact, and made it appear as if liberals were claiming that all men were in fact and in all respects equal.49

Conservatives advanced a “qualitative” definition of liberty, which held that people were essentially unequal, extending to their gifts and abilities and “to the very core of their beings.” Conservative liberty referred to the ability of each individual to develop according to the logic of his or her own genius. Thus, conservatism was an extension of the particularist mode of inquiry, which privileged the specific over the general and was more interested in details than in general theory. More than simply reactionary, “conservatism . . . is conscious and reflective from the first, since it arises as a counter-movement in conscious opposition to the highly organized, coherent and systematic ‘progressive’ movement.” Conservatism was a style of thought that ran, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, “against the current.” Conservatives themselves rejected notions of rupture and revolution, emphasizing instead continuity with the past and the legitimacy of tradition. For Mannheim, Justus Möser illustrated the “conservative attitude . . . in its purest form,” in his Osnabrück History when he wrote, “When I come across some old custom or old habit which simply will not fit into modern ways of reasoning, I keep turning around in my mind the idea that ‘after all our forefathers were not fools either,’ until I find some sensible reason for it.”50 I would add that Johann Jakob Moser employed a similar principle against the absolutizing policies of Duke Karl of Württemberg, as did Monboddo when he defended his estate from Johnson’s assault on the same ground. Möser argued elsewhere: The gentlemen of the General department, it seems, would like to see everything reduced to simple principles. If they had their way, the state would let itself be ruled according to an academic theory, and every councillor would be able to give his orders to the local officials according to a general plan. . . . That means in fact a departure from the true plan of Nature, who shows her wealth in variety; it paves the way for despotism which wants to force everything by means of a few rules and in doing so loses the wealth of variety.51

Mannheim considered this kind of particularism to be the last moment of “pretheoretical” thought. By pretheoretical he meant a form

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of social analysis grounded in concrete experience, or what he also called “qualitative” thinking. Justus Möser’s Patriotische Phantasien, essays published in the 1760s and 1770s on the indigenous legal, institutional, religious customs, and manners of Osnabrück, were a form of local history (Landesgeschichte) that celebrated the uniqueness of that small principality in northwestern Germany. Meiners’s history of humanity was also qualitative, but the rigor he brought to his analysis represents a beginning in the human sciences, not an end. And not only in anthropology or Landesgeschichte, but in Kameralwissenschaft, law, and especially in political theory during and after the French Revolution, a specific set of social critics was directly interested in the particulars and uniqueness of specific human groups. “The 1795 Constitution, like its predecessors, was made for man,” wrote Joseph de Maistre. But there is no such thing as man in the world. During my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians and so on; thanks to Montesquieu I even know that one can be a Persian; but I say as for man, I have never come across him anywhere; if he exists, he is completely unknown to me.52

Edmund Burke displayed a similar kind of qualitative thinking when he scolded the French for destroying their indigenous traditions instead of renovating them. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the wall, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. . . . You had all these advantages in your antient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew.53

Here was qualitative thinking at its finest. The premise of the Revolution was a legal fiction—the universal Man legally and morally equal to or interchangeable with all other men. Burke’s German translator, the Prussian Friedrich Gentz, along with the Hanoverian A. W. Rehberg,

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the Westfalian Möser, the Württembergers Moser and Spittler (the latter Meiners’s co-editor of the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin)—all public administrators working with local case law and regional governments—were keenly interested in developing an empirical science of society and the state.54 These administrators came to understand the advancement of the arts and sciences not through abstract principles of natural law but through the indigenous positive constitutions of particular principalities and regions. Their project of reforming penal, taxation, and constitutional law codes can be seen as an expression of the same particularism identified in anthropology, philology, linguistics, and cultural history. Local administrators and globalist historians shared a common vision of humanity: that human nature was to be found in groups, that each group had its own unique character, and that those characters could be known only through the specific and empirical investigation of collective human behavior. And not only in Germany but in France, too, members of the Société des Observateurs de l’homme self-consciously juxtaposed global comparative ethno-anthropology with statistics, demographics, and the economics of localities in the French countryside. Gusdorf saw the brief resurgence of the Idéologues as the last moment of an outmoded way of thinking, “men of the past” and “a lost generation.”55 But Landesgeschichte, Kameralwissenschaft, and the statistical study of small localities in the German-speaking realm was only just getting started in the late eighteenth century. “The concept of culture marks a semantic rupture [Brechung] in the second half of the eighteenth century,” wrote Jörn Garber, “that one may take as a sign of a paradigm shift in the perception of society and history.”56 This statement is patently false. Granted, there can be no cultural history without culture, but there was Menschheitsgeschichte. Before Menschheitsgeschichte there was l’histoire de l’esprit humain, and before l’histoire de l’esprit humain there was philosophical history in the form of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs. By now we find ourselves back in the 1740s, and although the names change, indicating a shift in methodology and intent, these are fairly nuanced changes that have gone largely unnoticed in the history of eighteenth-century historiography. “Culture” made a splash when it hit the intellectual scene ca. 1778, and it functioned as a shorthand tool that implied a

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whole set of social and historical processes, thus enabling scholars to examine human social development in a new way. But “culture” did not arrive fully formed with all its twenty-first-century or twentiethcentury or even late-nineteenth-century implications. “Culture” itself developed over time as a concept, and although the advent of its widespread use can be dated fairly precisely, a paradigm shift it was not. It has become “unacceptable to project the existence of such modern academic disciplines as psychology or sociology back into the past, as was done in the single discipline histories that once dominated the human sciences,” writes Roger Smith. Modern psychology did not begin with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The assumptions, methods, and conclusions of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws had little to do with those of modern sociology. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations surely cannot be taken to be the origin of modern economics.57 Michèle Duchet doubted that the eighteenth century represented the origins of anthropology. Although they might have been united in the goal of creating a “general science of man,” the five philosophes she examined came up with several possible anthropologies, not just one. “The principal object of their science of man is to fill in the lacunae and the silences of history for those centuries that separated the origins of man from the invention of writing,” she wrote, a point that Jean Dagen elaborated.58 Smith considers the appropriation of so-called classics to be a form of intellectual colonialism, “in order to claim all the best bits of high culture for modern science disciplines. We now wish to decolonize that territory of the past and understand the past in its own terms.”59 Whether it is possible to understand the past in its own terms, as if to rethink the thoughts of other people far removed in time, I am not certain. But I have considered myself as a sort of postcolonialist, giving voice to a set of scholars who have not been heard in the past two hundred years, even if those scholars themselves were among the most privileged of classes and were articulate to the point of being published. The fact that they remain neglected is testimony of the narrowness of inquiry that has characterized intellectual and disciplinary history. It is doubtful whether the human sciences reached their modern configurations before Wundt, Boas, Durkheim, Schleicher, and Saussure. Degérando, Jauffret, Meiners, and Herder probably had more in

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common with Lafitau than with Boas. Modern social science the Göttingen School was not. Their particularism, their emphasis on the group over the individual, their denial of a universal human nature and of Man, represent one of many avenues that will eventually converge in modern social science.

Notes Index

Notes

Introduction

1. Johann Christoph Adelung, Versuch einer Geschichte der Cultur des menschlichen Geschlechts (Leipzig: C. G. Hertel, 1782; 2nd ed., 1800; reprinted Königstein: Scriptor, 1979), unpaginated Vorrede. 2. D. G. Herzog, Versuch einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Kultur der deutschen Nation (Erfurt, 1795; 2nd ed., 1799), 24; cited after Volker Hartmann, Die deutsche Kulturgeschichtsschreibung von ihren Anfängen bis Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Marburg, 1971), 39. 3. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4. Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des Observateurs de l’homme: Des anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2002), 469–470. 5. For example, Notker Hammerstein, Jus und Historie: Eine Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an deutschen Universitäten im späten 17. und im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1972); Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994). 6. Blandine Kriegel, L’histoire à l’Age classique, 4 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Chantal Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie: Étude sur la connaissance historique à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); J. G. A. Pocock, The Enlightenments of 301

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes to Pages 6–17

Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988; originally Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1959), 105–109. See also “Translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘Krise,’ in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” trans. Melvin Richter and Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 343–400. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315; reprinted in Arnaldo Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 1–39. See Peter N. Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87. Compare Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Williams, Keywords, 219. “Essay on Man” (1732), ep. 1, part X, in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. John Wilson Croker (1871; reprinted New York: Gordian, 1967), vol. 2, 370–371. “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850), sec. 56, quatrain 4, in The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), vol. 2, 197. “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” (1791), in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: Bohn, 1855), 82, 86–87. Moses Mendelssohn, “Ueber die Frage: Was ist aufklären?” trans. James Schmidt in What Was Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 53–57; originally published in Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784): 193–200. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, bk. 9, ch. 1 (1785) in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. 13 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1887), 348. John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690), sec. 6 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses (Everyman Library), trans. G. D. H. Cole et al. (London: Dent, 1993), 71–72.

Notes to Pages 19–20

303

19. See Timothy J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Thomas Behme, Samuel von Pufendorf: Naturrecht und Staat. Eine Analyse und Interpretation seiner Theorie, ihrer Grundlagen und Probleme (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995); Horst Denzer, Moralphilosophie und Naturrecht bei Samuel Pufendorf: Eine geistes- und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Geburt des Naturrechts aus der Praktischen Philosophie (Munich: Beck, 1972); and Leonard Krieger, The Politics of Discretion: Pufendorf and the Acceptance of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Two works examine Pufendorf ’s debt to Hobbes: Simone Goyard-Fabre, “Pufendorf, adversaire de Hobbes,” Hobbes Studies 2 (1989), 65–86; and Fiammetta Palladini, Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes: Per una reinterpretazione del giusnaturalismo moderno (Bologna: Mulino, 1990). Palladini also discusses the spread of Pufendorf ’s ideas through the early eighteenth-century translations of his work by Jean Barbeyrac, a Huguenot exile living in Berlin. See also Sieglinde Othmer, Berlin und die Verbreitung des Naturrechts in Europa: Kultur- und sozialgeschichtliche Studien zu Jean Barbeyracs Pufendorf-Übersetzungen und eine Analyse seiner Leserschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). For Pufendorf ’s influence on the development of German historical scholarship, see Hammerstein, Jus und Historie, and Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. 20. Pufendorf, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, vol. 4.1, De iure naturae et gentium, ed. Frank Böhling (Berlin: Akademie, 1998), 2.3.13–16, pp. 144–151. 21. Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennet (London: J. Walthoe et al., 1729), 2.1.6; cited after Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory,’ ” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 263. 22. “Unsocial sociability” was the “predisposition most apparent in human nature. . . . Man has a tendency to associate in society, because in that condition he feels himself more than man, i.e. in the development of his natural faculties. However he also has a strong tendency to isolate himself.” Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784): 385–411,

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23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

Notes to Pages 21–23

here 396–397. Daniel Jenisch used virtually the same formulation of human nature at the end of the century in Universalhistorischer Überblick der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts als eines sich fortbildenden Ganzen: Eine Philosophic der Culturgeschichte, vol. 1 (Berlin: Voss, 1801), 64–65. Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 24–26, 37–46, 193–194, 315–321. Richard van Dülmen, Die Gesellschaft der Aufklärer: Zur bürgerlichen Emanzipation und aufklärerischen Kultur in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1986); Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Fruhaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680–1720 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002); Wiep van Bunge, ed., Early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Martin Mulsow, “ ‘Steige also, wenn du kannst, höher und höher zu uns herauf ’: Adam Weishaupt als Philosoph,” in Die Weimarer Klassik und ihre Geheimbünde, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel and Wolfgang Riedel (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 27–66. The letter was from Pufendorf to Boineburg, January 19, 1663; reprinted in Fiammetta Palladini, “Le due letteri di pufendorf al Barone do Boineburg: quella nota e quella ‘perduta,’ ” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1 (1984): 119–144. See also Palladini, Discussioni seicentesche su Samuel Pufendorf: Scritti latini 1663–1700 (Bologna: Il mulino, 1978). The term was first published in Samuel Pufendorf, “De origine et progressu diciplinae iuris naturalis” in Specilegium controversarium (1680); reprinted in Eris Scandica qua adversus libros de Jure naturali et Gentium objecta diluuntur (Frankfurt a.M.: Knoch, 1686); itself reprinted as an appendix to Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium, ed. Mascovius, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Knoch, 1712). See Samuel Pufendorf, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, vol. 5, Eris Scandica und andere polemische Schriften über das Naturrecht, ed. Fiammetta Palladini (Berlin: Akademie, 2002). Emanuel Hirsch, “Der Kulturbegriff. Eine Lesefrucht,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 3 (1925): 398–400; Heinrich Günter, Deutsche Kultur in ihrer Entwicklung (Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1932), 267. Joseph Niedermann, Kultur: Werden und Wandlungen des Begriffs und seiner Ersatzbegriffe von Cicero bis Herder (Florence: Bibliopolis, 1941), 164 n. 282.

Notes to Pages 23–25

305

30. Ibid., 167. 31. Jörn Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 7, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), implicitly agrees with Günter; Tim Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment, 95–96, explicitly disagrees with Niedermann. 32. Niedermann, Kultur, 198–199. 33. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 228–231, said that Herder’s “metaphysics of history” was “based on Leibniz’s central doctrine” of the monad. The same was true of all the cultural historians in Herder’s day. 34. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), bk. 1, sec. 4, 349, p. 104. 35. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. T. Nugent (New York: Macmillan, 1949), bk. 1, sec. 3, pp. 6–7. 36. “La barbarie égale tous les hommes.” See Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “Second discours, sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain” (1750) in Oeuvres de Turgot, vol. 2 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1844), 599. 37. Turgot, “Second discours, sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain,” in Oeuvres, vol. 2, 600. 38. Jean Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain dans la pensée français (Strasbourg: Klinksieck, 1977). 39. Friedrich August Carus, Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1804), in Nachgelassene Werke, ed. F. Hand, vol. 6 (Leipzig: Barth, 1809), 51. Cited after Jörn Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7.682. 40. Philip Massinger, The Emperor of the East (1631), in Plays and Poems, ed. P. Edward and C. Gibson, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1976), 419: “By my theoremes which your polite, and terser gallants practise, I rerefine the Court, and civilize their barbarous natures.” Cited after Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7.699. 41. James Boswell wrote in his journal on March 23, 1772 about the fourth edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary: “He would not admit Civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization from to civilize, better in the sense opposed to barbarity.” Johnson allowed the verb civilize only in the legal sense: to turn a criminal process into a civil process. Victor de Riquetti Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes, ou, traité de la population (Avignon, 1756), used “civilisation” three times in his work, referring to processes of social change. See Bruce Mazlish, The Longue Durée: Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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Notes to Page 25

42. Williams, Keywords, 89. That Herder is named as the innovator is characteristic of the reputation Herder has enjoyed in the wake of Isaiah Berlin. Williams only discovered Herder in Keywords, the first edition of which appeared at the same time (London: Fontana/Croom Helm, 1976) as Berlin’s Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976). In Williams, Culture and Society, 1750–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), Herder’s name appears only once, dropped in passing in a list with Vico and Montesquieu (p. 130). 43. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952). Also The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); and “The Superorganic,” American Anthropologist 19 (1917): 163–216. For Kroeber’s conception of culture as both spatial and temporal, see Thomas Buckley, “ ‘The Little History of Pitiful Events’: The Epistemological and Moral Contexts of Kroeber’s Californian Ethnology,” in Volksgeist as Method: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 257–297; E. Wolf, “A. L. Kroeber,” in Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology, ed. Sydel Silverman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 34–55. For examples of reconstructed aboriginal culture, see A. L. Kroeber, “Yurok National Character, in Ethnographic Interpretations,” University of California Publications in American Anthropology and Ethnology 47 (1959): 236–240; and especially Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). 44. Jörn Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7.711 and 747 n. 404. Only in the mid-nineteenth century was culture rendered a specific object, necessary before it could be pluralized as cultures. Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860) was the first (or at any rate most prominent) thoroughgoing objectification of culture (rendered “civilization” in English) as a historically distinct set of institutions and structures rather than a process. Only after one spoke of somebody’s specific culture could one then speak of others in the plural. Twenty years before Burckhardt, “civilization” was objectified in French and German when Adam Gurowski, La civilisation et la Russie (St. Petersburg: Hauer, 1840), 113, referred to sociétés ou civilisations. The German version was entitled Rußland und die Civilisation (Leipzig: Hunger, 1841). See Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7.747 n. 405. An English version avoided the ambiguous term altogether in the title Russia and Its People (London: Nelson, 1854).

Notes to Pages 26–37

307

45. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945; originally Berlin: De Gruyter, 1933), 303. 1. Orientalism and Reform

1. Carsten Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern (Zurich: Manesse, 1992), 253–259. Originally published in 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Möller, 1774, 1778; and Hamburg: Perthes, 1837). 2. Ibid., 234–237. 3. Ibid., 238. 4. Ibid., 245. 5. Stig Rasmussen, “Die arabische Reise” in Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 45. 6. Johann David Michaelis, Fragen an eine Gesellschaft Gelehrter Männer, die auf Befehl Ihro Majestät des Königes von Dännemark nach Arabien reisen (Frankfurt a.M.: Johann Gottlieb Garbe, 1762), Vorbericht; cited after Rasmussen, “Die arabische Reise” in Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 10. 7. Michaelis, Fragen, Vorbericht [n.p. 28–29]. 8. Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 50. 9. Michaelis, Fragen, Vorbericht. 10. Ibid., 4–5, citing his own notes and preface to Pierre Hardy, Essai physique sur l’heure des marées dans la mer rouge, comparée avec l’heure du passage des hébreux (Göttingen: Pockwitz & Barmeier, 1758). 11. Michaelis, Fragen, Royal Instruction 12 [n.p.]. 12. Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 253–255; engraving on p. 256. The Codex Sinaiticus was discovered in part in 1844 by the German theologian and explorer Constantin von Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s. In 1859, under Russian sponsorship, he returned and procured the rest of the manuscript as a gift from the monastery to Alexander II. The manuscript was purchased by the British Library shortly after the Russian Revolution. In 1975 the monks discovered a room that had collapsed centuries before, burying manuscripts totaling over 4,000 pages. None has yet been published. 13. Michaelis, Fragen, Question 65, 185–188. 14. Peter Forskål, Descriptiones animalium avium, amphibiorum, piscium, insectorum, vermium quae in itinere orientali observavit (Copenhagen: Möller, 1775); Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabia, sive descriptiones plantarum, quae per Aegyptum inferiorem et Arabiam felicem detexit (Copenhagen: Möller, 1775), including a Tabula Arabiae felicis geographico-botanica.

308

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to Pages 37–51

Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 337. Ibid., 363. Ibid., 522, 556. Ibid., 530–553. Translated from Rasmussen, “Die Arabische Reise,” in Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 33–34. August Ludwig Schlözer, Fortsetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie, Theil 31/32: Historie der neuern Zeiten, Theil 13/14 (Halle: Gebauer, 1768–1771); Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Einleitung ins alten Testament, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1787). Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London: G. Bishop, 1606), I. 8, p. 113e. Johann David Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, 6 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: J. G. Garbe, 1770–1775), §1 (vol. 1) and preface to vol. 6. Anthony F. Upton, Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, vol. 1, unpaginated dedication, citing a Latin text by Olaf Rabenius, who in turn quoted Koenigius, ed., Codex legum Sueciarum (Holm, 1743). Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, §3, vol. 1, pp. 8–9. Ibid., §55, vol. 2. Ibid., §§1, 2, 9, vol. 1. Ibid., §§2, 12, vol. 1, 10 [quote], post-50. Ibid., §5. “Wenn auch GOtt selbst bürgerliche Gesetze giebt, die höchste Macht auf Erden, welche sie verwaltet, das Recht von ihm bekomme, in ausserordentlichen Fällen von diesen Gesetzen abzugehen, zu dispensiren, und zu begnadigen.” Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, §11, vol. 1, 42. Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, §11, vol. 1, 46, 47. Ibid., §3, vol. 1, 14–15, citing Icke, De institutis et ceremoniis legis Mosaicae ante Mosen (Bremen, 1751). Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, §§41–42, 44. Ibid., §§32–33 and §37, respectively. See Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), for the hostility aroused by monotheism in the ancient Near East. Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, §37. Ibid., §§61–63. Ibid., §§6, 131–136; quote in §135, vol. 2, p. 413. Ibid., vol. 6, prologue, 12–13. Ibid., 48.

Notes to Pages 52–55

309

40. Ibid., §282, vol. 6, 67–71. Is this Teutonic irony? Surely Michaelis knew that slavery was not permitted in England, as reinforced a few years later in the Estwick trial. 41. Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 114, April 20, 1751. Cited after Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 254 n. 31. 42. Even Zedler could not count them all. His article on “Teutschland,” Großes Vollständiges Universallexikon, vol. 43, coll. 276–278, named some 136 principalities organized in ten circles (Creyse), plus “many other countries, small districts, and cities.” That was according to information that dated from 1512, before the Reformation, and did not even include the circles of Prussia and Bohemia, which had been added since then, to say nothing of the troublesome region of Silesia. 43. See Karl Otmer von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1786–1806: Reichsverfassung und Staatssouverainität, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1967); Aretin, Der aufgeklärte Absolutismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1974); Gerald Strauss, “The Holy Roman Empire Revisited,” Central European History 11 (1978): 290–301. Jonathan Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16–17 n. 40, did not believe the functionality argument. 44. Mack Walker, Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 125–135. 45. Ibid., 131. 46. Reinhard Rürup, Johann Jakob Moser: Pietismus und Reform (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965), 36; Walker, Johann Jakob Moser, 98. 47. Rürup, Johann Jakob Moser, 46–50, 203–05. Rürup follows Albert Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, 3 vols. (Bonn: Marcus, 1880–1886), vol. 3, p. 40, who wrote that Moser was the “most genuine successor of Spener (not “one of ” but “the”). 48. Carl Hinrichs, “Der hallische Pietismus als politisch-soziale Reformbewegung des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 2 (1953): 177–190. Also W. R. Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996). 49. Johann Jakob Moser, Betrachtungen über die Sonn-, Fest-, und Feiertäglichen Evangelien (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1774). Cf. Moser, Teutsches StaatsRecht, vol. 1 (Nürnberg, 1737), 191. Quoted after Rürup, Johann Jakob Moser, 48. 50. Rürup, Johann Jakob Moser, 24.

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Notes to Pages 55–62

51. Walker, 93. 52. See Walker, 334, Rürup, 114. 53. The course was offered at Tübingen under the title “Collegium on European public law and the modern practice of the European law of nations.” See Rürup, 63. 54. Rürup, 63–73. 55. Rürup, 79–84; Walker, 177–184; Georg Achilles, Die Bedeutung und Stellung von Gottfried Achenwall in der Nationalökonomie und der Statistik (Göttingen: Huth, 1906), 10–12; Paul Streidl, Naturrecht, Staatswissenschaften und Politisierung bei Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772) (Munich: Utz, 2003). 56. “Tableau comparatif des Armées de France et de Prusse, 1789,” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 6 (1790): 163–165; adapted from an appendix to Adresse à l’Assemblée nationale et au Roi, par les Officiers de l’infanterie de la Garrison de Strasbourg (Strasbourg, 1789), 44. 57. Gottfried Achenwall, Vorbereitung zur Staatswissenschaft der heutigen fürnehmsten europäischen Reiche und Staaten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1748), 3–44, for definition of Statistik; he reviewed his book himself in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (1748), nr. 64, pp. 505–506; and Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (1749), nr. 64, pp. 361–362. August Ludwig Schlözer, Allgemeine Statistik: Theorie der Statistik nebst Ideen über das Studium der Politik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1804) credited Achenwall (his teacher) with inventing the term Statistik and defining the modern discipline. Achilles, Gottfried Achenwall, 45–48, said bunk: Achenwall wrote qualitiative historical descriptions of European states, whereas modern (ca. 1900) Statistik was quantitative “political arithmetic.” 58. A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, Renate Wilson et al., In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 59. As Rürup, put it, “For Moser, there was no contradiction between ancient law and reformist policy” (202). 60. Johann Jakob Moser, Von der Teutschen Reichs-Stände Landen, deren Landständen, Unterthanen, Landes-Freyheiten, Beschwerden, Schulden und Zusammenkünften, vol. 13 of Neues Teutsches Staats-Recht (1769), 846; quoted after Rürup, 201–202. 61. Johann Jakob Moser, Von der Landeshoheit derer Teutschen Reichs-Stände überhaupt, vol. 14 of Neues Teutsches Staats-Recht (1773), 52; quoted after Rürup, 200.

Notes to Pages 62–68

311

62. Johann Jakob Moser, Von der Landeshoheit derer Teutschen Reichs-Stände überhaupt, vol. 14 of Neues Teutsches Staats-Recht (1773), 51–52; quoted after Rürup, 200. 63. Johann Jakob Moser, “Entwurf einer patriotische Gesellschaft im herzogthum N. N.,” Wochentliche Frankische Abhandlungen 20 (1755): 305. Dated October 17, 1751. 64. Moser’s son, Friedrich Carl, carried on much of the father’s inquiry into the unique genius and constitutions of various principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. See Friedrich Carl von Moser, Der Herr und der Diener (Frankfurt: Raspe, 1758); F. C. von Moser, Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist (Frankfurt a.M.: Schäfer, 1765); F. C. von Moser, Ueber die Regierung der geistlichen Staaten in Deutschland (Mannheim: Schwan, 1787); and a rejoinder to the latter by Andreas Joseph Schnaubert, Ueber des Freiherrn von Mosers Vorschläge zu Verbessern der geistlichen Staaten in Deutschland ( Jena: Cuno, 1787). 65. For example, the Genevan professor of French Paul-Henri Mallet, Introduction à l’histoire du Dannemarc où l’on traite de la religion, des loix, des moeurs et des usages des anciens Danois (Copenhagen: Philibert, 1755); also Mallet, Histoire du Dannemarc, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Philibert, 1758–1777). 66. Carsten Niebuhr, for example, a German, was a career officer who ranked as a lieutenant when the expedition departed in 1761. 67. Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776, 251. 68. Correspondence entre le comte Johan Hartvig E. Bernstorff et le duc de Choiseul, 1758–1766 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1871), 240; translated in Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776, 237. 69. Walker, Johann Jakob Moser, 233. 70. Elie-Salomon-François Reverdil, Struensée et la cour de Copenhague, 1760–1772 (Paris: Meyrueis, 1858). Reverdil (from Geneva) was Christian VII’s tutor, hired by Frederick V and part of the old guard that was swept out in the late 1760s. Struensee recalled him in 1771, and Reverdil witnessed the events reported. 71. Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776, 250–254. 72. Reverdil, Struensée et la cour de Copenhague, 232, said that Struensee’s affair with the queen was the motivation for reform of marital laws. 73. Christine Keitsch, Der Fall Struensee: Ein Blick in die Skandalpresse des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Krämer, 2000). 74. Reverdil, Struensée et la cour de Copenhague, 232. 75. Ibid., 287–289, 307–309. 76. Ibid., 420. 77. Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Aufklärung als Prozeß (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988).

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Notes to Pages 70–72 2. Culture and the Origin of Language

1. James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (London: Dilly, 1785), Saturday, August 21, 1773. 2. [ James Burnett, Lord Monboddo], Antient Metaphysics, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfuth; and London: T. Cadell, 1795), 403–408. Also a letter of December 9, 1731, written at Châlons by M.A.M.N., “De la fille sauvage trouvée aux environs de cette ville” in Mercure de France (December 1731): 2983–2989; cited after J. A. L. Singh and Robert M. Zingg, Wolf-Children and Feral Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1939), 256–257 n. 5; and a supplementary “Extrait d’une autre lettre sur le même sujet,” Mercure de France (December 1731): 2989–2991; cited after Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 232 n. 72. 3. See the mystery novel by Lillian de la Torre, The Heir of Douglas (New York: Knopf, 1952). 4. Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 81. 5. Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics, vol. 4 (1795), 403–408. In an important footnote to her recent discussion of Leblanc, Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, 230 n. 55, cites unpublished archival work by a certain Dr. Franck Rolin who has traced Leblanc’s origins to either the Sioux or the Fox nation in the Wisconsin region. Apparently, Leblanc was purchased as an infant in 1712 by the widow of the French commandant of Labrador, in whose care she was raised for about eight years. In 1720 the widow and her adoptive daughter returned to France, where they were quarantined in Marseilles for a year and a half due to a plague epidemic. In May 1722 Leblanc ran away, and over nine years made her way a thousand kilometers north to Châlons before being captured in September 1731. 6. See the letter of December 9, 1731, written at Châlons by M. A. M. N., “De la fille sauvage trouvée aux environs de cette ville” in Mercure de France, p. 2988. The Mercure de France is obscure, but an English translation is provided in Singh and Zingg, Wolf-Children and Feral Man, 256–257 n. 5; Zingg’s English translation is itself from a German translation by August Rauber, Homo Sapiens Ferus oder die Zustände der Verwilderten und ihre Bedeutung für Wissenschaft, Politik und Schule: Biologische Untersuchung, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Brehse, 1888), 41–48. 7. The “critical period” hypothesis, formulated by Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts, Speech and Brain Mechanisms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

Notes to Pages 72–80

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

313

University Press, 1959), states that there is a biologically scheduled window of opportunity in which a first language can be learned. If a child fails to learn a language before the onset of puberty, it appears to be impossible for him or her ever to learn one. See the review essays by Christo Moskovsky, “The Critical Period Hypothesis Revisited,” in Proceedings of the 2001 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, ed. Cynthia Allen (http://www.als.asn.au, 2002); and M. Long, “Maturational Constraints on Language Development,” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12 (1990): 251–285. Both Peter of Hanover and Victor of Aveyron apparently missed that window, although Connor’s Lithuanian bear-boy was still young enough to learn at least some language. Bernard Connor, Evangelium Medici, seu Medicina Mystica de Suspensis Naturae Legibus, sive de Miraculis (London: Wellinton, Nelme, and Brescoe, 1697; also Amsterdam, 1699), 181–183. Bernard Connor, The History of Poland, in Several Letters to Persons of Quality (London: Brown and Roper, 1698), 342–343. Letter of Johannes Petrus van den Brande de Cleverskerk to Bernard Connor, January 1, 1694, printed in French and translated by Connor in The History of Poland, 344–348. Connor, History of Poland, 348–349; citing Christophorus Hartknoch, De republica Polonica, libri duo, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Hallervorden, 1698). Connor, History of Poland, 343, 349–350. Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: J. Balfour; and London: T. Cadell, 1784), 58. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, 21–23. Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys, 24–32. Ibid., 51–52. Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics, vol. 3 (1784), 59–68, 368–378. Ibid., 377. Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), Saturday, August 21, 1773. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Amsterdam: P. Mortier, 1746); Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Condillac had also refuted Locke’s conception of reflection. Sensation and reflection were the two principal parts of Locke’s understanding of human cognition. The capacity for reflection was still innate, an intangible capacity of the mind to organize the experience received through the senses. Condillac’s “sensationalist psychology,” which conflated body and mind, was a major contribution to the mechanistic and mate-

314

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

Notes to Pages 83–89

rialistic conception of man developed by Helvetius, D’Holbach, La Mettrie, and Diderot. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 517. Christian Wolff, Psychologia Rationalis (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1734) in Gesammelte Werke, Abteil 2, Band 6, Jean École, ed. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1994), §461, pp. 378–379. Maupertuis, La Figure de la Terre (Paris, 1738); The Figure of the Earth (London, 1738); Figura Terrae (Leipzig, 1742). Réginald Outhier published an illustrated account of the journey, Journal d’un voyage au nord en 1736 et 1737 (Amsterdam, 1749). The Paris Academy had also dispatched an expedition to Peru (now Ecuador) to measure the earth at the equator. Ronald Calinger, “The Newtonian-Wolffian Controversy, 1740–1759,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 319–330; and “The NewtonianWolffian Confrontation in the St. Petersburg Academy of Science, 1725–1746,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 11 (1968): 417–435. Maupertuis, Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues, et la signification des mots in Oeuvres de Mr. Maupertuis, vol. 1 (Lyon: Bruyset, 1756), 253–309. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 275–276. Maupertuis, “Dissertation sur les différentes moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leurs idées,” in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin, 1754 (Berlin: Académie Royale des Sciences, 1756), 349–364. Johann Peter Süßmilch, Versuch eines Beweises, daß die erste Sprache ihnen Ursprung nicht vom Menschen, sondern allein vom Schöpfer erhalten habe (Berlin: Buchladen der Realschule, 1766). Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über die Ursprung der Sprache (Berlin: Voss, 1772; 2nd ed., 1789) in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. 5 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1891), p. 29; also in Herder, Frühe Schriften, 1764–1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 717; and in Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung, ed. Wolfgang Pross (Munich: Hanser, 1987), 272. Hans Aarsleff makes this point vigorously in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and “Herder’s Cartesian Ursprung vs. Condillac’s Expressivist Essay,” in Language Philosophies and the Language Sciences: A Historical Perspective in Honor of Lia Formigari (Münster: Nodus, 1996), 165–179.

Notes to Pages 90–98

315

32. Herder, Suphan ed., 18; Gaier ed., 708–709; Pross ed., 263–264. 33. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses, Everyman Library, trans. G. D. H. Cole et al. (London: Dent, 1993), 64–68. 34. Herder, Suphan ed., 98; Gaier ed., 773; Pross ed., 323. 35. Herder, Suphan ed., 31; Gaier ed., 719; Pross ed., 274. 36. Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 137. 37. Herder, Ursprung der Sprache, Gaier ed., 1304, 1319, 773. 38. Herder already used the term cultur once in his Essay in 1772. 39. Gaier ed., 1279–1281. 40. Herder, Suphan ed., 33; Gaier ed., 721; Pross ed., 276. 41. Herder, Suphan ed., 34; Gaier ed., 722; Pross ed., 276. 42. Herder, Suphan ed., 34; Gaier ed., 722; Pross ed., 276. 43. Herder, Gaier ed., 724–725. 44. Herder, Suphan ed., 100; Gaier ed., 774; Pross ed., 324; J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 20–21. 45. Herder, Gaier ed., 729, quoting Süßmilch. 46. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 140. 47. Herder, Suphan ed., 99; Gaier ed., 774; Pross ed., 323. 48. Herder, Suphan ed., 112; Gaier ed., 783; Pross ed., 332. 49. Herder, Suphan ed., 120; Gaier ed., 789; Pross ed., 337; Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 65. 50. Herder, Suphan ed., 116; Gaier ed., 786; Pross ed., 335. 51. Herder, Suphan ed., 138; Gaier ed., 803; Pross ed., 350. 52. Herder, Suphan ed., 135; Gaier ed., 801; Pross ed., 348. 53. Barnard, ed. and trans., J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, 167. 54. Herder, Suphan ed., 129; Gaier ed., 796; Pross ed., 344. 55. Herder, Suphan ed., 137; Gaier ed., 803; Pross ed., 350. 56. Karl Franz von Irwing, Erfahrungen und Untersuchungen über den Menschen (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1772); 2. vermehrte und verbesserte Ausgabe, 4 vols. (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1777–1785). 57. In the Vorrede to Volume 4 he called his work “philosophische Untersuchungen” and “philosophische Anthropologie.” 58. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere (Hamburg: Bohn, 4 eds., 1760, 1762, 1773, 1798). 59. Irwing, 2.32–35, §121. 60. Ibid., 2.8, §116. 61. Ibid., 3.127, §188.

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Notes to Pages 99–106

62. Ibid., 3.122–227, §188. 63. Ibid., 3.360–369, §206. 64. Johann Nicolaus Tetens, Philosophische Versuch über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1777). 65. Michael Denis, Einleitung in die Bücherkunde, 2 vols. (Vienna: Trattner, 1777–1778). See Michael C. Carhart, “Historia Literaria and Cultural History from Mylaeus to Eichhorn,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 184–210. 66. Irwing, 3.122–125, §188. 67. Johann Christoph Adelung, Über die Geschichte der Deutschen sprache, über Deutsche Mundarten und Deutschen Sprachlehre (Leipzig: n.p., 1781); Johann Christoph Adelung, Über den Ursprung der Sprache und den Bau der Wörter, besonders der Deutschen: Ein Versuch (Leipzig: n.p., 1781). Both were excerpts (chapters 1 and 2, respectively) from Adelung’s Umständliches Lehrgebäude der deutschen Sprache zur Erläuterung der Deutschen Sprachlehre für Schulen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1782). 68. Adelung, Über die Geschichte der Deutschen sprache, 3–4. 69. Adelung, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 7. 70. Ibid., 8. 71. Maupertuis, Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues. 72. Adelung, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 8–9. 73. Maupertuis, Réflexions philosophiques; Adelung, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 7. 74. Adelung, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 7. 75. Adelung, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 8. 76. Ibid., 7. Compare Pufendorf ’s sociability. 77. Adelung, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 5. 78. J. C. Adelung, Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachkunde, 4 parts (6 vols.), edited by J. S. Vater with contributions from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Adelung’s son Friedrich (Berlin: Voss, 1806 –1817). 79. Adelung, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 5–6. 80. Ibid., 13. 81. Adelung, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 9. 82. Adelung, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 10–11. 3. The Search for the Historical Plato

1. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650 –1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 359–374.

Notes to Pages 107–111

317

2. Bernard Fontenelle, Of the Origin of Fables, in The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680–1860, trans. Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 11. 3. Ibid., 15–16. 4. Ibid., 13, 18. 5. Christian Gottlob Heyne, ed., Apollodori Atheniensis Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1803), 2, xvi [hereafter, Apollodorus]. Martin Gottfried Hermann, Handbuch der Mythologie aus Homer und Hesiod (Berlin and Stettin: Fr. Nicolai, 1787), ii. See generally Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820, trans. Brigitte Szabó-Bechstein (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995), 267–299; Gioachino Chiarini, “Ch. G. Heyne e gli inizi dello studio scientifico della mitologia,” Lares 55 (1989): 317–331; Friedrich Leo, “Heyne,” in Festschrift zur Feier des hundertfünfzigjährigen Bestehens der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen: Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Klasse (Berlin: Weidmann, 1901), 153–234. 6. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, 2nd ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), 53. 7. “Temporum mythicorum memoria a corruptelis nonnullis vindicata” (originally 1763), revised in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis, vol. 8 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1787), 6. 8. Heyne, Apollodorus, vol. 2, xvii. 9. C. G. Heyne, “Proluduntur nonnulla ad quaestionem de caussis fabularum seu mythorum veterum physicis,” in Opuscula academica collecta et animadversionibus locupletata, vol. 1 (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1785), 195 [hereafter, Heyne, “De caussis fabularum seu mythorum physicis”]. This lecture was originally presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in 1763, and Heyne revised and published it for the first time in 1785. There is no record of what he said (or failed to say) in that early lecture, before he revised it to accord with the new cultural history emerging in the 1780s. 10. Heyne, “De caussis fabularum seu mythorum physicis,” 191. 11. This and the preceding quotation are from ibid., 189. 12. “Percussus sit animus adspectu, auditu vel tactu rei insolitae, nondum visae, aut vtilitate aliqua vel noxa nondum percepta probatae.” Heyne, “De caussis fabularum seu mythorum physicis,” 199. 13. “In hominibus itaque rudibus et modo a siluestri vita progressis vix cogitatio vllius rei esse potest nisi quae sub sensus cadat.” Heyne, “De caussis fabularum seu mythorum physicis,” 190. 14. “Primos in orbe deos fecit timor.” Heyne, “De caussis fabularum seu mythorum physicis,” 196. Compare also Vico, The New Science of Gi-

318

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

Notes to Pages 111–117

ambattista Vico, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), 118–119, who considered fear and ignorance to be the basis of poetic wisdom. Vico was unknown to the Germans until the late 1780s. Heyne, “Vita antiquissimorum hominum Graeciae ex ferorum et barbarorum populorum comparatione illustrata. Commentatio I. Ad commendandum nouum Prorectorem Godofr. Less d. 2. Julii 1779,” in Opuscula academica collecta et animadversionibus locupletata, vol. 3 (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1788), 11. Heyne, “De caussis fabularum et mytharum physicis,” 196. Ibid., 193, 204. Heyne, “Vita antiquissimorum hominum,” 14. Cf. also Heyne, “De caussis fabularum et mytharum.” Aeschylus, Fragment 30 (Heliades) in Die Tragödien und Fragmente, ed. F. Stoessl (Zurich: Artemis, 1952), 423; trans. Michael Grant, Myths of the Greeks and Romans (New York: Mentor, 1962), 104. Heyne, “Sermonis mythici seu symbolici interpretatio ad caussas et rationes ductasque inde regulas revocata” (1807) in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis, vol. 16 (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1808), 285–323. Heyne, “De caussis fabularum et mytharum physicis,” 187. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 204. Heyne, Apollodorus, vol. 2, xviii. Ibid., xvi. Homeri hymnus in Cererem, ed. David Ruhnken (Leyden: Luchtmans, 1780; 2nd ed., 1781). They were found by C. F. Matthaei, an Ernesti student. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Geschichte der Philologie, vol. 1, part 1 of Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, ed. A. Gercke and E. Norden (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1921), 1. Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7–16, 336–337. Also Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). Friedrich Creuzer and Martin Gottfried Hermann, Briefe über Homer und Hesiodos, vorzüglich über die Theogonie (Heidelberg: Oswald, 1818); M. Gottfried Hermann, Über das Wesen und die Behandlung der Mythologie: Ein Brief an Herrn Hofrat Creuzer (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1819). J. J. Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke (Friedrichstadt: Hagenmüller, 1755), §1; Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Walther, 1764), bk. 1; here bk. 3, ch. 3, §1.

Notes to Pages 118–126

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

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Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, bk. 3, ch. 3, §1. Ibid., bk. 4, ch. 2, §27. Ibid., bk. 3, ch. 3, §1. Ibid., bk. 2, ch. 5, §§14, 17. C. G. Heyne, “Priscae artis opera ex epigrammatius graecis partim eruta partim illustrata; nunc quidem antiquiorum operum memorabilia: Commentation II,” Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis, vol. 10 (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1791), 106; Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, bk. 5, ch. 2, §3. See Hermann Bräuning-Oktavio, Christian Gottlob Heynes Vorlesungen über die Kunst der Antike und ihr Einfluss auf Johann Heinrich Merck, Herder und Goethe (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig, 1971). Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, bk. 4, ch. 2, §18. Ibid., bk. 4, ch. 2, §§21, 32; see §§22–26, a manifesto defining beauty. Ibid., bk. 4, ch. 2, §28. Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 5th ed., vol. 1 (Cologne: Phaidon, 1956), 431–438. Daniel Wyttenbach, Vita Davidis Ruhnkenii (Amsterdam and Leiden: Hengst and Honkoop, 1799); reprinted with Ruhnken’s Elogium Tiberii Hemsterhusii, ed. J. T. Bergman (Leiden: Luchtmans and Amsterdam: Hengst, 1824). Ammonii De differentia adfinium vocabulorum, ed. L. C. Valckenaer (Leyden: Luzac, 1739); Moeridis Atticistae Lexicon Atticum, ed. Johann Pierson (Leyden: Eyk and Pecker, 1759); Thomae Magistri Ecloga vocum Atticarum, ed. Johann Stephan Bernard (Leyden: Eyk and Pecker, 1757); Gregorii Corinthi et aliorum grammaticorum libri de dialectis linguae Graecae, ed. Gisbert Koen (Leyden: Eyk and Pecker, 1766). Timaei Sophisti Lexicon vocum Platonicarum, ed. David Ruhnken (Leyden: Luchtmans, 1754). Bernard de Montfaucon’s edition was in Bibliotheca Coisliniana, olim Segueriana (Paris: L. Guérin and C. Robustel, 1715). J. J. Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1742–1744). See E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences, 1974), 57–61. Anthony T. Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986). John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 3 (New York: Hafner, 1958), 7–8; Friedrich Boehme, Die formale Bildung des Intellekts in der Unterrichtslehre des aufsteigenden Neuhumanismus (Gesner, Ernesti, Heyne), dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1912 (Leipzig: Reichardt, 1912). J. A. Ernesti, ed., Marci Tulii Ciceroni Opera omnia . . . , 6 vols. (Halle: Orphanotropheum, 1737–1739, reprinted through 1831). Also J. A.

320

47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Notes to Pages 127–131

Ernesti, ed., Clavis Ciceroniana (Leipzig: Martin, 1739), a concordance to Cicero; and Index latinitatis philologico criticus in opera Ciceronis auctior et emendatus (Zweibrücken: Ducali, 1787). Cf. Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 1350–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 181. J. M. Gesner, Index Etymologicus Latinatitis (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1749), a beginner’s dictionary successful enough to be translated into French; and Linguae et eruditionis latinae thesaurus, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1749), a tool for scholars adapted from Faber’s seventeenth-century Thesaurus eruditionis scholasticae, which he had edited for republication in 1726. A. H. L. Heeren, Christian Gottlob Heyne: Biographisch dargestellt (Göttingen: J. F. Röwer, 1813), 251–253. Heyne, Vorrede to Hermann, Handbuch der Mythologie, iv–vii. Heyne also tried to use philology to enhance the aesthetic appreciation of classical texts, which was central to his activities as a teacher and editor. He especially had in mind the more sophisticated Virgil, who was less important as a historical witness than as a model poet for neoclassical Latin. See Wolf-Hartmut Friedrich, “Heyne als Philologe,” in Der Vormann der Georgia Augusta: Christian Gottlob Heyne zum 250. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980). On the pedagogical goals of classical philology in the nineteenth century, see Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus. Ibid., x. Heeren, C. G. Heyne, 255. J. G. Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vol. 14 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877), 97; cited after Robert S. Leventhal, The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750–1800 (New York: De Gruyter, 1994), 237. But see Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 273–274. Heyne, Apollodorus, I.vii. C. G. Heyne, review of Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London: Wood, 1769), in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeige (1770), Stück 32; reprinted as the preface to the German translation of Wood, Versuch über das Originalgenie des Homers (Frankfurt a.M.: Andreas, 1773), 8. Heyne, Apollodorus, 1, vii. Heyne, “Vita antiquissimorum hominum,” 15. Heyne, “De caussis fabularum et mytharum physicis,” 205. Ibid., 200. Ibid.; drawing on Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétisches, ou parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Negritie (Paris, 1760).

Notes to Pages 131–142

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

321

Heyne, “Vita antiquissimorum hominum,” 14. Heyne, “De caussis fabularum et mytharum physicis,” 203. Heyne, “Vita antiquissimorum hominum,” 7–15. “But barbarians who have not made such linguistic developments have notions of neither divine nature nor divine cult that can be assimilated in any way to the notions we have. There has been an endless dispute among ancients and moderns concerning the possibilities of translating from our genius to theirs those notions among the wild and barbarous nations. It must be seen in the first place whether those notions of divine nature and divine cult truly exist in the minds of those men, and if so, then to what extent.” Heyne, “Vita antiquissimorum hominum,” 8. Even the ancients confused the origin of ideas, said Heyne, “De caussis fabularum et mytharum physicis,” 198, citing Cicero’s De natura deorum. J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785), bk. 8, ch. 2, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. 13 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1887), 300–301. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking), xxii. Herder, “Travel Journal” (1769), in Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vol. 4, 472; cited after Berlin, Vico and Herder, 210–211. Berlin, Vico and Herder, 207. 4. The Search for the Historical Homer

1. Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart (London: Wood, 1753), 2 (unpaginated preface). See also Robert Wood, The Ruins of Baalbec (London: Wood, 1757). 2. Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London: Wood, 1769), 146. 3. Ibid., 153. 4. Ibid., 150. 5. Ibid., 155. 6. Ibid., 161. 7. Ibid., 163. 8. Ibid., 158. 9. Ibid., 40–41. 10. R. Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse on Freethinking (London: Morphew, 1713), cited after Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 1300–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 148, 156, 158. 11. Wood, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, 66.

322

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Notes to Pages 143–148

Ibid., 280. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 283. Ibid. A. H. L. Heeren, Christian Gottlob Heyne: Biographisch dargestellt (Göttingen: Röwer, 1813), 212. C. G. Heyne, review of Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeige, 1770, Stück 32; reprinted in Wood, Versuch über das Originalgenie des Homers, trans. C. F. Michaelis (Frankfurt a.M.: Andreas, 1773), 8–9. J. G. Herder, “Homer and Ossian,” Die Hören, ed. F. Schiller (1795), issue 10, pp. 86–107; in Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vol. 18 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883), 446–462. George Gregory (1787) in a note to his translation of Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (London: Chadwick, 1847), 53. J. G. Herder, “Ueber den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen” (1764) in Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877), 2. [A. Y. Goguet], De l’origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences; et de leurs progrès chez les anciens peuples, 3 vols. (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1758), vol. 2, bk. 1, ch. 3, p. 9. Hebrews 9:18–20 (NIV). Compare Exodus 24:4–8. The authorship of Hebrews is uncertain. “Paul” functions as a place-holder much like “Homer.” On Goguet see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37–64; also Nathaniel Wolloch, “ ‘Facts or Conjectures’: Antoine-Yves Goguet’s Historiography,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 429–449. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. de Sélincourt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 1.74. Goguet, De l’origine, vol. 2, bk. 1, ch. 3, pp. 9–10, citing Frezier, Relation du Voyage de la Mer du Sud, dans les Années 1712–1714 (Amsterdam, 1717), 73. Goguet, De l’origine, vol. 1, p. 4. The other sources included Juvenal, Macrobius, Martin’s Histoire de la Chine, Lettres Edificantes, a History of the Incas, Acosta’s History of the West Indies, and a lecture in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions. Ibid. Other sources included Le Blanc’s Voyage, Nouvelle relationes de la France equinox, Histoire général des voyageurs, and Recueil des voyages au nord. “Eloge de Monsieur Fugere,” Journal des Sçavans, August 1758, edition de Paris, 255–262; “Eloge de Monseiur Goguet,” Journal des Sçavans, August 1758, 263–268.

Notes to Pages 148–152

323

27. Nouvelle biographie générale, ed. J. C. F. Hoefer, vol. 21 (Paris: Didot, 1857), s.v. “Goguet.” 28. Archives biographiques française (Paris, 1886), s.v. “Goguet.” 29. Jean Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain dans la pensée française de Fontenelle à Condorcet (Strasbourg: Klincksieck, 1977), 508–509. 30. Joseph Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages américains comparée aux moeurs des premiers temps, 2 vols. (Paris: Saugrain l’aîné, 1724). 31. Antoine, abbé Banier, L’explication historique des fables (Paris: LeBreton, 1715); François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, Conjectures academiques ou Dissertation sur l’Iliad (Paris: Fournier, 1716). 32. Goguet, De l’origine, vol. 1, xxi. 33. Joseph-Marie Degérando, The Observation of Savage Peoples, trans. F. C. T. Moore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 63. 34. Histoire littéraire de la France, où l’on traite de l’origine et du progrès, de la décadence et du rétablissement des sciences parmi les Galois et parmi les François . . . , 12 vols. (Paris: [various publishers], 1733–1763). The Maurists were a congregation of Benedictine monks who produced some of the most erudite works in the history of European scholarship. Bernard de Montfaucon, who was mentioned in connection with David Ruhnken in the Chapter 3, was a Maurist. 35. A. F. Bourreau-Deslandres, Histoire critique de la philosophie, ou l’on traite de son origine, progrès, et des diverses Revolutions qui lui sont arrivées jusqu’à notre temps, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Changuion, 1737), on whom see L. Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, 144–152. For Fontenelle see Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain, 36–46; and R. Lenoir, Les historiens de l’esprit humain. Fontanelle, Marivaux, Lord Bolingbroke, Vauvenargues, La Mettrie (Paris, 1926), 1–34. Voltaire’s statement cited after Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain, 307. 36. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1985), 565–566; cited after J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 182. 37. A. F. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1993), 200n. 38. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, vol. 3 of Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 83. 39. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), 169; cited after David Carrithers, “Montesquieu’s Philosophy of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1986): 65. 40. Montesquieu, Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, 108; cited after Carrithers, “Montesquieu’s Philosophy of History,” 67.

324

Notes to Pages 152–157

41. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), bk. 10, ch. 13. 42. Ibid., bk. 10, ch. 14. 43. Ibid., bk. 19, ch. 4. 44. Montesquieu, Pensées et fragments inédits, ed. Gaston de Montesquieu, vol. 2 (Bordeaux: Gounouilhou, 1901), 70; trans. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 160. 45. Montesquieu, De la politique, in Melanges inédites de Montesquieu, ed. Gaston de Montesquieu (Bordeaux: Gounouilhou, 1892), 160–161; trans. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, 161–162. 46. Goguet, De l’origine, vol. 1, xxi. 47. Blandine Kriegel, L’histoire à l’Age classique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), vol. 3, Les académies de l’histoire, 53–139, 221–264. 48. Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Saint-Palaye (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). 49. Kriegel, L’histoire à l’Age classique, vol. 2, La défaite de l’érudition, 280–306. Also Chantal Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie: Étude sur la connaissance historique à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 23, 29; and J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chs. 6–8. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 219–250, presents the Enlightenment Republic of Letters as an unfortunate decline from its scholarly predecessor, substituting polite manners and “talk about nothing” for erudition. 50. Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 51. “Eloge de Monseiur Goguet,” Journal des Sçavans, 268. 52. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contribution to the Historical Method,” in Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 42. 53. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Montesquieu in Deutschland,” in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), 10. 54. Justus Möser to Thomas Abbt, June 1764. Cited after Vierhaus, “Montesquieu in Deutschland,” 16. 55. Hans Aarsleff, “Herder’s Cartesian Ursprung vs. Condillac’s Expressivist Essay,” in Language Philosophies and the Language Sciences: A Histor-

Notes to Pages 157–163

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

325

ical Perspective in Honor of Lia Formigari (Münster: Nodus, 1996), 165–179. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 245 n. 78. See also László Kontler, “William Robertson and His German Audience on European and Pan-European Civilizations,” Scottish Historical Review 80 (2001): 63–89. Heeren, Christian Gottlob Heyne, 93. C. Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2nd ed. (Lemgo: Meyer, 1793), 40. Wood, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, 146. Ulrich Im Hof, Isaak Iselin und die Spätaufklärung (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), 87. Isaac Iselin, Ephemeriden der Menschheit oder Bibliothek der Sittenlehre und der Politik, Stuck 11 (Basel: Schweighauser, 1778), pp. 123–24; reprinted in Geschichte der Menschheit (Carlsruhe: C. G. Schmieder, 1784), xiv–xvi. See also Béla Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Mankind (Basel: Schwabe, 2006), 298–299; and Annette Meyer, Von der Wahrheit zur Wahrscheinlichkeit: Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in der schottischen und deutschen Aufklärung, dissertation, University of Cologne, 2005. Isaac Iselin, Philosophische Muthmaßungen über die Geschichte der Menschheit, 1st ed. (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: J. H. Harscher, 1764), bk. I, Hauptstück 24 (vol. 1, p. 38 in 1st ed.). The sentence is less pithy in later editions. Later editions were entitled simply Isaak Iselin über die Geschichte der Menschheit. Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétisches, ou parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Negritie (Paris, 1760); Jens Kraft, Kort Fortälning af de Vilde Folks fornemmeste Indretninger, Skikke og Meniger til Oplysning af det menneskeliges Oprindelse og Fremgang i Almindelighed (Sorøe, 1760), translated as Die Sitten der Wilden: Zur Aufklärung des Ursprungs und Aufnahme der Menschheit (Copenhagen: Mumm, 1766). See Im Hof, Isaak Iselin und die Spätaufklärung, 87–88. 5. The Search for the Historical Moses

1. Johann August Ernesti, Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1761). 2. Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten, Ausführlicher Vortrag der Biblischen Hermeneutik (Halle, 1742; new editions in 1745 and 1759, and re-edited in 1769 by J. C. Bertram).

326

Notes to Pages 163–172

3. Johann Salomo Semler, Lebensbeschreibung (Halle, 1781–1782), 2:121–122. 4. Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment, ed. Abraham Anderson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). 5. Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglott Bible (1653–67),” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 463–482. 6. Semler, Lebensbeschreibung, 2:123. Johann Gottlieb Carpzov, Introductio ad libros canonicos bibliorum Veteris Testamentis, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Lankisch, 1721); and Critica sacra Veteris Testamenti, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Martin, 1728). 7. Semler, Lebensbeschreibung, 2:122. 8. Ibid., 2:125. 9. Ibid., 2:123. 10. Ibid., 2:127. 11. Johann Philipp Gabler, ed., Johann Gottfried Eichhorns Urgeschichte, vol. 1 (Altdorf and Nürnberg: Monath und Kußler, 1790), v–vi. “Urgeschichte” first appeared in Eichhorn’s Repertorium für Biblische und Morgenländische Litteratur 5:4 (1779): 129–256. Gabler studied under Eichhorn at Jena in the late 1770s. From 1781 to 1783, he went to Göttingen for further study; then he became professor at Altdorf. On Eichhorn see especially Giuseppe D’Alessandro, L’illuminismo dimenticato: Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752 –1827) e il suo tempo (Naples: Liguori, 2000). On the relationship among Heyne, Herder, and Eichhorn, see Christian Hartlich and Walter Sachs, Der Ursprung des Mythosbegriffes in der modernen Bibelwissenschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1952), 172–175. 12. Eichhorn, Urgeschichte, Gabler ed., 1:3–4, 5. 13. Ibid., 2:21–24. 14. Jean Astruc, Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse (Brussels: Fricx, 1753), 308–314. The labels J [ Jehovah Elohim] and E [Elohim] were given by Eichhorn, although the “E” document was relabeled “P,” a Priestly document, in Wellhausen’s system. 15. Astruc, Conjectures sur la Genèse, 316–332. 16. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament (Leipzig: Weidmann & Reich, 1780–1783), §§408, 409, 411, 416. 17. Astruc, Conjectures sur la Genèse, 315. 18. Ibid., 312, 359. 19. Ibid., 378–430. 20. Ibid., 431. 21. Ibid., 452.

Notes to Pages 173–179

327

22. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §412. 23. George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1876). See C. W. Ceram [Kurt W. Marek], Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archeology, trans. E. B. Garside and Sophie Wilkins, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), ch. 22. 24. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §413. 25. Ibid., §418. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., §12. 28. Ibid., §§406a, 413. 29. Eichhorn, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Rosenbusch, 1823–1824), 3:19. 30. “Mythen sind überhaupt Sagen der alten Welt in der damaligen sinnlichen Denkart und Sprache.” Eichhorn, Urgeschichte, Gabler ed., 2:482. 31. Eichhorn, Urgeschichte, Gabler ed., 2:482. 32. Gabler commenting on Eichhorn’s Urgeschichte, 2:481–485. The “people” Gabler had in mind was Gottfried Less, for whose inauguration as prorector of the University of Göttingen Heyne had written the lecture “Vita antiquissimorum hominum Graeciae ex ferorum et barbarorum populorum comparatione illustrata.” Gabler scolded Less for continuing to confuse fictitious fables with mythical Volkssagen, years after Heyne had pointed out the difference between the two. 33. Martin Gottfried Hermann, Handbuch der Mythologie aus Homer und Hesiod, als Grundlage zu einer richtigern Fabellehre des Alterthums mit erläuterenden Anmerkungen begleitet (Berlin and Stettin: Fr. Nicolai, 1787). 34. Gabler commenting on Eichhorn’s Urgeschichte, 2:260–265. 35. J. G. Eichhorn, Einleitungen ins AT, 1st ed., 1:431, “Wie man die Genesis lesen muß.” 36. De sacra poesie Hebraeorum praelectiones, ed. J. D. Michaelis, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1770). 37. Exodus 15:20–21. 38. Nehemiah 12:24, 31, 38, 40; Ezra 3:11. 39. Pliny, Letters and Panegyricus, vol. 2, trans. Betty Radice, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), bk. 10, Ep. 96, p. 289; Isaiah 6:3. 40. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (London: Chadwick, 1847), lecture 4, p. 50. 41. Ibid., lecture 2, p. 34. 42. Lowth, De sacra poesie Hebraeorum praelectiones, ed. Michaelis, p. 34 n. 3. 43. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, lecture 4, p. 51.

328

Notes to Pages 180–186

44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 52. 46. De sacra poesie Hebraeorum praelectiones, ed. J. D. Michaelis (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1770), 73 n. 10. 47. Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Litteratur, 18 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1777–1786), method explained in introduction to vol. 1. 48. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Weidmann und Reich, 1787), preface. 49. Litterärgeschichte, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Rosenbusch, 1814), 1070. 50. J. D. Michaelis, Deutsche Ubersetzung des Alten Testaments, mit Anmerkungen für Ungelehrte, 13 vols. (Göttingen, 1769–1783). On his interpretation of ancient “Sayings,” see Valerio Verra, Mito, rivelazione e filosofia in J. G. Herder e nel suo tempo (Milan: Marzorati, 1966). See also Eichhorn’s obituary of Michaelis in Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Litteratur, 3 (1791): 827–906; and Michaelis’s autobiography, Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst abgefaßt, mit Anmerkungen von J. M. Hassencamp. Nebst Bemerkungen über dessen litterarischen Charakter von Eichhorn, Schulz und dem Elogium von Heyne (Rinteln and Leipzig, 1793). 51. Mosaisches Recht, 6 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: J. G. Garbe, 1770–1775). 52. Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1981): 101–129; also F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans. Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 53. See above, Chapter 2, n. 79. 54. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §10. 55. Ibid., §11. 56. Ibid., §10. 57. Josephus, Contra Apion, 1.8.38–46, esp. 40 in The Works of Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987), 776; Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §41. 58. The case was different for “autograph” manuscripts, that is, manuscripts created when the author himself or herself put pen to paper. Even here one had to be careful when referring to the original text, as it was common practice for literate authors to produce multiple copies of the manuscript. Between these manuscripts that issued from the author’s own pen there could be variants. In a sense, the question of autograph was moot because no autograph copies existed, nor did Eichhorn know when they were lost. 59. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §61.

Notes to Pages 187–195

329

60. Ibid., §5. 61. Eichhorn cites Pliny, Natural History, bk. 13, ch. 26. Here Pliny noted an extant autograph document of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, then almost two hundred years old, which Pliny said was remarkable. In Chapter 27 Pliny said that books of Numa Pompilius had been preserved on papyrus for 535 years, but those were housed in a coffer bound to a stone with waxed cords and covered with citrus leaves. That is, the papyrus survived that long only due to great effort. There is nothing in Pliny about the lifespan of a well-used volume. How did Eichhorn read his Pliny? 62. Probably tax tariffs from a.d. 137. See J. K. Stark, Personal Names in the Palmyran Inscriptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Efrem Yildiz, “The Aramaic Language and Its Classification,” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 14 (2000): 36. 63. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §67. It had been my intention to insert here a picture of a Hasmonean coin, owned in the early nineteenth century by a certain Prince Simon, reproduced in Eichhorn’s fourth edition. Unfortunately the plate in the Göttingen library exemplar, which I intended to reproduce here, has been cut out of the volume with a razor blade. 64. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §140. 65. Ibid., §81. 66. Ibid., §114. 67. Ibid., §154. 68. Ibid., §68: Comparison of the Chaldean Paraphrase “mit unserem punctirten Masorethischen Text.” 69. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins AT, §70. 70. Ibid., §§75, 77. 71. Ibid., §157. 72. See Michael C. Carhart, “Historia Literaria and Cultural History,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 194–195, 198–199. 6. The Sociology of Ancient History

1. J. G. H. Feder, preface to C. Meiners, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1811), vi. 2. C. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, rev. ed. (Tübingen: Cotta, 1791), 1:1–12. 3. Andreas Gestrich, “Johann Jakob Moser als politischer Gefangener,” in Andreas Gestrich and Rainer Lächele, eds., Johann Jakob Moser: Politiker,

330

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Notes to Pages 195–201

Pietist, Publizist (Karlsruhe: Braun, 2002), 41–56; Mack Walker, Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Reinhard Rürup, Johann Jakob Moser: Pietismus und Reform (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965). Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 1:12. My thanks to Frau Bärbel Mund of the Manuscripts and Early Imprints collection at the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek for confirming the location of the Bible. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 1:12. “Johann Jakob Moser,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 22 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot 1885), 379. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 1:12. “Ein Schreiben an Herzog Karl Eugen von Württemberg” (1765) in Reinhard Rürup, Johann Jakob Moser, Appendix 4, 246–247. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 1:14. Ibid., 1:15. Ibid., 1:26. Ibid., 1:22. C. Meiners, Histoire de l’origine, des progrès et de la décadence des sciences dans la Grèce, trans. Jean-Charles Laveaux (Paris: Laveaux, 1798). John Gillies, The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies, and Conquests; from the Earliest Accounts till the Division of the Macedonian Empire in the East, 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1786), viii. E. S. Schaffer, Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 29. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315; Peter N. Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia Philosophia Critica, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1742–1744). Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom, 2 vols. (Lemgo: Meyer, 1781–1782), 2:viii–ix. Constance Blackwell, “Thales Philosophus: The Beginning of Philosophy as a Discipline,” in D. R. Kelley, ed., History and the Disciplines (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 61–82. E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences, 1974), 60. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. Oswyn Murray, trans. Sheila Stern (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

Notes to Pages 201–206

331

23. C. Meiners, “Oratio de philosophia Ciceronis, eiusque in universam philosophiam meritis,” in Vermischte philosophische Schriften, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Weygand, 1775), 299. 24. Conyers Middleton, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 2 vols. (Dublin: John Smith, 1741), 1:xix. 25. Ibid., 1:xxi. 26. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1782), 9. 27. J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–50; and Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 105–107. 28. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, 107. 29. Ibid. 30. Condorcet, Equisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, in vol. 6 of Oeuvres (1913), 195–196; trans. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 75. 31. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 75–95. 32. Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 33. Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Amsterdam: Desbordes, 1734); Antoine Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (Paris: Court de Gébelin, 1773–1782); Jean Antoine Rigoley de Juvigny, De la décadence des lettres et des moeurs, depuis les Grecs et les Romains jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Mérigot le jeune, 1787); Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet, Histoire des révolutions de l’empire Roman: pour servir de suite à celle des révolutions de la République, 2 vols. (Paris: Desaint, 1766). 34. Otto of Freising, Chronicon seu Historia de duabus civitatibus, ed. Adolf Hofmeister, Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, vol. 45 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1912). William McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); Walter Rehm, Der Untergang Roms im abendländischen Denken (Leipzig, 1930; reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966). 35. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 151–235, 315–316.

332

Notes to Pages 206–208

36. Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols. (London: Strahan, 1783, 2nd ed., 1793). 37. Constantin François de Chassebeuf Volney, Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), “Paris Translation” (1802) (New York: Twentieth-Century Publishing Co., 1890), ch. 2. Cf. Volney, Leçons d’histoire (Paris: Brosson, 1795); and Donald R. Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 36–38. 38. C. Meiners, Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 4 (Hanover: Helwing, 1800). 39. Meiners, Wissenschaften in Griechenland, 2:i–iv. 40. C. Meiners, Geschichte des Luxus der Athenienser von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf den Tod Philipps von Makedonien (Lemgo: Meyer, 1782). He began work on his histories of Greece and Rome simultaneously in the summer of 1776, knowing they would require several years to complete. See Meiners, Vermischte philosophische Schriften, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Weygand, 1776), preface. 41. C. Meiners, Beytrag zur Geschichte der Denkart der ersten Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt, in einigen Betrachtungen über die Neu-platonische Philosophie (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782); C. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782); C. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten, der Wissenschaften, und Sprache der Römer in den ersten Jahrhunderten nach Christi Geburt, als Einleitung zu Gibbons Geschichte der Abnahme und des Falls des Römischen Reiches (Vienna and Leipzig: Stahel, 1791). 42. C. Meiners, Historische Vergleichung der Sitten, und Verfassungen, der Gesetze, und Gewerbe, des Handels, und der Religion, der Wissenschaften, und Lehranstalten des Mittelalters mit denen unsers Jahrhunderts in Rücksicht auf die Vortheile, und Nachtheile der Aufklärung, 3 vols. (Hanover: Helwing, 1793–1794). 43. C. Meiners, Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts, 4 vols. (Hanover: Helwing, 1788–1800); translated as History of the Female Sex, Comprising a View of the Habits, Manners, and Influence of Women, among all Nations, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, trans. Frederick Shoberl, 4 vols. (London: Colburn, 1808); C. Meiners, Lebensbeschreibung berühmter Männer aus den Zeiten der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften, 3 vols. (Zurich: Orell, Gessner und Füssli, 1795–1797); C. Meiners, Leben Ulrichs von Hutten (Zurich: Orell, Gessner und Füssli, 1797). 44. Martin Martin, Voyage to St. Kilda, the Remotest of all the Hebrides, or Western Isles of Scotland (London: Brown and Goodman, 1698). St. Kilda was abandoned by its Gaelic-speaking inhabitants in 1930 and is now deserted.

Notes to Pages 208–215

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45. John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London: Davies, 1782). Now widely available in Penguin and Oxford editions. 46. Meiners, Luxus der Athenienser, 5. 47. Ibid., 12. 48. Ibid., 34–36. 49. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 103 (Chapter 3). 50. C. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782), 16. 51. Ibid., 23, citing Lucan’s description of the effect of growing wealth on the Romans. 52. See Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 231–232. 53. C. Meiners, review of Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols. (London, 1783) in Göttingische Anzeingen von gelehrten Sachen (1784), vol. 2, 892–893. Cited after Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246. 54. C. G. Heyne, review of Adam Ferguson, Geschichte des Fortgangs und Untergangs der Römischen Republik, trans. C. D. Beck (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1784) in Göttingische Anzeingen von gelehrten Sachen (1785), vol. 1, 630. Cited after Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, 246. 55. A. H. L. Heeren, Christian Gottlob Heyne: Biographisch dargestellt (Göttingen: J. F. Röwer, 1813), 40, 44, 56. 56. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer, 32–33. See G. N. Clark’s appendix in War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) on the idea that wealth and luxury create vice, and vice poverty. 57. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer, 127–128. 58. Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782); Beytrag zur Geschichte der Denkart der ersten Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt, in einigen Betrachtungen über die NeuPlatonische Philosophie (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782); Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten, der Wissenschaften und Sprache der Römer in den ersten Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt (commissioned as an introduction to the German translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall) (Vienna and Leipzig: Stahel, 1791). 59. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 1:51–165. 60. Ibid., 2:214–215.

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Notes to Pages 216–227

61. Ibid., 2:216–218. 62. Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959); Jane Ceitac, Voltaire et l’affaire des natifs (Geneva: Droz, 1956). 63. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776 –1789, vol. 2, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 464 n. 21. 64. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 2:221. 65. Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, 471. 66. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 2:227. 67. Ibid., 2:250. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 2:250–262. 70. Ibid., 2:292. 71. Ibid., 2:296. 72. Ibid., 2:297. 73. Friedrich Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781, 12 vols. (Berlin and Stettin: Nicolai, 1783–1796), here vol. 4, 926–928. 7. Three Anthropologies

1. John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, vol. 1 (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1773), 410–489. 2. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage de la frégate la Boudeuse et de la flute l’ Etoile autour du monde (1771) (Paris: Maspero, 1981), 120–147. 3. Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772, pub. 1792) in Oeuvres de Diderot, vol. 2 (Paris: Garniers, 1875), 212. 4. Bougainville, Voyage, 161–170. 5. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, vol. 3, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776 –1780 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1968), lxxxvii–lxxxviii. 6. “I think this shows how much more nature can do without art, than art with all her refinement unassisted by nature,” she added. Frances Burney to Samuel Crisp, December 1, 1774, in The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768 –1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis (London: Bell, 1907), vol. 1, 334, 336–337. Also in The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 2, 1774–1778, ed. Lars E. Troide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 7. Beaglehole, in Cook, 3:lxxxviii.

Notes to Pages 227–230

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8. Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 3:241 (November 2, 1777). 9. Briefe über die Schweiz, 4 vols. (Berlin: Spener, 1791); Kleinere Länder- und Reisebeschreibungen, 3 vols. (Berlin: Haud und Spener, 1794–1801). Other accounts of his travels, which he never published, remain in the Historisches Gebäude of the Staats- und Universität Bibliothek, Göttingen. See also the compilation by Johann Beckmann, Litteratur der älteren Reisebeschreibungen, 2 vols. in 7 parts (Göttingen: Röwer, 1807–1810). See Hans Erich Bödeker, “Reisebeschreibungen im historischen Diskurs der Aufklärung,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Bödeker et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986), 276–298. 10. Friedrich Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unterschiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” in Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen: Eine Vorlesungsreihe, ed. Hartmut Boockmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), 39. On Meiners’s Geschichte der Menschheit, see Sabine Vetter, Wissenschaftlicher Reduktionismus und die Rassentheorie von Christoph Meiners: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der verlorenen Metaphysik in der Anthropologie (Aachen: Mainz, 1997); Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995), 110–121; Frank W. P. Dougherty, “Christoph Meiners und Johann Friedrich Blumenbach im Streit um den Begriff der Menschenrasse,” in Die Natur des Menschen: Probleme der Physischen Anthropologie und Rassenkunde, ed. Gunter Mann and Franz Dumont (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1990); Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, “Christoph Meiners et Joseph-Marie de Gérando: un chapitre du comparatisme anthropologique,” in L’Homme des Lumières et la découverte de l’autre: Etudes sur le XVIIe siècle, ed. D. Droixhe and P. P. Gossiaux (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1986); and Rupp-Eisenreich, “Des choses occultes en histoire des sciences humaines: Le destin de la ‘science nouvelle’ de Christophe Meiners,” L’Ethnographie 90 (1983): 131–183; Alexander Ihle, Christoph Meiners und die Völkerkunde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1931). 11. Meiners, “Ueber die Natur der Afrikanischen Neger, und die davon abhangende Befreyung, oder Einschränkung der Schwarzen,” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 6 (1790): 394–399. 12. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997) is a recent reformulation of the environmental thesis. 13. For example, The Histories of Polybius, vol. 1, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1962), IV. 21, p. 297.

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Notes to Pages 232–236

14. Oeuvres complètes de Buffon, 2nd ed., ed. Bernard Germain Etienne, Comte de Lacépède, vol. 10 (Paris: Rapet, 1819), 371. 15. William Falconer, Remarks on the Influence of Climate, Situation, Nature of Country, Population, Nature of Food, and Way of Life on the Disposition and Temper, Manners and Behaviour, Intellects, Laws and Customs, Form of Government, and Religion, of Mankind (London: Dilly, 1781), 33. 16. Ibid., 586. 17. Ibid., 186, 508–541. 18. Ibid., 48. 19. Ibid., 510. Luxury in fact reversed their character (see p. 518). 20. A. F. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: W. Creech; and London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1807; reprinted London: Routledge, 1993), 160. 21. Henry Home (Lord Kames), Sketches of the History of Man, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: W. Creech; and London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1774; reprinted London: Routledge, 1993), 28. 22. Ibid., I, 22. 23. Ibid., 23, 73, 75. 24. Lotter, “Christoph Meiners,” 42. 25. Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 10–11. Lowie placed Gustav Klemm in second place, followed by Theodore Waitz, “a worthy fore-runner of Boas.” T. K. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology (London: Duckworth, 1935), 39–40: “Christoph Meiners may be said to have laid the foundation of modern comparative ethnology in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit.” 26. Rudolf Martin, Anthropologie als Wissenschaft und Lehrfach ( Jena: Fischer, 1901). 27. For a partial overview, see Claude Blanckaert, “L’anthropologie en France: Le mot et l’histoire (XVIe–XIXe siècle),” Bulletin et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, n.s. 1 (1989): 13–44. The situation was similar for psychology. See Fernando Vidal, Les Sciences de l’âme, XVIe–XVIIIe siécle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006). For the institutional context, see William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 435–452. 28. Otho Casmann, Psychologia anthropologica, sive animae humanae doctrina, vol. 1 (Hanover: Fischer, 1594); vol. 2, Fabrica humani corporis (Hanover: Fischer, 1596). Cf. Magnus Hundt, Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, natura et proprietatibus: De elementis, partibus et membris humani corporis (Leipzig: Wolfgang Monacensis, 1501). See Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die Funktion der Anthropologie in der Kultur des 16. und 17. Jahrhun-

Notes to Pages 236–241

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

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derts” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991), 416–492. Mareta Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts, dissertation, University of Trier, 1975 (Bern and Frankfurt: Lang, 1976). Recent discussions of late-eighteenth-century anthropology include Robert Wokler, “From l’homme physique to l’homme moral and Back: Towards a History of Enlightenment Anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993): 121–138; Paul Ziche, “Anthropologie zwischen Physiologie und Naturphilosophie: Wissenschaftssystematische Aspekte der Fachgebiete Anthropologie und Psychologie um 1800,” in Naturwissenschaften um 1800: Wissenschaftskultur in Jena-Weimar, ed. Olaf Breigbach and Paul Ziche (Weimar: Böhlaus, 2001), 96–106; Temilo van Zantwijk, “Anthropologische Aspekte der ‘philosophischen Konstruktion’ der ‘Naturwissenschaft’ bei Schelling,” in Naturwissenschaften um 1800: Wissenschaftskultur in Jena-Weimar, ed. Olaf Breigbach and Paul Ziche (Weimar: Böhlaus, 2001), 107–122; less directly, Lisbet Koerner, “Daedalus Hyperboreus: Baltic Natural History and Minerology in the Enlightenment,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 389–422. Carsten Zelle, “Vernunftige Ärzte”: Hallescher Psychomediziner und die Anfänge der Anthropologie in der deutschen Frühaufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002). C. Meiners, Revision der Philosophie (Göttingen and Gotha: J. C. Dieterich, 1772), 82. John Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 249–250. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, bk. 9, ch. 1, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. 13 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1887), 345. Christoph Meiners, Untersuchung der Frage: Ob die Neigungen der Menschen natürlich sind und folglich vertilget werden können oder nicht, in Untersuchen über die Neigungen, ed. Leonhard Cochius (Berlin: Haud and Spener, 1769), 187–309. My thanks to Simone Zurbuchen and Johan van der Zande for drawing my attention to this essay. Meiners, Ob die Neigungen der Menschen natürlich sind, 237. Ibid., 210, 244. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, bk. 9, ch. 1. Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Philosophie, Pathologie, Moralphilosophie und Aesthetic (Leipzig: Crusius, 1772); revised as Neue Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise . . . (Leipzig: Crusius, 1790).

338

Notes to Pages 241–244

38. Isaak Iselin, Ueber die Geschichte der Menschheit, 4th ed. (Basel: Schweighauser, 1786), bk. 4, ch. 3, p. 321. 39. Ibid., bk. 4, ch. 9, p. 338. 40. The initial reviews of Iselin’s psychology were harsh, but with modifications over several editions the book was successful enough to outlive its author. See Ulrich Im Hof, Isaak Iselin und die Spätaufklärung (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), 91–92. 41. Iselin, Ueber die Geschichte der Menschheit, bk. 2, ch. 6, p. 136. 42. Ibid., bk. 2, ch. 15, pp. 185–186. 43. Im Hof, Isaak Iselin und die Spätaufklärung, 248, indicates that he had read Hans Egede, Ausführliche und wahrhafte Nachricht vom Anfange und Fortgange der grönländischen Mission, wobey die Beschaffenheit des Landes sowohl, als auch die Gebräuche und Lebens-Arten der Einwohner beschreiben werden. (Hamburg: Brandt, 1740), in 1764 but did not cite it until the second edition of 1768. 44. Mendelssohn, review in Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, vol. 4, Stuck 2, p. 237–238, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5/2. Peter Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 69, is more correct when he says that Iselin was in no way equipped to understand Rousseau’s contradictory vision of humanity and history, much less to refute it. 45. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumieres (Paris: Maspero, 1971), is a study of five philosophes who attempted to construct a universal model of human social development by augmenting gaps in the historical record with observations of modern travelers. That is, it was conjectural history. Robert Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31–52, has argued directly that Scottish conjectural history was in fact a form of anthropology. 46. Volker Hartmann, Die deutsche Kulturgeschichtsschreibung von ihren Anfängen bis Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, dissertation, Marburg, 1971. 47. Fanny Burney, daughter of the most prominent music historian in England, called the whole enterprise of aesthetic education into question when she said that Omai’s polite manner “shows how much more nature can do without art, than art with all her refinement unassisted by nature.” Burney to Crisp, December 1, 1774, in The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 337. 48. C. Meiners, “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien, auf den Ostindischen und Südsee-Inseln, und in den Südländern,” Göttingisches historisches Magazin 7 (1790): 258–306.

Notes to Pages 244–248

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49. Standard procedure in natural history: a hierarchy of minerals, plants, animals, and man. Meiners knew four continents (das feste Land): Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The Südländer (Australia) were known only on the coasts. C. Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2nd ed. (Lemgo: Meyer, 1793), 48. See Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 50. Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, ch. 2. 51. Despite being pushed to the desolate Südländer, the cold and harsh region had left their original color almost unchanged, Meiners noted. See “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien,” 259; Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, 27–28. 52. Meiners believed it necessary to dispel the belief (most recently perpetuated by Grose) that Pygmies inhabited the interior of India. See “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien,” 261. 53. “The climate and the soil of these lands . . . and consequently the food and the modes of living are so different that from these differences in physical cause there must necessarily have occurred specific aberrations in the colors and sizes of the nations.” See “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien,” 261, 262. 54. Animals and plants were also affected by the climate. Even the best Persian horses were so transformed by the climate in Siam and elsewhere that in a few years they looked like donkeys and jackasses. See “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien,” 280. 55. Ibid., 263; citing Thomas Forrest, A Voyage to New Guinea and the Moluccas from Balambangen (London: Scott, 1779), 383. 56. Nor did all Africans make satisfactory slaves. See “Ueber die Natur der africanischen Neger,” Göttingisches historisches Magazin 7 (1790): 385–456. 57. Compare Georg Forster, Voyage Round the World in Georg Forsters Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 1986), 294; also C. Meiners, History of the Female Sex, trans. Fredrick Schoberl, 1:1–6, 70–91. 58. “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien,” 263. 8. A Scientific Revolution

1. The latest installment to the debate over the credibility and interpretation of European travel literature is Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), to which William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), and Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Notes to Pages 249–252

Margaret Iversen, eds., Cannibalism and the Colonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), are allied. Opposed are Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and especially Marshall Sahlins, “Artificially Maintained Controversies: Global Warming and Fijian Cannibalism,” Anthropology Today 19/3 (June 2003): 3–5, who argues on the basis of specific terminology, cultural practices, and even material culture dedicated to the eating of human beings, that actual eyewitness observation of the practice is not necessary to verify that it occurred. Obeyesekere grants that anthropophagia has occurred, but he denies that it carried the meaning given to it by Europeans. The cannibalism debate is an extension of a debate between Sahlins and Obeyesekere over how to read and interpret European and non-European perceptions of each other, including the Hawaiians’ supposed deification of Captain Cook following his violent death at their hands in 1779. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Hiti-Hiti is the form of his name most frequently used in modern scholarship. Georg Forster called him Mahine; J. Reinhold Forster referred to him as “the young Bolabola Man Mahaine or Oi-diddy”; Captain Cook spelled it Oediddee. Journal of William Wales, manuscript in Mitchell Library. Partially transcribed in The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, vol. 2, The Voyage of the Resolution and the Adventure, 1772–1775 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969), 776–869, here 818–819. Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and the Adventure, 1772–1775, ed. Beaglehole, 294. The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster 1772–1775, ed. Michael E. Hoare, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1982), 3:427. On jade, see Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Robert L. Kahn, vol. 1 of Georg Forsters Werke, ed. Gerhard Steiner et al. (Berlin: Akademie, 1968), 299. The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster, 3:427. Forster, Voyage Round the World in Werke, 1:295. Ibid., 1:297. Ibid., 1:296.

Notes to Pages 253–258

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10. Ibid., 1:298. 11. Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and the Adventure, 1772 –1775, 292. 12. Charles Clerke, A log of the Proceedings of, and Occurrences onboard His Magesty’s Ship, Resolution upon a Voyage of Discovery towards the South Pole, Public Record Office, Admiralty 55–103, 8952, November 24, 1773; quoted after Beaglehole in The Journals of Captain James Cook, vol. 2, The Voyage of the Resolution and the Adventure, 1772 –1775, 292 n. 2. 13. The Journals of Captain James Cook, vol. 3, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776–1780, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967), 204 n. 14. James Burney’s Log, Public Record Office, Admiralty 51/4523; manuscript in Alexander Turnbull Library; edited by Beaglehole in The Voyage of the Resolution and the Adventure, 1772 –1775, 749–752. 15. See Michael Hoare, The Tactless Philosopher: Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98) (Melbourne: Hawthorne, 1975). 16. J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974); Richard Hough, Captain James Cook (New York: Norton, 1995); Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York: Walker, 2003). 17. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Krüger, eds., James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas: The Cook/Forster Collection, Göttingen (Munich: Prestel, 1998). 18. Francis E. Cuppage, James Cook and the Conquest of Scurvy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994). 19. Banks and Solander of course had led a team assembled by the Royal Academy of Sciences on Cook’s first voyage, which was more explicitly scientific than the second. Their team was charged with observing the passage of Venus across the sun, and in addition to astronomy they recorded observations on Tahitian flora, fauna, minerals, and society. Despite their work, considerable work remained to be done on Tahitian flora, particularly in the interior regions. 20. Forster, Voyage Round the World, in Werke, 1:178, 182, 198. 21. [Meiners and Gmelin], Zugabe zu den Göttingenischen gelehrten Anzeigen, 1778, 10. Stück (7. März): 148–159. Meiners discussed the cultural aspects of Forster’s work. The naturalist and chemist Johann Friedrich Gmelin commented on the flora and fauna Forster described. His contribution begins on p. 153. The review of vol. 2 is in Zugabe zu den Göttingischen gelehrten Anzeigen, 1778, 12. Stück (21. März): 177–189. Gmelin also reviewed Forster anonymously for the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 34 (1777) (2. Stück, no. 14, “Vermischte Nachrichten”), 588–609.

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Notes to Pages 259–261

22. Meiners, review of Forster, 150. Robert Kahn (G. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in Werke, 1:677) considered Forster’s Voyage “the finest work with regard to style and power of expression to have come out of the three expeditions of Cook and one of the great travelogues written in any tongue or age.” Meiners considered Forster’s Sturm-und-Drang style to be effusive. 23. Meiners, “Ueber die Natur der Völker im südlichen Asien,” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 7 (1790): 263, 287–291. Cook concurred. See James Cook, Tobias Furneaux, and William Hodges, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1777), 2:400. 24. Georg Forster, A Letter to the Right Honorable the Earl of Sandwich (London: Robinson, 1778), reprinted in Forster, Werke, 4:61–90. See Robert L. Kahn, “A History of the Work,” in Forster, Werke, 1:688–708. 25. Georg Forster, Antwort an die Göttingischen Recensenten (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1778), reprinted in Forster, Werke, 4:49–60. Forster replied specifically to other reviews as well, most notably his Reply to Mr. Wales’s Remarks (London: White, Robson and Elomsley, 1778), reprinted in Forster, Werke, 4:7–48. 26. John Reinold Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy. Especially on the Earth and its Strata, Water and the Ocean, the Atmosphere, the Changes of the Globe, Organic Bodies, and the Human Species (London: Robinson, 1778), reprinted by Nicholas Thomas et al., eds. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996). 27. Letter 80 to J. R. Forster, Kassel, December 14, 1778, Forster, Werke, 13:157–159. Georg Forster taught at the Carolinum from 1780 to 1784. 28. Letter 84 to J. R. Forster, Göttingen, December 24, 1778, Forster, Werke, 13:166–168. 29. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. W. Promies, vol. 4 (Frankfurt a.M: Zweitausendeins, 1994), p. 51, no. 218 to K. H. Hindenberg, Göttingen, October 1778. Although Lichtenberg had a falling out with Meiners and his philosopher colleague J. G. H. Feder in the mid-1780s, in the 1770s the three played Kegel together every Friday night. 30. Letter 16 to J. D. Reuß, Kassel, April 19, 1784, Forster, Werke, 14:38–40. 31. Georg Forster, “Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen,” Teutsche Merkur (October 1786): 57. Reprinted in Werke, 8:130–156. 32. Letter 213 to Sömmerring, Vilnius, January 19–21, 1787, Forster, Werke, 14:617–620.

Notes to Pages 261–263

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33. Des Capitain Jacob Cook dritte Entdeckungs-Reise in die Südsee und nach dem Nordpol, trans. Georg Forster (Berlin: Haud and Spener, 1789). 34. Letter 214 to Herder, Vilnius, January 21, 1787, Forster, Werke, 14:620–623. 35. [Anon.], Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, May 4–6, 1789, nos. 136–138, cols. 273–293. That the review appeared in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (AL-Z) is not coincidental. The AL-Z was one of the chief organs of Kantian philosophy in the 1780s and 1790s, and Meiners was one of Kant’s harshest critics. With Feder Meiners co-edited a journal, Philosophische Bibliothek (1788–1791), devoted exclusively to attacking Kant from an empiricist-historicist point of view. Philosophische Bibliothek was teamed with J. A. Eberhard’s Philosophisches Magazin, which attacked Kant from a rationalist point of view. See Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), chs. 6 and 7. 36. [Georg Forster], Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, January 8–10, 1791, nos. 7–8, cols. 49–62; reprinted in Forster, Werke, 11:236–252. 37. Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2nd ed. (Lemgo: Meyer, 1793), 29. 38. Meiners’s position was actually more nuaned than this. He asserted that humanity constituted a single species, but very early in its history it divided into the Caucasian and Altaic stocks. The Altaic stock was so different from the Caucasian “that one could take it to be the work or remnant of a completely different creation.” Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2nd ed., 47. A few pages later, however, he maintained that “all nations of the earth in fact constitute only one single race [Geschlecht], or one single type [Art] (species) of creatures; however in this single human race one must hypothesize two entirely different stocks.” Ibid., 59. Modern historians typically have taken this theory of an early division as a de facto polygenism; for example, John H. Zammito, “Policing Polygeneticism in Germany, 1775: (Kames), Kant, and Blumenbach,” in The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 35–54. Like “culture,” however, “polygenism” has a history and did not exist as a term or as a coherent scientific doctrine before about 1820 or probably even 1860. 39. Forster, Werke, 11:238. 40. Ibid., 11:238–239, quote on p. 239. 41. Ibid., 11:239. 42. Ibid. Forster was building a case for the enlightened individual who stood out from the rest of his culture. Meiners did have room in his

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43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

Notes to Pages 263–267

method for the exceptional individual, particularly in his work on ancient history, for example, Cicero, but even that individual was constrained by linguistic and cultural conventions. Forster, Werke, 11:245. Ibid., 11:239–240. Ibid., 11:240. This was the argument from physiognomy, which reached a frenzy in Europe (especially Germany and England) in the 1770s but which had been discredited by the mid-1780s. Forster, Werke, 11:240. See Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). [Georg Forster], review of Dominique H. l’Amiral, L’Afrique et le peuple africain, considérés sous tous leurs rapports avec notre commerce et nos colonies . . . (Paris: Dessenne, 1789), in Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1792), 6. Stück (12. January): 49–56. Meiners, “Fortgesetzte Betrachtungen über den Sclavenhandel, und die Freylassung der Neger,” Neues Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 2 (1793): 5–6. Ibid., 8. Forster, Werke, 11:240. Meiners citing Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London: Lowndes, 1774), misnaming the author as Samuel Estwick. On Long see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Zugabe zu den Göttingischen gelehrten Anzeigen (1778), 10. Stück (7. März), 150. Forster, Antwort an der Göttingischen Recensenten (1778); Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung review of Göttingisches Historisches Magazin (1791) in Forster, Werke, 11:241. Michael C. Carhart, “Anthropology and Statistik in the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin (1787–1794),” in Historians and Ideologues: Studies in Early Modern History, ed. Anthony T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 245–270. Christian Gottlob Heyne, “Libertatis et aequalitatis civilis in republica Atheniensium delineatio ex Aristophane” (September 1793); “Libertas populorum raro cum expectato ab iis fructu recuperata” (September 1789); both in Opuscula Academica Collecta et Animadversionibus Locupletata, 6 vols. (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1785–1812). [Forster], review of Amiral, p. 54. The question mark is Forster’s.

Notes to Pages 267–273

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58. Ibid. 59. Meiners, “Fortgesetzte Betrachtungen über den Sclavenhandel,” 2–8. 60. Meiners, “Über die Natur der Africanischen Neger,” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 7 (1790): 391. 61. Ibid., 402. 62. Ibid., 386–387. 63. “Über die Natur der Americaner,” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 7 (1790): 229–230. 64. Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2nd ed., 233–234. 65. Meiners, “Fortgesetzte Betrachtungen über den Sclavenhandel,” 1, 8. Meiners was responding directly to Forster’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung review here. For the abolitionist movement, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006). 66. Meiners, “Fortgesetzte Betrachtungen über den Sclavenhandel,” 9. 67. Meiners, “Ueber die Ursachen der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten Europäischen Völkern,” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 8 (1791): 489. 68. Ibid., 511. 69. For the following see Forster, Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im April, Mai und Junius 1790 (Berlin: Voss, 1791); republished in Forster, Werke, 9:111–116. 70. Ibid. 71. Forster, Über die Beziehung der Staatskunst auf das Gluck der Menschheit, in Forster, Werke, 10/1:576. 72. Ansichten vom Niederrhein, in Forster, Werke, 9:112. In Über die Beziehung der Staatskunst auf das Glück der Menschheit, in Forster, Werke, 10/1:571, he cited China as another example of despotism suppressing reason. 73. Ansichten vom Niederrhein, in Forster, Werke, 9:113. 74. Forster was no trained philosopher: freedom of the will was a metaphysical reality and could not be taken away. Shoddy reasoning like this irritated Meiners, particularly when it was used to promote an ideology Meiners thought subversive. 75. Ansichten vom Niederrhein, in Forster, Werke, 9:116. 76. “Seriously, what do the priests blaspheme about the raging, rebellious human race? Was it not entrusted to them for millennia? Were they not its absolute custodian? Were they not used to them following blindly? Didn’t it have to be formed after their own image? Far be it from me to excuse crimes that blasphemed the holy things of freedom, but whose fault is it if the banquet of immorality is responsible for the latest

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77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

Notes to Pages 273–277

revolutions? Who made for us the false, destructive system of moral cultivation? who preceded us with bad examples and who pursued impudent depravity so far that there was finally nowhere to hang the coat of hypocrisy? Wretched human race! out of what abyss must you work your way!” Über die Beziehung der Staatskunst, in Forster, Werke, 10/1:577. Letter no. 212 to Therese Forster (his wife, the daughter of C. G. Heyne), Cambrai, August 1, 1793, in Forster, Werke, 17:410. Forster, Parisische Umrisse, in Werke, 10/1:600–601. See Forster’s republican works in Werke, vol. 10. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Briefwechsel, ed. U. Joost and Albrecht Schöne (Munich: Beck, 1985–1992), vol. 4, no. 2255, April 27, 1793. See also Ulrich Joost, “Die Respublica Litteraria, der gelehrte Zunftzwang und ein Beispiel wahrer Liberalität,” Göttinger Jahrbuch (1979): 172. Letter no. 143 to Therese, Mainz, December 8, 1792, in Forster, Werke, 17:264. Ibid. Forster, Parisische Umrisse, in Werke, 10/1:599–600. C. Meiners, Kleinere Länder und Reisebeschreibungen, vol. 2 (Berlin: Spener, 1794), 228–229. “Georg Forster: Fragment einer Charakteristik der deutschen Klassiker,” Lyceum der Schönen Künste 1 (1797); republished in Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Hanser, 1964), 325, 328, 339. Letter no. 202 to Therese, Paris, July 7, 1793, in Forster, Werke, 17:382; and no. 213 to Therese, Cambrai, August 7, 1793, in Forster, Werke, 17:411. C. Meiners, Historische Vergleichung der Sitten, und Verfassungen, der Gesetze, und Gewerbe, des Handels, und der Religion, der Wissenschaften, und Lehranstalten des Mittelalters mit denen unsers Jahrhunderts in Rücksicht auf die Vortheile, und Nachtheile der Aufklärung, 3 vols. (Hanover: Helwing, 1793–1794). Conclusion

1. C. Meiners, Beschreibung einer Reise nach Stuttgart und Strasburg im Herbste 1801, nebst einer kurzen Geschichte der Stadt Strasburg wärend der Schreckenzeit (Göttingen: Röwer, 1803). 2. Sergio Moravia, La Scienza dell’uomo nel Settecento (Bari: Laterza, 1970), 275–314, noted a bound volume of Jauffret’s papers in the Bibliothèque de l’Académie de Médicine in Paris (ms. 165), which had been

Notes to Pages 277–278

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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organized by Robert-Marie Reboul in the 1870s. F. C. T. Moore also knew of the papers, listing an analysis of them in the bibliography to his translation of Joseph-Marie Degérando, The Observation of Savage Peoples (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 107–109. Neither Moore nor Moravia, nor apparently Reboul, knew that the notes were taken from Meiners’s GHM articles. Britta Rupp-Eisenreich collated Jauffret’s notes with Meiners’s articles. See Britta RuppEisenreich, “The ‘Société des Observateurs de l’homme’ and German Ethno-Anthropology at the End of the 18th Century,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 10 (1983): 5–11. Separately from the French translations, a couple dozen of Meiners’s GHM articles were translated into English and published in Selections from the Most Celebrated Foreign Literary Journals and other Periodical Publications, 2 vols. (London: Debrett, 1798). Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison, ed., Le magasin encyclopédique or Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts (Paris: Fuchs, An. III–1816). Meiners’s articles appeared in An. V. Joseph-Marie Degerando, “Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages,” in Aux origines de l’anthropologie française. Les mémoires de la Société des Observateurs de l’Homme en l’ann VIII, ed. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (Paris: Sycomore, 1978); Joseph-Marie Degérando, The Observation of Savage Peoples, trans. F. C. T. Moore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). See Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, “C. Meiners et J. M. Gérondo. Un chapitre de comparatisme anthropologique,” in L’homme des Lumières et la découverte de l’autre: Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, ed. Daniel Droixhe and Pol-Piette Gossiaux (Brussels: Université libre de Bruxelles, 1985), 21–48. Sergio Moravia, La scienza dell’uomo nel Settecento, 80–112; Michel de Certeau, “L’opération historique,” in Faire de l’histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 1:23–68; Georges Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire: Les idéologues (Paris: Payot, 1978); Aux origines de l’anthropologie française, ed. Copans and Jamin. Cf. George W. Stocking, Jr., “French Anthropology in 1800,” Isis 55 (1964): 134–150. Claude Blanckaert, “L’anthropologie en France: Le mot et l’histoire (XVIe–XIXe siècle),” Bulletin et mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, n.s. 1, nos. 3–4 (1989): 24; also Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des Observateurs de l’homme (1799–1804): Des anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2002), 273–277, 302–303. In Degérando, Observation of Savage Peoples, preface, x.

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Notes to Pages 279–282

8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [no translator listed] (New York: Vintage, 1970 [originally Paris: Gallimard, 1966]), 308. 9. Ibid., 316. 10. Ibid., 304. 11. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964), 25, 43, cf. 322, 331. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). 12. Gusdorf, Introduction aux sciences humaines (Paris: Payot, 1960), 487; cited after Claude Blanckaert, “L’histoire générale des sciences de l’homme. Principes et pérodisation,” in L’histoire des sciences de l’homme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 37. 13. Ellul, The Technological Society, 397. 14. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972). 15. Claude Blanckaert, “L’histoire générale des sciences de l’homme,” 37. 16. Sergio Moravia, “The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man,” History of Science 18 (1980): 247; also Sergio Moravia, “L’origine teorica delle scienze umane nel Settecento,” Il pensiero politico 12 (1979): 159–181; reprinted in Sergio Moravia, Filosofia e scienze umane nell’eta dei lumi (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), 3–26. 17. Moravia, “The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man,” 250. 18. Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, ed., Histoires de l’anthropologie (XVIe–XIXe siècles) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984); Giulio Barsanti, La mappa della vita. Teorie della natura e teorie dell’uomo in Francia 1750–1850 (Naples: Guida, 1983); Pol-Pierre Gossiaux, L’homme et la nature. Genèses de l’anthropologie à l’âge classique 1580–1750 (Brussels: De Boeck, 1993); Richard Olson, The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642–1792 (New York: Twayne, 1993). 19. John Christie, “The Human Sciences: Origins and Histories,” History of the Human Sciences 6/1 (1993): 1–12. 20. Claude Blanckaert, “Buffon and the Natural History of Man: Writing History and the ‘Foundational Myth’ of Anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences 6/1 (1993): 13–50, here 42. 21. Robert Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 52 n. 43. 22. Ibid., 46. 23. Christopher Fox, “Introduction: How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The Spectacle of Human Science,” in Fox, Porter, and Wokler, Inventing Human Science, 3–4.

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24. Gilbert Chinard, Jefferson et les Idéologues (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1925), 43–44. 25. Keith M. Baker, “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science,’ ” Annals of Science 20 (1964): 211–226. 26. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 381; Chappey, La Société des Observateurs de l’homme, 327. See generally Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Sarah L. Bonnefoi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 27. Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 128–145. 28. Helmut O. Pappe, “Enlightenment,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 2:89. 29. Isaiah Berlin, “Counter-Enlightenment,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 2:105–106. 30. The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 31. J. G. A. Pocock, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, vol. 1 of Barbarism and Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. 32. See Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670 –1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 33. “Enlightenment,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 2:91. 34. Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775 –1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1979). 35. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). 36. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 17. 37. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 703. 38. Jonathan I. Israel, “Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 542. 39. Steven Lestition, “Kant and the End of the Enlightenment in Prussia,” Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 57–112. 40. A. H. L. Heeren, Christian Gottlob Heyne: Biographisch dargestellt (Göttingen: Röwer, 1813), 49. 41. C. Meiners, Historische Vergleichung der Sitten, und Verfassungen, der Gesetze, und Gewerbe, des Handels, und der Religion, der Wissenschaften, und Lehranstalten des Mittelalters mit denen unsers Jahrhunderts in Rücksicht auf

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

Notes to Pages 290–296

die Vortheile, und Nachtheile der Aufklärung, 3 vols. (Hanover: Helwing, 1793–1794), 3:583. Werner Schneiders, Die wahre Aufklärung: Zum Selbstverständnis der deutschen Aufklärung (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1974), 175. Meiners, Historische Vergleichung, 3:548–552. Ibid., 3:552. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8. Ibid., 28, 41. Meiners, Historische Vergleichung, 3:466. C. Meiners, History of the Female Sex, 4 vols., trans. Frederick Shoberl (London: Colburn, 1808), 4:264–307. See Elizabeth Zeidler-Johnson, “Die Aufteilung der Menschheitsgeschichte: Christoph Meiners und die Geschichte des anderen Geschlechts als Gegenstand der Geschichtsschreibung in der Spätaufklärung,” in Weiblichkeit in geschlechtlicher Perspektive, ed. Ursula J. J. Becher and Jörn Rüsen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988); and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Väter der Frauengeschichte? Die Geschlecht als historiographische Kategorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 262 (1996): 39–71. Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought” in Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). Justus Möser, Sämtliche Werke, 14 vols. (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1943–1986), 5:260; cited after Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” 140. Justus Möser, “The Modern Taste for General Laws and Decrees Is a Danger to Our German Liberty” (1772), in Sämtliche Werke 2:20–21; cited after Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” 143. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France [1796], Chapter 6 in The Works of Joseph de Maistre, ed. Jack Lively (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 80. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 121–122. Jonathan Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 181–186. Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire: Les Idéologues, vol. 8 of Les sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale (Paris: Payot, 1978), 24, 549; cited after Donald R. Kelley, “Gusdorfiad,” History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 134. Jörn Garber, “Von der Menschheitsgeschichte zur Kulturgeschichte: Zum geschichtstheoretischen Kulturbegriff der deutschen Spätaufklärung,” in Spätabsolutismus und bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studien zur

Notes to Page 297

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deutschen Staats- und Gesellschaftstheorie im Übergang zur Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.: Keip, 1992), 409. 57. Roger Smith, Norton History of the Human Sciences (New York: Norton, 1997), 26–28. 58. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières, 479; Jean Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977). 59. Smith, Norton History of the Human Sciences, 28.

Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 81, 157 Abraham, 109, 182, 184 Absolutism, 53, 195 Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, 32 Achenwall, Gottfried, 56–58, 194 Achenwall, Wilhelmina Luise (Moser), 194 Adelung, Johann Christoph, 1, 14–15, 23, 100–103, 105, 109, 184 Adorno, Theodor, 280–281 Aesthetics, 10, 163, 203–204, 232, 238, 242, 255, 259; in Greek art, 115, 117– 120, 179; in philological education, 121, 124–125, 126–127 Africa, 130, 229, 245, 266–268, 269, 270 Ahutoru (Aotourou), 223–224, 227, 229–230, 243, 244, 245 Alembert, Jean LeRond d’, 155, 283, 288, 291 America, 16, 18, 21, 25, 51–52, 59, 71, 72; and primitivism, 112–113, 130, 131, 140, 146, 149, 154, 245, 268; colonies, 208, 217, 232, 269; and travel reports, 223, 227, 228, 261 Anthropology, 12, 96, 233–234, 239–240, 244, 270, 278, 295, 296, 338n45 Apollodorus (pseudo-), 108, 112 Arabs, Arabia, 27–29, 31–32, 89, 130,

135, 137, 139–140, 146, 158, 166, 228. See also Language Arbuthnot, John, 76 Armstrong, Neil, 26 Astruc, Jean, 170–172 Augsburg, Peace of (1555), 45 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 126 Banks, Sir Joseph, 256 Barnard, F. M., 92, 95 Baudin, Nicolas Thomas, 277, 278 Bauernfeind, Georg, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38– 39 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 163 Baumgarten, Jakob, 163, 166 Bayle, Pierre, 6 Beaglehole, John Cawte, 225–227, 254 Beccaria, Cesare, 52, 67, 291 Beck, Christian Daniel, 157 Beddoes, Thomas, 198 Bentley, Richard, 107, 142, 143, 177, 179 Berggren, the Swedish chef, 32, 34, 38–39 Berlin, Isaiah, 155, 235, 255, 286, 289, 294, 306n42 Berlin Academy of Science, 84, 257, 292 Bernstorff, Johann Hartwig Ernst von, 29, 64–65 Blanckaert, Claude, 281, 282 Boas, Franz, 297–298 Bodin, Jean, 45

353

354

Index

Boswell, James, 69–70, 76–77, 232–233 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 59, 222– 223, 224, 227, 228, 257 Bourreau-Deslandres, A. F., 150 Brosses, Charles de, 130, 159 Brucker, Johann Jakob, 124, 199–200 Brühl, Heinrich, graf von, 212 Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc de, 230, 282, 284 Burckhardt, Jacob, 201, 306n44 Burke, Edmund, 15, 18, 275, 295 Burney, Fanny, 225, 338n47 Burney, James, 254 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, 279, 283, 284 Cairo, 32, 33–34, 35 Cannibalism, 228, 242, 248–254, 255, 256, 339–340n1 Carteret, Philip, 59, 222 Carus, Friedrich August, 25 Cassirer, Ernst, 285 Catherine II “the Great,” tsarina of Russia, 64 Chamfort, Nicolas, 206 Chappey, Jean-Luc, 282–283, 285 Charles XI, king of Sweden, 46 Charlotte, queen of Great Britain, 260 Chartier, Roger, 288 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 285 China, 26, 155, 246 Chladenius, Johann Martin, 166 Choiseul, Étienne-François, duc de, 65 Choiseul, Mme. de, 224 Christ, J. F., 120–121, 124 Christian VI, king of Denmark, 29, 31 Christian VII, king of Denmark, 43, 63, 65, 67 Christie, John, 282 Cicero, 12, 122, 147, 201–202, 265 Clement of Alexandria, 117 Clerke, Charles, 248–249, 253–254 Cleverskerk, Johannes Petrus van den Brande de, 73–75 Coccejus, Samuel von, 53, 56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 128 Condamine, Charles-Marie de La, 71 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 77, 102,

109, 178, 179, 235, 281, 283, 287; Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 78–84; reception in Germany, 87, 89– 90, 92, 93, 94 Conjectual history, 9, 18–19, 96, 148– 154, 160, 243, 338n45; rejected, 7, 22, 102, 103, 156–157 Connor, Bernard, 72–75, 82 Constance, 197 Cook, James, 225, 227, 228, 248–251, 253, 254, 256–259, 260, 261, 271 Cramer, Christian, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38–39 Cranz, David, 132 Cultura animi, 2, 19, 23, 26, 237 Cultural history, 160, 192, 193, 247, 296, 317n9 Culture, 48–49, 68, 172, 183–184, 243, 255, 266, 274, 275; usage, 1, 129, 173– 174, 192, 197–198, 215, 218, 221; origin of term, 2, 9, 149, 229, 239, 279; definitions, 7, 13–17, 23–26, 98– 100, 104, 247, 296–297 Dagen, Jean, 148, 297 Dale, Anthonie van, 106, 108 Darnton, Robert, 288 David, Hebrew king, 45, 141, 144 Degérando, Joseph Marie, 150, 277, 278, 279, 282, 283, 297 Denis, Michael, 99 Denmark, 3, 29, 31–33, 35, 43, 63–68, 287 De Pauw, Cornelius, 228 Descartes, René, 78, 80, 234, 281, 283– 284 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude, 283 Diderot, Denis, 223–224, 227, 290 Dieterich, J. C., 260 Disease, 32, 37–39, 42, 44, 222, 223, 224 Dobrizhofer, Martin, 228, 261 Duchet, Michèle, 297 Duties, 20–21, 202, 209–210, 266, 267– 268, 270. See also Law; Rights Egalitarianism, 12–13, 266–270, 275, 293–294 Egypt, Sinai, 27–29, 32, 33, 34, 136, 140,

Index 166; ancient, 43, 44, 174, 185; art, 116–117, 133 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 8, 11, 12, 44, 128, 145, 148, 240, 291; and higher criticism, 161–162, 165, 167– 170, 172–176, 180–192 Ellul, Jacques, 280 England, 3, 217, 243, 256, 286–287; contrasted with Germany, 18, 53, 63, 157, 160, 166, 197, 203, 221, 290; united to Hanover, 32, 45, 64; and slavery, 51– 52, 267, 269; expeditions, 59, 225– 227, 228 Enlightenment, 1, 15, 26, 68, 247, 255, 265, 266, 269, 271, 272, 275, 276, 281, 285–293; Radical, 22, 49, 68, 164, 174, 189, 265, 287, 289–291 Environmental thesis, 12, 110, 230–231, 241, 245. See also Innate thesis Erasmus, Desiderius, 5, 165 Ernesti, Johann August, 11, 122, 126– 127, 133, 162–163, 165, 167, 204 Erudition, 5–7, 8, 148, 154–156 Estates, 60–61, 63, 67, 195 Evans-Prichard, E. E., 278 Ezra, 164, 185, 186, 189, 191 Falconer, William, 230–231, 232 Family, 9, 92–95, 210, 214, 219, 238, 242, 246 Feder, J. G. H., 193 Feral children, 9, 70–76, 82–84, 92–93, 109, 278. See also Leblanc, Marie Angelique “Memmie”; Lithuanian bear-boys; Peter of Hanover Ferguson, Adam, 148, 157, 158, 206, 211–212 Ficino, Marsilio, 123 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 81–82, 106–108, 150 Forskål, Peter, 31, 33–34, 37–38, 44, 185 Forster, Georg, 12–13, 148, 228; travel writer, 252–253, 254–256; conflict with C. Meiners, 260–264, 265, 266, 267; Jacobin, 270–276 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 228, 249, 251–252, 254–255, 256, 260

355

Forster, Therese (Heyne, later Huber), 261, 274, 275 Foucault, Michel, 278–279, 281 Four-Stages Theory, 50, 173, 231, 241–243 Fox, Christopher, 282 Fragments, 5, 43, 115, 166, 170–172, 174, 187 France, 64, 148, 149, 195, 215, 217, 218, 277–285; perceived decadence of, 12, 204; contrasted to Germany, 17–18, 53, 63, 157, 159, 160, 166, 220, 221; revolution in, 21, 67–68, 192, 269– 270, 273–276, 288; expeditions, 59, 222–223, 228, 243; and slavery, 267. See also Philosophes Francke, August Hermann, 55 Frankfurt an der Oder, University of, 54, 56 Franklin, Benjamin, 231 Frederick I, king of Prussia, 56, 163 Frederick II “the Great,” king of Prussia, 84, 163, 197, 212, 272, 287, 291 Frederick V, king of Denmark, 29, 31, 43, 63 Freret, Nicolas, 154–155 Fugere, Alexandre, 147–148, 155 Furneaux, Tobias, 222, 224, 254 Gabler, Johann Philipp, 168, 169, 175, 192 Garve, Christian, 237 Gay, Peter, 285, 291 Geneva, 3, 12, 214–220, 274 George I, king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover, 75–76 George II, king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover, 56 George III, king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover, 225 Germans, 103, 166, 287, 292; contrasted with British, 157, 160, 197, 203–204, 290; contrasted with French, 157, 160, 215, 220–221, 278, 296; contrasted with ancient Romans, 180, 208. See also Holy Roman Empire Gesner, Johann Matthias, 125, 126, 127, 133, 154, 204

356

Index

Gibbon, Edward, 11, 12, 148, 206, 211, 212, 286–287 Gillies, John, 198 Gmelin, Joseph, 228 Gobien, Charles le, 147 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 88, 116, 127, 129, 221 Goguet, Anton-Yves, 146–149, 153–155, 158, 159, 160, 182, 229 Göttingen, University of, 4, 6, 32, 56–58, 108, 126–127, 128–129, 134, 181, 195, 241, 287 Göttingen Academy of Science, 228, 257, 273 Göttingen School, 4–7, 13, 21–22, 156– 160, 278, 291, 298 Greece, ancient, 3, 12, 26, 133, 136, 137, 149, 152, 156, 205, 220, 243; to be imitated, 10, 116–120, 124–127; as primitive, 111–113, 129–130, 139–144, 179, 180; decadence of, 198–201, 207–210, 212, 218, 219 Grell, Chantal, 5 Grotius, Hugo, 19 Günter, Heinrich, 23 Gusdorf, Georges, 279, 281, 283, 296 Gustavus I, king of Sweden, 46 Haakonssen, Knud, 21 Halle, University of, 84, 160, 162–163, 234, 241 Hamann, J. G., 93, 132, 235, 286 Hanover, 32, 64, 193, 197, 212, 266 Haven, Frederik Christian von, 27–29, 34–35, 37–38, 44, 161, 166, 185 Hebrews, 29, 47–50, 68, 146, 166–167; as primitive, 130, 139; identity of, 172, 183, 184, 185–186; sacred poetry of, 176–180. See also Language Heeren, A. H. L., 157, 257 Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb, 53, 56 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 49, 97, 283, 291 Hemsterhuys, Tiberius, 107, 121, 122, 177 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 20, 23, 116, 129, 221, 235, 243, 261, 297, 306n42; Essay on the Origin of Language, 9, 77, 80, 88–96, 100, 109; usage of Cultur,

15–16, 25, 26; and national character, 101, 113, 168, 182, 265; as particularist, 132–133, 236–237, 238, 240, 286 Hermann, Martin Gottfried, 116, 176 Herodotus, 127, 146, 147 Herzog, D. G., 1 Hesiod, 10, 108, 112, 113, 114, 123, 166 Hesse-Kassel Society of Antiquities, 209, 273 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 10, 11, 116, 121, 124, 125, 126, 133, 140, 143, 148, 157, 172, 212, 240, 261, 266, 290; mythologist, 105, 107–114, 175–176, 182, 183, 191; philological seminar, 127–132, 167, 181, 204; librarian, 228, 257 Higher criticism, 161, 168–170, 172– 176, 180–192. See also Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried Hirsch, Emanuel, 23 History of the human spirit, 7, 10, 99, 149, 229, 283 Hiti-Hiti (Mahine), 249, 251–252, 254 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 19, 175, 291 Holbach, Paul-Henri, baron d’, 49, 290 Holy Roman Empire: constitution of, 8– 9, 18, 53–54, 220–221, 273–274, 309n42; particular states in, 60, 63, 162–163, 197. See also Germans Homer, 10, 11, 123, 124, 125, 137; compared to other national literatures, 89, 94, 165, 166, 173, 174, 184, 186, 189; as primitive, 105, 112, 113, 114, 129, 139, 140–144, 160, 161, 172, 179, 181 Horkheimer, Max, 280–281 Human sacrifice, 228, 254 Humboldt, Alexander von, 12, 228, 271 Hume, David, 97, 148, 151, 236, 291 Idéologie, 283, 284, 285, 296 India, 32, 39, 244–246 Innate thesis, 12, 227, 231, 237–238, 263–264. See also Environmental thesis Inscriptions, 27–30, 187, 188 Institut Nationale de France, 278, 279, 283

Index Irwing, Karl Franz von, 80, 96–100, 115, 239, 240 Iselin, Isaac, 15, 62, 148, 158–159, 240– 243 Israel, Jonathan, 22, 107, 289–291 Istanbul, 33, 35 Jaeger, Werner, 26 Jan III Sobieski, king of Poland, 72 Japan, 246 Jauffret, Louis-François, 277, 282, 283, 284, 285, 297 Jefferson, Thomas, 283 Jerome, Saint, 189–191 Jesus Seminar, 124 John the Divine, Saint, 165 Johnson, Samuel, 25, 52, 69–70, 76–77, 232, 294, 305n41 Jones, Sir William, 278 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 272 Juliana Maria, queen of Denmark, 67 Kahn, Karim, 39 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 100, 151, 157, 159, 231–232 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 111, 235, 236, 240, 278, 286, 290 Karl, duke of Württemberg, 63, 195, 197, 294 Koran, 32, 50, 184 Koselleck, Reinhart, 5–6 Kraft, Jens, 159 Kriegel, Blandine, 5, 155 Kroeber, A. L., 25 Kypke, Georg David, 122 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 7, 148, 298 Lamarck, Jean-Baptist Pierre Antoine de Monet de, 70, 278 Language, 7, 204, 223–224, 225, 278; oriental, 8, 31, 33, 43–44, 95, 139–143, 168, 173, 181, 184–185; origin of, 9– 10, 78–96, 178–179; Hebrew, 11, 31, 32, 33, 43–44, 103, 184–191; Arabic, 31–32, 33, 184–185; Chaldean, 32; Samaritan, 32; Greek, 33, 114, 127, 166, 191; German, 103; Latin, 125– 127, 191, 205

357

La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 49 L’Amiral, Dominique, 266–267 Lapland, 84, 89 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 214 Law: natural, 16–23, 54; divine, 44–52, 56; positive, 52–58 Leblanc, Marie Angelique “Memmie,” 70–72, 312n5 Lebanon, 36, 43, 137 Le Clerc, Jean, 163–164, 181 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 247 Leipzig, University of, 162–163, 165 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 116, 120, 179 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 260 Linnaeus, Carl, 44, 72 Lithuanian bear-boys, 72–75, 82–84, 93 Locke, John, 17, 76, 78, 90, 235, 237, 283, 285, 289, 291, 297 Longinus, 137 Lotter, Friedrich, 233 Louis XIV, king of France, 51, 205 Lowie, Robert, 233 Lowth, Robert, 172, 176–180 Luther, Martin, 165 Mabillon, Jean, 154 MacPherson, James. See Ossian Mainz, 273–275 Maistre, Joseph de, 295 Mannheim, Karl, 293–295 Marmontel, Jean-François, 205 Martin, Rudolf, 233 Masoretes, 11, 197–191 Massieu, Jean, 278 Matilda, queen of Denmark, 67 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 84–85, 86, 101–102, 109, 205 Maurists, 150, 154–155, 323n34 McMahon, Darrin M., 155, 205, 285, 289, 293 Meiners, Christoph, 15, 128, 148, 193– 198, 274–275, 295, 296, 297; as antiegalitarian, 12–13, 22, 255, 258–271, 276, 290, 291, 292–293; as antiquarian, 124, 198–202, 206–221; as particularist, 157–158; as anthropologist, 228–230, 232–233, 236, 237–238, 240, 243, 244–247, 254, 277, 278

358

Index

Meiners, Luise Friedrike (Achenwall), 193–198 Meinhard, Johann Nikolaus, 231 Mendelssohn, Moses, 15–16, 23, 242 Mesopotamia, 32, 42–43, 135–137, 173– 174 Michaelis, Johann David, 8, 9, 63, 66, 68, 148, 185, 228, 240, 291; as expedition organizer, 29, 31–33, 35–37; Mosaic Law, 43–52; as orientalist, 165, 166, 167, 172, 177, 179, 180, 181–182 Middleton, Conyers, 201–202 Millar, John, 151 Millin de Grandmaison, Aubin-Louis, 277 Moltke, Adam Gottlob, 65 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 6 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 69–77, 115, 294 Montaigne, Michel de, 248, 252, 255 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat de, 46, 50, 230, 241, 289, 297; conjectural history, 151, 152–153, 154, 155, 156–157, 158–159, 160; on Roman decadence, 201–202, 206, 210, 211 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 154, 323n34 Moravia, Sergio, 281–282, 283 Morellet, André, 283 Moser, Johann Jakob, 8–9, 53–63, 65, 66, 68, 294, 296; political prisoner, 194– 197 Möser, Justus, 157, 221, 294, 295, 296 Moses, 8, 11, 124, 136, 184, 185, 189; law-giver, 36–37, 43–52, 68; compared to Homer, 160, 161; editor of Pentateuch, 171–172, 173, 179, 182, 183 Müller, Karl Otfried, 128 Münchhausen, Gerlach Adolph von, 56– 57, 126 Myth, 106–114, 175 Napoleon, 59, 194, 283 National character, 4, 6, 82–83, 101, 104, 113, 145, 153, 167, 182, 199, 227, 264– 265; and language, 82–83, 101 Natural history, 32 Netherlands, 17–18, 217 Newton, Isaac, 84, 241, 285, 289

Nicolai, Friedrich, 221 Niebuhr, Carsten, 8, 27–31, 34–43, 63, 64, 181 Niedermann, Joseph, 23 Norden, Frederik Ludvig, 29, 31 Old Testament, 8, 10, 11, 29, 31, 105, 145; and European law, 43–46, 47–52; composed of fragments, 161–162; higher criticism of, 166–192. See also Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried; Higher criticism; Michaelis, Johann David Olearius, Adam, 29 Omai, 224–227, 229–230, 243, 244, 245 Orality, 186–189 Origen, 189 Ossian, 94, 95, 144–145 Otto of Freising, 205 Owen, John, 164 Oxford University, 177, 198 Oz-Salzberger, Fania, 157 Pacific Islands, 59, 146, 222–227, 228, 229, 244–246, 248–254, 257, 271 Paine, Thomas, 275 Palmyra, 11, 135–138, 187, 188, 190, 191, 206 Pappe, Helmut O., 285–286, 287–288 Particularism, 4, 6, 7, 8–9, 13, 22, 102, 104, 156–160, 197, 294–296, 298 Paul, Saint, 146, 165 Pausanias, 117 Pelasgoi, 111 Penniman, T. K., 233 Perfection of humanity, 26, 99, 100, 115, 237, 241 Persepolis, 42 Persia, 39–42, 118, 136, 148, 149, 185, 205, 209, 220 Persian Gulf, 32, 39 Peter III, tsar of Russia, 64 Peter of Hanover, 72, 75–77 Petrarch, 125 Philip II, king of Spain, 64 Philosophes, 22, 49, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156, 158, 205, 206, 216, 283, 284, 287, 291 Physiocracy, 60, 62, 67 Pickersgill, Richard, 248–249

Index Pierson, Johann, 122 Pietism, 48, 54–55, 66, 162–166, 195 Pindar, 10, 108, 112, 113 Platner, Ernst, 96–97, 238–240, 278 Plato, Platonism, 10, 12, 121–125, 144, 146, 147, 160, 161, 166, 172, 200 Pliny, 136, 146, 177, 187, 212, 329n61 Plutarch, 117, 212 Pocock, J. G. A., 5, 202–203, 206, 286– 287 Poland, 3 Pope, Alexander, 14 Popularphilosophie, 204, 235, 240 Primitivism, 77, 99; and language, 101– 102; and myth, 109–114, 128, 129– 131; Homeric, 139–150, 161; biblical, 169, 170, 173, 175, 178–180; in anthropology, 231, 242, 246, 248, 252– 254, 255 Prussia, 56, 59, 63, 64, 162–163, 195, 212, 217, 274, 287 Psychology, 96, 240, 241 Pufendorf, Samuel, 19–20, 22–23, 53, 80 Pütter, Johann Stephan, 56–58 Pythagoras, 12, 124, 145, 199, 200 Quesnay, François, 67 Rabenius, Olaf, 46 Race, 244–246, 247 Rashi, 170 Red Sea, 33, 37 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 97 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 225–226 Richardson, Samuel, 207 Rights, 21, 264, 267–268, 270. See also Duties; Law Rigolet de Juvigny, Jean Antoine, 205, 206 Robertson, John, 292 Robertson, William, 71, 131 Roman Empire, 2, 12, 26, 95, 118, 136– 137, 149, 150, 152, 186–187 198, 220, 243; decadence of, 201–202, 205–207, 208–209, 210–214, 218, 219 Rosetta Stone, 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 90, 94, 216, 256, 283, 287; reception of Discourse

359

on the Arts and Sciences, 158–159, 204, 235, 242, 255 Royal Society of London, 84, 256 Ruhnken, David, 10, 11, 107, 121–125, 126, 133, 145, 161, 172, 183, 200 Rupp-Eisenreich, Britta, 277 Rürup, Reinhard, 55 Russia, 3, 29, 64, 206, 228, 256 Saint-Germain, Charles-Louis de, 64 Sandwich, John Montagu, earl of, 225 Sardinia, 3, 218 Saxony, 162–163, 287 Scalager, Joseph Justus, 115, 120, 121 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 128 Schiller, Friedrich, 116, 221 Schlegel, Friedrich, 128, 275–276 Schlözer, August Ludwig, 44, 156 Schultens, Albert, 181 Scotland, 7, 144–145, 159, 160, 208, 285 Semitic languages. See Language: oriental Semler, Johann Salomo, 11, 163–167, 183 Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), 29, 32, 59, 63, 64, 159, 212, 240 Siberia, 228 Sicard, Roch-Ambroise Cucurron, 277 Sigonio, Carlo, 205 Silesia, 163 Simon, Richard, 163–164, 181 Sinai peninsula, 27–29, 34–37, 307n12 Slavery, 33, 34, 51–52, 213, 242, 245, 246, 255, 266–269, 271, 272 Smith, Adam, 62, 215, 232, 278, 297 Smith, Roger, 297 Sociability, 19, 102, 241 Social contract, 17. See also Law: natural Société des Observateurs de l’homme, 4, 277–278, 282–285, 296 Solomon, 136 Sophists, 26, 124, 161 Spain, 146 Spener, Philip Jakob, 55 Spinoza, Baruch, 175, 291 Spittler, Ludwig Timotheus, 58, 261, 266, 296 Statistik, 58–61, 62 Strabo, 147, 180 Strauss, David Friedrich, 124, 191

360

Index

Streuensee, Johann Friedrich, 9, 65–68 Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine, 283 Suetonius, 127 Suez, 27, 32, 34, 37 Süßmilch, Johann Peter, 87–88, 89, 100, 179 Sweden, 3, 19, 46–47, 53, 63, 64, 152, 180, 287 Switzerland, 159, 193–198, 211, 214– 220, 228 Syria, 135–137 Tacitus, 127, 180, 202, 207 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 14 Tetens, Johann Nicolaus, 99 Theon of Smyrna, 123 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 18, 19, 59, 194, 203, 220 Thomasius, Christian, 53, 163 Tierra del Fuego, 16 Travel reports, 7, 11, 12, 198, 227–228, 229, 240, 241, 257–259 Troy, 11, 137 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 3, 62, 67– 68, 148, 151 Turkey, 3, 32, 33, 35, 205, 206 Universities, 8, 52. See also Frankfurt an der Oder, University of; Göttingen, University of; Halle, University of; Leipzig, University of; Oxford, University of; Wittenberg, University of Valckenaer, Ludwig Caspar, 107, 121, 122 Valla, Lorenzo, 5 Vater, Johann Severin, 192 Venturi, Franco, 3 Venus (the goddess), 118–119, 223 Venus (the planet), 222 Vico, Giambattista, 235, 286 Victor of Aveyron, 72, 278

Virey, Julien-Joseph, 283 Virgil, 111 Virtue, 202–204, 207–214 Volney, Constantine François Chassebeuf de, 206, 283 Voltaire, 148, 150, 151, 216, 219, 283, 288, 289, 291, 296 Wales, William, 249, 251 Walker, Mack, 54 Wallis, Samuel, 59, 222, 257 Walton, Brian, 163–164 Wellhausen, Julius, 170 Wends, 102–103, 184 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 45 Wette, W. M. L. de, 192 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 221 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 115 Williams, Raymond, 13, 25 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 10, 116–121, 124, 125, 127, 133, 148, 179, 204, 240 Wittenberg, University of, 162–163 Wokler, Robert, 282 Wolf, Friedrich August, 114–115, 116, 123, 125, 128–129, 143–144, 145, 183 Wolff, Christian, 55, 83–85, 163 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 293 Wood, Robert, 135–143, 158, 160, 161, 177, 181, 187, 206 Württemberg, 58, 60–63, 194–197 Xenophon, 127 Yemen, 8, 31, 32, 37–39 Zammito, John, 235, 239 Zelle, Carsten, 234, 239 Zenobia, 136–137 Zeus, 111–112, 129