UID:
edocfu_9960962758102883
Format:
1 online resource (385 p.)
ISBN:
0-231-54128-7
Series Statement:
Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History
Content:
Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers, he argues, employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. Palmeri finds evidence of speculative frameworks in the political economy of Malthus, Martineau, Mill, and Marx. He traces the influence of speculative thought in the development of anthropology and ethnography in the 1860s, the foundational sociology of Comte and Spencer, and the sociology of religion pioneered by Weber, Durkheim, and Freud. Conjectural histories reveal a surprising ambivalence toward progress, modernity, and secularization among leading thinkers of the time, an attitude that affected texts as varied as Darwin's Descent of Man, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, and the novels of Walter Scott, George Eliot, and H.G. Wells. Establishing the critical value of conjectural thinking in the study of modern forms of knowledge, Palmeri concludes his investigation with its return in the work of Foucault and in recent histories on early religion, political organization, and material life.
Note:
Description based upon print version of record.
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Frontmatter --
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Contents --
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Foreword --
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Acknowledgments --
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Introduction: Conjectural History, the Form and Its Afterlife --
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1. Conjectural History: The Enlightenment Form --
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2. Political Economy and the Question of Progress --
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3. Comte, Spencer, and the Science of Society --
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4. The Origins of Culture and of Anthropology --
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5. Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Prehistory of the Human --
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6. The Social Psychology of Religion --
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7. Novels as Conjectural Histories --
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Conclusion: Conjecturalism Now --
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Appendix 1. Enlightenment Conjectural Histories --
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Appendix 2. Hegel, History, and Conjecture --
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Appendix 3. Were Conjectural Histories Racist? --
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Notes --
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Index
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Issued also in print.
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English
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0-231-17516-7
Language:
English