Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  29. A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk 4, ch. 5. The standard edition is that edited by R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

  30. A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk 5, ch. 2.

  31. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Millar, 1790), 4.1, 10; Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. J. R. Otteson (Exeter: Academic, 2004), p. 74.

  32. T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  33. F. W. Hirst, Adam Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 236.

  34. D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (La Salle: Open Court, 1989), sets Smith’s work in the context of modern liberal economics. D. D. Raphael, Adam Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), is a good short introduction. P. H. Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), traces his influence.

  35. O. Höffe, Thomas Hobbes (Munich: Beck, 2010), is the best work. Hobbes’s main work is usefully analysed in C. Schmitt, ed., The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). A. Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), sets Hobbes in the context of Locke and Rousseau. N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), is a highly illuminating collection of searching essays. The quotation from Aristotle is from Politics, 1.2.

  36. S. Song, Voltaire et la Chine (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1989).

  37. D. F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), is fundamental. Also important are J. Ching and W. G. Oxtoby, Discovering China (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1992); W. W. Davis, ‘China, the Confucian ideal, and the European Age of Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xliv (1983), pp. 523–48; T. H. C. Lee, ed., China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991). The quotation from Montesquieu is from L’Esprit des lois, Book XVII, ch. 3.

  38. N. Russell, ‘The influence of China on the Spanish Enlightenment’, Tufts University PhD dissertation (2017).

  39. G. T. F. Raynal, Histoire philosophique, i, p. 124; quoted in Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 112.

  40. Fernández-Armesto, Millennium, pp. 458–9; The Americas (London: Phoenix, 2004), pp. 64–5.

  41. P. Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire (Cambridge: Icon, 2004), pp. 96–126.

  42. M. Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 22, 32; H. Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

  43. T. Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), is a useful introduction. H. Fairchild, The Noble Savage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), is an elegant history of the concept. M. Hodgen, Early Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), and Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, are invaluable studies of the ideas generated by early modern ethnography.

  44. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, quoted in C. Jones, The Great Nation (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 29; M. Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 292–3; Z. M. Trachtenberg, Making Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 79.

  45. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, pp. 130–1, 700.

  46. R. Wokler, Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 1–28.

  47. Rousseau, Du contrat social, bk 1, ch. 6. T. O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999), is particularly good at elucidating this text. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), is the fundamental text. A. Widavsky, The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1991), is an excellent introduction. D. Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), traces the concept in eighteenth-century French thought. R. W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), is a provocative work, linking radical American egalitarianism to the Christian tradition and arguing for a future in which equality will be attainable. A. Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), is an arresting essay that brings the story up to date and poses challenges for the future. On the general will, A. Levine, The General Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), traces the concept from Rousseau to modern communism. P. Riley, The General Will before Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), is a superb study of its origins.

  48. Rousseau, Du contrat social, bk 1, ch. 3.

  49. J. Keane, Tom Paine (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), is a good biography. E. Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), is a classic study. Rousseau’s most influential works in the field were the Discourse on Inequality (1754) and Émile (1762).

  50. O. de Gouges, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, article x; there is a convenient edition (Paris: République des Lettres, 2012). De Gouges’s views are curiously illuminated by her novel, Maria or the Wrongs of Woman. C. L. Johnson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), is wide-ranging and helpful.

  51. C. Francis and F. Gontier, eds, Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir: la vie-l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 245–81.

  52. D. Diderot, Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris: Pantoucke, 1783), ii, p. 222.

  53. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  54. F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996); F. J. Turner, Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?, readings selected and introduced by R. W. Etulain (Boston: Bedford, 1999).

  55. M. Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–62 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 308.

  56. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolutions in France, ed. F. M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 80.

  57. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, introduction and vol. 1, ch. 17. A recent edition is by H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). J. T. Schneider, ed., The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), is comprehensive.

  58. C. Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), traces the history of the American franchise. Fascinating light on the reception of American democratic ideas in Europe is cast by the influential J. Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1888).

  59. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk 2, ch. 1.

  60. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936), is the baldest statement of logical positivism. For a critique, see Putnam, Reason, Truth and History. See pp. 363–5.

  61. R. Spangenburg and D. Moser, The History of Science in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Facts on File, 1993), is a short popular introduction. A. Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), is a fine biography that sets the subject against a clear account of the science of the time. R. E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley, and The Enlightened Joseph Priestley (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, 2004), form an equally impressive biography of Lavoisier’s rival.

  62. L. Pasteur, The Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine and Surgery (1909).

  63. R. W. Reid, Microbes and Men (Boston: E. P. Dutton, 1975), is a readable history of germ theory. A. Karlen, Man and Microbes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), is a controversial, doom-fraught survey of the history of microbially inflicted plagues. L. Garrett, The Coming Plague (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), is a brilliantly written admonition to the world about the current state of microbial evolution.

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sp; 64. Papers and Proceedings of the Connecticut Valley Historical Society (1876), i, p. 56. M. J. McClymond and G. R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), is the most complete study.

  65. George Whitefield’s Journals (Lafayette: Sovereign Grace, 2000).

  66. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. L. Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), x, p. 403.

  67. T. Blanning, The Triumph of Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

  68. Baron d’Holbach, System of Nature, quoted in Jones, The Great Nation, pp. 204–5.

  69. Fernández-Armesto, Millennium, pp. 379–83.

  70. I. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), is a challenging collection of lectures. W. Vaughan, Romanticism and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), is a spirited survey. D. Wu, Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), is intended as an aid for the study of British romantic literature but is much more widely useful. The final allusion is to a speech W. E. Gladstone made in Liverpool on 28 June 1886. P. Clarke, A Question of Leadership (London: Hamilton, 1991), pp. 34–5.

  Chapter 8: The Climacteric of Progress: Nineteenth-Century Certainties

  1. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  2. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and A. Glover (London: Dent, 1904), x, p. 87.

  3. T. R. Malthus, Population: The First Essay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 5.

  4. W. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (London: Templeman, 1858), p. 93.

  5. A. Pyle, ed., Population: Contemporary Responses to Thomas Malthus (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), is a fascinating compilation of early criticism. S. Hollander, The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), is an exhaustive and authoritative study. M. L. Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), is a useful introduction to demographic history. A. Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), puts population anxiety in perspective.

  6. Langford et al., eds, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ix, p. 466.

  7. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is the founding text of the tradition. The conservatism he established is brilliantly satirized – though perhaps rather caricatured – in T. L. Peacock’s novel of 1830, The Misfortunes of Elphin. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), and R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London: Macmillan, 1980), are outstanding modern statements. R. Bourke, Empire and Nation: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), is masterly and vivid.

  8. D. Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning (London: Cassell, 1988), p. 1.

  9. E. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber, 1952), remains unsurpassed. See J. R. Dinwiddy, Bentham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), for a short introduction, and G. J. Postema, Jeremy Bentham: Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy, 2 vols (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 2002), for a useful collection of important essays on the subject.

  10. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1970–in progress), xxxv, pp. 84–5.

  11. A. Bain, James Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 266; cf. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, 1863), pp. 9–10.

  12. G. W. Smith, ed., John Stuart Mill’s Social and Political Thought, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1998), ii, p. 128.

  13. H. H. Asquith, Studies and Sketches (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1924), p. 20.

  14. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Longman, 1867), p. 44. For a long-term view of the origins of liberalism, with roots in the Christian tradition, see L. Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

  15. A. Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London: Macmillan, 1987), is an outstanding introduction. J. Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge, 1991), is useful and pithy. M. Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), is a superb and cogent study.

  16. E. O. Hellerstein, Victorian Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), is a valuable collection of evidence. C. Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), is a fine study of the problem of the labour laws. L. de Mause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Harper, 1974), is a pioneering collection of essays.

  17. W. Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).

  18. S. Fraquelli, Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters, 1891–1910 (London: National Gallery, 2008), p. 158.

  19. J. C. Petitfils, Les socialismes utopiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977). A. E. Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, the Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), remains valid on US experiments in the tradition.

  20. E. Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 141.

  21. L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire, eds, The Socialist Idea (London: Quartet, 1974), is an excellent, critical introduction. C. J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), is a good study of backwoods socialism in America. C. N. Parkinson, Left Luggage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), is perhaps the funniest-ever critique of socialism.

  22. D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation [1817] (London: Dent, 1911), is the basic work. G. A. Caravale, ed., The Legacy of Ricardo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), collects essays on his influence. S. Hollander, The Economics of David Ricardo (London: Heinemann, 1979), is an exhaustive study. A volume of the same author’s collected essays, which brings his work up to date in some respects, appeared in Ricardo: The New View, i (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995).

  23. The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. P. Saffra (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), ix, p. 29.

  24. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, chs. 1, 5, p. 61; The Works of David Ricardo, Esq., MP (London: Murray, 1846), p. 23.

  25. The latter is the well-supported thesis of Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

  26. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York: International, 1948), p. 9.

  27. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, is a brilliant study and a devastating critique. D. McLellan, Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), is a good introduction to Marx. F. Wheen, Karl Marx (New York: Norton, 2001), is a lively, insightful biography.

  28. Berkeley’s theory appeared in The Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1893), is a classic statement of an extreme form of idealism. G. Vesey, ed., Idealism: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), treats the subject historically.

  29. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, ed. T. F. Geraets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991); cf. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (Berlin, 1833), p. 35; G. A. Magee, The Hegel Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 111 ff., does a good job of making Hegel’s notions intelligible.

  30. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: Bell, 1914), p. 41.

  31. S. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), is a clear introduction to the key concepts. E. Weil, Hegel and the State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), offers a sympathetic reading and an interesting discussion of some of the lineages of political thought Hegel fathered. R. Bendix, Kings or People (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), is an important comparative survey of the rise of popular sovereignty.

  32. Thomas Carlyle’s Co
llected Works (London: Chapman, 1869), i, pp. 3, 14–15.

  33. J. Burckhardt, Reflections on History [1868] (Indianapolis: Library Classics, 1943), pp. 270–96; many other editions.

  34. T. Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History [1840] (London: Chapman, n.d. [1857]), p. 2.

  35. T. Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: Scribner, 1918), p. 249.

  36. H. Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: Appleton, 1896), p. 34.

  37. O. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), is a brilliant study of the context.

  38. Carlyle, On Heroes, is a representative text. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarasthustra [1883], ed. G. Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), contains his thinking on the subject.

  39. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, part 3, p. 11. On Nietzsche as conscious provocateur see S. Prideau, I Am Dynamite: A Life of Nietzsche (New York: Duggan, 2018).