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Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.3 (2005) 237-265



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Savages in the Scottish Enlightenment's History of Desire

Victoria University of Wellington

If sex is assumed by most people today to be a relatively stable feature of human biology, and if, partly as a counter to this, one preoccupation of the field of sexual studies in the academy is the tracing of the complex histories of the different social identities and practices that we now take for granted as sexual, then the most striking feature of the social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment was its assumption that sexual desire did have a history. The taming of the sexual appetite was a theme prominent in the Enlightenment thinkers' investigations of savage societies , their histories of Europe, and their critiques of luxury. The idea that desire had undergone progressive refinement like other tastes was integral to their general histories of societal development.

In the eighteenth century a natural history approach to the study of societies came into vogue on the Continent but also and particularly in Scotland.1 Adam Smith's stadial scheme is typical and perhaps the best known. He saw societies commonly progressing through four successive stages: the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture, and the age of commerce. Each stage, distinguished by its mode of subsistence, had associated with it different divisions of labor, types of production, and consequently different conceptions of property, systems of law, manners, and forms of government. Each developmental stage was presumed to be more mature, more complex, and more refined than the preceding one. In the original state of savage simplicity, the sexual appetite was understood as weak and unfocused. Accompanying improved modes of subsistence that [End Page 237] furnished more plentiful provisions and greater leisure time, there was a gradual multiplication of needs and a refinement of desires. New regimes of discipline and education produced acquired tastes. Desire in general but sexual desire in particular was invigorated and channeled by novel allurements and new mechanisms of constraint. Expansive markets and expectations, though, also brought perils in their train, and the humanist discourse they employed warned of the decline into luxury and decadence to which all affluent societies were prone. Social corruption, as we shall see, was frequently coded in sexual terms.

Attention has been given of late to the position of women in Scottish Enlightenment thought.2 John Millar, professor of law at the University of Glasgow and a student of Adam Smith, wrote a history of manners structured around the status and treatment of women in those four stages.3 He and his contemporaries understood the position accorded to women to be an important index of a society's degree of barbarity or civility.4 At the same time, Millar and a number of late-eighteenth-century authors were also constructing a history of sexual desire, or what John Dwyer has called a "natural history of love."5 Rather than focusing on questions of gender, the following inquiry looks at how the sexual appetite itself was conceived, how its cultivation and transformation in different historical periods was understood, and how ideas about the sexuality of savages in particular formed part of their histories of societal development. It will be shown that John Millar, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, William Robertson, Thomas Malthus, and William Godwin, despite their many differences, relied on common conceptions of savagery and the refinement of appetites in their theories and histories of society. [End Page 238]

In his recent cultural history of masturbation Thomas Laqueur has provided a rich account of why in eighteenth-century Europe this solitary vice came to be regarded as a deadly sexual pathology.6 Simply put, his explanation is that masturbation became emblematic of the dangers besetting the formation of the modern self. New anxieties were generated as traditional forms of restraint were set aside and a new regime of self-control gradually took their place. What was necessitated and encouraged by but also feared in these developments was the power of...

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