State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse by Frank Palmeri (review)

Patterns of thought that extend over lengthy periods of time and across national borders and different genres of writing provide a tempting, if potentially hazardous, subject for intellectual history. On the one hand, tracing such connections is vital to the discipline and allows a historian to show that ideas are not ephemeral and insignificant products of a particular age, but phenomena capable of exerting significant and prolonged forms of influence. On the other hand, however, in identifying continuities between ostensibly disparate works, there remains a danger that differences in context, genre, and polemical intention will be ignored as texts and authors are shoe-horned into elaborate genealogies. At their worst, these schemas end up revealing more about the intellectual preoccupations of their creator than any historical personages.

Frank Palmeri's State of Nature, Stages of Society is the latest work to take on the challenge of tracing a single intellectual phenomenon across an extended period of time. The core thesis is bold. Conjectural approaches, Palmeri argues, did not, as has been widely assumed, expire with the Enlightenment. Rather, they played a key part in the development of the social sciences (particularly political economy, sociology, and anthro pology), underpinned the innovations of the modern era's most influential thinkers (including Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud), and remain a formative influence on modern social and scientific thought.

This argument is rooted in a distinctive definition of conjectural history. For Palmeri, the genre is best conceived of as "a speculative, natural istic, noncontractual explanation of early social forms that usually falls into stages and shows the unintended consequences of human actions" (35). At one level, such a characterization serves to close off a number of potential lines of enquiry. The use of an interconnected knot of conjectural characteristics, for example, means that either a work is a con jectural history, and is thus of interest, or it is not, and therefore can be ignored entirely. As a consequence, what are labelled "Enlighten ment conjectural histories" are detached in analytical terms both from other forms of historical writing (which receive no coverage at all in this volume), and other non-conjectural currents of Enlightenment thought. At the same time, while a brief prehistory of conjectural history is provided, the dis cussion of Enlightenment-era texts is structured around a synchronic analysis that deals with each of the genre's characteristics in sequence. This ensures that there is very little reflection on how conjectural history came into existence or the ways in which conjectural historians responded to one another's work.

Such issues mean that readers looking for a straight account of "Enlightenment Conjectural History" might be disappointed. Palmeri's approach, however, is vindicated once the book moves on to its key theme: the influence of conjectural history on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century social discourse. At a methodological level, the focus on genre ensures that the discussion avoids many of the potential pitfalls of examining intellectual continuity over the longue durée. The claim made here is not the highly problematical one that an overarching idea or belief can be shown to link writers who lived, on occasions, hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart from one another. Rather, Palmeri's point is that the strategies of conjecture generated a tool-kit of approaches to the past, which have proved useful in a range of different intellectual disciplines, and remain of central importance to thinking in the social sciences and humanities. Tracing such links, meanwhile, enables Palmeri to demonstrate the existence of a series of significant, but hitherto ignored patterns of intellectual continuity. These patterns can be divided into two types. First, Palmeri is alert to the specific ways in which later writers engaged with the conjectural canon. At times, the discussion of these connections expands on well-known material such as...