The origins of the lectures and book on Cosmologies of Capitalism

Until I was into my late twenties, it had never occurred to me how much we see the world through a set of filters. One breakthrough came, I remember, when I read an article by Ernest Gellner in 1967 on ‘Concepts and Society’, where he described, with diagrams, the process of filtering. Around the same time, I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

These and the effect of starting to study anthropology seriously, and perhaps my move from one intellectual environment, Oxford, to another, the London School of Economics, gradually made me aware of the way in which what we see is determined by a much wider ‘spirit of the age’, a Zeitgeist, a paradigm, an episteme, or ‘climate of knowing’ of which we are largely unaware. These, as Kuhn showed, determine what questions we ask and what answers we find satisfying. Thus began a lifelong interest in the ‘science of knowing’, epistemology, or, in Wittgenstein’s famous image, an attempt to become aware of the fly-bottle which imprisons each of us.

The next stage in my awareness of the air in which I flew, was when I was asked to give a series of lectures on the history of the social sciences in 1982. I decided to take a long time period, from the Greeks onwards, and to use an idea from Evans-Pritchard, which linked space, time and power, and a little later from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), to investigate something missing from Kuhn. In other words, not only to explore what the major paradigms behind knowledge-periods were, but also what made them change.

In this set of lectures on the ‘cosmologies of capitalism’ I looked at the way in which time was perceived: from circular, to linear, to evolutionary, to structural. I linked this to how the power balances and knowledge flow between the Rest and the West changed over time. In essence, I tried to show that, when the West and the Rest were level, or the West was weaker, time was conceived in the West to be cyclical and static. When the West started to forge ahead industrially and militarily, from the middle of the eighteenth century, time became conceived of as progressive, and then highly evolutionary, with the West at the top of the ladder. All this collapsed again in the carnage of the First World War and with the rising power of Japan and colonial resistance movements.

Here is an account of the writing and later filming of the lectures from my contemporary diaries and thoughts books.

DIARY
Alan finished his marriage lectures.
Sarah 9.7.1982

This is the second entry in my ‘Great Thoughts Book’.

Evolution, Change and Society. 9.7.1982

Having finished my draft of a work on marriage in England, and off tomorrow to witness the systems in action at a wedding, my thoughts already turning to the next set of lectures on ‘Evolution and Society’. Am tempted to structure these around Kuhn’s theory of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But instead of stopping at the interesting point, as Kuhn does, when he shows that paradigms change at a high level and affect a whole lot of disciplines, and this happens not because of superior logic/truth/accuracy of new observations, but because of many social and other factors, I would attempt to go on to look at why certain paradigms were attractive and why they should be superseded. It would partly be a testing/extension of Kuhn, but also an organising framework for a host of other fairly high-level and abstract observations concerning the social sciences in general, including history and social anthropology.

This attempt to see which types of explanation, which cosmologies and systems of thought are meaningful and why at certain stages, would also follow a certain strand in anthropology.

It has long been shown that people only believe, accept as explanations, certain things which fit their experience. They tend to create or recreate these systems. Thus, for example, myths and beliefs are manipulated in order to justify things: the past is moulded, manipulated to justify or explain the present. Indeed, it is not as simple as that. The past and theories of how we got here and where we will go appear to grow naturally out of the present situation. It is not as crude as many neo-Marxists claim, but certainly ideologies are partly determined by the economic, social, class and other relations.

How does this relate to the theme of the lectures? It will (probably!) be argued that there have been in history and the social sciences several major paradigms dominant for longish periods. These are roughly:



How can we explain these? For example, the Darwinian revolution of the mid–19th century, or functionalism in the early 20th century? It is partly a matter of new information — the Beagle, Haddon in the Torres Straits, Lévi-Strauss etc. But it is clearly as much, if not more, a ‘climate of opinion’ which makes the old explanations old-fashioned and encourages people to look for the new. What shows this to be the case is that there are (as in Kuhn's paradigm shifts) associated shifts in a number of different disciplines at about the same time — as in structuralism.

But if this is indeed the case, how would we set about explaining the revolutions? Again, it depends on one's perspectives, but the argument I shall probably pursue is that the major causes lay in power relations between the nationalities and countries of the world. Very roughly, one would then see the following:



Thus, one might fit anthropology, sociology, history as systems of explanation into the two, the twin relations of the theorists as follows.

(a) the past of its own society, relations between A and B;
(b) the relations of society to other societies in relations of A to B.

Both are important and influence each other. The working out of this theme will probably show how inadequate the first guess is.

DIARY
Alan started his lecture series on the history of anthropology.
13.7.1982 Sarah

Continued to work on history of theory lectures — exciting new venture.
14.7.1982 Alan

Started to write Evolution and Change lectures — fun and interesting but tiring.
15.7.1982 Alan

Both a bit tired, but did some further writing on causes of change from circular to lineal concepts of time.
17.7.1982


Evolution in England/History 20.7.82

Have finished a first very rapid sketch of my Evolution argument. Among the reasons which may lie behind the new evolutionism of the 1970s, in which I have not mentioned, are:

(a) Dominance of America — see American Power and the New Mandarins by Chomsky etc.
NB. Almost all those involved in more aggressive forms of evolutionism are American, whether earlier historians like Notestein, Stone and others, or Peacock, Marvin Harris et al.

(b) The gap in technology of destruction; what gunpowder and cannon were to arrows in the 16th century, nuclear weapons are to conventional weapons. Horrifyingly more powerful. One is in a new era.

(c) Travel once again into a new dimension — this time out into space rather than the closed world of 1900 to 1970. The Moon, Mars and so on. This excitement/expansion is very clear in the pages of the National Geographic Magazine, which devotes much time and coverage to space travel from the 1960s.

Factors which affect the observation of past and present through a glass darkly, 20.7.82



Thus, in order to see what it is that people select and why, we need to look at the encompassing glass that surrounds us, the paradigm. This is always changing.

The different components of evolutionism, 23.7.82

Literally, evolutionary means the unfolding, opening out, bending-back of a system. It thus means change but also continuity. Thus, one has an organic metaphor: no sudden ruptures or revolutions (progressive). Onto this, however, there tend to be grafted two features which make an otherwise rather useful metaphor less palatable.

The first is the idea of progress, advance and so on, usually along the continuum of and their various scales of rationality as in Lecky and Weber, morality as in 19th-century evolutionists, civility and civilisation as in Norbert Elias, economics as in Rostow and Polanyi, personality from child to adult, equality, political integration and freedom. Usually this is implicit in the language of space, colour and time. For example, modernisation against the old world, the advance as against decline, upwards and arise through space, darkness to light and so on.

The second is the idea of unilinear evolution. That is to say that all societies will pass through roughly the same stages. Once we have an idea of what these stages are, we can then determine firstly the societies’ relation to each other, secondly the society's relation to its past and future, where it is going.

Thirdly, there is the idea of the leading place of one part of the globe. The society which promulgates evolutionism usually does so partly to place itself at the head of this line. It is then its duty to help the others to catch up on it.

Some possible types of change in a system, 23.7.82



The curious alternation of concepts of change/evolution, 23.7.82



Concepts of time, change and space, 24.7.82

Evans-Prichard, The Nuer, page 108: ‘It will have been noted that the Nuer time dimension is shallow. …How shallow is Nuer time may be judged from the fact that the tree under which mankind came into being was still standing in Western Nuerland a few years ago! Beyond the annual cycle, time-reckoning is a conceptualization of the social structure… [AM: my underlining] It is less a means of co-ordinating events than of co-ordinating relationships...’

This provides one of the keys. The first reminds one of the explosion of time depth in the 19th century. In a strange way, as the Biblical chronology was dropped/undermined by geology, it was exactly the period of European expansion. It is as if an expansion in one dimension required a deepening in another. It is as if a Nuer lineage had suddenly expanded much more widely, hence time had deepened. One could very crudely make a diagram of this as follows:



The job of sociology/anthropology was to try to map out some of the new hatched in space. Hence it is not surprising that there should be an obsession with origins, with evolution. As time/beginnings suddenly shot back millions of years, and as space suddenly shot outwards at lightning speed, it was a huge mental task not merely to document and assimilate but also to explain/classify. The works of Spencer, Quant, Marx, Morgan, Tylor and the rest were doing those things to come to terms with this. And so, as time and space deepen, as one begins to feel that things are moving outwards (expanding universe) and backwards at incredible speed, one gets a heightened sense of change.

Evolutionary laws, 27.7.82

It is clear from Spencer's account of his theory of evolution (Autobiography, ii, pp. 12-13) that the central feature was religious, a faith, a belief, a replacement for the loss of Christianity in the mid–19th century. In other words, anthropology/sociology, as Keith Thomas joked, were substitutes for religion — a secular view of progress. The central feature is the teleological, inevitable nature of Evolution: human societies, like organisms and animals, necessarily move in a certain direction, to diversity or division of labour, etc. Thus, for Herbert Spencer, Tylor and the rest, the Law of Evolution provided the explanation of how things had come to be as they are, and what they would be in the future. Christianity had provided such a framework before — with a progressive historical sense to it. But Christianity was increasingly incapable of dealing with the expansion of time and space from the mid–18th century onwards. Sociology/anthropology and evolutionism were born out of the mingled ‘enlightenment and despair’ which the vacuum created, only itself to be undermined.

The reaction against evolutionism and Robert Chambers, 28.7.82

It looks as if the rapid development of evolutionary thought in political philosophy, law, economics, etc. in the work of later 18th-century philosophers of the French and Scottish Enlightenment was suddenly reversed and largely crushed by the reaction after the French Revolution. The period 1750–1790 can thus be seen as a period of optimism/progressive/evolution of systems, etc. The final burst was in the American Rebellion, French Revolution and the works of Paine and Godwin — the perfectibility of man — and in the work of the Romantics (first phase: Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.). Then came a savage reaction — politically, religiously, intellectually, in the works of Malthus, Paley, etc. (see Hazlitt), which roughly lasted 1790–1840. To speak of progress was heresy. Anthropology and sociology, as substitutes or alternatives to theology, were stopped dead in their tracks.

Interestingly, the development that then occurred, occurred right outside of the formal academic channels on the whole. In observation/analysis, it was the gifted amateur who made the running and finally brought the whole edifice crashing — bringing back ‘Evolution’ and ‘Enlightenment’. Thus, for example, Schoolcraft and Catlin, amateur observers of American Indians; J.C. Pritchard, sanitary inspector; Hugh Miller, self-made geologist; Charles Darwin, amateur zoologist.

An archetype of the gifted amateur, and in many ways the linchpin of the whole movement, was Robert Chambers. His importance was centred round two facts.

(a) His Vestiges summed up current knowledge, free from orthodox pressure, and was enormously popular. It left the way open for Darwin.

(b) His other books, and especially the printing press and Encyclopaedias, opened up knowledge. New information/knowledge could no longer be squashed by a conspiracy of theologians and dons. He unlocked the gates to ordinary mechanics, etc. It was in many ways the second Gutenberg revolution — equivalent to television in its impact. It opened up the floodgates of new knowledge to the rising middle classes.

As a Scotsman, a disciple of Walter Scott and visitor of all the oldest inhabitants in Edinburgh, he was directly in touch with the Scottish Enlightenment. He kept that flame awake and built on it. Thus, while Herbert Spencer and others were completely ignorant of the tradition, he kept it going. As a bookseller and avid reader, he also absorbed the Enlightenment.

Thus, Chambers is a central figure in the development of modern civilisation — a turning point and a fascinating man. Furthermore, the circumstances of the publication of Vestiges are such that it is an excellent illustration of Kuhn's paradigm change theories.

Four possible themes/monographs to occupy the next ten years, 4.8.82

1. The history of love and marriage in England [description]
2. A comparative study of judicial process [description]
3. Changing paradigms in the social sciences

Lectures — based on the eight lectures for part II on ‘Evolution and Change’; 4 lectures on ‘From Feudalism to Capitalism’ and 2 on ‘Urban Systems’.

Sources

(a) Our collection of material on history of philosophy and sociology;
(b) Our material on history/archaeology;
(c) Our material on history of anthropology/travel.

Present state
A few earlier sketches in early lectures on Marx/Maine for ‘Communities, workings on Stubbs, Maitland et al and just starting on lectures. Practically fresh.

Cycles in the social sciences, 6.8.82

1660–1740 Hints of progress and ideas of change.
1740–1790 Enlightenment and evolution, Scottish and French.
1790–1840 Reaction and withdrawal from evolution, consequences of the French Revolution; withdrawal and muted progress.
1840–1890 Evolution at its most strident in anthropology, sociology, archaeology and history.
1890–1940 Withdrawal from evolution; structuralism.
1940–1990 Muted Evolutionism, time and change.

The central problem is to apply to the cosmologies of Western industrial, literate, ‘high culture’ the kinds of analysis that anthropologists have made of non-Western societies, i.e., of open and closed systems, and of what influences cosmologies and systems of causation in philosophy. To my knowledge, no anthropologist has attempted to do this, though there are hints in the works of Lowie, Evans-Pritchard, Horton, Goody, Leach and others.

The determinants of cosmologies, 6.8.82

Added to the usual social causes of thought analysed in relation to simple societies, one has got the complex technological/political and other changes which affect thought — the tools of thought change thought itself — for example printing, films, computing. Thus, it is essential to look at all these as well as products of thought, i.e., books and ideas.

The long-term and short-term changes, 6.8.82

Looked at long view, one could look at these stages in the evolution of social explanations:

To 1750 Pre-evolutionism;
1750–1900 Evolutionism;
1900 on Post-evolutionism.



Evolutionism and technological/political dominance, 10.8.82

One necessary, if not sufficient, cause of an evolutionary view may be a gap in technology/politics. Thus, no coincidence that evolution no longer in favour in Europe from about 1890 onwards as their dominance declined, and no coincidence that the ‘new evolutionism’ is most conspicuous in American anthropology, which feels itself superior technologically, economically, politically, and hence historically evolutionary thought is in fashion. Thus static/circular evolutionary views are related not to the actual state of a society but to its relations to other societies (as relative deprivation in reverse, relative superiority). After all, it is a necessary ideology for action, rule, power, etc. Thus, just as the Whig view of history is related to Victorian superiority are all long-term evolutionary views related to a feeling of innate superiority.

Anthropology/sociology and evolution, 14.8.82

Both anthropology and sociology are deeply embedded in progressivist and particularly evolutionist views, since their acknowledged roots are in the two periods/sets of writers who were most conspicuously evolutionists, i.e., later 18th-century progressivists and later 19th-century evolutionists. However much there may have been a relativist reaction against such feelings of superiority in the first part of the 20th century, in some quarters, it is still lurking there, just as it is in historical work, ready to pop out. And necessarily, since without such a frame it is arguable that ultimately anthropology is:

(a) without any causal framework and hence meaning;
(b) of little relevance to us: if each culture is separate etc., how do they concern us?

The problem and the trick is somehow to separate out the various strands of evolutionism. Thus, clearly, there is technological, physiological, and perhaps even moral and intellectual evolution, but at the same time their nature is different from what is commonly imagined.

The similarities of evolutionism's history and rites of passage, 15.8.82

There is a curious similarity between the great profile of evolutionary theory and the schematic representation of rise of evolutionism and decline. They fit with a famous idea of the ‘rites of passage’ in anthropology, put forward by Arnold van Gennep in his book The Rites of Passage, where you have a previous state, a flat and level landscape you're moving along, then you go upwards, out of time and space into a liminal phase, and then you come back, everything changed, into a new phase. Three stages, as it were. This can be illustrated in a diagram:



Evolutionism, progress and optimism

Evolutionism is, strangely, a radical and optimistic view — almost liberal, for it believes that things are constantly changing and in general the tendency is towards something ‘better’. Especially when coupled with the idea of ‘The Civilising Process’. It is likely to be most prevalent in periods of:

(a) rapid economic growth,
(b) rapid technological growth,
(c) rapid political growth, both in relation to the past of the society in question and also in relation to other societies.

Thus, we see evolutionism, progressivism dominant in Scotland as opposed to the highlands in the 18th century. In 18th-century France, in later 19th-century England and later 20th-century America. There has to be an idea of movement, of direction, of destiny and mission and an idea of oneself as the provider of civilisation.


Evolutionism and evolution: the features, 16.8.1982

The theoretical paradigm of evolution is particularly complicated because each theorist gives the word/concept a different meaning. Thus, we can call Marx an evolutionist or an anti-evolutionist (revolutionist). To disambiguate the word, we can make a start by separating various features, continuums along which writers have placed themselves.

1. Is there a supposedly moral dimension to evolution, i.e., from ‘worse’ to ‘better’, or ‘better’ to ‘worse’?



2. Is the evolutionary framework universal? In other words, is it unilineal evolution, whereby all societies go through the same stages, or is it multi-lineal. Morgan is an example of the first, Maine of the second.

3. How does one move from one ‘stage’ to another? There are two contrasts here:
internalist explanations (e.g., class conflict), versus
externalist (e.g., diffusion)
and gradualist (proper ‘evolution’ and sudden breaks, revolutions).

4. The length of the cycles/stages, rapid changes or long term; the degree to which circular and when did it change, over what period.

5. The number of levels upon which evolution occurs, from those who limit it to technological, to those, like Avebury, who see evolution of religion, morals, ethics, languages and so on.

6. The ultimate dynamic or causes of evolution. Necessity of, for example Spencer, a natural tendency for simplicity, from simplicity to complexity; Durkheim, population growth and hence division of labour; Marx, the dynamics of the dialectic; Darwin, population and natural selection; the 18th century Scots, a natural growth of reason, civilisation and ‘smoothness’.

7. The criteria for distinguishing the stages, for example technological (as in archaeology), or means of subsistence (as hunting, pastoral), or the relations of production (as Marx).

8. Views of the future: towards what are we inexorably moving?
(a) optimistic (Marx) or pessimistic (Weber);
(b) known (Marx) or unknown (Darwin).

Evolutionary frameworks in the social sciences, 20.8.82

In anthropology: hunter-gatherer, tribal, peasant, industrial in the 19th century. Savage barbarian civilised; Morgan, 19th century.
Sociology: community to association, status to contract, traditional to modern, mechanical to organic in the 19th century.
History: ancient, medieval, modern.
Archaeology: stone, bronze, iron ages — the three-age system.
Demography: pre-transition, transition, post-transition.
Marxist: tribal, feudal, capitalist, communist.

Thus, almost all the frameworks within which we still place our data and think were developed and elaborated in the unusual conditions of the 19th century.

The ebb and flow of progressive evolutionism in sociological thought, 27.8.82

After the progression of the Enlightenment comes the reaction against them: Malthus, Burke and so on. Then, commencing with writers born after the revolution, there is a heightening optimism – works written 1830–1880 and particularly 1850–1870 are generally progressive and optimistic, thus Kant, Mill, Spencer, Marx. But as in anthropology and history there is a reaction in the 1880s when the second generation (Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and so on) become functionalists and anti-progressive. Always, in each period there are dissident voices, e.g., Le Play, de Tocqueville during the optimistic period, but the general tenor of an age, the climate is thus, it seems.

Parallels in art/literature in relation to evolutionary/static views, 27.8.82

Whenever there is a move towards medievalism, etc., one can be sure of a conservative reaction and attack on evolutionism. Thus, with the romantic nostalgia of Scott and the Gothic movement of the period 1810–1830, and then later the pre-Raphaelite movement with Maitland as a historian and others, both periods of reaction against secularisation/progressivist views.

Filming of the Cosmologies of Capitalism Lectures 2012
(Alongside writing and then delivering the Huxley Lecture)

DIARY

Nov 30 Theoretical frameworks
Dec 1st Planning
Dec 2nd Cosmologies, Lecture 1 Film
Dec 3rd Cosmologies Lecture 2
December 4th Cosmologies Lecture 3
December 5th Cosmologies Lecture 4
December 8th Cosmologies Lecture 6
December 9th Cosmologies Lectures 10/11
December 10th Cosmologies Lectures 12/13
December 11th Cosmologies Lectures 14/15

Tried my experiment of filming my lectures, starting with 'Cosmologies of Capitalism' and did the first lecture in 2 parts — 35 and 55 mins. Enjoyed it, and it looked pretty good and sounded good too. Am greatly encouraged.
2.12.2012

Cold. Alan lit the fire in the barn as no washing to dry. He did another lecture recording in the Morse House despite having a backache which makes it very difficult to lift or bend. I did more footnoting and some slide and black & white photo transfers this afternoon. The slides were from Alan's lectures.
4.12.2012
Sarah

Our usual pattern — Alan filming his lecture in the Morse House, I doing more Montagu footnotes, and then photos. Alan's back still aching.
5.12.2012
Sarah

Another cold and miserable day. Feeling rather worn as:
(a) my cricked back continues painful (after 4 days — related to sitting awkwardly at the start of my lecture filming/constipation?);
(b) have done 8 shortish lectures on 'Cosmologies of Capitalism' in 4 days — 2 a day in the rather freezing Morse House straight to camera. Great fun and illuminating, but I hope of interest. Needed a rest…
6.12.2012

Coldish but clear. Started filming the 'Cosmologies' lectures again — no. 9. Experimented with a) lights and b) radio mike. The latter works and is a great improvement. Will continue with that.
8.12.2012

Filmed 2 lectures on 'Evolution'. Rather enjoyable.
9.12.2012

Colder. We lit the fire in the barn. Alan did two 1-hour lectures in the Morse House.
10.12.2012

Cold. Alan finished his lecture recordings. He has done remarkably, sticking at it until finished, in 9 days.
11.12.2012
Sarah

An auspicious date — a busy day. A bit of tidying up having finished the 15 parts of the 'Cosmologies of Capitalism' lectures yesterday. Went well and enjoyable.
12.12.2012

About to go and give the most distinguished lecture in anthropology — the Huxley medal and lecture — things come full circle. Huge hall (in the British Library) seating 300+ and my audience less than half that. But it went well, I think — 'Anthropology, Empire and Modernity', with a nice introduction by Roy Ellen. Lots of older friends there — Wendy James, Adrian Mayer, Jean La Fontaine, Michael Banton, Raymond Apthorpe, as well as younger people! A lot of people came up and said how brilliant it was — felt happy at reception.
14.12.2012