Семинар Центра истории идей и социологии знания ИГИТИ

Some Thoughts on the American Social Sciences as Secretly Neo-Kantian

1)  American historical economics and anthropology began with Lewis Henry Morgan (rather than Maine, Morgan doesn't really address Maine, something to ponder.)  And unlike the later generation of English historical economics (Maitland) who purposely circumscribed their inquiries, the hitching of American historical economics to a theory of stages ( drawing upon Morgan as well as the work of Karl Bucher) allowed for structured speculation into all stages of historical existence which runs unbroken (but not unchallenged) until the Second World War (and after, as I will detail later.)

Richard Ely crafted an evolutionary narrative of the progress of society from clan/tribe to the industrial nation state, primarily focusing on economic aspects.  He describes a hunting and fishing state, a pastoral and nomadic (etc.)  through to an industrial state. Many, many discussions of the development of industrial society in the us during this time began with primitive tribes and ended with discussions of the appropriateness of the Industrial Revolution to mankind's material and mental circumstances. Economic studies of the time benefited from renewed appreciation of the society of Homeric Greece, such as produced by Albert G. Keller and were given further nourishment by the psychological and biological writings of Darwin, Kropotkin, Romanes and Lloyd Morgan (see Giddens’  more spiritual (as opposed to Ely) discussion, "The Economic Ages.")  

2) At the same time, there were also some quite sophisticated overt discussions of the distinctions between the primitive and modern mind and the connection of mind to changes in material culture, using in modified form this same stadial structure.   One finds Franz Boas inquiring into the nature of the distinction and these connections but also (far more originally and more fully) Otis T. Mason (who at some moment in anthropology had a reputation which was equal to that of Boas, but whom has unjustly been forgotten). 

Mason outlined the stadial progress of all nations civil and savage (through the prism of technology) as the trek from "naturalism to artificialism" where the story of the evolution of the state and of society is also the evolution of mind (in an applied Spencerian sense) from simplicity to complexity.    

Mason remarks in "The Origins of Invention," "In fact, the history of industry is the story of the greater diversity of materials used, of the more complicated thought of the inventors, of the perfection of tools and processes, which take place of the hands and  feet and brain, and lastly, of the final causes of the products of men's brain and hands. They play of these diversified motives and materials upon one another is one of the most interesting objects of human thought" (17.) Mason is here also indebted to Gustav Klemm. (A completely contrary argument of the progress of the mastery of nature and intellectual life was articulated by Thomas Nixon Carver, who argued in the "Economic Basis of the Problem of Evil" of the increasing social and mental mal-adaptation of human beings to their surrounding environment.)

3) Especially in the late 1930s, 1940s, this stadial model begins to fight for space with overt discussions of the transition of the peasant to the urban citizen (through the work of Robert Redfield) and the mental and material transformations (and dislocations) which must occur.  This built upon an indigenous dialogue in rural sociology in the United States (Sorokin and Ross) but also through a new-found appreciation of Tonnies and Max Weber (as well as other German neo-Kantians).  The model survived with significant flourishes and modifications in the work of Julian Stuart  and Leslie White.

4)   The discussion between the differences between the civil and savage mind (which flourished in pre-war psychology and comparative ethnology) was settled by Levi-Stauss, who also grounded it biologically.  If mankind was seen as having a universal mind not determined by race and development, the task was now to see if man’s mind was built for the modern world, and as importantly, how it evolved in the first place to be built so.

5) In the post-war period in addition to an evolutionary theory of society, anthropologists and biologists reexamined mankind’s history and culture from the perspective of material and social life being a response to biological ‘givens.’ Mankind’s primate past and his achievement of sentience in the Pliocene guided his cultural development and social evolution in the present according to biological givens (particularly his language acquisition, and his preference for kin over non-kin.)  Important for this melding of biology, primatolgy, and social science was Noam Chomsky and his rather popularized account of the biological origins of language. 

With the publication of E.O Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1974 as well as Robin Fox’s Imperial Animal in 1971, many cultural anthropologists, including Marshall Sahlins, whom had been receptive to the idea of biological ‘givens,’ particularly in discussions of kinship, as well as a biological sciences foundation for the sciences of anthropology and sociology cried reductionism.  However, Robin Fox’s students and admirers (including Napoleon Chagnon, the bête noir of anthropology) continue (to this day) to write about biological givens and its connection to (among other things) pastoralism, tribalism in African politics, and the failure of bureaucracy under the umbrella of “biosociology.” Fox’s own very recent “The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind” appropriates Lewis Henry Morgan and his stadial theory, combining it with a theory of biological givens from the toolbox of biosocial anthropology.   Stadial theory has come full circle.

6) Fox’s own classification of his work as “Neo-Kantian” and his own admiration of F.H. Bradley’s
“my station and its duties” illustrates the continual tensions between empiricism and idealism in anthropology that it has never shed in its history (or its Kantianism in all its forms.)  Boas’ salvage anthropology was famously grounded attempt to carve out an autonomous space for the social sciences and the uniqueness of mind and culture (as the neo-Kantianism of Dilthey.)  This account also proposed a rather robust universal theory of mind as interpreting experience through certain categories regardless of the level of advancement.   

One may argue that the American social sciences from Richard Ely forward interpreted the evolution of human cultures through two types of ‘givens’ in a robust Kantian sense.  Kant proposed that experience is mediated through static features of mind.  In much the same way, the stadial theory, as an ideal type (or progression of types), allows for historical experience to be rendered comprehensible universally across all cultures through its simplification according to specific predetermined features.  In a mirror image, the biosocial theory of  Fox and others as explaining the evolution of society from kin-state to the decline of the state in bureaucracy (and anomie) grounds the development of specific periods of history and culture as natural and expected due to evolved features of the human mind.  This presupposes the inability of human beings to interpret the individual and the social life outside of dedicated categories.  Such restrictions explain past history and present societal conflicts.