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UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Reasoning with Savages: The Anthropological Imagination of the Scottish Enlightenment Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3j30q197 Author Holt, Randall Joseph Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California University of California Los Angeles Reasoning with Savages: The Anthropological Imagination of the Scottish Enlightenment A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Randall Joseph Holt 2016 © Copyright by Randall Joseph Holt 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reasoning with Savages: The Anthropological Imagination of the Scottish Enlightenment by Randall Joseph Holt Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Peter Hanns Reill, Chair This project examines the origins and history of early anthropological thought in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment during the last half of the eighteenth century. The aim of this investigation is to set into historical context the intense interest in tribal societies exhibited in the writings of the leading members of the Scottish intelligentsia. Increasing contact with and awareness of non- European societies in the eighteenth century raised the problem of accounting for both the diversities and uniformities existing among the world’s peoples and their societies. After midcentury many enlightened moral theorists drew upon the methods and epistemologies of the new natural sciences to reestablish the moral sciences on natural historical foundations. Human and social development were ii understood as analogous to generative theories posited in the vitalist life sciences of epigenesis, which was instrumental, most notably, in the stadial or “four-stages” theory of progress articulated by Adam Smith. Reinterpreting the Scottish Enlightenment in the context of vitalist thought offers greater insight into what is perhaps its preeminent idea, that of “spontaneous order.” The theorization of moral and social systems as products of human nature allowed for a far-reaching revision of the human sciences and the systems of thought upon which they were based, including natural law theory. The mainstream of anthropological theorists understood the continuities among human societies as evidence of a uniformity in human nature. A minority, however, located divergences in civilizational progress in racial difference. This study attempts to draw out the implications of these understandings of humanity and connections between empire and anthropology, which were constitutive strands of the late eighteenth-century Scottish human and moral sciences. Recognizing in British imperial and commercial expansion nascent processes of globalization, enlightened Scots made its theorization a part of the moral and human sciences. Smith posited that it was familiarity with others mediated through the imagination that produced sympathy. With increasing contact between unequal societies, the more liberal Scottish theorists reasoned with “savages” sought in part to cultivate humanitarian and egalitarian sentiments towards them among their readers through the creation of an anthropological imagination. iii The dissertation of Randall Joseph Holt is approved. David W. Sabean Anthony Pagden Patrick Coleman Peter Hanns Reill, Committee Chair iv Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Adam Smith and the “Anthropological Turn” of the Scottish Enlightenment 17 Chapter 2. Vitalizing Human Nature I: Moral and Social Order in Adam Smith’s Science of Man 67 Chapter 3. Vitalizing Human Nature II: Adam Ferguson: Moral Philosophy as the Natural History of the Species 116 Chapter 4. Global Sympathies and Provincial Sociabilities: Civil Society, Empire, and Moral Philosophy as Anthropology 158 Chapter 5. Anthropological Antipathies: Monboddo, Kames, and the Construction of Race in the Scottish Enlightenment 228 Chapter 6. The End(s) of Scottish Enlightenment Anthropology: James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind 279 Epilogue 327 Bibliography v Acknowledgments After a long and circuitous path through the graduate programs at several institutions of higher education interrupted sporadically by life’s contingencies, it is with great satisfaction and relief that I submit this dissertation in completion of my doctoral studies. It is also an opportunity to put into words my feelings of gratitude towards some of the people who have guided and supported me along the way. I would first like to offer my thanks to those institutions and their staffs who supported my work. The financial support from the University of California, Los Angeles enabled me to undertake graduate study after a considerable hiatus from academia. The History Department teaching fellowships provided not only support, but also invaluable experience. A fellowship from the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library enabled me to undertake initial research in primary sources before going abroad. Summer research funding from the Department enabled me to live for an extended period in Scotland while I conducted archival research at the National Library of Scotland and in the Special Collections of Edinburgh University Library. I would like to thank the knowledgable, courteous, and efficient staff at each of these institutions. As the eighteenth-century coffee house was a central locus for disseminating enlightenment, I would be remiss not to acknowledge those modern-day iterations of that institution where much of the writing of this project was done. For the conversation and caffeine, I thank the patrons and baristas of Luxxe Caffe, Groundwork, and Profetta Espresso in Los Angeles; Black Medicine, Artisan Roast, vi and Costello Coffee in Edinburgh; and, Dog River Coffee in Hood River, Oregon. I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues in the History Department, Beth Greene, Kimberly Garmoe, Lela Gibson, Kris Pangburn, Peter Park, Daphne Rozenblatt, Jesse Sadler, and Noami Taback for the benefit of their conversation and camaraderie. I also extend my thanks to the staff of the UCLA History Department for their long-suffering and professional practical assistance on numerous occasions. My special thanks to Hadley Porter, Director of Student Affairs, for her inestimable help in navigating the labyrinthian bureaucracy of the Department and the Graduate Division. I have been most fortunate to have a dissertation committee composed not only of scholars of the highest caliber, but also of men of great generosity and humaneness. I thank Peter Reill, my committee chair, for his encouragement and support. After I was tasked with presenting a paper on Adam Smith (who was not the subject of my paper proposal) to the annual conference of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) in 2012, I turned to Peter’s research in order to say something about Smith that would be novel to ECSSS members. His work on eighteenth-century vitalism subsequently became a key part of the interpretative constellation within which I have attempted to situate the Scottish Enlightenment and a crucial point of departure for my approach to it. I am also grateful to David Sabean for his support and advice. His critical reading and queries set me rethinking and rewriting several early pivotal chapters, and many other passages besides. Thanks, too, for his “setting a fire” beneath me - and, on occasion, beneath others. Anthony Pagden provided a scholarly model vii for contextualizing European thought within the wider world, which formed an important part of the intellectual orientation that I sought to establish in my own work. I appreciate the continued support and encouragement he has offered during countless office hours. As the departmental “outside” member of the committee, Patrick Coleman has shown me much goodwill, as well as provided meaningful insights into eighteenth-century literary culture. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to family and friends for their moral and financial support. To my parents, Joe and Nadine Holt, my thanks for their ongoing support without which this dissertation would likely still be a work-in-progress. I thank my good friends, John and Deanna Joyer, who have kept me in the coffee houses writing and off the streets by employing me in physical labor, which has supplemented my mental labor and helped me maintain some semblance of equilibrium during the final throes of the writing process. Throughout the years of doctoral study and dissertation writing, I have been motivated and encouraged to bring this project to completion by my son, Gabriel. I hope that after having been my “teaching assistant” on occasion during my own teaching at UCLA and traveling companion to a 2013 ECSSS conference in Paris at the Sorbonne he has come to share some of my love of the life of mind. It is to Gabriel that this dissertation is dedicated. viii Vita 1993 A. B., History University of California, Davis 1996 Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Reed College 1999 Instructor, Humanities Columbia Gorge Community College 1999-2001 Department of History Fellowship, Stanford University 2001 A. M., European History, Stanford University 2001-2004 Instructor, History/Humanities Columbia Gorge Community College 2006-2008 Cota-Robles Fellowship, UCLA 2008-2010 Department of History, UCLA Teaching Assistant 2010-2012 Department of History, UCLA Teaching Fellow 2013 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
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