The Science of Sympathy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Boddice
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Medical Progress ◽  
Compulsory Vaccination ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
Descent Of Man ◽  
Civilized Society

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in civilized society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. Combining the history of emotions, the history of medicine, the history of science and the history of morality, Boddice shows how specific interpretations of Darwinism sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection, an essential part of new research in physiology, and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged sympathy for the "fit" alone, placing this emotion at the heart of eugenics. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualised obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

The Historical Significance and Contemporary Relevance of Conservative Liberalism and Ordo-Liberalism: A Hollow Promise?

2020 ◽  
pp. 410-450
Author(s):  
Kenneth Dyson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Karl Polanyi ◽  
Balanced Assessment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Liberalism

This chapter attempts to assess the significance of conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism in the larger context of liberalism by examining five questions. Why have they been marginalized? How have their ideas fared in Germany, the epicentre of Ordo-liberalism? What is the position of conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism in the intellectual history of political economy? What are their prospects in a new transformational crisis of liberalism? Are they likely to prove no more than a ghostly shadow in liberal political economy? Or can they act as a source of liberal rejuvenation? Finally, do conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism offer no more than a hollow promise of disciplining capitalism and democracy? Do the gaps in their thinking—their focusing illusion—disable them as a source of intellectual insight and as a relevant influence on debate, institutions, and policies? Or do they contribute to the overall strength and resilience of liberalism by complementing the contributions of social liberalism and laissez-faire liberalism? The chapter examines conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism using the insights from the Austrian School, the new Chicago School, and libertarian thought; from Karl Polanyi and Michel Foucault; from critics of authoritarian liberalism and of the long shadow of Carl Schmitt; and from writers on the moral economy, including John Rawls and Amartya Sen. It concludes by offering a balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this liberal tradition and its place in wider liberalism.

Darwin and the Ethnologists

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
Group I ◽  
History Of ◽  
Descent Of Man

Toward the end of The Descent of Man, Darwin made a striking assertion. “I would as soon be descended,” he claimed, from a “heroic little monkey” than from a “savage” who practiced torture and infanticide, treated “wives like slaves,” and was indecent and superstitious. These lines have been often quoted but rarely analyzed. I argue here that they provide a means for following Darwin’s thought as he grappled with contemporary ethnological evidence that seemed—if today’s “savages” were to be taken as models for primeval humans—to work against his theory of sexual selection as it applied to humankind. In addition to explicating what I suggest is a crucial element of Descent, this paper has three aims, all of which help us better understand the relationships between ethnology and Darwinian thought. First, to offer a selective intellectual history of British ethnology between 1864 and 1871, focusing on those texts that Darwin deemed most problematic for his arguments. Second, and as a result, to better specify Darwin’s views on race by comparing him not to his opponents, but to his like-minded peers, a group I term “liberal racialists.” Third, to explore the utility of what I term the “geological analogy,” a mid-nineteenth-century version of the comparative method (which substituted study of “less developed” peoples today for humans in much earlier periods). Where liberal ethnologists deployed the geological analogy consistently, Darwin would be much more selective, denying its application at times in favor of analogies to lower animals. He would thus save his theoretical suppositions by denying that contemporary “lower” races, with their depraved morality, could serve as appropriate models for our apparently more decent, yet more animalistic forebears.

Life, Death, and Resurrections

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessi Streib ◽  
SaunJuhi Verma ◽  
Whitney Welsh ◽  
Linda M. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Culture Of Poverty ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of

This article examines the culture of poverty thesis, focusing on its many lives, deaths, and reincarnations. It first considers the intellectual history of the culture of poverty thesis before discussing how the argument has been interspersed throughout U.S. history and applied to various groups. It then considers the argument’s scholarly reproduction, noting how it is underlain by a binary whereby segments of the poor, racial minorities, and immigrants are positioned as having a deviant, morally suspect culture that undermines their potential upward mobility, whereas white middle- and upper-class Americans are positioned as having a normal, morally upstanding culture that secures their class position. The article also describes four routine scholarly practices that engender a specter of support for the culture of poverty thesis. Finally, it argues that the culture of poverty should either be put to rest or allowed to live based on its own merits, and suggests ways to end its unintentional resurrection.

scholarly journals Descent of Darwin: race, sex, and human nature

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam ◽  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Biological Importance ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In 1871, Charles Darwin published Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, a text that extended, elaborated and completed his On the Origin of Species (1859). When he had published Origin, Darwin sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to skirt controversy; in Descent he waded into the fray on near-innumerable issues. Readers could find explicit the claim that humans had descended from apes, in addition to explorations of the similarities and apparent gulfs between ‘man’ and other animals. They also found Darwin's opinions on issues ranging from the origin and hierarchy of races to the question of women's education, from the source of altruistic bravery to the biological importance of aesthetic judgement, from his views on what his cousin would term ‘eugenics’ to the history of monogamy. In the last 150 years these ideas have been variously contested, rejected and recovered, so that the shadow of Descent extended into debates over the development of languages, the evolution of human sexualities, the ongoing possibilities of eugenics and the question of women's equality. In this volume, appearing during the sesquicentennial of the text's first appearance, one finds papers dedicated to all of these themes and more, laying out the roots and fruits of Darwin's Descent.

scholarly journals Of lice and men: Charles Darwin, Henry Denny and the evidence for the human races as varieties or species

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Gregory Radick ◽  
Mark Steadman
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Distinct Species ◽  
Social World ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Scientific Collections ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract Charles Darwin never doubted the common ancestry of the human races. But he was open-minded about whether the races might nevertheless be so different from each other that they ought to be classified not as varieties of one species but as distinct species. He pondered this varieties-or-species question on and off for decades, from his time aboard the Beagle through to the publication of the Descent of Man. A constant throughout was his concern with something that he first learned on the Beagle voyage and that, on the face of it, seemed to favour the species ranking: the different races, he was told, play host to distinct species of lice. This paper reconstructs the long run of Darwin's reflections and interactions on race, lice and history, using his extended correspondence with Henry Denny – curator of the scientific collections of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and Britain's leading expert in the natural history of lice – as a window onto the social world whose imprint is everywhere in the pages of the Descent.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

FBI and Religion

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Orientation ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Assessment ◽  
Civic Religion ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.

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