Ideas as Remedies to Inconveniences

This chapter locates the roots of the pragmatic genealogical tradition in David Hume’s explanations of artificial virtues as remedies to inconveniences. The motivation for Hume’s turn to genealogy is examined, and it is shown how viewing his accounts of the virtues of justice and fidelity to promises through the lens of pragmatic genealogy sets them apart from the Enlightenment genre of conjectural history. Four functions performed by Hume’s fiction of a counterpossible state of nature are identified, and it is shown how Hume introduces two key ideas: that under certain circumstances, the motivations to engage in a practice need to be non-instrumental motivations if the practice is to be stable; and that shared needs can give rise to practices that serve a point for participants even when those fail to grasp what that point is. This prevents genealogies from becoming overly intellectualist or circular.

An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

Natural Law and Civilizational Progress: Assumptions of a Political Theory in Simonas Daukantas’s Historiography

This article aims to identify and reconstruct a few main elements of political theory upon which the works of Simonas Daukantas, the founding father of the national Lithuanian written history, are based. Daukantas’s major works on Lithuanian history were researched while identifying and closely analyzing the passages where Daukantas specifically speaks about natural law and civilizational progress. Daukantas’s history works were considerably influenced by authors of Neostoic natural law theory, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Antoine-Yves Goguet. This influence shows in the adopted conceptions of natural needs, natural sociability, and a characterization of the emergence of private property rights in Lithuania with the help of conjectural history methods. Daukantas traces natural law elements in the oldest customs of the people and therefore gives most attention to reconstructing and describing the mores of the ancient Lithuanians. In describing historical evolution, he applied in his works the concepts of bright and dark periods as well as the distinctions of other separate stages of civilizational progress as discussed in Enlightenment historiography and conjectural history in particular.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the central themes and arguments in the book, a brief chapter outline, and a discussion of research methodology. Besides being in the forefront of commercial credit, Britain also led the way during the eighteenth century in creating and sustaining an intellectual justification for a credit economy based on gold, most clearly articulated in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s conjectural history of gold and later modifications hewed closely to the twin categories of class and status, which molded the changing contours of British society during the decades on either side of 1800. Gold’s dual role in this history provides a useful map for exploring Britain’s ascendance during the century after 1750. The dominant British discourse on gold, which privileged its use as currency over decoration, aligns with an interpretation of that century as radically modern, whereby Britain took a comfortable if short-lived lead in the race among nations for wealth and power. Against a forward-looking story that identifies gold as a modernizing motor, the nagging prevalence of decorative gold in Britain and its empire supports a contrary narrative that emphasizes continuity rather than a radical break. In this story, the rise of a modern credit economy shared space with an empire that depended as much on ornamental splendor as on economic and racial subordination and an impulse to draw from the past in order to create a habitable present in the face of rising levels of population and class division.

The Menger-Mises Theory of the Origin of Money--Conjecture or Economic Law?

In recent years some economists have begun to doubt the scientific standing of the standard Austrian theory of the origin of money. They seem to think that it is only one possible solution to the problem of accounting for money’s value. Of these economists, Gary North (North 2012b) has presented the most cogent counter-interpretation to how we should understand the theory of the origin of money as elaborated by Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises. Unlike the rest of economic theory, the origin of money and Mises’s regression theorem do not partake of the character of a scientific law deduced from the basic principles of the science, but is rather, and is presented as such in the writings of Menger and Mises, what North terms “conjectural history.” In this essay we will respond to North’s challenge and to the economists who agree with him.

History, Romance, and the Novel

This chapter traces Charles Brockden Brown’s theories of romance, history, and the novel, from his earliest fictional-historical essays, “The Rhapsodist” (1789), “Walstein’s School of History” (1799), and “The Difference between History and Romance” (1800); to Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799); to An Address to the Government of the United States (1803) and “Annals of Europe and America” (1807–1810). For Brown, romance is a form of conjectural history, true because of its imaginative range beyond the limitations of the novel’s verisimilitude. The future-oriented romance is especially suited to the local and regional conditions of the United States and uniquely connected to the geography of the nation. Brown’s influence can be found in later writers of romance, such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.