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Lloyd Kramer, Frank Palmeri. State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 185–186, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.185
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The origins of the modern social sciences are often traced to the eighteenth-century European cultural turn toward scientific methods and empirical knowledge. Frank Palmeri’s insightful analysis of influential modern European thinkers argues, however, that some of the Enlightenment era’s most influential cultural legacies came from “conjectural histories” that provided almost no empirical evidence to support wide-ranging speculations on the early evolution of human societies. State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse therefore develops a well-informed, ambitious intellectual history of how speculative social theories shaped the construction of modern social scientific knowledge. Such theories provided conceptual paradigms that Palmeri compares to Thomas Kuhn’s account of the shaping paradigms that generate knowledge in the natural sciences. Although researchers may downplay these epistemological frameworks, they often carry disciplinary power long after specific empirical studies disprove parts of the theory.
Palmeri wants to explain why nonempirical conjectures became so important for the creation of empirical-minded social scientific research. “Conjectural history,” he writes, “opens up a space for theory, for hypotheses” (14); and this theoretical “space” created opportunities for new critical thinking. Palmeri supports this argument through careful analysis of conjectural historical works whose paradigm-shaping authors still provoke deep dialogical engagement. The genre began with Bernard Mandeville in the 1720s and reappeared in the influential books of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, the Marquis de Condorcet, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Malthus, Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault—to name only the most notable theorists whom Palmeri examines. All of these authors and many others (including the women novelists Harriet Martineau and George Eliot) speculated about the early emergence or continuing evolution of religion, marriage, language, government, and economic relations, even though they often lacked the kind of empirical evidence that a social scientist would now expect to see in a Ph.D. dissertation.
