The “Common and Impure Earth”

Abstract

This chapter assesses the texts of Isaac La Peyrère and the English responses they generated. Around the same time as Gerrard Winstanley, La Peyrère began developing his own version of the preadamite thesis in France. In Praeadamitae, which was not published until 1655 and translated into English a year later as Men before Adam, La Peyrère argued at length that the biblical story of Adam and Eve was not the history of all humanity. God had created people many times and in many places before the couple in the garden, and though he attributed to the Edenic pair a sacred importance, they were not the foundation of human kinship. Like Winstanley, La Peyrère transformed the basis of existing ideas of human equality, which were rooted in the Genesis account of creation. Rather than being concerned with equality inside the nation, La Peyrère used the preadamite thesis to reformulate what people had in common across cultures, particularly in terms of religion. The chapter then considers how La Peyrère's cosmopolitan sense of low equality became transformed into a polygenetic ideology supporting slavery and imperialism.