‘When wild in woods the noble savage ran’: The European Discourse of American Utopianism, 1748–1783

Abstract

In this essay I explore the proposition that the American degeneracy controversy, which emerged as one of the Enlightenment's most contentious debates, was at heart not a dispute about climate, soil and population, but about conflicting ideologies of progress. It is my contention that by offering utopian representations of America and the American Indian, Rousseauesque agrarian-utopians and progressive philosophes alike had brought about a radical rupture between the social reality of the day and perceptions of an alternative future society — privileging the latter over the former. By contrast, being deeply invested in the infallible progress of European civilization, the supporters of the degeneracy thesis had adopted a dismissive stance towards the New World. Hence, in one guise, eighteenth-century degeneracy theory can be seen as a kneejerk reaction to an underlying crisis in the prevalent belief in reason and progress: a crisis that had been provoked by the compelling need to come to terms with the idea of race as a category of biological and social otherness.