ABSTRACT Most intellectual historians use the term “conjectural history” to designate a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth‐century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. These writers traced the development of human society and culture through conjectural reasoning based on philosophers’ views about human nature and travelers’ accounts of “primitive” peoples. Their work had a deep impact on eighteenth‐century philology: it helped to shape such original and influential studies of the ancient world as Edward Gibbon's history of the fall of Rome, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's history of the rise of ancient art, and Friedrich August Wolf's demonstration that Homer was an oral poet. But the connection between conjectural history and classical philology began long before any of the varied Enlightenments conjured up by modern scholars came into being. Conjectures about the past were deeply rooted in the central humanistic discipline, rhetoric; this gave Lorenzo Valla the tools for his conjectural refutation of the legend of the Donation of Constantine. But these same tools were plied with similar skill and originality by many other humanists, from Valla's contemporary in the Roman curia, Leon Battista Alberti, to the Jesuit historian of the New World, José de Acosta, a century later. And they saw them not as an innovation but as part of the philological and historical tradition in which they were grounded. Valla, for example, saw Thucydides—whose histories he translated into Latin—as a conjectural historian and thus identified conjecture as a central feature of historiography in the classical tradition.

ABSTRACT The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and an acerbic satirist, was one of the most controversial works of the eighteenth century. Numerous contemporaries condemned Mandeville for ostensibly arguing that vice is the driving force of modern commercial societies, virtue is an arbitrary invention, and happiness consists in worldly pleasures. This article challenges the historiographical consensus that Mandeville’s account of commercial society depended on his encounters with Epicurean moral and political thought. Instead, it contends that Mandeville deployed a distinctive blend of Augustinian and Hobbist ideas to argue against what he regarded as Epicurus’s unrealistic valorisation of virtue as the way to secure the delights of mental tranquillity. This critique of Epicurus supported a wider polemic against the “easie Divines” of the Church of England, who had appealed to Epicurean maxims to declaim on the pleasures of virtue. To defend this vision of egoistic human nature, Mandeville proposed conjectural histories of the origin of moral virtue, which inverted Lucretius’s depiction of contented primitive humanity in his Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura. The upshot of this reinterpretation is to highlight the creative tensions within the diverse intellectual traditions that constituted the wider neo-Epicurean Enlightenment.

Gloger's rule states that homeotherms are darker at lower latitudes; however, a number of 19th-century naturalists also suggested that animals are more brightly coloured in the tropics than in temperate regions. Using phylogenetic comparative methods, we investigated and compared both ideas across a global sample of 2726 species of mammals, examining their head, torso, legs and tail regions. Coloration data were obtained from photographs and compared with a colour chart specifically devised for mammals; ecological data were extracted from pre-existing, open-source databases. All analyses were conducted using phylogenetic comparative generalised linear mixed models in a Bayesian framework. We found strong support for mammals being darker in the tropics and in areas of high precipitation and evapotranspiration, little support for them being darker in warmer areas, little support for them being redder in more arid regions (a more nuanced interpretation of Gloger's rule), and virtually no support for 19th-century naturalists' conjecture regarding coloration, contrast, or patterning being more conspicuous in the tropics. These results were replicated at both class and order levels. Our findings provide clear evidence for eumelanic coloration to be more prevalent in more humid climates (one facet of Gloger's rule), operating at a class level, but indicate that 19th-century observations about bright coloration in the tropics do not pertain to mammals. Our results confirm the importance of Gloger's rule across mammals as a whole and add to a growing tide that darker coloration is linked to humidity at a macroecological scale.

Recent debate regarding reservation for the Marathas in the state of Maharashtra has not only reverberated across the nation but has also found similar echoes in the demands by the Jats and Gujjar communities in North India. Scholars have estimated that the Maratha (Maratha–Kunbi) caste cluster accounts for 33% to 40% of the total population of the state. To complicate matters, Kunbis have been included in the other backward class list of the Central Government in the 1990s during the implementation of Mandal Commission recommendations. To complicate matters, the Marathas, who are deeply intertwined with the Kunbis through marriage and kinship throughout precolonial and colonial history, have been denied the same. Colonial ethnography and local narratives suggest that the terms ‘Maratha’ and ‘Kunbi’ have been used interchangeably in the past. Moreover, the term ‘Maratha’ is multi-layered and when contextualised it could mean a linguistic group, a geographical community, a jati and even a feudal class. This article explores the historical conjectures and strategies employed by the political elite belonging to the Maratha–Kunbi caste cluster that facilitated this caste cluster to appropriate various identities ranging from kingship and kinship to martial race and also that of a peasant caste group.

The anthropological critique of philosophy has traditionally challenged conjectural histories and simplistic abstractions used by philosophers to define human nature. While this critique often leans toward cultural relativism, this paper argues that David Graeber's work exemplifies a distinctive, anti-relativist version of the anthropological critique. Grounded in ethnographic, historical and archaeological material, Graeber's approach contests Eurocentric assumptions not only about non-European societies but also about Western social institutions themselves. The paper situates Graeber's position within contemporary anthropological debates, contrasting it with prevailing forms of anti-relativism such as cognitive, ecological and ontological perspectives. It then reconstructs Graeber's anthropological critique through key examples from Debt and The Dawn of Everything , including his reinterpretation of freedom inspired by the Indigenous critique of European society. Ultimately, this paper proposes that Graeber's work models a form of concrete universalism that respects cultural differences while offering a plural, historically informed critique of dominant social theories. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Italian are mine.

Primitive Marriage analyzes the conjectural history installed in Victorian anthropology and taken up by novelists, in which sex drives a civilizational progress from domination and force to liberal relations of exchange, contract, and consent. Kathy Psomiades’s act of critical reflection doubles fin-de-siècle anthropology’s reflexive turn upon its own investments in symbol and representation. Her argument models an ethically and politically responsible criticism that restores the difference of past cultural formations, viewed as unfinished, potential, and manifold in their bearing on our present.

Fletcher Coleman. Review of "Imagining Sculpture: A Short Conjectural History" by Stanley Abe.

ABSTRACT This article defends the importance of the idea of historical progress for constructivist justifications of moral normativity inspired by Kant’s analysis of practical reason. Focusing on some key methodological requirements that must be satisfied for the constructivist vindication of practical normativity to succeed, the article focuses on the concept of purposiveness as it develops within Kant’s moral and political philosophy. It concludes that without a critical notion of ‘purposiveness’ and related philosophical analysis of history, the constructivist rejection of scepticism is at risk of circularity.

In European painting, a transition took place where artists started to consciously introduce blurred or soft contours in their works. There may have been several reasons for this. One suggestion in art historical literature is that this may have been done to create a stronger sense of volume in the depicted figuresor objects. Here we describe four experiments in which we tried to test whether soft or blurred contours do indeed enhance a sense volume or depth. In the first three experiments, we found that, for both paintings and abstract shapes, three dimensionality was actually decreased instead of increased for blurred (and line) contours, in comparison with sharp contours. In the last experiment, we controlled for the position of the blur (on the lit or dark side) and found that blur on the lit side evoked a stronger impression of three dimensionality. Overall, the experiments robustly show that an art historical conjecture that a blurred contour increases three dimensionality is not granted. Because the blurred contours can be found in many established art works such as from Leonardo and Vermeer, there must be other rationales behind this use than the creation of a stronger sense of volume or depth.

Abstract This article explores the role of human-animal relations in the emergence of amour-propre, as presented in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men (also known as the Second Discourse). Rousseau’s natural vegetarianism thesis is used to elucidate and interrogate fundamental pivots in his conjectural history of human development. The implications of the connection between amour-propre and human-animal relations are explored in relation to anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, and the disavowal of nonhuman suffering in Western culture.

ABSTRACT The long eighteenth century was a good time for history and historians. This article considers one of its most original genres, conjectural history, and of one of conjectural history’s most interesting subjects, woman. What made the conjectural history of woman most interesting was not only that it brought together all the elements that were themselves the subjects of theoretical histories, such as language, the arts and sciences, society, religion, and man, but continued to matter politically well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, one might argue that it continues to shape understandings of what it means to be civilized to this day. Following some observations on some of the challenges such a history presented to its practitioners, the essay turns to Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan and his contestation of the eighteenth-century view of the history of woman. It ends with some reflections on the importance of revisiting such histories.

No abstract available.

In his lectures of 1978–79, published posthumously as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault addressed versions of liberalism in which an invisible market appears immune to government intervention. Among the thinkers discussed were Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. This essay offers critical reflections on Foucault’s description of Smith as emphasizing the invisibility of the economy, as well as on Foucault’s interpretation of the “invisible hand” and his ascription of egoism to Smith’s economic agents. Foucault also appeals to Ferguson’s notion of civil society to resolve incompatibilities between economic agents and the sovereign. However, Ferguson’s theory of society does not provide the assistance that Foucault thinks it does. Moreover, like Smith, Ferguson holds no egoistic view of economic motivation. Nonetheless, and surprisingly, Foucault would have found enticing Ferguson’s use of conjectural history, with its appeal to the unintended, contingent, and conflictual basis of social change.

This article traces the history of scholarly analysis of the South Slavic vila. By asking a simple question, ‘where does the vila live?’, I return to that scholarship to weed out problematic older theories and clarify historical conjecture. I offer a refinement of the analysis of origin by returning to the art and assertions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century peasant storytellers, singers, and other tradition-bearers.

ABSTRACT David Hume’s historical thought was shaped before he even began writing the History of Great Britain in 1752. This article shows how Hume developed his historical thought in an attempt to combine two historical structures: the natural-jurisprudential conjectural history of the Treatise of Human Nature and the early eighteenth-century historical narratives of modern Europe that featured in his Essays. The Treatise’s conjectural history used the developmental categories “rude” and “civilised” to explain the origins of justice, government and the moral sentiment. The narratives of modern Europe, in contrast, revolved around the historical categories “ancient” and “modern.” Hume’s historical thought was shaped by the attempt to merge those two structures into a single, coherent structure. The critical question concerned the relation between the ancient and the modern: was modern Europe merely a “revival” of classical antiquity? Or did it have new, “post-ancient” dimensions? The article shows how Hume gradually distanced classical antiquity from modern Europe, thereby creating space for exclusively modern concepts such as “civilised monarchies” and the narrative of modern civilisation that structured his History of England (1754–1762). The paper concludes by suggesting that this structure defined Enlightenment philosophical history, not just Hume’s version of it.

<i>The Age of Johnson</i> , ed. Jack Lynch and J. T. Scanlan

ABSTRACTAs wondering “what if?” about the past has become increasingly prominent in Western life, scholars have sought to historicize the phenomenon. The latest attempt to do so is Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou's A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. A stimulating, if somewhat meandering, book of essayistic reflections on historical speculation, A Past of Possibilities highlights the challenges of, and continuing opportunities for, historicizing the field that today is called “counterfactual history.” Ever since the mid‐nineteenth century, historians have recognized the presence of “what‐ifs” in historical scholarship, but they have disagreed about what to call them. For over a century, they have embraced a bewildering array of phrases, including “imaginary history,” “hypothetical history,” “subjunctive history,” “conjectural history,” “conditional history,” “probable history,” “iffy history,” “alternate history,” “allohistory,” “uchronia,” “historical might‐have‐beens,” and “historical ifs.” Deluermoz and Singaravélou continue this tradition by employing many different terms for historical counterfactuals in their effort to explain their increasing prominence. This conceptual pluralism, which is rooted in an interdisciplinary methodology, enables the authors to arrive at important insights about the field of counterfactual history. However, it also prevents them from generating a systematic argument that builds toward a larger conclusion. A Past of Possibilities is thus an important study that nevertheless highlights the need for further research.

ABSTRACT Between the first two Critiques, Kant wrote what he called a “conjectural history” of the development of human freedom through a reading of Genesis. In the essay, reason itself is conceived of in terms of its “genesis,” and Kant primarily reads “Genesis” as an account of reason’s ascension or becoming. Just as humankind becomes itself through the Fall, so too does reason simultaneously come into its own. Adam indeed acts as a template for the conception of moral agency that Kant will go on to develop in much more detail in the second critique. More significantly, however, as I argue below, the “genesis” and ascension of reason is only made possible through Eve’s covering up of herself. I argue that the act naturalizes both shame and clothing onto a feminine body conceived as un-reasonable. It is against this foil of unreason that reason (through Adam) is able to reach its own heights. I argue that Kant’s reading of Genesis in the “Conjectures” naturalizes women and clothing as superfluous: to humankind and to the ascent of reason alike. However, their function as the condition of possibility for Kant’s own system will show that they are anything but superfluous. Rather, they are essential.

Anthropology and history are inseparable, sharing concerns with societies other than the one we currently inhabit—whether in time or in space. This entry considers how the relation between anthropology and history developed since the late nineteenth century when anthropology professionalised as a discipline. Initially, anthropology was wedded to a form of history that was conjectural, based on hypothetical ideas of societal development deriving from evolution or diffusion. Thus, societies were often held to progress over time, in ways comparable to biological evolution, or they were held to develop through adoption of sociocultural traits from one or several culture centres. Criticism of this conjectural history came from within both anthropology and history. For a period of several decades, then, anthropology had a relatively detached relation from history, but by the mid-twentieth century this all changed. Anthropology was now understood as analogous to historiography—to writing history—as both seek to understand another society or culture and translate it into terms of one’s present society. Later, the influences of colonialism and global capitalism on the societies studied by anthropologists were given greater prominence, as was the issue of understanding societies in historical time, i.e. as subject to change over time. However, the supremacy of historical knowledge and historical time was subsequently questioned, as anthropologists asked whether all people should be seen to exist in a single and secular historical time that encompasses other kinds of time. In contrast to the single frame of historical time, with its radical separation of past and present, greater recognition is being given to the multifaceted temporal relationships of past, present, and future as diverse peoples have distinct ways of valuing and communicating temporal categories and their interconnections. Anthropology thus raises the question of whether everything can or should be historicised.

Experience and Its Discontents