Search Results

This chapter analyzes how, since the seventeenth century, versions of the invisible-hand explanation were employed to illuminate the course of history, the evolution of society. Giambattista Vico described at length the slow process by which man created his social nature out of his initial brutish existence, arguing that it was a spontaneous process. Vico named this process “providence” and stressed time and again the oblique nature of its operation—unintended by individuals and unknown to them. A strong sense of the absolute autonomy and spontaneity of human history is common to all historical constructions of the invisible hand. From Vico to Marx, they envision the subject of history as capable of generating all of its institutions, beliefs, and achievements of itself.

This chapter discusses ethical issues and policies relating to the protection of vulnerable subjects in research. It reviews the history of human experimentation with vulnerable human subjects such as people with impaired decision-making capacities, children, fetuses, and subordinate populations (i.e., prisoners, students, employees, and soldiers). It discusses the definition of vulnerability as well as the criteria for decision-making capacity. The chapter also examines the federal regulations and the special safeguards, or lack thereof, currently available to protect vulnerable populations, and it discusses different types of research with children and examines the concept of minimal risk.

This concluding chapter reflects on the lessons presented by this volume as a whole and considers the ongoing study into the origins of humanity in the post-1970s era. In the decades after, readers have not lost their passion for epic evolutionary dramas in which the entirety of human history unfolds before their eyes. Yet when students today respond to the question “What makes us human?” they are far more likely to invoke neurological facts than paleontological ones. The public battlefield over violence and cooperation has since shifted to new ground in the mind and brain sciences. Despite the apparent polarization of scientists writing about human nature into culture- and biology-oriented positions, the intellectual landscape defined by scientists working on the interaction between culture and biology has continued to flourish.

This chapter argues that it was Gilles Deleuze's argument in favour of intensive quantities — against Henri Bergson's rejection of this notion in Time and Free Will — that provided the way for Deleuze and Félix Guattari to situate a human history beyond humanity. Deleuze and Guattari also present a direct criticism of the ‘despotism of the signifier’. Their distinction between capitalism as a virtual tendency or created whole existing alongside effected parts and capitalism as an actual body is the key to their universal history. Their commitment to a passive, materialist and virtualist vitalism supports their historical claims and results in distinct methodological imperatives. Additionally, they produced a history that elaborates the genesis of individuals and their social relations, and that regards forces not as relations among quantities, but as the production of quantities through relations. The ideas determining the radical historicism of Deleuze and Guattari are then explained.

The chapter summarizes the main themes and conclusions of the book, suggests the ways in which the canon question continued after the Civil War, and makes general arguments for taking ideas about God seriously in the study of human history.

This chapter introduces Johann Jakob Bachofen, the man responsible for introducing narratives about the matriarchal myth, presenting some background information about his childhood and education before focusing on the Das Mutterrecht, his book on matriarchy. It examines the chronology of human history that is presented in the Das Mutterrecht and shows how he interpreted myths, also addressing the question of how Bachofen viewed women and providing a detailed discussion about his legacy.

Erich Kahler (1885–1970) belongs with some of the great names of the impressive German literary tradition destroyed by Adolf Hitler; and it is only in relation to this tradition that his work can be properly appreciated. What marks out this line of writers and thinkers is the universality of their ambitions, and their admirable ability to master the intellectual resources necessary to carry these ambitions through. All are inspired by a vision of the unity of human history. Kahler, who came to the United States as an exile from Hitler's Germany in 1938 and, after a distinguished career as a university professor and freelance intellectual, died in 1970, belonged to that great wave of German emigration provoked by Nazi barbarism which did so much to enrich American cultural life. One of his major works was Man the Measure (1944), which elicited words of admiration from Thomas Mann. Art occupied a major place in Kahler's thought.

This chapter examines the role of psychology in human history. It discusses how writing the history of psychology went beyond its initial function of defining “psychological” themes, and describes how this development extended empirical psychology to the study of past civilizations and “primitive” peoples, reaffirming its break with rational psychology. It also highlights the role of the analysis of language in providing the foundations for a psychological and cultural history.

This concluding chapter looks back to the Earth's considerable history, emphasizing that the history of humanity herein is interlinked with that of many other living things sharing the same planet. To that end, humanity acts as the “co-tenants” on Earth alongside other creatures, albeit with a knowledge and awareness of the Earth's bounty. To that end the chapter emphasizes our obligations to the planet and, furthermore, to attain wisdom beyond humanity's accumulated knowledge of the Earth and its myriad components. It posits, in short, that we engage our planet in a conversation—not merely an interrogation—of the Earth and what it can teach us.

This chapter explores Immanuel Kant's own systematic account of the critical project. It also demonstrates how Kant locates the implicit metacritical dimension of the critical project within a transcendental account of human culture. Kant understands that the deduction of freedom in the Groundwork is inadequate, thus precipitating the revision of the Critique of Pure Reason and the writing of the Critique of Practical Reason. There is one fundamental distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason, concerning thought and intuition. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes the ends of reason as interests of reason. The problems that have been determined in the account of the self-critique of reason can be decreased to equivocity of reason and unity of reason. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's ‘metaphysical empiricism’ involves acts of ‘psychic repetition’. It is noted that human history is to be examined from the perspective of the concept of ‘repetition’.

This chapter deals with Cavalli-Sforza’s early work in the development of statistical and computer techniques to create human population trees on the basis of the genetics of blood groups. The history within was now conceived to reside in the gene. At the same time, also Cavalli-Sforza synthesized knowledge from other fields such as archaeology, linguistics, and history with the genetic data to arrive at encompassing pictures of modern human population migrations. This also generated controversy, especially with exponents of cultural anthropology. Cavalli-Sforza’s team at Stanford University was a center of human population genetic research and pioneered the development of DNA analysis for the establishment of genetic kinship trees. mtDNA and Y-chromosomal markers became the most important objects for the reconstruction of modern human evolution. On the basis of that knowledge and the out-of-Africa hypothesis, diverse branches of the human origins sciences became integrated and the new view of human evolution was popularized.

In the world that we are living in today, people should be mindful of the ways their analyses confirm the common presumption that human history has been characterized by bounded geographical and cultural areas. As the author started writing this book, the thought that came into his mind was to challenge notions of discrete socio-cultural spaces and limited interactions which shape people's understanding of the past and give rise to a person's wonder at a “globalized” present. The author hopes that through his writing in this book that he can offer a reflection on the seemingly sense of out of placeness, on the social lives of people and objects well beyond the boundaries of nation, continent, or sea which people regularly imagine to have been historically restrictive.

In order to properly understand whether or not—and, in case, to which extent—human rights standards are universal, it is useful to analyse how the idea of human rights developed within the different human societies. In Chapter 2, a brief look at pre-colonial societies is sufficient to show that the idea according to which human rights would be a creation of Western philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment is inaccurate, human rights having contextually developed in virtually all human communities since ancient times. At the same time, human rights have been shaped within all the said communities according to heterogeneous models, determined by their different cultural specificities. These differences are reflected in the present characterization of human rights, showing that the Western model of rights represents only part of the picture in the contemporary world.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the text, outlines the main arguments and defines terms and ideas used throughout the book, including the concept of the objects and subjects of humanitarianism. It situates the book within the existing historiography of relief, charity, humanitarian intervention, and development. And it explains the book’s larger relationship with the contested histories of human rights.

Bowlby recognized that studying other primates could help identify the needs of human infants; his evolutionary perspective has had a wide impact on understanding of human development. Much more is now known about evolutionary processes and variation, within and between species. This chapter reviews aspects of evolutionary theory and primatology relevant to Bowlby’s theory of attachment. Beginning with primate phylogeny, ecological and social forces that contribute to the varieties of primate sociality are considered and some reasons canvassed that explain why primatologists do not all agree on the choice of words to describe the relationships between animals, including use of the term “attachment.” Variations and commonalities are identified and used to explore how development in human infants can be understood in terms of social relationships and maturational state at birth and weaning compared to other primates. Infant experience has long-term effects in primates other than humans. Some of that evidence is summarized and special attention is given to interactions between particular chimpanzee mothers and infants in an unusual setting, where trusting relationships between mothers and human researchers reveal variations in mothering style that appear to result from early life events, recent experience, and social context.

This chapter examines the international human rights law background to the creation of the ECHR system. It looks at the main steps taken in the field of the international law of human rights in the late 1940s, after World War Two. It comments on the writing and views of Hersch Lauterpacht, one of the leading intellectual forces on international human rights law at the time. It addresses and examines the failures of the United Nations to create effective human rights institutions and systems in the immediate post war period, focussing on the work of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This chapter reports the contribution of molar entities and molecular populations in human history. Legitimacy is an emergent property of the entire organisation even if it depends for its existence on personal beliefs about its source. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari sometimes show that there are indeed only two levels, the micro or molecular, corresponding to the individual person, and the macro or molar, corresponding to society as a whole. They introduced territorialisation and coding to explore the influence that an emergent molar entity has over its components. Fernand Braudel's three-volume work is a systematic critique of the idea that capitalism was ever a society-wide system, let alone a worldwide one. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari remain under the spell of the bankrupt political economy of Marx.