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Notes
Francis Wilson uses Voyages and Travels to argue how Defoe lampoons the popular image of the Chinese. See Francis Wilson, “The Dark Side of Utopia : Misanthropy and the Chinese Prelude to Defoe’s Lunar Journey”, Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 4, n°2, 2007, 193-207.
See Mukhtar A. Isani, “Melville’s Use of John and Awnsham Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels”, Studies in the Novel, vol. 4, 1972, or Horace E. Hamilton who looks at Harris’s influence on James Thomson (Horace E. Hamilton, “James Thomson’s Seasons : Shifts in the Treatment of Popular Subject Matter”, ELH, vol. 15, n°2, 1948).
Marshall and Williams adroitly survey broader “perceptions”, and others briefly point to the general tone of, for instance, Campbell’s works, who is frequently described as “patriotic” and promoting an “imperialist theme” : see for instance, Mackay and also Frost, who describes Campbell as “taking a patriotic stance” (Alan Frost, “The Spanish Yoke : British Schemes to Revolutionise Spanish America, 1739-1807” in Alan Frost and Jane Samson eds., Pacific Empires : Essays in Honour of Glyndwr Williams, Vancouver, BC : Melbourne University Press, 1999, 35). See also Greene, who says that “prosperity and trade” were associated with “national identity” of which he gives an example of Campbell (Jack Greene, “Empire and Prosperity” in Peter J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire : The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 215-216) and see Williams, who says Campbell’s Navigantium is “passionate in its advocacy of British overseas trade” (Glyndwr Williams, Voyages of Delusion : The Quest for the Northwest Passage, New Haven : Yale University Press, 2002. 149).
Marshall and Williams discuss how these collections added to the renewed popularity of travel narratives : see Peter James Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind : British perceptions of the world in the Age of Enlightenment, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982, 48-49. See also Oliver Warner, English Maritime Writing: Hakluyt to Cook, London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1958, 25, and Gerald Roe Crone and Raleigh Ashlin. Skelton, “English Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1625-1846” in Edward Lynam (ed.), Richard Hakluyt and His Successors, series II, vol. 93, London : The Hakluyt Society, 1946.
See James Helfers’s discussion of Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s use of religious appeals in “The Explorer or the Pilgrim ? Modern Critical Opinion and the Editorial Methods of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas”, Studies in Philology, vol. 94, n°2, 1997, 173-174.
Crone and Skelton note that in 1747 Osborne owned the copyright of Churchills’ collection.
Warner, English Maritime Writing, op. cit., 34.
Unlike Churchill’s and Harris’s editions, other early eighteenth-century large collections lack extensive introductory sections, such as James Knapton’s A New Collection of Voyages and Travels, which appeared six years later in 1711, as well as the Royal Society’s third volume of Miscellanea Curiosa : Containing a collection of Curious Travels and Natural Histories of Countries (1st edition 1707, 2nd edition 1727). Even though John Green is not mentioned by name on the title page, G.R. Crone offers evidence indicating that John Green wrote the Preface. Also see Edward Button’s reference to Green and his collection in New Universal Collection (1755), iv. Even though Osborne’s edition appears chronologically after Campbell’s, Osborne’s text will be analyzed first to show more effectively the shift between the older and newer discourses. The shift in language did not occur linearly or suddenly, but coalesced gradually and disjointedly around a new cultural rhetoric of travel and the Other.
Although the compiler is not acknowledged in the text, the British Library registers Edward Button as the ostensible editor for the 1754 edition, and also as the compiler for the 1755 edition. The 1754 edition contains this written note across from the frontispiece : “The Compiler, Edward Button, formerly of Kilncote, Leicestershire. The completion of the work was prevented by his death.”
Each editor was aware of the previous collections, referring to collections by the editors’ names and usually noting how their compilation differed from those before.
Here I use “discourse” in the way that Edward Said uses it from Foucault in Orientalism (1978). As Foucault maintains in Archaeology of Knowledge : “There is a notion of ‘spirit’, which enables us to establish between the simultaneous or successive phenomena of a given period a community of meanings, symbolic links, an interplay of resemblance and reflexion, or which allows the sovereignty of collective consciousness to emerge as the principle of unity and explanation” (Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York : Pantheon Books, 1972, 22). Importantly Thompson argues how travel rhetoric moves more towards “subjective” strategies in the eighteenth century, and this study demonstrates in part how the language of commerce encourages varieties of subjectivism. See Carl Thompson, Travel Writing, London : Routledge, 2011.
See Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, Voyages and Visions : Towards a Cultural History of Travel, London : Reaktion Books, 1999, 47-48.
I use “framework” and “discourse” similarly to refer at once to Foucault’s notion of discourse as well as Heidegger’s conception of “frame” or “Ge-stett”, an ideological mesh or frame that controls / directs being. Heidegger discusses this en-framing. See also, Charles B. Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge, Indianapolis : Hackett, 1983, 1 : “The Anglo-American tradition generally tends to see philosophy as a set of current topics or problems that are to be discussed within pre-given frameworks. […] Heidegger maintains that it is these frameworks themselves that are the source of traditional philosophical problems”.
These are not new claims or observations, and several important texts outline this earlier framework, which originates from the Middle Ages, propelled by Augustine’s thought, and creates a unifying, progressive, and hierarchical metaphysics for European nations, i.e., Christendom. See for instance, C.A. Patrides’s The Grand Design of God : The Literary Form of the Christian View of History, London : Routledge, 1972. See also Otto Friedrich Von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. Frederic William Maitland, New York : Cambridge University Press, 1958, 9. See Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self : The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1989, and A Secular Age, Cambridge : The Belknap Press, 2007. Both describe Augustine’s important role in defining the internal / external notion (internal and external authority) of the Western consciousness. In this pre-modern framework, hierarchy serves an important role, according to W.H. Greenleaf, because “[o]rder implied the harmonious maintenance of each form of being in the place designed for it in the divine plan of creation and its obedient subordination to the degrees of being superior to it” (Order, Empiricism, and Politics : Two Traditions of English Political Thought, 1500-1700, London : Oxford University Press, 1964, 26). For other descriptions of this hierarchical order, see John Neville Figgis’s The Divine Right of Kings, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1914, and Arthur O Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being ; A Study of the History of an Idea, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1936. The notion of connecting progress to Christian history and narrative follows from Augustine ; see Frederick J. Teggart, The Idea of Progress : a Collection of Readings, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1949. See also Dyson’s Introduction in Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R.W. Dyson, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998, xxi, and Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World : Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c. 1800, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1995. See Chapter 1, especially his discussion of Christendom and its connection to Aristotelian eudaimonia.
In Sources of the Self, Taylor explains this framework of reason, knowledge, and higher understanding in terms of Augustine’s philosophy : “Augustine’s proof of God is a proof from the first-person experience of knowing and reasoning. I am aware of my own sensing and thinking; and in reflecting on this, I am made aware of its dependence on something beyond it, something common. But this turns out on further examination to include not just objects to be known but also the very standards which reason gives allegiance to. So I recognize that this activity which is mine is grounded on and presupposes something higher than I, something which I should look up to and revere. By going inward, I am drawn upward” (Ch. Taylor, Sources of the Self, op. cit., 134).
Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts : the Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992, 255.
A specific example of a “rude fact” can be found in Captain George Shelvocke’s voyage to the west coast of North America. Shelvocke describes his personal experiences of Baja natives and how these contrast with prescribed notions of Western dress, decorum, civility, and order. Shelvocke observes “there is a wide difference between what one would, upon the first sight, expect to find from them, and what they really are” (George Shelvocke, Voyage Round the World 1726, in Harris’s / Campbell’s 1744 edition of Navigantium, ed. cit., 404-406).
Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “strategy” and “tactic” demonstrates how cultural standards and norms are subject to practical experiences. Everyday practices and “tactics” are “multiform and fragmentary” (Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1984, xv) and ultimately change “the status of the discourse” by acknowledging that the dominant discourse and its “analyzed ‘object’” are both “organized by the practical activity” and “determined by rules they neither establish nor see clearly, equally scattered in differentiated ways of working” (Ibidem, 11). As a result, the dominant “strategy” or discourse “disappears into the ordinary,” and “[t]his disappearance has as its corollary the invalidation of truths” (Ibid., 11). In this essay, I argue that the “invalidation of truths” or the older travel discourse cedes to a newer framework of truth, influenced by the rhetoric of seventeenth-century natural law theory.
In this essay, I am not concerned with showing how travel accounts complicate traditional views. Others have done this before me, such as Grafton, Greenblatt, or Frantz, who, for example, describes how observations described in the “new science” exert “considerable pressure on crystallized institutions”. Frantz stresses that “[t]he various forces that produced seventeenth- and eighteenth-century humanitarianism, toleration, and cosmopolitanism were […] many; but not least among them must have been the influence exerted by travel-books” (Ray William Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas : 1660-1732, New York: Octagon Books, 1968, 118). Instead, in this essay I will show how Western discourse changes as a response to travel’s “considerable pressure on crystallized institutions”.
“Critical reasoning capacity” refers to depiction of the change of the role of reason for Paul Hazard. See Paul Hazard, The European Mind : The Critical Years (1680-1715), trans. J. Lewis May, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1953.
Tuck notes that one characteristic of this new nature and its framework is that “an individual in nature […] was morally identical to a state, and that there were no powers possessed by a state which an individual could not possess in nature”. See Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace : Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999, 82.
Much of the natural law accounts and terminology in this study follows Martin Rhonheimer’s analysis. See Martin Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason : A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy, trans. Gerald Malsbary, New York : Fordham University Press, 2000.
See Tuck, op. cit., 60-63, T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 4-5 and David Armitage, “Empire and Liberty : A Republican Dilemma” in Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism : A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001, 38-39. This position contrasts with critical studies that focus on the hegemonic tendencies of Western discourse. Casey Blanton states : “In effect, the eighteenth-century traveler begins to admit to and exploit the connection between the world and self, yet the ‘hegemonic reflex’ posits the European, and therefore modern, world as superior both in time and space” (Casey Blanton, Travel Writing : the Self and the World, New York : Twayne, 1997, 12). For similar positions see Said ; Orientalism, op. cit., François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus : The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988 ; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes : Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York : Routledge, 1992 ; and Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, New York : Columbia University Press, 1999.
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 1.
Anthony Pagden describes the medieval empires and those that may succeed them in terms of an “Aristotelian identity”. He adds : “The ancient polis had made human flourishing – eudaimonia – possible. By rendering eudaimonia as ‘blessedness’ […], Aristotle’s thirteenth-century translator, Robert Grosseteste, had made that a state which it was clearly only possible to achieve within the territorial limits of the Christian monarchia”. See A. Pagden, Lords of all the World, op. cit., 27.
James Helfers discusses this religious tone and its coupling with a “naïve patriotic confidence about England’s exploratory efforts”. See Helfers, art. cit., 173.
It is widely accepted that John Locke did not write the introductory section, although it is sometimes attributed to him. John Locke and Awnsham Churchill were friends. See Crone and Skelton, art. cit., 81-84. See also, Esmond Samuel De Beer, “Bishop Law’s List of Books Attributed to Locke”, The Locke Newsletter, vol. 7, 1976, 47-54.
See Pagden, op. cit., 24-27.
Thompson discusses the development of “objectivist strategies”, which increased as science became more rigorous and specialized. See Thompson, op. cit., 82.
The OED indicates that the first definition for “history” means “a relation of incidents, [...] a narrative, tale, story”. See OED, 2nd edition, 1989.
Unpaginated.
Paul E. Sigmund states, “Self-preservation through rational conduct is the single ‘natural law’ in Hobbes’ system, despite the fact that he never describes it this way” (Paul E. Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought, Lanham: University Press of America, 1971, 78-79).
See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories : Their Origin and Development, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1979, Ch. 6. Tuck also notes how Hobbes’ focus on self-preservation removes an obligation to obey natural law for fear of God’s punishment in an afterlife : “It is fairly clear that Hobbes never in fact believed that the after-life was relevant to prudential calculations of all men” (Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, op. cit., 126).
In “Of Property,” Locke states, “God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it)”. See Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Peter Laslett (ed.), 2nd ed., London : Cambridge University Press, 1967, 309 ; ch. 5, sec. 34, lines 1-6.
Pocock has argued how natural law language was important for the development of commerce. See John G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1985, 115. The connection between natural law and commerce has been explored by Amalia D. Kessler in A Revolution in Commerce : The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France, New Haven : Yale University Press, 2007. See in particular chapter 4, page 159 : “the law of commerce was synonymous with the laws of nature. In other words, since commerce was an expression of divinely created principles of human nature – principles of self-interest or necessity, on the one hand, and sociability or charity on the other – it was these very same principles that should govern its practice”. I draw from Kessler’s argument to support my claim that natural law notions change the language of travel and by extension the conception of the Other in introductory sections of travel collections.
Spinoza, Locke, and Cumberland were born around the same time (1632), and they maintained tremendous influence on discussions of natural law, ultimately outlining the characteristics of the “new” nature. Not only does Aaron Garrett maintain that Richard Cumberland was one of the “most important natural lawyers of the seventeenth century” or that John Locke “was also clearly deeply indebted to the natural law theory developed by Grotius” (A. Garrett, “Spinoza’s Law and Ethics : Spinoza as Natural Lawyer”, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 25, n°2, 2003, 627), but Spinoza himself “wished to provide a kind of therapy to the natural law in showing that a consistent definition of natural law […] results in truly fixed and determinate laws” (Ibidem, 636). I do not argue that the editors directly read and borrowed specific ideas from Spinoza, Locke, or Cumberland to inform their expositions on travel, although I think one may have a stronger case arguing this with Hobbes and Locke; nevertheless, their influence was so immense that the editors could not help being exposed to their thought, which radically altered European ideas. Jonathan Israel provides an outline of Spinoza’s influences in Enlightenment Contested : Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006.
See Garrett, “Spinoza’s Law and Ethics”, art. cit., 636, 640 : “For Spinoza, there is no natural hierarchy” and “There are no natural hierarchies to be discovered”.
Aaron Garrett states, “Our minds are most stable and fixed when we understand reasons, since when we recognize the necessity in laws, they become necessary psychological laws from which we act consistently. The more this is the case, the less we need rely on any positive law, human or divine, and the more our minds are guided by the same fixed and determinate rules which govern all parts of nature”. See Garrett, “Spinoza’s Law and Ethics”, art. cit., 639.
Garrett explains Locke’s contrast to Spinoza : “There is no need for Locke to build up a complicated theory of the passions, insofar as pleasure and pain are primarily anchored in and refer to external laws rooted in the vast system of obligations, rights, and duties” (Garrett, art. cit., 640). Thus Lockean passions “refer us to an external system that gives them meaning” whereas with Spinoza, the “natural sanction is […] built into the natural psychological laws of the passions” (ibidem, 640).
Sigmund, Natural Law, op. cit., 84 : “Consent based on natural equality had appeared in the writings of political theorists before Locke. […] However, for them consent was a corporate act of the community at some point in the past, while for Locke it was an individual act”.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John W. Yolton (ed.), London : Everyman, 1996. Subsequent quotes come from this edition.
Daniel Carey states that Locke’s “accumulation of testimony on customs and manners treated human nature as something to be understood inductively, rather than through pre-assigned assumptions about essences”. See Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson : Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006, 34. Yolton states that for Locke “[r]eason and sense are the sole foundations for all knowledge” (Locke, Essay, op. cit., 482).
Jon Parkin provides a robust account of seventeenth-century natural law theory and its influence upon Cumberland as well as Cumberland’s contributions to natural law theory. Parkin notes, “Cumberland’s conception of the common good does not stop at temporal forms of socialitas. […] Cumberland seeks to universalise [sic] his socialitas, to form a general and universal proposition which applies to all rational agents, including God” (Parkin, Science, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England : Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae, Rochester, New York : The Boydell Press, 1999, 104).
Schneewind argues that this observation is original and distinctive. See Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy : A History of Modern Moral Philosophy, New York : Cambridge University Press, 1997, 104. See also William Ewald’s essay, “The Biological Naturalism of Richard Cumberland”, Annual Review for Law and Ethics, vol. 8, 2000, 126.
Cumberland states, “it is owing to this most noble Motion of reciprocal Beneficence, that others reap like, and often, as occasion offers, greater Benefits, than those we obtain for ourselves” (617 ; ch. V, sec. XLVIII).
Charles Taylor motivated these observations : see Taylor, A Secular Age, op. cit., 60.
Locke, “On Property” in Second Treatise : “Now of those good things which Nature hath provided in common, everyone had a Right (as hath been said) to as much as he could use, and had a Property in all that he could affect with his Labour; all that his Industry could extend to, to alter from the State Nature had put it in, was his” (318 ; ch. V, sec. 46, lines 7-12).
Campbell largely worked for the Tories, such as Lord Bute, which demonstrates how many of his writings promote a Bolingbrokean notion of blue-water policy in relation to commerce : i.e., non-interventionist and non-continental. For more on Campbell’s politics and his writing see Guido Abbattista, Commercio, Colonie e Impero Alla Vigilia Della Rivoluzione Americana : John Campbell pubblicista e storico dell’Inghilterra del sec. XVIII, Florence : Olshki, 1990, and for an account of blue-water policy, see Daniel A. Baugh, “Great Britain’s ‘Blue-Water’ Policy, 1689-1815”, The International History Review, vol. 10, n°1, 1988, 33-58.
See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, op. cit., 115 : “The apologist of commerce […] preferred, to any scheme of history based on civic humanism, those schemes of natural law and jus gentium propounded by Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and the German jurists, which stressed the emergence of civil jurisprudence out of a state of nature, since the latter could be readily equated with barbarism”. Importantly progress and commerce started to be joined in Whiggish thought early in the eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe, while a robust, four-stages theory of progression (Scottish history of stadial progression) does not reach maturity within “Scottish historical school” until the two following decades after Hume in such luminaries as William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar (ibidem, 252-53).
Spinoza’s conatus, an inclination to preserve the self, may offer the means for Campbell to privilege an indefinite “Spirit” over a definite Christian telos. For Spinoza, by acting in accordance with nature, one “endeavors to preserve his own being”, and this comes “from the laws of his own nature”. Thus, “it follows […] that the basis of virtue is the very conatus to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in a man’s being able to preserve his own being” and “that those who commit suicide are of weak spirit and are completely overcome by external causes” (330-331 ; pt. IV, prop. 18, sch.). There are references to “Spirit” in the third earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, section VII. Again, I do not argue for a direct correlation between Campbell’s use of “Spirit of Commerce” and Spinoza and Shaftesbury, but rather highlight the rhetorical framework that permits such language.
As Abbattista shows, this sentiment largely reflects Tory / Bolingbrokean aspects of Campbell’s thought. In Idea of a Patriot King (1738), Bolingbroke states that the manner in which a state pursues its interests demonstrates that a difference “arises from the situation of countries, from the character of people, from the nature of government, and even from that of climate and soil ; from circumstances that are, like these, permanent, and from others […] accidental”. See Bolingbroke, Political Writings, David Armitage (ed.), New York : Cambridge University Press, 1997, 273.
Campbell returns to and reinforces this topic at varying points, for example, at the beginning of Book I from volume II : “Whereas other Conquests tend only to the Benefit of this or that Nation; these are advantageous to the Species, and add Dominion not to a single People, but to the whole Race of Mankind” (2 ; vol. II, bk. I, ch. III, sec. 1, col. 1).
Even though Campbell stresses the equality within the colonizing relation, he notes how the commercial enterprise increases the power of the home country : “we owe many other great Advantages to this Commerce in the East. For, in the first place, it is the great Support of the Maritime Power of Europe ; it makes us Masters of all other Parts of the Globe” (984 ; vol. 1, “Concl.”). Jennifer Pitts provides a helpful distinction here ; initially a “tolerant and pluralist universalism” predominated eighteenth-century thought, “one premised on the equal rationality of all human beings and the belief that standards of morality and justice that governed relations within Europe also obligated Europeans in their dealings with other societies” ; however, “in the first half of the nineteenth century” a “progressivist universalism” developed that “justified European imperial rule as a benefit to backward subjects”, and “authorized the abrogation of sovereignty of many indigenous states and licensed increasingly interventionist policies in colonized societies’ systems of education, law, property, and religion” (Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2005, 21). See also David Armitage, “Empire and Liberty : A Republican Dilemma”, in Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism : A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001, 42, where Armitage points out the shortcomings in Bolingbroke’s argument on this point.
However, like Campbell, by stressing self-interest, Green also exhibits a clear bias to England in colonialism. In volume 2, Book II, the voyages to the western coast of Africa, he argues for Parliament’s funding fort construction : “But how shall the Company be able to do this Service to the Public, unless farther assisted by the Public ? And there seems to be the more Necessity for this, as both the French and Dutch, from a due Sense of the great national Benefits arising from this Trade, support it by a national Encouragement” (161; vol. 2, bk. 2, ch. 1, sec. 1, col. 2). Indeed without stating “self-interest” overtly, Green provides a thinly veiled support of stronger British engagement in colonialism in western Africa, from a “due Sense of the great national Benefits arising from this Trade”.
Following Campbell’s and Green’s examples of following self-interest, Button states “extensive commerce is the one thing necessary in politics. It is ridiculous for such a nation to complain, […] that her condition grows worse and worse; because it is in her own power to remedy all these grievances, by consulting her own interest” (xii ; “Intro.”).
Mandler provides a helpful distinction in types of character between the ladder and tree-branching approaches, which also elucidate the contrasting notions of nature : the first “assumed a high degree of fundamental commonality among all humans […]. It also assumed a set of universal qualities to which all humans could aspire, and which societies at the top of the ladder embodied more than those below” (18), and the second “suggested that human groups became more and more different over time, exhibiting different characteristics that rendered them increasingly incompatible”. See Peter Mandler, The English and National Character : The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven : Yale University Press, 2006, 18.
Some have identified this shift towards a form of perspectivalism. See for example Larry Wolff, “Discovering Cultural Perspective : The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment”, 3-32 in Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (eds.), The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 7-8 : “The Enlightenment may be correspondingly characterized by the discovery of cultural perspective […], globally demarcated by the principle of cultural relativity”. See also Joanna Stalnaker, who observes about Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s description of Paris : his “individual voice” is convinced of its ability to describe, but simultaneously is “lost in a multitude of overwhelming changes that it can neither control nor capture” (Joanna Stalnaker, The Unfinished Enlightenment : Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2010, 186).
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