The very existence of medieval political philosophy is sometimes questioned. The activities and problems that we think of as forming a distinctively political dimension of human life cannot, it is suggested, be isolated in the medieval period from other dimensions of human activity: centrally, that of religion. The regnum, the sphere of worldly administration, was only one half – and the lesser half at that – of the entire governance of humankind; the other being the sacerdotium, the priesthood, which is to direct us in our capacity to transcend this earthly existence. While worldly government was in the hands of the multifarious kingdoms, principalities, city-states, and feudal domains of medieval Europe, spiritual government was in the hands of the church and its head, the pope. In other words, what we call politics was then only a subordinate branch of religion: theology was the master-science of human life on earth, just as the church was its master-government – in theory at least.

I disagree with this way of thinking about the medieval attitude to the political. As I shall seek to show, medieval thinkers were quite capable of (and, moreover, deeply interested in) addressing the activities and problems of human beings relating to each other within a common public space as a distinctive sphere of human life. This was in part because they were heirs to an Antique discourse of the political which did just that. Medieval theologians certainly did not consider the rationale of politics in this sense separately from questions of the overall rationale of human life, which involved them immediately in questions of religion and the church.

If medieval philosophy is strange to the modern reader, medieval Jewish philosophy is even stranger. To the extent that medieval philosophy has been recognized as philosophy rather than dismissed as theology, its boundaries have been strictly drawn, geographically and doctrinally, around Christian western Europe. This excludes both Islamic and Jewish philosophy, so that even significant philosophical activity in southern France and Islamic Spain has remained invisible to the modern western tradition. When activity beyond the prescribed boundaries has been acknowledged at all, it has been by the few historians of medieval philosophy and then, as a rule, only to the extent that its influence on major Christian thinkers could not be ignored. The significance of work beyond the boundaries has thus been determined almost exclusively by relevance to the interests of Christian philosophers. Except for a few specialists, therefore, the general view of medieval philosophy remains unduly narrow. Whether one reads Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, or Heidegger’s, or Russell’s, one could only conclude that there were no medieval Jewish philosophers – and this despite the fact that the period in question is esteemed by scholarly Jews as a golden age.

Ancient Greek philosophers have much to say about God or the gods; some of them also have much to say about being (whether being as predication or identity, expressed by “X is Y,” or being as existence, expressed by a bare “X is” or “there is an X”). They do not systematically connect the two topics, however, and neither do many modern philosophers. But many medieval philosophers did. Can thinking about being help us understand God? Can thinking about God help us understand being? I will explore some connections that medieval philosophers saw between the two topics, and also some difficulties that they encountered. I will focus not so much on particular philosophers as on central ideas that many different philosophers took up, illustrating these ideas from the work of philosophers who set them out in especially interesting or accessible ways, and noting challenges that different philosophers answered in different ways. Many of these ideas and challenges begin with Muslim authors and are then taken up by Christian authors from the thirteenth century on. I will go back and forth between Muslim and Christian sources.

PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL PROOFS OF GOD

The proofs of the existence of God are an obvious place to begin. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, says that God’s existence can be proved in five ways. Thomas’s first way, arguing from causes of motion, and his second, from efficient causes, are physical arguments, taken from Aristotle; his fifth way, from teleology, is equally physical, derived ultimately from the Stoics.

Nothing in medieval philosophy was more fiercely contested than the topic of human nature. Among the many questions discussed were the nature of the soul, the relationship between the soul and the mind, the workings of sense and intellect, the role of the passions, the limits to human freedom, and the extent of our dependence on divine grace and illumination. Yet these disputes, though wide-ranging, were fought in the context of general agreement on a number of basic issues. There was general agreement that human beings have a soul but are not merely souls – that they are composites of soul and body. There was also agreement that the human soul is immaterial and created by God; it does not come into existence naturally, as the souls of other animals do. Likewise, almost all agreed that the soul does not preexist the body, that God brings it into existence once the fetus has sufficiently developed, and that, once created, the soul will exist forever – that it is incorruptible. The story of medieval thinking on human nature concerns how this general framework was developed in various and conflicting ways and how these various theses could be proved philosophically – if indeed they could be proved at all.

MIND AND BODY AND SOUL

It is hard to imagine a more impressive start to medieval thinking about human nature than the writings of Augustine. “Refuse to go outside,” he advised. “Return to yourself.

Aristotelian science seeks to define the essential nature of a thing and then to demonstrate the features the thing must have because of that nature. A philosophically inevitable question thus arises for Aristotelians: what is a nature? Is it a reality over and above (or perhaps “in”) the things whose nature it is? Is it a mental construction, existing only in our understanding of things; if so, on what basis is it constructed? This is the medieval problem of universals, or at least one way of thinking about the problem. In a classic formulation, Boethius states the problem in terms of the reality of genera and species, two main types of universals involved in an Aristotelian definition of essential nature (as in “a human being is a reasoning/ speaking animal,” which places us in the genus of animals and marks off our species by reference to our “difference”from other animals in reasoning or using language): “Plato thinks that genera and species and the rest are not only understood as universals, but also exist and subsist apart from bodies. Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles.” A rigorous tradition of, mainly Aristotelian, discussion originates from Boethius’s tentative exploration of the problem thus stated. But a more Platonic solution had been put into play about a century before Boethius by Augustine, and this, too, would have a rich development.

Why “Philosophy in Islam”? Why not “Islamic Philosophy” or “Arabic Philosophy”? The simple answers to these questions and the far from simple consequences of those answers provide an entry into the rich world of ideas briefly explored in this chapter. The simple answer to the question “Why not 'Islamic Philosophy'?” is that not all philosophers in lands under Islamic rule in the Middle Ages were Muslim. It is easy to forget how diverse the empire of Islam was and, in particular, that it included numerous lively religious minorities. Among philosophers there were:

• Muslims, such as al-Farabi,Avicenna (Ibn Sina), andAverroes (Ibn Rushd), some of whom were Sunni, others Shiites or Ismaili, as the Brethren of Purity

• Christians, for instance Yahya Ibn ’Ady, a leading disciple of al-Farabi and a well-known Jacobite theologian

• Sabians, such as the physician Thabit ibn Qurra, a translator

• Mazdaeans or Zoroastrians, such as Mani al-Majusi

• Pagans, such as Abu Bakr al-Razi, the famous Rhazes, who denied the very possibility of revelation or prophecy, on the ground that it would favor a particular people and would therefore be incompatible with God’s justice

• Jews, such as Ibn Suwar, Halevy, Maimonides, etc.

The great number and importance of Jewish philosophers, including those working in the Latin West after the Reconquista, call for a full chapter devoted to their thought (the chapter following this one), but they, as well as the other non-Muslims listed above, must be considered as participants in a single philosophical conversation carried on from the ninth through the thirteenth century and beyond.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the study of language and logic for the understanding of medieval philosophers and theologians. Many of the subjects discussed by grammarians and logicians are of interest in themselves and have an obvious relevance to theological and scientific problems, but at a deeper level, all the writing and thinking of the period is permeated by a technical vocabulary, techniques of analysis, and inferential strategies drawn from the basic training in the liberal arts that every medieval student received. The nature of this training reveals two important features of medieval education. On the one hand, thinkers focused on authoritative texts - the Bible, the works of Aristotle and Augustine, Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, Peter Lombard's Sentences - and the attempt to reconcile and reinterpret these authorities lies behind many developments.On the other hand, the method of teaching was largely oral, and this influenced written expression in many ways, from the philosophical dialogues of Augustine and Anselm to the highly structured disputational presentation of Aquinas's Summa theologiae.

One cannot capture the richness and complexity of medieval theories of language and logic in a short chapter. In what follows I shall first give a brief overview and then focus on a few principal themes.

Cultural anthropology, social anthropology, ethnology, Volkskunde and Völkerkunde, anthropology tout court: It would be foolhardy to attempt a common definition for these terms, let alone to specify a shared program for what appears to be rather a series of loosely connected, geographically variable, and historically unstable projects. Indeed, a coherent history of the varieties of world anthropology is not a plausible enterprise.

My strategy here is to concentrate on the development of what came to be known in the early twentieth century as social anthropology (the usual term in Europe), or cultural anthropology (the American designation), the dominant traditions throughout this period. Second, I will identify common elements in the trajectories of these traditions, although much of the argument will necessarily concern various national schools. In tracing the modern history of this discourse, I have adopted the conventional, though certainly debatable, division into three stages: the evolutionist debates and the confrontations between evolutionists and diffusionists, roughly, 1860–1920; the social science or behaviorist phase, running from about 1920 to 1970, when the theoretical models were drawn from sociology and psychology or from structural linguistics; and the more recent period, during which the dominant project has been what Clifford Geertz termed “the interpretation of cultures” and the most potent theoretical influences have come from philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. To be sure, some national schools developed along very different lines; and while this periodization is most apparent in the development of cultural anthropology in the United States, even there, all three orientations — roughly, evolutionist, functionalist or structuralist, and interpretivist — coexisted uneasily throughout the twentieth century.

Jesus Christ was born while Mary and Joseph were on their way to be counted in an imperial census, in order to be taxed. From antiquity onward, the state has played an active part in social survey work. By the sixteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “survey” meant a state-conducted inventory of property, provisions, or people in order to raise revenue or a military force. However, starting in the seventeenth century, and well entrenched by the nineteenth, a different set of purposes for studying populations had also evolved, and the process of taking surveys began to pass into the hands of other social groups as well. Now voluntary enthusiasts as well as state bureaucrats were becoming concerned with statistics, in the sense not only of facts useful to the state but also of tabulated facts that would depict “the present state of a country,” often “with a view to its future improvement.”

This chapter will explore some key developments and discontinuities in the history of large-scale quantitative social surveys, mainly in Britain and France. Others have told this story in terms of conceptual and methodological discoveries leading toward truly scientific modern surveys. I will instead examine the historical practices of social inquiry considered scientific in their own times, and argue that these investigations were also shaped by social imperatives, even in ostensibly neutral areas like statistical method. The chapter begins with the introduction of the census around the time of the French Revolution, and ends with the move to professionalization around the time of the First World War.

Over the past two centuries, the concept of human mental ability has undergone three important transformations: from a concept referring to a general faculty to one primarily referring to an individual attribute; from a focus on talents in the plural to one on intelligence in the singular; and from a position of relatively limited cultural significance to one of considerable weight within the United States and, to a lesser extent, within various European countries. These shifts in meaning and emphasis have rendered intelligence a tool available to government, business, and the “helping professions” for the purpose of sorting, classifying, diagnosing, and justifying. Starting in the early part of the twentieth century, determinations of degree of intelligence have been used as aids in the placement of army recruits, in determing the kind of schooling a child will receive, in the hiring of job applicants, and in the decision to allow a person legal immigration. This chapter explores how intelligence has come to play these various social roles. It focuses especially on how experts in the human sciences have both created new meanings for the concept of intelligence and developed technologies that could make those meanings available and useful to a wider public.

FROM TALENTS TO INTELLIGENCE

During much of the nineteenth century, two distinct languages flourished in scientific and intellectual circles to describe the operations of the human mind. Mental philosophers and others interested primarily in what would later be called the “normal” employed a language of character and talents, emphasizing the diversity of the mental faculties and the operation of the individual mind.

Human beings have probably always cultivated knowledge about their own cognitive and affective processes, knowledge that might be called, in the broadest sense of the term, “psychological.” Over the longue durée, such knowledge has been stored, accumulated, and reworked within a variety of discursive pigeonholes, among them philosophy, religion, and literature. But only with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did Western Europeans begin to specify the foundations of their hitherto multiform knowledge of the psyche and to codify it with the special kind of rigor called science. Only later still would they attempt to create for it a new, exclusive pigeonhole bearing the name “psychology.” This chapter treats the early phase of the endeavor to bring cognitive and affective processes into scientific focus; it leaves off around 1850, before the advent of concerted efforts to create and institutionalize the unitary academic discipline of “psychology.”

The history narrated here is necessarily a heterogeneous one, a kind of patchwork. This is true not only because of the predisciplinary and hence somewhat inchoate condition of the particular bodies of knowledge that constitute its subject matter, but also because of the approach that the chapter takes to the category of science. A positivist approach would assume that the criteria of scientific knowledge are clear and universal and hence that the history of psychology can and should be narrated as a teleological progress leading from faulty, methodologically unsound propositions to verifiable scientific ones. Such a history would, in other words, possess a distinctive and forceful plot line.

History, Marc Bloch said, is the “science of men in time … [which is] a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush … the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field in which they become intelligible.” Social science, by analogy, is the science of modernity, “an enterprise of the modern world. Its roots lie in the attempt, full-blown since the sixteenth century, and part and parcel of the construction of our modern world, to develop systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically.” Modernity, in short, stands in the same “plasmic” relation to social science that time does to history.

Perhaps until the end of the 1960s, common sense might have maintained that modern equaled Western, that Westernization equaled modernization. In the wake of worldwide events since 1989, it has again pleased some segments of public opinion to reassert this commonsense view, particularly in the name of neoliberal economic reform. The chapters that follow, notwithstanding their differences in approach, focus, and argument, suggest that the equation of modern with Western is (whether for or against) more an ideological than a historical position. For no single, universal modernity lies waiting at the end of all particular histories. Though powerful (and destructive, according to Serge Latouche), the Western-oriented “drive toward global uniformity” cannot succeed. The paths to modernity are many, and those paths lead to different modernities.

Among the intellectual traditions that have helped to form modern social science, natural philosophy and natural science stand out. The emerging social sciences have also drawn in important ways from humanist philosophy, juridical scholarship, political tracts and treatises, Christian theology, travel accounts, and literary and moral essays. But the natural sciences have provided an enduring set of models for modern social science, models that go well beyond suggestive analogies and illustrative metaphors. Their formative influence was particularly salient during the period addressed here, from the Enlightenment to the last third of the nineteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, the new natural philosophy came to be seen in Europe as the most reliable and authoritative system of knowledge. Inescapably, it was considered relevant to political thought and moral philosophy as well. In its most basic form, natural philosophy meant the search for natural principles and laws, in place of supernatural agencies. Applied to the domain of moral philosophy, the naturalistic outlook generally fulfilled a similar function: It allowed for a shift away from Christian doctrines toward secular models, yet offered reliable knowledge by which one could evade the relativistic consequences of the “skeptical crisis” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Among the traditions that grew out of this naturalistic quest for knowledge of human nature and human society was modern natural law, initiated by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). It provided the predominant general framework for questions of state and society during the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries. Natural law theorists like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) developed elaborate systems of moral duty and political obligation based upon what they took to be permanent features of human nature, such as the concern for self-preservation.

Political economy was a creation of the European Enlightenment — more specifically, at first, of the French and Scottish Enlightenments. By the early nineteenth century, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) had been widely acknowledged as the founding text of a new classical economics that treated labor as the source of value and the accumulation of the products of human industry as the path to national wealth. It regarded commercial liberty and civic liberty as joint conditions for progress along this path. “Political economy” was understood in the early nineteenth century as a body of doctrine that identified the principles governing the good order of the body politic, or of wise legislation. “Economics,” the modern term that displaced this usage in the late nineteenth century, systematically elaborated these basic principles; they became more arcane and academic, no longer part of the general knowledge of those active in public life and the world of commerce. The economic agents of the classical world — laborer, capitalist, and landlord — contributed in their different ways to the production of commodities, and received revenues — wages, profits, and rents — according to their contributions. The “new economics” of the later nineteenth century replaced these social groups, each with its particular income, with agents linked only by the mutuality of supply and demand, the allocation of resources becoming purely a question of price formation. Each agent sought to maximize its own welfare through a calculus of choice; economics became a logic of optimizing decisions capable of mathematical representation.

The principle turning point in this development is the so-called marginal revolution of the 1870s, during which William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger published books that were based upon a rejection of the classical paradigm, and that shared a common understanding of price formation as the outcome of choices based upon an evaluation of the marginal utility of economic goods.

“Social science” entered the vocabulary of the West near the end of the eighteenth century, first of all in the United States and France. Many of its early enthusiasts, well into the nineteenth century, aspired to a single, unified science of the social, in stark contrast to the multiple disciplines that were taking shape by 1900. We might be tempted to frame the history of social science as a relentless process of advancing specialization, just as the history of natural science has often been conceived as a sequence of disciplinary separations from a once-unified philosophy. But such an understanding is no more satisfactory for social than for natural knowledge. Not least among its shortcomings is its privileging of the pure life of the intellect, the vita contemplativa, over the interventions and engagements of scientific life in practice. Social science has from its earliest beginnings aimed to administer and to change the world as well as to understand it. It did not spring forth from the head of humanity only, but from the body as well – from law, medicine, politics, administration, and religion, as well as from philosophy. Both intellectually and institutionally, it has always been diverse.

Seeing social science as part of philosophy has, nevertheless, some decided advantages over the most influential opposing view, disciplinary Whiggism, which regards each of the modern fields of knowledge as if they have always been coherent specialties. Strict disciplinary history encourages – if it does not require – a narrowness of perspective that leaves few openings for an inclusive cultural understanding. It can lead also to the rather absurd view that makes Aristotle the first psychologist, the first anthropologist, and one of the first sociologists, economists, and political scientists.

Sociology, and the social sciences in general, made their entry into the area from Turkey to Morocco through a transfer of European theories, concepts, methods, and interrogations during the colonial period. These transfers, at first provided by the French tradition, then rapidly followed by its Anglo-American rivals, allowed societies freshly open to social scientific investigation to enter into the scholarly representations of their worlds, a prelude to the deployment of the “civilizing missions” of their respective metropolises. Social science disciplines were then mobilized by the new indigenous elites to construct a national apparatus and to contest the self-image that had been reflected in the mirror of colonial science.

The relatively precocious development of the social sciences produced an accumulation of knowledge that diverged, both qualitatively and quantitatively, according to country. Yet one principal result of this process was to consolidate a representation of the unity of this part of the world. It is surely problematic to speak of the “Arab world” or the “Arab-Islamic world” as a stage on which the process of internationalization of the social sciences is played out or as a common identity, be it Arab or Muslim, despite the fact that the producers of these disciplines have asserted such an identity through pan-Arab or pan-Islamic social scientific associations, such as the Association of Arab Sociologists (1985). Such an approach erases specific national developments and makes it difficult to locate the role that Western social science maintained long after independence in the production and reproduction of local social sciences.

The mercantilist pamphlets of the 1600s are commonly viewed as the first systematic writings on political economy, at least in the English language. While many of these works were unabashed promotions of merchant rights, historians have come to appreciate their rich array of insights on the topics of money, market forces, and the global economy. Two other important traditions of economic inquiry had emerged by the late seventeenth century, fostered by the rise of political freedom and the growth of a scientific culture. The first stems from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689–90), which addressed the problems of economic justice and distribution via the fundamental concepts of rights and property. Locke also privileged the economic contract in his state of nature and adumbrated a labor theory of value. The second tradition, exemplified by William Petty’s Political Arithmetic (1690), devised quantitative measures of economic phenomena, such as the national product of Ireland, the velocity and quantity of money, and the population of London. While Petty’s measures were bold and imprecise, they helped draw attention to aggregate phenomena and thus to new empirical relationships.

All three lines of thought spoke to the new capitalist system, which had transformed early modern Europe. As Joseph Schumpeter has rightly observed: “By the end of the fifteenth century most of the phenomena that we are in the habit of associating with that vague word Capitalism had put in their appearance,… [and] even then these phenomena were not all of them new.” He had in mind the prices of commodities and factors of production, such as the interest rate.

Sociology emerged in response to the problem of social order in modern society in the wake of the American and French Revolutions and the rise of industrialism and market capitalism. A precondition of the project was the recognition of a civil society apart from any particular political form. Combining skepticism and a faith in reason, sociologists insisted that society is not a reflection of a natural or divine order but is nonetheless subject to rational analysis. Whereas Enlightenment theorists had viewed society in terms of a “social contact” and a convergence of individual interests, sociology explored the forms and structures that make “society” possible.

Taking sociality as its subject, sociology differed from the other social sciences in claiming no specific area as its own, such as primitive society, politics, or the economy. While the other social sciences took their subjects as given, the first academic sociologists expended vast energy arguing that there was such a thing as “society” to be studied. As a result, the discipline developed a decade or more later than anthropology, political science, and economics. Strategies to legitimate the new discipline ranged from claims that it was the capstone of the social sciences to more limited proposals to study social relations.

Sociology had its roots in the theories of August Comte and Herbert Spencer and in empirical work previously conducted by census bureaus, state labor boards, and reform organizations. A tension between theory and practical knowledge persisted throughout the various stages of its history: (1) a preacademic era, during which the concept of “sociology” emerged (1830s–1860s); (2) the proliferation of organicist and evolutionist models of society (1870s–1890s); (3) parallel traditions of statistics and social investigation (1830s–1930s); (4) a “classical period” coinciding with mature industrialization and the formation of modern nation-states, during which sociology became an academic discipline (1890s–1910s); (5) the interwar flowering at the University of Chicago in the United States, paralleled in Europe by a relative decline and virtual disappearance following the rise of fascism; (6) a worldwide revival under United States influence after 1945, when, ironically, American sociological theory was being re-Europeanized; and (7) fragmentation and continuing crisis following the radical assaults of the 1960s.

As a social scientific term, gender came into common use only in the final quarter of the twentieth century. But its core idea, that biological sex and its cultural expression are separable, had been evolving for over a hundred years. As rapid urbanization fostered greater sexual freedom and spurred a vibrant women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century, a disparate group of sex reformers, feminists, and university-trained researchers began to question a number of conventional beliefs. Does effeminacy in men signal biological abnormality? Is politics, by nature, a masculine enterprise? Are geniuses disproportionately male? Do females lack sexual drive? At the turn of the century, most social theorists answered yes to these questions. But by the 1970s, even as researchers were mapping the human brain with ever-greater precision, scholars had ceased treating the cultural expression of sex as a direct product of physiology. Symbolic of this dramatic shift, social scientists abandoned “sex” in favor of “gender” when discussing human behavior. Long used exclusively as a grammatical category, “gender” appealed to those who found the biological associations of “sex” too limiting. Here was a term that freed investigators to explore with new intensity the multiple ways in which cultures distinguish males from females, structure sexual experience, and deploy power.