History as Imagination

Gavin Kennedy ()

Chapter 18 in Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, 2005, pp 84-88 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract What passed for law before our predecessors wrote about it? This led in the 18th century to imaginative debates on society’s origins. Most contributors believed that humans were induced (by social contracts) or coerced (by violence) into forming societies. Views of society’s origins were fuelled from contemporary accounts of the ‘savage’ societies in America, Africa and the Pacific islands, compared to both modern and classical Europe.1 Enlightenment readers were fascinated by the differences between human societies and to the errors, confusions and false conclusions about them they added an absence of evidence.

Keywords: Contemporary Account; Imaginative Debate; Open Savannah; Inside Society; Hebrew Bible (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-51119-4_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230511194

DOI: 10.1057/9780230511194_18

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().