Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition
    The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition
    The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition
    Ebook123 pages4 hours

    The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition

    By Marshall Sahlins

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook


    Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrickly Paradigm Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2023
    ISBN9781958846018
    The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition

    Read more from Marshall Sahlins

    Related to The Western Illusion of Human Nature

    Titles in the series (3)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Spring By Nature

      Mar 1, 2021

      Spring By Nature
      9 min read

    • Article

      Body Politic

      Jan 23, 2020

      In this ambitious study, Julie Peakman examines how sex, gender and empire interacted in imperial contact zones that range from the first ‘New World’ of the Americas to Polynesia and Oceania, Africa, post-colonial America and the Caribbean, India, th

      1 min read

    • Article

      Vive La Commune? The Working-class Insurrection That Shook The World

      Mar 7, 2021

      A couple of years ago, as railway workers demonstrated in Paris against proposed government reforms, a banner in the crowd offered a blast from France’s revolutionary past: “We don’t care about May ’68,” read its slogan. “We want 1871.” It was a mess

      6 min read

    • Article

      Trump’s New Recruits

      Sep 19, 2022

      Trump’s New Recruits
      5 min read

    • Article

      When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

      Aug 21, 2017

      One of the pleasures of Walls’s Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The post When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Soun

      7 min read

    • Article

      Humans Of The Anthropocene

      Jan 29, 2019

      Humans Of The Anthropocene
      4 min read

    • Article

      Breaking the Spell

      May 9, 2021

      Breaking the Spell
      8 min read

    • Article

      Optimism For Homo Sapiens

      Jan 28, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Amanda Rees & Charlotte Sleigh Reaktion Books 2020 Pb, 216pp, £12.95, ISBN 9781789142143 Fingers on buzzers: which species was described in 2008 by the International

      3 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On...

      Jan 21, 2021

      I’m reading Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun, which won the 2020 Cundill Prize, the biggest literary prize anywhere for history. A boldly imaginative attempt to tell the story of the Aztecs from indigenous sources, it raises fascinating issues. The Spani

      3 min read

    • Article

      Know Your Philosophers

      Aug 2, 2020

      Know Your Philosophers
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Lesson of Virtue

      Jul 21, 2022

      A Lesson of Virtue
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Common Genius of Lincoln and Einstein: The president and the physicist teach us a lesson about moral genius.

      Oct 30, 2014

      Abraham Lincoln would still be remembered today as a self-taught prairie prodigy and an astute political operator who crushed the Confederate uprising, even without the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the end of slavery. Albert

      6 min read

    • Article

      Chris Jones: Eugenics, George Bernard Shaw And The Need For A Dramatic Reckoning

      Jul 24, 2020

      On Monday, Planned Parenthood removed the name of Margaret Sanger from its health clinic in Manhattan. By way of explanation, the organization cited its founder's "harmful connections to the eugenics movement." So is this now curtains for George Bern

      3 min read

    • Article

      We Need To Reframe The Way We Thinkabout “Free Speech”

      Jun 29, 2023

      NO IDEA IS MORE LOATHED TODAY, especially on the Right (how times change), than censorship. Nothing is worse, we are told, than being “censorious”, and seeking to end “vigorous debate” in the “marketplace of ideas”. But what exactly ensures that a de

      11 min read

    • Article

      Nothing But Human

      Jan 29, 2019

      Nothing But Human
      4 min read

    • Article

      Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism

      Dec 10, 2018

      Jackie Wang is “a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD candidate at Harvard University.” 1 I was first introduced to her writing in 2012 when some prairie prison

      5 min read

    • Article

      Errant Thought

      Mar 1, 2023

      If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Introduction: The Political Economy of Great Works of Literature

      Nov 1, 2020

      The Independent Review aims to be an “interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of political economy and the critical analysis of government policy,” which covers “economics, political science, law, history, philosophy, and sociology.”1 This iss

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Western Illusion of Human Nature

    4/5

    8 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Western Illusion of Human Nature - Marshall Sahlins

      Hobbes and Adams as Thucydideans

      In 1763, young John Adams wrote a brief essay titled, All men would be tyrants if they could. Adams never published the essay, but he revisited it in 1807 to endorse its conclusion that all simple (unmixed) forms of government, including pure democracy, as well as all moral virtues, all intellectual abilities, and all powers of wealth, beauty, art and science are no proof against the selfish desires that rage in the hearts of men and issue in cruel and tyrannical government. As he explained the essay’s title:

      It means, in my opinion, no more that this plain simple observation upon human nature which every Man, who has ever read a treatise upon Morality, or conversed with the World. . .must have often made, vis., that the selfish Passions are stronger than the Social, and that the former would always prevail over the latter in any Man, left to the natural Emotions of his own Mind, unrestrained and unchecked by other Power extrinsic to himself.

      This sense of the human condition was a lifelong conviction of Adams’, complemented by the belief that a government of balanced powers was the only way to control the beast. Already in 1767 he claimed that twenty years’ investigation of the secret springs of human action had more and more persuaded him that from the Fall of Adam to this time, Mankind in general, has been given up, to strong Delusions, Vile Affections, sordid Lusts and brutal Appetites. These corrupt impulses, moreover, were stronger than the social. Using a language much like Thucydides’ account of certain incidents of the Peloponnesian War, Adams likewise lamented the vulnerability of civil institutions to the egoistical urges of man’s nature. Religion, superstitions, oaths, education, laws, will all give way before passions, interest and power—unless and until they are resisted by passions, interest and power. Hence his long advocacy of a government of counterbalancing powers. By opposing one against another, the destructive dispositions might be turned to beneficial effects. Like many of his educated countrymen, Adams advocated a republican form of Aristotelian or Polybian mixed government, reserving sovereignty to the people while combining democracy, oligarchy and monarchy in a way that realized the virtues and restrained the excesses of each. By counterposing a popularly-elected lower house to a natural aristocracy of wealth in an upper house, the endemic conflict of rich and poor could be neutralized, even as this legislature in general were opposed to and by a single executive authority. Left to itself and human nature, each of these three powers would issue in a self-aggrandizing tyranny; but thus melded together, their self-serving rivalry would preserve the domestic

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1