the past is another culture

The Past Is Another Culture*

Barry Hindess

Australian National University

This article addresses two questions relating to the modern Westerntreatment of contemporaries as belonging to the past; how has Westernsocial thought come to treat belonging to the past as a bad thing, thatis, as a kind of moral and intellectual failure; and how has it learned toassign some of our contemporaries to the world of the past. Myresponse to the first question is in two parts. One examines the conven-tional modern division between past and present. The other considersthe effects of Western social thought’s equally conventional develop-mental understanding of humanity. In the section that separates thesetwo discussions, I suggest that the answer to the question of how havewe learned to assign some of our contemporaries to the past is to befound in the early history of modern imperialism.

In his inaugural lecture as Professor of history at the University of Jena, Freidrichvon Schiller observed that European voyages of discovery had provided his audi-ence with:

A spectacle, which is as instructive as it is entertaining. They show us societiesarrayed around us a various levels of development, as an adult might be sur-rounded by children of different ages, reminded by their example of what heonce was and whence he started. A wise hand seems to have preserved thesesavage tribes until such time as we have progressed sufficiently in our own civili-zation to make useful application of this discovery, and from this mirror to dis-cover the lost beginning of our race. (von Schiller 1972:235)

A closely related view appears in a well-known letter from Edmund Burke to thehistorian William Robertson (Burke 1961:351) in which he asserts that all [past]human conditions are now—meaning in his and Robertson’s present—‘‘underour view’’ on the surface of the earth.

If we set aside Schiller’s reference to entertainment, the most striking featuresof these passages are, first, the suggestion that many of Schiller’s and Burke’scontemporaries, living in distant parts of the world, were anachronisms, peoplewho really belonged to earlier times. In this perspective, distance in time is clo-sely associated with distance in space: history is thus seen as a kind of descriptivehuman geography. Similar views about many of their contemporaries can befound in Hegel’s Philosophy of History and its Marxist successors, the developmen-tal theories of the Scottish enlightenment and in the classics of sociologicaltheory, from Comte to Parsons and Luhmann.

*An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘‘Dialogue across Difference: Governance in a Multicul-tural Era’’ conference at the Australian National University in December 2006. I am grateful to participants in theconference, the anonymous reviewers for IPS and most especially to Christine Helliwell for their assistance in pre-paring this final draft.

� 2007 International Studies Association.Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK .

International Political Sociology (2007) 1, 325–338

The second striking feature is Schiller’s reference to children, as if to suggestthat the people he portrayed as belonging to an earlier time were less than fullymature, that their intellectual and moral capacities were relatively undeveloped.This reflects an understanding of humanity, in which the development of moraland intellectual capacities is associated with the development of institu-tions—marriage, agriculture, writing, money, law, the state, and so on—that waswidely shared by educated Europeans of the Enlightenment era.

Third, Schiller’s image conveys an appealing sense of inclusiveness and a not soappealing sense of European superiority. It is inclusive (in the manner of Kantiancosmopolitanism) because it suggests that, under suitable conditions, childrencan be expected to grow into fellow adults. The adult has already been throughthe stages of childhood, so that children are seen as belonging to the same historyas the adult observer. The sense of superiority arises from the representation ofthe others as less mature versions of the European adult. This developmentalunderstanding of humanity fosters the apprehension of at least two kinds of differ-ence: first, that between and within peoples who are seen as being at roughly thesame level (between and within the adults of Schiller’s tableau, say, the English,French, and Germans) and, second, that between peoples who are seen as beingmore and those who are seen as less mature, or, as in Schiller’s case, betweenthose who are thought to belong fully to the present and those who are thoughtto belong to various positions in the past (Helliwell and Hindess 2005).

This relegation of peoples and ways of life to the status of anachronisms con-tinues to be influential in Western social and political thought, in spite of thefact that it has often been disputed, for example, by Diderot and Herder in theEnlightenment period (Muthu 2003), and more recently by critics of evolution-ary assumptions in development studies (Sachs 1992) and in anthropology andarchaeology (Boas 1940; Fabian 1983; McGrane 1989; Pluciennik 2004, 2005).One of its most striking recent manifestations appears in Jurgen Habermas’s TheTheory of Communicative Action, which brings Jean Piaget’s developmental psychol-ogy together with a neo-Weberian account of the rationalization of the world toargue that rationality at the level of the individual actor depends on the rational-ization of the actor’s life-world and thus that many of Habermas’s contemp-oraries are condemned to unreason:

The more cultural traditions predecide which validity claims, when, where, forwhat, from whom, and to whom must be accepted, the less the participantsthemselves have the possibility of making explicit and examining the potentialgrounds on which their yes ⁄ no positions are based. (Habermas 1984:70–71)

Habermas’s argument has distinctive features of its own, but the same develop-mental perspective plays an important part in social scientific discourses of moder-nity and modernization which divide the contemporary world into those who arefully of our time and those who have yet to reach it and even, somewhat playfully,those who have moved on to a postmodern condition (Lyotard 1984). In somecases, the claim to have moved on is advanced all too seriously along with the cos-mopolitan suggestion, which relies on the inclusiveness noted above, that the moreadvanced have a duty and therefore a right to intervene in, and to improve thecharacter and the conduct of, the less advanced (Cooper 1996; Ignatieff 1998).

The best-known argument for this last perspective is Kant’s Perpetual Peace,which envisages a law of nations resting on a federation of free states ‘‘extendinggradually to encompass all states and thus leading to perpetual peace’’:

For if by good fortune one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic(which is by its nature inclined to seek perpetual peace), this will provide a focalpoint for federal association among other states. These will join up with the first

326 Past Is Another Culture

one, thus securing the freedom of each state in accordance with the idea ofinternational right, and the whole will gradually spread further and further by aseries of alliances of this kind. (Kant 1991:104)

This view of the special place, and thus also the special moral and politicalresponsibility, of constitutional republics (now often interpreted as democraticstates) in the emerging world order has a disturbing resonance in our own time.

The temporalizing of differences between people is developed, more systemati-cally, in Hegel’s philosophy of history and its Marxist successors. Hegel maintainsthat the different moments of the development of the Idea coexist in hispresent.1 The Spirit’s supreme imperative, he argues:

is that it should recognize, know, and realize itself for what it is. It accomplishesthis end in the history of the world; it produces itself in a series of determinateforms, and these forms are the nations of world history. Each of them representsa particular stage of development, so that they correspond to epochs in the his-tory of the world. (Hegel 1982:64)

The nations of history, in Hegel’s view, are spiritual forms but they are alsonatural entities. ‘‘Accordingly, the various patterns they assume … exist perenni-ally’’ (Hegel 1982:128). The claim that these different stages in the developmentof the spirit, which are, effectively, different stages of human history, coexist ingeographically distinct regions of his own world allows Hegel to present his dis-paraging perceptions of non-Western peoples as if they reflected a kind of histor-ical necessity. Hegel also argues that the earlier stages of the spirit arereproduced within each later stage because the spirit always faces difficulties inrealizing its own concept. It is necessarily ‘‘divided against itself … [and] has toovercome itself as a truly hostile obstacle to the realization of its end’’ (ibid.:176–7). This is Hegel’s version of the theory of uneven development.

In contemporary Western societies, the temporalizing of difference is com-monly associated with discomfort over a multiculturalism which has been accusedof promoting, endorsing or at least of not being sufficiently critical of the valuesof backward cultures (Barry 2001). Moreover, the developmental perspectivewhich informed many colonial practices remains influential in the work of inter-national financial and development agencies and in other aspects of the West’sinteractions with the non-Western world. For example, Susan Rose-Ackerman, adevelopment specialist who has worked closely with the World Bank, observes inthe introduction to her Corruption and Government that what counts as corruptionoften depends upon culture: ‘‘one person’s bribe,’’ she notes, ‘‘is another per-son’s gift’’ (Rose-Ackerman 1999:5). Yet, while acknowledging the significance ofcultural differences, her aim ‘‘as an economist’’ is to show ‘‘where the legacy ofthe past no longer fits modern conditions’’ (ibid.) Here Rose-Ackerman pre-sumes to judge contemporary cultures and practices, and to identify whichelements within them belong in the modern world and which do not.

My title is adapted from the opening line of L.P. Hartley’s, TheGo-Between—‘‘The past is another country. They do things differently there’’(Hartley 1958:7). These sentences begin the novel’s prologue in which its fic-tional narrator reflects on the contents of a diary written some 50 years earlierby his own much younger self. Far from wishing to pass judgment on his pastbehavior the narrator sets out to establish the difficulty of such an enterprise.Indeed the prologue ends with an attempt to show that the values and motiva-tions of the older narrator and of his much younger self are mutually incompre-hensible because they belong to different worlds, with radically different

1See the excellent analysis of Hegel’s understanding of history in Guha (2002).

327Barry Hindess

relations between classes, as the novel goes on to show. We do not belong in thepast, Hartley suggests, because they do things differently from us. ‘‘If the past isa foreign country, then,’’ as Sahlins (2004:2) insists, ‘‘it is another culture.’’

Notice also that the past is a very big place. It contains many ways of doingthings. The ‘‘another country’’ of Hartley’s prologue exists some 50 years behindhis fictional present. There is no reason why ‘‘the past’’ should be restricted tothis time. The past of Hartley’s narrator has ‘‘another country’’ of its own inwhich ‘‘they do things differently’’ again. This is itself part of the past of the nar-rator’s present. And so on. There is room for many different countries in ouroverall past, for a whole continent of different countries in fact.

Notice, finally, that Hartley’s opening sentence—‘‘The past is…’’ has thegrammatical structure of an identity which is more familiar in its inverted formin which some other country or culture is said to be in or to belong to the past.The identity does not tell us which other country or culture is to suffer the indig-nity of being relegated from our present. Nevertheless, its inverted formexpresses a sentiment which has been a comforting feature of Western politicalthought at least since the time of Locke’s bold assertion in his Second Treatise onGovernment that ‘‘in the beginning all the World was America, and more so thanit is now’’ (Locke 1988:301). Locke did not have our contemporary America, theUnited States, in mind. His past is a different world.

This article addresses several of the themes noted in this short introduction.In particular, it considers two fundamental questions which relate to the moderntreatment of contemporaries as belonging to the past; how has Western socialthought come to treat belonging to the past as a kind of moral and intellectualfailure; and how has it learned to assign some of our contemporaries to theworld of the past. These questions should not be confused with the related issueof how to account for the pervasive sense of Western superiority which domi-nates modern political thought. The latter has been thematized variously as amatter of, say, military success, greater prosperity or life expectancy, the superiortreatment of women, and the valorization of individual liberty, philosophy,democracy, and other goodies which the West is often said to have inheritedfrom ancient Greece (Hindess 1995). However, the issue that concerns me hereis not so much to account for the origins of this sense of superiority or of its var-ious thematizations but rather to show how it came to be expressed and under-stood through a temporal idiom.

My discussion of the first question—how has Western social thought come totreat belonging to the past as a kind of moral and intellectual failure?—is in twoparts. One draws on Constantin Fasolt’s illuminating discussion in The Limits ofHistory to examine the conventional modern division between past and present.The other considers the effects of Western social thought’s equally conventionaldevelopmental understanding of humanity. In the section that separates thesetwo discussions, I follow the lead of Anthony Pagden’s The Fall of Natural Man.The American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology by suggesting that theanswer to the question of how have we learned to assign some of our contempo-raries to the past is to be found in the early history of modern imperialism.

An immediate difficulty here is that, as he presents it, Pagden’s lead appearsto point in another direction. He describes comparative ethnology, somewhatanachronistically (because the modern concept of culture was not available tothe major figures whose work he discusses), as treating ‘‘cultural differences’’ asindications of the locations of the societies concerned ‘‘on an historical timescale’’ (Pagden 1986:4). In this sense, he maintains, comparative ethnology isnot a general evolutionary history of mankind (Pagden 1986:3–4). Here ‘‘generalevolutionary history of mankind’’ is a polite description of the kind of universalhistory that Schiller envisaged and that Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the sociologicalclassics later proposed. It aims to encompass all of humanity within a coherent


narrative first, by insisting that human groups can be located on a single devel-opmental continuum and, second, by offering a speculative account of how theymove from one stage of development to another. Comparative ethnology avoidsthis speculation, but is no less universal in its attempted coverage. In contrast touniversal history, it presents itself as a modestly empirical, classificatory endeavor,but it nevertheless provides universal history with the earlier and the most recentstages of human development, and some of the stages in between, which are tobe included in its narrative. Universal history and comparative ethnology sharethe presumption that all sections of humanity can be placed in their positionson a developmental continuum which runs from the simplest human conditionto the most advanced (a position that is assumed to be occupied by the prosper-ous societies of the modern West).

Pagden presents the writings of Las Casas, and Acosta in the sixteenth cen-tury, and of Lafitau in the eighteenth, as influential early examples of com-parative ethnology. Yet, if Las Casas and Acosta are to be seen as pioneers ofthis classificatory endeavor, it is necessary to consider how a comparativeframework developed for use in the Americas came to be seen as applying tohumanity in general: how did the New World and the Old come to be seenas participating in the same history? I turn to this issue toward the end of thisarticle.

Past and Present

Most readers of this article will have been trained, like its author, to think ofthe past as remote and unalterable while the present is seen as discontinuouswith the past, as not entirely determined by what was done then. The presentis an open field of human action and what happens within it is the result ofthe choices and actions of its inhabitants while the past is a field in whichaction has already taken place with results that are given and able to beknown, at least in principle. We may have different views about what theseresults are, but our choices now can do nothing to change them. The way‘‘they do things…there,’’ to follow Hartley’s expression, is seen, as it often isin other cultures, as being fixed and unalterable. This manner of thinkingabout the past and the present and the differences between them is by nomeans an obvious one and it has not always been the conventional Westernview. Constantin Fasolt argues that the dominance of our present view of thedifference between past and present is the most important outcome of theearly modern ‘‘historians’’ revolt against the Papacy and against the HolyRoman Empire, both of which claimed to be eternal and, like many nations,based their claim to legitimacy on the past and therefore liked to insist on acontinuity between the past and the present. The historians, in Fasolt’s view,insisted that the Papacy and the Empire misrepresented the past and thatpast and present were substantially distinct. As he describes it, the historians’revolt was a declaration of independence of the present.

We can acknowledge the force of Fasolt’s argument while noting that theissues he addresses should not be separated from those identified in Latour’s(1993) no less polemical discussion of early modern attempts to establish a dis-tinction between nature and culture. Three consequences which Fasolt sees asfollowing a declaration of independence of the present are particularly worthnoting here. One, is that the declaration of independence lays the foundationfor modern understandings of state sovereignty and citizenship:

No state could be sovereign if its inhabitants lacked the ability to change acourse of action adopted by their forefathers in the past, or even one to whichthey once committed themselves. No citizen could be a full member of the

329Barry Hindess

community so long as she was tied to ancestral traditions with which the commu-nity might wish to break—the problem of Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy.(Fasolt 2004:7)

The second consequence is that it establishes two fundamental principles of his-torical inquiry. The first gives normative force to the radical distinction betweenpast and present: thou shalt not commit anachronism. Every action must beplaced in the context of its time, that is, in the context of the way they didthings then. We should not judge them with the benefit of hindsight or in termsof normative principles belonging to our own time.

The second principle is a methodological assertion of individual liberty: theevidence, documentary or otherwise, that we have about the past should alwaysbe seen as resulting from the choices made by someone acting in their ownpresent. If individuals had choices then, this suggests that ‘‘the way they didthings then’’ was not immutable.

A third consequence is that it identifies a fundamental break in the pastbetween what happened before the declaration of independence and what hap-pened after. It says that there was a time in which people were dominated by thepast, in which they allowed themselves to be ruled by custom and tradition andshould thus be seen as irrational.2 This view of people in the distant past is peril-ously close to the view promoted by the state of nature theories of early modernpolitical thought which I consider in the final section of the paper.

Fasolt’s discussion suggests that states will be tempted to produce a damninghistorical representation of the predeclaration of independence past from whichthey claim to have emerged. Thus, if there is something unpleasant about beingconsigned to the past, it is especially damning to be consigned to this predeclara-tion of independence past. It is almost as bad is to be consigned to some placethat is significantly closer to that past than the present of whoever is doing theconsigning, to be treated as if there had indeed been a declaration of indepen-dence in one’s past but that its effects have not yet been fully assimilated, oreven as if, as was said all too often of non-Western others during my childhood,one were only recently down from the trees. This brings us to Western socialthought’s developmental view of humanity which I examine in my final section.

The Past in the Present

Fasolt’s discussion also suggests that there was once a time when Europeansthought that the past was always with them. Once they had learned to make aradical distinction between past and present, how were they able to think of thepast as still part of the present in such a way that some of their contemporariescould be seen as living within it and history could be seen as dispersed acrossthe surface of the globe, as it clearly is in Hegel’s philosophy of history, Robert-son’s letter to Burke, and in conventional development discourse?

This is too large a question to address effectively in just one section of a shortpaper. It is easy to see how, at the time of or shortly after the break, one mightbe tempted to consign to the past those of our contemporaries who appear tohave refused the declaration of independence of the present. Another importantpart of the answer is to be found in European attempts to use the resources pro-vided by their classical heritage to make sense of what was thought to be foundby the European invaders of the New World. Anghie (1996, 2005) has arguedthat the origins of international law are to be found in early Spanish attemptsto legitimize their colonization of America and specifically in the arguments of

2Max Weber’s fable of the rationalization of the West (published in English as the introduction to Weber(1930), can be seen as a late expression of this view.


Vitoria’s De Indis. I make a related claim for the colonial origins of the disparag-ing temporalization of difference.3

I begin by noting that the challenges posed by the Americas to Europeanunderstandings are sometimes thought to have been radically different fromthose presented, say, by Portuguese encounters with the hitherto unknown (atleast to Europeans) peoples who inhabited the Western coasts of sub-SaharanAfrica, although they took place in the same period as the invasions of theAmericas. In themselves, it could be argued encounters with strange peoplesposed no great problem for the late medieval European understanding of theworld, which allowed for, and even anticipated, the discovery of ‘‘mythical ani-mals, giants Amazons, monsters, the… Christian Kingdom of Prester John, theten lost tribes of Israel’’ and numerous wonders of other kinds (Jahn 2000:35).However, these wonders were thought to be located in remote corners of a worldwhose contours were already known, at least in broad terms. The Christian OldTestament indicated that all people were descended from the sons of Noah, Ja-phet, Shem, and Ham, who were given the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africarespectively to cultivate and populate. This biblical view suggested that humanitywas contained within what later became known as the Old World, and that all ofits parts had developed over the same historical time: they were all of the sameage and belonged, in a sense, to the same present.

Since America and its peoples were not part of this biblically sanctioned design,commentators have been tempted to suggest that their discovery resulted in amajor ‘‘culture shock,’’ challenging the world view of Christian Europe in a waythat encounters with other peoples did not.4 According to this view, the expropria-tion of American lands, the slaughter of many of their inhabitants and the brutaltreatment of those who survived presented Spain with problems of interpretation,and of justification, of a kind which did not arise in connection with the expansionof Christian Europe into areas whose existence was already known. The biblicalstory implied either that the American peoples were not descended from the sonsof Noah, and thus that they belonged to a different creation than humanity properor, somewhat more comfortably, that they too were descended from the sons ofNoah but had lost contact with the Old World some time after they had moved tothe New (Allen 1949:113–37; Huddleston 1967). Disagreement over the veryhumanity of the American peoples, Jahn (2000) argues, ensured that there had tobe a debate in Spain over the legitimacy of its actions in the New World.

Yet we should be careful not to exaggerate the challenge posed by the Ameri-cas to the worldview of Christian Europe. To the extent that there was a chal-lenge, it related only to elements of that world view which followed directly fromthe biblical story of the flood and the subsequent division of the world betweenNoah’s three sons and their respective descendents. In other respects Europe’sclassical heritage provided a complex and flexible interpretative framework,including a range of images of the possible forms of humanity (Grafton,Shelford, and Siraisi 1992; Haase 1993) within which the new discoveries couldbe located.5 Michael Ryan has argued that, in the relationship between late

3This treatment of Vitoria’s De Indis as the origins of international law is dismissed as anachronistic by Pagden,who favors the conventional view that its origins lie in the natural law theories of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden,in his introduction to Vitoria (1991:xvi), but see Armitage’s introduction to Grotius, The Free Sea (Armitage2004:xv).

4I leave open the question of whether one can sensibly talk of the world view of medieval Europe. For a power-ful negative answer see Heidegger (1976).

5Waswo (1997) argues that the legend of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Troy, as retailed in Virgil’sAeneid and many later commentators, provided Western civilization with ways of thinking about relations betweenWestern and non-Western peoples which have been re-enacted many times in the history of Western imperialism,for example: the view that civilization is always brought to people from somewhere else and that it will often beresisted; the identification of civilization with agriculture and the cities that depend upon it and the identificationof savagery with the forest.

331Barry Hindess

medieval Europe, its own pagan past and the newly found exotics, ‘‘the principallinkage was between Europe and antiquity’’ (Ryan 1981:537). Thus the classicsoften provided the most significant authority for what was alleged to be foundin America. Peter Martyr’s De Orbe novo, one of the most influential of theearly European commentaries on the New World, reports that there wereAmazons in America but, as Peter Mason notes, it does so ‘‘because the ancientsattested to their existence’’ not ‘‘on the basis of Columbus’ testimony’’ (Mason1993:154).6

In emphasizing the interpretative resources provided by the classical traditionin Europe, my point is not to suggest that the Americas had little real impact oftheir own on European perceptions of the world around them. Rather, it is thatthe influence of the encounter with the Americas on European thought in thisperiod can hardly be disentangled from that of ideas received from classicalantiquity. After noting the classical elements in Peter Martyr’s reports of the NewWorld, Mason goes on to argue that there was ‘‘only a vague dividing linebetween the superficial use of classical trimmings to decorate a story and a moreserious use of parallels to indicate a more deep-seated isomorphism.’’ In the lat-ter case, Mason continues, the presumed correspondence works in both direc-tions: ‘‘details from the Old World could be used to explicate the New, and viceversa’’ (Mason 1993:155). Systematic comparisons between the customs of theNew World and those of the ancient peoples of the Old can be found as early asLas Casas’ Historia de las Indias whose publication began in 1527. By the earlyeighteenth century, we find Lafitau (1974–1977) using the Old World to throwlight on the New and vice versa. ‘‘The ancient authors have given me informa-tion on which to base happy conjectures about the Indians, [while] the Indianshave given me information on the basis of which I can understand more easilyand explain more readily many things in the ancient authors’’ (1724, quoted inPagden 1986:200; cf Mason 1993:155; Iacono 1993; Ryan 1981).

In fact, the transition from the use of ‘‘classical trimmings’’ to the ‘‘deeplyseated isomorphism’’ evident in Acosta’s Historia is more complex than Mason’sdiscussion suggests. In practice, as Margaret Hogden notes, such comparisonswere rarely drawn between a single contemporary American people and those ofa particular people at a given time and place in the Old World. The search forsimilarities between contemporary Americans and ancient peoples of the oldworld focused on the Old Testament tribes, the ancient Greeks and Romans andthe barbarians of Northern Europe in Roman and medieval times. What was atissue, Hogden suggests, was not the establishment of correspondence betweenways of life that were both clearly identified and well understood. Instead, wecan observe a double move, involving first the construction of a generic tribalway of life out of reports from contemporary America and elsewhere and out ofdescriptions of peoples in the Western past, from the Old Testament and espe-cially from the writings of Herodotus, Caesar, and Tacitus, and second, the claimthat this tribal way of life is what preceded the emergence of Western civilization.‘‘Somewhere at the back of the mind’’ of every sixteenth and seventeenthcentury European inquirer, Hodgen maintains:

Was the conviction … that a European or Eurasian culture was, and must be,older than an American culture. (Hodgen 1964:348)

There may be an element of anachronism in this rendering of sixteenth and sev-enteenth century European perceptions of difference, and indeed of European

6In fact, sightings of Amazon warriors had been reported in Carvajal’s account of Orellana’s voyage down theAmazon, which was widely distrusted at the time (Mann 2005:320). Carvajal’s account was the source for the film‘‘Aguirre: wrath of God.’’


superiority, in terms of a temporal idiom which only became established duringthis period. By the end of the seventeenth century, under the influence ofAcosta’s writing this temporal ordering of humanity seems to have taken a holdin European thought. In its terms, the point of comparison was less to establishan empirical correspondence between one people and another than to show thatAmericans were behind contemporary Europeans. Tribal Americans were thusrelegated, not to an identifiable point in time before the European present, butrather to an era and a way of life that was held to precede European civilization,in fact to the conjectural predeclaration of independence era which Fasolt seesas required by the radical modern division between past and present.

Nevertheless, these complications aside, if the peoples of the New World andof the Old came to be located at different points within the one history, animportant part of the reason must surely lie in the interpretative resources pro-vided by the classical tradition. In addition to what appeared to be descriptiveaccounts of tribal peoples provided by Herodotus, Caesar, and Tacitus, the clas-sics provided early European commentators on the Americas with a variety ofbroad interpretative schema. First, at the most general level, they offer twomodes of understanding difference in relation to oneself, both of which, Mason(1993:143f) reports, were commonly employed in discussion of the Americas. Inthe one case, difference is seen as increasing roughly with distance, so that thosewho are furthest away are expected to be the most strange, and in the other dif-ference is seen as a matter of inversion, in which case others are seen as beingwhat one is not. Hartog (1988) has shown that both schemata figure promi-nently in Herodotus’ History and much later historical writing. The two schemataoverlap in the case of areas that are most remote and thus expected to be themost different. If cannibals, Amazons, animal-human hybrids, and other mon-sters are to be found at all, it will be in these places. In practice, reports of Ama-zons and other extreme forms of difference in the Americas vanished under theweight of careful observation. Reports of less radical differences remained, ofcourse, but even the most striking of these were readily assimilable to the histori-cal and developmental schema provided by the classics. In the numerous paral-lels that were drawn between the New World and the Old, the difference that isassociated with distance from the European centre also tends to be identifiedwith distance in time.

Universal History

If the origins of the modern tendency to relegate some of our contemporariesto a time earlier than our own can be traced to early modern imperialism, some-thing similar could be said of the tendency to treat belonging to the past as abad thing, that is, as a kind of cultural and moral failure. I argued earlier thatthe modern division between past and present is one important source of the lat-ter tendency. A second is what we might call the cosmopolitan view according towhich all sections of humanity belong to, and can be located at different pointswithin, the one developmental history. This view took various forms in the worksof the Scottish enlightenment, Kant, Hegel, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social sciences. All of them assumed that societies, cultures, and peoplescould be ranked according to their level of moral and institutional development.One of the clearest expressions of what is involved in this perspective is set outby Dugald Stewart in his account of the life and writings of Adam Smith, writtentowards the end of the eighteenth century:

When in such a period of society in which we live, we compare our intellectualacquirements, our opinions, manners, and institutions with those which prevailamong rude tribes, it cannot fail to occur to us, as an interesting question, by

333Barry Hindess

what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts ofuncultivated nature to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.(Stewart 1980:292)

Stewart calls the disciplined attempt to answer the question presented here‘‘conjectural history.’’7 He takes Smith’s, now largely forgotten (see Schreyer1989), attempt to explain the origins of language as a model of this enterprise.Conjectural history assumes that all sections of humanity could be located atsome point on the continuum which stretched between the first, natural ora-social condition, and the latest which. In Stewart’s account, was the conditionof the prosperous, commercial states of Europe. The task of conjectural history,was first, to locate peoples in their proper place on this continuum, and, second,to explain their forward movement along it.

Stewart’s ‘‘conjectural history’’ combines the ambitions of universal historywith what later became known as comparative ethnology which employed system-atic comparison to place peoples and cultures in their proper positions in anoverarching developmental hierarchy. Anthony Pagden argues, as we have seen,that the origins of this nineteenth century discipline (Stocking 1987) are to befound in the early Spanish histories of America, especially in the writingsof Bartoleme Las Casas and Jose d’Acosta. He notes that the latter’s historia natu-ral y moral de las Indias (2002), first published in 1588:

dominated speculations on the Amerindians and their culture… for the laterpart of the sixteenth and for most of the seventeenth century. (Pagden1986:146)

In this and other works Acosta distinguishes three categories of barbarians. Atthe bottom of the scale are savages who, as Acosta describes them, have littlehuman feeling because they belong to no human community, having no lan-guage and no real family structure. Next above the savages are those barbarianswho have language, but no developed system of writing, and only a limiteddegree of political organization. Finally there are barbarians, like the Chinese,the Mexica, and the Inca, literate peoples who live in cities, in ordered societiesunder the rule of law, and who form states and empires. Those in this last cate-gory were seen by Acosta as being located below, but not far below, the civil soci-eties of Europe, because they possessed less sophisticated forms of writing and asruled by tyrants—this form of rule being, in Acosta’s view, the best that can beexpected of non-Christian peoples (Pagden 1986:146–198).

Acosta’s tripartite division of American barbarians has informed most laterWestern conjectural histories, but not without significant complications. First,Williams (1990) shows that European perceptions of American barbarians werecolored first, by earlier encounters with the Irish, with the pagans of NorthernEurope and the peoples of the Canary Islands and of sub-Saharan Africa, andsecond, by the successful campaign to drive the Moors out of Spain. He alsohighlights (Williams 1990:121f) a significant Protestant translation of earlier dis-courses on the Americans. The English modeled their colonial endeavors in Ire-land on Spanish techniques in the Americas and later transferred some of thelessons to their American colonies (Canny 1976; Quinn 1991). Second, laterEuropean imperial expansion produced new candidates for the lower stages ofbarbarism. Pocock (1999:330–345), for example, shows that, for the lowest cate-gory of barbarian in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson (1995)

7Stewart’s use of the term ‘‘conjectural’’ is likely to mislead modern readers and perhaps suggest an exercise inundisciplined speculation. In his view speculation is to be constrained both by known historical facts and by the‘‘known facts of human nature.’’


drew on materials from Siberia and Central Asia. In these cases, Acosta’s basiccategories and their presumed developmental ranking remained the same, some-times with further subdivisions and minor refinements, but their empirical in-stantiations varied. Finally, the American anthropologist, Franz Boas underminedthe project of comparative ethnology by arguing (Boas 1940:282) that there wasfar too much diversity among tribal peoples for them all to be fitted into a singledevelopmental scheme.

Acosta locates the American peoples he discusses at various points along adevelopmental continuum in which the gradual development of institutions pro-vides conditions for the emergence of corresponding moral and intellectualcapacities. In effect, he presents us with a conjectural history of the Americas.His references to China and to contemporary Europe suggest that the laterstages of the continuum he identifies in the New World could also be found inthe Old. Along with the presumed isomorphism, noted earlier, between contem-porary Americans and long-dead peoples of the Old World, this allowed the NewWorld and the Old to be fitted together into a cosmopolitan, conjectural historyof humanity.

The presumed link in this cosmopolitan history between institutional develop-ment on the one hand and moral and intellectual development on the othersuggests that peoples who are some way behind the West in their institutionaldevelopment will also be behind its inhabitants in their moral and intellectualcapacities. Subsequent political thought in the West has followed Acosta in plac-ing considerable weight in this respect on the formation of the state and the ruleof law. Hobbes presents this developmental vision in its starkest form. Wherethere is no state, he tells us in a famous passage of Chapter XIII in Leviathan(Hobbes 1968), there can be:

no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and dan-ger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The state in Hobbes’s view secures conditions which enable the subsequentdevelopment of arts, letters, and society. This suggests that those who are closerto the period of state formation will have had less chance to develop in theserespects than those who are further away. Later, more elaborate versions of uni-versal history array the different portions of humanity along a single continuum,starting from an original a-social condition and progressing through the slowaccumulation of institutions—language, marriage, agriculture, property, money,law, writing, and, most especially, the state—and through the correspondingaccumulation of the moral and intellectual capacities which these institutions aresaid to make possible. Along with the division between past and present notedearlier, all of them suggest that belonging to the past is evidence of moral fail-ure. They also suggest that older cultures which appear not to have advanced asfar as the West can be seen as especially reprehensible.

To conclude, following a short introduction, this article has sketched threelines of argument relating to the temporalizing of difference, two of whichfocused on how the location of some of our contemporaries in the past func-tions as a kind of criticism, while the third asks how we have learned to locatecontemporaries in the past. The first argument drew on Constantin Fasolt’spolemical account of how European thought in the early modern period cameto insist on a radical distinction between the past and the present. One effect ofthis distinction was that those who refuse to accept it came to be seen as actuallybelonging to the past or as being just like people in our own past. Moreover,they are seen as being dominated, unlike ourselves, by tradition. This argumentsuggests that those who belong to the past in this way will be less rational thanthose of us who fully belong to the present.

335Barry Hindess

After presenting this argument, I noted that the radical distinction betweenpast and present raises the question of how it is possible to see some of our con-temporaries (who clearly belong to our present) as also and more properlybelonging to the past. I suggested that this perception could be seen as one ofthe lasting products of the European invasions of the Americas, and thus of theearly stages of modern Western imperialism. We have seen that, around the sameperiod as Fasolt’s ‘‘historian’s revolt,’’ there were various attempts to make senseof what was reported to exist in the Americas. These, too, should be seen as con-tributing to an emerging European understanding of temporality. More specifi-cally, the interpretative resources which Europeans employed to make sense ofthe inhabitants of their newly acquired possessions resulted in the constructionof parallels between their contemporaries in the New World and long-dead peo-ples of the Old. These parallels, in turn, suggested that the peoples of the NewWorld and those of the Old could be seen as belonging to the one line of histor-ical development.

My final argument was that this vision of the universal history of humanity,which represents the peoples of the West as the most advanced, implied thatthose who remained behind the West were also less advanced in their moral andintellectual capacities. This, I suggest, is the patronizing view of humanity whichunderlies the rosy future projected by Kantian cosmopolitanism and most of itsmodern successors. At best we can say that cosmopolitanism is somewhat lessdestructive than the racist, evolutionary view of humanity which has been itsmost influential modern competitor. Without always looking forward to the dis-appearance or assimilation of non-Western peoples, modern cosmopolitanismnevertheless persists in regarding these others as living in the past.

References

Acosta, Jose de. (2002) Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Allen, Don C. (1949) The Legend of Noah. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Anghie, Anthony. (1996) Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law. Social

and Legal Studies 5(3): 321–336.Anghie, Anthony. (2005) Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge Stud-

ies in International and Comparative Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Armitage, David. (2004) ‘‘Introduction’’ to Hugo Grotius. In The Free Sea, edited by David

Armitage. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Barry, Brian. (2001) Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.Boas, Franz. (1940) Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan.Burke, Edmund. (1961) Letter to William Robertson, June 9, 1777. In Correspondence, Vol. 3, edited

by T.W. Copeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Canny, Nicholas. (1976) The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565–76. Hassocks,

Sussex: Harvester.Cooper, Robert. (1996) The Post-Modern State and the World Order. London: Demos.Fabian, Johannes. (1983) Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia

University Press.Fasolt, Constantin. (2004) The Limits of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Ferguson, Adam. (1995) An Essay on the History of Civil Society (edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger).

Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.Grafton, Anthony, Shelford April, and Siraisi Nancy. (1992) New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The

Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Guha, Ranajit. (2002) History at the Limit of World History. New York: Columbia University Press.Haase, Wolfgang (1993) America and the Classical Tradition. In The Classical Tradition and the

Americas, edited by W. Haase and M. Reinhold. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.Habermas, Jurgen. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action. In Reason and the Rationalization of

Society, Vol. 1, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.Hartley, Leslie Poles. (1958) The Go-Between. London: Penguin.


Hartog, Francois. (1988) The Mirror of Herodotus. The Representation of the Other in theWriting of History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich. (1982) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, Martin (1976) The Age of the World Picture. In The Question Concerning Technology andOther Essays, edited by M. Heidegger. New York: Harper & Row.

Helliwell, Christine J., and Barry Hindess. (2005) The Temporalizing of Difference. Ethnicities5: 414–418.

Hindess, Barry. (1995) ‘‘The Greeks Had a Word for It’’: The Polis as Political Metaphor. ThesisEleven 40: 119–132.

Hobbes, Thomas. (1968) In Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin.Hodgen, M. (1964) Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press.Huddleston, Lee Eldridge. (1967) Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729.

Austin: University of Texas Press.Iacono, Alfonso M. (1993) The American Indians and the Ancients of Europe: The Idea of

Comparison and the Construction of Historical Time in the 18th Century. In The ClassicalTradition and the Americas, edited by W. Haase and M. Reinhold, Berlin and New York:Walter de Gruyter.

Ignatieff, Michael. (1998) The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. London:Chatto & Windus.

Jahn, Beate. (2000) The Cultural Construction of International Relations. The Invention of theState of Nature. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Kant, Immanuel. (1991) Perpetual Peace. In Political Writings, edited by H. Reiss, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Lafitau, Joseph Francois (1974–1977) [1724] In Customs of the American Indians Compared With theCustoms of Primitive Times, edited and translated by W.N. Fenton and E.L. Moore. Toronto:Champlain Society.

Latour, Bruno. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern (translated by Catherine Porter), Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Locke, John. (1988) In Two Treatises of Government, edited by P. Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press.

Mann, Charles C. (2005) 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf.Mason, Peter (1993) Classical Ethnography and Its Influence on the European Perception of the

Peoples of the New World. In The Classical Tradition and the Americas, edited by W. Haase, andM. Reinhold. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin and New York.

McGrane, Bernard. (1989) Beyond Anthropology. Society and the Other. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Muthu, Sanka. (2003) Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton.Pagden, Anthony (1986) The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative

Ethnology (2nd edition.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Pluciennik, Mark (2004) The Meaning of ‘‘Hunter-Gatherers’’ and Modes of Subsistence: A Com-

parative Historical Perspective. In Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archeology, and Anthropology, editedby A.J. Barnard. Oxford, New York: Berg.

Pluciennik, Mark (2005) Social Evolution. London: Duckworth.Pocock, John G.A. (1999) Barbarism and Religion, Volume 2: Narratives of Civil Government. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Quinn, David B. (1991) Ireland & America: Their Early Associations, 1500–1640. Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press.Rose-Ackerman, Susan. (1999) Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform.

Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.Ryan, Michael T. (1981) Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

Comparative Studies in Society and History 23: 519–538.Sachs, Wolfgang. (1992) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power. London: Zed

Books.Sahlins, Marshall. (2004) Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice-Versa.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

337Barry Hindess

von Schiller, Freidrich (1972) [1789] The Nature and Value of Universal History. History andTheory 11: 321–334.

Schreyer, Rudiger (1989) Pray What Language Did Your Wild Couple Speak, When First TheyMet?—Language and the Science of Man in the Scottlish Enlightenment. In ‘‘The Science ofMan’’ in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by P. Jones. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Stewart, Dugald (1980) [1793] Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith LL.D. In AdamSmith: Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W.P.D. Wightman, J.C. Bryce and I.S. Ross, Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Stocking, George W. (1987) Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press.Vitoria, Francisco de. (1991) Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Waswo, Richard. (1997) The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam. Hanover,

NH: Wesleyan University Press.Weber, Max. (1930) In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, edited by T. Parsons. London:

Allen & Unwin.Williams, Robert A. (1990) The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.

New York: Oxford University Press.


the past is another culture

Documents