Book review: The Invention of Humanity
The Invention of
Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History
By Siep Stuurman
The range of his work also requires him to
reject the current commitment of many intellectual historians to deep
contextualism. These days, scholars are supposed to tell us in great detail how
a particular book was read in its time: What did the words mean to their first
readers? What other, perhaps lesser-known books and pamphlets were written
around the same time? What were the immediate occasions of this writing? Who
were the living targets of its arguments? Too much of this sort of thing,
Stuurman argues, makes it impossible to understand the lasting significance of
a given text. He is, instead, interested in a different question: Why is a text
still important to us?
Reviewed by Michael Walzer
Siep Stuurman, a Dutch
intellectual historian, won’t be familiar to most American readers. Before The
Invention of Humanity, his only book published in English was a
biography- and a celebration - of another little-known author, the French
Cartesian philosopher François Poullain de la Barre, who wrote three treatises
on the equality of the sexes in the 1670s. “The mind has no sex whatsoever,”
Poullain declared, and he told his female readers: “You are endowed with
reason; use it, and do not sacrifice it blindly to anyone.” These treatises,
Stuurman argues, played a significant part in “the invention of modern
equality.” His new book is a much larger and bolder account of that
“invention,” stretching across two millennia and virtually every known
civilization; it takes as its focus not just the idea of equality but also of
our “common humanity.”
Stuurman’s earliest
(untranslated) books were about Dutch socialism, and he is obviously a
supporter of both of these ideas. So, he argues, is everyone else these days,
though the support is often inconsistent and hypocritical. Once, long ago, the
ideas of equality and a common humanity were literally “unthinkable”; today,
they are the default position of almost all of us. The Invention of
Humanity is the story of how this dramatic change came about - and how
long it took.
Stuurman’s book is a
big one, and it violates many of the current rules of academic
writing -especially the ones regarding turf. Stuurman provides us with a
critical discussion of texts and authors from ancient Israel, Greece, and
China; early Christendom and Islam; medieval Europe and Central Asia; Europe’s
colonizers and the colonized peoples; the Enlightenment and the American,
French, and Haitian revolutions; the Indian and African national-liberation
movements and the African-American struggle for equality. The book ends with an
account of the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
following a critique of Samuel Huntington’s the “clash of civilizations.”
Stuurman includes a
good number of philosophers and religious writers (Confucius, Ibn Khaldun,
Francisco de Vitoria, John Locke, and many more) and also the sort of people we
now call public intellectuals (Voltaire, W.E.B. Du Bois). Unexpectedly, he also
writes about travelers and ethnographers. Covering such a wide terrain and such
a long period of time means that he trespasses on many academic fields, and I
am sure the book will be criticized by scholars defending their specific
expertise. Don’t let that bother you; Stuurman offers very skillful readings of
the texts and figures that he surveys.
The range of his work
also requires him to reject the current commitment of many intellectual
historians to deep contextualism.. read more:
