Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder

Product description From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Europeans struggled to understand their identity in the same way we do as individuals: by comparing themselves to others. In Savages, Romans, and Despots, Robert Launay takes us on a fascinating tour of early modern and modern history in an attempt to untangle how various depictions of “foreign” cultures and civilizations saturated debates about religion, morality, politics, and art. Beginning with Mandeville and Montaigne, and working through Montesquieu, Diderot, Gibbon, Herder, and others, Launay traces how Europeans both admired and disdained unfamiliar societies in their attempts to work through the inner conflicts of their own social worlds. Some of these writers drew caricatures of “savages,” “Oriental despots,” and “ancient” Greeks and Romans. Others earnestly attempted to understand them. But, throughout this history, comparative thinking opened a space for critical reflection. At its worst, such space could give rise to a sense of European superiority. At its best, however, it could prompt awareness of the value of other ways of being in the world. Launay’s masterful survey of some of the Western tradition’s finest minds offers a keen exploration of the genesis of the notion of “civilization,” as well as an engaging portrait of the promises and perils of cross-cultural comparison. Review “ Savages, Romans, and Despots is an informative, valuable, delightfully readable book. It will be particularly interesting to those unfamiliar with how writers of the early modern period envisioned themselves through their real and imagined encounters with people of other times and places. Anthropologists and intellectual historians alike will be enticed by this highly accessible account to approach these major thinkers anew.” , Lawrence Rosen, Princeton University “Launay has taken a familiar theme and utterly transformed it. No other account of the European self-imagining through the mirror of multiple others covers so wide a range of peoples and places with such acuity and verve as he has done—this is an original, compelling, and persuasive book.” , Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles “Original, persuasive, and accessible, Savages, Romans, and Despots offers a fascinating narrative on ideas of time, space, and history—both of the observer and of the observed society. Launay’s strong sense of history and context in the study of anthropology’s prehistory effectively relinks anthropology to wider currents in contemporary social thought.” , Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth College About the Author Robert Launay is professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.