Studies of American Indians anchored Enlightenment social science’s model of earliest social development
Evidence
Meek argues that “no one who reads the work of the French and Scottish pioneers [of social science] of the 1750s can fail to notice that all of them, without exception, were very familiar with the contemporary studies of the Americans; that most of them had evidently pondered deeply about their significance and that some were almost obsessed by them.… The studies of Americans provided the new social scientists with a plausible working hypothesis about the basic characteristics of the ‘first’ or ‘earliest’ stage of socio-economic development” (1976, 128). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 663
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Concrete evidence that the construction of the ‘Rest’ was constitutive of Western social science from its start, not incidental.