Western social development theory was built on the invented figure of the ignoble savage

Evidence

This was only one side of the story. For, at the same time, the opposite image—that of the “ignoble savage”—was becoming the vehicle for a profound reflection in European intellectual circles on the nature of social development. There were eighteenth-century figures, such as Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, and Dr. Johnson, who poured scorn on the idea of the noble savage. Ronald Meek has remarked that contemporary notions of savagery influenced eighteenth-century social science by generating a critique of society through the idea of the noble savage: “It is not quite so well known … that they also stimulated the emergence of a new theory of the development of society through the idea of the ignoble savage” (Meek 1976, 2). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 658

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘ignoble savage’ is the direct ancestor of the stadial/evolutionary thinking later used to rank civilizations — connecting to race-thinking and hierarchical classification the reader is scaffolding.
• DEEPTHINKING: The juxtaposition shows the same fabricated figure serving opposite ideological functions (idealization AND justification for hierarchy), revealing how flexible the Other is as a construct.