Exam 3: Anthropology Before Anthropologists

Charles de Montesquieu advanced the idea that societies evolved from savagery to barbarism to civilization as their members increased their command of rational thought.

Although prevalent in the ancient world, the notion of Plinian races died out long before the beginning of European colonization of the New World.

Locke's ideas acquired political significance as the ideological basis of democracy and the American and French revolutions.

The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a continued decline in the influence of institutionalized religion and religious belief in England and the United States.

Although both Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin had advanced evolutionary theories long before Charles Darwin, such ideas became increasingly controversial and unacceptable in the first decades of the 1800s.

Comte's ideas were generally ignored by political and industrial leaders of his time, largely because of his extremely odd behavior.

After the Napoleonic wars, most of Europe witnessed a decline in censorship and greater freedom of speech.

At birth, according to John Locke, the mind is an "empty cabinet," and is devoid of any inherent values, beliefs or predispositions.

A Papal declaration of the 1500s (Sublimus Dei) declared that American Indians lacked human souls, and therefore could be freely enslaved by Europeans.

Auguste Comte coined the term "sociology" to refer to the study of society, but only did so after a competitor adopted his term "social physics" to refer to this field.