It is encouraging that there is a measure of overlap here. Agriculture, weapons, science, industrialisation, and printing, for example, are each selected by more than one author. These arguments and ideas certainly help us begin to find our way about a massive field but, as will become clear later in this Introduction, and then throughout the book, though I think that all these ideas and innovations are important, my own candidates are very different.
Of course, this is by no means the only way of looking at the development of ideas – by identifying the most influential innovations and abstractions of all time. In their book, The Western Intellectual Tradition, Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish identify three ‘realms’ of intellectual activity, an approach that I have found very useful. There is first the realm of truth: the effort to inquire into truth is the concern of religion, science and philosophy, where, in an ideal world, agreement would be total and involuntary – i.e., inevitable in a logical, mathematical or syllogistical sense. Next, there is the search for what is right: this is the concern of law, ethics and politics, where agreement, largely voluntary, need not be total but in order to work still needs to be widespread. And thirdly there is the realm of taste, which is largely the business of the arts, where agreement is not necessary at all and where disagreement may be fruitful. Of course, there is again a measure of overlap between these realms (artists search for the truth, or say that they do, religion is concerned with what is right as well as with what is true) but the distinction is worth bearing in mind throughout this book. The Greeks early on recognised an important distinction between natural law and human law.25
Of course, there is nothing sacred or inevitable about ‘the rule of three’. An alternative approach has been to stress the continuity of ‘big’ thoughts. Many books, for instance, have been written on such overwhelming topics as ‘Progress’, ‘Nature’, ‘Civilisation’, ‘Individualism’, ‘Power’, what is and what is not ‘Modern’. A number of scholars – political historians and moral philosophers in particular – have seen the most important intellectual strand running through the past as a moral saga revolving around the twin issues of freedom and individuality. Immanuel Kant was just one who viewed history as the narrative of man’s moral progress. Isaiah Berlin also devoted his energies to defining and refining different concepts of freedom, to explaining the way freedom has been conceived under different political and intellectual regimes, and at different times in history. The study of individualism has grown immensely in recent years, with many historians seeing it as a defining aspect of modernity and capitalism. Daniel Dennett, in his recent title Freedom Evolves, described the growth of individualism throughout history and the various ways that freedom has increased and benefited mankind. Freedom is both an idea in itself and a psychological/political condition especially favourable to the instigation of ideas.
Each of these approaches to intellectual history has something to be said for it and each of the books and essays referred to above is warmly recommended. In the event, however, I have given this book a tripartite structure, in the manner of Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, Giambattista Vico, Carlo Cipolla, Ernest Gellner, Jared Diamond and others. Not merely to ape them (though one could do worse than follow this array of distinguished minds) but because the three particular ideas I have settled on, as the most important, do, I believe, concisely summarise my argument about what has happened in history and describe where we are today.
All of the forms of organisation mentioned above are recognisable in the following pages, but the three ideas I have settled on as the most important, and which determine the book’s ultimate structure and thesis, are these: the soul, Europe, and the experiment. I do not intend to rehearse the argument of the book in this Introduction but, if I may anticipate some criticisms, I trust it will become clear why I think the soul is a more important concept than the idea of God, why Europe is as much an idea as it is a place on the map, and why the humble experiment has had such profound consequences. I also think that these three ideas are responsible for our present predicament – but that too will emerge in the following pages.
I should perhaps expand a little on what I mean by ‘idea’. I do not have any magic formula according to which ideas have been chosen for inclusion in this book. I include abstract ideas and I include inventions which I think are or were important. According to some palaeontologists man’s first abstract idea occurred around 700,000 years ago, when stone hand-axes became standardised to the same proportions. This, the scientists say, shows that early man had an ‘idea’ inside his head of what a hand-axe should be. I report this debate and discuss its implications on pages 35–37. But I also treat the invention of the first hand-axes – 2.5 million years ago, before they became standardised – as evidence for an ‘idea’, after early man realised that a sharp stone would break through animal hide when his own fingernails or teeth wouldn’t. Writing is an idea, a very important idea, which was invented before 3000 BC. Today, however, we tend not to regard letters or words as inventions, as we do computers or mobile phones, because they have been so long with us. But inventions are evidence of ideas. I have treated language as an idea, because language reflects the way that people think, and the ways in which languages differ characterise the social and intellectual history of different populations. In addition, most ideas are conceived in language. Thus I consider the history and structure of the world’s most intellectually influential languages: Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, French and English.
The first person to conceive of intellectual history was, perhaps, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He certainly argued that the most interesting form of history is the history of ideas, that without taking into account the dominating ideas of any age, ‘history is blind’.26 Voltaire (1694–1778) spoke of the philosophy of history, by which he meant that history was to be looked at as what interests a philosophe (rather than a soldier-politician, say). He argued that culture and civilisation, and progress on that score, were susceptible of secular, critical and empirical enquiry.27 The French Annales school, with its interest in mentalités, some of the less tangible aspects of history – for example, the everyday intellectual climate at various points in the past (how time was understood, or what, say, medieval notions of privacy were) – also comprised a form of the history of ideas, though it was hardly systematic.