Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-89wxm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T07:48:07.228Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Sociability and self-love in the theatre of moral sentiments: Mandeville to Adam Smith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2009

Stefan Collini
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Richard Whatmore
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Brian Young
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Get access

Summary

When the anthropologist Marcel Mauss was invited to give the 1938 Huxley Memorial Lecture, he chose for his subject ‘A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’. Mauss thought that his contemporaries falsely believed that the idea of the self captured an innate human property, and that, due to this error, they subscribed to a socially divisive cult of the individual. He proposed that the conception of ourselves as unique is largely a historical artefact. Not only do other peoples hold very different notions of the self, but each conception is intimately connected to the specific ethical community to which persons belong. Mauss referred to ethnographic materials from North America, Australia and archaic Greece to show that in cultures where personhood is defined by kinship, descent and status, responsibility flows directly from family or clan membership, and neither love nor one's conscience alone serve as justifications for action. Only with the emergence of a more abstract conception of a person, seen as the locus of general rights and duties, could individuals understand themselves as endowed with a conscience and inner life. It is this notion of the person as the possessor of a moral consciousness, as the source of autonomous motivation and something capable of self-development, that is the foundation of our own self-understanding.

We, Mauss's current readers, are sceptical about there being any single narrative that could account for self-conceptions of the human subject, and we are more attentive than his contemporaries were to the impersonal nature of the forces that shape the individual's consciousness.

Type
Chapter
Information
Economy, Polity, and Society
British Intellectual History 1750–1950
, pp. 31 - 47
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×