ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Enlightenment thought to provide a background to standpoints that appeared around 1750 and affected social commentators, including Marx, wrote that date. It examines the philosophical and empirical foundations of the new anthropology of Enlightenment writers as well as the contexts in which it emerged in the mid eighteenth century. The chapter also examines the subsequent development of anthropology and considers the various manifestations of anthropological sensibilities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the time Herder was formulating his philosophical anthropology, the idea of race was being discussed increasingly by Enlightenment writers. The Enlightenment was marked by continuous conflicts between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and various Protestant fringe movements from the 1520s onward. The standpoints of Enlightenment thinkers never constituted a unified, fixed body of ideas and arguments. Montesquieu and Buffon provided a “green light” to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and other commentators of the Scottish Enlightenment to write about the history of human society.
