ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the broad currents of European social philosophy that swept chance and character away from respectable academic company. The sixteenth-century voyages of discovery, and the seventeenth-century voyages of the European trading companies, brought more than mere profit to London and other European capitals. Accompanying the arkfuls of new species, joining the ranks of beautifully distinguished insects, came knowledge of new kinds of societies, new religions, and new social customs. These cultures may have been news for Europeans, but it was clear they were of long standing, some clearly ancient, rivalling the antiquity of the Classical Mediterranean models. The new naturalism, the faith in explaining human behaviour by the same means that science explained the natural world, was driven by noble hopes and aspirations. Empiricism appealed to theorists of all political and moral persuasions, it appealed to those who like Adam Smith sang the praises of early capitalism and to those who sang from a more radical hymn sheet.
