Reviewed here
The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
by Stefanos Geroulanos
New York, NY: Liveright Books, 2024.
In recent years, a different style of left-wing critique has gained a foothold in the academy. A group of mostly young scholars criticize the postwar liberal consensus, which they charge with propping up global inequality and sanctioning American hegemony abroad. But they are not Old Left holdouts: They recognize that, after Michel Foucault’s unmasking of modern disciplinary techniques, class politics and progressive social reform need new justifications, to the extent they can be salvaged at all. Foucault’s successors in an important sense, they are also critical of him, suggesting his Cold War-era opposition to the state was one form of a tendency that also came in neoliberal guise, underwriting marketization and austerity at home, human rights and the “rules-based order” abroad. The movement is led by historians whose preferred genre is the genealogy: a method of denaturalizing ideas and practices by excavating their contingent pasts. "Post-Foucauldian emancipatory genealogy" is a mouthful—easier to call this tendency “Moynism,” after Samuel Moyn, a leading force in the new critique. The Moynist project, in a nutshell, is to liberate left-liberalism from itself.
If you have read a book by the prolific Yale law professor and historian, the structure of a Moynist argument is likely familiar. The postwar condition is characterized by an historical amnesia induced by a new collective mythology: The moral imperative of “never again” has bred a politics of “no alternatives.” Yet the just-so story of liberal triumph over totalitarianism misleads in presenting the postwar settlement as morally inescapable and politically incontestable. In fact, everything that matters in our common life has emerged from a contingent and controversial past, a history that could have been otherwise. Genealogy can awaken us to our freedom to live by the values we imagine for ourselves, here and now, without kowtowing to outdated precedents or repeating past mistakes. By piercing the veil of superstition that hangs over contemporary norms and institutions and lends them an aura of authority, genealogy opens new possibilities for action and reminds us that we have always been at liberty to create the world anew. Or so the argument goes.
Moyn, his students, and fellow-travelers, are best known for applying these methods to contemporary human rights discourse in revisionist historical studies that assail its antipolitical, inegalitarian, Christian, and conservative assumptions. In recent years they have deployed similar arguments against everything from liberal humanitarianism and interventionism to the legalism of political life under the U.S. Constitution. More ambitiously, Moyn has turned his sights on liberalism itself. Drawing on recent historiography that privileges civic freedom over individual rights, Moyn depicts the “Cold War liberalism” of thinkers like Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin as a pessimistic aberration from liberalism’s historic norm. Here Moyn and his band of genealogists finally start to tell us what they like: Their liberalism is comprehensive, not procedural; perfectionist, not value-neutral; emancipatory, not conflict-averse; utopian, not chastened and resigned. Their heroes are neither Locke nor Rawls but Rousseau, Hegel, and the early Judith Shklar.
In The Invention of Prehistory, which boasts Moyn’s blurb on the back cover, Stefanos Geroulanos carries this critique as far as it can go—and beyond. Not content to historicize and dethrone merely one contemporary prejudice or another, Geroulanos aims for nothing less than liberation from the past as such. The book offers a “genealogy” of the study of human origins that promises to do away with the “origin story” as a source of human identity—except, perhaps, the one the book itself proposes. Alongside his polemical review of the annals of prehistory, Geroulanos mounts a case for a vision of humanity that recognizes itself as the product of its own invention: “It is time to wallow a little less in origins,” he proclaims, and turn our minds toward “the humanity we wish for, the world we want, the future we hope to build.”
Geroulanos is known as an historian of Continental philosophy. In An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in Modern France (2010), he charted the French reception of German phenomenology, the eclipse of the concept of “man,” and the rise of “negative anthropology” in midcentury thinkers (like Kojève, Bataille, and Merleau-Ponty) whose work paved the way for better-known antihumanisms in the 1960s. The book established Geroulanos’s brilliance as an intellectual historian, but The Invention of Prehistory aspires to more. It marks Geroulanos’s transition from documentarian to advocate for a school of thought, from observer to executor of its critical methods.
Geroulanos’s portraits of major thinkers and movements in fields such as paleontology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, psychology, and religious studies are well-drawn and often devastating. He is right to argue that these disciplines emerged together as the authority of Christianity declined in the eighteenth century, becoming bearers of a modern faith that the origins of humanity and the meaning of human existence can be explained in naturalistic terms alone.
Beginning with the Enlightenment ideal of the noble savage and the Romantic lore of the untamed Indo-Aryan, then proceeding at a clip through stadial theories of prehistorical “deep time,” the diffusion of innumerable rival Darwinisms, the savage Id and collective unconscious, and more, Geroulanos demonstrates how speculation—and projection—have always run rife in these arenas of purportedly scientific research. Academic disagreements about the deep past and their popular representation have always tracked with the dominant ideologies of the times. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past,” he writes. “Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.” And every generation gets the Neanderthals it deserves.
Both left and right have fallen victim to the semiotic tyranny of tropes and memes that construct the mythology of prehistory, and Geroulanos’s treatment aims to be politically even-handed. Communists and racists, imperialists and Pan-Africanists, feminists and misogynists have all found inspiration for their ideologies in dubious theories about early humanity. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Friedrich Engels’s utopia of “primitive communism” was just as fantastical as the Nazi obsession with ancient Indo-Germans. Yet every new cohort of researchers claims to have overcome such facile stereotypes and finally hit upon empirical bedrock. Both idyllic and horrific depictions of prehistory can serve the narcissism of power. No matter who wields it, Geroulanos suggests, “prehistory has been a mirror.”
Reviewers have objected that Geroulanos’s book sometimes amounts to a case against curiosity. But Geroulanos is hardly the first to charge the practitioners of prehistory with unscientific projection. Nor is he wrong to insist that curiosity can be a vice. If anything, the opposite is true: he often seems far too credulous when it comes to claims of scientific authority. Rather than confronting prehistory head-on, he proposes to “bracket” the question of truth in favor of a genealogy that merely catalogues the effects the prehistorical disciplines have had on modern life. “I do not much care if particular theories are true: I ask what work they do, and at whose expense,” he explains. Geroulanos thus steers clear of any direct confrontation with evolutionary biology, and at times dogmatically affirms potted interpretations of Darwinian concepts that are far from uncontroversial even among mainstream philosophers of science and many practicing biologists.
Declining to challenge the premises of the prehistorical sciences on their own terrain, Geroulanos backs himself into a corner. He is forced to draw a distinction between the valid conclusions of “scientific inquiry” and their social “meaning” while carefully confining himself to the latter. There is a scientific truth about human origins, he acknowledges, but we must contemplate it in the silence of our hearts, lest we exploit it to inflict harm on others.
In the end, there is only one example of “real violence” that Geroulanos is willing to blame on prehistory. “The most obvious and greatest cost of the 250-year obsession with human origins research,” he claims, “has been borne by the Indigenous peoples whose destruction was rationalized because they were ‘primitives’ who were ‘vanishing’ anyway.” This story of indigenous suffering is the recurring theme that ties the book together. For all his invocations of indigenous peoples and his repeated denunciations of false humanitarianism, however, Geroulanos never stops to ask what indigeneity actually means.
Who are the indigenous, really? If we understand the term in light of its etymological meaning (Lt. indigena: in-born, native), then we may still ask who qualifies. How to classify the Lakota, themselves conquerors of the northern plains where they made their tragic last stand? Or the Arabs of East Africa—colonists and slavers who, by the time European imperialists arrived in the late nineteenth century, had occupied the coastlands and interior trading posts for centuries? What to make of the Indian Muslims whose presence on the subcontinent dates only to the Middle Ages? As the rise of religious intolerance in Modi’s India makes clear, postcolonial nationalist ideologies have invested indigeneity with a moral purity that can motivate horrendous injustices.
Geroulanos is not wrong to draw attention to the degradation of traditional ways of life in the modern world, the rapacity of European imperialism, and the role that ideas about prehistory has played in abetting both. But he minimizes the no-less-real harms that prehistorians have inflicted on themselves and their own societies. The understanding of human nature to which the scientific study of prehistory has given rise is a distorted one, and false. But instead of exhorting us to search out a truer one, Geroulanos takes issue with having an origin story at all.
“I firmly believe that we should have a definition of humanity that does not rely at all on an origin story,” he writes. Yet the book never presents such an alternative—and frequently suggests the futility of the task. Geroulanos reserves his praise for thinkers like Bataille and Freud, for whom “humanism, which has always hidden violence, has run dry of hope.” He asks us to recognize that “humanity is an invention,” that we are “cyborgs.” He calls for a new working conception of humanity without a capital H, defined—if such a thing is possible—solely by “doubt” and “a skepticism that never rests.”
Ironically, this demand for relentless critique tends to reproduce the intellectual conditions of early modern political philosophy and state of nature theory with which Geroulanos begins his narrative. Locke, too, was a skeptic about our theoretical knowledge of species, including the species man. He was also a neo-Pelagian: In the First Treatise of Government, he reread the Book of Genesis against the traditional doctrine of original sin. Not unlike Geroulanos, Locke made an encounter with the limits of human understanding serve the ends of emancipation and hope; for Locke, this meant increase, industry, and improvement, while Geroulanos looks to a more egalitarian future.
Is skepticism an adequate bulwark against the alluring power of mythos at a time of narrative breakdown and cultural disintegration? Today, young men are flocking to right-wing influencers with names like Stone Age Herbalist and Bronze Age Pervert. Far from patience for endless skepticism, we witness rising demand for communion with prehistorical heritage. But the contemporary pitfalls of Geroulanos’s approach are wider than that. He barely mentions Nietzsche, whose speculations about human origins call out for criticism and even polemic—but whose philosophy contains a warning for those who believe they can opt out of the origins game. Geroulanos believes that exposing “the profound problems with the ideology of human origins is not to give up on human equality, on difference, or on the shared dreams of a fairer and better future.” But why should a revitalized democratic ethos, of all things, follow from the renunciation of our concern for human origins and our liberation from the bonds of the past? Isn’t the opposite just as likely? We should take Nietzsche seriously when he warns us, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”
Origins and destiny are difficult to disentangle—far more difficult than the Moynists would have us believe. What is born in perfection can only persist or decline. What is wholly corrupt from the beginning can never come to good in the end. For this reason, we need to know where we come from as much as where we are going. Genealogy can serve the critical function of exposing lies and half-truths about our past by forcing us to confront their crippling and distorting effects on the present. But we need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become. The problem with the Moynist critique of postwar liberalism is not that it gets the history wrong, but that it lacks an account of human nature, or of the material and social conditions that delimit human potential.
The Invention of Prehistory confronts humanity with the horror of its own self-invention. But it is hard to see how its summons to endless reinvention could either overcome historical injustice or prevent its recurrence. At the horizon of redemption, this is a worldview that pits the future against the past, making against being—even freedom against love. “Can we still identify with the ‘birth’ of humanity?” Geroulanos asks. “We should not. For there to be any future for humanity, we must see that the deep past, however enchanting, isn’t worthy of our love. It must become another time.” Such studied disdain for the human past finds its proper antithesis—and the unity of humanity finds its most profound grounding—in the biblical account of creation. We are not cyborgs, we are creatures, and as creatures our freedom does not stem from self-assertion but from our relation to the creator who formed us in reason and love.
Modern thought cannot help but perceive this relation as a threat to human autonomy, but it has the advantage of establishing a clearer norm against injustice than any anti-essentialist alternative. At times, Geroulanos almost says that prehistorical homo sapiens and modern humans are just different species: “The animals we call Homo had horizons vastly different than we do.… Just as it is ludicrous to look fifty or two hundred thousand years into the future and pretend we are the origin of the people hopefully living then, it is folly to glance just as far or further into the past and declare that we are the same as those humans long ago.” Yet as Hannah Arendt once noted—echoing St. Augustine—adherents to biblical faith cannot go down this path. The descent of humanity from a single pair of common ancestors whose sins and hopes are still our own militates against the cruelty of one to another, not on the basis of any intangible humanist “dignity,” but something more visceral: They share one blood, one Father.