Redefining Reason: The Story of the Twentieth Century "Primitive" Mentality Debate

Throughout the twentieth century, Western thinkers engaged in a politically charged, often highly personal and acrimonious debate over the mental and rational capacity of people from traditional non-literate societies. At issue was the question of whether or not humanity was, at bottom, psychologically and rationally unifi ed and equal as a species. Redefining Reason offers the fi rst in depth, critical history of that debate and its repercussions in modern Western thought and society.

This debate, of course, is as old as humanity itself, and one that was never formally announced, coordinated or neatly staged. In tracing it through the twentieth century, this book focuses on what was the most thoughtful, interesting, and cogent phase of an ancient controversy in the Western world.

This book is called the story of a “primitive” mentality/rationality debate because that is what it was called most commonly by those who participated in it. While as readers will see, there was nothing uniquely “primitive” about the mentality of people from traditional oral societies; to deprive the twentieth-century debate of its own terms and questions would be to lose sight of what it was.

Divided into three sections, this book fi rst sets the twentieth century “primitive” mentality debate within its historical context so that it may be better understood. It then focuses on some of the highlights of the debate. The next section suggests that this debate was, in reality, itself but a chapter in (or aspect of ) a much larger story: the story of what may be appropriately referred to as the “hyperrationalization” of human society. To conclude, this book follows the debate into the twenty-fi rst century and offers the clarifi cation and resolutions developed in earlier chapters to contemporary students, scholars, and educated lay readers.