Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Nevertheless, W. A. Dunlap, writing in 1905, used the word ‘triposis’ to describe this tendency to divide intellectual history into three, while Ernest Gellner in 1988 favoured the term ‘trinitarian’.¹⁶ In recent years we have had J. H. Denison’s Emotions as the Basis of Civilisation (1932), which divided societies into the patriarchal, the fratriarchal and the democratic. In 1937, in his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, Harry Elmer Barnes described three great changes in ‘sensibility’ in history – the arrival of ‘ethical monotheism’ in the Axial Age (700–400 BC), the advent of individualism in the Renaissance, when the present world became an end in itself instead of a preparation for the shadowy afterlife, and the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century.¹⁷

Economists have often thought in threes. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith (1723–1790) offered a pioneering analysis of the fundamental division of income into rents, wages and the profits of stock, identifying their respective owners as the landlord, the wage-earner and the capitalist, the ‘three great, original and constituent orders of every civilised society’.¹⁸ Even Marxism can be reduced to three: an age when man knows neither surplus nor exploitation, when both surplus and exploitation are pervasive, and when surplus remains but exploitation is ended.¹⁹ And Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944), distinguished three great economic epochs – reciprocity, redistribution and the market. Two years later, in The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood described ‘three great crises’ that have occurred in the history of European historiography. The first occurred in the fifth century BC, when the idea of history as a science came into being; the second took place in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, with the advent of Christianity, which viewed history as the working out of God’s purpose, not man’s; and the third came in the eighteenth century with a general denial of innate ideas and intuitionism or revelation. In 1951, in Ideas and Men, Crane Brinton, professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard, identified humanism, Protestantism and rationalism as the three great ideas making the modern world. Carlo Cipolla published Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 in 1965, in which he argued that nationalism, guns and navigation accounted for the European conquests which created the modern world. The rising nationalism in Europe, as a result of the Reformation, led to a new round of war, which promoted the growth of metallurgy, and ever more efficient – and brutal – weapons. These far outstripped anything available in the East (in contrast to the situation in 1453, when the Turks sacked Constantinople), while the developments in navigation, fuelled by ambitions of empire, enabled European ships to reach both the far east (the ‘Vasco da Gama’ era) and, eventually, the Americas.²⁰

In Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book (1988), he argued that there have been three great phases in history – hunting/gathering, agrarian production and industrial production – and that these fitted with the three great classes of human activity – production, coercion and cognition. In 1991, Richard Tarnas, in The Passion of the Western Mind, argued that philosophy, in the West at any rate, can be divided into three great epochs – as largely autonomous during the classical period, as subordinate to religion during the dominant years of Christianity, and as subordinate to science ever since.²¹

In his book Fire and Civilisation (1992), Johan Goudsblom argued that man’s control of fire produced the first transformation in human life. Early man was now no longer a predator: control of fire enabled him to corral animals and to clear land. Without this, agriculture – the second transformation – would not have been possible. Control over fire also introduced the possibility of cooking, which distinguished man from the animals and may be regarded as the origins of science. (The use of smoke may also have been the first form of communication.) Control over fire, of course, also led to baking, ceramics and smelting (the ‘pyrotechnic cultures’), which enabled metal daggers and then swords to be constructed. But the third great transformation, and the most important, after agriculture, Goudsblom said, was industrialisation, the union of fire with water, to produce in the first instance steam, harnessing a new form of energy which enabled machines of unprecedented size and power to perform certain routine skills much better and much faster than was possible by hand.²²