Bagby’s Unfinished Science of Civilization
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 16 July 2025 is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Philip Haxall Bagby (16 July 1918–21 September 1958), who was born in Henrico County, Virginia, on this date in 1918. Bagby was only 40 when he died, but he had led an active life as a diplomat stationed in Casablanca and Culcutta, and he produced one book before he died, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations.
Before I talk about Bagby in particular I want to set his work in a certain intellectual milieu that’s now largely lost to us. In the middle of the twentieth century, in the immediate post-war period, there was a kind of flowering of thought about civilization, especially in the US. A lot of this came from anthropology, and a lot of it was based at the University of Chicago. If there weren’t already a school of economic thought called the Chicago School, I would call these mid-century anthropologists who found their way to the most general questions about civilization the Chicago School, but that’s already taken. This school of thought, whatever we choose to call it, deserves to be better known. It’s far more scientific in temperament than more familiar names in the study of civilization.
If anyone were asked to name the most important writers on civilization in the twentieth century, I suspect that they would name Spengler and Toynbee, maybe also Sorokin, and a few would mention Fukuyama and Huntington. Very few, if any, would mention Robert Redfield and his colleagues, or this mid-century flowering of civilizational thought in America. And it’s chiefly Robert Redfield that I’m thinking about, and many of Redfield’s colleagues and associates can be counted as part of this, particularly Milton Singer and A. L. Kroeber, though there are other names as well. For example, Gregory Bateson, who is reasonably well known, contributed to a collection of papers, Anthropology of Folk Religion, that also has papers from Redfield and Singer. I’ve seen little scholarly recognition of this brief efflorescence of civilization studies in mid-century America. There’s a book about Redfield, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology by Clifford Wilcox, published in 2004. This is an excellent book and I recommend it. It touches on the wider context of mid-century anthropology, though it’s focused on Redfield.
Redfield did his fieldwork in Central America, but his colleagues spread out over the world and brought their insights to many different cultural contexts. Milton Singer did his fieldwork in India. This is important, because a scientific understanding of civilization needs to be applicable to any and all civilizations, or it’s a merely parochial account. If we could produce a parochial account of only one civilization that would be valuable, so parochial theories have their place, but ultimately we want our theory to be sufficiently general that it applies to all instances. A parochial account could be a limiting case in a more comprehensive theory, as Einstein observed, and we often have to start in this way, with a limited scope and limited aims. But, so far, we can’t even produce a parochial theory of history or a parochial theory of civilization.
I said I wanted to set Bagby’s work in a certain milieu, so it’s this milieu of anthropological thought about civilization that is, I think, the proper context for understanding Bagby’s contribution. Bagby himself wasn’t associated with Redfield or the University of Chicago, but he wasn’t isolated from the intellectual milieu of his time to the extent that, for example, Spengler was. He dedicated his book to A. L. Kroeber, a colleague of Redfield, and in an acknowledgement note he says that W. H. Walsh read the manuscript. Walsh was the author of Philosophy of History: An Introduction, which I mentioned in the first episode of Today in Philosophy of History. This book was largely responsible for the revival of philosophy of history in Anglo-American philosophy.
I became aware of Bagby as I became aware of many things: I found a copy of his book at a used book store, having never previously heard of the book or the author. I learned about Redfield the same way when I found a copy of his The Primitive World and Its Transformations at a used book store. Bagby’s Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations is one of my favorite books on civilization, but we could just as well say that it’s a book about history, or philosophy of history, or philosophy of civilization, or all of these things at once.
One of the reasons this is my favorite book is that Bagby says a great many things with which I agree, and he opens his book with a discussion of philosophy of history. The first page of the Introduction begins thus:
“The ‘philosophy of history’ is the term customarily used to designate those general and somewhat vague speculations about the pattern and meaning of historical events in which historians, philosophers and even theologians occasionally indulge. As the term itself shows, this is a branch of human thought which has not yet emerged from the womb of philosophy; it has not yet become a separate science or intellectual discipline with its own concepts and its own rules. Like psychology a hundred years ago or physics before Aristotle, it has remained essentially a branch of philosophy, speculative rather than empirical in its approach, closely dependent on metaphysical presuppositions rather than on observations of fact.”
Bagby acknowledges the distinction with which Walsh led his influential book between critical and speculative philosophy of history. Bagby calls critical philosophy of history historical epistemology and historical logic, while he calls speculative philosophy of history historical metaphysics. Bagby is interested in historical metaphysics, or speculative philosophy of history, because he’s interested in the historical process itself, but there’s a problem that appears immediately with metaphysical philosophies of history. Traditional speculative philosophies of history are in a rush to make a moral judgment on history. Though Bagby was interested in speculative philosophies of history because they are directly concerned with the historical process, he rejects this moralizing approach. Bagby distinguishes his approach from moralizing philosophies of history, saying that he takes the perspective of the scientist, which is also, interestingly, the perspective of the saint, so he says:
“When… moral points of view become fully explicit, when they are used to order, evaluate and explain the whole past of the human race, we are dealing with the philosophy of history in its most common form. All historical events are seen as leading to the ultimate triumph of the Good. But the moral ends of historians need not find so sweeping and systematic an expression; they may be confined to the assumption, never openly expressed, that, for instance, the Welsh are a fine and badly-treated people or that rural life and simple faith are to be preferred to the pleasures and scepticism of cities. In contrast, the approach to history which will be advocated here is essentially aesthetic rather than moral. It involves a sympathy with things as they are, rather than as they ought to be. It is the point of view of the scientist or the saint as opposed to that of the political or religious reformer.”
If you weren’t already surprised that someone interested in history scientifically would prefer speculative philosophy of history over analytical philosophy of history, you might be surprised that Bagby is advocating for an aesthetic approach to history. In my episode on Walter Pater I suggested that Pater had an aesthetic conception of history, but what I outlined in that episode is only distantly related to what Bagby had in mind. Bagby was interested in a dispassionate view of history from a distance, from which distance we can appreciate its features, but in which we aren’t participants, but observers. But we’re not observers because, like artists, we want to produce an imitation of history. We’re observers, rather, because we’re scientists, and we want to understand what it is we’re observing. The awe of the spectacle is part of the fascination, but we want to pass beyond awe and arrive at understanding.
This is a subtle distinction, and, like many of the positions that Bagby takes, it would be easy to misunderstand, because Bagby is trying to do something unfamiliar. And this is similar to Bagby’s unfamiliar relationship to philosophy of history, which is instrumental. For Bagby, philosophy of history wasn’t an end in itself, but a means to an end. Clearly Bagby didn’t entirely shy away from philosophy of history, but in reading the book it’s obvious that he had something different in mind. What he was attempting to do was to provide the foundations for the scientific study of history and civilization. In an obituary for Bagby, A. L. Kroeber wrote a telling description of Bagby’s work that suggests these ambitions:
“Bagby worked slowly and carefully toward large ends kept consistently in sight. He thought and wrote with sharp definition, reasoned control, and unusual precision. His book clarifies and advances the difficult study of comparative civilizations.”
Bagby didn’t live to elaborate and expand on Culture and History, but the book received many reviews. A review by John T. Flint characterizes Bagby’s work as “analytical philosophy of history,” and also “a workable, empirical science of history.” That’s pretty fair, except that Bagby explicitly distanced himself from analytical philosophy of history. Some of the reviews make it clear that the reviewer didn’t understand what Bagby was trying to do, and, inevitably, Bagby was compared to Spengler and Toynbee despite his criticisms of both of them. For an example of this, consider the final paragraph of Irving Rouse’s review:
“The author’s approach in the final chapters is closer to that of the philosophers of history, such as Spengler and Toynbee, than it is that of to the anthropologists who have written upon the subject. He tends to stress the role of ideas and values in the development of civilization, whereas most anthropologists would start with more empirical factors, such as irrigation and writing. The reader who wishes to know the anthropological approach to the problem would be better advised to consult works such as Julian H. Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana, 1955) and Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture: the Development of Civilization to the Fall off Rome (New York, 1959).”
Rouse makes it out that Bagby’s account is simply a failed exposition of anthropology, which has been done better by others. This kind of response is predictable when someone is trying to do something that hasn’t been done before. A review by Leon Goldstein, who was a philosopher of history in his own right, makes it out that Bagby was a failed follower in the footsteps of Teggart, to whom he is compared unfavorably. Goldstein’s review ends with this:
“Notwithstanding the repeated insistence of the author, there is really no reason to think that this hodgepodge of prescription and observation will offer the least aid to anyone interested in pursuing what used to be called ‘universal history’.”
I’m a bit surprised that Goldstein responded in this way, since he was certainly equipped to understand what Bagby was trying to do. Bagby made no claim to pursuing universal history. A review by George Simpson is more sympathetic, but implicitly regrets the sudden end of Bagby’s research program with his death:
“This is a refreshing, stimulating approach to the study of history. The author’s death, shortly after publishing this volume, ended his quest for new ways of understanding history. The point of view is promising, and one hopes that others will test it further.”
Realistically, Simpson was right: without others taking up Bagby’s point of view, nothing more would come of it. The reviews of Bagby’s one book constitute a cautionary lesson for anyone else who would dip their toe in the same waters; you will be misunderstood and criticized for the wrong reasons. But Bagby was clear-headed and eminently rational in his approach to a topic that has led others into confusion and, eventually, into despair. He saw what needed to be done, which a few others like Redfield also saw, but which many of the reviewers failed to grasp.
I said that Bagby was interested in the actual historical process, which seems to make his work a speculative philosophy of history, but he’s not about making a moral judgment about history. He doesn’t want to praise or condemn, he wants to understand what is. This is the perspective of the scientist, though it might make you a bit uncomfortable that science has to be approached by way of metaphysics. This shouldn’t surprise you. All sciences in their formative stages are unavoidably philosophical. Many contemporary scientists try not to acknowledge this out of distaste for philosophy, and most are working well established disciplines so that these philosophical questions never come up. They are settled for all practical purposes. But where no science yet exists, the foundations of the discipline aren’t settled.
If we want to someday converge on a legitimate science of history, or a legitimate science of civilization, we have to pass through the formative stage of the discipline, and that means formulating the conceptual framework within which the science is to be expressed. In more concrete scientific terms, this means converging on observational and theoretical terms that are used in common by most of the researchers in the field, so that their results can be compared straight across, like apples to apples and oranges to oranges. What are the observational and theoretical terms of history? And what are the observational and theoretical terms for civilization? We don’t know. We don’t have the concepts for observation and theory that we would need for a science of history or civilization, and Bagby recognized this:
“In the physical sciences, little or no progress was made until certain very general aspects of the physical environment had been abstracted from the confusing mass of impressions which make up our experience. These abstractions were then investigated in and for themselves without regard for other aspects of that experience. Among the abstractions of physics, for instance, are mass, momentum, and energy, all of which now seem to us familiar and even obvious, but whose discovery and clarification was the work of many minds and many centuries. It is probable that the difficulties which have hitherto been encountered in finding regularities in history are due to the absence of broad abstractions of this kind, in terms of which the phenomena can be ordered.”
Because we don’t know the requisite observational and theoretical terms, because we haven’t been through the process of concept formation, because we haven’t settled on the mode of abstraction proper to the inchoate discipline, we can’t yet call our work in these areas properly scientific.
However, before we’ve established an actual science, we can work toward a science philosophically, and that’s why thinkers like Spengler and Toynbee are sometimes called historians, sometimes philosophers of history, and sometimes philosophers of civilization. It’s an awkward and difficult place to be in, and it explains some of the reviews of Bagby’s book. I just said in my episode on Hayden White that “all science, even… the most narrowly-conceived positivist exercises in science, has foundational philosophical presuppositions” That’s the point I’m making here again. Arguably, the most successful and effective sciences are those in which the philosophical presuppositions remain implicit, but which have a deep resonance in human intuition. If the presuppositions of a science are sufficiently intuitive, they never need to be made explicit, though there has to be some agreement on the meaning of basic observational and theoretical terms. Even if we can’t define these terms as we would like to be able to define them, if we can use them consistently and others can understand us, sometimes that’s enough.
It’s not a problem unique to history or civilization that we can’t define our terms. Physics can’t define matter. Psychology can’t define mind. Sociology can’t define society. But they all manage to muddle through, with the occasional bitter scholarly controversy or foundational crisis. History, or rather a science of history, not only hasn’t muddled through, it hasn’t even gotten started. Something else has been missing. Bagby recognized what that missing ingredient was:
“There is no growing body of doctrine; there are no established positions and no progress; we do not even have an agreed definition of ‘history’.”
A growing body of doctrine and established positions are framed in a common set of observational and theoretical terms, but they also represent a step beyond mere concept formation or clarification, because they represent the relations among concepts. The absence of a body of doctrine and established positions is what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called the methodology of scientific research programs. What Bagby is saying is that there’s no scientific research program in history. A scientific research program in history would involve a number of researchers who share a body of doctrine and established positions, allowing them to constructively communicate with each other and move the ball forward.
Even if scholars of history and civilization disagree, they would be disagreeing with each other in a shared terminology. This makes it possible for those who disagree to disagree constructively, by critiquing the views of others, and having one’s own views critiqued in turn, but by those with shared philosophical presuppositions. These circumstances are greatly facilitated by institutional support and organization. Robert Redfield, whom I mentioned earlier, recognized this, and along with the economist Frank Knight, John Nef, and Robert Hutchins, attempted to create a degree-granting program in the study of civilization at the University of Chicago as early as 1942. This is discussed in chapter five of the Wilcox book I mentioned earlier. The executive committee turned them down, but they came back again with a different proposal and a different name, watered down a bit, but with much of the context intact. Wilcox writes that Redfield’s proposal was cool and scholarly, and not the sort of thing that would appeal to donors, and so we see, as we so often find, that appeasing the donor class is usually how institutions maintain themselves.
Redfield and others did eventually get money for a program, but it wasn’t an ongoing commitment. The program endured for a few years and then shut down. This has happened with many programs in the study of civilization. For example, Centre for Research into Dynamics of Civilisation (CREDOC), ran from 2013–2018 at the University College London, and the Research Centre for the study of the civilization of nomads in Kazakhstan was started also in 2013, and may still be ongoing, but there’s no new material on their webpage.
We can imagine a counter-factual history in which Redfield presided over a degree-granting program in the study of civilization at the University of Chicago, other institutions get on board with their own programs, journals are founded, and a network of researchers are now loosely working with each other on a shared scientific research program. This didn’t happen. Here’s another counterfactual. Redfield was working on a book on civilization when he died, and the initial three chapters are published in volume 1 of his collected papers. But how many people make an effort to get a hold of volumes collected papers? Imagine that Redfield’s book had been finished, or had been posthumously edited into a short, mass market paperback about civilization. That could have changed things too.
The most obvious counterfactual here is if Bagby had lived to expand on his work. But, as we’ve seen, one man isn’t a scientific research program. One man can start a scientific research program, as Darwin started scientific biology and Adam Smith started economics, but others have to come along to pass the torch in an epistemic relay. If the torch gets dropped, it’ll probably go out. The mid-century American efflorescence of civilization studies was, like Camelot, one brief, shining moment. But Arthur is still asleep in Avalon, and he may yet return.
