P1: SBT
9780521662161c07 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:21
7
Genealogies and the State of Nature
EDWARD CRAIG
The opening chapters of Bernard Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness are an
appetizing invitation, which I here gratefully accept, to reflect on a question
which in its most general form is of very wide application indeed: what kinds
of light can one shed on something by recounting its history?
1
Restricted
to the philosophical tradition this becomes a question about the nature and
effectiveness of what are nowadays often called “genealogies” and “state-of-
nature theories,” and it is on these that Williams’ attention is concentrated.
The same is true of mine in this essay; but I shall not bother too much about
the limits set by those terms as they are usually applied, in the belief that
since this is an aspect of a broader issue a broader approach is desirable, at
least so long as there is any suspicion that our present borderlines, which
are certainly fuzzy, may be arbitrary, too.
Much that I shall say Williams has said already – rather more succinctly
and deftly, the reader may feel – and I doubt whether anything of mine
conflicts with anything of his, once a few terminological matters are sorted
out. But his purpose in these chapters was to prepare the ground for a
specific exercise of the state-of-nature and genealogical methods: his own
application of them, which forms the rest of the book, to the twin virtues
of truthfulness, sincerity, and accuracy. With nothing on my plate but the
methodological questions per se,Ican afford to plod around the terrain a
little more widely.
1. THE FORMS OF GENEALOGY
Whether there is any important difference of type that we might mark by
selective use of the expressions “state-of-nature theory” and “genealogy” is

of the vindicatory type are mostly found in political philosophy – one thinks
immediately of Hobbes and Nozick – but not exclusively: Williams’ own
book offers an ethical application.
We can distinguish between the intrinsically subversive and the merely
accidentally subversive genealogy. In the intrinsic type we have an account
of the history of certain attitudes, beliefs or practices that their proponent
cannot accept without damage to his esteem for, and certitude in, the atti-
tudes, beliefs or practices themselves. For one thing, it may in some cases
actually be a part of the belief-system that the belief-system itself had a
quite different kind of origin – most religions are like this, perhaps all.
And that point quite apart, it would be a very well-padded Christian who
could accept Hume’s account of the origins of monotheistic belief and con-
tinue with faith unabated, for Hume presents these beliefs as arising out of
processes that have no apparent connection with truth, and in some cases
out of motives that are positively disreputable, such as the wish to appear,
to oneself and others, the kind of person so favoured as to be capable of
believing things that others find literally unbelievable. Nobody who accepts
what Nietzsche tells us in The Genealogy of Morals could continue in a calm
conviction of the sanctity of Christian moral principles, as he presents these
2
For Williams’ preferred usage of the term “genealogy,” see Williams (2002), pp. 20–21.
P1: SBT
9780521662161c07 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:21
Genealogies and the State of Nature
183
principles as an expression of hatred, resentment, and bewilderment. Not,
notice, just as arising out of these emotions – which a Christian moralist
could construe in a sense that would make it quite harmless (see how the
Holy Spirit has transformed hatred into love!) – but as being an expression
of them, and a self-deceptive expression at that.

eyes of some people, so long as the Founder is held in high esteem. That
the royal line has an extremely ancient pedigree, preferably going back to a
demigod, is a political device which itself has an extremely ancient pedigree,
3
Williams (2002), p. 36.
P1: SBT
9780521662161c07 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:21
184
Edward Craig
but it will not bolster the loyalty of subjects who think the present king a
scoundrel if they have an even lower opinion of his ancestors.
There may also be neutral genealogies, which give us a history of X
without either impugning or enhancing the standing of X. I doubt whether
there can be such a thing as an intrinsically neutral genealogy, if that means
one containing no feature which human beings could, even locally and
temporarily, find to tell for or against the item whose history it purports
to narrate. But I also doubt whether this is a very interesting class for
philosophy, and don’t propose to spend time or energy on it. Indeed unless
we use the word very broadly, genuinely neutral genealogies of any type
may be vanishingly rare. Williams is surely right that very many genealogies
work by ascribing functions to their objects, telling us what they are for.
4
If the function is of some importance to us and the object performs it well,
we have to that degree a recommendation, if we find the function in some
way disreputable, then a critique. If the function really is one to which we
are indifferent it becomes unclear what the genealogist can be aiming for:
certainly not an evaluation of the phenomenon whose genealogy is offered;
but not even a neutral explanation of its existence either – for how could
it explain the existence of any practice or institution to show that it has
a certain function, if it is a matter of indifference to us whether anything

stories? I think we should. I have been using “genealogy” very broadly,
allowing it to include even the detailing of the causal processes, perhaps
lasting only a fraction of a second, that lead to a belief. But even on a much
narrower usage there seems to be a point in keeping the two expressions
separate. If we take the normal meanings of the words as our starting point,
we would expect state-of-nature theories to begin by considering condi-
tions as they are supposed (by the theory itself) to have been in some very
early stage of human existence and association, a state characterized only
in terms of factors to which any human society must at one time have been
subject. So famous a genealogy as Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality,
beginning as it does from a position in which there is a ruling class and a
subject class, and a ruling class with a quite specific behavioural code and
specific attitudes towards its subjects, is hardly a state-of-nature theory thus
understood; most of Foucault’s projects certainly aren’t, for the same kind
of reason. By contrast, Hobbes’ equally famous account of the origins of
government could well be a state-of-nature theory, at least in intention;
and so (if I may intrude myself on this company, taking shameless advan-
tage of the kindly helping hand from Williams) could my own construction
of the concept of knowledge in Knowledge and the State of Nature.
6
What the
words themselves suggest, to put it roughly, is that state-of-nature theories
are those genealogies which start from human prehistory. But we shall soon
see that this is not the only way to look at things, and may not be the best.
What is the status of genealogies, including state-of-nature stories? I
implied earlier that they might be factual, imaginary, or conjectural, and in
doing so I was taking my cue from Williams:
A genealogy is a narrative that tries to explain a cultural phenomenon by
describing a way in which it came about, or could have come about, or
might be imagined to have come about.

as he described his characters as acting. Wouldn’t the devouter section of his
readership feel relieved? They can now regard Nietzsche’s narrative as an
ingenious piece powered by a dark, even misanthropic imagination – whilst
continuing to think of morality as having whatever prestigious pedigree they
were previously inclined to ascribe to it: it began when God communicated
with humanity through prophets, or when men first encountered and read
the eternal Vedas, or whatever. The more scrupulously honest among them
might feel that now, since Nietzsche’s imaginary genealogy had shown that
it could have originated in another way, it would take just a little more
weight of evidence to be quite sure that really it originated as they had
previously thought – for whatever the subject matter the appearance of
a new hypothesis that isn’t obviously absurd puts a little more epistemic
pressure on the old, familiar incumbent. But beyond that, no change of
action or attitude, just moral business as usual. Likewise, no believer need
shift their position as a result of accepting that Hume’s account of the origins
of religious belief could have been true, so long as they remain convinced
that it isn’t.
9
8
Williams (2002), p. 21.
9
Strictly speaking, that does depend on just what the believer’s position was. A system of
religious beliefs may include beliefs about man and human psychology, or about the kind of
thing the deity would allow to happen, in which case acceptance of a genealogy as merely
possible, in the sense in which the plot of a good novel is possible, might indeed conflict
with them.
P1: SBT
9780521662161c07 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:21
Genealogies and the State of Nature
187

That is not imaginary, nor would I even call it conjectural. But it isn’t all
that Hume’s explanation of the emergence of polytheistic beliefs needs – he
has to make a claim about how the human beings who experienced those
natural facts reacted to the experience, and it is the status of this claim that
threatens to make trouble for the state-of-nature theorist.
Initially, we were worried by the question “If the state of nature is
something imaginary, how can it explain anything?” But it seems – for
the moment at least – that that may not be the problem. Where, as in this
10
Both these passages are from Hume (1757/2006) Ch. 2.
P1: SBT
9780521662161c07 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:21
188
Edward Craig
example from Hume, the posited state of nature isn’t imaginary, it can’t be
the problem. But there surely is one. Whether or not it is definitive of the
state-of-nature method, as distinguished from genealogy more generally,
that the posited state of nature is taken to be prehistorical, in the sense of
being something that obtained way back beyond the reach of historical evi-
dence, that is how it is being taken here. We are relying on judgments about
what the natural world, and the human beings in it, must have been like,
even all that indeterminately long time ago. No doubt storms and tempests
ruined what was nourished by the sun; no doubt our ancestors, who had
been hoping to eat it, noticed.
There is something liberating about prehistory. If we can get agreement
that “things must have been like that,” then we can proceed without the
painful business of assembling detailed evidence – of which there isn’t any.
But precisely because of that there is a cost, and the bill arrives when a
chink appears in the agreement. Sticking with Hume’s Natural History of
Religion, suppose we are asked what reason we have to think that human