Econophysics was started in the mid-1990s by several physicists working in the subfield of statistical mechanics.
Unsatisfied with the traditional explanations and approaches of
economists – which usually prioritized simplified approaches for the
sake of soluble theoretical models over agreement with empirical data –
they applied tools and methods from physics, first to try to match
financial data sets, and then to explain more general economic
phenomena.
One driving force behind econophysics arising at this time was
the sudden availability of large amounts of financial data, starting in
the 1980s. It became apparent that traditional methods of analysis were
insufficient – standard economic methods dealt with homogeneous agents
and equilibrium, while many of the more interesting phenomena in
financial markets fundamentally depended on heterogeneous agents and far-from-equilibrium situations.
The term "econophysics" was coined by H. Eugene Stanley,
to describe the large number of papers written by physicists in the
problems of (stock and other) markets, in a conference on statistical
physics in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) in 1995 and first appeared in its proceedings publication in Physica A 1996. The inaugural meeting on econophysics was organised in 1998 in Budapest by János Kertész and Imre Kondor. The first book on econophysics was by R. N. Mantegna & H. E. Stanley in 2000.
The almost regular meeting series on the topic include: ECONOPHYS-KOLKATA (held in Kolkata & Delhi), Econophysics Colloquium, ESHIA/ WEHIA.
If "econophysics" is taken to denote the principle of applying
statistical mechanics to economic analysis, as opposed to a particular
literature or network, priority of innovation is probably due to
Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover (1983). Their book Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy proposes dissolving (their words) the transformation problem in Marx's political economy by re-conceptualising the relevant quantities as random variables.
If, on the other hand, "econophysics" is taken to denote the application of physics to
economics, one can consider the works of Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto as part of it. Indeed, as shown by Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, general equilibrium theory in economics is based on the physical concept of mechanical equilibrium.
For potential games,
it has been shown that an emergence-producing equilibrium based on
information via Shannon information entropy produces the same
equilibrium measure (Gibbs measure from statistical mechanics) as a stochastic dynamical equation which represents noisy decisions, both of which are based on bounded rationality models used by economists.
The fluctuation-dissipation theorem connects the two to establish a
concrete correspondence of "temperature", "entropy", "free
potential/energy", and other physics notions to an economics system.
The statistical mechanics model is not constructed a-priori - it is a
result of a boundedly rational assumption and modeling on existing
neoclassical models. It has been used to prove the "inevitability of
collusion" result of Huw Dixon in a case for which the neoclassical version of the model does not predict collusion. Here the demand is increasing, as with Veblen goods, stock buyers with the "hot hand" fallacy preferring to buy more successful stocks and sell those that are less successful, or among short traders during a short squeeze as occurred with the WallStreetBets group's collusion to drive up GameStop stock price in 2021.
Nobel laureate and founder of experimental economics Vernon L. Smith
has used econophysics to model sociability via implementation of ideas
in Humanomics. There, noisy decision making and interaction parameters
that facilitate the social action responses of reward and punishment
result in spin glass models identical to those in physics.
Quantifiers derived from information theory
were used in several papers by econophysicist Aurelio F. Bariviera and
coauthors in order to assess the degree in the informational efficiency
of stock markets.
Zunino et al. use an innovative statistical tool in the financial
literature: the complexity-entropy causality plane. This Cartesian
representation establish an efficiency ranking of different markets and
distinguish different bond market dynamics. It was found that more
developed countries have stock markets with higher entropy and lower
complexity, while those markets from emerging countries have lower
entropy and higher complexity. Moreover, the authors conclude that the
classification derived from the complexity-entropy causality plane is
consistent with the qualifications assigned by major rating companies to
the sovereign instruments. A similar study developed by Bariviera et
al.
explore the relationship between credit ratings and informational
efficiency of a sample of corporate bonds of US oil and energy companies
using also the complexity–entropy causality plane. They find that this
classification agrees with the credit ratings assigned by Moody's.
Another good example is random matrix theory,
which can be used to identify the noise in financial correlation
matrices. One paper has argued that this technique can improve the
performance of portfolios, e.g., in applied in portfolio optimization.
The ideology of econophysics is embodied in a new probabilistic
economic theory and, on its basis, a unified theory of stock markets.
There are also analogies between finance theory and diffusion theory. For instance, the Black–Scholes equation for option pricing is a diffusion-advection equation (see however for a critique of the Black–Scholes methodology). The Black–Scholes
theory can be extended to provide an analytical theory of main factors
in economic activities.
When mathematician Mark Kac attended a lecture by Richard Feynman he realized their work overlapped. Together they worked out a new approach to solving stochastic differential equations. Their approach is used to efficiently calculate solutions to the Black–Scholes equation to price options on stocks.
Quantum statistical models have been successfully applied to finance
by several groups of econophysicists using different approaches, but the
origin of their success may not be due to quantum analogies.
Quantum economics
The editorial in the inaugural issue of the journal Quantum Economics and Finance
says: "Quantum economics and finance is the application of probability
based on projective geometry—also known as quantum probability—to
modelling in economics and finance. It draws on related areas such as
quantum cognition, quantum game theory, quantum computing, and quantum
physics." In his overview article in the same issue, David Orrell outlines how neoclassical economics benefited from the concepts of classical mechanics, and yet concepts of quantum mechanics "apparently left economics untouched".
He reviews different avenues for quantum economics, some of which he
notes are contradictory, settling on "quantum economics therefore needs
to take a different kind of leaf from the book of quantum physics, by
adopting quantum methods, not because they appear natural or elegant or
come pre-approved by some higher authority or bear resemblance to
something else, but because they capture in a useful way the most basic
properties of what is being studied."
Main results
Econophysics is having some impacts on the more applied field of quantitative finance,
whose scope and aims significantly differ from those of economic
theory. Various econophysicists have introduced models for price
fluctuations in physics of financial markets or original points of view on established models.
Presently, one of the main results of econophysics comprises the explanation of the "fat tails" in the distribution of many kinds of financial data as a universal self-similar scaling property (i.e. scale invariant over many orders of magnitude in the data),
arising from the tendency of individual market competitors, or of
aggregates of them, to exploit systematically and optimally the
prevailing "microtrends" (e.g., rising or falling prices). These "fat
tails" are not only mathematically important, because they comprise the
risks,
which may be on the one hand, very small such that one may tend to
neglect them, but which - on the other hand - are not negligible at all,
i.e. they can never be made exponentially tiny, but instead follow a
measurable algebraically decreasing power law, for example with a failure probability of only where x
is an increasingly large variable in the tail region of the
distribution considered (i.e. a price statistics with much more than 108
data). I.e., the events considered are not simply "outliers" but must
really be taken into account and cannot be "insured away".
It appears that it also plays a role that near a change of the tendency
(e.g. from falling to rising prices) there are typical "panic
reactions" of the selling or buying agents with algebraically increasing
bargain rapidities and volumes.
As in quantum field theory the "fat tails" can be obtained by complicated "nonperturbative" methods, mainly by numerical ones, since they contain the deviations from the usual Gaussian approximations, e.g. the Black–Scholes
theory. Fat tails can, however, also be due to other phenomena, such
as a random number of terms in the central-limit theorem, or any number
of other, non-econophysics models. Due to the difficulty in testing such
models, they have received less attention in traditional economic
analysis.
Criticism
In 2006 economists Mauro Gallegati, Steve Keen, Thomas Lux, and Paul Ormerod, published a critique of econophysics.
They cite important empirical contributions primarily in the areas of
finance and industrial economics, but list four concerns with work in
the field: lack of awareness of economics work, resistance to rigor, a
misplaced belief in universal empirical regularity, and inappropriate
models.
Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the area of computational economics that studies economic processes, including whole economies, as dynamic systems of interacting agents. As such, it falls in the paradigm of complex adaptive systems. In corresponding agent-based models, the "agents"
are "computational objects modeled as interacting according to rules"
over space and time, not real people. The rules are formulated to model
behavior and social interactions based on incentives and information. Such rules could also be the result of optimization, realized through use of AI methods (such as Q-learning and other reinforcement learning techniques).
The theoretical assumption of mathematical optimization by agents in equilibrium is replaced by the less restrictive postulate of agents with bounded rationalityadapting to market forces. ACE models apply numerical methods of analysis to computer-based simulations of complex dynamic problems for which more conventional methods, such as theorem formulation, may not find ready use.
Starting from initial conditions specified by the modeler, the
computational economy evolves over time as its constituent agents
repeatedly interact with each other, including learning from
interactions. In these respects, ACE has been characterized as a
bottom-up culture-dish approach to the study of economic systems.
ACE has a similarity to, and overlap with, game theory as an agent-based method for modeling social interactions.
But practitioners have also noted differences from standard methods,
for example in ACE events modeled being driven solely by initial
conditions, whether or not equilibria exist or are computationally
tractable, and in the modeling facilitation of agent autonomy and
learning.
The "agents"
in ACE models can represent individuals (e.g. people), social groupings
(e.g. firms), biological entities (e.g. growing crops), and/or physical
systems (e.g. transport systems). The ACE modeler provides the initial
configuration of a computational economic system comprising multiple
interacting agents. The modeler then steps back to observe the
development of the system over time without further intervention. In
particular, system events should be driven by agent interactions without
external imposition of equilibrium conditions. Issues include those common to experimental economics in general and development of a common framework for empirical validation and resolving open questions in agent-based modeling.
ACE is an officially designated special interest group (SIG) of the Society for Computational Economics. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have contributed to the development of ACE.
Example: finance
One area where ACE methodology has frequently been applied is asset pricing. W. Brian Arthur, Eric Baum, William Brock,
Cars Hommes, and Blake LeBaron, among others, have developed
computational models in which many agents choose from a set of possible
forecasting strategies in order to predict stock prices, which affects
their asset demands and thus affects stock prices. These models assume
that agents are more likely to choose forecasting strategies which have
recently been successful. The success of any strategy will depend on
market conditions and also on the set of strategies that are currently
being used. These models frequently find that large booms and busts in
asset prices may occur as agents switch across forecasting strategies.More recently, Brock, Hommes, and Wagener (2009) have used a model of
this type to argue that the introduction of new hedging instruments may
destabilize the market, and some papers have suggested that ACE might be a useful methodology for understanding the 2008 financial crisis.
See also discussion under Financial economics § Financial markets and § Departures from rationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics Complexity economics is the application of complexity science to the problems of economics. It relaxes several common assumptions in economics, including general equilibrium theory.
While it does not reject the existence of an equilibrium, it sees such
equilibria as "a special case of nonequilibrium", and as an emergent
property resulting from complex interactions between economic agents. The complexity science approach has also been applied to computational economics.
Models
The "nearly archetypal example" is an artificial stock market model created by the Santa Fe Institute in 1989. The model shows two different outcomes, one where "agents do not search much for predictors
and there is convergence on a homogeneous rational expectations
outcome" and another where "all kinds of technical trading strategies
appearing and remaining and periods of bubbles and crashes occurring".
Another area has studied the prisoner's dilemma,
such as in a network where agents play amongst their nearest neighbors
or a network where the agents can make mistakes from time to time and
"evolve strategies". In these models, the results show a system which displays "a pattern of constantly changing distributions of the strategies".
More generally, complexity economics models are often used to
study how non-intuitive results at the macro-level of a system can
emerge from simple interactions at the micro level. This avoids
assumptions of the representative agent
method, which attributes outcomes in collective systems as the simple
sum of the rational actions of the individuals. It also takes into
account the view of emergence in economics.
Measures
Economic complexity index
Physicist César Hidalgo and Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann
introduced a spectral method to measure the complexity of a country's
economy by inferring it from the structure of the network connecting
countries to the products that they export. The measure combines
information of a country's diversity,
which is positively correlated with a country's productive knowledge,
with measures of a product ubiquity (number of countries that produce or
export the product). This concept, known as the "Product Space", has been further developed by MIT's Observatory of Economic Complexity, and in The Atlas of Economic Complexity in 2011.
Relevance
The economic complexity index (ECI) introduced by Hidalgo and Hausmann is highly predictive of future GDP per capita growth. In Hausmann, Hidalgo et al.,
the authors show that the List of countries by future GDP (based on
ECI) estimates ability of the ECI to predict future GDP per capita
growth is between 5 times and 20 times larger than the World Bank's
measure of governance, the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global
Competitiveness Index (GCI) and standard measures of human capital, such
as years of schooling and cognitive ability.
Metrics for country fitness and product complexity
Sapienza physicist Luciano Pietronero and collaborators have recently proposed a different approach.
These metrics are defined as the fixed point of non-linear iterative
map. Differently from the linear algorithm giving rise to the ECI, this
non-linearity is a key point to properly deal with the nested structure
of the data. The authors of this alternative formula claim it has
several advantages:
Consistency with the empirical evidence from the export
country-product matrix that diversification plays a crucial role in the
assessment of the competitiveness of countries. The metrics for
countries proposed by Pietronero is indeed extensive with respect to the
number of products.
Non-linear coupling between fitness and complexity required by the
nested structure of the country-product matrix. The nested structure
implies that the information on the complexity of a product must be
bounded by the producers with the slowest fitness.
Broad and Pareto-like distribution of the metrics.
Each iteration of the method refines information, does not change
the meaning of the iterated variables and does not shrink information.
The metrics for country fitness and product complexity have been used in a report of the Boston Consulting Group on Sweden growth and development perspectives.
Dispersed interaction—The economy has interaction between
many dispersed, heterogeneous, agents. The action of any given agent
depends upon the anticipated actions of other agents and on the
aggregate state of the economy.
No global controller—Controls are provided by mechanisms of
competition and coordination between agents. Economic actions are
mediated by legal institutions, assigned roles, and shifting
associations. No global entity controls interactions. Traditionally, a
fictitious auctioneer has appeared in some mathematical analyses
of general equilibrium models, although nobody claimed any descriptive
accuracy for such models. Traditionally, many mainstream models have
imposed constraints, such as requiring that budgets be balanced, and such constraints are avoided in complexity economics.
Cross-cutting hierarchical organization—The economy has many
levels of organization and interaction. Units at any given level
behaviors, actions, strategies, products typically serve as "building
blocks" for constructing units at the next higher level. The overall
organization is more than hierarchical, with many sorts of tangling
interactions (associations, channels of communication) across levels.
Ongoing adaptation—Behaviors, actions, strategies, and products are revised frequently as the individual agents accumulate experience.
Novelty niches—Such niches are associated with new markets,
new technologies, new behaviors, and new institutions. The very act of
filling a niche may provide new niches. The result is ongoing novelty.
Out-of-equilibrium dynamics—Because new niches, new
potentials, new possibilities, are continually created, the economy
functions without attaining any optimum or global equilibrium.
Improvements occur regularly.
Contemporary trends in economics
Complexity
economics has a complex relation to previous work in economics and
other sciences, and to contemporary economics. Complexity-theoretic
thinking to understand economic problems has been present since their
inception as academic disciplines. Research has shown that no two separate micro-events are completely isolated, and there is a relationship that forms a macroeconomic
structure. However, the relationship is not always in one direction;
there is a reciprocal influence when feedback is in operation.
Complexity economics has been applied to many fields.
Intellectual predecessors
Complexity economics draws inspiration from behavioral economics, Marxian economics, institutional economics/evolutionary economics, Austrian economics and the work of Adam Smith. It also draws inspiration from other fields, such as statistical mechanics in physics, and evolutionary biology.
Some of the 20th century intellectual background of complexity theory
in economics is examined in Alan Marshall (2002) The Unity of Nature,
Imperial College Press: London. See Douma & Schreuder (2017) for a
non-technical introduction to Complexity Economics and a comparison with
other economic theories (as applied to markets and organizations).
In
the literature, usually chaotic models are proposed but not calibrated
on real data nor tested. However some attempts have been made recently
to fill that gap. For instance, chaos could be found in economics by the
means of recurrence quantification analysis. In fact, Orlando et al.
by the means of the so-called recurrence quantification correlation
index were able detect hidden changes in time series. Then, the same
technique was employed to detect transitions from laminar (i.e. regular)
to turbulent (i.e. chaotic) phases as well as differences between
macroeconomic variables and highlight hidden features of economic
dynamics.
Finally, chaos could help in modeling how economy operate as well as in
embedding shocks due to external events such as COVID-19.
For an updated account on the tools and the results obtained by
empirically calibrating and testing deterministic chaotic models (e.g.
Kaldor-Kalecki, Goodwin, Harrod), see Orlando et al.
Complexity economics as mainstream, but non-orthodox
Rosser "granted" Horgan "that it is hard to identify a concrete
and surprising discovery (rather than "mere metaphor") that has arisen
due to the emergence of complexity analysis" in the discussion journal
of the American Economic Association, the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Surveying economic studies based on complexity science, Rosser wrote
that the findings, rather than being surprising, confirmed
"already-observed facts." Rosser wrote that there has been "little work on empirical techniques for testing dispersed agent complexity models."
Nonetheless, Rosser wrote that "there is a strain of common perspective
that has been accumulating as the four C's of cybernetics, catastrophe,
chaos, and complexity emerged, which may now be reaching a critical
mass in terms of influencing the thinking of economists more broadly."
In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the Myth of the Noble savage refers to a stock character
who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the "noble" savage
symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive
people living in harmony with Nature. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
The intellectual politics of the Stuart Restoration (1660–1688) expanded Dryden's playwright usage of savage to denote a human wild beast and a wild man. Concerning civility and incivility, in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), the philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, said that men and women possess an innate morality, a sense of right and wrong conduct, which is based upon the intellect and the emotions, and not based upon religious doctrine.
In the philosophic debates of 17th-century Britain, the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit was the Earl of Shaftesbury's ethical response to the political philosophy of Leviathan (1651), in which Thomas Hobbes defended absolute monarchy and justified centralized government as necessary because the condition of Man in the apolitical state of nature
is a "war of all against all", for which reason the lives of men and
women are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" without the
political organization of people and resources. The European Hobbes
gave, incorrectly, as example the Native Americans as people living in the bellicose state of nature that precedes tribes and clans organizing into the societies that compose a civilization.
In 18th-century anthropology, the term noble savage then denoted nature's gentleman, an ideal man born from the sentimentalism of moral sense theory. In the 19th century, in the essay "The Noble Savage" (1853) Charles Dickens rendered the noble savage into a rhetorical oxymoron by satirizing the British romanticisation of Primitivism in philosophy and in the arts made possible by moral sentimentalism.
In many ways, the noble savage notion entails fantasies about the
non-West that cut to the core of the conversation in the social
sciences about Orientalism, colonialism and exoticism. The key question
that emerges here is whether an admiration of "the Other" as noble
undermines or reproduces the dominant hierarchy, whereby the Other is
subjugated by Western powers.
Origins
In
the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), about the Tupinambá people of Brazil,
the philosopher Michel de Montaigne introduced the noble savage
(nature's gentleman) as a stock character in the stories of Europeans' relations with the non-European Other.
16th century
The stock character of the noble savage originated from the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), about the Tupinambá people of Brazil, wherein the philosopher Michel de Montaigne presents "Nature's Gentleman", the bon sauvage counterpart to civilized Europeans in the 16th century.
The playwright John Dryden coined the term "noble savage" in the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672).
17th century
The first usage of the term noble savage in English literature occurs in John Dryden's stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards
(1672), about the troubled love of the hero Almanzor and the Moorish
beauty Almahide, in which the protagonist defends his life as a free man
by denying a prince's right to put him to death, because he is not a
subject of the prince:
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
In the poem "An Essay on Man" (1734), the poet Alexander Pope developed the noble savage into the non-European Other. (Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736)
18th century
By the 18th century, Montaigne's predecessor to the noble savage, nature's gentleman was a stock character usual to the sentimental literature
of the time, for which a type of non-European Other became a background
character for European stories about adventurous Europeans in the
strange lands beyond continental Europe. For the novels, the opera, and
the stageplays, the stock of characters included the "Virtuous Milkmaid"
and the "Servant-More-Clever-Than-the-Master" (e.g. Sancho Panza and Figaro), literary characters who personify the moral superiority of working-class people in the fictional world of the story.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
To the English intellectual Pope, the American Indian was an abstract being unlike his insular European self; thus, from the Western perspective of "An Essay on Man", Pope's metaphoric usage of poor
means "uneducated and a heathen", but also denotes a savage who is
happy with his rustic life in harmony with Nature, and who believes in deism, a form of natural religion — the idealization and devaluation
of the non-European Other derived from the mirror logic of the
Enlightenment belief that "men, everywhere and in all times, are the
same".
The Noble savage: In the royal coat of arms of Denmark, the wild men (woodwose) who support the royal house date from the early reign of the Oldenburg dynasty.
19th century
Like Dryden's noble savage term, Pope's phrase "Lo, the Poor
Indian!" was used to dehumanize the natives of North America for
European purposes, and so justified white settlers' conflicts with the
local Indians for possession of the land. In the mid-19th century, the
journalist-editor Horace Greeley
published the essay "Lo! The Poor Indian!" (1859), about the social
condition of the American Indian in the modern United States:
I have learned to appreciate better
than hitherto, and to make more allowance for the dislike, aversion,
contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white
neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but
little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince
anyone that the poetic Indian — the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow
— is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the
average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little
credit to human nature — a slave of appetite and sloth, never
emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion, save by the more
ravenous demands of another.
As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the reservations of the Delawares, Potawatamies,
etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on Earth, and saw their
owners sitting around the doors of their lodges at the height of the
planting season, and in as good, bright planting weather as sun and soil
ever made, I could not help saying: "These people must die out — there
is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue
and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous
decree."
Moreover, during the American Indian Wars
(1609–1924) for possession of the land, European white settlers
considered the Indians "an inferior breed of men" and mocked them by
using the terms "Lo" and "Mr. Lo" as disrespectful forms of address. In
the Western U.S., those terms of address also referred to East Coast
humanitarians whose noble-savage conception of the American Indian was
unlike the warrior who confronted and fought the frontiersman.
Concerning the story of the settler Thomas Alderdice, whose wife was
captured and killed by Cheyenne Indians, The Leavenworth, Kansas, Times and Conservative
newspaper said: "We wish some philanthropists, who talk about
civilizing the Indians, could have heard this unfortunate and almost
broken-hearted man tell his story. We think [that the philanthropists]
would at least have wavered a little in their [high] opinion of the Lo
family."
Cultural stereotype
The Roman Empire
In Western literature, the Roman book De origine et situ Germanorum (On the Origin and Situation of the Germans, AD 98), by the historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, introduced the anthropologic concept of the noble savage to the Western World; later a cultural stereotype who featured in the exotic-place tourism reported in the European travel literature of the 17th and the 18th centuries.
Al-Andalus
The 12th-century Andalusian novel The Living Son of the Vigilant (Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, 1160), by the polymath Ibn Tufail, explores the subject of natural theology as a means to understand the material world. The protagonist is a wild man
isolated from his society, whose trials and tribulations lead him to
knowledge of Allah by living a rustic life in harmony with Mother
Nature.
Kingdom of Spain
In the 15th century, soon after arriving to the Americas in 1492, the Europeans employed the term savage to dehumanise the indigènes (noble-savage natives) of the newly discovered "New World" as ideological justification for the European colonization of the Americas, called the Age of Discovery (1492–1800); thus with the dehumanizing stereotypes of the noble savage and the indigène, the savage and the wild man
the Europeans granted themselves the right to colonize the natives
inhabiting the islands and the continental lands of the northern, the
central, and the southern Americas.
The conquistador mistreatment of the indigenous peoples of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (1521–1821) eventually produced bad-conscience recriminations amongst the European intelligentsias for and against colonialism. As the Roman Catholic Bishop of Chiapas, the priest Bartolomé de las Casas witnessed the enslavement of the indigènes
of New Spain, yet idealized them into morally innocent noble savages
living a simple life in harmony with Mother Nature. At the Valladolid debate
(1550–1551) of the moral philosophy of enslaving the native peoples of
the Spanish colonies, Bishop de las Casas reported the noble-savage
culture of the natives, especially noting their plain-manner social etiquette and that they did not have the social custom of telling lies.
Kingdom of France
In the intellectual debates of the late 16th and 17th centuries, philosophers used the racist stereotypes of the savage and the good savage as moral reproaches of the European monarchies fighting the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). In the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne reported that the Tupinambá people
of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies, as a
matter of honour, whilst reminding the European reader that such wild man behavior was analogous to the religious barbarism of burning at the stake: "One calls ‘barbarism’ whatever he is not accustomed to." The academic Terence Cave further explains Montaigne's point of moral philosophy:
The cannibal practices are admitted
[by Montaigne] but presented as part of a complex and balanced set of
customs and beliefs which "make sense" in their own right. They are
attached to a powerfully positive morality of valor and pride, one that
would have been likely to appeal to early modern codes of honor, and
they are contrasted with modes of behavior in the France of the wars of
religion, which appear as distinctly less attractive, such as torture and barbarous methods of execution.
As philosophic reportage, "Of Cannibals" applies cultural relativism to compare the civilized European to the uncivilized noble savage. Montaigne's anthropological report about cannibalism in Brazil indicated that the Tupinambá people were neither a noble nor an exceptionally good folk,
yet neither were the Tupinambá culturally or morally inferior to his
contemporary, 16th-century European civilization. From the perspective
of Classical liberalism of Montaigne's humanist portrayal of the customs of honor of the Tupinambá people indicates Western philosophic
recognition that people are people, despite their different customs,
traditions, and codes of honor. The academic David El Kenz explicates
Montaigne's background concerning the violence of customary morality:
In his Essais ...
Montaigne discussed the first three wars of religion (1562–63; 1567–68;
1568–70) quite specifically; he had personally participated in [the
wars], on the side of the [French] royal army, in southwestern France.
The [anti-Protestant] St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
[1572] led him to retire to his lands in the Périgord region, and
remain silent on all public affairs until the 1580s. Thus, it seems that
he was traumatized by the massacre. To him, cruelty was a criterion
that differentiated the Wars of Religion [1562–1598] from previous
conflicts, which he idealized. Montaigne considered that three factors
accounted for the shift from regular war to the carnage of civil war:
popular intervention, religious demagogy, and the never-ending aspect of
the conflict. ...
He chose to depict cruelty through the image of hunting, which
fitted with the tradition of condemning hunting for its association with
blood and death, but it was still quite surprising, to the extent that
this practice was part of the aristocratic
way of life. Montaigne reviled hunting by describing it as an urban
massacre scene. In addition, the man–animal relationship allowed him to
define virtue, which he presented as the opposite of cruelty. ... [As] a sort of natural benevolence based on ... personal feelings.
Montaigne associated the [human] propensity to cruelty toward animals,
with that exercised toward men. After all, following the St.
Bartholomew's Day massacre, the invented image of Charles IX shooting
Huguenots from the Louvre Palace
window did combine the established reputation of the King as a hunter,
with a stigmatization of hunting, a cruel and perverted custom, did it
not?
Literature
In the stageplay Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1696), by Thomas Southerne, plot complications lead the protagonist Oroonoko to kill his beloved Imoinda.
The themes about the person and persona of the noble savage are the subjects of the novel Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, which is the tragic love story between Oroonoko and the beautiful Imoinda, an African king and queen respectively. At Coramantien, Ghana, the protagonist is deceived and delivered into the Atlantic slave trade (16th–19th centuries), and Oroonoko becomes a slave of plantation colonists in Surinam
(Dutch Guiana, 1667–1954). In the course of his enslavement, Oroonoko
meets the woman who narrates to the reader the life and love of Prince
Oroonoko, his enslavement, his leading a slave rebellion against the Dutch planters of Surinam, and his consequent execution by the Dutch colonialists.
Despite Behn having written the popular novel for money, Oroonoko proved to be political-protest literature against slavery, because the story, plot, and characters followed the narrative conventions of the European romance novel. In the event, the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne adapted the novel Oroonoko into the stage playOroonoko: A Tragedy (1696) that stressed the pathos
of the love story, the circumstances, and the characters, which
consequently gave political importance to the play and the novel for the
candid cultural representation of slave-powered European colonialism.
Uses of the stereotype
Romantic primitivism
In the 1st century AD, in the book Germania, Tacitus ascribed to the Germans the cultural superiority of the noble savage way of life, because Rome was too civilized, unlike the savage Germans. The art historian Erwin Panofsky explains that:
There had been, from the beginning of Classical speculation, two contrasting opinions about the natural state of man,
each of them, of course, a "Gegen-Konstruktion" to the conditions under
which it was formed. One view, termed "soft" primitivism in an
illuminating book by Lovejoy and Boas, conceives of primitive life as a
golden age of plenty, innocence, and happiness — in other words, as
civilized life purged of its vices. The other, "hard" form of
primitivism conceives of primitive life as an almost subhuman existence
full of terrible hardships and devoid of all comforts — in other words,
as civilized life stripped of its virtues.
— Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition (1936)
In the novel The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699), in the “Encounter with the Mandurians” (Chapter IX), the theologian François Fénelon presented the noble savage stock character in conversation with civilized men from Europe about possession and ownership of Nature:
On our arrival upon this coast we found there a savage race who ... lived by hunting and by the fruits which the trees spontaneously produced. These people ...
were greatly surprised and alarmed by the sight of our ships and arms
and retired to the mountains. But since our soldiers were curious to see
the country and hunt deer, they were met by some of these savage
fugitives.
The leaders of the savages accosted them thus: “We abandoned for
you, the pleasant sea-coast, so that we have nothing left, but these
almost inaccessible mountains: at least, it is just that you leave us in
peace and liberty. Go, and never forget that you owe your lives to our
feeling of humanity. Never forget that it was from a people whom you
call rude and savage that you receive this lesson in gentleness and
generosity. ... We abhor that brutality which, under the gaudy names of ambition and glory, ... sheds the blood of men who are all brothers. ...
We value health, frugality, liberty, and vigor of body and mind: the
love of virtue, the fear of the gods, a natural goodness toward our
neighbors, attachment to our friends, fidelity to all the world,
moderation in prosperity, fortitude in adversity, courage always bold to
speak the truth, and abhorrence of flattery. ...
If the offended gods so far blind you as to make you reject peace, you
will find, when it is too late, that the people who are moderate and
lovers of peace are the most formidable in war.”
— Encounter with the Mandurians, The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699)
In the 18th century, British intellectual debate about Primitivism used the Highland Scots as a local, European example of a noble savage people, as often as the American Indians were the example. The English cultural perspective scorned the ostensibly rude manners of the Highlanders, whilst admiring and idealizing the toughness of person and character of the Highland Scots; the writer Tobias Smollett described the Highlanders:
They greatly excel the Lowlanders
in all the exercises that require agility; they are incredibly
abstemious, and patient of hunger and fatigue; so steeled against the
weather, that in traveling, even when the ground is covered with snow,
they never look for a house, or any other shelter but their plaid, in
which they wrap themselves up, and go to sleep under the cope of heaven.
Such people, in quality of soldiers, must be invincible. . . .
Whatsoever therefore is consequent
to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is
consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than
what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them
withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the
fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no
Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no
commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things
as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account
of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all,
continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
— Leviathan
In the Kingdom of France, critics of the Crown and Church risked
censorship and summary imprisonment without trial, and primitivism was
political protest against the repressive imperial règimes of Louis XIV and Louis XV. In his travelogue of North America, the writer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce de Lahontan, Baron de Lahontan, who had lived with the Huron Indians (Wyandot people), ascribed deist and egalitarian politics to Adario, a Canadian Indian who played the role of noble savage for French explorers:
Adario sings the praises of Natural Religion. ... As against society, he puts forward a sort of primitive Communism, of which the certain fruits are Justice and a happy life. ...
[The Savage] looks with compassion on poor civilized man — no courage,
no strength, incapable of providing himself with food and shelter: a
degenerate, a moral cretin, a figure of fun in his blue coat, his
red hose, his black hat, his white plume and his green ribands. He
never really lives, because he is always torturing the life out of
himself to clutch at wealth and honors, which, even if he wins them,
will prove to be but glittering illusions. ...
For science and the arts are but the parents of corruption. The Savage
obeys the will of Nature, his kindly mother, therefore he is happy. It
is civilized folk who are the real barbarians.
— Paul Hazard, The European Mind
Interest in the remote peoples of
the Earth, in the unfamiliar civilizations of the East, in the untutored
races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the 18th century.
Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu
used Hurons or Persians to hold up the [looking] glass to Western
manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticize the society
of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the Abbé Raynal's History of the Two Indies,
which appeared in 1772. It is however one of the most remarkable books
of the century. Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of
facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement
against negro slavery. But it was also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. ...
Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries which
had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian
conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher
of Progress. He was unable to decide between the comparative advantages
of the savage state of nature
and the most highly cultivated society. But he observes that "the human
race is what we wish to make it", that the felicity of Man depends
entirely on the improvement of legislation, and ... his view is generally optimistic.
— J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origins and Growth
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was critical of government indifference to the Paxton Boys massacre of the Susquehannock in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in December 1763. Within weeks of the murders, he published A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County,
in which he referred to the Paxton Boys as "Christian white savages"
and called for judicial punishment of those who carried the Bible in one
hand and a hatchet in the other.
When the Paxton Boys led an armed march on Philadelphia in February 1764, with the intent of killing the MoravianLenape and Mohican who had been given shelter there, Franklin recruited associators including Quakers to defend the city and led a delegation that met with the Paxton leaders at Germantown
outside Philadelphia. The marchers dispersed after Franklin convinced
them to submit their grievances in writing to the government.
In his 1784 pamphlet Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, Franklin especially noted the racism inherent to the colonists using the word savage as a synonym for indigenous people:
"Savages" we call them, because
their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of
civility; they think the same of theirs.
Franklin praised the way of life of indigenous people, their customs
of hospitality, their councils of government, and acknowledged that
while some Europeans had foregone civilization to live like a "savage",
the opposite rarely occurred, because few indigenous people chose
"civilization" over "savagery".
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) by Allan Ramsay (1766)
Like the Earl of Shaftesbury in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), Jean-Jacques Rousseau
likewise believed that Man is innately good, and that urban
civilization, characterized by jealousy, envy, and self-consciousness,
has made men bad in character. In Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Rousseau said that in the primordial state of nature, man was a solitary creature who was not méchant (bad), but was possessed of an "innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer."
Moreover, as the philosophe of the Jacobin radicals of the French Revolution (1789–1799), ideologues accused Rousseau of claiming that the noble savage was a real type of man, despite the term not appearing in work written by Rousseau; in addressing The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1923), the academic Arthur O. Lovejoy said that:
The notion that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
was essentially a glorification of the State of Nature, and that its
influence tended to wholly or chiefly to promote “Primitivism” is one of
the most persistent historical errors.
In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau said
that the rise of humanity began a "formidable struggle for existence"
between the species man and the other animal species of Nature. That under the pressure of survival emerged le caractère spécifique de l'espèce humaine, the specific quality of character, which distinguishes man from beast, such as intelligence capable of "almost unlimited development", and the faculté de se perfectionner, the capability of perfecting himself.
Having invented tools, discovered fire, and transcended the state
of nature, Rousseau said that "it is easy to see. . . . that all our
labors are directed upon two objects only, namely, for oneself, the
commodities of life, and consideration on the part of others"; thus amour propre
(self-regard) is a "factitious feeling arising, only in society, which
leads a man to think more highly of himself than of any other."
Therefore, "it is this desire for reputation, honors, and preferment
which devours us all . . . this rage to be distinguished, that we own
what is best and worst in men — our virtues and our vices, our sciences
and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers — in short, a vast
number of evil things and a small number of good [things]"; that is the
aspect of character "which inspires men to all the evils which they
inflict upon one another."
Men become men only in a civil society based upon law, and only a
reformed system of education can make men good; the academic Lovejoy
explains that:
For Rousseau, man's good lay in
departing from his "natural" state — but not too much; "perfectability",
up to a certain point, was desirable, though beyond that point an evil.
Not its infancy but its jeunesse [youth] was the best age of the
human race. The distinction may seem to us slight enough; but in the
mid-eighteenth century it amounted to an abandonment of the stronghold
of the primitivistic
position. Nor was this the whole of the difference. As compared with
the then-conventional pictures of the savage state, Rousseau's account,
even of this third stage, is far less idyllic; and it is so because of
his fundamentally unfavorable view of human nature quâ human. ...
[Rousseau's] savages are quite unlike Dryden's Indians: "Guiltless men,
that danced away their time, / Fresh as the groves and happy as their
clime" or Mrs. Aphra Behn's natives of Surinam,
who represented an absolute idea of the first state of innocence
"before men knew how to sin." The men in Rousseau's "nascent society"
already had 'bien des querelles et des combats" [many quarrels and
fights]; l'amour propre was already manifest in them ... and slights or affronts were consequently visited with vengeances terribles.
Rousseau proposes reorganizing society with a social contract that will "draw from the very evil from which we suffer the remedy which shall cure it"; Lovejoy notes that in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau:
declares that there is a dual
process going on through history; on the one hand, an indefinite
progress in all those powers and achievements which express merely the
potency of man's intellect;
on the other hand, an increasing estrangement of men from one another,
an intensification of ill-will and mutual fear, culminating in a
monstrous epoch of universal conflict and mutual destruction. And the
chief cause of the latter process Rousseau, following Hobbes and
[Bernard] Mandeville, found, as we have seen, in that unique passion of the self-conscious animal — pride, self esteem, le besoin de se mettre au dessus des autres
[the need to put oneself above others]. A large survey of history does
not belie these generalizations, and the history of the period since
Rousseau wrote lends them a melancholy verisimilitude. Precisely the two
processes, which he described have ...
been going on upon a scale beyond all precedent: immense progress in
man's knowledge and in his powers over nature, and, at the same time, a
steady increase of rivalries, distrust, hatred and, at last, "the most
horrible state of war" ... [Moreover, Rousseau] failed to realize fully how strongly amour propre tended to assume a collective form ... in pride of race, of nationality, of class.
Charles Dickens
In 1853, in the weekly magazine Household Words, Charles Dickens published a negative review of the Indian Gallery cultural program, by the portraitist George Catlin, which then was touring England. About Catlin's oil paintings of the North American natives, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire said that "He [Catlin] has brought back alive the proud and free characters of these chiefs; both their nobility and manliness."
For European art collectors, the American portraitist George Catlin painted idealized representations of the North American noble savage. (William Fisk, 1849)The Noble Savage as stereotype: Sha-có-pay, Chief of the Ojibwa Indians of the Great Plains. (George Catlin, 1832)
Despite European idealization of the noble savage as a type of
morally superior man, in the essay “The Noble Savage” (1853), Dickens
expressed repugnance for the American Indians and their way of life,
because they were dirty and cruel and continually quarrelled among
themselves. In the satire of romanticised primitivism
Dickens showed that the painter Catlin, the Indian Gallery of portraits
and landscapes, and the white people who admire the idealized American
Indians or the bushmen of Africa are examples of the term noble savage used as a means of Othering a person into a racialist stereotype. Dickens begins by dismissing the noble savage as not being a distinct human being:
To come to the point at once, I beg
to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider
him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. . . .
I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a
savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the
Earth. . . .
The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his
life and limbs without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is
passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly,
is in his turn killed by his relations and friends the moment a grey
hair appears on his head. All the noble savage's wars with his
fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of
extermination — which is the best thing I know of him, and the most
comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral feelings of
any kind, sort, or description; and his "mission" may be summed up as
simply diabolical.
Dickens ends his cultural criticism by reiterating his argument against the romanticized persona of the noble savage:
To conclude as I began. My position
is that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage it is what
to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his
nobility, nonsense. We have no greater justification for being cruel to
the miserable object, than for being cruel to a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or
an ISAAC NEWTON; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and
higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will
be all the better when this place [Earth] knows him no more.
Theories of racialism
In 1860, the physician John Crawfurd and the anthropologist James Hunt identified the racial stereotype of the noble savage as an example of scientific racism, yet, as advocates of polygenism — that each race
is a distinct species of Man — Crawfurd and Hunt dismissed the
arguments of their opponents by accusing them of being proponents of
"Rousseau's Noble Savage". Later in his career, Crawfurd re-introduced
the noble savage term to modern anthropology and deliberately ascribed coinage of the term to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Modern perspectives
Supporters of primitivism
In
"The Prehistory of Warfare: Misled by Ethnography" (2006), the
researchers Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli challenged the idea
that the human species is innately bellicose and that warfare is an
occasional activity by a society, but is not an inherent part of human
culture. Moreover, the UNESCO's Seville Statement on Violence (1986) specifically rejects claims that the human propensity towards violence has a genetic basis.
Anarcho-primitivists, such as the philosopher John Zerzan, rely upon a strong ethical dualism between Anarcho-primitivism and civilization;
hence, "life before domestication [and] agriculture was, in fact,
largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual
equality, and health."
Zerzan's claims about the moral superiority of primitive societies are
based on a certain reading of the works of anthropologists, such as Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee, wherein the anthropologic category of primitive society is restricted to hunter-gatherer societies who have no domesticated animals or agriculture, e.g. the stable social hierarchy
of the American Indians of the north-west North America, who live from
fishing and foraging, is attributed to having domesticated dogs and the
cultivation of tobacco, that animal husbandry and agriculture equal
civilization.
In anthropology, the argument has been made that key tenets of
the noble-savage idea inform cultural investments in places seemingly
removed from the Tropics, such as the Mediterranean and specifically
Greece, during the debt crisis by European institutions (such as
documenta) and by various commentators who found Greece to be a positive
inspiration for resistance to austerity policies and the neoliberalism
of the EU
These commentators' positive embrace of the periphery (their
noble-savage ideal) is the other side of the mainstream views, also
dominant during that period, that stereotyped Greece and the South as
lazy and corrupt.
Opponents of primitivism
In War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), the archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley said that the "widespread myth" that "civilized humans have fallen from grace from a simple, primeval happiness, a peaceful golden age"
is contradicted and refuted by archeologic evidence that indicates that
violence was common practice in early human societies. That the noble savage paradigm has warped anthropological literature to political ends. Moreover, the anthropologist Roger Sandall likewise accused anthropologists of exalting the noble savage above civilized man, by way of designer tribalism, a form of romanticised primitivism that dehumanises Indigenous peoples into the cultural stereotype of the indigène peoples who live a primitive way of life demarcated and limited by tradition, which discouraged Indigenous peoples from cultural assimilation into the dominant Western culture.
In the 2003 book, Constant Battles: Why we fight written by Steven LeBlanc, a professor of archaeology at Harvard University who specializes in the American Southwest,
LeBlanc further documents the mythical notion of primitive non-violence
against foreign tribal peoples, internal strife and internecine
violence, as well as violence against animals and wildlife. In many of
these instances the homicide rate even rising to substantially higher
levels than that seen in modernity.
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