Response to Reviews

Let me begin my response to these very generous reviews of my recent book, Paleolithic Politics, with the remarks by Tilo Schabert. Knowledge, he said, is precarious, though scholarship aims to make knowledge lastingly available. Moreover, the “production” of knowledge is accompanied by ambition: one always wants one’s work to be accepted as well as to be true. Often, however, acceptance hinges upon following the right method or confirming accepted conventions and judgements. Schabert then drew attention to what he called “the arrogance of scholars” expressed within various schools of thought, which nevertheless succeed one another, usually in a cloud of recrimination and sharp criticism of how one’s predecessors could have been so foolish. This is as true for the study of Paleolithic art as it is of the study of democratic government, and it is one of the themes I emphasized in Paleolithic Politics, using the succession of French schools, from the Abbe Breuil to Jean Clottes as exemplars, and notwithstanding their otherwise remarkable scientific achievements. Specifically, the insights of Alexander Marshack, which began with his reflections on a problem he initially encountered as part of a very conventional and journalistic research project, happened to be recognized by a major archaeological scholar, Hallam Movius Jr., director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. In addition, Movius happened to be open-minded with respect to Marshack’s enthusiasm. Marshack was excited to realize that the well-known cave and mobile art of the Upper Paleolithic was symbolic, not just decorative, and that it conveyed a meaning that could be decoded and reconstituted by contemporaries typically using the discursive language of archaeological science. With Movius’ help he did so. Marshack’s work was, and remains, controversial. Moreover, because it was based on a finely developed connoisseurship that took many years to perfect, it has scarcely been replicated. To the impoverishment of archaeology, it has been turned into something of a period piece. A second scholar, who was even more of an “outsider” with respect to any archaeological school, was Marie König. She was less pugnacious than Marshack, but her insights (to my mind) were more profound. In addition, she had much greater difficulties receiving a hearing from the established scholars, being both female and what the Germans called a “private scholar,” Privatgelehrtin, which is not a term of praise. Her interpretations were based on her recognition that similar symbols were used by human beings remote from one another in time and space. She concluded that they expressed similar and perhaps equivalent experiences of cosmic order. König saw that the otherwise enigmatic petroglyphs visible today in the caves and rock shelters of the Fontainebleau Forest (and elsewhere) were expressions of that order. Even more audaciously, she argued that Paleolithic symbols were transmitted into Roman times through the unexpected vehicle of Celtic numismatics. König had been working on her account of Paleolithic symbolism for several years prior to delivering a paper at a scholarly conference in Rome in 1968. Eric Voegelin was in the audience. He approached her, excited about what he had heard, and proposed a collaboration. Looked at from the perspective of Voegelinian political science, Paleolithic Politics aims to apply Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness (which I discussed in Consciousness and Politics) to “materials” that he was never able to consider in any detail. Readers of Voegelin’s Order and History will be familiar with his concept of “cosmological empire” to describe Mesopotamian and Egyptian political organizations. With König’s insights he realized that cosmological order could be distinguished from and imperial political “substructure” that sustained the meaning of early imperial politics. To simplify somewhat: the fact that cave images and mobilary art exist is significant because it seems evident that humans (including Neandertals) existed for ages in the absence of art or, if they produced art, it was temporary because it was inscribed on perishable objects such as animal hides or wood. That is, when early humans created lasting art, art that could be contemplated by generations of adepts, they undertook an innovation, a creative action that expressed a new meaning. In this context, I found Voegelin’s concept, “the primary