In The Invention of Prehistory, which boasts Moyn’s blurb on the back cover, Stefanos Geroulanos carries this critique as far as it can go—and beyond. Not content to historicize and dethrone merely one contemporary prejudice or another, Geroulanos aims for nothing less than liberation from the past as such. The book offers a “genealogy” of the study of human origins that promises to do away with the “origin story” as a source of human identity—except, perhaps, the one the book itself proposes. Alongside his polemical review of the annals of prehistory, Geroulanos mounts a case for a vision of humanity that recognizes itself as the product of its own invention: “It is time to wallow a little less in origins,” he proclaims, and turn our minds toward “the humanity we wish for, the world we want, the future we hope to build.”
Geroulanos is known as an historian of Continental philosophy. In An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in Modern France (2010), he charted the French reception of German phenomenology, the eclipse of the concept of “man,” and the rise of “negative anthropology” in midcentury thinkers (like Kojève, Bataille, and Merleau-Ponty) whose work paved the way for better-known antihumanisms in the 1960s. The book established Geroulanos’s brilliance as an intellectual historian, but The Invention of Prehistory aspires to more. It marks Geroulanos’s transition from documentarian to advocate for a school of thought, from observer to executor of its critical methods.
Geroulanos’s portraits of major thinkers and movements in fields such as paleontology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, psychology, and religious studies are well-drawn and often devastating. He is right to argue that these disciplines emerged together as the authority of Christianity declined in the eighteenth century, becoming bearers of a modern faith that the origins of humanity and the meaning of human existence can be explained in naturalistic terms alone.
Beginning with the Enlightenment ideal of the noble savage and the Romantic lore of the untamed Indo-Aryan, then proceeding at a clip through stadial theories of prehistorical “deep time,” the diffusion of innumerable rival Darwinisms, the savage Id and collective unconscious, and more, Geroulanos demonstrates how speculation—and projection—have always run rife in these arenas of purportedly scientific research. Academic disagreements about the deep past and their popular representation have always tracked with the dominant ideologies of the times. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past,” he writes. “Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.” And every generation gets the Neanderthals it deserves.