Daniel Noah Moses, The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan (2009)

This is a wonderfully written, sensitive, nuanced, and persuasive account of Morgan, a 19th century pioneer of anthropology and social theory. Morgan was the only author cited by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. For me this is not just any old good book. It's a bridge back to a meaningful experience and set of friends. Daniel is a close friend, whom I got to know more than 20 years ago when were both teaching the sophomore tutorial in Social Studies at Harvard. This great books course, in which a handful of smart students and I read and discussed Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Weber, Freud, Beauvoir, Habermas, and others, is where I cut my teeth as a teacher and has shaped my approach to teaching ever since. (It's no accident that teaching the First-Year Seminar class has consistently been my favorite class to teach at BHSEC Queens). On Thursdays, Daniel, Paul Lachelier, Thomas Ponniah, and I would meet, usually at Grendel's, for nachos and drinks, to debate the world. After reading this book, I see why Daniel was the perfect teacher in Social Studies 10. Daniel paints a vivid, persuasive picture of Morgan's life and thought in an industrializing America. Born in 1818 to an affluent, educated, Calvinist family in the Finger Lakes region of NY State, which benefitted from the nearby Erie Canal, Morgan's thinking combined classical reverence for the virtues with liberal confidence in progress. Early on he became fascinated by, and drawn to, the remnants of the nearby Iroquois Nation. He befriended some of them and spent considerable time living with them, which launched his scholarly career as an ethnographer (which he pursued alongside his more traditional career as a lawyer). The Iroquois' tribal conception of property seemed utterly different than the Europeans' and convinced Morgan that kinship was both malleable and profoundly important. Eventually, he would expand his study of kinship, and its varieties, to encompass the rest of the world and changes over the long run. Morgan's mature theory, as presented in Ancient Society, was teleological - there was a single path, from simple kinship to more complex (and ultimately, the European nuclear family), along which different societies were travelling at different paces. Through this teleology, Morgan remained hopeful that the communal aspects of the Iroquois could be reconciled with the gains made by individualistic societies. Namely, while the Iroquois were fated to disappear, Morgan hoped that progress would lead full circle back to a newly invigorated community.