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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Introduction
Social scientists show a surprising lack of interest in the influence of climate on social and cultural life. Montesquieu’s claim that climate influences social life usually falls on deaf ears these days. Can anyone seriously believe that the Economic and Social Research Council would fund a research project to test the hypothesis that “in cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations”? Yet, I know that my mood is affected by weather conditions. It is difficult, however, to know exactly what the effect is and whether the same conditions are invariably associated with the same effects. My responses to The Enchantment of Sociology are a good case in point. I read it in proof in bleak midwinter; I read the published volume under a blazing Umbrian sun. The responses were quite different, but, as I shall explain, it is not easy to see why my responses to the book’s arguments varied with these different climatic conditions. In fact, the results were counter-intuitive in some respects, so perhaps this is why Montesquieu’s climatic thesis is regarded as problematic.
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2 These disparate elements are sometimes unhelpfully lumped together as “the Enlightenment project.
3 Flanagan is careful to distinguish the cultural condition of postmodernity from “postmodernism”, which he characterises as forms of culture such as ambiguity, pastiche, “irony, indeterminacy, anti‐narrative, fracture, surface readings and images in bizarre combinations” (p. 160).
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