Westermarck, Edward (1862–1939)

Edward Westermarck, the Swedo-Finnish moral philosopher and comparative sociologist who held the first chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics (from 1907), is generally known for two things that have been normally kept apart but are increasingly brought together. First, he provided theoretical arguments for moral relativism, which spurred greater open-mindedness toward the customs of nonWestern cultures, as well as anticipated logical positivist analyses of ethics as the expression of emotion toward people and objects. Second, he contributed empirical arguments against the uniqueness of the incest taboo to human beings, which scholars consider as evidence for the continuity of social norms with the hidden logic of evolutionary fitness.

Until recently, the disparate nature of these two contributions left the impression that Westermarck, an irreverent personality, was an enlightened but fundamentally unsystematic thinker. His popular and colorful History of Human Marriage is as remembered as his increasingly theoretical and polemical works. On one hand, after the title of one of his last books, Ethical Relativity, Westermarck became the standard-bearer for the “relativist,” the infinitely permissive social scientist, as stereotyped in philosophical arguments. On the other hand, Westermarck is also one of the few classical social scientists that sociobiologist E. O. Wilson considered a precursor of sociobiology. What unites these two [Page 1580]legacies is Westermarck's assumption—now a dogma of the neo-Darwinian synthesis—that there are no essential differences among animal species. Whatever differences one perceives among, say, the higher apes, simply reflect different selection pressures, which in the case of humans appear as cultural relativity.

Westermarck regarded attempts to distinguish sharply the human from the biological sciences as a religious vestige. He tied the very search for an “essence of humanity” to Christianity's normative stricture that served as an ideological smokescreen for centuries of cross-cultural abuse. Westermarck denied normative universalism less to uphold the integrity of “local knowledge” than to erase any ontological distinction between humans and animals, the final stage in the demystification of humanity's theologically inspired species pretensions.

For Westermarck, the so-called incest taboo turned out to be the last stand. Those who defended human uniqueness fixated on the incest taboo as the primal moment when human beings took systematic efforts to resist and transcend their animal nature, seen negatively as a “genetic burden.” The wide range of theorists who held this position—including Edward Tylor (1832–1917), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—averred to a secular version of Christianity as the self-conscious expression of humanity's uniquely “civilized” status. This in turn demanded active maintenance because it was under constant threat of recidivism. In contrast, Westermarck explained incest avoidance in terms of the desexualization of domestic life brought on by prolonged physical proximity, a phenomenon he observed across a wide range of primate species without any special need for legal sanctions—a variation on “familiarity breeds contempt.”