Hiram Caton

Hiram Caton (b. 1936) was Professor of Politics & History at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia until his retirement, he is an ethicist and AIDS dissident, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Biology (since 1994) , an officer of the International Society for Human Ethology , and a founding member of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. He held a National Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 1982-83. He was the inaugural Professor of Humanities at Griffith University in Brisbane, and later the Professor of Politics and History and Head of the School of Applied Ethics there.

Caton studied at the University of Chicago and received a PhD from Yale with an (earned) Doctor of Letters for his work in modern history.

Research
Caton's work has been concerned with ethics in the sciences (particularly in life sciences and medicine), the history of ideas, and on biological bases for individual, social, and political behaviour. Something of a polymath, he has published some 175 articles, across six or seven fields--medical ethics and bioethics, human ethology, modern political and economic history, anthropology (with special attention to the Freeman-Mead controversy), philosophy (with emphasis on rationalism and positivism), crowd studies, identity psychology, and problems of the integration of biological/evolutionary factors into the social sciences, especially political science.

He achieved notoriety in the mid 1990s for his book The AIDS Mirage (1994), in which he charged Donald Francis with "inventing a viral epidemic" in 1982 at the Centers for Disease Control. However, his most significant book has been The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600-1835 in which he explores the political forces surrounding the application of technology to subduing nature. Modern science, he argues, was born more from these political forces than from the ideological ones (such as the Protestant Reformation) more usually credited with it.

The book was reviewed in more than 20 professional journals. Some reviewers stressed that it set forth a new interpretation of what drove the creation of 'capitalism', partly by tapping little known historical sources. It attributes the key phase to events and leaders in France, the Netherlands, and England in the 1650-1700 period. It offers a new interpretation of the French Revolution, the American founding, of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and of the origin of the legend of wicked capitalism. It argues that Smith's conception of economics was pre-industrial (it failed to recognize that industrial technology had become a commodity) and shows the wicked capitalism legend was created in the 1820-1840 period by a clique of factory owners! When the book appeared, postmodernism had taken control of American history and it didn't fit that mold, partly because the book rejects the belief, integral to so much progress historiography, that the human species is evolving to a higher type on the savage-to-civilized ladder.

The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes, argues that Descartes based his epistemology on optics ('optical epistemology'); and that he used his metaphysics 'as a flag to cover the goods'-- a rationalist philosophy dedicated to the 'the mastery and possession of nature'.

His publications on Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoa controversy are part of the standard literature. His edited volume, The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock, remains the one comprehensive reader on the subject. Among his contributions are two studies on Freeman's well known peculiar psychology. They were featured in 2005 in a lead article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The same year, he was a consultant to the BBC for its documentary on the Freeman-Mead controversy, Tales from the Jungle. He was also interviewed, in Samoa, for the documentary.

His current work focuses on Charles Darwin. As an officer of the International Society of Human Ethology, he is working to integrate the Society into the web of activities celebrating the bicentenary of Darwin's birth (2009). Independently of that, he recently published a major reinterpretation of Darwin's contribution to the establishment of evolution. He has also devised a new interpretation of Darwin's famous illness, which was presented at the ISHE conference in Detroit, August 2006. This research is to be included in in The Darwin Legend.

Publications

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Reviews of The Politics of Progress