William Robertson Smith

William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) was successively the embattled champion of the emergent higher criticism as applied to the Old Testament, chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University. Today he is acknowledged to have been a pioneering figure in both social anthropology and the study of comparative religion, deeply influencing the thinking of J. G. Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. The first full-length biography of Robertson Smith to be published for almost a hundred years, this text makes use of hitherto unknown material preserved by the Smith family and draws upon the extensive range of correspondence between Smith and such scholars as Albrecht Ritschl, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Wellhausen, Abraham Kuenen and Theodor Noldeke. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the biography locates and defines the place of this remarkable polymath within the context of Free Church Calvinism, the Scottish Enlightenment and 19th century German Protestant theology. It highlights Smith's interest in physics and philosophy, his friendship with contemporary artists, his Oriental travels, and his involvement in the social life of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In recent years, the image of Smith as a comparative religionist has come to dominate all other perspectives and indeed tends now to overshadow his fame as an Old Testament scholar. This book seeks to redress the balance, aiming to discover the theological drive behind Smith's manifold activities.

"William Robertson Smith's influence on anthropology ranged from his relationship with John Ferguson McLennan, to advising James George Frazer to write about "Totem" and "Taboo" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he edited. This biography places a special emphasis on the notes and observations from his travels to Arabia, as well as on his influence on the representatives of the "Myth and Ritual School." With his discussion of myth and ritual, Smith influenced generations of scholars, and his insistence on the connection between the people, their God, and the land they inhabited inspired many of the concepts later developed by Émile Durkheim"--

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

William Robertson Smith (1846-94) was one of the most profound and versatile Victorian thinkers--a principal figure in the development of social anthropology and the founder of modern sociology of religion. In W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion, T. O. Beidelman, a renowned anthropologist and ethnographer, relates Smith's personality and career to the radical nature of his investigations. His study contains the only readily available account of Smith's life, and represents the only attempt to place Smith's work within the contemporary perspective of the field of social studies. Professor Beidelman discusses how Smith introduced to Britain the revolutionary interpretations in the fields of biblical and Semitic literary studies first formulated by Continental scholars, as well his original views on the interrelationship between human psychology, social structure, and history. The author also reviews the intellectual background and basic themes of Smith's work, the impact that it had upon his contemporaries, and the later influence that his theories had upon such diverse thinkers as Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert, Frazer, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and Freud. In his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, his last and most famous work, Smith sought to define the essential nature of religious behavior, and he approached the analysis of social institutions through comparative and historical studies. This is a problem that remains central to social anthropology, and the general methods by which Smith endeavored to clarify it are still employed today. Professor Beidelman indicates the ways in which Smith may still be read with profit, and he supplements his study with an extensive bibliography of works by and about this influential thinker.