Part 5: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

Jonathan Swift, to whom we owe the term Yahoos

 The final installment of R.G. Collingwood on Yahoos. 

30. 7. In the foregoing paragraphs I have outlined a picture of the Yahoo herd. From what sources have I drawn it? Partly from Hobbes; partly from Swift; partly from Dr. Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War; partly from Tarde’s Les Lois de l’imitation; partly from other books. But that is not the point. There is a thing which each of these authors has described in his way and I have tried to describe in mine. What is that thing? 

30. 71. The Yahoo herd is not a fact. It is not a state of human life known to historians by interpretation of evidence as having existed at some time in the remote past, like the Beaker Civilization. It is not a state of human life discovered by anthropologists as existing in their own time among members of some outlandish tribe like the Arunta. 

30. 72. The Yahoo herd is an abstraction.In painting a picture of it we have been trying to describe what human life would be like if men were not social. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.