Frank Palmeri sees in the conjectural history practiced by Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau and Hume a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents as evidence, speculative thought shaped the development of anthropology in the 1860s, the political economy of Malthus, Martineau, Mill, and Marx, and the first two generations of sociology in Comte, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim. Conjectural histories, with their surprising ambivalence toward modernity, influenced Darwin's Descent of Man and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, as well as the novels of Walter Scott, George Eliot, and H.G. Wells. Palmeri concludes his investigation with the return of conjectural thought in recent histories of early religion, political organization, and Neolithic society.

Frank Palmeri is Professor of English with courtesy appointments in Philosophy and Classics at the University of Miami. In 2016, Professor Palmeri was appointed a Cooper Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences. He has published on comparative literary studies of the 18th and 19th centuries; satire in narrative and graphic forms; conjectural history and the history of social thought; animal studies; and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. In addition to being comparative (primarily involving British, French, German, and American), his work is interdisciplinary—calling on the critical methods of history, visual studies, and philosophy. He has published two other authored books—Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, Pynchon (University of Texas, 1990), and Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms 1665-1815 (University of Delaware, 2003). His current project is Satire and the Public Sphere: Caricature, Novels, and Politics in England, 1790-1910.