:Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman

Abstract

This is an interesting and provocative book. James A. Steintrager, a scholar of comparative literature, attempts to define what he calls “moral monstrosity” in the eighteenth century, drawing from a multitude of examples in art, science, and literature. Eighteenth-century moral philosophy, by defining the human as naturally good and benevolent, left no room, he argues, for evil or cruel behavior. Cruelty was inhuman, and those who practiced it—or worse, enjoyed it—were “moral monsters,” outside humanity. This created a paradox in which “inhuman” behavior had somehow to be normalized. Steintrager begins the book with a competent survey of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, emphasizing the Scottish moralists but with brief forays into French and German thought. Pity, he concludes, is the basis of moral behavior in these philosophers. Steintrager engages with various eighteenth-century critiques of Aristotle's theory of tragedy (although he overlooks that of Anne Dacier) and concludes that tragedy leads to pleasure insofar as it engages our pity, but he omits the cathartic function of tragedy.