Abstract
Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the eighteenth century's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” It suggests that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment, and obscures the movement's contributions to one of the Enlightenment's most important, and in recent times, contentious norms—the ideal of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the study contends that sentimental judgment complicates long-standing interpretations of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability. As such, sentimental literature and philosophy implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.
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