Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau by John Farrell

Abstract

185 Cicero’s treatise On Duties. The Roman philosopher was the first to link conversation to civic harmony and tolerance, and provide a bulwark against violence and internecine conflict. Sparta was the ‘‘anti-conversation city-state’’; talkers were regarded as bad soldiers. Mr. Miller skips the Middle Ages for Castiglione and Erasmus, and later, the pantheon of the ‘‘conversible world’’ (David Hume’s phrase): Addison, Swift, Johnson , Boswell, Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Shaftesbury, Fielding , Gibbon, Franklin. For readers of the Scriblerian, his long chapter on the English eighteenth century is at the heart of his advocacy: it is in this period that coffeehouse culture, the emergence of clubs, the salon, politeness, the Enlightenment, and women’s education made conversation the supreme value of this society. The decline of religious zeal encouraged easygoing conversation , raillery, wit, skepticism, and rationality . Habermas’s theorizing about the new liberty in the public sphere is mentioned, but Mr. Miller scants postmodern theory. Lady Mary surprisingly commands more attention than such clubbable figures as Boswell and Sir Joshua Reynolds ; she represents the importance of women in the flowering of conversation. A traveler who met her in her late years noted: ‘‘her letters were, like her conversation ; natural, lively, gay; full of reason, wit and interest.’’ These are the virtues that Hume, the likely avatar of this new style, found at the polite round table where issues of the day were broached. What caused the decline of conversation ? Mr. Miller does not look to the changing social conditions or the emerging crass middle class, but to the shifting intellectual and artistic tastes— the new focus on romantic isolation (Rousseau and Wordsworth), the lack of interest in urban pleasures, the cult of ‘‘happy poverty’’ in the work of Gray (not clubbable), and a neurasthenic sensibility taking over England’s educated. Things have, however, not all fallen apart; Mr. Miller notes the emergence of 100 Socrates Cafés in America, yet he grumbles that the ‘‘prospects for conversation are not good.’’ Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University JOHN FARRELL. Paranoia and Modernity : Cervantes to Rousseau. Ithaca and London: Cornell, 2006. Pp. xii ⫹ 341. $35. In this wide-ranging and provocative work, Mr. Farrell, tracing the genesis in the early modern period of what he takes to be a distinctive pathology of modern culture, argues that a paranoid condition arises from a loss of confidence in the efficacy of individual agency . Luther and Don Quixote serve as exemplary figures in this development, and Mr. Farrell also devotes substantial attention to Descartes, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and Pascal before concluding with chapters on Samuel Butler , Locke, Hume, Smith, and especially Swift and Rousseau. Mr. Farrell’s close and largely persuasive readings of the two Discourses, Julie , Emile, Social Contract, Confessions, and Reveries of a Solitary Walker establish that Rousseau constructs a system of understanding in which individuals do not bear responsibility for injustices of the social system, and that according to Rousseau, society is corrupting in its effects on nature. In seeking to counteract the influences of society, however, 186 Rousseau establishes his own fantasies of surveillance and control. Of course, it helps Mr. Farrell’s argument that, unlike most of the other authors considered here, Rousseau became literally paranoid by the time he was writing his last works. Still, as Mr. Farrell points out, Rousseau exerted an influence that was not just the result of individual psychology ; his views of society and nature were vastly influential because he spoke for or to millions on these and related topics. If the argument were confined to Rousseau, there would be little to differ from and much to agree with. However, two areas of disagreement may arise. The first concerns the scope of the crucial term, ‘‘paranoia,’’ which Mr. Farrell employs with a great deal of latitude. At various times, it means ‘‘seeing oneself controlled by hidden forces from without ,’’ or being extremely ‘‘suspicious of society,’’ excessively ‘‘skeptical of individual agency,’’ or ‘‘unwilling to assign individual responsibility.’’ But such phrases are dubious criteria for understanding a thinker or a system of thought to be paranoid, even in an extended or metaphorical sense. What Mr. Farrell understands to be paranoia often proves to be skepticism...