The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin

I. Introduction: Catholic Enlightenment and Popular Catholicism One of greatest paradoxes of modern Catholic history is that a seemingly moribund Old Regime Church gave way to a broad-based popular Catholic revival in nineteenth century. How can this reinvigoration be accounted for? Miracles, of course, are always a possibility, but historians are required to look for more prosaic explanations. The Catholic revival has received a fair share of scholarly attention. As a multi-faceted phenomenon, scholars have focused on questions ranging from diocesan organization and clerical training, to in-depth studies on religious experience of common people. For all this interest in nineteenth-century Catholicism at local and popular level, however, it remains to be explained how Old Regime Church could accommodate its traditional distrust-when not outright repression-of popular religious practices, enabling popular Catholicism in fact to become one of key aspects of Church's political and social power. For all emphasis on nineteenth-century developments, then, it remains to be shown how Roman Catholicism in eighteenth century underwent a fundamental revision in its approach to popular religion. While it is certain that social, economic, and institutional factors had an important role in shaping of popular Catholicism, can it also be said that there were intellectual roots as well? The remainder of this article addresses this question by describing intellectual context of eighteenth-century revolution in Catholic moral theology that enabled institutional Church to align itself with practices of popular Catholicism. This essay also hopes to demonstrate that intellectual components of popular Catholicism must be understood on their own terms, and not merely reduced to social or political factors. I propose to demonstrate that new moral system outlined below overcame certain intellectual barriers that would otherwise have stood in way of Church's enthusiastic embrace of popular religious practices and attitudes.1 The central question of this essay, therefore, is how aristocratic-minded Church of Counter-Reformation adapted to social transformations of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to become, in words of Louis Châtellier, the religion of poor.2 Rather than seeing this new identity as a late reaction to changes of revolutionary era, I will suggest how its roots extend back into early eighteenth century, specifically to disputes over laxism, probabilism, and rigorism. Social historians like Châtellier have shown how, around eighteenth century, missionaries in Europe shifted their efforts away from trying to force peasants to completely abandon their so-called superstitious beliefs. Instead, missionaries embraced what they now accepted as genuine piety, and sought instead only to strengthen connections between popular piety and institutional Catholic Church. In my view, this shift in pastoral practice should be seen in concert with revolution in moral theology that-while not abandoning concept of original sin-downplayed strongly negative Augustinian condemnation of human nature and embraced a generally more optimistic view of human moral capability. The figure of Neapolitan moral theologian and founder of popular Redemptorist Congregation Alphonsus Maria di Liguori (1696-1787) stands at center of this transformation. Liguori not only authored one of most widely circulated tracts on Marian devotion-the queen of superstition to Enlightenment Christians and rational skeptics alike-the Glories of Mary. He also succeeded in elaborating a system of moral theology which postulated that in cases of doubt about existence of a moral law, human liberty was anterior to law.3 More clearly than others, Liguori overcame negative Augustinian view of human nature that had led Jansenists to follow their rigorist tendencies in moral theology. …

Reviewed by: Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron Elizabeth Kraft Sarah Eron. Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. xiii + 250. $85. Ms. Eron challenges conventional wisdom regarding eighteenth-century enthusiasm, linking it to a new kind of inspiration created by Augustan writers in response to modernity: a "practice" characterized by secularization and self-authorization rather than "a historical event," she defines enthusiasm broadly as an "ethos." Concentrating on the literary trope of invoking the muses, Ms. Eron finds in the works of Shaftesbury, Pope, Fielding, and Barbauld evidence of "worlding" the texts by rhetorically locating them within the public sphere. These writers employed invocation in order to "appeal to the social other" in the creation of communities of judgment and social exchange. Enthusiasm, as Ms. Eron acknowledges, was the source of much anxiety for eighteenth-century cultural commentators, but she finds that such anxiety produced reformation rather than rejection: "What had hitherto been seen as a religious and metaphysical phenomenon was in the early eighteenth century appropriated by poets and novelists as a means of figuring poetic inspiration." Augustan writers treated enthusiasm as an aesthetic rather than a theological concern and thereby tempered, governed, and transformed disruptive energies in the creation of a vital public sphere. Ms. Eron pursues her argument in five chapters devoted to three Augustan writers (Shaftesbury, Pope, and Fielding) and one late-eighteenth-century / Romantic writer (Barbauld). The heart of Ms. Eron's study, and the strength of her work, resides in her fine readings of Shaftesbury and Pope. The three chapters devoted to these writers (one to Shaftesbury and two, appropriately, to Pope) firmly establish the process and point of the "worlding" of literary discourse. Shaftesbury's treatment of enthusiasm and sympathetic identification in The Moralists and A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm speaks to the general template of Augustan inspiration in that it highlights the "conversational aspects of the public sphere" in its reformulation of the classical invocation to the muse. While the works take opposing stances toward the addressing of the other (The Moralists featuring an interlocutor who tempers enthusiasm with judgment and A Letter relegating that role to the audience of the author's imagination), the emphasis in both is on the "social nature of inspiration" and the "redefinition of enthusiasm" as an aesthetic experience followed (and tempered) by judicious critical mediation. For Shaftesbury, this two-part process is the antidote to blind enthusiasm (which he associates with idolatry); the public sphere of dialogic examination thus becomes the site of "unveiling" in Shaftesbury's terms, or "worlding," to employ Ms. Eron's term. In Ms. Eron's discussion of Shaftesbury (which is also germane to Pope and Fielding) she emphasizes his notion that "[s]atire, or humor, . . . [is] a cure for enthusiastic [End Page 80] disorders." Shaftesbury's address to Lord Somers (his human muse) in A Letter asserts the force and power of imagination and creation while at the same time exhibiting awareness of audience and exchange. In the Letter itself, Shaftesbury imitates "the very thing . . . [he] satirically critiques." In this manner, the way of later Augustan writers, as well, Shaftesbury encourages skepticism, self-awareness, and judgment in his reader as well as himself, forming community by creating his own muse in "the best kind of critical audience." Ms. Eron's treatment of Pope's use of invocation spans two chapters, the first devoted to the muse of The Rape of the Lock and the second primarily to Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and The Dunciad. For her, the Rape is a satire on enthusiasm, which, especially in its mock-epic substitution of sylphs for gods, reveals that in the modern world "[d]ivine inspiration no longer serves." It is the poet himself who has the power to move through his "rhetoric and agency." He depends on the reader's ability to judge and critique—unlike Belinda whose enthusiastic excesses and solipsistic desires stand in satiric support of the need for a sociability based on "meaningful language and critical responsiveness." The muses of Essay on Criticism (Walsh), Essay on Man (Bolingbroke), and The Dunciad (Swift) are invoked by Ms. Eron to further her...

The weather in the architecture: Soane, Turner and the ‘Big Smoke’

Primarily a work of interdisciplinary history, Andrew S. Curran's The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment takes readers through a mosaic of ideas and epistemologies about the perceived qualities, potential, and taxonomic place of black Africans throughout the course of the eighteenth century. Amorphous to the point of chaos, European conceptualizations of nonwhite individuals recruited a staggering array of data from fields as diverse as anatomy, natural history, theology, politics, economics, literature, and art. Although Curran openly admits that “tracking a specific genealogy within Africanist thought is a daunting task” (7), he crystallizes his narrative around the consideration of anatomy, which, he argues, penetrated into nearly every realm of Africanist imagination throughout the eighteenth century. At the center of the resultant “protean construct” (15) emerges the “textualized African” (ibid.), a profoundly complicated unit of European ethnography dependent not only on anatomical representations of Africans themselves, but also on the re-presentations of Africanist discourses during the Enlightenment era.Curran's interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw from a wide variety of genres and sources, focusing predominantly on printed material. Of paramount importance is a cluster of influential texts originating in the “high culture” of the Francophone scientific world: Buffon's Histoire naturelle, the corporate effort of the Encyclopédie, Dapper's Description de l'Afrique, academic prize essays, and the writings of the Société des amis des noirs among others. Alongside these fairly well-known sources emerge a host of now little-known, yet contemporaneously momentous, anatomical treatises: Le Cat's Traité de la couleur de la peau humaine (1765) is one such example, as is Meckel's “Recherches anatomiques, sur la nature de l'épiderme, et du réseau, qu'on appellee Malpighien” (1755). Curran draws extensively from travel writing, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and epitomes throughout the work both for support of his particular arguments as well as for general contextual purposes. Visual evidence in the form of ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic engravings enters into his discussion at times, although these elements tend to be ambient and illustrative rather than adopted as discrete elements of an art-historical approach. This reader found Curran's research to be neither encyclopedic nor myopic, but rather a quite judiciously balanced selection from a seemingly endless well of potential sources.In analyzing this broad base of historical material, Curran adopts a sophisticated framework drawing not only from critical race theory—Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness comes to mind—but also from material history and the history of science. Uncommon for works dealing with the history of race, the overarching methodology of the work can best be described as a “readers' history” approach, seeking to “[replicate] the reading practices of an imagined eighteenth-century reader” (18) by starting “where most Enlightenment-era people presumably did: with travelers' accounts and compilations” (ibid.). Subsequent chapters deviate slightly from a strictly reader-based history, as for instance in chapter 3's engaging discussion of the theatrical showing of the 1744 albino. Yet the work's overall focus is very much on the French reading public of the eighteenth century.That said, the first of Curran's many conclusions is perhaps the most obvious: Africanist discourse during the eighteenth century was far from static, and indeed seems to undermine any notion of a cogent, centralized Enlightenment perspective on race (27). More ambitiously, however, Curran draws a broader contrast between the racial thought of the pre-Enlightenment era, when “the concept of blackness came into relief against a synthesis of biblical exegeses and vague physical explanations dating from antiquity” (223) and that of Enlightenment broadly considered. Throughout the eighteenth century, Curran argues, the concept of blackness had been “dissected, handled, measured, weighed, and used as a demonstrable wedge between human categories…. Blackness had become a thing, defined less by its inverse relationship to light than by its supposed materiality” (223–24). In this observation lies one of the book's central theses, namely that anatomical materiality increasingly became the fulcrum by which moral, intellectual, or political statements about black Africans were mobilized. Anatomy ultimately usurped other spheres of Africanist discourses as the perspective on race and its concomitant issues. Although distinctly reminiscent of Voegelin's 1933 work on the internalization of blackness in the eighteenth century, Curran's investigation reaches similar conclusions from quite different starting points. Broadly stated, his analysis centers on four themes emergent from the work's constituent chapters: textuality, sameness, difference, and natural history.Chapter 1, “Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450–1750,” traces accounts of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans from the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries, demonstrating persuasively Curran's initial premise that these largely travel- or pseudo-travel-based narratives “continued to play a critical role in the overall understanding of Africa during the eighteenth century” (31). Curran addresses a large number of texts with varying degrees of depth. Ca' da Mosto, Leo Africanus, Duarte Lopes, Edward Tyson, Olfert Dapper, Jacques Savary, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Cavazzi, Abbé Prévost, and ultimately Rousseau enter into his argument throughout the course of the chapter. Although his primary goal is to establish the textual backdrop against which later racial theories emerged, Curran ensconces within his narrative many of the key ideas that emerge later in his work. Most important among these is the recurrent tension between the Plinian legacy of Africa as the source of perpetual strangeness contrasted with the “desire for a more rational view of Africa” (43) evinced by a large number of early-modern authors.Chapter 2, “Sameness and Science, 1730–1750,” largely focuses on and contextualizes Buffon's account of black Africans in the third volume of his Histoire naturelle. A central paradox that Curran identifies is the fact that as notions of the black African diversified and became more complex (such as in the consideration of caffres, albinos, and blafards,) Buffon approaches a more fundamental sameness between humanity worldwide. Of great importance in this regard is Buffon's espousal of monogenesis, the theory of human origins that posits a single shared ancestor among what we would now term “racial groups.” Of equal importance is the fact that Buffon's text implicitly “[conjures] up a particular group of sensible and sensitive people” (116), an “ideal audience” constituted by an “enlightened readership able to recognize the pitfalls of ethnographic knowledge production and transmission” (ibid.) Such a readership, Curran implies, did not exist in earlier periods. One important corollary of this “sensitive” readership was the introduction of decidedly moral valences to the question of race: the concept of blackness, more than in earlier periods, came to include the “three overlapping realms” (118) of “the moral, the intellectual, and the physical” (ibid.)Chapter 3, “The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African ‘Ethnography,’ 1750-1775,” traces the unforeseen and brutal consequences of Buffon's “degeneration-based ethnography” (116) by shifting the analysis to the “increasingly authoritative and naturalized understanding of the nègre” (118) as essentially inferior to its white counterpart. Whereas diversity engendered a concept of perceived sameness in Buffon, writers such as Voltaire and Formey interpreted diversity as evidence of just that: fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the white and black races. Such destructive perspectives generally drew upon polygenicist ideologies, which ascribe different ancestors to different racial groups. Curran introduces a series of sensitive observations, but one that particularly stands out is that by the end of the 1770s there seems to have evolved a distinct understanding of blackness as a material phenomenon, the interpretation of which projected a definite moral stance in the viewer. On the one hand, this opened up (and, at least in part, emerged from) the “zoological” perspective of proslavery politics; however, the newly moralized perspective on race also allowed for better and more concrete articulations of antislavery positions.Chapter 4, “The Natural History of Slavery, 1770–1802,” coalesces Curran's interpretations of racial thought around the most poignant of issues during the era: that of black chattel slavery. As throughout the work, Curran notes that racial theorists “rarely operated in lockstep with proslavery discourse” (169), thus—with varying degrees of forthrightness—arguing against the common scholarly tradition of analyzing natural history simply as a “subplot within the larger and all-powerful history of slavery” (168). Rather, Curran demonstrates that natural history was wielded by different authors to much different moral ends. Blumbenbach's comparative study of human anatomy, for instance, “served,” in the hands of antislavery thinkers, “to refute the possibility of essential differences between human groups” (173); the very same work equipped pro-slavery thinkers with “the notion that the physical features of the African and other races were measurable [and] constituted the basis for real categories” (ibid.) However authors decided to utilize natural history in their discussions on slavery, the primacy of natural history as an interpretative lens through which to position oneself seems to have become solidified by the early nineteenth century. Curran concludes by meditating on Enlightenment thinkers' “general blindness to the biopolitics of representation” (221), arguing that the “distressing paradox” of Enlightenment slavery was not “the inevitable outcome of an intentional European hegemony per se” (220), but rather that it emerged from the complicated relationship between disciplinary compartmentalization and the rising importance of natural history.Evaluated from the standpoint of the critical philosophy of race, The Anatomy of Blackness serves as a valuable sourcebook for a period of racial thought that remains obscure and woefully understudied. Readers inclined toward system building and broad generalizations will find themselves challenged with the disparity of ideas in contemporaneous eighteenth-century thinkers: the fact of the matter is that eighteenth-century perspectives on race were hugely variegated, not just in their methodology and structure, but also in their moral and political aims. Curran's approach, while “far from morally neutral” (223), carefully traces the contours of eighteenth-century racial thought, especially the rising ascendancy of anatomy and natural history. At times this gives the work a certain feeling of hesitancy toward analyzing the overt power structures incumbent on the objectification and materialization of the black body; but that might also be Curran's point. The black African of Curran's work is profoundly textual, representational, and, in a sense, hypothetical to begin with. The enactment of these racial theories on the ground would be a different and much more jarring story. This reader would recommend Curran's work as a challenging and rich starting point for scholars seeking to understand the complex intersections of imagination, science, and politics in the fabrication of racial thought during the eighteenth century.

Philosophical scepticism, the questioning of the adequacy of evidence to justify any view or belief, and the questioning of the criteria for deciding intellectual issues in any domain whatsoever, reached its high point in modern philosophy during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century the complete edition of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1702) appeared, raising sceptical problems about matters in philosophy, theology, science, and history, and providing what Voltaire called 'the arsenal of the Enlightenment'. Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet's Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain(Treatise on the Weakness of the Human Mind), a forceful presentation of Pyrrhonism, written at the end of the seventeenth century but published posthumously in 1723, became a sensation (Popkin 1993, p. 139). The Traité appeared twice in English, and in Italian, Latin, and German in short order. In 1718 the most scholarly edition of the writing of Sextus Empiricus was published by J. A. Fabricius, with the Greek text and Latin translations. This was soon followed by two printings of a French translation of Sextus's Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism), and David Hume carried the sceptical analysis of human reasoning to its highest point in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). A mitigated form of scepticism was developed by many French Enlightenment thinkers, culminating in the radical scepticism of Jean-Pierre Brissot and Condorcet in the last quarter of the century.

This bibliography does not aim at comprehensiveness. It is conceived as a guide to future reading and research, beyond the works mentioned in the text. The topic of the Enlightenment has never been short of major general surveys. Besides those mentioned in the text, the reader might consult still valuable examples of an older style of interpretation well represented by the lively writing of Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715 (first published in French in 1935, English translation 1963), and his European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (1946 and 1963). Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London, 1968) is valuable for its extended treatment of science in this period. Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1973) examines this period from a Marxist perspective. Radical reinterpretations of the Enlightenment are well represented by Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981). More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011) has been hotly debated. See also Anthony J. La Vopa, ‘A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment’, Historical Journal , 52 (2009), 717–38; Antoine Lilti, ‘Comment ecrit-on l'histoire intellectuelle des Lumieres?’, Annales ESC 64 (2009), 171–206. See also Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds, What's Left of the Enlightenment? A Post-Modern Question (Stanford, CA, 2001); Daniel Gordon, ed., Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York, 2001). Conflicts over the meaning of the Enlightenment may be further explored in E. Behr, ‘In Defence of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas’, German Studies Review , 2 (1988), 97–109, and in Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinow (New York, 1984). See also Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA, 1992).

Reviewed by: Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 by Alexander Lock Christopher Strangeman Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810. By Alexander Lock. [Studies in Modern British Religious History, Volume 34.] (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. 2016. Pp. x, 270. £60.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-132-0.) Alexander Lock's Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment is a study of one particular English Catholic—Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745–1810)—and how he can be seen as an example of the intersections of the Enlightenment and English Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lock, the Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, makes interesting contributions in this work to two important areas of recent historiography—the construction and manifestation of English Catholicism at a time during which the penal laws were still in place and of a distinct English national identity. It is an attractive book with a wonderful bibliography. In some ways, it serves as a complementary study to Gabriel Glickman's The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (2009); while Glickman covered the period of the perceived Jacobite threat, Lock focuses on the later eighteenth century when English Catholics were slowly making inroads into elite social and political circles. The book is divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 1 and 2) deals with Gascoigne's years abroad, through which he received a liberal education and took Grand Tours during which he met with different European heads of state. This is the most interesting and powerful section of the book, and Lock places his argument—about how the Enlightenment influenced English Catholic thought and behavior—within the work of earlier scholars, such as J. C. H. Aveling, Joseph Chinnici, and the aforementioned Glickman. However, while Lock [End Page 357] makes sure to explain what he means by liberal, he does not fully explain what he means by Enlightenment; it seems as though he equates the two—liberal and Enlightenment—which is problematic considering the demonstrated diversities of the Enlightenment. Lock also argues that Gascoigne's experiences with fellow English travelers on the Grand Tour highlight how equating an English identity with anti-Catholicism can be very misleading. This is good stuff and is an important contribution to English national identity studies, simultaneously being framed within and challenging earlier studies by scholars such as J. C. D. Clark, Linda Colley, and Colin Haydon. In the book's second section (chapter 3), Lock moves on to explaining how Gascoigne settled in England and abjured his faith publicly in order to gain a seat as an MP. According to Lock, this was the deal that Gascoigne was willing to make—becoming Anglican to make other things possible, though remaining at heart and in sympathies Catholic. This is a convincing portrait of Gascoigne. But, it begs the question: how representative was Gascoigne as an English Catholic? Locke's answer to this question is not fully convincing as he argues throughout that Gascoigne was an exceptional figure, given his upbringing and foreign education and his subsequent political, economic, and social position, but then contending that any answer to "typicality" is elusive. Nevertheless, scholars with an interest in how well biographies—or "life histories"—can serve to deepen a broader historical narrative will find Lock's argument in his introduction thought-provoking. In the last section (chapters 4 and 5), Lock provides an analysis of Gascoigne as a successful manager of his estate, whose ideas regarding estate management were shaped by the liberal education that he had received. This section should prove of interest to economic historians as Lock presents Gascoigne in contrast to the leading view of Anglican gentry who left direct management of their estates to others; in contrast, Gascoigne was forced to be different because of penal law obstacles and restrictions. Ultimately, Lock's work is a welcome addition to studies on English Catholic history and English national identity. The book's great strength is in depicting how the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was an important time...

Reviewed by: Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman Lauren Craig Stephen (bio) James A. Steintrager. Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. xviii+212pp. US$49.95 (hb); US$19.95 (pb). ISBN 0–253–34367–4. At the court of Brobdingnag, a land of (relative) giants, Gulliver describes to the King the European technology of gunpowder and its various uses in warfare. The horrified monarch is "amazed at how impotent and grovelling an Insect ... could entertain such inhuman ideas." The satire in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) is frequently multi-pronged, and if Gulliver's faith in the value of this technology is satirized, so too is the King's reaction. For, while this passage invokes inhumanity, a concept gaining currency in the early eighteenth century, it also exposes some key tensions. Why on earth should an insect, as the King deems Gulliver, not entertain inhuman ideas? The King's discourse makes plain that the inhuman is not simply the non-human, but (ironically) a particular mode of human desires and behaviours. How is it possible that some human behaviours can be deemed inhuman, and what is the logic that distinguishes proper human nature from its antithesis? James Steintrager's Cruel Delight traces the discursive formations and transformations of the notion of inhumanity through the Enlightenment period. If pity increasingly becomes the mark of the human in the eighteenth century, as Steintrager contends, then the cruelly inhuman being—the moral monster—functions as one of humanity's constitutive outsides. As such, the drive to eliminate cruelty from the sphere of humanity ensures its import: "Crucially, the centrality of pity does not so much banish cruelty as determine its necessary place as an element of the communication system of eighteenth-century ethical discourse" (xiii). That the elevation of pity as the quintessential human trait should also elevate cruelty's importance is one of several paradoxes of inhumanity that Cruel Delight identifies. And this study's greatest strength is its sophisticated considerations of paradox. "Paradoxes and problems," Steintrager writes, "far from simply ending in interpretive impasses, tend to reveal discourse at its most intriguing and most productive" (xvii). Cruel Delight makes an elegant and compelling case for the productive power of paradox, and for the importance of cruelty in producing a social subject known as human. The first of three sections, "The Inhuman," traces the rise of the notion of inhumanity in ethical philosophy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, taking as its launching point a 1699 definition of the inhuman by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Other Enlightenment figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, refine and qualify the idea of the inhuman, although Steintrager emphasizes that these thinkers share a fundamental position on inhumanity. Early Enlightenment writers tended to invoke the notion of inhumanity then deny its possibility: "Because inhumanity resists rational explanation, such monstrosity is thrust [End Page 232] into a non-existence of a rather odd kind. It does appear, or at least seems to appear, but only instantly to recede" (9). Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume all contend that disinterested cruelty—that is, cruelty for its own sake—does not exist; humans may appear to enjoy cruelty for its own sake, but never in fact do so. Apparent moral monstrosity is only apparent, the product of excessive or misdirected natural passions or an interested cruelty (such as one motivated by envy or revenge) displaced. Inhumanity remains strangely impossible in the early eighteenth century, even as it helps define the contours of the human. The second section, "Curiosity Killed the Cat," considers the inhuman in visual arts and journalism, emphasizing William Hogarth's series of engravings The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). Hogarth's narrative is "almost banal in its clarity," Steintrager writes (38): the protagonist Tom Nero begins by tormenting animals, moves on to killing a human, and ends up being dissected by the Royal College of Physicians. Cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans, and ultimately to the violent application of justice to the offender (or, the victimizing of the victimizer). Hogarth's rich background details and the parallels...

Recent works of modern French history have found it fashionable, when focusing on the eighteenth century from across the jagged shoals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, to reductively treat Francophone national identity as the dialogical interaction of two related “imagined communities.” On the one hand, as scholars such as Joseph Byrnes have unconvincingly argued, French national identity after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras has been shaped by the more secular “Cult of the Nation,” nourished by the Revolutionary ethos ofliberté,égalité, andfraternité; on the other hand, there is the identity of France as Europe's first, most Catholic people. Such stark contrasts between opposing identities, which were in fact self-consciously nourished and cultivated by nineteenth-century writers, are overdrawn, and yet the increasingly dialogical character of French national identity in the centuries after the Revolution remains relevant to the subject of eighteenth-century historiography, for the definition of French national identity or identities is intricately intertwined with the unfolding of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment identities that arose in various nuanced forms from the intellectual and religious history of France. Recently, provocative and timely work by Jonathan Israel, Dale Van Kley, and Darrin McMahon has taken up different aspects of these broader questions concerning why and when these competing visions may have sprung from the soil of eighteenth-century France. A remaining historiographical curiosity lingers as many historians of the French Revolution are quick to ascribe this dichotomy chiefly to the years after 1791 when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Oath of Allegiance made allegiance to the Revolutionary government more complicated for less Gallican, more ultramontane priests. On the other hand, historians of the French Enlightenment continue to focus on the inherently secular, scientific, and anticlerical nature of thesiècle de lumièresas though the Church were inevitably opposed to Enlightenment innovations after mid-century, preferring and harshly defending (as Jonathan Israel has recently and voluminously argued) a comfortable and cautious acceptance of Lockeanism and Newtonianism as the only forms of Enlightenment discourse considered acceptable and capable of synthesis with Catholic orthodoxy. Differing historical perspectives on the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion remain central to the identity of participants in the French Enlightenment at various points throughout the eighteenth century and after, and such questions continue to inform the definition of what it means to be “French” today. As such, the historical processes of Enlightenment identity formation continue to require examination; such processes—one of manylietmotifswithin the complex and invaluable conversations opened by the works of Israel, McMahon, and Van Kley—will be the subject of this article. For scholars remain far from a consensus on just what it meant to be Catholic and Enlightened together in the century preceding the French Revolution.

Preface Julie Park Click for larger view Figure 1 The "ancient" fortress of Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, designed by Sanderson Miller in 1751 and built in 1772. © Jonathan Lamb. All rights reserved. [End Page vi] Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Our men are the stoutest and the best, because strip them naked from the waist upwards, and give them no weapons at all but their Hands and Heels, and turn them into a room, or stage, and lock them in with the like number of other men of any nation, man for man, and they shall beat the best men you shall find in the world. —Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman In an article that appeared previously in this journal, Maximilian Novak addressed the question, "Why didn't the eighteenth century produce a War and Peace?" To answer the question is to account for why the "age of Johnson" or "the age of Enlightenment" was unable to produce a "serious and balanced depiction of the conditions [End Page vii] of war and peace in fiction."1 Novak arrives at his answers through a survey of eighteenth-century novels, from Defoe and Fielding to Smollett, as well as essays by Johnson, and poetry by Dryden and Dennis that treat war. If eighteenth-century authors embraced the challenges of verisimilitude in scenes of domestic life, or of producing universal moral truths, they could not meet the same mimetic challenges in direct confrontations with war, and with peace as a necessary adjunct of war. All attempts to do so would either be imbalanced—Defoe was "excellent on war ... but poor on peace"—or disarmed by the ironic and grotesque effects that David McNeil has delineated in the novels of Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne.2 Such aesthetic resistance perhaps resulted from the spatial locations of war throughout eighteenth-century Britain, which Novak offers as a second hypothesis in answering his original question. With the exceptions of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, most British military activity took place elsewhere, outside Britain, "abroad—in America and India, on the Continent, and at sea."3 Moreover, eighteenth-century warfare was marked by its style of containment and regulation—its "limited warfare"—effected by the establishment of a standing army. Wars were won or lost more through tactics and strategy than through battle and combat.4 Eighteenth-century writers of fiction, then, averted their eyes from war, or transfigured it through the framework of irony, because the face of war was itself displaced, geographically and commercially. Either war took place elsewhere, or resurfaced domestically as the imported commodities that issued from, and in turn supported Britain's naval supremacy and success in colonial warfare.5 Thus a paradoxical yet all too convenient equation characterized the passages of war in eighteenth-century Britain: at the same time the technologies of war became sleeker and more effective, the conditions of war moved further away from the spaces of daily life and into the vague reaches of distant lands. The inhabitants of eighteenth-century Britain did not have to confront the living faces of violence and suffering on their own ground, if they chose not to do so.6 Some eighteenth-century artifacts, if not novels, succeed in embodying the charismatic and willfully deceiving (as well as self-deceiving) fabric of war on domestic ground. The "ancient" fortress of Wimpole [End Page viii] Hall, Cambridgeshire, for instance, designed by Sanderson Miller in 1751 and built in 1772, appears, as most follies do, to reflect a romanticizing eighteenth-century view of Gothic ruins, and the acquisitive desire to reconstruct them (see figure 1). However, the very framing of the "ancient" fortalice as a "folly" or "fake" also works to reinforce the dual meanings of "fabric" as both "an edifice" and "a contrivance." On the one hand, the medieval fortalice resurfaces in eighteenth-century domestic architecture as a...

History followed the developmental logic of Kant's vision, he argued that his present 'age of enlightenment' would lead to 'an enlightened age', and Romanticism as the next period would realize rather than rejection. The technology of Enlightenment is writing; the tools are the forms that writing assumed in the eighteenth century; the procedures are the characteristic ways those forms mixed. Throughout the eighteenth century, writers maintained a Baconian caution regarding the use of system. The historicizing of Romanticism thus has been, and is, part of the process of historicizing literature, and thus a way of providing a touchstone for all of the volumes of the New Cambridge History. The period played a substantial role in drawing the other lines that have made Romanticism into a recognizable whole: generations, gender and genre. The purpose of embedding system into other forms was to allow its principles to travel into new areas of inquiry.

One of the predominant theories in political and social philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can arguably be identified in the modern natural law tradition, which was inaugurated and shaped by the influential writings of Hugo Grotius and then further developed by scholars like Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius or later by Christian Wolff. Pufendorf and Thomasius themselves fostered this picture of a linear and purposeful development from Grotius to their own writings.1 The Scottish philosophers, unlike those of any other country, were deeply influenced by this continental — mainly Dutch and German — brand of thought. In particular the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the university of Glasgow proved to play one of the key-roles in incorporating the natural law tradition. Obviously one cannot consider the natural law tradition as one homogenous block, nor can or should one consider the Scottish or French enlightenment in such a manner. The main concern of this chapter is a comparison, which will contribute to the endeavour to establish the cosmopolitan nature of European intellectual discourse in social and political theory during the eighteenth century. The case of Samuel Pufendorf will be considered as starting point, since his work played a central role in many of the contemporary debates of the early eighteenth century.2 Although most of the different discourses later used some aspects of Pufendorf s theory, it was frequently exploited with near contradictory aims and purposes.

The European Enlightenment differed from country to country and was often shaped by local conditions and grievances. In France, the French Enlightenment began to take shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak by the middle of the century. The French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was a great intellectual movement started by advanced bourgeois thinkers in France before the revolution to inspire people to free their minds from the confinement of religious theology and feudal dictatorship. Politically, most of these philosophes concerned with two issues: how to understand and improve government and how to create a society based on reason, logic and merit. The objects of criticism ranged from the established church, judicial practice, freedom of speech, art, literature and manners in general, the role of the King, and economic reform. The French Enlightenment achieved a complete negation of the feudal autocracy and fundamentally denied the existence of theocracy, monarchy and privilege. The French Enlightenment thinkers used their pens as weapons to expose the hypocrisy of religious theology, unveil the mysteries of tyranny, and accuse the evils of social inequality. The French Enlightenment also promoted the modernization of Christianity. As a result of religious tolerance, non-believers were no longer discriminated and persecuted, and people of pagan faiths in various countries began to enjoy universal human rights. The principle of disestablishment was finally established as a constitutional principle. Although it pit modern society against religious faith, which brought negative influence, the French Enlightenment had the significance as a milestone. It broke up religious regulation and feudal tyranny, reconstructed the ontological order and the legitimacy of the social and political orders, and formulated a cultural and political program of modernity.

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Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment