This slim volume impresses for its quality and scope. In eight chapters and less than 300 pages, it surveys a vast archive of eighteenth-century Anglophone (mainly British) reflections on epistemology, morality, science, law, religion, historiography, political economy, aesthetics, and sensibility. Its historical range is loosely defined as the long eighteenth century (1660–1832), with a major stress on the Enlightenment. “The unifying assumption of the contributors,” explains Frans De Bruyn, “is that a grasp of leading ideas, intellectual debates, and modes of thought in eighteenth-century Britain is foundational to an understanding of the period’s history, politics, philosophy, art, literature, and culture.” The chapters seek a balance between a presentist approach, emphasizing intellectual threads that remain of interest today, and a contextualist one, focusing on how eighteenth-century actors understood themselves within the coordinates of their own time and culture. While some chapters achieve this balance better than others, the collection as a whole practices the methods of intellectual history while avoiding a well-known pitfall of a traditional history of ideas: that of treating thought as the disembodied product of previous thinking. It prizes the continued relevance of eighteenth-century thought while also attending to its embeddedness in material contexts.Readers may be initially struck by the unusual line-up of contributors. With the exception of Robert Sparling, from Political Studies, all the contributors are from English (also my home discipline). There are no historians of philosophy or intellectual historians, as is usually the case in this genre. The collection accordingly bears witness, in its thoroughness and depth of insight, to the interdisciplinary character of modern English studies. The chapters not only display confident mastery of their primary material but also introduce readers to secondary work by prominent scholars in each field—J. G. A. Pocock, Karen O’Brien, Jerome Schneewind, Knud Haakonssen, or Ann Thomson among others—providing accounts that cross disciplinary boundaries in both their objects of study and their interpretive approaches.In a long opening chapter on “Philosophical Thought,” De Bruyn reminds us that eighteenth-century philosophy was a less technical and much broader endeavor than its modern academic equivalent, given its sustained investment in theological, historical, and literary forms of inquiry that now pertain to other disciplines; but as such topics receive coverage in later chapters, De Bruyn focuses on two mainstream concerns of modern philosophy: epistemology and moral theory. In tackling the former, he tells a familiar story from an illuminating angle, guiding us through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid, while lucidly discussing the distinction between rationalism and empiricism, the emergence of probabilism, theories of language, materialism and idealism, theories of perception, and accounts of the self. Except for claiming that Locke viewed secondary qualities as mental—for Locke, it is ideas of secondary qualities that are mental; secondary qualities are powers that inhere in objects—De Bruyn’s account is accurate, learned, and elegant. I particularly appreciate his nuanced account of Hume. Informed by the work of David Fate Norton, he portrays Hume not as an uncompromising radical skeptic, but as “a postsceptical philosopher” who used “sceptical arguments constructively, as a tool to clear away views that do not build rigorously on experience and observation.” His survey of eighteenth-century ethics is equally excellent. Following Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy (1998), he shows how eighteenth-century moral philosophy slowly shifted from morality as obedience toward a more autonomous ethics, ranging in the process from divine-command theory to Hobbes and Mandeville, and from moral rationalism to moral-sense ethics.Subsequent chapters, like Sara Landreth’s on science, Ruth Mack’s on historical thought, and Julie Murray’s on sensibility, live up to the very high bar set by De Bruyn. Landreth uses her lexicon conscientiously, reminding us to be cautious about labels like “the Scientific Revolution” and noting that there was no strict separation between rationalists and empiricists, or between defenders of mechanism, vitalism, and materialism in the period; she nonetheless stresses that such categories are heuristically useful and puts them to good service in surveying debates on gravity, theories of matter and spirit, the history of institutions like the Royal Society and the Lunar Society, and the rise of chemistry, botany, and geology as specialized scientific fields. Mack explores several concomitant shifts in eighteenth-century conceptions of history, from a view of the past as a repository of timeless lessons to the sense of historical differences that characterizes historicism; from a model of causation centered on the actions of great men to an increasingly complex understanding of historical causes; from exemplar history (or “moral philosophy taught through examples”) to “philosophical history” as practiced by Hume and Adam Ferguson; and from the antagonism between history and antiquarianism to their reconciliation in the work of Gibbon. Mack offers an appreciative assessment of the stadial model of history, acknowledging its Whiggism and discriminatory legacy, but highlighting as well “its lasting positive contributions to historiography, sociology, and anthropology.” Finally, Murray’s wide-ranging discussion of sympathy covers its philosophical origins, its diffusion through sentimental fiction and painting, its complex evolving reception by critics and supporters, and its imbrication with medical science and women’s mental health. From an abundance of insightful observations, we might cite the following summary of sensibility’s consequences: “If men of feeling were the new standard bearers of emotion in public life,” Murray writes, “Women were left to pick over the remains of a narrower affective range and were as a result pushed further along the nervous spectrum towards the extremes associated with illnesses such as hysteria.”Nancy E. Johnson, Roger Lund, and Philip Smallwood write, respectively, on political and legal thought, religious thought, and literary and aesthetic theory. Here, again, there is much on offer, although each of these chapters could have been stronger in my view. Johnson reveals a shift in the status of the juridical figure in both political and legal discourse, from “the ‘subject’ in a monarchy” to “the ‘citizen’ in a contract.” In order to do so, she guides us twice from Hobbes and Locke to Burke and Bentham, once to address political theory and again to cover theories of natural law—an approach resulting in redundancies that a single streamlined narrative could have avoided. A leaner approach might also have allowed room for important figures who were left out of this volume, most notably William Godwin. Lund’s learned account of Anglican establishmentarianism is unimpeachable as a piece of religious historiography, especially in its discussion of Dissenters’ fraught attitude toward the idea of a unified church; but it says more about events (the Clarendon Code, the Bangorian controversy, the rise of Methodism) than about religious thought itself. In addition, the focus on defenses and critiques of the established church means that important dimensions of eighteenth-century religious thinking—from debates on the historicity of the Bible to the Boyle lectures and the British reception of world religions—do not receive substantive coverage. (For some of this, one may turn to Lund’s excellent collection The Margins of Orthodoxy [1995].) Smallwood’s section, finally, would have benefited from a more organic narrative and a more substantive account of the outlooks under survey. Fragmentary and discontinuous, the chapter often alludes to topics in theories of aesthetics without spelling out the philosophical claims in question. We learn that Burke, for example, “makes an enthusiastic case for the awesome, prostrating effects of terror, extension, vastness, obscurity, darkness, and horror as sublime,” but we don’t learn what Burke’s case was. In his better moments, Smallwood reveals how aesthetics eventually emerged as a discipline to be pursued for its own sake rather than as a form of reflection ancillary and secondary to the arts.If I were to choose my favorite section of this book, it would probably be Robert Sparling’s chapter on social and economic thought. Like Lund, Sparling handles this broad topic through circumscribed case studies; but his choices—Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, the ideologies behind the South Sea Bubble, Adam Ferguson’s critique of the division of labor, and Adam Smith’s attack on monopolies—cover vast swathes of the relevant conceptual territory, from the moral core of eighteenth-century political economy to mercantilism, the national debt, critiques of corruption, physiocracy, the clash between agrarian and commercial ideologies, the debate on luxury, and the cultural alienation following from new labor regimes. Sparling is especially perceptive when tackling Mandeville and Adam Smith. He proposes, compellingly, that Mandeville’s appropriation of Hobbes serves not only to mock ascetic morality; in highlighting the collective benefits stemming from individual vices, Mandeville provides “a justification for commercial civilization and the small-souled people who inhabit it.” Smith, in turn, receives the nuanced treatment that modern economists often fail to accord him. A critic of societies that prioritize profit over rent and wages, Smith opposes mercantilism not only for the intrusion of government into markets, but as “a series of sophistries pretending that the interests of a particular group are the interests of the whole”—an ideology that allows monopolists to “seek special state protections that benefit them at the expense of the wider public.” We are a far cry from Smith the defender of entrepreneurialism and the free market.This Cambridge Companion, in short, is a welcome new resource on several relevant subfields in eighteenth-century British thought. It comes with certain noticeable lacunas. Considering the increasingly strong investment of eighteenth-century studies in the Atlantic world and the discourses surrounding British imperialism, it is strange not to find here a chapter on eighteenth-century racial theories and their role in debates over slavery. Feminist thinking receives passing treatment, although it merited its own chapter. (Mary Wollstonecraft receives several mentions, but there is only one reference to the Bluestockings and none to Mary Astell.) The chapters we do get are written in an accessible register that makes them ideal for use in graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Besides, scholars venturing into a new area of eighteenth-century thought will find here convenient points of entry. I myself learned more about the South Sea Bubble from Sparling’s concise discussion than from economic histories that presuppose that knowledge. Finally, this volume takes imaginative literature seriously as an arena of thought: Margaret Cavendish, Henry Fielding, Hannah More, and Sophia Lee are only a few of the authors who feature here as using fiction and poetry to delve into the century’s most pressing intellectual concerns.