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Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2015, pp.

239-245 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2015.0002

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 Reviews
Edited by Carolyn C. Guile

Vivasvan Soni, Northwestern University

A New Passion for Enlightenment

John Bender, Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2012). Pp. xiii + 294. $25.95.

Hina Nazar, Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of

Sensibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Pp. x + 182. $45.00.

John C. O’Neal, The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlighten-

ment (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). Pp. 237. $75.00.

Wolfram Schmidgen, Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early

Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Pp. xvi
+ 240. $59.95.

For better or for worse, literary scholars of the British eighteenth century
have largely made do without the overarching conceptual category of “enlighten-
ment” when trying to make sense of the distinctiveness of literature in this period.
Whereas, for example, it would be presumptuous to attempt to understand Ger-
man Romanticism without an intimate knowledge of the innovations and short-
comings of German Idealism, eighteenth-century British literature has tended to
resist analysis in terms of a guiding intellectual project like “enlightenment.” Even
when scholars make reference to Locke, Hume, or Adam Smith, the focus tends
to be on particular aspects of their theories rather than on a systematic outlook.
The reasons we might speculatively assign for this resistance are manifold: the
absence of anything so straightforward and unitary as a project of enlightenment
in the British context (and, indeed, the question of whether the category is rel-
evant to British philosophy in the eighteenth century); the difficulty of mapping
the large-scale literary trends of the period (satire, Augustan literature, the novel,
neoclassical aesthetics) onto corresponding philosophical agendas; the interpre-

© 2015 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 48, no. 2 (2015) Pp. 239–48.
240 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 48, No. 2

tive assumption that literary production should not be shaped by philosophical

programs; the reluctance to assign agency to ideas; the question of how to isolate
the influence of a philosophical tradition whose “common sense” orientation
amounts to a kind of antiphilosophy. However, there is indubitable evidence that
this trend has been dramatically reversed over the past few years. A new crop of
conceptually ambitious, theoretically inventive, and historically grounded books
by scholars of British literature (including three of those reviewed here) explicitly
and polemically takes up Enlightenment as an indispensable rubric, in order both
to frame the literature of the period in new ways and to argue for the continuing
vitality of Enlightenment thought in the present. This is an exciting development
that promises to bring a new degree of philosophical seriousness to the study of
the period’s literature.
The impetus behind these studies is not only to teach us to see unnoticed
alliances between eighteenth-century philosophy and literature (which they do), but
also to counter a legacy of twentieth-century critical thought, going back at least to
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Michel Foucault’s work
on the emergence of disciplinary society, which sought to forge an indissoluble link
between Enlightenment thinking and the calamities of modernity: instrumental rea-
son, rationalization, the exploitation of nature, disciplinarity. Wolfram Schmidgen
explains the context in which a project to recuperate the conceptual legacy of the
Enlightenment becomes necessary: “Exquisite Mixture has told a positive story. . . .
This book is related to a number of studies that have, over the past ten years or so,
begun to redeem the enlightenment from the withering critiques it suffered in the
second half of the twentieth century, especially in the wake of Max Horkheimer’s
and Theodor Adorno’s absorbingly bleak Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). . . .
As little as twenty-five years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine a broad
following for such a redemptive effort” (148; see also Bender, 8–11; Nazar, 1–10).
Such redemptive work is imperative, and is in fact implied in any properly dialectical
conception of Enlightenment. But we must be on our guard lest legitimate enthusi-
asm blunt our critical attention to the conceptual impoverishment also at work in the
period. As more studies make apparent the alliance of today’s (inadequate) critical
paradigms with those of the eighteenth century they purport to critique, the need
to delve further back in intellectual history to find the necessary critical resources
becomes increasingly evident. What such studies reveal, whether they intend to or
not, is that contemporary critical discourses share broad affinities with those of the
eighteenth century, even when they are developed as critiques of Enlightenment,
making us realize that we are co-implicated with the eighteenth century in a long
history of modernity whose conceptual webs we cannot yet escape.
Despite their similar purposes, the books considered here approach the
recuperation of Enlightenment in importantly different ways. While Hina Nazar and
John Bender aim to show that concepts associated negatively with the Enlighten-
ment function in more productive and positive ways than we have naively assumed
(aspects of scientific method in Bender’s case; autonomy and judgment in Nazar’s),
Wolfram Schmidgen and John C. O’Neal take concepts that we would be likely to
associate with the antithesis of Enlightenment (mixture and impurity in Schmidgen;
confusion in O’Neal) and show them to be everywhere at work in Enlightenment
thought. These studies also exhibit a methodological eclecticism that is refreshing
in its range: from conventional methods of literary analysis and intellectual history,
to fine-grained archival work, innovative theoretical constructions, and new digital
methods that enable unanticipated textual constellations to emerge. Because of their
 Reviews 241

differences in method and argument, it will be best to consider each of these books
on its own terms, before thinking further about their convergences.
I will begin with Schmidgen, whose book covers material that is chrono-
logically the earliest of the four. Exquisite Mixture is substantially a book about
Boyle and Locke, and the novel ways in which these two thinkers made the case,
against a prior Aristotelian tradition, that mixing substances could generate unan-
ticipated new phenomena rather than a substance whose properties were a mean
between those of the original components. In Schmidgen’s hands, what could be a
drily epistemological discussion becomes a key to unlocking some of the period’s
characteristic political innovations. In order to explain what makes these surpris-
ing ideas possible and politically urgent, Exquisite Mixture excavates in rich and
compelling detail a set of little-known arguments about the agency of mixture in
seventeenth-century science, politics, and theology. Properly speaking, then, this
is not a book about the eighteenth century, but it should be essential reading for
eighteenth-century scholars, because Schmidgen means to explain the ongoing
conceptual and cultural force of mixture into the eighteenth century and beyond.
To this end, the book opens with politically charged and epistemically revealing
arguments about the nature of British identity in the early decades of the eighteenth
century, showing that alongside the writers who sought the pure Saxon roots
of Britishness were many who insisted that the strength and distinctiveness of the
British people lay in the very multiplicity and impurity of their origins. Schmidgen
rightly recognizes that the mere existence of such arguments in the early eighteenth
century requires explanation, given our usual understanding about when diverse,
liberal, multicultural modern polities develop, but he proposes to account for it in an
unexpected way. Prejudices about the impurity and derivative character of mixture
run deep in the Western philosophical tradition, all the way back to Aristotle; it is
only once these fundamental epistemic objections have been unseated, in the con-
text of new scientific experimentation on chemical mixtures, that the valorization
of mixture can be transferred to the political domain, where it influences debates
about mixed government, the agency of the multitude, and the political viability
of the Duke of Monmouth. What is so thrilling about Schmidgen’s study is the
careful, rigorous, and persuasive ways in which he draws connections between
epistemological innovations in seventeenth-century science and new political argu-
ments that assert both the capacity of large numbers of people to act in politically
generative ways and the value of diverse, tolerant mixed societies. If Schmidgen is
right, then we will have to revise significantly our usual understanding of what is
at stake in seventeenth-century political thought: “The dominant strain of atomism
in seventeenth-century England, I contend, does not provide philosophical backing
for the atomist individual, cut off from the larger social whole . . . The politics of
atomism are not the politics of liberalism. Rather the strain of atomism that I fol-
low here is concerned with collective ideas of agency and identity, with a concept
of the body in which the many and the one could not be separated . . .” (64).
For all the wealth of archival detail that Schmidgen marshals in his study,
one cannot but marvel at the elegant lines of his argument visible throughout. The
book is a pleasure to read. If there are concerns to be raised, they lie at a different
level. It is not simply that the political vision offered by the text is a different version
of a modern liberal polity: multicultural, tolerant, and diverse instead of atomized
and alienated. In fact, Schmidgen himself observes the disturbing underside of such
ideologies: that they can underwrite a virulent nationalism and, paradoxically, an
expansionist and “inclusive” imperialism (131, 150). Rather, the question I would
242 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 48, No. 2

pose is whether a politics of mixture, without any reference to an Aristotelian ends-

oriented thinking, is sufficient to restore a sense of collective agency, or whether it
foreshadows the dialectical (and ultimately market-based) social theory so prevalent
in the eighteenth century—from Mandeville and Shaftesbury to Kant, Schiller, and
Hegel—in which agency is outsourced to an anonymous social process (history,
the market, the invisible hand), whose mixtures produce unpredictable, emergent,
and providential outcomes that exceed the machinations of mere human agents.
The affinities between these theoretical formations are too great to be overlooked.
If this major strand of eighteenth-century social and political thought is indebted
to seventeenth-century theories of mixture, it would confirm Schmidgen’s claim
that these theoretical innovations remain effective in the eighteenth century, but it
would also suggest that materialist accounts threaten rather than expand our sense
of agency. I find myself hoping that Schmidgen will extend his story further into
the eighteenth century in his future scholarly work, with these questions in mind.
John C. O’Neal’s Progressive Poetics is the perfect companion piece to
Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture, because although his book is concerned with the
French rather than the British tradition and his terms are slightly different (confu-
sion rather than mixture), he does effectively extend Schmidgen’s argument into
the eighteenth century, lending further credence to the latter’s claims that mixture
retains its force well into the Enlightenment. Drawing mostly on well-known writers
from the period (Marivaux, Crébillon, Voltaire, Diderot, Sade), O’Neal argues that
even though one might expect clarity and careful categorization to be prominent
features of Enlightenment thought, confusion is both indispensable and politically
progressive in much of the writing of this period. For O’Neal, the Enlightenment’s
refusal of dogmatism, its attention to complexity and contingency, are impossible
without a certain comfort with confusion and a desire not to rush to judgment.
Like Schmidgen, O’Neal also recognizes that there can be a dialectical underside
to the affirmation of confusion—most evident in the Marquis de Sade, who pushes
Enlightenment confusion to the limit, where its politics become indistinguishable
from an abusive play of power. But even beyond the political ambiguity of confusion
acknowledged by O’Neal, deep questions remain. For one thing, Progressive Poetics
often focuses on the literary aspects of confusion: the confusion of voice, character,
social class, tone, feeling (30); the unreliability and fragmentation of narrative au-
thority (65–67); the interpolation of stories (75–80); the psychological confusion
of characters (63); and dialogism (81). But given how widely used these methods
are in literary analysis across periods, one must wonder to what extent they can
capture the specificity of Enlightenment thought. Moreover, whereas Schmidgen’s
seventeenth-century thinkers clearly understand mixture as radical and irreducible,
this is less clear in O’Neal’s account. Confusion, as he sees it, certainly necessitates
an epistemological humility, but clarification and knowledge, now suitably stripped
of dogmatic certitude, still remain the goals. Confusion is often a way station, a
precursor to knowledge, a state one must pass through in order to change one’s
mind (36, 39, 47, 91, 94). Although there are times when confusion takes priority
(186–91), it is more often, like Cartesian doubt, a means to an end, necessary but
always to be surpassed. It remains more catalyst than agent, leaving us to wonder
whether the Enlightenment’s desire for clarity has only been chastened rather than
fundamentally transformed.
Hina Nazar’s Enlightened Sentiments takes aim at nearly the same tar-
get as Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture—the doxa that Enlightenment social and
political thought presupposes an isolated, atomized individual subject incapable
of belonging to a collectivity—but it attacks the problem in nearly the opposite
 Reviews 243

way. Instead of turning to mixture and confusion (the capacity for blending things
together), as one might expect, she turns improbably but astutely to judgment
(the capacity for distinguishing and differentiating). In order to draw attention to
the social aspects of judgment, Nazar situates it not within the rational and apri-
oristic strands of Enlightenment, but rather within the more sentimental strands
of the British Enlightenment which are expressly interested in sociability. Usually,
the signature Enlightenment concern with individual judgment and autonomy
is thought to be incompatible with the recognition in the sentimental tradition
that we can be profoundly affected by the emotions of those around us. These two
distinctive features of eighteenth-century thinking seem to coexist awkwardly and
inexplicably alongside one another. But Nazar’s remarkable insight is to recognize
that judgment and autonomy are as much at stake in sentimental encounters as
is emotional susceptibility: “I follow especially closely the sentimental rhetoric of
judgment, a principle connotation of the word sentiment in the eighteenth century.
By contrast with the a priori character it develops in many Enlightenment paradigms,
judgment emerges under sentimentalism as a worldly and contingent process, one
that is inextricably tied to feelings and sociability” (2; original emphasis). What
Nazar is able to track so well, across a range of texts from Hume and Adam Smith
to Richardson, Rousseau, and Austen, is that the language of spectatorship so
systematically deployed in sentimentalism refers not to passive observation, but to
active judgment: “sentiments themselves must be reflectively endorsed in a process
of judgment that is not reducible to sentiment as such” (5). Thus, not only is she
able to show, by way of eighteenth-century sentimental writers, how judgment
and autonomy are possible for postmetaphysical, socially constructed subjects
thought only to be capable of the infinite play of power and domination; but she
also helps to explain how Enlightenment concerns with judgment and autonomy
are compatible with, perhaps even dependent on, sentimentalism’s focus on emo-
tions and sociability.
One of the great virtues of Nazar’s study is her engagement with the work
of Hannah Arendt. Arendt is perhaps the most visionary political thinker of the
twentieth century, and her work grapples substantively with a number of eighteenth-
century debates (about revolution, judgment, aesthetics, freedom, history, and
action, among others). Given the extent to which Arendt draws on eighteenth-
century resources, both to formulate her paradigm-shifting theoretical constructs
and to critique modernity’s excesses, it is surprising how little attention her work
has received from eighteenth-century scholars (but see Sophia Rosenfeld’s recent
Common Sense: A Political History [2011]). Enlightened Sentiments provides a
model for how we might begin to remedy this oversight. Arendt’s relationship to
the eighteenth century is a complicated, indeed fraught one, using Kant and the
aesthetic tradition to formulate a groundbreaking account of the faculty of judg-
ment, but heaping scorn on the sentimental tradition (see her Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy [1982] and On Revolution [1965]). Nazar takes inspiration
from Arendt’s unconventional account of judgment as necessarily involving com-
munity, but she argues that we should see an Arendtian form of judgment already
at work in the sentimental thinkers of the eighteenth century. Her work takes
Arendt in unexpected directions, even ones that Arendt herself would not endorse
(the concern with autonomy, for example), and helps deepen and complicate our
understanding of the latter’s encounters with eighteenth-century thought.
Although Nazar teaches us to recognize in sentimentalism its often over-
looked aspiration toward an account of impartial judgment, thereby allowing us to
link sentimentalism to the Enlightenment discourse on autonomy, it must remain
244 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 48, No. 2

an open question whether this aspiration can be achieved within the confines of
sentimentalism. In fact, her own account gives us reason to doubt its success, since
“judgment” in sentimental theories is so often reflexive rather than reflective: that
is to say, reflexively conditioned by the dynamics of affective response rather than
properly deliberative. To take only one example, Nazar’s quote from Hume makes
clear the extent to which affect can be conflated with judgment in the sentimental
tradition, rather than making a genuine space for autonomous judgment: “To
have the sense of virtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind
from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or
admiration . . . The case is the same as in our judgments concerning all kinds of
beauty, and tastes, and sensations” (qtd. in Nazar, 22; original emphasis). One
wonders, then, whether the mechanics of sympathy can provide the occasion for
the non-rule bound process of judgment that Arendt sought, or whether Arendt
might have been right after all to be suspicious of sentimentalism. But at the very
least, Nazar’s heroic efforts to recuperate sentimental judgment are sure to add a
new and theoretically sophisticated perspective to debates about the political pos-
sibilities of sentimental discourse.
John Bender’s Ends of Enlightenment collects a series of his essays writ-
ten over twenty-five years, on a range of topics from individual author studies
(Fielding, Hume, Godwin, Laclos, Hogarth) to synoptic accounts of the novel in
relation to experience, scientific hypothesis, and Gothic realism. Such a collection
risks fragmentation under centrifugal pressures, but in Bender’s case, there is a
strong organizing kernel to most of the essays in the collection: the effort to come
to grips with the ideological function and significance of novelistic (and visual)
realism, particularly in relation to empiricist epistemology and the methods of the
new science. Ian Watt’s description of formal realism in Rise of the Novel, still so
relevant to studies of the novel today, had situated techniques of realist representa-
tion in relation to Locke’s philosophy, but Bender draws on newer research in the
history of science and in social theory, in particular Shapin and Shaffer’s notion of
“virtual witnessing” and Habermas’s conception of the “public sphere,” to give even
greater precision and force to Watt’s insights and to highlight the social, dialogic,
communicative dimension of empiricist ways of knowing. The result is a powerful
theoretical account that does not just identify loose affinities between empiricism
and realism, but argues more strongly that the nascent novel and the new science
are two integral parts of an emerging knowledge system, in which fiction, experi-
ence, and experiment are all essential: “The eighteenth-century novel was part of
a cultural system that worked to validate Enlightenment canons of knowledge by
dynamically linking the realms of science and fiction in the very process of setting
them in opposition” (38; see also 30). However, Bender explains that later in the
century, science and fiction were segregated into separate and incommensurable
realms, much as we experience them today. Although he notes the growing es-
trangement between science and fiction, what he does not take into consideration
sufficiently is that there is a strain of the novel that is expressly critical of the
growing culture of scientism, quantification, and even monetization, the strain
that Michael McKeon has dubbed “extreme skepticism” (Origins of the English
Novel [1987]), whose ongoing efficacy in stabilizing new institutions of capitalism
Christian Thorne has recently tracked (Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment [2009]).
Swift and Fielding find a comfortable place in Bender’s story, instead of constitut-
ing a counter-tradition, as I would argue with Thorne and McKeon that they do.
Rather than adopting the market- and exchange-based models of rationality and
motivation so prevalent within empiricism, Fielding develops an account of judg-
 Reviews 245

ment as an alternative to supplant calculative reasoning, harking back to classical

traditions of phronesis rather than new empirico-scientific methods. Bender has
given us new ways to map the close alliance between certain techniques of early
novelistic representation and aspects of scientific method, but one would like to
hear him weigh in on the culture wars, already present in the eighteenth century,
over the expanding and problematic role of empiricist epistemologies in the realms
of ethics and politics, especially since the ravages of these ways of thinking have
never been more apparent than they are today (see Michael Sandel, What Money
Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets [2012]).
The books reviewed here are not uncritical of the conceptual resources they
mean to recuperate from the Enlightenment: Schmidgen notices that a politics of
mixture can have nationalistic and imperial variants; O’Neal points to the Sadean
limit of a politics of confusion; Nazar alerts us to the moments when feeling can
displace judgment; and Bender dwells on the disciplinary violence encoded in the
epistemic gaze in novels by Goldsmith and Godwin. But it would be fair to say
that they are animated and even enthralled by the possibilities offered by particular
modes of Enlightenment thought for critical thinking in the present. Such taking of
sides is not only unavoidable, but it is also what gives these studies their polemi-
cal urgency. Nevertheless, Enlightenment has always been double edged: not just
since Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Foucault’s account
of the rise of disciplinary society, or Arendt’s critique of sentimentalism, the novel,
and the French revolutionary tradition, but at least since Shaftesbury took on the
philosophies of Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau polemicized against D’Alembert,
and Hegel characterized the dialectic of faith and Enlightenment. Today, the most
sustained and devastating critiques of the impoverishment that occurs within
Enlightenment thought come from another quarter, namely those who focus less
on the epistemological than on the ethico-political consequences of the period’s
conceptual innovations: Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis of the crisis of teleological
thinking and the atrophying of virtue ethics in the period (After Virtue [1981]);
Leo Strauss’s description of the displacement of strong evaluation by historicism
(Natural Right and History [1953]); Charles Taylor’s analysis of the shortcomings
of naturalism in ethics (Sources of the Self [1989]); John Milbank’s concerted attack
on rights theory (“Against Human Rights” [2012]); Hannah Arendt’s broad-ranging
account of the demise of the concept of action under the conditions of modernity
(Human Condition [1958]); Thomas Pfau’s magisterial study of the narrowing of
concepts of will and personhood since Hobbes (Minding the Modern [2013]); and
Christian Thorne’s narrative of the often retrograde politics that accompanies radi-
cal epistemological skepticism (Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment [2009]). How
do these stories intersect with, complicate, and even overturn the more optimistic
accounts offered in the four books reviewed here? Unfortunately, there has been
far too little conversation across this divide to know for sure, and one can only
hope that there will be more in the future. But we can be certain that all this new
scholarship on the conceptual bequest of eighteenth-century thought affords us
plenty of material for yet another Dialectic of Enlightenment (or even several).
The vitality and relevance of eighteenth-century studies today lies in this ongoing
dialectical struggle over the legacy of the Enlightenment.
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