"Besides our selves": An essay on enthusiastic politics and civil subjectivity

Public Culture

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 371-392

  Frank, Jason ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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EID: 27844532046     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-17-3-371     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. For a compelling account of how contemporary democratic theory might benefit from attention to the cultivation of ethos over the articulation of command moralities, see William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
2. For a critical engagement with Kant on this question, see William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 164-77.
3. David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 337-43
4. ; my emphasis. Unless otherwise noted, all italics used for emphasis are present in the original. On Puritan responses to enthusiasm more generally, see John F. Sena, "Melancholic Madness and the Puritans," Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 293-309.
5. On the textual basis of Puritan political authority, see John Schaar, "Liberty/Authority/Community in the Political Thought of John Winthrop," Political Theory 19 (1991): 493-518;
6. and Tracy B. Strong, "How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes," Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 128-59.
7. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 347.
8. David S. Lovejoy has convincingly argued that Hutchinson and other religious enthusiasts established a "pattern for radical expression" that can be detected in the politics of the American Revolution and beyond. See his "'Desperate Enthusiasm': Early Signs of American Radicalism," in Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 231-42,
9. and, especially, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
10. Clement Hawes, "Enthusiasm's Further Adventures," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 41 (2000): 247-53.
11. J. G. A. Pocock, "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment," in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. LaVopa (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1998), 7-28;
12. James Farr, "Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm," American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 51-69;
13. Melissa A. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 91.
14. Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971);
15. Crawford Brough MacPherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
16. Abiezer Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine, in A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nigel Smith (1649; repr., London: Junction, 1983), 69.
17. A formative conception of politics assumes that political institutions inevitably shape and pattern the practices and beliefs of those they govern. Political institutions not only establish a framework of rules and codes that regulates the actions of an otherwise autonomous citizenry, they also constitute both the very conditions favoring certain forms of politics over others and the everyday practices of the citizenry on a micropolitical as well as a macropolitical level. For a recent discussion which emphasizes the avoidance of this dimension in contemporary liberalism, see Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: In Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 129-33.
18. Investigation into "tempers, sentiments, and manners" characterizes a good deal of recent revisionary work in the history of political thought. For a lively account of political theory's tendency to overemphasize "juristic modalities of political discourse," see J. G. A. Pocock, "Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought," Political Theory 9 (1981): 353-68.
19. For a more recent exploration of eighteenth-century attempts to construct a properly civil subjectivity within the context of the "rise of the social," see Mary Poovey, "The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy," Public Culture 14 (2002): 125-45.
20. I take this phrase from Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 87-88.
21. Lawrence E. Klein's work on Shaftesbury emphasizes how Shaftesbury's writing worked to cultivate political subjectivities appropriate to civil society. See his Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
22. and also his "Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm," in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. LaVopa (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1998), 153-78.
23. On the role of political enthusiasm in the English revolution, see Christopher Hill's seminal The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1972).
24. Jan Goldstein, "Enthusiasm or Imagination: Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Contexts," in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. LaVopa (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1998), 29-50.
25. This raises the question of how enthusiasm is to be approached by researchers. Histories of semantic change, for example, do not do justice to the affective and rhetorical questions involved in tracing enthusiasm's volatile political history. Clement Hawes has helpfully suggested that enthusiasm is best understood as a rhetoric, a "manic style." Shaftesbury himself suggested the difficulty of locating the significance of enthusiasm with any real specificity. The term's far-reaching and ambiguous valence may, of course, help explain some of the power it had over the early modern political imagination. See Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
26. Susie I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
27. Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 46-68.
28. Taken from Hillel Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and That Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706-1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 50.
29. Meric Casaubon, A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme as It Is an Effect of Nature: But Is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolical Possession (London: Printed by R. D. and are [sic] to be sold by Tho. Johnson, 1655). Casaubon's Treatise can be credited with raising enthusiasm's profile in Restoration attempts to understand and explain the Civil War. After its publication, treatises explicitly addressing the political dimensions of enthusiasm became much more common. This might explain why Hobbes, in all of his writings, uses the terms enthusiasm, enthusiastic, or enthusiast only a handful of times, despite their obvious proximity to his concerns. I owe this insight to conversations with Kinch Hoechstra.
30. Casaubon, A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme, 5.
31. The association of enthusiasm with a rejection of context and worldliness becomes important in eighteenth-century transformations of the term, in particular those undertaken by Edmund Burke. See J. G. A. Pocock, "Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm," in The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789-1848, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (New York: Pergamon, 1990), 142-67.
32. Ronald A. Knox adapts and develops this Weberian typology in his interpretation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theological disputation. See his Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950).
33. Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Winch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1115-17.
34. Taken from Michael Heyd, "Be Sober and Reasonable": The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995), 170.
35. Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus; or, A Brief Discourse of the Nature, Causes, Kinds, and Cure of Enthusiasm (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 1.
36. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 5.
37. Heyd, "Be Sober and Reasonable," 10.
38. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 3, 4.
39. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 5.
40. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 12.
41. For an excellent account of the difficulties of negotiating reason and faith in Restoration theology see John Spurr, "'Rational Religion' in Restoration England," Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 563-85.
42. Enthusiasm and superstition had importantly different connotations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Hume's writing, for example, enthusiasm was clearly distinguished from superstition, though both were opposed to "enlightenment" and thought in terms of their relation to social and political authority. Where superstition emerged from unfathomable fear and led to public docility and priestly power, enthusiasm derived from hope and pride and was expressly antiauthoritarian: "superstition is an enemy to civil liberty" Hume summarizes, "and enthusiasm a friend to it" David Hume, "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (1772; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 46-57, 49.
43. See also Truman G. Steffan, "The Social Argument against Enthusiasm (1650-1660)," Studies in English 41 (1940): 39-63.
44. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (1711; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 352-53.
45. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 21.
46. This positive and political understanding of enthusiasm is developed by Immanuel Kant in his writings on the French Revolution. See his The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (1798; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). I am grateful to Jeff Lomonaco for bringing these writings to my attention. See his "Kant's Unselfish Partisans as Democratic Citizens," in this issue.
47. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 12.
48. Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness; or, A True and Faithfull Representation of the Everlasting Gospel of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Onely Begotten Son of God and Sovereign over Men and Angels (London: Printed by J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1660), 204.
49. Pocock, "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment," 12.
50. Richard Burthogge, An Essay upon Reason, and the Nature of Spirits (London: Printed for John Dunton, 1694), 44.
51. The complex relationship between sympathy and enthusiasm in eighteenth-century Anglo-phone political discourses can only be noted here. John Mullen has suggested that "throughout the [eighteenth] century, 'sympathy' could be synonymous with enthusiasm." While this may overstate the case, it marks an important site for further research. John Mullen, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 26.
52. Religio Clerici (London: Printed for Henry Brome, 1681), 64.
53. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (1740; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 577.
54. Mary Astell, Bart'lemy Fair; or, An Enquiry after Wit (London: R. Wilkin, 1709);
55. Edward Fowler, Reflections upon A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord *****; In Another Letter to a Lord (London: H. Clement, 1709).
56. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 52.
57. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 53.
58. This dynamic is present in the work of those Scottish Enlightenment figures influenced by Shaftesbury's work, most notably Hume; it is also emphasized by Gilles Deleuze in his study of Hume. For Hume, as for Shaftesbury, "society finds its obstacle in [improper, disorganized] sympathies rather than in egoism.... The problem of society ... is not a problem of limitation, but rather a problem of integration." Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 39.
59. "The fact that enthusiasm could be seen as both unsociable and sociable meant that the proposed antidotes to enthusiasm were diverse. Insofar as enthusiasm represented a deficiency of sociability, its cure involved socialization. However, insofar as enthusiasm represented an excess or unregulated form of socializing, its cure required a degree of social abstinence, a kind of solitude in which the social passions could be understood and addressed." Lawrence E. Klein, "Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm," 157.
60. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 55.
61. See Klein's introduction to Shaftesbury's Characteristics, xxix.
62. The influence of Cambridge Platonists like Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Benjamin Whichcote on Shaftesbury has been well documented; Shaftesbury's very first publication was an edition of Whichcote's sermons. While Shaftesbury was removed from the Cambridge Platonists' attempts to maintain the bonds between ecclesiastical and civil authority, he nonetheless drew a good deal from the "sociable" aspects of their theology emphasized in the above discussion of More.
63. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, 38.
64. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 8.
65. As Richard B. Wolf suggests, Shaftesbury's claim that "repression stimulates the growth of enthusiasm; ridicule serves as an aid to reverence; uncritical praise dishonors its objects" is just one of several paradoxes explored in his A Letter concerning Enthusiasm. See Richard B. Wolf, "Shaftesbury's Wit in 'Letter concerning Enthusiasm,'" Modern Philology 86 (1988); 46-53; quote at 47.
66. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 11, 13, 31.
67. The task of regulating enthusiastic expression is therefore directly related to what political theorists have characterized as the "rise of the social" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1962);
68. Keith Baker, "Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History," in Main Trends in Cultural History, ed. Willem Melching and Wyger Velema (Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1994), 95-120;
69. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
70. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 286-351.
71. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 11.
72. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. LaVopa, eds., Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1998), xii.
73. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002).
74. Lynn M. Sanders is right to point out that (and to criticize) the idea that "increasing deliberation enhances democracy has become, in some theoretical circles, a truism." See her "Against Deliberation," Political Theory 25 (1997): 347-76.
75. The relationship between enthusiasm and the aesthetics of the sublime has been examined by Shaun Irlam in Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
76. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 27.
77. Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine, 69.
78. See Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
79. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 351-52.
80. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 356.
81. Clement Hawes has suggested that this subjective undoing is achieved in the working of the "manic style" characteristic of enthusiastic tracts. Melissa Orlie has likened this undoing to Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault's conception of the "limit experience."
82. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style;
83. Melissa Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically, 61-88.
84. Habermas relegates the "world-disclosive" dimensions of speech to a sharply demarcated realm of "literature" in his critique of both Heidegger and Derrida. See Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
85. For a thoughtful critique of this approach to world disclosure from within a broadly Habermasian perspective, see Pieter Duvenage, Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2003), 120-41.
86. For a discussion of the threefold validity claims-claims to rightness, truth, and truthfulness-that Habermas believes implicit in a communicative utterance, see his "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification," in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 43-115.
87. On glossolalia, see Michel De Certeau, "Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias," Representations 56 (autumn 1996): 29-47.
88. Jürgen Habermas, "A Reply to My Critics," in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. J. B. Thompson and David Held (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1982).
89. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 490.
90. "'To understand ourselves and know what spirit we are of.' Afterwards we may judge the spirit in others, consider what their personal merit is and prove the validity of their testimony by the solidity of their brain. By this means we may prepare ourselves with some antidote against enthusiasm. And this is what I have dared affirm is best performed by keeping to good humour. For otherwise the remedy itself may turn out to be the disease." Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 28.