Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (review)

This is such a wide-ranging and richly researched book that it is hard to encompass it in a short review. It is a piece of intellectual and cultural history whose persuasive overarching thesis is that post-Lockean empiricism never was systematic, but on the contrary was receptive, sensitive, sentimental, moral, unsystematic, interested in unaccountable phenomena (Diderot is convincingly held to exemplify this tendency): hence Riskin's organizing notion of 'sentimental empiricism'. In her attempt to understand the ideology of non-mechanist science of the time and to characterize it as fundamentally guided by the principles of sensibility, she aims to go beyond Anne C. Vila's well-received Enlightenment and Pathology (FS, LIV (2000), 222-23), which, she claims, looks at sensibility 'rather as an object than as a style of investigation' (p. 6n). In her focus on this 'style of investigation' then, Riskin argues that our current belief that science is empirical and thus analytic and detached is not just a delusion inherited from the eighteenth century but is more precisely a legacy of their own self-criticism. In support of this, she offers a series of fascinating and informative case studies of (in turn) the Molyneux problem (Chapter 2), vitalist as opposed to mechanist theories of electricity (Chapter 3), how Franklin's 'sentimental' approach to electricity provided a model for physiocratic economics (Chapter 4) as well as a way for Robespierre to defend a client's right to erect a lightning rod (Chapter 5), how Mesmer exploited the vulnerable points of the discourse of sensibility to produce a caricature of it, forcing its own leading members (amongst whom we will not be surprised to meet Franklin again) to disown Mesmerism by admitting that sensibility does not always reliably reflect the exterior world (a painful admission for Lockean thinkers), but on the contrary, can be entirely imaginary (Chapter 6), and lastly looking at Lavoisier's new chemical nomenclature, which in its analytical bases forcefully denied that language was 'natural' or (as we might say) 'organic'. Each case study looks at how common metaphors, models, anxieties informed these debates and the shape they took, polarized between 'natural' (good) and systematic (bad). The 'spirit of system', as Riskin translates the more familiar 'esprit de système', is thus the arch weapon of each debate, used in turn to embarrass mathematicians, mechanists, upholders of traditional methods of taxation, upholders of new physiocratic economics and ultimately all experts, Robespierre going beyond embarrassment to abolition and execution, one of his victims being of course Lavoisier, the perfect target for anyone critical of systems. In a final twist, Riskin shows how subsequent interpretations (by Tocqueville, Taine, Cochin) of the eighteenth century and its Revolution continued to credit its thinkers with excessive rationality and thereby to blame them for the Terror. François Furet continues in this tradition, 'associat[ing] analytical thinking with absolutism' (p. 278). The hero or 'fil conducteur' of the entire work is undoubtedly Franklin himself, and thus a subsidiary aim is to account for Franklin's strikingly warm reception in France (the reason being the need felt by combattant anti-mechanists, for instance, Buffon, for new weapons which Franklin with his unsystematic empirical descriptions of the unaccountable behaviour of electricity amply provided). Telling, as well as scholarly details, are never lacking: thus we hear that the National Assembly (at Mirabeau's urging) called for three days of national mourning at Franklin's death in 1790, that Franklin's fifteen-year-old grandson Benny Bache laconically recorded the operations of the 1784 commission to investigate Mesmerism, writing in his diary that 'My grandpapa [and] the commissioners are gone into the garden to magnetize some trees' (p. 219). Worth the price for the admirably clear introductory survey of sensibility and the chapter on Molyneux's problem alone, this will be crucial reading for students and researchers alike, and should make its way...