Enlightenment and Emancipation (review)

In assembling the thirteen essays that make up this volume, Susan Manning and Peter France asked the writers to evaluate the emancipatory “force” (7) of the Enlightenment. The decision to concentrate on the issue of “force” turns out to have been a fruitful one. With this term, the editors—both of whom also author essays in the collection—cannily propose a means of eliding the distinction between outcomes and intentions, thus essentially requiring that these be discussed in combination with each other. The simultaneous attention to aims and ends becomes, in turn, a means of bypassing the sterile opposition between the Foucauldian critique of discipline and the Whiggish celebration of progress that has so often defined the debates surrounding the Enlightenment and its significance. What results is a collection focused on what Manning and France call “the complicated interaction” (9) between Enlightenment and emancipation. The essays in this volume are variously grounded in French, German, and English literary studies and the study of European and North American history, taking up objects of inquiry that reflect the distinct preoccupations and canons of their native fields. Complication emerges as a shared approach that lends these essays unexpected methodological unity even as France, in his own essay for the volume, identifies the method itself as “a possible third way” of approaching the Enlightenment (218).

Several essays explore the “third way” of complication especially compellingly. David Williams discusses the abolitionist writings of the Marquis de Condorcet as a blend of radically egalitarian claims and gradualist sentiments, conceiving their relationship less as tension than as complicated balance. Manning reads the numerous references to exhumation and reburial of ancient bodies and artifacts in (especially Scottish, but also American) Romantic-period literature as a repeated enactment of affiliation and disaffiliation with the past: a process born of those emancipatory claims of stadial history and the inescapable residual discomforts (recognizing the self in the other; acknowledging the claims of the past on the present) that Murray Pittock’s contribution to the volume describes so thoroughly in the Scottish historiography of a slightly earlier period. Paddy Bullard crowns these discussions with an account of paradox as the “figure of emancipation” in which is played out “a miniature drama of inhibition and release” as it thwarts, rewards, and disciplines the interpreter (45). His argument provides a gloss on the methods of the volume as a whole even as it helps to name and explain the ambivalences of its subjects.

The unity of this collection depends on a claim to methodology rather than on thematics, and the contributors define emancipation in a wide variety of ways. As a result, though they are comprehensive and often engaging in themselves, some essays have little in common beyond their attention to nuance. It is easy to see how John Renwick’s multifaceted corrective to the heroic assumption that Voltaire’s writings and influence brought about an increase in religious toleration in prerevolutionary France might speak to Anthony McFarlane’s anatomy of the ends and means of the rhetorical linkage of science with sedition in late eighteenth-century Spanish America. Nor is it an impossible stretch to see the symmetries between such arguments and Glynnis Ridley’s reminder that late eighteenth-century radicals’ claims to plain speaking depended, as much as their opponents’ flourishes, on mastery of a classical rhetorical tradition, or Catherine Jones’s illuminating discussion of the continued reliance of Enlightenment music and musical theory on verbal and affective content, despite scholarly claims for the “emancipation” of the former from the latter and for its new affiliation with experimental science (176). It is more challenging to bring any of these essays into conversation (for example) with Jane Rendall’s richly detailed account of female writers’ attitudes to America as an index of their difficulties in parlaying eighteenth-century Enlightened utopianisms into a more specific and practical claim on gender and “racial” equality. While Siân Reynolds’s discussion of Rousseau’s problematic hold on the...