Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility by Hina Nazar (review)

In this brisk and engagingly polemical study of eighteenth-century theories of judgment, Hina Nazar attempts to counter the postmodern suspicion of liberal-humanist values like autonomy and self-sovereignty as mere ideological fictions designed to justify structures of power and privilege. In Nazar’s self-professedly “Enlightenment-friendly” reading, three architects of these ideals, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, are described as offering a vision of judgment and civic participation that is both radical and humane in its egalitarianism and respect for plurality of opinion (38). Far from mystifying the creation of standards of judgment, or denying the role of culture in shaping social norms, the Scottish and German philosophers are all shown to stress the communal, intersubjective origins of belief systems in general—the ways in which normative judgments can and should emerge, not from the autonomous reflections of self-authorizing critics but rather through the co-ordinated deliberations of an intellectually engaged citizenry. As Nazar acknowledges, her constructivist reading of Kant draws heavily on earlier pro-Enlightenment scholars such as John Rawls and, especially, Hannah Arendt. More than Rawls or Arendt, however, Nazar emphasizes the impact of affect and aesthetic experience on the formation of judgment, in part to situate Hume, Smith, and Kant not only in a continuity of Enlightenment thought but also in the Enlightenment’s less reputable alias, the “Age of Sensibility.”

To this end, Nazar, a professor of English, dedicates three of her five chapters to literary evidence, exploring how Hume, Smith, and Kant’s accounts of judgment and consensus-building are reflected in two of the most celebrated novels of sensibility, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, as well as in Jane Austen’s equivocal critique of sentimental fiction, Sense and Sensibility. Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and William Godwin’s Fleetwood also receive attention. In Richardson and Austen no less than in Hume and Kant, according to Nazar, powerful feelings are or ought to be subjected to a tribunal of open-minded but dispassionate judges, or, as is so often the case in these novels, a virtual community of mutually observant letter writers. (“Peer-review” is Nazar’s witty phrase for this process of epistolary critique.) This is not to say that characters in sentimental fiction always succeed in finding such an audience of constructive critics, or that each novelist fully honours what Nazar sees as the emergent Enlightenment ideal of universal participation in the public realm. Richardson emerges from Nazar’s analysis as a divided figure, ambivalent about the potential of femmes soles like Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe to construct and defend a system of values that would justify Clarissa’s disobedience to her father (a problem Richardson solves, according to Nazar, by having Clarissa ultimately transfer her obedience from Mr Harlowe to a heavenly patriarch), while Rousseau, in the least original portion of Nazar’s book, is shown yet again to promote disparate standards of virtue for men and women.

By introducing Clarissa Harlowe to the sage of Königsberg, Nazar helps bring sentimental fiction out of its claustrophobic recesses, closets, and monastic cells, reminding modern readers of its interest in matters of civic concern and the exercise of public reason. Yet her readings, both of the philosophical tradition and of sentimental fiction, sometimes feel tenuous. This is in part because of the book’s brevity, which is impressive given the intellectual and physical heft of the material it covers, but which sometimes detracts from the thoroughness of Nazar’s analysis. Her reliance on Arendt in her discussion of Kant, for instance, which she touts as one of the book’s innovations, has the frustrating consequence of distancing us from Kant’s own language and logic, apart from familiar axioms like the one from the second Critique about “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (56). (We...