Capital Enthusiasm

Critical Enthusiasm brings together an important set of issues in the eighteenth century in a densely argued book drawing on a range of disciplines. The foundation lies in literary studies (with extended treatments of Shaftesbury and Swift), but the ambition extends to intellectual, economic, and colonial history, informed by an array of theoretical sources, including Marx, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson. The complexity of themes does not lend itself to easy summary, but there are a number of major premises: enthusiasm is neither a “remnant of a religious past” in the eighteenth century nor is it a “hallmark of secularization” (3) in its social or aesthetic incarnation. Rather, it “encodes” a defining contradiction in the period inherent in the “spatio-temporal manifestation of the logic of capital accumulation” (4). Perhaps the simplest way to characterize this inquiry would be as an extended meditation on the theses concerning religion and capitalism provided by Weber and Marx. The motivation is to “historicize” these issues and to question a narrative of modernity that depends on an account of religious enthusiasm as superseded by the secular.

The first chapter considers a range of figures who discussed enthusiasm, from Locke, to Shaftesbury and Hume. Rosenberg explores how eighteenth-century historicist thought relied on analyzing enthusiasm as well as how religious historicism was itself bound up with histories of capital accumulation. The second chapter investigates the Camisard controversy, in which French enthusiastic “prophets” arrived in London in the early eighteenth century and were met by stiff opposition, despite their status as refugees from Catholic absolutism. This chapter also discusses common law vs. statute law and the new provisions for capital punishment, which in turn defended the interests of capital accumulation. The third chapter introduces a spatial dimension to the argument, looking at moral philosophy in a colonial context. Reading the Carolina constitution, which Locke participated in drafting, alongside the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s letters on his Carolina holdings, leads to the conclusion that “racialized blackness functions in the period to secure an ideology of market self-regulation” (100). The fourth chapter returns to the Camisard episode and some of the literature produced by Camisard exponents. These works offer a nonsecular understanding of space that enables us to identify the unevenness of capitalist development. The closing chapter focuses particularly on Swift’s poem “A Description of a City Shower,” which produces “an enthusiastic spatialization: a composition of the spatial complexities of capital accumulation into poetic arrangements” (152).

The scope of the study and its large claims mean that Capital Accumulation deserves to be taken seriously, but the result is not without difficulties. Although there are brief references to events in the English Civil War, the prime instance of enthusiasm remains the Camisards. This historical moment is indeed fascinating and reveals a host of tensions and contradictions that are well described here, but it means that the evidence of “enthusiasm” brought into consideration is surprisingly narrow. The lack of reference to accusations of enthusiasm against Quakers, or for that matter Methodists, is puzzling, especially in a book with a transatlantic orientation. Quaker commerce and antislavery agitation might have proved an interesting complement, for example, to the book’s concerns. Shaftesbury features centrally, yet his essay “The Adept Ladys or The Angelick Sect” (1702), a satirical account of various enthusiasts, including a severe Quaker woman, goes unmentioned. This is significant, since Shaftesbury’s essay, while engaging in his familiar raillery, does not appropriate enthusiasm as a positive term. The brief engagement by Rosenberg with Hume’s History of England is certainly merited and could have been expanded; however, there is no attention to his important essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” or to the Natural History of Religion, other than a single reference in which it is mistitled (34) as the History of Natural Religion (nor for that matter did Gibbon write the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire mentioned on the same page).

The attempt to integrate enthusiasm with capital accumulation remains...