Ideology and Addison’s Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination

One of the dominant practices in contemporary eighteenth-century literary studies is reading art and aesthetics as ideology. This practice commonly issues in the specific claim that eighteenth-century literary writing and aesthetics serve the interests and values of the middle class or bourgeoisie, which is understood to be the rising or emerging group within a society whose economic structure can reasonably be referred to as "capitalism." Indeed, as Lisa von Sneidern puts it in a recent article in Eighteenth-Century Studies, a journal that has encouraged and welcomed this approach, "it has become nearly commonplace to disclose how complicit the belles lettres were with the emergence of bourgeois capitalism and colonialism." ¹

Since Addison's essays on the pleasures of the imagination are, if not the origin of eighteenth-century English aesthetics as some have argued, then at least of central importance to English speculation about art during the period, it is not surprising to find that both they and the periodical in which they appeared are exhibits in the case for eighteenth-century aesthetics as bourgeois ideology. ² In what, for those engaged in this project, was an extremely influential book published in 1962 but not translated into English until 1989, Jurgen Habermas identifies The Spectator as a major institution of "the bourgeois public sphere," which he sees emerging in eighteenth-century western Europe. Following Habermas, Robert Holub discussed Addison's aesthetics and "its place in this atmosphere of bourgeois justification and preparation," while Terry Eagleton discussed his literary criticism as part of "a project of a bourgeois cultural politics." Carole Fabricant, unhappy with the way in which literary critics were ignoring social and political history, then tried to give some textual support to the argument by citing and commenting on Addison's essays on the pleasures in her essay, "The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century." Though Eagleton passes over Addison's aesthetics in his later major treatment of the subject, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Erin Mackie has recently reaffirmed, with some adjustments, Habermas' view of Addison's periodical as "an exemplary organ of the bourgeois public sphere" and proceeded to discuss Addison's aesthetics as a contribution to the "cultural aesthetic of bourgeois ideology." ³

That this case is untenable becomes clear, I propose, as soon as we begin to take into account some of the work that has been done by historians of eighteenth-century society and historians of post-Renaissance political thought since Habermas presented his vision of eighteenth-century English society and ideology thirty-eight years ago. By doing so, we can see not just that the understanding of Addison's aesthetics as bourgeois ideology is misguided, but also that the commitment to interdisciplinary studies that is supposedly a hallmark of the criticism supporting this understanding is weak. That the case is untenable is further evident once we consider those passages from Addison's essays that are cited as evidence, as well as some other passages from these essays. In response to the charge that denying the existence of bourgeois ideology in the essays is to empty them of all ideological content (on grounds that if Addison's ideology is not bourgeois it cannot be anything), I will further suggest that insofar as they serve, promote, or justify the interests of any social groups, Addison's essays serve the interests of the diverse groups that were represented by what these groups, their opponents, and historians call "Whigs." This becomes clear if, again, we take into account some of the work of historians of Augustan society and political thought ignored and misread by literary critics bent on making Addison (and other eighteenth-century figures) a bourgeois ideologue. This is not, however, to say that Whig ideology is the essence of these essays, or that these essays are reducible to what might be taken as a Whig political or social statement, or that those who...