Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, and: Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (review)

Karen O'Brien. Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pp. 249. $59.95 cloth.

Jonathan M. Hess. Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1999). Pp. 286. $39.95 cloth.

Politics and art seem to occupy mutually exclusive spheres. The former is embroiled in the vagaries of social life, caught up in debate, deliberation, and strategy in ways that often expose our crassest impulses. Art, on the other hand, appeals to the more refined sensibilities, and at first blush appears divorced from the harsh realities of public life. Indeed, artistic expression seemingly dwells in an aesthetic sanctuary unsullied by the unpleasantness of everyday life, its flourish having no overlap with the struggle for power. Yet as O'Brien and Hess demonstrate, art and politics are in fact connected at the deepest level, intertwined in such a way that the division separating political battleground from aesthetic sanctuary proves false. Each of these texts examines the interplay between politics and art against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Europe, whose groundswell of enthusiasm over Enlightenment principles presumably lent cultural cohesion to the continent's varied nationalities. Yet both O'Brien and Hess demonstrate how eighteenth-century European culture experienced the limits of community. Indeed, on their reading of events, a shared European identity animated by a common purpose and a collective mission was never a lived reality, only a desired objective found more readily in narrative and rhetoric than in everyday life. It was as much the by-product of imagination as of reason and philosophical argument. Both O'Brien and Hess thus explore the inventive, rhetorical dimensions of Enlightenment culture, whose cosmopolitanism often worked against itself by undermining, rather than supporting, a cohesive European identity. And it is the freedom of artistic license that helps underscore these limits of community, demonstrating the contrived, fictitious nature of a movement known as the "Enlightenment" which nevertheless claims several unifying themes.

However, despite these similarities, the two authors examine the entanglement of politics and art in very different ways. O'Brien, for instance, gives a meticulous and original reading of the highly porous boundaries between history and literary criticism, disciplines that can at times be indistinguishable despite claims to the contrary. With great aplomb, Narratives of Enlightenment offers a convincing testimony to the manner in which imagination, interpretive play, and the latitudes of narration are as much a part of "history" as they are a poem or a novel. Did a common European culture exist in the eighteenth century, one that bound the distinct nationalities together in a shared consensus? Is it possible to speak of a widely held sensibility that drew nations together, or is that sensibility a fiction, a narrative creation which, helping to confer irony, existed largely in the minds of such literati as Voltaire, Hume, and Ramsay? The effort to answer these questions effectively, and to prove the tenuousness of European cohesion, showcases O'Brien's talents as a historian, a literary critic, and a writer.

Throughout her book's roughly two hundred and fifty pages, O'Brien delves deeply into the writings of prominent Enlightenment intellectuals with a view toward demonstrating the close relationship between historical account and literary creation. She scrutinizes with care the work of Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and David Ramsay, always highlighting the intervention of literary criticism into historical narration. In her analysis of Voltaire, for instance, O'Brien examines "the neoclassical poetics of history" in which the latter's interests in theater, philosophy, metaphysics, and history are amply given play. It is his conflation of artistic panache and intellectual insight that gives rise to Voltaire's unique voice, that brilliant, often incredulous voice whose...