The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (review)

I have never read a book quite like The Secret History of Domesticity, although McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel (1987) comes close in its ambition, authority, and importance (and indeed this study can be considered a continuation of that book, with many cross-references to the earlier work). Monumental and magisterial are among the many panegyrical terms that describe McKeon's new book, although exhausting and overwhelming also describe this reader's reactions upon finally closing this immense study, with 717 pages of densely argued text, supported by 230 pages of notes, many of them discursive, as well as eighteen colour and black-and-white plates and numerous illustrations. McKeon's scholarship is commanding, his erudition staggering, his systematic rigour and intellectual control steady and sure (or, depending on taste, unrelenting). This work of epic historical synthesis traces in all its myriad complexities the emergence of the modern transformation of knowledge.

In his introduction, McKeon outlines the transition that is the historical grounding of his argument as a move away, at a point in the early seventeenth century, from the "tacit" understanding of "traditional" cultures that "saturates social practice" to the self-conscious modern knowledge that is "disembedded from the matrix of experience it seeks to explain" and "is defined precisely by its explanatory ambition to separate itself from its object of knowledge sufficiently to fulfill the epistemological demand that what is known must be divided from the process by which it is known" (xix). I quote McKeon to offer a sample of the uncompromising rigour and analytical density and difficulty of his style, although after a few hundred pages one grows fairly accustomed to his terms and his systematic approach. McKeon operates at a level of ideological abstraction that is exhilarating but also vertiginous in its dialectical intensity and totalizing frame of reference. Despite the honours heaped upon his Origins of the English Novel, he is aware of the hostility that his work can provoke, and he responds forcefully to those charges of a reductive or abstract teleological master narrative that his ambitions can generate "in some circles of academic study" (xxv). His introduction offers a strong defence in which he says (convincingly if one pays attention in the nearly eight hundred pages that follow) that "abstraction" as he practises it opens up "concrete particularity" and is a matter not of "occlusion but the explicitation of concretion" (xxv). "Explicitation" is one of McKeon's crucially revealing neologisms ("disembedded" and "separation out" are two other key recurrent expressions), for by them he invokes the self-conscious or self-aware qualities of modern knowing, and his approach involves a similar reflexivity in which particular insights and textual features are related to the abstract or general ideological situation that promotes them. As he summarizes his project near the middle of the book, McKeon is evoking the essence of modernity as a long process of privatization and internalization that necessarily involves a reconception of the "nature of the realm of the public, which can, precisely by virtue of its impersonality, acknowledge and comprehend this indefinite potential of private entities" (324).

Although there are many strands in the complex weave of his argument, McKeon's master narrative begins with a specific historical moment: the English revolution of the seventeenth century, which he sees as a watershed or a rupture with the past. Paradoxically, he notes, defences of patriarchalism such as Filmer's hastened the decline of the validity of the analogy between the state and the family, and the analogy collapsed in the face of the repeated dynastic failures of the Stuart line that lead to the Hanoverian succession. These historical events contribute to a crucial ideological moment that McKeon calls "the devolution of absolutism" via the rise of political contract theory, the "separation out" of the "political subject" under the paternalistic sovereign into an "ethical subject," who in the wake...