Misreading Run Riot

"Isolated Cases is about an imagination of human origins so counterintuitive that it meets resistance as soon as it is ventured, yet so compelling that it is formulated again and again, leaving a rich reaction in its wake." So begins Yousef's introduction. The "imagination" in question is an ill-defined notion first identified in the "presocial 'natural state of men'" posited by Hobbes, then elaborated in an opening chapter, "Locke's Loneliness." The "resistance" and "rich reaction" are exemplified by Rousseau's Second Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (chapters 2–3), Wordsworth's The Prelude (chapter 4), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (chapter 5), and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (chapter 6). The last chapter, "Mill Alone," also echoes the first, for Yousef sees the Autobiography as "at once a poignant transmission and striking indictment of the Lockean legacy" (9). Some sort of ambivalence marks her readings of each of the key texts. The disparity of these works gives one sense of "isolated cases," the theme of a psychology of isolation another.

One thing that links the texts of Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Shelley for Yousef is that each "questions, criticizes, and ultimately repudiates" the Enlightenment premise, also characterized as an ideal, that humans are "essentially independent," but unlike other Romantic repudiations of Enlightenment ideas, "their peculiarity lies in containing, acknowledging, and making sense of the drive to reject and deny the ordinary view of human 'fitness' to social life" (3), the drive that underlies the claim to independence. Thus, these texts offer "paradoxical challenges to autonomy," which may be the "anxieties of autonomy" of the book's title. Yousef's appreciation of ambivalence makes it difficult to know where she stands at any point in her narrative or argument, and makes taking one's bearings from intellectual history impossible and probably irrelevant. The sole gesture toward intellectual, historical context is a reference to Marshall Brown's "more dialectical account" of the relation between the Enlightenment and Romanticism; he holds that "the self-knowledge of Enlightenment is what we know as Romanticism" (10). To make matters worse, not only do the works considered coexist in an abstracted mental space of intertextuality, but they are also often simply built up, or rather suggested and represented, by passages that come without any context.

That Hobbes did not think of his "state of nature" as saying anything about human origins should be apparent. It is also clearly not pre-social. Rousseau criticized Hobbes for simply putting socialized man into this imagined state, but that is precisely what Hobbes meant to do. His purpose was to "think away" the civil state in order to show people what they owed to the establishment of sovereignty and law. Yousef writes, "It bears repeating that his vision opens up only by an oddly deliberate turning way from the familiar truth that 'to man by nature, as soon as he is born, solitude is an enemy'" (2). Hobbes's quotation is from a footnote in De Cive, chapter 1, §2, which he appends to "born fit for society." Hobbes's point is that being born in need of care and nurture does not make one naturally fit for society: "Wherefore I deny not that men (even nature compelling) desire to come together. But civil societies are not mere meetings, but bonds, to the making whereof faith and compacts are necessary." How man can make himself fit for civil society is a question beyond the scope of Yousef's interest here. Her reaction to Hobbes's clearly presented supposition of a "state of nature" without enforceable law is overwrought:

Hobbes's notorious invitation to "consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other" flamboyantly [her emphasis] veers away from the familiar, the recognizable, and the obvious facts of how human beings come into the world. It does not ask to be accepted or denied on grounds we...