Returning to Emotion, via the Age of Sensibility

It should come as no surprise that the eighteenth century has been a period of particular interest among scholars charting the history of emotion. This was the age, after all, in which David Hume claimed that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Emotions were considered to be infectious, moving as promiscuously between one person and another as between texts and their readers. Philosophers saw feeling as an essential ethical resource, while imaginative writers defended literature based on its capacity to stimulate the social passions. For much of the twentieth century, however, literary historians approached eighteenth-century emotionality with deeply ingrained suspicion, redeeming the age only by finding in it the residue of neoclassicism, with its emphasis on rationality, and the anticipation of expressive Romanticism, with its emphasis on individual passions.

In recent years, however, scholarship has expanded our understanding of sentimental culture, revealing its affiliations with liberal reform, commercial capitalism, and the discourse of human rights. Scholars have explored the role sensibility played in the rise of the British Empire, the consolidation of middle-class values, and the definition of modern gender roles. And they have shown that sentimentalism was itself a theory of community formation, a way of understanding how the social world comes to be organized through sympathetic affiliation. The four books under review here help recover sentimental culture while also addressing, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, the turn to emotion as a central problem in the humanities. Two of them establish longer chronologies, from antiquity to modernity, and two focus solely on that watershed era, the decades before and after the French Revolution. All four books demonstrate that the long eighteenth century continues to be a fascinating era for studying emotion's history, one in which the passions took on many of their modern contours, yet which offered other ways of understanding, and valuing, feeling.

Daniel Gross's The Secret History of Emotion is an ambitious work of intellectual history, which focuses on the period between the English Civil War and the French Revolution while drawing connections from Aristotle and Hellenistic Stoicism to contemporary cognitive science. Gross makes sweeping claims about the status of emotion in modern thought along with pointed critiques of contemporary theorists of the passions. His target is the liberal humanist's conception of emotions as hardwired expressions of a private inner life. Gross traces this model to Descartes’ “reductive psychophysiology of emotion” (5), and he finds modern versions of it in the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio, the ethical thought of Martha Nussbaum, and the work of progressive historians like Michael Walzer and Carolyn Merchant.

As a corrective to the impoverished humanist tradition, Gross retrieves a classical conception of the emotions not as “universal traits of our biology expressed by individuals,” but rather as “contested terms negotiated in a public sphere where power is distributed unevenly” (110–11). This robust hermeneutic of the passions emerges in Aristotle's account of the pathe in the Rhetoric and reappears in Renaissance political and moral philosophy. Philosophers like Hobbes and Hume, Gross reminds us, had at their disposal a sophisticated approach to the emotional variations that occur within and across cultures. Their understanding of emotion as mediated and socially stratified is, according to Gross, essentially rhetorical. That emotions are produced within a hierarchical social world is evident with feelings like jealousy, pride, and apathy, each of which, Gross observes, reflects not an unchanging...