A Review of Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832

In 1990 then President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain.” Yet ongoing interest in neuroscience suggests that that declaration might have been too modest. Nearly twenty years later, neuroscience, we are still being told, can explain everything from voting patterns to belief in God. Not limited to the traditional sciences, the brain’s (evolving) workings have become a source of fascination and explanation for some scholars in the humanities. Within eighteenth-century studies several recent works have attempted to use cognitive science as a critical tool through which to make sense of the period’s texts. More interesting to my mind, however, has been the body of important work on conceptions of sensibility and sympathy within the eighteenth century itself. After all, while they did not know about mirror neurons—brain cells activated both by performing an act and by simply observing someone else perform it—moral sense philosophers such as David Hume did argue for what he described as a “propensity” of “human nature . . . to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own” (quoted in Gottlieb, 52). For Adam Smith, while it might take more effort than Hume’s account allowed for, we can “experience what other men feel” “by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (quoted in Gottlieb, 33). Smith, Hume, and their contemporaries believed that these powers of sympathy could and did play a significant role in social relations, particularly in imagining economic and political collectivities.

Those who have written about the discourse of sympathy within the eighteenth century have been able to ask questions left aside by cognitive science—such as what that role might be at a particular point in time, or why a specific section of society might have valued and promoted this “propensity,” or at least capacity, at a particular moment of history. Evan Gottlieb’s Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, 2007) asks just such questions. Like Susan Manning before him, Gottlieb brings an analysis of the differing and often shifting theories of mind emerging out of eighteenth-century Scotland together with a critical mapping of the period’s literary negotiations of fragmented socio-political terrains. Like her, Gottlieb asks why it might have been that men working within distinctly Scottish institutions—the Scottish universities, law, and church—were particularly invested in a discourse of sympathy that promised to bridge both individual and sociopolitical divides. While Manning’s Fragments of Union (2002) focuses on Scotland and North America, Gottlieb trains his sights on the more often examined Anglo-Scots relations and the formation of a post–1707 British identity.¹ His contention that “the discourse of sympathy, as developed by the Scottish Enlightenment and then deployed and disseminated by a variety of writers from both sides of the Tweed, was central to the formation of this new identity” (14) manages to make his take on that oft-regarded identity formation a fresh one.

The stakes are clear. For Gottlieb, the discourse of sympathy underwrites “a more secular, more popular, and therefore more modern form of Britishness than anything that preceded it” (14). In this claim, Gottlieb situates his work amongst an important body of emerging work on the Scottish Enlightenment—Manning’s among them, James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1999), Ian Duncan’s Scott’s Shadow (2007), are other formidable contributions to this field—that illuminates the relationship between Scottish Enlightenment thought and modernity itself.² Gottlieb refers to what he helpfully calls “knowledge techniques of the Scottish Enlightenment,” emphasizing that the force of the writings he studies and their modernity are not so much any specific argument about or model of national identity so much as the ways of knowing and feeling they articulate and advance. Gottlieb describes the ways of apprehending others, of imagining how others know and feel, and how these imaginings might have consolidated social and political bonds in eighteenth-century Britain...