Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States by Edward Cahill (review)

Edward Cahill’s Liberty of the Imagination is a compelling and far-reaching study that scrutinizes the transatlantic influence of aesthetic theory during the eighteenth century. Liberty of the Imagination is clearly the work of a capacious intellect deeply engaged with British and American aesthetic politics. Cahill’s study necessarily (and, to my mind, rightly) assumes the primacy of aestheticism in the larger discursive exchanges of the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Because of this assumption, Liberty of the Imagination demands patient attention to the nuanced and, at times, byzantine contours of such theoretical musings. Identifying aesthetic theory as a central cultural discourse capable of addressing competing claims of universality/particularity, self/society, liberty/restraint, and republican democracy/tyrannical coercion, Cahill insists that the imagination’s inherent structure is dialectic, oscillating between unrestrained imaginative creativity and regulatory aesthetic standards. “This dialectic of liberty in aesthetic theory,” he argues, “offered American writers a rich critical vocabulary for articulating the imperatives and challenges of political liberty and, thus, for confronting the social contradictions” of the period (5). Cahill scrutinizes the structural and discursive similarities between aesthetic theory and cultural discourses as varied as constitutional ratification, settlement policies, racial oppression, psychological and medical pathology, and Federalist literary criticism. While some readers may fault his occasional reluctance to fully substantiate direct correlations between aesthetic and political discourse, there is much to celebrate in this rewarding contribution to the field of transatlantic studies and aesthetic theory.

In the first chapter, “Ingenious Disquisition and Controversy,” Cahill sketches the foundational principles of British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory reflected in college curricula, the imported and domestic book trade, and the domestic periodical industry of the early Republic. The deft articulation and leisurely unpacking that characterize Cahill’s discussion of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), James Beat-tie’s Elements of Moral Science (1790), and Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), is outdone only by the exhaustive and laudable archive of early American responses he brings to bear on this body of theory. In particular, his discussion of John Trumbull’s commencement speech to New Haven graduates, Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts (1770), ably foregrounds the centrality of aesthetic theory for the learned classes of the young nation. This discussion is balanced with an impressively succinct yet nuanced overview of the central paradoxes of republican political theory. Working from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689) through the work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Joyce Appleby, and Michael Kammen, Cahill insists on the similarly paradoxical nature of republican civic identity, in which the promotion of individual civil rights is paradoxically offset by the requisite disavowal of such rights to the state. The distinction raised by republican theory between public disinterestedness and private self-interest is identified homo-logically with aesthetic theory’s similarly paradoxical relationship between the liberty of the imagination and the proscriptions of, for example, a universalized standard of taste. Insisting on the politicized tenor of aesthetic philosophy, Cahill avers that “the volatile drama of political liberty” shares a common hermeneutic rubric with “the distinctive formal volatility of the Revolutionary and early national writing,” such that celebrations of liberty, deprecations of constraint, and oscillating shifts between these two polarized categories instantiate the fundamentally aesthetic nature of the republican political problem (15).

The second chapter, “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Revolution,” moves through a discussion of the pastoral, lyrical, and epic poetry of the Revolutionary and early national periods. In the initial context of the nonimportation boycott against British taxation and goods during the 1760s, it draws on works by Elizabeth Graeme...