Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton (review)

91 everyday life, the essays in Performing the Everyday are hindered by their simultaneous breadth and brevity. W. B. Gerard Auburn University Montgomery Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. £60; $99. Mr. Dick and Ms. Lupton’s collection of thirteen essays, divided into sections on ‘‘Writing Philosophy,’’ ‘‘Reading Hume,’’ and ‘‘Thinking Literature,’’ reassesses eighteenth-century British philosophy , cogently arguing the Introduction ’s claim: ‘‘[T]he present collection proposes that literary practice—its technologies , genres and responses—was a crucial and indeed constant preoccupation of eighteenth-century philosophy . And eighteenth-century writing— poetry, history, fiction—became a vital force in European culture because it insistently posed and reposed the epistemological and ethical questions it inherited from philosophy.’’ Nicholas Hudson ’s opening essay notes that the early Derrida directs at eighteenth-century empiricism the same charge he directs at Levinas: in the guise of ‘‘reject[ing] ontology ,’’ it ‘‘‘more or less secretly’ relies on ideas of being: it dismisses being as a metaphor, but refuses to weigh the ontological status of metaphors themselves .’’ Thus, like Levinas, empiricism denies clams ‘‘that either ‘presence’ or ‘being’ can be experienced in a form unmediated by language’’ while nonetheless embodying ‘‘a finite, egoistic and instrumental understanding of reality’’ predicated on treating presence or being as unmediated, as empirically given. Derrida’s charge, of course, makes empiricism epistemologically naı̈ve or incoherent and thus a ripe target for deconstruction , but Mr. Hudson traces Locke’s concern to get around the linguistic heritage of realist metaphysics and delineates how those ‘‘who built on Locke’s philosophy were less concerned to protect even the vestige of a realist conception of nature, more fully integrating language and signs into consciousness .’’ Mr. Hudson concludes that empiricism sought to ‘‘do without ‘philosophy ’ in the traditional sense that Heidegger wished to revive,’’ that is, philosophy as an enquiry into unmediated being or recovery of original presence, long before Derrida made that his project. From Hudson’s initial debunking of post-structuralist history of philosophy follows a series of studies charting the self-consciousness about language, and self-aware literariness, of empiricist philosophical discourse. Within this framework, incisive readings of Locke on desire, Shaftesbury’s style, notions of common sense in Reid, and aesthetic judgment in Hume emerge. Of particular interest is the way literary form and philosophical argument enter into dialogic tensions among philosophers and literary writers alike. Jonathan Sadow argues, for example, that ‘‘Sterne’s treatment of historiography’’ invites ‘‘a revision of De Man’s thesis ’’ that ‘‘the novel acts as a sort of ‘depository ’ of philosophical anxiety,’’ for ‘‘continuous engagement’’ rather than ‘‘homology’’ obtains between literature and philosophy in, for example, genre innovation: ‘‘genre was essentially epistemological , and even formulations such as a ‘new species of writing’ recognized the relationship between the creation of a type and a mixed mode.’’ Brian Michael Norton points out, ‘‘To read the novel alongside contemporary treatises 92 on happiness is to see it as a participant in a broader cultural enquiry into the question of what it means to live a good life in the modern world,’’ and observes, ‘‘As Barbauld’s reading of Rasselas makes clear, eighteenth-century thinkers could be as critical of ‘disembodied’ and ‘disembedded’ forms of theorizing as the communitarians of our own day. It is the novel, more than any other form of writing, that promoted this way of reflecting on moral problems.’’ The collection’s success in addressing the entwinement of literary and philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century is inseparable from its redressing the consequences of their institutionalized segregation in our time. One product of our own disciplinary practices has been the hegemony within literary studies of conventional and dated accounts of philosophical history, accounts that naturalize simplistic understandings of empiricism, as well as Western thought in general. In all these respects, Mr. Dick and Ms. Lupton’s volume is timely and much needed. The essays are listed in Contents, p. 130. Donald R. Wehrs Auburn University H. R. FRENCH. The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750. Oxford: Oxford, 2007. Pp. xii ⫹ 305. $125. Mr. French’s The Middle Sort of People makes...