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  • The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance by Kathleen Frederickson
  • Philipp Erchinger (bio)
The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance, by Kathleen Frederickson; pp. xi + 220. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014, $75.00, $26.00 paper.

Even though the current Oxford English Dictionary (OED) entry on “instinct” has not been revised since it was first published in 1900, the meaning of the concept to which it refers is anything but stable and unchanging, as Kathleen Frederickson’s intriguing study makes abundantly clear. Whether “instinct” is used in the sense of “innate impulse,” “natural or spontaneous tendency,” “intuition,” or “unconscious dexterity or skill,” it always seems to inhere in activities and processes that exceed or frustrate the attempt to contain them in predefined ideas or conscious thoughts (qtd. in Frederickson 1–2). While instinct is generally taken to indicate something distinctly other than reason, for instance, it often manifests itself in actions “which appear to be rational,” as the OED concedes, even if they are evidently performed “without conscious design or intentional adaptation of means to ends,” as in the case of nest-building animals (qtd. in Frederickson 1).

Frederickson’s book, The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance, takes up this unresolved tension between the instinctive and [End Page 582] the rational as well as the conscious and the unconscious in order to pursue instinct’s various and shifting implications through a large and highly diverse array of texts which include natural history writing, legal reports, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (along with some of his anthropological sources), physiological as well as philosophical texts, autobiographical memoirs, and fiction. By drawing together these heterogeneous materials, Frederickson seeks to set up a “conversation” between them which is meant to elucidate how the category of instinct mediates between seemingly separate domains, continuously changing its meaning and function in the process of traveling from one of them to another (14). This method of gathering materials from various fields results in an “assemblage” of broadly liberal beliefs and theories among which the notion of instinct is shown to have circulated in transverse ways, engendering various and often surprising connections (14). As Frederickson argues, what all of these theories had in common is that they made use of instinct in order to come to terms with modes of behavior that, although not necessarily opposed to reason, could not quite be accommodated to staple concepts of Enlightenment humanism such as free choice, voluntary action, and independent thought. When Anthony Trollope, for example, has the Duke of St. Bungay in one of his Palliser novels opine that “in politics” he “would a deal sooner trust to instinct than to calculation,” the term denotes a type of practical intelligence or “political knowhow” that shows itself in the ability to adapt swiftly and flexibly to changeable circumstances and local demands (qtd. in Frederickson 10). Combining “intuition and impetus,” the notion of instinct, thus employed, became “a paradigm for skillful and efficient action” that was taken to be particularly well-suited to the fast-paced world of late nineteenth-century modernity, with its “growing urbanization” and industrialization as well as the rapid increase in technological and economic possibilities brought about by it (11, 10, 11).

As the book shows, this way of speaking about instinct conflates not only the biological with the political, but also the savage or primeval with the civilized and advanced. Thus, the Duke’s use of instinct as a kind of pragmatic responsiveness and versatility, coupled with immediate certainty and unburdened by too much ponderous reflection, clearly coincides with the discourse of evolutionary theory in which the same notion refers to the unconscious capacity of organisms to attune their behavior and appearance to changing environments. According to Charles Darwin, more specifically, instinct is a malleable mechanism that contributes not so much to the welfare of the individual as to that of the species. It organizes the activity of the individual in relation to the survival of the population, which, in turn, is regulated by natural selection. Similarly, the Duke identifies instinctive action as a flexible way...

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