Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (review)

REVIEWS 261 This study is constructed on a foundation of secondary rather than primary research. Indeed , the words of the main eighteenth-century authors are at times situated in such a dense matrix of recent theory and commentary that historical distance seems to disappear. The language of Hayden White or J.G.A. Pocock is made to seem almost interchangeable with that of Samuel Johnson or Edmund Burke. In a book about history and the creation of consensus, this style is oddly self-reflective: Damrosch seems determined to create the impression of a broad agreement that embraces not only modern historians, but intellectuals from across the centuries. The result is a study that is up-to-date and knowledgeable , but that disappoints its original promise to venture outside the mainstream of opinions and attitudes. Nicholas Hudson University of British Columbia Carol Kay. Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. xi + 286pp. US$29.95. The one thing to be gathered with any certainty from die title of this book is that it is ambitious in its scope, offering as it does to delineate some meaningful "relations" between such wildly divergent authors as the six named. And in the opening pages, Carol Kay confirms the breadth and seriousness of her project—a new theory of fiction which provides, along the way, some chapters in what will be a recharted history of the eighteenth-century novel. Whig histories of the novel have repeatedly connected the growth of the genre with changing images of the self or with the entrenchment of the middle class. In Kay's corrective view, political energies as much as epistemological or sociological trends are recognized as the shaping forces. Complaining of "the tendency in all the movements that feed current literary theory to underestimate the role of political institutions" (p. 15), Kay develops her own flexible if ill-defined approach of employing political theorists from the period to insist on the primacy of the state over the individual. From Hobbes, in particular, she derives the central maxim that "absolutely anything could become political" (p. 3) and learns to read the family as a pervasive image for authority. A Hobbesian yearning for political stability pervades the fiction of a century in which, Kay rightly argues, political violence remained a constant threat to Britain's apparently calm progress. Kay turns first to Defoe, arguing that his early career as propagandist and projector was driven by "a restless desire to shape his nation" (p. 53) and a need to find a place for himself in the machinery of the state. His novels in turn effect a "tension between the desire for supportive associations with other people and the fear of them" (p. 84). Thus in Robinson Crusoe Defoe dwells on contracts establishing authority between master and servant and between governor and subject. And Crusoe himself appears at moments as the shrinking Hobbesian man with his intricate defences and overstuffed larder. And while Moll Flanders, her power limited by her sex, cannot aspire like Crusoe to a Hobbesian position of sovereign "command," she nonetheless manages in her own narrative to attain a "more authoritative position as counselor" (p. 118). In Kay's view, to read either novel solely as spiritual autobiography, as a history of inner growth, is to miss Defoe's political preoccupations. Defoe consistently creates "situations in which law and the principles of authority are unclear" (p. 64), situations in which his protagonists must act to re-establish social order. Next, Hume's ethical thought is brought to bear on Richardson's fiction. For Hume the bond of society springs not from the commands of a sovereign authority but from 262 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 a shared morality built on social intercourse and expressed in a language of approval and disapproval. Pamela's love of praise becomes the ground of a teasing drama of mutual exploration and, ultimately, accommodation between master and servant. "The testing action of the plot and the mode of private letter seem to offer what Hobbes denied, a privileged view into character, one that will guarantee a firm basis of trust for other...