Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1

Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain

By Michael McKeon

Bucknell University Press

The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Unparalleled in its range and erudition, McKeon’s far-reaching and boldly synthetic intellectual history challenges critical accounts that abstract the conceptual and methodological innovations of Enlightenment from the moment of their emergence. Essential reading for anyone interested in ongoing debates over the role of the Enlightenment in global modernity. Lynn Festa, author of Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Cult

Michael McKeon has written a deeply learned history of the English Enlightenment which draws on both literary sources and philosophical and political texts. He finds a series of repeated patterns of thought as he takes us through considerations of tradition, civil and religious liberty, secularization, the economy, and modern systems of gender and sexuality. It is an exhilarating and challenging book. Randolph Trumbach, coeditor of A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages

MICHAEL MCKEON is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. He is the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, and many articles, as well as the editor of Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach.

Introduction
Periodizing the Enlightenment
Understanding Enlightenment Thought
Enlightenment Separation and Conflation
Experimental Method
Quantification
Politics
(Civil) Society
The Public Sphere
Capitalist and Enlightenment Universality
Imperialism
Macro-pastoralism
Conjectural History
Slavery

1 Tradition as Tacit Knowledge
Tradition
Ideology
The Aesthetic

2 Civil and Religious Liberty: A Case Study in Secularization
Accommodation
Civil Society
The Empirical Criterion
The Sociology of Group Formation
Accommodating God’s Will: Thoughts, Speech, Actions
Defining Spheres of Discourse
The Three Negative Liberties
Secularization

3 Virtual Reality
Religion
Corporation
Polity and Economy
Capitalist Universality
False Consciousness and Uneven Development
The Commodity Form
The Trope of the Fetish
Parody
The Trope of the Invisible Hand
Conceptual Abstraction
Capitalist and Enlightenment Universality
Superstructure and Dialectics
Conjectural History
Polity and Society
The Public Sphere
The Two Publics
Print
Experimental Science
Experience and Experiment
Instruments: Experimental versus Artful
Extending Experiment I: Political Philosophy
Extending Experiment II: Beyond Observables
The Imagination

4 Gender and Sex, Status and Class
From Patriarchalism to Modern Patriarchy
From Domestic Economy to Domestic Ideology
Separate Spheres?
Sex and Sex Consciousness
The Two-Sex Model?
The Three-Gender System: Conflation I
Gender as Culture: Conflation II
The Dialectic of Sexuality and Class
The Common Labor of Sexuality and Class
Sodomy and Aristocracy
Types of Masculinity

5 Biography, Fiction, Personal Identity
Biography, Fiction, and the Common
Biography, Fiction, and the Actual
Biography, Fiction, and the Virtual
The Self behind Self-Fashioning
From Secret History to Novel
The Rise of Personal Identity

6 Historical Method
Distance and Proximity
Historicizing Empiricism
Historical Method: Matching Particulars
and Generals
Dialectical Opposition I: History as Focalizations
of Perspective
Dialectical Opposition II: History as Moments
of Temporality
Dialectical Opposition III: History as Levels
of Structure

Acknowledgments
Notes
Source Notes
Index

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