The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism, and Political Economy in Eighteenth Century Britain

by Motooka,Wendy

• ISBN13: 9780415179416
• ISBN10: 0415179416
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-08-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Wendy Motooka contends that the "Age of Reason" was actually an Age of Reasons. Joining imaginative literature, moral philosophy, and the emerging discourse of the new science, she seeks to historicize the meaning of eighteenth-century "reason" and its supposed opposites: quixotism and sentimentalism. Reading novels by the Fieldings, Lennox and Sterne alongside the works of Adam Smith, Motooka argues that today's social sciences are the legacy of sentimentalism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
List of abbreviations	xi
Introduction: the quixotic problem	1	(31)
Defining the quixotic	2	(4)
The quixotic case of Captain Mostyn	6	(11)
Quixotism, feeling and sentimentalism	17	(11)
Sentimentalism and the "science of man"	28	(4)
1 Turning authority into jest: tyrants, pedants, quixotes and enthusiasts in the early eighteenth century	32	(42)
Ridicule, reason and revolution	33	(5)
Reason in context: quixotism and arbitrary power	38	(6)
Quixotism and the Sacheverell affair	44	(9)
Universal quixotism	53	(9)
Rebellious subjects: gender, arbitrary power and the natural order	62	(12)
2 Common sense, moral sense and nonsense: sentimentalism and the empirical study of invisible things	74	(51)
Authority, romance and the Royal Society	76	(18)
Seeing the "invisible union": empirical method, moral virtue and sentimental quixotism	94	(15)
The knowledge of benevolence: sentimental quixotism and Sarah Fielding's David Simple	109	(16)
3 Coming to a bad end: sentimentalism, The Female Quixote and the power of interest	125	(17)
4 Seeing the general view: Henry Fielding and quixotic authorship	142	(31)
Rational men and quixotic women	143	(6)
Rational men and quixotic authorship	149	(12)
Quixotism and Jacobitism	161	(8)
Sentimentalism and Sophia's body	169	(4)
5 De gustibus non est disputandum: Tristram Shandy and "the production of a rational Being"	173	(25)
Certain standards of taste: Hume and Gerard	174	(5)
Disputing against hobby-horses: Shandean rationality	179	(12)
The "already written" law of "God and reason"	191	(7)
6 Laying down the general rule: Adam Smith, impartial spectators and the philosopher's trade	198	(33)
Imagined philosophy, Newtonian method and the laughing artisan	199	(6)
Impartial spectators and the man within	205	(15)
The Philosopher's trade	220	(11)
Epilogue: "The grandsons of Adam Smith"	231	(6)
Notes	237	(25)
Bibliography	262	(13)
Index	275