The Enlightenment of Sympathy Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today

by Frazer, Michael L.

• ISBN13: 9780195390667
• ISBN10: 0195390660
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Enlightenment is commonly referred to as 'The Age of Reason.' The term signifies the triumph of rationalism over emotionalism and sentiment in the late eighteenth century. Rationalists, the most famous of whom was Kant, posited a mind that was hierarchically arranged, with reason sitting atop of the passions. Yet as Michael Frazer argues, there were in fact two enlightenments--the sentimentalist enlightenment and the rationalist one--and the Enlightenment of Sympathy reclaims the importance of the former. As he explains, enlightened sentimentalism encompassed more than 'mere feeling' (as its critics claimed) and in fact harnessed the human mind in full to offer a positive account of the sentiments' centrality to moral and political reflection. Rather than treating the mind as a hierarchy, sentimentalists offered a more egalitarian theory of it. The mind, in their view, was integrated, and its various compartments were equals. Many of the most famous Enlightenment thinkers can rightly be called sentimentalists--Hume, Smith, and Herder, to name a few--yet the rationalist vision of politics has proven to be more influential. In fact, the most important political philosopher of liberalism of the past half century, John Rawls, relied on the rationalist enlightenment for his most important work. By reclaiming this equally important strand of enlightenment thought, Frazer not only offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of the Enlightenment political thought. His argument will also enrich contemporary political theory by integrating a more behaviorally-oriented and psychologically complex account of the mind into the corpus of liberal philosophy.

Author Biography

Michael L. Frazer is an Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance for contemporary political theory. Professor Frazer has also published articles on Maimonides, Nietzsche, John Rawls and Leo Strauss in such journals as Political Theory and The Review of Politics. Before arriving at Harvard, he studied at Yale and Princeton Universities, and received a postdoctoral appointment in the Political Theory Project at Brown University. He lives in Somerville, MA with his wife Coral and son Oren.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Tale of Two Enlightenments

Sentimentalism Before Hume

The New Science of Human Nature

Religious and Metaphysical Foundations

Theories of Justice

Hume's Free-Standing Sentimentalism

Sympathy and the Moral Sentiments

Moral Development

Hume's Normative Theory

Hume's Conservative Sentimentalism

Hume's Theory of Justice

The Sentimentalist Case Against Hume's Theory

Adam Smith's Liberal Sentimentalism

The Alleged Incompatibility of Sentimentalism with Individualism

The Space Between Actor and Spectator: Sympathy and Moral Judgment

The Space Between Actors: Justice and Natural Jurisprudence

Kant's Abandonment of Sentimentalism

The Critical-Period Position on the Foundations of Morals

The Critical-Period Normative Evaluation of Sympathy

The Critical-Period Theory of Affects and Passions

A Contrasting Pre-Critical Position

Herder's Pluralist Sentimentalism

Sentimentalism and the Problem of Diversity

From Sympathy to Diversity

From Diversity to Empathetic Understanding

From Empathetic Understanding to Justice

Sentimentalism Today

Sentimentalism and Social Science

Sentimentalism and Normative Theory

Sentimentalism and Political Practice

Bibliography

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