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With The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction, John Robertson took on a daunting task: summing up a vast field in a thin pocketbook. It was all the more courageous of him, then, to include in the fifth and final chapter (“The Enlightenment in Philosophy and History”) succinct sketches of some of the Enlightenment's most conspicuous critics among twentieth-century philosophers and social theorists, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Michel Foucault, Alastair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty. Robertson calls for a rapprochement, beyond his book's compass, between postmodernism and historians’ defense of the Enlightenment's “modern” legacy. “A greater degree of mutual respect” is overdue.

In the previous four chapters, the philosophers’ critiques play hardly any role in Robertson's account of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. That may be just as well. The strength of this Introduction lies in its economical syntheses of developments in the historians’ Enlightenment over the past half-century. But the book also tells us something regrettable about the state of things in the historians’ Enlightenment. It marks, almost despite itself, an internal divide between intellectual and cultural history. It points to the need for an intra-disciplinary rapprochement—one that would not just sit the two subfields beside each other at the table, but would commit them to discussing the shared pleasures of the meal.

What Robertson calls his “intellectual-historical approach” is at its best in his fine-edged corrective to conventional wisdom on the Enlightenment's “hostility to religion” (Chapter 2). Chapter 4 (“Enlightening the Public”) necessarily enters cultural history, but it will probably get at best a lukewarm reaction from historians who see the future of Enlightenment studies in the social and cultural processes in which Enlightenment ideas were produced, disseminated and received. Robertson takes pains to give credit to the new cultural history, but has serious doubts about some of its claims. He wants to return us to the economic basics of cultural change. What produced a public was the rapid expansion of relatively cheap print, which made possible a new status and independence for authors; and it was above all in the proliferating coffee houses of Europe's great cities that print and conversation fed each other to form opinion. When it comes to recent work on Freemasonry he is dismissive, despite the contributions of Margaret Jacob and others. “It is difficult,” he writes, “ to see what intellectual purposes could be served by membership [in a Masonic lodge]”; Freemasonry was not likely to have served as “an inspiration or a conduit” for Enlightenment ideas about religion and society (88–90). Robertson's test here seems to be whether Masonic lodges were intellectual innovators, as most of the individual authors in his book are. He misses the point of Jacob's cultural approach, which explains how Masons collectively put the values of a political culture into practice, not creating but “living” them in a way that formed some lodges into microcosms of a constitutional order. The cultural question is not how ideas came into being, but how they shaped and were shaped by a particular kind of eighteenth-century sociability. Jacob documents this process far more convincingly than Robertson will allow.Footnote ¹⁰

Robertson is not simply critical of some findings of the new cultural history; he finds the entire enterprise menacing. The chapter begins with a warning: “there remains a danger that the cultural history of the Enlightenment may submerge the intellectual, by treating the arguments of philosophers as secondary to the institutions and the media through which they were propagated and received” (83). In Chapter 3 (“Bettering the Human Condition”) philosophical arguments are given primacy; and not surprisingly, this is the chapter that drives the overarching theme of the book, the one in which Robertson shifts from critical synthesis of others’ research to an argument from his own work on what really matters about the Enlightenment. The argument was originally laid out in his magisterial The Case for the Enlightenment (2005), using Scotland and Naples as its case studies. Now length constraints require him to state definitively the larger case, though he simply wants to “suggest” it. We find the Enlightenment at its most original in the “intensive enquiry into the motives, causes, and prospects of human betterment.” It was a matter of learning “why we are, or have become, sociable, and how societies developed in history.” In a textually and chronologically sharper formulation: “the core of the Enlightenment's contribution to Western thought” is “political economy as the prospect of human betterment in this world rather than the next, in the present over the past,” conceived historically as “the progress of society” (80).

For this argument Hobbes and Kant are the bookends, each in his way denying that man is naturally social. The notion of progress that Robertson has in mind—the progress that human beings realize for and by themselves—is to be found in more positive thinking about the role of natural sociability in humanity's past and future. The main line of descent, from natural law to political economy, will be familiar to intellectual historians of the Enlightenment: among others, Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Locke, Barbeyrac, Nicole, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, Melon, Montesquieu, Quesnay, Robertson, Gibbon, and Genovesi. In Robertson's careful readings, the belief in human beings’ capacity to better their conditions—or in a word, the belief in progress—does not develop in a straight line; rather, it forms within a field of argument that extends over a century, with variation after variation. Rousseau is the odd man out, decrying the moral costs of progress. It is a measure of Robertson's commitment to balance that he devotes about as much space to the Citizen of Geneva as he does to Adam Smith, his culminating figure.

However obvious the theme of progress may be to specialists, it is essential to understanding the Enlightenment and deserves the emphasis Robertson gives it. And yet his way of tracing the theme invites us to take issue with him. We are left with a somewhat narrow understanding of how progress was conceived and what ways of thinking shaped the cluster of norms and values that made it such a compelling concept. A qualified exception is his discussion of Enlightenment Europe's treatment of “other, apparently backward peoples.” He stresses the Enlightenment's openness to diversity and its critique of colonial exploitation and mistreatment. And yet he also acknowledges that arguments for polygenesis “permitted what appears to be a straightforward racial hierarchy,” with white Europeans at the heights and black Africans at the bottom (62). One wishes he had pondered deeper. It is now arguable that the logic of racial inequality was not an inconsistency—a failure to be consequential—in the Enlightenment's universalist openness to diversity, as Robertson seems to suggest, but rather was inherent in the core tensions in historical thinking about human progress and the prospects for human equality on a global scale. The reader of an introduction to the Enlightenment, however brief, ought to be made aware of the highly complicated question whether the construction of racial hierarchies was integral to some Enlightenment thinking about progress, and whether thought about race—intimately bound up with stadial history, anthropology, and the physical sciences—paved the way for the ideology of “scientific” racism in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹

The explanation for this absence may lie in Robertson's resolute historicism. We do not see the Enlightenment through the lenses of modern political ideologies. His question—a rigorously historicist question—is what was new and original about a text when it appeared. He is well aware that the belief in progress (human betterment) was not simply to be found at the rarified heights of a few original thinkers; it was one of the broadest currents in an irrevocable sea change that flowed across wide stretches of educated society and culture. Precisely because it was a sea change, however, his focus on canonical texts in moral philosophy, history, and political economy and his way of reading them seem inadequate to explain it.

I should stress that Robertson is by no means a typical practitioner of the “Cambridge school” of the history of political thought (if we assume that there has been such a school, with a concern, bordering on the phobic, to avoid any form of social contextualization as reductionist). He has been a key figure, in fact, in broadening the notion of “context” in the field from a virtually self-contained zone of political languages to include the shaping role of social and economic structures. Still, he does work within an anglophone tradition, dating back at least to the 1960s, in which the political content of the intellectual—one particular province in intellectual history—has pride of place. My point is not that in tracing the idea of progress Robertson should have done cultural history rather than an intellectual history that has become dispensable. The question is how to configure as an integral whole a close examination of more or less familiar texts in intellectual history and an examination of the logic of a value system or, more precisely, the logics of intermingling value systems.

In an iconic remark Robertson quotes from The Wealth of Nations, Smith expressed confidence that “the natural effort of every individual to better his condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security,” would, by its own power, generate “wealth and prosperity” (80). There surely was such a pairing of material progress with labor conceived as self-interested market agency in a commercial society, but it must be understood as one strain in a larger set of discourses, much more diffuse than the argumentation of political economy, that gained purchase from the late seventeenth century onward. Economic benefit was one among many implications in thinking about progress; the others were manifested in everything from new ideals of professional work and a new academic research ethos to movements for educational reform, penal reform, and the abolition of slavery. They take us into what intellectual historians might consider the underbrush of Enlightenment texts: autobiographies, diaries, personal correspondence, sermons, pamphlets, newspapers, novels that were widely read then but have fallen into obscurity, and so on. To rephrase our question: how do we bind together such sources and more canonical texts without producing an excessively impressionistic pastiche?Footnote ¹²

To posit political economy as the “core” of the Enlightenment's contribution is to leave on the sidelines huge swaths of social and cultural logic in the belief in progress that may have been more magnetic and more pervasive. One has to reach deeper into religious cultures than Robertson has done, with particular attention to ways of conceiving moral progress through an ethos of agency as self-emptying or self-transcendence that does not square well with Smith's notion of material self-betterment.Footnote ¹³ Perhaps the most imposing obstacle that the idea of progress had to overturn was the ancient Christian view that God had imposed labor on man as punishment for Original Sin (“by the sweat of thy brow”), which required a rejection, or at least a considerable modification, both theological and cultural, of the doctrine of Original Sin that had been fortified in European Protestantism by the seventeenth-century revival of Augustinianism. Another obstacle was an aristocratic social aesthetic of leisure, a tenacious cultural imperium that stigmatized any form of labor as dishonorable and made freedom from labor the only fully human freedom. We might call this one of the logics of the old-regime culture of honor. Its increasingly assertive rival was a revaluation of labor as the route to social honor, conceived now as the individual's self-validation in his own and others’ eyes, and in some cases as essential to a new economy of salvation in which concupiscence acceded to the capacity for self-perfection. The improvement of society required the self-improvement, or “self-perfecting,” of its individual members, and central to the latter was the habitual practice of self-disciplined labor that the term “industry” evoked. In the new celebration of patriotism in the second half of the eighteenth century it was this industrious labor that made the individual “useful”; and it was the degree of his usefulness that should determine his social recognition and rewards.

We have entered a world of social and cultural psychology with widening circles, only one of which has to do with market agency. Disciplined work habits were construed as a kind of self-determination, allowing the individual to appropriate his own natural resources—his talents or “powers”—for a willed purpose, rather than leaving them subject to the “chance” operation of nature's blind forces. In Enlightenment Calvinism this logic reshaped the meaning of life as struggle; the struggle between sanctification and sin—between God's saving grace and Satan's seductions—acceded to the struggle between the imperatives of character, conceived as habituated action, and the threat of its dissolution in the inertia of indolence and in its result, the depressive's state of hypochondria or melancholy. “Improvement” was conceived as a linear progress, like the process of collective improvement to which it contributed. At the same time, though, the believer's active pursuit of his own life plan had moral meaning only because, in the new economy of salvation, the specialized division of labor—the structural context of his pursuit—was the instrument of a Providential Design. In this distinctly Protestant Enlightenment the division of labor became the key social mediation between the Absolute and the individual life course.Footnote ¹⁴

Robertson's book follows only a few of the threads running through the quilt of discourses that made progress a central idea of the Enlightenment. And yet in a small book these threads crowd out others; little space, and in some cases no space, is left for other subjects that might be considered indispensable, even in a necessarily short book. Changes in the cultural and material conditions of natural science, which might be said to have embodied the idea of progress, receive hardly any attention. It is not simply that much of the most original work in Enlightenment studies, and particularly in the new cultural history, has been in the history of science; concepts of “self-organization” and organic self-generation in natural philosophy and experimental science that challenged Newtonian mechanism in the eighteenth century tended to find echoes in social and economic conceptions of progress, many of them retaining some kind of providential framework.Footnote ¹⁵ Robertson clearly does not mean to perpetuate the shopworn stereotype of the Enlightenment as the triumph of reason over unruly passions fueled by the imagination; but we learn almost nothing about the new reverence for the spontaneity of emotional cognition and the imagination's imagistic powers, seen as essential counterpoints to abstractions of reason that seemed to coerce and dehumanize. Such developments were not deviations from the Enlightenment: they were integral to what it was. Making readers see that would require some attention to aesthetic thought and the recurring disagreements about what constituted “taste” and how it related to morality. Perhaps most striking is the absence of even brief references to imaginative literature and especially fiction. One would hardly know that there was a literary Enlightenment: French neo-classicism, the novel, the literature of sentiment and sensibility, the Sturm und Drang, the German classsicism of the late Enlightenment. In fiction, sometimes echoing natural science, we find more or less secular notions of self-organization that are quite relevant to thinking about progress. We also find the other side of the Enlightenment, the one that plumbed the whirlpools of subjectivity beneath the calm waters of reason, and that sometimes championed the potentially explosive sense imagery of the imagination over the coercive abstractions of reason. None of these can be understood as exceptions to Enlightenment thought, much less as a “counter-Enlightenment”; they were important voices in the field of argument that was the Enlightenment. Postmodernist critics, had they given them due attention, might not have misconceived the Enlightenment as the fatal turn to the idolization of reason in modernity.

Robertson had to make choices in a very tight space. But his choices were not due simply to space limitations; they serve an argument that operates within a hierarchy of priorities, with argumentation in political thought forming the spine of Enlightenment thought. One has to ask whether in that regard the book represents what was central to the Enlightenment, or what has been central to the prodigious anglophone achievements over the past half-century in the history of early modern political thought. As much as I admire his accomplishment, I'm inclined to the latter view.

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Within the discipline of history, biography as a genre has experienced an upswing, much of it experimental, that would not have been imagined several decades ago, when old-style social history was in the ascendancy and biography was considered a fossil. Some of the most interesting work in the new cultural history makes the biographical subject a nodal point for networks of knowledge production and exchange, reconstructed above all through far-flung friendships and correspondence. In Hume: An Intellectual Biography James Harris devotes much space to Hume's circles of friends and men of letters, but it would distort his purpose to say that he used Hume to reconstruct such a network. Set against the new biography, Harris's Hume might seem to be a largely old-fashioned, even regressive, effort.

What accounts, then, for its originality? Harris has made a crucial choice, surprising for a scholar whose career has been in the history of philosophy, and it has had a huge payoff. He was uncomfortable with a divide in Hume studies. One side had it that Hume's real work as a philosopher was done in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), whose full agenda he left incomplete at age twenty-six. From then on he gave up on philosophy; the rest of his writings are not of philosophical importance. For the other side everything that came after the Treatise must be related to it; it all fits together as a unified and systematic study of human nature. Harris found a false choice here between exaggerated disjuncture and exaggerated continuity. The way around it—Harris's crucial step—was “to take seriously Hume's description of himself “of having intended from the beginning to live a life of a man of letters,” or, in Harris's more precise phrasing, “a philosophical man of letters.” To take this aspiration seriously is to place Hume within a historical category of self-understanding, the way in which eighteenth-century authors thought of themselves, that persists through all his changes in genres and subjects. We come to understand at once what was typical about Hume's career and “what was distinctive about [his] construal of the literary vocation” (2, original emphasis). We learn that Hume was not a professional philosopher, much less an academic one, though so much scholarship has departed from the premise that he was, drawing him into a modern world of specialization he would not have been willing to enter. A number of contexts are opened up, including the reforming Scottish universities, eighteenth-century authorship and publication strategies, “polite” sociability and literary culture, a world of friendships, the battles in Scotland between Whigs and Jacobites and between Presbyterian “moderates” and the orthodox clergy, and the fierce partisanship of the British political melee.

This is not to say that Harris abandons the history of philosophy. Quite the contrary; though this is a biography of Hume as a man of letters, it studiously ignores Van Damme's rejection of the territorial claims of the history of philosophy. Perhaps most striking is Harris's extended discussion of Hume's philosophical paths to the Treatise. Harris works with a concept of influence that is seldom found in intellectual biographies. He does so partly out of necessity; whatever working notes and drafted sections Hume produced in writing the Treatise, they have been lost, and there is scant evidence of what he was reading from 1734, when he finally got the writing of the Treatise off the ground, to 1739. Harris nonetheless pushes ahead in what he acknowledges to be a more or less speculative interpretation, opening himself to the charge of resorting to little more than educated guessing. What makes his reading a tour de force is that his guessing is so philosophically informed and impeccably reasoned that it ceases to be guessing. Since in this case there is so little evidence of what books the author read and what he got from them, Harris works backward. Having identified what in the Treatise echoes, in more or less modified tones, philosophical texts spread over nearly a century, he then infers how Hume cut an original path through the field of argument that those texts formed. It is a field with multiple voices, including Locke, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Mandeville. It threatens to become a labyrinth with no exit, since Hume seldom completely rejected one argument as he was drawn to another. In no small part because he works here as a historian of philosophy, Harris provides the conceptual acuity needed to guide the reader through the twisting corridors. The result is a quite original reading of the Treatise and its making. We now have an expanded understanding of Malebranche's influence on Hume. Contrary to the usual view that Hume, like so many of his contemporaries, was intent on refuting Mandeville, Harris demonstrates convincingly Mandeville's influence on the Treatise. We exit the labyrinth with a deeply informed awareness of how much Hume engaged other thinkers, which in turn clarifies how he pursued his own course and arrived at unprecedented conclusions in the Treatise. I can only summarize three of these that many of his readers, including friends who were mostly like-minded, found alarmingly wrongheaded. Hume denied that there is a “Will” acting as “a kind of executive power in the mind”; that the practice of virtue is a natural way of life (though “his conception of human nature is intensely, almost claustrophobically, social”); and that there is a self, understood as a continuous unitary subjectivity (115).

In 1752 Hume began an immensely taxing project, The History of Great Britain, whose sixth and final volume appeared only nine years later. It brought him the international fame as a man of letters he had always sought. His historical narrative is not without philosophical reflections, but this is not the kind of philosophy he had attempted in the Treatise. It is a measure of Harris's commitment to understanding Hume as the man of letters he had aspired to be that he devotes more space to the History (102 of 472 pages of text) than to the Treatise. Hume's research was almost entirely in printed sources available in the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, of which he was the librarian from 1752 to 1757. Again Harris had to work backward, often identifying what histories Hume read from echoes of them in his own work or simply from affinities with them. Now we have the voice of the intellectual historian, positioning the numerous histories within an argument between Old Whigs, Court Whigs, and Tories at the core of English politics from the late seventeenth century onward. Did the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as the Tories had it, confirm the rights and liberties of an “ancient constitution” that Tudor and Stuart monarchs had respected ? Or did it, in the Whig version, demolish Stuart usurpations and, contrary to the myth of an ancient constitution, create an English liberty that had not existed? Harris's steady focus on this argument keeps the trek from history to history from losing direction. Precisely because Harris is so meticulous in tracing the influences on Hume, he can distinguish between what was conventional (or just borrowed) and what was original about his historical thought. He shows us how Hume, standing above the partisanship even as his reading immersed him in it, achieved an unprecedented impartiality. “He clearly did not want his History to look like it was just another move in (the) ongoing political argument”—and he just as clearly succeeded. He was certainly no Tory, and if he can be said to have been a Whig, he was a very skeptical one (49).

Hume's determination to remain impartial in the History was anchored in his larger ambition that all his writings exemplify the “philosophical spirit.” Here is where Hume the man of letters and Hume the philosopher bond. Hume wanted to be “independent” in practicing “a habit of mind, a style of thinking, and of writing, such as could in principle be applied to any subject whatsoever.” The proof of independence was the effort at detachment, “attempting to disengage [his readers] as much as possible from their ordinary beliefs and sentiments, rather than of compromising the objectivity of the philosopher” (18–19). In places Harris is more than willing to admit that Hume fell short of this ideal. What matters is the ideal itself: in principle philosophical detachment brings readers into a neutral discursive space whose occupants rise above everyday life, from particular ends to general principles, and everything is open to criticism. This is the one issue on which I wish that Harris, as a philosopher, had taken us deeper into a problematic in Hume's thought. Integral to Hume's narrative of self-discovery in the Treatise was the realization that the philosopher, like everyone else, could not think or communicate from, in Thomas Nagel's famous phrase, the “view from nowhere.” Seeking such a place only plunged him into the “philosophical melancholia and delirium” which the radical skeptic inevitably brought on himself. Though able and obligated to be more critical than others about the particular life forms of his place and time, the philosopher operated within the same “custom” to which everyone else was confined, with custom meaning something like Pierre Bourdieu's doxa of collective assumptions that are seated so deep as to be beyond critical questioning. These were serviceable and indeed indispensable fictions; without them daily life in a material world and a web of social relations would be impossible. To what extent, then, could the philosopher and his virtual community of interlocutors take the high ground of critical detachment from common preconceptions and “opinion”? Were they not all severely limited in that regard? There may be no satisfying answer, in part because it is often not clear whether Hume is using the term “custom” in a strictly epistemological sense (as in perceptions of cause and effect and selfhood) or a more broadly social and cultural sense (as in assumptions about gender differences). In any case, Harris might respond that answering the question is a task for the philosopher as philosopher, not for the intellectual biographer as historian.

If Harris leaves us a bit puzzled about the relationship between critique and custom, his way of removing the central divide in Hume studies—on how Hume's thought changed, both in content and in expression, over the course of his writing career—is quite clear. Not everything spun off the Treatise; some of the essays simply broke different intellectual ground. For the more philosophically grounded essays Harris becomes eclectic in the best sense by venturing into a mode of interpretation that most historians of philosophy and intellectual historians do not frontally engage: the question of “style” in an author's prose, and to a degree in his thought. That Hume adopted a “polite” style is well known. Harris wants to show that in Hume's case, as in so many others well known to literary scholars, style is not just a way of representing thought; the literary form and the intellectual content are inseparable. As an authorial tactic Hume's change of style required a new voice and a new selectivity in presenting his thought. But in using the essay form to restate his philosophy for a broad reading public, Hume neither dumbed it down nor retreated from it by shaving off the more radical skeptical critiques that were likely to shock. His aim was to “ensure that its radicalism did not prevent it from being rejected out of hand” (248, 265). Above all in this analysis of style, Harrris shows that the scholarship he is correcting, positing either a disjuncture or a continuity between the Treatise and the essays, has bequeathed us a false choice.

To Harris, Hume's most admirable trait lay in maintaining cordial friendships with people with whom he fundamentally disagreed. He did so in a highly contentious age, with vilification routinely substituting for reasonable argument. Though Harris clearly has not written a Plutarchian exemplary life, he does implicitly make Hume a reproach to our own times—and we certainly need one. If Hume emerges as a personality, however, it is often obliquely. There is a certain tension between Harris the historical biographer and Harris the philosopher. Harris tells us that Hume wanted his readers to engage him in a philosophical “discursive space,” not making connections between his writings and his personal convictions, focusing only on the ideas and arguments “without trying to second-guess what someone's intentions might be” and “what kind of person it might be who could write in this way about that topic” (24). If we follow Quentin Skinner's distinction between an intended meaning and a motive, “intentions” in Harris's usage is closer to the notion of motive. Often the implication would seem to be that in reading a text, the biographer, like Hume himself, can and should bracket out the particular personality—the individuality, one might say—of its subject. Emulating Hume, he will keep the biographical subject, as a particular person, out of the conversation. If we are to avoid all sorts of psychological (and social) reductionism, we must obviously avoid collapsing the text completely into authorial particularity. But if we want to exclude that particularity altogether, what is the point of doing a biography? Is it possible to ignore intentions qua motives and still write one? To say that Hume was a man of letters is, after all, to give him a particular identity. In the essays he often becomes more particular, purposefully not speaking in a voice of detachment. In the first part of “Of Essay Writing” he poses as a gallant. In “Of the Middle Station of Life” he not only speaks to a social group; he speaks as one of its members. Van Damme's solution to this challenge—to shift the weight almost entirely to “philosophical action” (as opposed to “philosophical content”)—offers little help. It makes motive collective, when the questions that Hume's texts raise are about what I have called in another context the conflictual coherence of the author.

Harris's caution about subjecting his subject to psychological probing is often justified. In a society woven together by myriad dependencies, he tells us frequently, Hume insisted on remaining independent to write what he pleased, without the constraints of political clientage, service to a prominent family, and even the obligations of academic employment. As the sources from Hume's childhood and youth are so sparse, Harris wisely does not attempt an etiology of this character trait. At other times Harris does entertain the possibility that a personal intention (or motive) lies behind the philosophical import of a text, but stops well short of turning the possibility into an explanation. A qualified exception is Harris's use of Hume's letter to a London physician in 1734, in which he described the physical and mental crisis he had suffered since beginning his attempt to write the Treatise in 1729. Harris describes this crisis as a “breakdown,” a “depression,” and “a nervous and physical collapse” (80). He makes the crisis at once psychological and philosophical. Under the influence of Shaftesbury, Hume has sought a sense of direction through Stoicism. Following Hume's self-diagnosis, Harris attributes his “collapse” to his attempt to live the philosophical life of the Stoic practicing solitary meditation and relentless labor. He strongly suggests—but leaves tentative—that it was by thinking through Mandeville, Hutcheson, Bayle, and Malebranche that Hume worked his way out of his breakdown (35–6, 44–5).

Harris is still more cautious in dealing with Hume's famous first-person narrative of his own psychic drama in the Conclusion to Book 1 of the Treatise. Hume relates how as a radical skeptic he fell into the “forlorn solitude” of a “philosophical melancholy and delirium,” stranded on a “barren rock” in a “boundless ocean,” and how “nature” pulled him from futile abstractions to the more sociable life of a moderate skeptic. Harris suggests that Hume may not have actually undergone the crisis he describes; perhaps the “pathos-laden description was nothing more than an artful way of clarifying the proper relation” between radical skepticism and “a commitment to experimental science” (100). Hume certainly does lay on the pathos (and the metaphors), but I wonder whether Harris is leading us into to a false either/or choice between the “artful” and reliable personal testimony. In his concern with style Hume sought to give himself a rhetorical persona or, more precisely, to make his writing a particular kind of rhetorical performance. I would suggest that in Hume's case such a persona was not artful, if artful connotes a fabrication, but a mediation between his subjectivity and his authorial identity. An artful performance is not necessarily an artful fiction. Indeed the choice of a persona may be rooted in intensely personal experience, even if the explanation of it takes the form of a fictionalized narrative. In trying to detach argumentation in the text from “intention,” Harris is too constrained by the conventional inhibitions of a pure history of philosophy. The point is not that he should have written a psychological biography, but simply that we need more probing into the intertwining of the philosophical and the author's unique subjectivity through the literary properties of the text.

I am in danger of carping. Offering one tour de force after another, Harris's Hume will quickly become a classic in both the philosophers’ Enlightenment and the historians’ Enlightenment. It is a reminder that innovations in form do not necessarily yield originality of understanding. Not all is in the doing, but much is. Harris gives us a new Hume not despite his reliance on conventional forms of biography, but because he practices them so well. Philosophers will have to contend with the fact that Hume's ambition to be a polite man of letters was integral to his philosophical projects, and hence that he was not a professional philosopher in the modern academic sense; that the meaning of his texts lies as much in their style and rhetoric as in their demonstrative reasoning; that much of Hume's writing is imbricated in the particulars of eighteenth-century British politics, which make the story all the more fascinating. Practiced with this mastery, contextual intellectual biography conveys the historical significance and originality of Hume's thought by coming at him through what preceded him and what surrounded him, rather than through the lenses of what followed him. This approach poses questions that could not be answered, and probably would not be asked, if context were equated simply with social networks and institutions and media of cultural exchange, as revealing as those may be. A figure like Hume cannot be understood without situating him within the intellectual field of argument in which he participated, and that requires the kind of close attention to texts that is now usually wanting in the new directions the historians’ Enlightenment has been taking.

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If we look back on “postmodernism” as a mere flashpoint, the short-lived wrong turn that its dismissive critics would like it to have been, we turn a blind eye to the fact that some of its interpretive strategies now have and will continue to have a shaping presence in Enlightenment studies, and with beneficial results. A case in point is Genevieve Lloyd's Enlightenment Shadows, a reading of texts by eight figures in the Enlightenment canon (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Smith, D'Alembert, Diderot, and Kant). Lloyd is a justly celebrated Australian philosopher whose best-known work is The “Man of Reason” (1984), a classic of feminist scholarship. So far as I can tell, Enlightenment Shadows, published in 2013, has not yet received a single review in a historical journal. In academic publishing, of course, four years are but a moment; reviews may be on the way. But we may also be seeing the tenacity of modern disciplinary self-containment; books like Harris's Hume notwithstanding, the gulf between intellectual history and the history of philosophy remains wide. In this case, the distance is especially unfortunate. Like Harris, but more self-consciously and with close attention to the interpretive implications of postmodernism, Lloyd “take(s) seriously the literary aspects of philosophical texts” (7) to develop her central theme: the authors’ unsettling realization that the imagination, not reason, is the real source of objectivity in moral consciousness. We may be glimpsing a curious irony; this literary divergence from both the historians’ Enlightenment and the philosophers’ Enlightenment may offer a way to bridge the division of labor between the two.

It is important to understand what Lloyd's book is not. The book is precisely the kind of reading-of-canonical-texts work that the new cultural history finds antiquated and largely pointless. At first glance, it might seem to be a throwback to the old history of ideas. It has virtually nothing of the dense biographical contextualism that James Harris brings to his life of Hume. To the extent that it is contextual, it places its authors almost entirely in an intellectual field, and far more attention is paid to their critiques of ancient philosophical schools than to their dialogues with other authors in their own eras. And yet its textual internalism is quite different from the reconstruction of overt argumentation often found in the history of philosophy. The purpose of Lloyd's close readings is not to purify past texts of outdated foolishness, as in rational reconstruction. She wants to provide a fuller and more challenging understanding of the texts by focusing on their “interplay of intellect, affect, and imagination.” The conventional reconstruction of logical argumentation is secondary to the grasp of “something of the mood and tone,” the “dynamic movements of thought” in “processes of thought internal to the text” (6–7).

As a contextual intellectual historian I should find the book sadly wanting. How is it, then, that I have learned so much about reading texts for their historical meanings from a book that is, by my standards, so unhistorical? It is not surprising that Robertson's précis of the book in his concluding remarks is ambivalent. His own theme of the centrality of the belief in progress in Enlightenment thought makes him particularly sympathetic to Lloyd's suggestion that “what is most challenging in the philosophy of Kant is its orientation to the future.” That “many Enlightenment thinkers, from Diderot to Adam Smith, were more interested in the powers of the imagination than in those of reason” is no more than an “obvious point” (though it is not at all obvious in his own text) (127–8).

At the center of Lloyd's inquiry is the play of metaphor and other literary devices, especially multiple authorial voices, not simply in the figurative language of each text, but as an organizing concept for the book as a whole. Metaphors of sight—the “shadows” of the title and their binary, “light”—form entryways to the book from two directions. There is our own sight looking backward: the light of the Enlightenment blinds us, which is to say not that it occludes the “shadow meaning,” the spaces of darkness, that the authors were unaware of and we, looking past their blindness, must now expose, but that we find it hard to see what they were quite well aware of. We have to find ways of reading that recover their awareness and appreciate their “ability to hold . . . tensions unresolved.” That is to say that we have to listen carefully for tensions in the text, often resonating from their metaphors and other literary strategies. “The ascendancy of the imagination” over reason,” Lloyd writes, “can be both exhilarating and unsettling.” The shift in thought is accompanied by “an unease, a sense of vulnerability which coexists with Enlightenment optimism” (7). The authors’ vulnerability to doubt and uncertainty is what makes Lloyd's chosen texts worthwhile, and indeed necessary, in engaging “our contemporary intellectual predicaments and moral conflicts.”

Because she formulates her argument as much in the metaphor of the literary as in the logic of the philosophical, Lloyd does not offer a single fixed definition of either reason or the imagination. She plays the two off against each other, using a language of structure, space, and time that is itself implicitly metaphorical. Reason is about timeless structural relations, “rigid, universal abstractions”; imagination is the realm of change, a “wandering uncertainty.” The voice of je in Diderot's Rameau's Nephew is “static, judgemental” (135). To D'Alembert the passions and tastes “have their own sort of knowledge”, with “principles different from ordinary logic.” The question is whether the imagination can be liberated from “the cramping constraints of conventional Reason” without plunging into “the randomness of subjectivity” (116). I found myself wondering at times whether Lloyd's own argument about imagination, not reason, coming to be seen as the real source of objectivity in moral consciousness needed more denotative fixity. It may suffice to know, however, that for Lloyd's authors the cost of reason's unambiguous answers to moral questions is inflexible constraint, while the imagination expands and liberates, opening new possibilities, but also misleads into uncontrollable flux, fantasies that vitiate the rational principles that should constitute our moral compass.

Underlying both the lucidity and the elusiveness of Enlightenment Shadows is Lloyd's long effort to come to terms with Jacques Derrida, centering on the issue of the role of metaphor in philosophy. In the Introduction and the Conclusion to Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature she countered Derrida's theory of metaphor with the response to it in Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor.Footnote ¹⁶ Derrida, she writes, tries to undermine “the model of meaning as grounded in an originating consciousness—a self which stands behind language.” He attacks the notion that the philosopher can adopt “a speaking position above and beyond the figurative”—that he can “dominate metaphors from outside.” “Metaphor is less in the philosophical text than the philosophical text is within metaphor.” To Ricoeur, drawing on Aristotle, metaphors can be “conscious acts” of innovation. Lloyd suggests that “Ricoeur's emphasis on the philosopher's ‘active’ use of metaphor” points us to what may be a fruitful way of “thinking of philosophical truth as a form of metaphorical truth.”

In Being in Time Lloyd was concerned not to categorically reject Derrida's radical skepticism about the knowing subject, but to correct misreadings of him by “some of his followers.” As Derrida himself understood, his “deconstructive strategies,” though often seen as replacing classical ideas of self-consciousness, “are perhaps better seen as aids to recognize an instability that has already inhabited these traditional theories.”Footnote ¹⁷ Twenty years later, in Enlightenment Shadows, probing instability is precisely what Lloyd does, but as one might expect from Being in Time, her way of doing it requires that she reject Derrida on two key points. She does not think that language, unburdened of the author as knowing subject and inherently self-subverting, makes for texts that are “open” in the sense of having no stability of meaning; there is instead an element of instability in the form of “tension,” a “shadowing” doubt that the author might like to efface but cannot, or indeed that he wants his readers to share (or suffer) with him. The author as knowing subject is not erased; his presence in the text takes the form of conflictual coherence. However conflicted he may be, the author as subject (or agent) is very much there, the agent behind the text, actively using metaphor. He is at some level aware of the tension; though he may try to resolve it, in most cases he accepts having to live with it or even exploits it—and implicitly asks the reader to do the same.

Of all the figures Lloyd interprets, Voltaire is perhaps the most self-conscious and active in making tension-ridden instability the very point of an Enlightenment pedagogy. What fascinates her about Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and the “Prayer to God” that concludes his Treatise on Toleration (1763) is his “ventriloquism,” the “extraordinary capacity to speak in many voices.” He plays off different voices not only from one Dictionary entry to another, but within an entry. A “theatrical” character himself, he stages voices as characters or, better, metaphors in the form of characters, reflecting “a concern with attitudes toward knowing and not knowing.” In this reading Voltaire has far more depth and complexity than in the usual image of him as a militant rationalist intent on eradicating religious belief. His target is not belief itself, but “the way in which belief is held.” What he decries is the “lack of doubt” in ruthlessly intolerant, persecuting zealotry. The repudiation of certainty in Voltaire's ventriloquism may seem to make him a complete relativist, but in fact he advocates a quest for objectivity through an acceptance of “not-knowing” what we cannot know. Lloyd makes “the fluidity of [Voltaire's] roles and masks . . . one of the paradoxes played out more generally in the texts of the Enlightenment—the readiness with which commitment to truth can be held in tension with what seems an attraction to the instabilities of uncertainty” (58).

Lloyd sometimes leaves us wondering how one practices her reading strategy. It is not entirely clear whether her distinction between the way a belief is held and the belief itself is viable, or how “the dynamic movement of thought” in a text can be distinguished from its fixed content. It may not be surprising that her strategy is best suited to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew. Few would disagree that moi, the voice of the Enlightenment rationalist, does not prevail in his conversation with the utterly cynical and intellectually unmoored nephew lui. More interesting is that Lloyd does not see either character speaking for Diderot in his narrative voice. What interests her is the multivocity itself, which allows the parenthetical narrator to hold in suspension the irresolvable contrast between moi’s “deliberated judgments” and the wild “imaginative force” of lui. Again, though, the larger point is the ascendancy of the imagination; “As the conversation becomes increasingly chaotic, the voices [of the parenthetical narrator and lui] work in collaboration to yield something richer than the static, judgemental stance adopted by Je” (135).

The chapters on David Hume and Adam Smith culminate Lloyd's theme of the emergence of a new understanding of moral objectivity, at once more grounded in experience than classical rationalism and exacting the price of an unsettling but unavoidable uncertainty. Hume makes the momentous claim that by themselves the abstractions of reason cannot produce an action impelled by moral judgment: reason by itself has never moved anyone to do anything. This is to say that “impartial judgements are situated; they are not expressed as general principles or rules” (104). When Lloyd characterizes Hume's approach as “genial and appealing,” it is with a concomitant sense of loss. Like Voltaire, Hume's Sceptic rejects “dogmatic ways of holding beliefs” (rather than “belief as such”); but “has he forfeited,” she asks, “all that gives intensity and purpose to belief” (79)? This is the alarming possibility that Hume's friend Adam Smith tried to close off with “a sustained account of the role of the imagination in producing an objective moral consciousness, capable of integrating the perspectives of individual selves—and their circles of amiable friends—with more alien others” (80). As Robertson also observes, Smith's underlying assumption is that people are driven by a desire for status; to put the point more generally, they need others’ approval. The paradox is that in pursuit of that need they can develop objective moral judgment, or something like it. It is constituted by what Lloyd calls “emotional intelligence,” which in turn is developed socially in the sympathetic interaction with others—the mutual effort to enter the other's standpoint and feelings—that can be effected only by the imagination. In a secular culture it is precisely because objective moral knowledge is situational that it is credible.

Robertson acknowledges that, as Smith admitted, “sympathy with others’ motives and circumstances might not be a sufficient basis for a convincing moral philosophy” (58). But that is offered as a mere qualification; Smith's secular belief in progress still makes him the culminating figure in the key intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. Strikingly, the moral psychology that Robertson finds in Smith's thought is an interaction of sympathy and sentiment; there is no mention of the imagination. For Lloyd the imagination is the crux of the matter. It produces a kind of objective moral judgment that is inherently uncertain, and it is precisely the uncertainty we should be engaging, even as we recognize the strength of Smith's and others’ belief in progress.

Again imagination, metaphor, and multivocity are inseparable. That becomes apparent in Lloyd's searching discussion of Smith's engagement with Stoicism, where she draws on the scholarship of the philosopher Charles Griswold and especially the literary scholar Vivienne Brown (104–6).Footnote ¹⁸ Trying to dispel his doubt by positing an “impartial spectator” within the breast, Smith entered a complex performance of multivocity: the agent and spectator, the author and the reader, the universal “we” of humanity and the particular “I.” Following Brown, Lloyd finds that in the use of these metaphorical voices “the author's voice becomes ‘refracted’, losing its certainty,” and as a result the text displays “an uncertainty about itself” (107). The impartial spectator notwithstanding, the reader has to enact in himself “an active imaginative response—a changing of places, imagining oneself into another's situation.” The agent “cannot become a unified moral being; it must remain fractured and morally ambivalent, ‘subject to bifocal vision and competing voices’.” Lloyd, like Brown, find this “disturbing,” but the “authorial tone” of Smith's “account of moral judgement” is nonetheless “exhilarating” (107).

Lloyd is not equivocating; that Smith's theory is disturbing does not mean that it is incoherent or self-contradictory. Nonetheless I find that at this juncture she concedes too much to the postmodernist erasure of a centered subjectivity. What is missing is Smith's argument, stated from the very first paragraph of Theory of Moral Sentiments, that the person's capacity to change places with another is limited. That is critical to the development of a conscience, or at least of a “character” observing “propriety.” Because your changing of places with the other is only virtual—because no leap of the imagination can make it actual—you know you can't count on her sympathetic approval beyond a certain point; if you are verbally insulted by an interlocutor, shooting him in the chest will forfeit others’ sympathetic approval. This moral self-disciplining may not constitute a “unified moral being,” but it makes the imagination a check on its own destabilizing effect.

Lloyd's reading is obviously a challenge to the ways in which historians of philosophy customarily analyze texts. Is it problematic for contextual intellectual historians? True, its largely internalist approach may be objectionable in principle to contextualists. Also true, they may find suspect its interpretation of metaphors and voices, which, its philosophical underpinnings aside, employs an iconoclastic literary hermeneutic strongly influenced by postmodernism. But the book is far too impressive in method and substance to be shunted aside for those reasons. Lloyd's way of adopting the postmodernist notion of textual instability has given historians as well as philosophers a powerful new resource.

* * *

Can our reading of Enlightenment texts help us cope with the present conditions of modernity? Obviously alluding to Pagden, Robertson treads carefully in his final paragraph:

Robertson's main concern is to avoid a simplistic notion of “relevance” which, in a classic example of the genetic fallacy, tries to justify truth claims in our current context by appealing to their validity, or at least to their innovative authority, in their very different context of origins. He is surely right to warn us not to lift out of the Enlightenment its proposed solutions to problems (as when we argue that Smith's concept of the free market will somehow eliminate the current exploitation of workers around the globe). The question of relevance becomes murkier, however, when we ask how Enlightenment texts “can enrich our own thinking” about modernity in the present, and what it means to “imaginatively reconstruct the conceptual language of Enlightenment thinkers.” Robertson seems to suggest that this is a matter of recognizing, imaginatively in some sense, the difference between terms used then and the ones we use now. Here too he is surely right. From this distance, we should read much of the language of the Enlightenment as foreign to us. It should be added, though, that we have to distance ourselves from language from the Enlightenment we still do use, as though it were unchanging. We cannot assume that a term like “equality,” as it was meant then, provides us with the meaning of equality we need now.

The other two books under review suggest that Robertson takes too narrow a view of “relevance.” Harris's Hume may at first seem to offer an unlikely example. Hasn't Harris done precisely what Robertson thinks should be done? Hasn't he shown us, by the depth of his contextualization of Hume's thought, that he cannot be simply inserted into current philosophical argument as a thinker in a timeless space. But that is precisely the point. By removing him from the timeless space, by giving him back the voice in which he spoke and by witnessing the rhetorical performances he conducted, we do not make him irrelevant to our concerns. We make him a much more challenging interlocutor on any of a number of subjects: moral choice, selfhood, identity, character, reason and emotion, religious belief, and so on. To historicize Hume as Harris has done is to offer a way for present-day philosophers to become more self-critical.

Ultimately at stake in the Enlightenment wars is the truth value of knowledge. To some a radical skepticism is liberating precisely because it allows us to read texts as completely labile. In this view the Enlightenment generated illusions about a human capacity to make purely rational judgments from an abstractly conceived position of individual autonomy. Promised a uniquely human autonomy, we have in fact been condemned to a dehumanized self-consciousness and myriad ways of rationalizing injustice. It is not clear how we are to make choices in a world that, to be honest with itself, must be suffused with doubt on this scale. In much of recent scholarship, however, the Enlightenment operates in a space between blind certainty and equally blind doubt, between the tyranny of reason and the tyranny of the imagination, between dogmatic knowledge and an ignorance we cannot overcome. The particular value of Enlightenment Shadows to our understanding of this space lies in prompting a different kind of self-examination. In philosophical texts as in imaginative literature, metaphor casts meanings that are inherently resistant to being made fixed truths. That is not to say that coherent meaning accedes to chaotic instability. Metaphor operates in the realm of the more or less probable.Footnote ¹⁹ Its evocative comparisons limit us to saying what might be the case rather than what indubitably is the case, but without annulling the fact that some choices are more rationally justifiable than others. We have to learn how to live with, and learn from, the tensions (Lloyd's “shadowing”) that lurk in the text. We need, as Lloyd puts it, the ability to hold tensions unresolved.

In an age of hyper-aggressive certainty it is no small thing to learn from Enlightenment thinkers, so easily caricatured as being all too certain, how to live with, perhaps how to profit from, a measure of uncertainty.