The eighteenth century was an age of (check one): neoclassicism, classicism, empiricism, criticism, rationalism, reason, enlightenment, print, the public sphere—or, as in Lee Morrissey's view, was it more like an ideological sequel to the religious and political upheavals of the seventeenth century? The blind men gather round and touch the elephant, and, in the comforting moral to the story, each gets it somewhat right. In the discomforting moral, as offered by the cartoonist Walt Kelly and reported in Wikipedia (that emblem of the Web age, easy to criticize but even easier to use), matters are otherwise. Pogo says, “Each of the blind men was partly right.” To which Churchy Lafemme, the superstitious turtle, replies, “Yeah, but they were mostly all wrong.” Morrissey is far from all wrong, but neither is he, in the case at hand, particularly right.

The Constitution of Literature asks why literary criticism in Britain (I think the focus on Britain is too exclusive) came into being when it did, and Morrissey locates the big bang that began it all in England's Civil Wars. It is not clear, however, how deeply convinced he is by his own myth of origins. He proceeds on tiptoe. “It was not lost on contemporaries” that the new wave of print in the mid-seventeenth century “happened to coincide” with the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. This not-very-robust claim then gains some momentum—after Hobbes's Leviathan, the violence of the wars “becomes associated with the newly popular press and … with the kinds of reading associated through it during the 1640s”—and issues in a strenuous “therefore” supposed to clinch the case: “Therefore … I argue that English literary criticism initially emerges as part of a reaction against the role print was thought to have played in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s” (4–5). But the assertive “therefore” has quickly collapsed in a cascade of hesitations: “part of a reaction”; “was thought to have”; and “initially emerges,” a formulation that promises little carryover to the likes of John Dryden, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson—Morrissey's principal subjects. Of Dryden and the others, Morrissey manages to say only that “as we will see”—“as we will see” and “as we have seen” are rhetorical staples throughout, marks of compositional unease—“the Civil Wars are mentioned by each of the major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary critics” (5). That the wars are “mentioned” by all does not foretell a firm argument.

Morrissey's target is Jürgen Habermas, to whom he attributes a “heroic story” (2) of criticism wresting public power from the aristocracy. This exaggerates Habermas's version of how the public sphere was “transformed,” an exaggeration against which Morrissey sets his own story, that of critics from Dryden to Hume and Johnson reacting conservatively to the tumult of the Civil Wars and to contemporary seventeenth-century excesses of scriptural interpretation (Morrissey, in the manner of recent criticism, calls it “reading”), whether in the Ranters—millenarian hippies of the 1640s like Abiezer Coppe and Jacob Bauthumley—or in John Milton, sometimes yoked together to form a curious trinity: “As we have seen with Coppe, Bauthumley, and Milton …” (125). Morrissey announces his subject as “literacy, democracy, and early English criticism” and needs Habermas as a foil: before Habermas, few would have thought to associate literary criticism so closely with the coming of democracy. Now we take the link for granted, yet it is more associative than direct, and Morrissey is always straining after a connection. Certainly the tumult of the Civil Wars, the Glorious Revolution, and the Jacobite uprisings and the fury of political faction all inflect public discourse throughout the eighteenth century, but Morrissey underestimates the other tale of tumult that accounts more directly for the “conservative” bent of literary criticism in the eighteenth century, that of the unruly language itself.

In 1635 the French Academy, founded by Cardinal Richelieu and an outgrowth of the Parisian salons, opened its doors. An argument parallel to Morrissey's might locate the impetus for its founding in the sixteenth-century wars of religion. Plausible or otherwise, the argument would undervalue the problem of the language in favor of an omnivorous worldview that makes everything the political consequence of everything else. In Britain, the longing for linguistic stability ran deep. Dryden worried that he would become as obscure to later generations as Geoffrey Chaucer was to his own. Swift proposed an English academy to emulate the French example. Johnson set out to fix the English language in place, only to find that reality overtook the dreams of the lexicographer. British criticism was in fact more “democratic,” because it was more empirically minded, than its French counterpart, and it is not hard to assign political reasons for the difference. But Abiezer Coppe, Jacob Bauthumley, and even John Milton are a small part of the story.

When his political argument is set aside, Morrissey has useful things to say. He covers a great deal of ground. His analyses of critical positioning in work by Dryden and others are often insightful. He is good, for example, on the crisscross tensions in Hume's aesthetics. He is familiar with the secondary literature, almost to a fault. Only when Coppe and Bauthumley and Milton and the Civil Wars assert their presence does the structural fragility of the historical-political argument stand out. It seems to be the case of a modern paradigm misdirecting an otherwise sturdy intelligence.

Finally, however, the writing is often ungainly. In a convoluted commentary on a passage from Dryden's The Medall: “The right to be a monarch inheres in the being monarch just like the meaning inheres in the word. To thus argue that a monarch has an inherent right would not concede anything to the contractual side” (76). What to make of “the being monarch,” a locution as ambiguous as it is ungainly? Have we really reached a point where “like” is an acceptable substitution for “as” and infinitives get split without a pang of guilt? Where have all the copy editors gone? Or have these reflections from an earlier time passed their sell-by date?