Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1

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.

This book “historicizes” the British Enlightenment, 1650-1800, as the beginning of the modern world by reconstructing what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that have come to define the character of daily existence.

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 

"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." “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.”