Subjects
The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century
Jonathan Lamb
The Enlightenment World
978 1 85196 854 1: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 690 5
This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from four related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture.
Three of the most piercing political minds of the first quarter of the eighteenth century—Defoe, Mandeville and Trenchard—all thought the provision of charity, particularly free education, was counterproductive. They were responding partly to the corrupt nature of contemporary charitable foundations, and partly to the nature of commercial society itself. But the suspect status of charity left an ethical vacuum which had to be filled by some bond between humans more solid than self-interest.
So sympathy, the sudden and spontaneous entry of one person’s feelings into those of another, filled up this vacuum. Now it was possible for people to share sentiments so vividly that neither reason nor self-interest could limit the degree to which individuals might care for others, or act involuntarily on their behalf.
The progress of sympathy is intertwined with the period of global exploration evidenced by Cook’s voyages and the rise of the sentimental novel before being met by growing suspicion in the works of radicals such as Wollstonecraft and Godwin.
The history of sympathy seems to involve a dialectic of immediacy and artifice in which the knowledge of what it is like to be someone else is alternately the product of involuntary passion and of conscious manipulation. The question of social virtue, where it comes from, how it is aroused and in what direction it tends, is perpetually being interrogated with no definite answer ever emerging.
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies