Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era

Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity

Robert Mitchell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415771429
• eBook ISBN: 9781135983659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era explores a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated Romantic-era discourses, outlining the extent to which eighteenth and early nineteenth century theories of sympathy were generated by crises of state finance. Through readings of authors such as David Hume, Adam Smith, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley, this volume establishes the ways in which crises of state finance encouraged the development of theories of sympathy capable of accounting for both the fact of "social systems" as well as the modes of emotional communication by means of which such systems bound citizens to one another.

Employing a methodology that draws on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, Michel Serres, and Giovanni Arrighi, as well as Gilles Deleuze's theories of time and affect, this book argues that eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophies of sympathy emerged as responses to financial crises. Individual chapters focus on specific texts by David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ann Yearsley, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley, but Mitchell also draws on periodicals, pamphlets, and parliamentary hearings to make the argument that Romantic era theories of sympathy developed new discourses about social systems intended both to explain, as well as contain, the often disruptive effects of state finance and speculation.

1 Finance and the exchange of passions

The origins of the collective imagination

DOI: 10.4324/9780203941751-2

[T]his surprising Fall of the Reputation of Stocks is not by Management, but for want of Management. Believe me, Sir, there are no French Agents or Popish Plots in the matter, but ‘tis for want of Agents, and for want of Plot; these Men are confounded and amazed by the Sur-prise of their own Affairs. (The London Journal, September/ October 1, 1720)

“[I]t is by the imagination only,” Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), that we ever have access to the emotions and affects of the other, for it is only by means of this faculty that “we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him” (TMS 1.i.1.2). Though couched in the idiom of mid-eighteenth-century Scottish sentimental moral philosophy, Smith’s claim nevertheless has a recognizably modern flavor. We can discern in it the paradigm of more recent suggestions that, for example, nationalism operates by establishing an “imagined community” among members of a polity; that humanitarianism in the age of mass media depends upon the refinement of our abilities to bring home imaginatively the sufferings of others; and that gender identity depends on a series of imaginative acts, in which we continuously “identify” with valorized images of subjectivity while at the same time “disidentifying” with terrifying subjective possibilities.¹ Smith’s understanding of the importance of the imagination in establishing social relations—an understanding that he shared with contemporaries such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—has to come to seem so obvious that it takes on the form of common sense itself. For how could I ever have access to the feelings of others—or, more generally, access to the other at all—if not through something like that process of imaginative, representational identification that Smith outlines?

Yet if such a claim about the imaginative foundations of society has come to seem obvious, it was, for all that, a decidedly emergent form of common sense when Smith first articulated his position. If Smith had proposed even a generation earlier that imagination and sympathy mediated most, if not all, social interactions, such a claim would have met with surprise and incredulity. Before the eighteenth century, concepts of the imagination were almost invariably used to explain quasi-corporeal processes internal to the individual, rather than interactions that occurred between subjects, and though seventeenth-century authors had sometimes cited this “faculty” to explain aberrant forms of sociality, such as religious enthusiasm, the imagination was understood as too unpredictable, too liable to usurp the role of reason, for it to serve as the necessary ground of all social relations. The claims made by Smith and his contemporaries thus represented a fundamentally new commonsense understanding of imagination, one that firmly linked its effects to the operation of even normal social relations.²

It is admittedly not entirely clear what significance we ought to attribute to this relatively rapid emergence, in the eighteenth century, of a new common sense concerning the imagination and its relationship to social relations. Perhaps its emergence in the eighteenth century was simply something of an historical anomaly—a vague, anachronistic intimation of a principle that would only later come to have real theoretical utility after being tempered and sharpened by Marxist and psychoanalytic theory? Or perhaps we should take a stronger approach, and understand these claims about the imagination as ideologically necessary; as intrinsic components of a capitalist system that was effecting fundamental social transformations—transformations of labor relationships, epistemological approaches to the world, and emotional relationships with others—in ways that would eventually propel a middle class to power? While the latter approach would of course also have to account for the ideological role of subsequent post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theories of imagination, it at any rate would have the virtue of explaining how and why Smith and his fellow sentimental moral philosophers were able to establish a new mode of common sense through their theories.

This chapter in fact seeks to chart a path between these two perspectives—the perspectives of anomaly and necessity, respectively—by approaching eighteenth-century claims about society and imagination in a way that accounts for both their anomalous and their systematic aspects. More precisely, I focus on the emergence of a kind of system that was able to transform conceptual anomalies into systemic necessities. And, as it turns out, it is precisely Smith’s emphasis on the speculative nature of imagination—its capacity to project the self beyond its borders—that provides the clue that will allow us to understand the nature of this system. For if we look more closely at the real origins of the notion of a “collective imagination,” we shall find that it first emerged in that most speculative of early eighteenth-century discussions: the discourse on state finance that helped to create early eighteenth-century French and British investing cultures. By attributing the rise and fall of public credit and the vagaries of commercial exchange to the imagination, early eighteenth-century authors shifted the term from its traditional role as an explanatory term for processes within an individual—that is, as a quasi-corporeal faculty that mediated between animal spirits and intellect—to a principle that explained affective relationships between individuals. It was this latter, protosociological sense of the term that served as the foundation for Hume’s, Smith’s, and Rousseau’s subsequent theories of sympathy and identification. The moral philosophy of these authors responded to the systems of state finance developed in early eighteenth-century Britain and France both by appropriating the concept of the collective imagination from financial discourse, and by seeking to resolve the conflicts and factions purportedly engendered by state finance by creating a new system of discourse (sentimental moral philosophy) that treated actual financial phenomena as part of its environment, rather than as an element within its system.

This chapter has five parts. I begin by outlining the extent to which seventeenth-century discussions of the imagination relied upon a classical hierarchical schema of the faculties of the soul that discouraged interest in the intersubjective dimensions of the imagination. I then outline the social-ization of the faculty of imagination in early eighteenth-century financial discourse. In the third part, I explain how such conceptual innovation was possible by focusing on the interplay between the primary genre (satire) and the primary media (print journalism and occasional pamphlets) within which these new concepts appeared, arguing that the distributed authorial nature of early eighteenth-century journalism and occasional pamphlets, in combination with the quick turnover and large volume of these media, established a context that encouraged conceptual “mutation.” Moreover, insofar as these periodical communications were themselves central to the operation of state finance, there was also a selective pressure for concepts capable of explaining the rapid transfer of representations between individuals, and the traditional association of concepts of the imagination with processes of amplification and feedback provided precisely such a term. The fourth part focuses more narrowly on one of the earliest explicitly philosophical discussions of the collective imagination, David Hume’s theory of sympathy, as developed in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). While Hume’s insistence on both faction and virtual property as the keys to the dynamics of the imagination emphasized the linkage of his theory of sympathy to early eighteenth-century financial discourse, his Treatise was also intended to provide a philosophical system for understanding social systems: that is, it was intended to serve as an instance of a literary form that could both describe, as well as intervene in, the dynamics of all social systems. I conclude this chapter with a critical discussion of the extent to which our contemporary category of “ideology” allows us to understand the social and cultural functions of theories of sympathy and identification in the eighteenth century.

I Imagination, The Hierarchy of Faculties, and Closed Social Systems

Just as for classical and early modern philosophy, the imagination played an important role in seventeenth-century theological and philosophical discourse. In England, anatomists and physicians such as Robert Burton and Thomas Willis postulated about the anatomical location of the faculty of imagination; natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes speculated on the power of the imagination over matter (often in order to critique earlier—and what they saw as the more extravagant— claims made by alchemists such as Paracelsus); and theologians such as Henry More and Meric Casaubon theorized about the role of imagination in producing religious fanaticism. In France, René Descartes questioned whether imagination was necessary for thought, that defining attribute of the subject, and Descartes’s pupil Nicholas Malebranche further pursued Bacon’s earlier speculations about the power of imagination over matter and bodies.

Yet even as more and more seventeenth-century authors took interest in the powers of the imagination, the continued persistence of an Aristotelian paradigm for understanding the faculties of the soul meant that such discussion almost invariably focused on the role of imagination within the subject, rather than between subjects. Two basic principles governed the Aristotelian understanding of the imagination. First, the imagination held the middle place within a hierarchy of faculties that led upward from sensation to reason. Second, all thought required the help of imagination, for thinking itself required the support of images (phantasmata), and thus, the mediation of the imagination. When imagination kept its proper place in this hierarchy, it facilitated perception, thought, and movement by mediating between sensation and reason; when imagination usurped the governing role of reason, hallucinations and madness resulted. Seventeenth-century authors rarely questioned these principles, preferring instead to describe more specifically the anatomical specificities of the hierarchy of faculties.³ In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51), for example, Burton, localized the imagination within the “middle ventricle” of the “fore part” of the brain, where it received influxes of animal spirits (Burton 2001, vol. 1: 154), while Thomas Willis argued in Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (1683) that the imagination was “planted in the middle part of the Brain,” where it could “receiv[e] the Sensible Species [of external objects, which were at] first only impressed on the Organs of Sense, and from thence by a most quick Irradiation of the spirits delivered inwards” (Willis 1971: 38).⁴ Burton explained that hallucinations resulted when imagination usurped the “governing” role of reason by “keeping the species of objects” and overly “amplifying them” (Burton 2001, vol. 1: 160, 253); individuals with particularly “powerful and strong” imaginations were at greatest risk of such internal revolt, the consequence of which might be a state of melancholia, or—a more positive possibility—a capacity for artistry (Burton 2001, vol. 1: 159).

The overwhelming emphasis of this neo-Aristotelian schema on the role of imagination in mediating between faculties within an individual discouraged interest in the ways in which this imagination might mediate between subjects. Seventeenth-century authors did not deny that imagination might under some circumstances link two separate individuals, but such instances were invariably presented as isolated and anomalous. The purported power of the mother’s imagination to mark her unborn child is one particularly well-discussed example of such an exception. As Dennis Todd notes, “[b]ecause of its corporealizing power, the imagination was generally believed to have some degree of control over material things” (Todd 1995: 59), and while under normal circumstances, this capacity was restricted to the translation of reason’s commands into bodily action, under extreme circumstances the imagination might also affect nearby bodies. The capacity of the imagination to control external matter explained how a fetus could be marked if the mother was exposed to mental shocks or inor-dinately desired some object: being surprised by a rabbit might produce a rabbit-shaped birthmark on the fetus, while craving strawberries could produce a strawberry-shaped birthmark. Bacon and Malebranche postulated that the power of the imagination over foreign bodies might even extend to small groups. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), for example, Bacon defined fascination as “the power and act of imagination, intensive upon other bodies than the body of the imaginant,” and he was willing to grant that in some cases the imagination might facilitate a “contagion that passeth from body to body.” However, he contended that adherents of “the school of Paracelsus, and the disciples of pretended Natural Magic” had greatly overestimated the capacities of such imaginative influence, and in any case, these were anomalous and unusual instances (Bacon 1825–34, vol. 2: 172).⁵ In The Search for Truth, Malebranche outlined a slightly more extended field of action for the effect of one imagination on another, suggesting that both madmen and “great people” possessed strong imaginations that could exert influence over others (Malebranche 1997: 87–196). However, he too presented these instances as problematic exceptions to the normal workings of the imagination.

In England, religious theorists employed this same schema to explain the fervency—the “enthusiasm”—of Protestant dissenting groups. In the wake of the proliferation of Protestant groups such as the Diggers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchy men, “enthusiasm” became an important element of “the Protestant attempt to subdue its [own] more extreme expressions” (Klein 1994: 160).⁶ Lawrence Klein notes that where a century earlier religious opposition was represented as a matter of heresy, in the seventeenth century many authors “transferred religious arguments from issues of doctrine to estimations of social personality” (Klein 1994: 162), and the imagination played an important role in this psychosociological approach to the question of the origin of extreme Protestant dissent. In Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656, 1662), for example, Henry More argued that religious “Enthusiasme is nothing else but a misconceit of being inspired,” a self-deception that he attributed to a “Temper” that “disposes a man to listen to the Magisterial Dictates of an over-bearing Phansy, more than to the calm and cautious insinuation of free Reason” (More 1966: 1). Yet if, from the side of the individual, enthusiasm was the result of “the enormous strength of Imagination” which allows the soul to “sin[k] into Phantasmes (More 1966: 1, 4), groups of enthusiasts could form if the self-deceived messiah and his followers all had the same “melancholic” temperament, which allowed their imaginations to become disordered in the same way (More 1966: 22). While this explanation begged the question of how exactly similarly tempered people affected one another, it nonetheless extended the power of imagination to groups, rather than focusing discussion on its power over isolated individuals. Moreover, as Meric Casaubon noted in A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm (1655), in such cases the opposition between “real” and “imaginary” causes was of limited utility in explaining the mechanics of enthusiasm, for enthusiasm’s origin in a disordered imagination (rather than authentic inspiration) did not make its effects any less real. The impression of being inspired, Casaubon argues, was a “real, though but imaginary, apprehension of it in the parties, upon some ground of nature; a reall [sic], not barely pretended, counterfeit, and simulatory, for politick ends” (Casaubon 1970: 4).

II Imagination, Social Systems, and Intersubjectivity in Early Eighteenth-Century Financial Discourse

While these seventeenth-century accounts of fetal development, fascination, madmen, and enthusiasm represent intriguing accounts of the power of one individual’s imagination over others, their significance lies precisely in their exceptional character. For seventeenth-century theorists, the social systems enabled by the imagination were all small and “closed”: the proto-social system of mother and fetus could not be expanded beyond these two individuals, and the social systems of madmen and enthusiasts were small and hermetic; one was either mad or not, an enthusiast or not, and “rational” claims from the environment of the sane or nonbelievers were held to have no meaning or force within these small ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Finance and the exchange of passions: The origins of the collective imagination
• 2 The violence of system: Rousseau and Smith on identification and sympathy
• 3 Antislavery poetry and the speculative subject
• 4 Systems and the parasite: Wordsworth and the financial crisis of 1797
• 5 The ghost of gold: National debt, imagery, and the politics of sympathy in P. B. Shelley
• Conclusion: State finance, systems, and literary criticism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index