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Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political by Peter DeGabriele

2016; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sdn.2016.0017

1934-1512

Tony Brown,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Reviewed by: Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political by Peter DeGabriele Tony C. Brown DeGabriele, Peter. Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. 216pp. $70.00 hardcover. Peter DeGabriele’s book offers us a great deal, in its close reading of eighteenth-century texts (novels and histories) as in its questioning of public sphere discourse as a variety of liberalism. DeGabriele employs continental political philosophy (especially, recent work by Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and Jacques Derrida) in a field (eighteenth-century British literary history) that has, beyond Jürgen Habermas’s Habilitationsschrift of 1962, traditionally ignored it. Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere found much favor in eighteenth-century British literary studies for two reasons: first, it opened with eighteenth-century British literary culture, which meant not only did Brit. Lit. scholars not need to read too far into the book, but the account of that culture as inaugural served to boost the subject’s supposed value—Habermas’s claim being, after all, that a central category of bourgeois society emerged first in England; and second, it helped solve, upon its 1989 publication in English translation, a problem as much of the time as David Hasselhoff’s performing “Looking for Freedom” next to the Berlin Wall at that same year’s end: [End Page 244] namely, how to promote, against certain other continental tendencies deemed nihilistic, an historicism whose mere practice was thought to entail being adequately critical. With Habermas one could continue loving one’s object (secretly if necessary) while being critical of its blemishes. I don’t think DeGabriele listens to Hasselhoff, or not by choice (in some contexts, such things can’t be avoided). His project is anti-hegemonic in this sense: not content to “complicate” the reigning assumptions that go without saying (liberalism, the public sphere), he rejects them, at least in their supposed eighteenth-century incarnation. As a first step, DeGabriele sets out the claim that public sphere talk is an incurable strain of liberalism, having taken over from the latter an overemphasis on the rational, sovereign individual to the point of making the “sovereign power” of DeGabriele’s title unthinkable. As a second step, DeGabriele reads closely in his primary eighteenth-century texts to conclude that talk of the “liberal, public sphere” does not need fixing; rather, given the extent to which the primary texts contradict it, the notion of a totalizing, ever-increasingly inclusive public sphere needs abandoning. In the eighteenth century, sovereign power is there, all over the place, its existence incompatible with the familiar notions of a liberal, public sphere. But we should note that the interest in recent continental political philosophy (which is certainly not DeGabriele’s alone) may, in a context limited to eighteenth-century British literary studies, share at least one inducement with that turn, all those years ago, to Habermas. In recent work, Thomas Hobbes is central. As DeGabriele himself makes clear discussing Esposito, Leviathan has become paradigmatic. So once again, it all begins with the English, which also means: if you do Brit. Lit., you don’t have to leave the Sceptred Isles (even if Hobbes did, writing Leviathan in exile). DeGabriele includes chapters on Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Ann Radcliffe, interspersed with accounts of Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke. Montesquieu stands as sole exception to British rule. Which is to say: disciplinarily, Brit. Lit. tends to strictly police its British-only policy. But hegemony is by definition flexible, and perhaps even dorsal: you may think you’ve put it behind you but that’s where its been all along, providing stability in history’s currents, as unavoidable as it is unscratchable. DeGabriele joins his close reading of primary material with the continental tradition he follows, to argue policing is never total, at least in the eighteenth century. He does hold out the possibility—and here his account fits Agamben’s narrative in Homo Sacer—that the individual will be fully incorporated into the public sphere upon its nineteenth-century solidification as sovereign over itself (140...