My research focuses on the literary and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Britain and France.
Having finished a book on British empiricism and the novel, I am now working on a new project entitled Relativism and the Enlightenment's Legacies.
Relativism and the Enlightenment's Legacies: A Literary and Intellectual History
Work in progress.| Read a sample here.
My current book project has two goals: to provide the first comprehensive history of early modern relativism and shed light on the fraught legacies of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment has a tremendous presence in contemporary debates about politics, human rights, religion, science, and ethics.
For sympathizers from Lynn Hunt to Steven Pinker, the Enlightenment was a foundational moment for Western democracies, the source of values such as religious tolerance, the rule of reason, and universal human rights. Conversely, critics from Adorno to Jamelle Bouie have stressed instead the Enlightenment’s association with scientific racism, totalitarianism, and empire.
These two sets of legacies are striking not only because they seem so disparate, but also because they were often expressed by the same historical actors. This poses a difficult question that has occupied intellectual historians for the last several decades: how could a movement that asserted the entitlements of every individual simultaneously support a hierarchical and exclusionary vision of human societies?
The answer my book offers—inevitably a partial one given the scope of the question—is that these two legacies had a common genealogy in debates about the relativity of values. Such debates, which remain understudied, involved a wide range of participants throughout the 1600s and 1700s, from philosophers and novelists to legal authorities and the national churches. Their engagement with relativism inflected not only the history of ethics, but also the way Europeans came to think of human and cultural hierarchies.
Can works of fiction — stories about people who never existed and events that never happened — teach us anything reliable about the real world? This was a key question for defenders of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain, and in this book I connect their theories of fiction to contemporary debates about the value of the humanities. Like detractors of the novel in the eighteenth century, critics of the literary humanities today often deny that imaginative literature can be a source of knowledge. They argue that the worlds of fiction are unfaithful to the world we know through observation and experience.
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Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: From Fielding to Austen
Such skepticism about fiction has relatively recent origins. It emerged around the time of the Scientific Revolution, especially after empiricism became the prevalent philosophical movement in Britain. From Bacon and Hobbes to Locke and Hume, British empiricists discarded the Aristotelian view that poetry is more philosophical than history. They championed factual narratives and denied that fiction can reliably instruct readers about the empirical world. Hume, in particular, viewed the new genre of the novel as a source not of knowledge, but of mistake and delusion.
Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel traces the origins and features of empirical skepticism about the novel, in order to make two claims. First, that the theories of fiction developed by novelists including Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, William Godwin, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen were shaped by the attempt to respond to the empiricist challenge. Second, that these novelists developed cognitive defenses of fiction that prefigure, in remarkable detail, the defenses of the humanities offered today by thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Mitchell Green. I conclude that the debates over the rise of the novel and over the literary humanities constitute two phases in one longstanding cultural crisis, characterized by the tendency to subject literature to an extra-literary standard of knowledge: that of the empirical sciences.
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The book can be ordered here. If you find the cost prohibitive, please get in touch at rogermaioli[at]gmail.com.