Main description:

The Enlightenment is commonly referred to as 'The Age of Reason.' The term signifies the triumph of rationalism over emotionalism and sentiment in the late eighteenth century. Rationalists, the most famous of whom was Kant, posited a mind that was hierarchically arranged, with reason sitting atop of the passions. Yet as Michael Frazer argues, there were in fact two enlightenments-the sentimentalist enlightenment and the rationalist one-and the Enlightenment of
Sympathy reclaims the importance of the former. As he explains, enlightened sentimentalism encompassed more than 'mere feeling' (as its critics claimed) and in fact harnessed the human mind in full to offer a positive account of the sentiments' centrality to moral and political reflection. Rather than
treating the mind as a hierarchy, sentimentalists offered a more egalitarian theory of it. The mind, in their view, was integrated, and its various compartments were equals. Many of the most famous Enlightenment thinkers can rightly be called sentimentalists-Hume, Smith, and Herder, to name a few-yet the rationalist vision of politics has proven to be more influential. In fact, the most important political philosopher of liberalism of the past half century, John Rawls, relied on the
rationalist enlightenment for his most important work. By reclaiming this equally important strand of enlightenment thought, Frazer not only offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of the Enlightenment political thought. His argument will also enrich contemporary political theory by integrating a more
behaviorally-oriented and psychologically complex account of the mind into the corpus of liberal philosophy.

Contents:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS; INTRODUCTION: A TALE OF TWO ENLIGHTENMENTS; I. THE NEW SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE; II. RELIGIOUS AND METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS; III. THEORIES OF JUSTICE; I. SYMPATHY AND THE MORAL SENTIMENTS; II. MORAL DEVELOPMENT; III. HUME'S NORMATIVE THEORY; I. HUME'S THEORY OF JUSTICE; II. THE SENTIMENTALIST CASE AGAINST HUME'S THEORY; I. THE ALLEGED INCOMPATIBILITY OF SENTIMENTALISM WITH INDIVIDUALISM; II. THE SPACE BETWEEN ACTOR AND SPECTATOR: SYMPATHY AND MORAL JUDGMENT; III. THE SPACE BETWEEN ACTORS: JUSTICE AND NATURAL JURISPRUDENCE; I. THE CRITICAL-PERIOD POSITION ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALS; II. THE CRITICAL-PERIOD NORMATIVE EVALUATION OF SYMPATHY; III. THE CRITICAL-PERIOD THEORY OF AFFECTS AND PASSIONS; IV. A CONTRASTING PRE-CRITICAL POSITION; I. SENTIMENTALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF DIVERSITY; II. FROM SYMPATHY TO DIVERSITY; III. FROM DIVERSITY TO EMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING; IV. FROM EMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING TO JUSTICE; I. SENTIMENTALISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; II. SENTIMENTALISM AND NORMATIVE THEORY; III. SENTIMENTALISM AND POLITICAL PRACTICE; BIBLIOGRAPHY