In recent post-Foucauldian writings on liberalism, the roles of habit, instinct, and free will have become increasingly important issues. Kathleen Frederickson offers a timely contribution to this area of study by way of The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance, an expansive, interdisciplinary reevaluation of the notoriously misunderstood and misidentified concept of instinct. In Britain between 1850 and World War I, naturalists, sexologists, psychologists, and philosophers, among others, often defined instinct as a replacement for or an alternative to reason. Therefore, instinct was supposed to occur naturally in groups perceived to be less equipped to reflect on their own self-consciousness—groups that included animals, savages, women, and the lower classes. Frederickson sets out in four chapters to illuminate fissures in this historical conception by studying instinct as both an ideology and a mode of being.

Instinct is the locus in which politics and biology meet. In Frederickson's complex analysis, which joins liberalism with the sciences of nature and sexuality, evolutionists Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer stand shoulder to shoulder with political economists like John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons as equally significant touchstones. But while instinct, which is automatic and unwilled, seems to oppose the classical liberal categories of reason, choice, and self-ownership, Frederickson shows that, in fact, “instinct eases contradictions and gaps in liberal political and economic theory” (4). To support this paradoxical conclusion, Frederickson investigates instinct's role in a variety of primary sources, such as fiction, pornography, memoir, ethnography, medicine, political philosophy, and natural history. Frederickson's methodological preference for inclusion and heterogeneity advances her contention that in British culture during the nineteenth century, ideas about instinct, liberalism, biology, politics, sex, and gender cannot be disentangled. Frederickson offers a convincing account of instinct as a concept that Victorian scientists and political economists both despised and could not do without.

Frederickson devotes the remainder of her monograph to broadening the project outlined in her introduction; specifically, she focuses on suspending clear distinctions between reason and animality as a problem for liberal philosophy's theories of the desire-based choice. In chapter 1, Frederickson considers the consequences of the Enlightenment cult of reason on Victorian naturalists including Darwin and George Romanes. Grounded in Locke's ideas about free will, and using examples from pornographic texts and especially My Secret Life (1890), in this chapter Frederickson engages with the epistemology of scientific inquiry by suggesting that both erotic writings and natural history use empirical modes of demonstration relying on the senses and requiring specific cases or scenarios. Using motivation as the connecting thread, chapter 2 surveys similarities between the non-reproductive drive of inverts, the contradictory stereotype of the savage as dually slothful and vigorous, and the artificial and repetitive movements of the factory laborer. Each of these groups is in danger of foregoing natural instincts for mechanistic habits. Frederickson uses Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics (1872) to underscore this idea, explaining that many Victorians considered the “modern savage” degenerate because he/she acts according to static habits, whereas primitive humans more nobly acted on the basis of evolving instincts. In chapter 3, Frederickson shows how Victorian ideas about savagery, particularly those recorded in English and Anglo-Australian ethnological writings about native Australians, circumscribed the definition of instinct. This version of instinct influenced not only Sigmund Freud's ethnological Totem and Taboo (1913), but also the discipline of psychoanalysis in its entirety. Nineteenth-century ethnological writings concerned with laws and customs support Freud's claim that savages and neurotics share psychological similarities. In the fourth and final chapter, Frederickson employs the suffragette hunger strikes to illustrate the shrewd manner in which women activists subverted the biological fallacy. By refusing to eat, and therefore ignoring the instinct of self-preservation, the hunger-striking suffragettes undermined arguments that women were incapable of acting outside of instinct and must instead be viewed as reasoning citizens.

With The Ploy of Instinct Frederickson challenges two major assumptions that typify contemporary narratives about British liberalism: an overly simplistic conception of reason's absolute opposition to animalistic unreason, and the notion that liberal subjectivity is ideal and therefore not embodied. A strength of this study is the extent and theoretical grounding of Frederickson's research. Elevating relatively obscure sources like Romanes and Bagehot makes this text an innovative contribution to intellectual and cultural history, but the agile connections Frederickson draws between subject areas and philosophical concepts is often electrifying. For instance, by underscoring the tension between the individual and the species, especially as this relates to what she terms a queer biopolitics, Frederickson emphasizes the roles of gender and sexuality in terms of psychoanalysis. And while this reviewer finds Freudian and Lacanian theory to form an uncomfortable alliance with the political and ideological critique of science and history, The Ploy of Instinct succeeds in convincing me that the link between instinct and the authentically embodied subject must be theorized outside of any rigidly historicist paradigm. Owing to its sophisticated treatment of instinct, this book is sure to interest scholars of political and intellectual history, as well as gender and sexuality studies.