Michael Frazer contends that the liberal idea of autonomy is “perhaps the most important legacy of the Enlightenment” (181). The Enlightenment case for autonomy, for moral and political self-legislation, includes the condition that we be reflective, or capable of self-examination and revision. Frazer observes that the Enlightenment produced two competing accounts of reflective autonomy: one guided by reason and one based on moral sentiments, or more precisely on the “reflectively refined feelings shared among individuals via the all-important faculty of sympathy” (4). Frazer's book offers a compelling case for recovering the long-neglected second account, which he labels “sentimentalism.” Through his analysis of some of the eighteenth century's leading sentimentalists, and especially David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. G. Herder, Frazer hopes to “reclaim the sentimentalist account of reflection as a resource for enriching political science, political philosophy, and political practice today” (5).
In Frazer's telling, sentimentalism has much to recommend it. Unlike the Enlightenment rationalists, who separate the faculties of the mind in order to subject some faculties (including our emotions and imagination) to others (reason), the sentimentalists develop an “egalitarian view in which normatively authoritative standards are the product of an entire mind in harmony with itself” (6). Frazer also lauds the sentimentalists for their empirical bent, and defends them against the perennial rationalist charge that they are unable to generate authoritative normative standards. This last point is especially significant, as Frazer emphasizes the extent to which sentimentalists agreed that our moral feelings must undergo a rigorous process of reflection and refinement. “Only those moral sentiments that have endured when we reach reflective equilibrium can be treated as authoritative” (9). Interestingly, something resembling this process of testing and improvement can be found in the organization of Frazer's book itself, as each major thinker in his history of eighteenth-century sentimentalism makes some small but vital improvement on what has come before.
The book begins with a chapter on the pre-Humean founders of the sentimentalist tradition, including Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Joseph Butler. Here we see the impetus for sentimental moral philosophy. These thinkers sought to apply to morality the observational methods of the natural sciences, and they desired to carve out a greater role for natural human benevolence and sociability than was allowed by the “selfish system” of Hobbes and Mandeville. We also find in this chapter the first of several well-done technical accounts of the operations of our moral sentiments. While Frazer appreciates the contributions of these early sentimentalists, they provide him with the book's first example of refinement and improvement, insofar as they are unduly reliant on theological or metaphysical foundations and lack a distinctively sentimentalist political philosophy, one capable of deriving “moral standards suitable for evaluating law-governed political practices from the nonjuridical movements of the human heart and mind” (16). David Hume's sentimentalism attempts to address both of these deficiencies.
The book's two chapters on Hume provide a welcome corrective to some of the lingering mischaracterizations of Hume as a committed moral skeptic or relativist. Especially well done is Frazer's use of Hume's essay “Of the Standard of Taste” as a model for how our moral sentiments should be refined and corrected, eventually approaching “a single standard for moral judgment” (49). Despite his obvious admiration for Hume's sentimentalism, Frazer finds Hume's theory of justice unsupportable within Hume's own moral framework. Of particular concern here is the “conservative protoutilitarian” (108) character of Hume's theory of justice. Hume admits that our sense of humanity may be offended by particular harms to individuals in any operating system of law, but we are nonetheless obliged to sympathize with the long-term public interest in maintaining a stable legal order. While Hume explains that “only the refined moral sentiments of those with considerable rational and imaginative discernment … would approve of justice as a virtue” (73), Frazer is unwilling to follow him this far, and concludes that “strict obedience to the conventions of justice may not actually be in the long-term interest of all those for whom we are concerned” (85). Accordingly, Frazer defends Adam Smith's more individualists and liberal sentimentalism as a necessary corrective to Hume.
Frazer makes a strong case that public utility plays a relatively smaller role for Smith than for Hume. He finds that Smith better protects the distinctiveness of individuals both in his description of our moral sentiments at work and in his theory of justice. What keeps this argument from being totally convincing, however, is the absence of any practical example that forces Smith and Hume into divergent positions. Curiously, in the only practical example Frazer offers—deciding whether or not to execute a sleeping sentinel (110)—Smith ends up choosing against the unfortunate individual in favor of the public interest.
After a chapter devoted to fending off the antisentimentalist attacks of Immanuel Kant, Frazer turns to a final refinement of the sentimentalist position in the thought of J. G. Herder. In tracing the moral-sense tradition beyond the confines of the British Isles, the book clearly distinguishes itself from usual surveys of this subject. Frazer contends here that Herder's unique contribution to sentimentalism—and improvement on the versions provided by Hume and Smith—appears in his embrace of cultural diversity, illustrating “how a sentimentalist approach to moral philosophy … can lead to a set of commitments akin to today's liberal multiculturalism” (141). This conclusion reveals the criteria Frazer has been using throughout the book to guide his account of refinement and improvement. Unlike the eighteenth-century sentimentalists themselves, who sought above all to provide a true account of our moral reflection, Frazer's book seeks to find one that might achieve “widespread acceptance” (168) in contemporary society. Use of the term “sentimentalism” itself, a word not used by any of the authors examined, suggests the possibility of transforming a school of philosophic inquiry into a public philosophy or ideology.
Given this project, the book's final chapter—outlining how sentimentalism might enrich social science, political practice, and political philosophy—is admirably modest. Frazer is no doubt correct that contemporary disciplines such as social psychology and neuroscience would be well served by mining these eighteenth-century texts for testable hypotheses. Likewise, it is impossible to resist his conclusion that our civic life would be improved by a more serious commitment to a “rigorous liberal arts education” (181) capable of sparking the moral imagination. Frazer is on somewhat more controversial ground, however, when he suggests that political philosophy might be transformed “from a dispassionate to an impassioned reflective practice” (177). Frazer admits that his eighteenth-century authors were divided on this question, with Hume on one side as a cool and dispassionate “anatomist” of sentiment, and Shaftesbury and Herder on the other as evocative “painters” of sentiment (177). That Frazer himself seems to settle for the Humean position in no way detracts from the book. Filled as it is with careful and insightful readings of all the major eighteenth-century philosophers of moral sentiment, Frazer's book makes a worthy contribution to the study of moral and political philosophy.
