But whereas Skinner was concerned exclusively with historicizing the study of political thought, I want to broaden his idea to encompass the performed qualities of all kinds of intersubjective exchange in language.26
My working use of the term “rhetorical” may seem so broad as to be meaningless. For my purposes, however, it has the advantage of having a reach that is at once specific and capacious. In several of my selected texts—Shaftesbury’s essays, for example, or Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature—the performance selfconsciously enacts the art (or arts) of language use, particularly in the practice of a literary genre, the choice of authorial voice, and the presentation of authorial character in style. In some cases the practice of the art was quintessentially public, as oratory was in the ancient polis; the aim was to constitute or renew a civic culture. With other texts, I have extended the notion of rhetorical performance to writing that was not intended to be art, and indeed in some cases was not intended to be read by others. I have in mind, for example, Shaftesbury’s solitary exercises in Stoic askesis and Mme Necker’s voluminous journals, as well as the private correspondence of figures like Hume and Diderot.
I will hazard the claim that any verbal trace of an individual’s subjectivity is a rhetorical representation of it. Even the most intimate revelation in a diary entry is a performance, if only as a dialogic effort to convince oneself. It is always, in Richard Holmes’s apt phrase, “evidence that is witnessed,” which is to say that the subject produced it with some awareness of the witnessing. And that is a way of saying that the traces are always “transactions of the social realm,” ways of “giving social expression to the subjective interior.”27 The retreat to labor in solitude, so often considered essential to a manly mind, was a social act with a social message.
Approaching a text as a rhetorical performance does not require positing a unitary subjectivity, or a wholeness of the writing self. The performance may reflect a yearning for the absent, for an unachievable wholeness; and in any case—as Shaftesbury’s and Diderot’s texts demonstrate—it can be done in two or more voices in counterpoint. At the same time, this approach avoids what Fritz K. Ringer has called the “identificationist” fallacy, which he sees as a failure to maintain “hermeneutic distance.”28 The fallacy lies in assuming that in an intuitive act of empathy, one can relive the subject’s inner states, the “experience” behind the text, and make those states immediate to the reader. There is an illusory premise, a notion of self-emptying, or self-abandonment, that purports to short-circuit the unavoidable fact that we must translate from the subject’s meaning to our own. We are left with no way of recognizing when, in our effort to intuit the subject’s self-understanding, we’re really indulging in a presentist reading of ourselves into the historical Other. An effort to plumb alterity all too easily becomes a way of erasing it.
The only verbal access we have to the subjectivity of the historical subject is through rhetorical mediations. That means, of course, that we have to practice self-denial; but if we take an emphatically contextual approach, the mediations themselves abound in meaning. The performance of a rhetorical persona is situated in various directions, and as we examine its situatedness we engage in an interactive recovery of meaning, with the text pointing us to contexts that bear on it, and with contexts illuminating the historical meaning of the text. The rhetorical persona, by the very nature of its mediating function, has an intended audience. The social implications are, of course, obvious if the intended audience is an actual group of readers, as in much polite literature written for le monde. But authors often imagine audiences as rhetorical communities in the making, as Hume did in celebrating a middle station, or they try to constitute such communities, as Shaftesbury did in his essays, and in these cases too the question of audience has a social dimension. The other contextual strategy is biographical. To say that contextual biography is an inherently reductionist approach to ideas is to ignore the way the genre has been evolving. There are ways of practicing it that avoid one of the crudest forms of reductionism, making ideas instruments of social interests. In constructing a biographical narrative we can see class and status not as reified structural entities to which ideas are attached, but as relational processes in which we can learn more about what ideas meant by seeing what work they did in social exchange. In these ways, and in others, biography is in a state of creative experimentation; it has become one of the main ways of restoring the social to intellectual history.29
Though five of the book’s chapters focus on single figures, they are obviously not full-scale contextual biographies. I have selected biographical episodes in which the themes of the book become sharply etched: Poullain de la Barre’s disillusionment with university scholasticism; Malebranche’s relationship to his own tortured body, which played no small role in his conversion to Cartesianism; Mme de Lambert’s disgust with what she saw as the shameless decadence of false gallantry under the Regency; the life crises that led Shaftesbury to undertake Stoic exercises; David Hume’s turn to polite essay writing in the wake of the failure of his Treatise to find a readership; the treacherous terms on which Thomas ascended to literary celebrity; Diderot’s anxious efforts to find a husband for his daughter as he conceived his essay “On Women”; Louise d’Épinay’s troubles with her prodigal son.
Can we read texts rhetorically, as I have done, and at the same time connect our reading to a refashioned intellectual history encompassing the longue durée? Perhaps the point is simply that the two approaches offer intellectual history a needed contrapuntal division of labor. But I find more possibility of convergence, or at least of the subfields touching on each other fairly habitually. The logic of situatedness takes us into the author’s biographical circumstances, her passage through webs of social relations, the immediate field of argument she is addressing. But rhetorical readings also by necessity require a wide-angle lens, if we are not to remain on the textual surface. If we pay close attention to a text’s rhetorical properties—its figurative language, its tropes, it use of conventions of genre, its changes of voice, and so on—we reach deeper into its layered meanings. We might call this the vertical route to horizontal extension; we are led out to the longue durée embedded in the text, or at least to the middle durée. The language of seventeenth-century politeness echoes through texts of the High Enlightenment, over a century later, which play with and sometimes bend beyond recognition their received connotations. We cannot understand Malebranche without Augustinianism; Shaftesbury and others without Stoicism; Diderot without a succession of medical mind/body paradigms. To do justice to the labor/aisance binary we have to be aware of the lineages of the family of words in which it operated, which have articulated gender differentiation since antiquity.
All this may not meet the aims of a refashioned history of ideas. I prefer to call it a history of language at work, a history whose tight focus on the form as well as the content of texts requires a long view.
Chapter 1
The Social Aesthetic of Play in Seventeenth-Century France
In the second half of the seventeenth century French authors commonly gave their nation pride of place in the creation of a distinctly modern literature. The natural grace of literary French seemed to make it superior not only to other European vernacular languages, but also to classical Greek and, perhaps more striking, to the classical Latin on which boys and young men labored in the collèges, heard university lectures, and conducted academic theses and disputations. There was much arrogance and more than a little pretension to the assumption that French belles lettres were, or ought to be, the envy of Europe. And yet many of the innovations that came to characterize “modern” literature did have their origins in seventeenth-century France, and the reason is not hard to find. It was in le monde—the elite society of Paris—that the writing of prose and poetry entered into symbiosis with a new culture of orality, the polite conversation of the salons and other venues of sociability among the titled and the wealthy.1 Out of this chemistry came a wide array of new stylistic forms and genres in the vernacular, among them the mock epic, the “gallant” love letter, the vernacular poem, the epistolary essay, the polite dialogue, and the novel. Strict traditionalists among “the learned” (savants) might disapprove, but they were scorned