“Besides Our Selves”: An Essay on Enthusiastic Politics and Civil Subjectivity
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”
Considering the perilous cast of contemporary political life, structured as it is by the perceived threat and reality of theologico-political violence, a study into the historical proximity of religious enthusiasm and modern democratic politics might seem frivolous, on the one hand, and imprudent, callous, or worse, on the other. Frivolous, if we forget that enthusiasm and enthusiasts posed a constitutive challenge to the formation of our now seemingly fraught political modernity. Imprudent or callous, if we simply conflate enthusiasm with democracy and suggest that, despite recent reports to the contrary, these two are not intertwined in a World Historical struggle but are instead disturbingly partnered, expressions of a shared historical drift. Optimistic purveyors of modern disenchantments prefer the former thesis, while those that locate a secret fanaticism at the heart of modern universalism, rationalism, or liberalism sometimes pursue versions of the latter.
In what follows, I sidestep these positions and suggest instead that the examination of enthusiasm in early modern Anglophone politics and political theory provides an important lens for understanding how modern forms of civil subjectivity were imagined and achieved in prominent Enlightenment responses to enthusiasm, in particular those responses associated with eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism. For moral sentimentalists like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, civil subjectivity was in part a product of ongoing encounters with enthusiasm rather than an effect of its theoretical and practical suppression, and these encounters were often marked by a transformative undoing of the self rather than its autonomous declaration. A more supple vision of democratic politics can be glimpsed from this approach to enthusiasm than from the approaches contemporary democratic theorists have inherited from Kant and his followers. In the civil subjectivity of the moral sentimentalists, citizenship is envisioned as an ongoing practice of encounter and negotiation rather than a primarily juridical category, and the cultivation of political sentiments and ethos takes precedence over the articulation of a command morality.1 Rather than joining the campaign against enthusiastic politics, particularly as manifested in the familiar call for a more deliberative democracy, I suggest we be more attentive to both its persistence and its promise. In order both to mark the political valence of enthusiasm in early modern Anglophone contexts and to flag its relevance for debates in contemporary democratic theory, the essay begins with the appearance of enthusiasm in the newly formed communities of colonial Massachusetts.
We are (I say) in that River, and that River in us, when we are
besides our selves, undone, nothing.
Abiezer Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine
By the time Anne Hutchinson was summoned to appear before accusing ministers and deputies of court in 1637, what would subsequently become known as the “Antinomian crisis” had already made a deep and lasting impact on the political culture of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and beyond. That this impact was at once theological and political, ecclesiastical and civil, can be readily seen in the existing records of her examination and particularly in the questions and answers pursued by Hutchinson and the then-governor of the colony—also its foremost political thinker—John Winthrop. In her statements before the court, Hutchinson marshaled scripture to justify her semipublic ministrations against the colony’s religious authorities and their purported commitment to a doctrine of works rather than a doctrine of free grace. These authorities, Hutchinson claimed, were “ministers of the letter” rather than “ministers of the spirit,” their sermons given over to the exigencies of worldly law rather than the ineffability of divine gospel.2 What was worse for her accusers, Hutchinson based these claims not on the authority of scripture alone but on an inspired appeal to the Word behind the words, to the arresting call of “immediate revelation.” It was this appeal to an ultimate authority beyond the ministry of the word that Winthrop identified as “the most desperate enthusiasm in the world,” “the ground of all these tumults and troubles . . . the root of all mischief.” This attempt to circumscribe entirely the mediation of worldly, textual, covenantal authority—the very basis of Puritan political and religious obligation—threatened, as Winthrop succinctly stated during Hutchinson’s examination, to “overthrow all.”3
Hutchinson was ultimately found guilty, “not fit for [Puritan] society,”4 and exiled with her family first to Rhode Island and then to the New York frontier, where she was killed in an Indian raid (an event that authorities back in Massachusetts took as a sign of divine justification). The difficulties that Hutchinson’s enthusiasm posed for colonial authorities, however, were not so easily expelled.5 Across the Atlantic, “enthusiasm” became arguably the “central discursive flashpoint of England’s Civil War,” the privileged term for designating the manifold challenge posed to religious and political orthodoxy by the “giddy headed multitude,” the swarming sects and congregations of radical dissenting Protestantism.6 As such, enthusiasm stands at the center of one of the formative theological and political debates of Western modernity. This centrality has been emphasized by a number of contemporary political theorists and historians of political thought. John Pocock, for example, characterizes enthusiasm as “the Antiself of Enlightenment” while also carefully framing how enthusiasm thereby became an important component of that self. In a similar vein, James Farr identifies antienthusiastic discourse—particularly in its Scottish expression—as the main progenitor of eighteenth-century political science. And in her compelling work on Thomas Hobbes, Melissa Orlie argues that the early modern response to enthusiasm “institutes the predominant modern, sovereign conception of the political.”7
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Notes
I would like to thank UCLA’s Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the staffs of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Ahmanson and Getty Foundations for providing the resources needed to begin this study. Although in its initial stages, the project has already benefited from conversations with Rom Coles, Kim Curtis, Sarah Ellenzweig, Peter Euben, Stanley Hauerwas, Kinch Hoechstra, Jeff Lomonaco, Kirstie McClure, John Pocock, and George Schulman; its shortcomings are mine alone.
- For a compelling account of how contemporary democratic theory might benefit from attention to the cultivation of ethos over the articulation of command moralities, see William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). For a critical engagement with Kant on this question, see William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 164–77.
- David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 337–43; my emphasis. Unless otherwise noted, all italics used for emphasis are present in the original. On Puritan responses to enthusiasm more generally, see John F. Sena, “Melancholic Madness and the Puritans,” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 293–309.
- On the textual basis of Puritan political authority, see John Schaar, “Liberty/Authority/Community in the Political Thought of John Winthrop,” Political Theory 19 (1991): 493–518; and Tracy B. Strong, “How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 128–59.
- Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 347.
- David S. Lovejoy has convincingly argued that Hutchinson and other religious enthusiasts established a “pattern for radical expression” that can be detected in the politics of the American Revolution and beyond. See his “ ‘Desperate Enthusiasm’: Early Signs of American Radicalism,” in Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 231–42, and, especially, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
- Clement Hawes, “Enthusiasm’s Further Adventures,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 41 (2000): 247–53.
- J. G. A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. LaVopa (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1998), 7–28; James Farr, “Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 51–69; Melissa A. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 91.