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.