Abstract
“Character” has a long history and a dense literature. In both its general and particular manifestations it permeates the writing of the Greek and Roman classical authors that formed the basis of eighteenth-century education and by which cultural standards were set. Ethical norms, both public and personal, deferred to the authority and the examples of Tacitus, Cicero, and Seneca. The dominant mode of character writing in the West at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the Theophrastan ethical type, derived from short studies of Greek personalities construed by Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. Theophrastus’s exemplary figures included the Boor, the Loquacious Man, the Social Parasite, the Miser. A sixteenth-century text of Theophrastan fragments prompted English sketches such as Samuel Butler’s Characters of 1667–79 (published in 1759) and the Caractères of La Bruyère. Character in this context is defined by public manifestation; it is a functional and rhetorical product of characterization, character-as-represented either by oneself or by another. These were portraits—images—in words of ethical types. Alexander Pope’s Moral Epistles, for example, took a broadly Theophrastan line: the “Argument” to the first, “Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN,” outlines the semantic range of the term:
Some Peculiarity in every man, characteristic to himself, yet varying from himself…Some few Characters plain, but in general confounded, dissembled, or inconsistent…The same man utterly different in different places and seasons…No judging of the Motives from the actions…Yet to form Characters, we can only take the strongest actions of a man’s life, and try to make them agree: The utter uncertainty of this, from Nature itself and from Policy…Actions, Passions, Opinions, Manners, Humours, or Principles all subject to change…It only remains to find (if we can) his Ruling Passion.1
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Notes
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 317.
On TMS, see also Nicholas T. Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Allen Lane, 2010), chap. 7.
Gordon Graham, “The Ambition of Scottish Philosophy,” The Monist: Scottish Philosophy 90 (April 2007): 154–69.
David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 86.
Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vols., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xxiii. Subsequent references by page number in the text.
See, for example, George Turnbull, Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy: Philosophical Works and Correspondence of George Turnbull, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Broadie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:445–46.
Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 64–65.
Malebranche’s work was the first of four titles Hume advised that his friend Michael Ramsey should read before encountering the Treatise. See Susan James, “Sympathy and Comparison: Two Principles of Human Nature,” in Impressions of Hume, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and P.J.E. Kail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 107;
and Peter J.E. Kail, “On Hume’s Appropriation of Malebranche: Causation and Self,” European Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 1 (April 2008): 63.
James, “Sympathy and Comparison,” 107. See also Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), chap. 7.
On Malebranche’s importance for the development of Hume’s thought, see also John A. Passmore, Hume’s Intentions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 86–89, 92. Passmore, like many other critics, addresses inconsistencies in Hume’s thinking that it is not appropriate to pursue here.
Anthony LaVopa, “Malebranche and the Bel Esprit” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.); see also Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 192, 250.
Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 198.
Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 338–42.
On two relevant theorists, Christian Thomasius and Johann Jacob Schmauss, see, for example, Thomas Ahnert, “Epicureanism and the Transformation of Natural Law in the Early German Enlightenment,” in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, ed. N. Leddy and A. Lifshitz (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 53–68.
Besides Seigel’s Idea of the Self, see also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004);
Deirdre S. Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, eds., Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, 1650–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
There is a large body of scholarship on Scottish university developments during the eighteenth century. See, for example, Roger L. Emerson, Professors, Patronage and Politics: The Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1992);
Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985);
Robert D. Anderson, M. Lynch, and N. Phillipson, The University of Edinburgh: An Illustrated History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), chap. 6.
Richard A. Kleer, “Final Causes in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33, no. 2 (April 1995): 275–300.
Stephen J. McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 55–56.
See, for example, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982);
Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982);
John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993);
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
David Hume, “An Abstract of a Book Lately Published, Entitled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c.,” in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; repr., 2004), 414 [Hume’s italics].
For an expanded version of this account, see Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), chap. 1.
Phillipson, “Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture,” in Scotland and England 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 226–46.
David Hume, “Essay I. Of Essay-Writing,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 534–35.
See, for example, Lynch, Economy of Character, 16; see also Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988),
and Ian Hunter, “Reading Character,” Southern Review 16, no. 2 (1983): 226–43.
Tobias Smollett, “Dedication,” in The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, ed. Damian Grant (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2–3.
See, for example, chap. 5 of Phillipson’s Adam Smith; J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pts. 2 and 3;
Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 7;
David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 7.
Older works that are still useful include Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Enquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945),
and Harro Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (1978): 19–40.
Colin Kidd, “Constitutions and Character in the Eighteenth-Century British World,” in From Republican Polity to National Community: Reconsiderations of Enlightenment Political Thought, ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jonathan Mallinson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), 40–61.
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Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (2011). Introduction: Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. In: Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (eds) Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119956_1
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