Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States

By Edward Cahill

In Liberty of the Imagination, Edward Cahill uncovers the surprisingly powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination—philosophical ideas about aesthetic pleasure, taste, genius, the beautiful, and the sublime—on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth century. Far from being too busy with politics and commerce or too anxious about the morality of pleasure, American writers consistently turned to ideas of the imagination in order to comprehend natural and artistic objects, social formations, and political institutions. Cahill argues that conceptual tensions within aesthetic theory rendered it an evocative language for describing the challenges of American political liberty and confronting the many contradictions of nation formation. His analyses reveal the centrality of aesthetics to key political debates during the colonial crisis, the Revolution, Constitutional ratification, and the advent of Jeffersonian democracy.

Exploring the relevance of aesthetic ideas to a range of literary genres—poetry, novels, political writing, natural history writing, and literary criticism—Cahill makes illuminating connections between intellectual and political history and the idiosyncratic formal tendencies of early national texts. In doing so, Liberty of the Imagination manifests the linguistic and intellectual richness of an underappreciated literary tradition and offers an original account of the continuity between Revolutionary writing and nineteenth-century literary romanticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9780812206197

Edward Cahill

Edward Cahill is Professor of English at Fordham University. He is the author of Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. Disorderly Men is his first novel. Learn more at www.edwardcahill.net.

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Liberty of the Imagination

LIBERTY OF THE

IMAGINATION

Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form,

and Politics in the Early United States

EDWARD CAHILL

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used

for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this

book may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

2  4  6  8  10  9  7  5  3  1

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4412-0

Contents

Introduction

1. Ingenious Disquisition and Controversy

2. Poetry, Pleasure, and the Revolution

3. The Beautiful and Sublime Objects of Landscape Writing

4. Taste, Ratification, and Republican Form in The Federalist

5. The Novel, the Imagination, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Aesthetic State

6. Federalist Criticism and the Power of Genius

Conclusion

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

[A] little formalism turns one away from history, but . . . a lot brings one back to it.

—Roland Barthes, Mythologies¹

Early U.S. literary culture speaks the philosophical language of the imagination fluently and vociferously. Despite the extraordinary political demands of the day, literary texts of all kinds invoke the concepts of aesthetic theory with erudition and persistence. Poetry explores the morality of pleasure and the creative powers of the mind. Natural history writing describes the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque forms of the American landscape. Political writing apprehends the beauties of republican government through the rhetoric of taste and artistic representation. Novels portray the conflicts of the imagination and the trials of sensibility. Literary criticism debates the claims of genius and taste and the priorities of literary culture. In newspapers and magazines, commonplace books and memoirs, sermons and moral tracts, private correspondence and polite conversation—in nearly every genre and medium of expression, the rhetoric of aesthetic theory is ubiquitous and insistent. As a grammar of mental experience, it gives recognizable meaning to its various objects, be they of the mind, the heart, the people, or the state. Thus, in recounting that the new nation offered a curious subject for philosophical contemplation, David Humphreys, in the 1804 preface to his Poem on the Happiness of America (1786), insists on the centrality of the imagination to Revolutionary American writers: Our minds, imperceptibly impressed with the novelty, beauty, or sublimity of surrounding objects, gave energy to the language which expressed our sensations.² Humphreys’s use of Joseph Addison’s aesthetic categories, first articulated in his Spectator essays On the Pleasures of the Imagination (1712), registers both his debt to a British intellectual tradition and his own intellectual preparation for the experience his poem describes. But it also specifies the nature of the linguistic energy that connects aesthetic feeling to textual representation and literary form. Novelty, beauty, and sublimity are more than watchwords of literary refinement. Rather, they point to a set of key assumptions about the imagination, its literary powers, and their vital relation to the surrounding objects of nature, society, and politics. This book is about those assumptions and the ways in which they have shaped early American literature.

Scholars in the field have paid little sustained attention to the language of aesthetic theory. Although it claims to define the very foundation of literary production and reception, many have taken it for granted as a relatively meaningless mode of formal gesture. In this way, we have made a double mistake. First, we have understood rhetoric like Humphreys’s to be merely derivative of the European literary culture in which it originated and was authoritatively used and, therefore, fundamentally foreign to the contexts of American culture. According to this view, to invoke Addison’s categories is merely to ape British literature and to impose a genteel tradition on a republican, commercially minded society. At the same time, we have understood the language of aesthetics—even when used by European writers—as an indulgent vocabulary of privilege whose rococo formulations were suspect in their own time and have since been rejected for their rhetorical abstraction and inherent exclusion. Thus, we have seen in words like Humphreys’s not argument but ornamentation, a polite performance without substance, both unworthy of critical attention and implicitly guilty of elitism. By slighting aesthetic theory as either imitative or complicit, we have deemed some of the most important theoretical ideas about art and aesthetic experience in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American culture irrelevant to our study of that period’s literature.

When we look closely at this tradition and explore the history of its development, however, a complex relation of ideas, politics, and form emerges with astonishing clarity. Liberty of the Imagination demonstrates that American writers of the Revolution and the early republic were not too busy with nation building or too ambivalent about the imagination to theorize its powers. Indeed, ideas about pleasure, fancy, association, taste, genius, beauty, and sublimity permeated literary culture. Educated Americans read about, reflected upon, discussed, and debated such ideas with remarkable frequency and intensity. They encountered them in British rhetoric textbooks, moral philosophy treatises, and literary criticism; they discussed them in college classrooms and salon conversations; they wrote critically about them in domestic magazine and newspaper essays; they invoked them in their poems, novels, and other literary productions; and they used them to frame important political debates during the colonial crisis, the Revolution, Constitutional ratification, and the advent of Jeffersonian democracy. Like Humphreys, they turned to aesthetic ideas to describe natural landscapes, art objects, social formations, and political institutions. For writers like Fisher Ames, William Bartram, Charles Brockden Brown, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Joseph Dennie, Timothy Dwight, Elizabeth Fergusson, Philip Freneau, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Trumbull, Mercy Otis Warren, and Phillis Wheatley, such ideas were central to the political and cultural development of the British colonies, the new American states, and the emerging nation. They offered a means of understanding, advocating, and regulating the pleasures of the imagination for a society increasingly determined to claim its share of sensibility in a transatlantic literary culture. But they also provided a means of articulating notions of liberty, equality, virtue, community, and difference during a time of political revolution and social improvisation.

To speak of aesthetic theory in eighteenth-century America is necessarily anachronistic. Alexander Baumgarten’s appropriation of the word aesthetic in 1750 as a rubric for philosophical questions of taste had no currency in English until the nineteenth century. But it is nonetheless a useful placeholder for an otherwise diverse constellation of concepts similarly concerned with discovering truth in pleasure, emotion, and non-rational modes of knowledge. Sometimes called philosophical criticism or criticism of taste, eighteenth-century aesthetic theory relates to ideas of sensation, perception, pleasure, fancy, imagination, beauty, sublimity, the picturesque, taste, judgment, genius, criticism, belles lettres, art, eloquence, passion, emotion, sympathy, sentiment, sensibility, sensus communis, and other modes, forms, and objects of affect, epistemology, and ethics. If such ideas are bound together by their central reference to the imagination, they are also united in their common interest in connecting the mind with the world around it. They comprehend the relationship between subjects and objects, the particular and the universal, the material and the ideal, and the individual and the collective. Although they derive variously from the fields of moral philosophy, rhetoric, the fine arts, journalism, theology, political economy, and medicine, these ideas cannot be understood to exist in any symmetrical or linear relation. Rather, they constitute an elaborate and shifting web of affiliation, attracting, opposing, and impinging on one another in both predictable and unexpected ways.³

With such diversity and range, aesthetic theory was an innovative source of explanatory power and social cohesion. It justified virtue and benevolence, imposed order on unruly nature, shored up the vulnerability of reason, gave legitimacy to forms of pleasure and desire, and raised art and literature to the highest status. By specifying the mechanics of human thought and social interaction, it also clarified the moral foundation of families, communities, nations, and empires. Theories of beauty and sublimity privileged the vagaries of private feeling but also subordinated bodily pleasures to mental ones, provided a common vocabulary of sensibility, and inspired socially binding programs of cultivation and improvement. Theories of genius celebrated the creative powers of individuals while linking them to the common capacities of the human mind. Theories of taste imposed an idea of universality on the otherwise intractable variety of pleasures and preferences, while creating a supple discourse of distinction. In these and other ways, aesthetic theory generated new conceptions of self and society whose authority was based not in coercive political power but in qualities of mind and habits of cultural practice. By elaborating the pleasures of the imagination, it both exalted the uniqueness of individual subjects and connected them to a like-minded community of perceivers.⁴

As a philosophical discourse, however, aesthetic theory struggled against its own premises, claims, and implications. Rhetorically, we see this in ruptures between ideas of aesthetic disinterestedness and the insistence of interested pleasure, and between lofty claims of universality and a practical tendency toward exclusivity. But philosophically, we also see it in the phenomenological gap between aesthetic subjects and aesthetic objects whose uncertain topography was the persistent dilemma of eighteenth-century theorists. In connecting beauty and sublimity with the formal qualities of objects, for example, these writers gain the moral assurance of the imagination’s universality but at the cost of the specificity of the perceiving subject. Conversely, in locating the source of beauty and sublimity in the imagination of the perceiver, they elevate the moral status of aesthetic perception and invention while leaving the imagination vulnerable to the moral hazard of its radical autonomy. For these reasons, aesthetic theory was fundamentally contradictory. Addison’s pleasures of the imagination rise above bodily sensation to denote an infinite Faculty of the Soul, even as he discovers their efficacy in the regulatory logic of virtuous moderation.⁵ The concept of taste articulated by David Hume, Alexander Gerard, and Edmund Burke promises to unite the judgments of all sensible subjects, but this totalizing imperative renders it less capable of particularizing the pleasures of the imagination that made taste seem so necessary in the first place. The association of ideas advanced by David Hartley, Lord Kames, and Thomas Reid gives order to the processes of the imagination, but in revealing the complexity of aesthetic subjectivity it all too clearly spells out the likelihood of their disorder. In this way, aesthetic theory’s contradictory nature continually threatens to undo its syntheses and makes it a problem always in need of a solution.

Yet it is precisely the problems of aesthetic theory that made it such an incisive means of thinking about the problems of American society and politics. For at its heart lies a language of liberty, a persistent expression not only of individuality, autonomy, and agency but also their necessary limits. Ideas about the imagination emphasize what Hume calls liberty of the imagination—the mind’s innate and vigorous capacity for creating associative chains of images and ideas—as well as the dangers of its excess, the moral need to constrain such excess, and the opposition between liberty and the power of such constraint.⁶ This dialectic of liberty in aesthetic theory offered American writers a rich critical vocabulary for articulating the imperatives and challenges of political liberty and, thus, for confronting the social contradictions of Revolutionary and early national culture. By invoking models of virtuous pleasure and regulated imagination, they constructed and experimented with ideal proportions of liberty and constraint. But they also interrogated such ideas as a means of comprehending the pressures of revolution, constitution-making, and nation-formation, the conflicts of class, race, and gender, and the vicissitudes of political life in a republic.

Until recently, scholars have been somewhat reluctant to explore the significance of aesthetic theory in early U.S. literary culture. In the 1980s, the poststructuralist critique of aesthetics understood it as a mere prop of bourgeois hegemony and its fictions of autonomous subjecthood. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, calls the aesthetic disposition—the highly rarified mode of disinterested aesthetic consumption—an ideological strategy of the elite classes, the only means they have of distinguishing art from commodities in an otherwise commodified world.⁷ For Barbara Hernnstein-Smith, too, the concept of aesthetic value is axiological because it defines a universal realm of value as consisting of particular values that, through the discourse of taste, are realized as universal.⁸ Such arguments taught a generation of scholars that critical attention to form and pleasure could only come at the expense of historical and political specificity.⁹ As a result, by redefining our own critical values, we lost sight of the values of earlier literary cultures. Cultural paradigms that were once the chief concerns of authors—pleasures of the imagination, judgments of taste, powers of genius—were neglected as merely decorative expressions whose relevance to literary study faded with the privilege they once both upheld and disguised. In learning to interpret the political unconscious of literary texts, we became less conscious of the aesthetic ideas in which they are so often grounded. In historicizing literary culture beyond facile claims about the power of art, we ceased to historicize the claims of art at all. Indeed, in learning to be wary of aesthetic judgments, we learned to assume an opposition between aesthetics and historicism.¹⁰

In the 1990s, however, a movement in literary studies offered to reclaim the aesthetic, as George Levine puts it, with a counter-critique dedicated in various ways to a historicized, politically sensitive, even progressive idea of aesthetics.¹¹ Isobel Armstrong argues for the uncoupling of the aesthetic and privilege and attention to the radical potential of art and imagination.¹² Likewise, Peter Brooks and Elaine Scarry insist that, despite its bourgeois history, aesthetics plays valuable roles in culture, such as enabling hermeneutic pedagogy and inspiring social justice.¹³ Such arguments assume not only that aesthetics is a basic human need and practice, but also that it is central to the mechanisms of democratic culture and inherently committed to ideas of openness, negotiation, interpretation, and play. If aesthetics sometimes obscures politics and power, these critics suggest, it also helps us to see how they work, how they change over time, and how they might be improved. This more capacious idea of aesthetics is, in fact, more consistent with its own contradictory nature, what Terry Eagleton calls its radically double-edged commitment to both discipline and emancipation. For Eagleton, aesthetics is both an elite discourse of pleasure and a form of knowledge rooted in the body. It functions as both an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation, and material possessiveness and a libratory discourse originating in a bourgeois critique of absolutist power.¹⁴ Accordingly, it implies both a flight from history and a substantive particularization of it. Its rhetoric of disinterested pleasure and hierarchical regimes of sensibility authorize political authority and social inequality, to be sure, but they also enable profound insights into the nature of political and social experience.

Since the 1990s, scholars of British literature have brought illuminating historicist perspectives to the rhetoric of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.¹⁵ In American literary studies of the period, the aesthetic turn has moved at a slower pace, but a number of useful interventions have laid a strong critical foundation. Cultural histories of eloquence and oratory, politeness and belles lettres, sympathy and sensibility, and art and taste have affirmed the relevance of aesthetic discourse to Revolutionary and early national literature, finding its most significant expressions in oratorical performance and the sentimental novel.¹⁶ Such histories have also charted the domestication of aesthetic theory to the uses of national politics and to questions of class, race, and gender. They have demonstrated how aesthetics sought simultaneously to naturalize elite politics and give voice to marginalized political subjects, how it offered both a reprieve from the demands of democracy and an ideal of political community. In this way, they have reoriented our critical priorities toward rhetorically rich but under-examined structures of feeling and given us provocative answers to David S. Shields’s instructive prompting: What literature would be brought to life if one studied pleasure as a mode of power?¹⁷

Liberty of the Imagination is indebted to this work and builds on it in a number of ways. Above all, it is grounded methodologically in intellectual rather than cultural history. It recovers a world in which ideas mattered as ideas, in which writers did not merely translate them into cultural practice but understood them self-consciously as philosophical constructions and objects of debate whose significance was fundamental to wisdom and virtue. For this reason, it avoids making any general assumptions about the currency of aesthetic theory for American writers. Instead, it substantiates an analytical focus on the significance of specific theoretical categories by elaborating the breadth and depth of their reception and circulation in significant domains of print culture: college curricula, book importing and reprinting, and periodical criticism (Chapter 1). It also looks beyond single aesthetic traditions by exploring a wide array of ideas and the dynamic relations between them, for it assumes that only in the context of such relations are their meanings fully realized.¹⁸ To focus exclusively on the idea of sympathy, for example, is to ignore the closely related ideas of imagination, taste, and beauty. Critics of the early American novel who emphasize sympathy as its primary aesthetic category thus tend to confine the novel’s aesthetic concerns to social passions and the act of imagination to imagining other people. But accounting for the circulation of aesthetic ideas also demands that we look beyond the claims of an individual aesthetic theorist or text, such as Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry or Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Readers and writers rarely responded to single aesthetic models; their views and representations invariably emerged from exposure to a variety of ideas, always in conversation, often competing, and sometimes incomplete or distorted. Accordingly, this book explores the ideas of an extensive range of aesthetic philosophers and critics: not only Addison, Burke, Gerard, Hartley, Hume, Kames, and Reid, but also Archibald Alison, Hugh Blair, William Gilpin, William Hogarth, Francis Hutcheson, Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, August Wilhelm Schlegel, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and many others.

It also explores the political valences of these ideas without assuming that they are definitively liberal or conservative.¹⁹ Literary scholars engaged with the politics of aesthetics have argued largely by analogy, seeing in invocations of imagination, feeling, and form corresponding ideas of political power. Alternatively, this book argues that the politics of aesthetic theory is inherent in the language of its rhetoric. Its dialectical conception of the imagination comprehends the tensions between liberty and constraint that structure aesthetic theory’s main concepts and debates. It thus sees aesthetics and politics as linked more by homology than analogy, bearing not only a structural resemblance but also an intimate and original discursive relation (Chapter 1). As a result, its analyses discover in literary texts a politics that is more nuanced than definitive, alternately liberal and conservative, democratic and elitist; but it also finds that such terms often fail to describe the complex political identifications of many authors or works. This approach allows me, for example, to explore the consensual rhetoric of The Federalist without dismissing it as a merely hegemonic project of political domination, or to read in the aesthetic practices of Brown’s Wieland family or in Dennie’s disdain for democracy not merely guilty elitism but also highly wrought idealism. By focusing on the contradictions inherent in aesthetic theory, that is, I aim to shed new light on the contradictions of early U.S. political culture.

The literary significance of aesthetic theory, however, extends beyond politics and intellectual history to matters of genre and form, both of which this book foregrounds in its organization and analyses.²⁰ It assumes that the representation of aesthetic ideas depends on the conventions of literary language and that specific literary genres tend to engage with specific aesthetic categories and express specific political concerns.²¹ But it also explores how the discursive tensions within and across aesthetic categories alert us to the rhetorical patterns and formal energies of the genres in which they are represented. Ideas of pleasure in Revolutionary poetry help us to locate its divided moral, epistemological, and political priorities, while accounting for its dramatic tone and cautious meter, sudden reversals and monotonous diction (Chapter 2). The discourse of beauty and sublimity in post-Revolutionary landscape writing not only manifests its debt to theories of painting and relevance to federal land politics but also defines its dynamic perceptual logic and engenders its most poignant moments of transcendence and crisis (Chapter 3). In Constitutional-era political writing, the language of taste recapitulates the challenges of republican polity as it constructs a flexible rhetoric of political form and normative models of political judgment (Chapter 4). The novel’s engagement with theories of the imagination dramatizes late eighteenth-century philosophical conflicts of materialism and idealism, thereby illuminating its tendencies toward verbal excess and narrative incoherence, rigid determinism and unsettling indeterminacy (Chapter 5). In early nineteenth-century literary criticism, debates about genius and taste clarify the reactive politics of Federalism in a rising democratic culture but also help us to understand the tradition’s rhetoric of nostalgia, melancholy, and dispossession (Chapter 6). Thus, although it pays close attention to individual literary texts, the book’s larger goal is to define persistent patterns of formal representation within and across genres, to uncover what might be called the deep form of early U.S. writing—its dramatic peripeteia, metaphors of enslavement and liberation, figures of tragedy and transformation, and rhetorical investment in the discontinuous, chaotic, and obsessive.²²

Finally, this book demonstrates not only that early U.S. literary culture was a transatlantic phenomenon but also that U.S. nation formation was utterly dependent on British (and sometimes even French, German, and Italian) intellectual materials.²³ Such transnational borrowing, as Leonard Tennenhouse argues, allowed Revolutionary Americans to steer a course between independence and authority.²⁴ The tension in aesthetic theory between such forces made it particularly suitable for use and adaptation by American writers, most of whom rarely understood their engagement with it in narrowly national terms. As the language of aesthetic pleasure ponders the relation between selfish and social passions, for example, it confronts the paradoxes of political collectivity. Ideas of beauty and sublimity vividly allegorize the tenuous balance between liberty and power. Theories of taste and genius signal conflicted visions of cultural identity. As a paradigmatic discourse of the eighteenth-century public sphere, moreover, aesthetic theory generally subordinated national identities to affiliations of class and ideals of universality.²⁵ To comprehend and communicate its concepts was to participate in the republic of letters and to claim membership in an elite transatlantic community of feeling. For this reason, the primary focus of my argument is less the emergence of a national culture than the ideas that produced and contested its various articulations. My analyses turn not on questions of literary nationalism but those of political power and social class, to which the language of aesthetic theory offers especially expressive answers. Although it was sometimes used to celebrate the nation, it was more often used to trace its tentative development and confront its limitations. In short, the propensity to scrutinize the meanings of nation and resist its teleologies is inherent in the language of aesthetic theory itself.

Liberty of the Imagination begins with the transformation of aesthetic discourse in the late 1760s and early 1770s by ambitious undergraduates who embraced the new Scottish moral philosophy and rhetoric to recast the pleasures of the imagination as central to America’s culture of liberty. Then it explores pivotal moments in the history of aesthetic theory, literary culture, and politics along a parallel trajectory from the anxious empiricism of the colonial crisis through the emergent subjectivism that marks the rise of democratic populism in the 1820s. It concludes with a brief discussion of the aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Jacksonian era. But it is not a Whig history of aesthetics. By reading early American literary culture through the lens of aesthetic theory, it rejects a linear progression from republican neoclassicism to liberal romanticism. Instead it reveals an insistently dialectical narrative of cultural development, one that understands the nineteenth-century emergence of the romantic aesthetic subject and the democratic state as highly contested and contingent. Humphreys’s preface to the Poem on the Happiness of America recalls that the Revolution presented a momentous and awful spectacle to mankind, marked by threatening prospects and distressing apprehensions and pointing to a doubtful outcome. Although, nearly two decades after writing the poem, he boasts of the establishment of a general government and other scenes of happiness and looks forward to national prosperity, his account of its earlier history is rooted in profound uncertainty.²⁶ That he understands the language of aesthetic theory as uniquely capable of representing such uncertainty exemplifies its rhetorical efficacy. But as the following pages seek to demonstrate, it also reminds us that effective formalism, far from turning us away from history, brings us back to its richest particularities.

Chapter 1

Ingenious Disquisition and Controversy

[T]he central idea to emerge in eighteenth-century aesthetics is that of the freedom of the imagination.

—Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty¹

In Federalist 37, James Madison interrupts a sustained argument in support of the federal Constitution with an elaborate aporia concerning the difficulties inherent in the very nature of the undertaking referred to the convention. Foremost among these difficulties was the problem of balancing national strength with local and individual rights, or as Madison puts it, combining the requisite stability and energy of government with the inviolable attention due to liberty and to the republican form.² Such a contradictory charge rendered the Convention at Philadelphia an arduous and imperfect enterprise. But the greatest difficulty of all, Madison insists, came from the intellectual work of fallible men in creating, contemplating, and judging the Constitution.³ They struggled not only with the indistinctness of the object before them but also with the imperfection of the organ of conception through which they sought to understand and evaluate it, as well as the inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas through which they might voice their judgments.⁴ Although Madison assumes that such philosophical complexity could be appreciated only by those accustomed to contemplat[ing] and discriminat[ing] objects extensive and complicated in their nature, even such educated and experienced citizens would have to admit their uncertainty about the nature of contemplation and discrimination: The faculties of the mind itself have never yet been distinguished and defined with satisfactory precision by all the efforts of the most acute and metaphysical philosophers. Sense, perception, judgment, desire, volition, memory, imagination are found to be separated by such delicate shades and minute gradations that their boundaries have eluded the most subtle investigations, and remain a pregnant source of ingenious disquisition and controversy.⁵ In other words, he suggests, the ultimate challenge to the Constitution’s framers lies not with questions of political power but with those of the creative, discerning, Constitution-making mind.

Why does Madison raise such abstract philosophical questions in the midst of an urgent political project whose purpose is significantly more specific and concrete? One aim, certainly, is rhetorical. By invoking the unwieldy ramifications of the faculties of the mind, he identifies those most capable of asking such weighty questions, explains their failure to derive perfect answers, and mitigates the imperfections of a Constitution drafted by judicious, self-effacing men. If the faculties of the mind cannot be distinguished and defined with satisfactory precision, then one should not expect more from the Convention’s balancing of national stability and energy with republican liberty.⁶ However, Madison’s language has a more substantive relation to the problem of power and liberty facing the Convention, for it invokes signal aspects of the transatlantic discourse of aesthetic theory, which first emerges in the early eighteenth century and gains in significance and complexity around the same time as the American colonial crisis in the 1760s. As a staple of learned print culture and polite conversation, aesthetic theory defined the possibilities and limits of the imagination, linking the sensory perception of objects to the processes of association and regimes of taste, and describing a realm of mental experience beyond the confines of reason. But by representing the imperatives of the body and mind through the disembodied abstractions of philosophy, aesthetic theory also offered to reconcile the affective experience of the individual to universal principles of thought and action. In constructing collective models of subjectivity, it concerned itself with questions of social diversity and unity, interest and disinterestedness, agency and subordination, consent and coercion. In this way, it was both a type of political discourse and something separate from politics. On the one hand, in invoking modes of perception, imagination, and judgment, Madison’s philosophical aside suggests a belief that the difficulties of the Convention were not so different from those of reading a poem, hearing a concert, or viewing a painting. On the other hand, the tradition it names assumes a disinterestedness and universality that make it wholly distinct from the interests of political power. Thus, Madison’s disquisition and controversy is less a rhetorical dodge than an illuminating gesture toward a discourse that speaks with both compelling immediacy to and critical distance from the primary question which lay before the Convention: How much liberty should there be in a republic?

If there is a touch of the satirical in Madison’s description of aesthetic theory as ingenious—a word he seems never to have used as unqualified praise—this only emphasizes its significance to him. For one, the tag was a commonplace. Eighteenth-century philosophers often referred to the work of their peers as ingenious, even as they criticized the tradition of pedantic excess upon which they hoped to improve.⁷ But more importantly, Madison himself was a serious and prolific intellectual for whom the word would have been appropriately descriptive. As Garry Wills notes, for someone who railed against closet theorists, Madison was thoroughly devoted to the closet study of theoretical works.⁸ Under the tutelage of John Witherspoon at Princeton, he read extensively in aesthetic theory under the rubrics of moral philosophy and rhetoric, including works on the faculties of the mind by Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Hume’s cousin, Lord Kames. From such works, Madison and his peers—five of whom would attend the Constitutional Convention—learned to believe that by studying the faculties of the mind they would be better prepared to improve the political institutions that conduced to liberty and social harmony.⁹

It is significant, however, that Madison refers to both the disquisition and the controversy of aesthetic theory. In eighteenth-century usage, the terms were often opposed. Disquisition implied the public, disinterested intellectual inquiry of educated, rational minds, while controversy suggested the private, interested, often impassioned claims of political faction.¹⁰ The disquisition and controversy of aesthetic theory, then, signals a field of inquiry concerning the autonomy of the individual in relation to collective forms of power and authority. It asks whether we are bound by innate ideas or if such ideas are freely constructed through the haphazard impressions of sensory experience; whether the faculties of perception and judgment are purely rational or influenced by the passions and the imagination; whether the associative powers of the imagination and genius are guided by judgment or by a more spontaneous but less reliable logic of their own; whether the sources of beauty and sublimity are perceived by cultivated, objective contemplation or by immediate, subjective response; and whether or not the ineluctable diversity of tastes is finally reconcilable to a universal standard. These questions suggest a wide range of discursive affiliations shared by aesthetic theory and early national politics. But they also reveal that such affiliations are not merely analogous or metaphorical but more properly homologous, implying a relation based on shared origins. They assume not merely that aesthetic theory borrows its language of liberty from politics but also that the liberty to act politically originates with, and is ever after conditioned by, the liberty to imagine.¹¹ Thus, aesthetic theory is a pregnant source of controversy not only because it produces philosophical disagreement in itself but also because it aims to understand the problem of liberty—the very relations of self and society that produce controversy in the first place.

American writers who considered the problems of aesthetic theory were sensitive to the homology of aesthetic and political liberty and ambitious in their pursuit of its implications for both the pleasures of the imagination and the forms of national polity. In aesthetic theory, they discovered a means of both defining American liberty and thinking about the problem of liberty. By invoking it, they sought not only to buttress the claims of nationhood but also to interrogate its contradictions. They aimed not merely to construct exemplary citizen-subjects but also to delineate the relationship between citizenship and subjectivity. If they sometimes saw in the language of taste, genius, beauty, and sublimity a vocabulary for discerning a distinctly American sensibility, more often they saw it as a means of distinguishing sensible from vulgar minds, assessing the political viability of aesthetic diversity, and charting the modes of perception, imagination, and judgment that seemed to make moderate liberty in a republic possible.

This chapter offers an account of the rhetorical tradition of aesthetic theory by pursuing four distinct but closely related aims. It first considers the ambiguity, contestation, and insufficiency of the political discourse of liberty that informed Madison’s writing, and it argues that aesthetic theory functioned as a counter-discourse that more effectively represented liberty’s delicate shades and minute gradations, not as rational abstractions but as sensible experiences of the imagination. The second section describes the chief sources from which American writers discovered aesthetic theory, sketching both the roles they played in the formation of a vernacular philosophical culture and the scope of their theoretical engagements. The third section discerns in these sources a definitive interest in the contours and contradictions of liberty. In revealing liberty to be a fundamental preoccupation in the philosophical rhetoric of aesthetic theory, I describe how it signifies the complexities of politics, citizenship, and selfhood, alternately articulating ideas of expansive agency and restrictive authority. The dynamism of this dialectic points to the final section of the chapter, which discusses the implications of aesthetic theory for our understanding of literary form. For as ideas about the imagination invoke a subjective encounter with objects, their phenomenology of perception, ideation, and judgment gives shape to the literary representations that seek to embody it. Just as aesthetic theory stages the volatile drama of political liberty, the forms of this drama can be seen in the distinctive formal volatility of Revolutionary and early national writing: its exultations of liberty, lamentations of constraint, and sudden, wrenching, often irrevocable transitions from one to the other.

Political Liberty and Aesthetic Liberty

Forged in the violence of seventeenth-century political struggles, British liberty functioned as both a description of the nation’s constitutional and representative government and as a potent racial myth that distinguished Britons from less free and enlightened peoples. Central to its conception, however, was the idea that liberty was always bounded by and exercised within authoritative limits. It might refer to one’s citizenship, property, humanity, or even salvation, but it was typically opposed to some form of power. It watched jealously for the abuses of tyranny, but it also assumed the possibility of its own transgressions. Often opposed to the liberty of man in his natural state, British liberty was a creature of society, born of essential human freedom but sustained by a necessary adjustment to the demands of political community. Not only were its limitations rooted in law—that of God, society, nature, or reason—and thus never arbitrary, but they were also consensual, accepted as legitimate by the very persons whose freedom they limited. Such an idea thus assumed that the protection of certain rights required the disavowal of others. As John Locke writes in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom . . . for where there is no Law, there is no Freedom.¹² According to this logic, British law also enforced the regressive distribution of liberty’s privileges. It thus never included African slaves sent in British ships to America, nor did it grant political rights to Indians, women, or men without property. But this is