Colonial-era governance oscillated between reason and sentiment rather than reason alone

Evidence

It would not be one that starts with the supremacy of reason in the nineteenth century and then traces it back to the roots of rationality in the Enlightenment. It would rather set out another genealogy of equal force— and of as long a durée. Such a genealogy might register the incessant flux in political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over what morality was (either a “natural sense” or a “cultivated taste,” as it was for Shaftesbury). It would look to that eighteenth-century “culture of sensibility” that tied material power and moral weight to the taste and character of cultivated and lettered men. It would register that sustained oscillation between reason and sentiment rather than the final dominance of the one and their definitive severance. It might take up William Reddy’s case that modernity’s early moments in the “age of reason” could as accurately be characterized as an “age of sentiment.” It would register the recurrent attack on what constituted reason and political rationality in the eighteenth century. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 445

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s central thesis on episteme/anxiety in colonial governance — the colleague’s reading purpose. — connects to: Colonial power instrumentalized reason and thereby corrupted modernity’s promise — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 615
• DEFINE: Introduces William Reddy’s reframing of the ‘age of reason’ as an ‘age of sentiment’.