Modernity’s early period was as much an age of sentiment as reason

Evidence

It would not be one that starts with the supremacy of reason in the nine- teenth century and then traces it back to the roots of rationality in the En- lightenment. 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 sensi- bility” that tied material power and moral weight to the taste and charac- ter of cultivated and lettered men. It would register that sustained oscil- lation 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 ac- curately be characterized as an “age of sentiment.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 445

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to William Reddy’s Navigation of Feeling and the broader emotion-history literature.
• SEED: Angles for an essay on how colonial archives encode affectively-charged epistemics rather than pure rationality.

Related

• Colonial-era governance oscillated between reason and sentiment rather than reason alone (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial governance ran as much on sentiment’s management as on reason’s rule. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial state vocabularies were built on sentiments, not just reason (similarity 0.79)
• Sentiment is the negative print underlying the colonial archive’s reasoned surface (similarity 0.78)