Abstract:

This dissertation revisits a key eighteenth-century debate on the nature of moral and political reflection. While Enlightenment-era rationalists separated the legislative faculty of the reflective mind---identified as "reason"---from the faculties that obey, their sentimentalist contemporaries did not distinguish sovereign and subject mental faculties in this way. Instead, they saw our reflectively-endorsed standards of justice and virtue as the product of the mind as a whole, emotion and imagination included. Employing critical re-appraisals of three of this theory's strongest defenders---David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. G. Herder---as well as its single greatest critic---Immanuel Kant---I seek to reclaim reflective sentimentalism as a resource for political theory and political practice today. Sentimentalism maintains that the imaginative transmission of emotion through sympathy leads to moral sentiments demanding justice for all those whose feelings we share. Our moral sentiments then undergo progressive revision as we extend our sympathy to an ever-increasing range of others. The widespread sharing of emotion thus enhances rather than diminishes our reflective autonomy. Sentimentalism therefore suggests an impassioned rather than a dispassionate politics, one in which citizens use rhetoric and narrative to spur one another on in the reflective revision of their moral sentiments.