men and women, as they were imagined and practiced. As different as are the texts of Saint-Évremond, Lambert, Hume, Thomas, Necker, and d’Épinay, they share a quest for a wholeness that would absorb gender differentiation into a holistic ideal of the human, even as they proceed from the reigning assumption of the reality of difference.
Contextual intellectual history is at once experiencing a renewal and undergoing skeptical questioning. To some critics we run the risk of trapping ourselves in a hyperparticularism, and to escape it we need what Darrin McMahon calls a “refashioned history of ideas.” The critics are not calling for a return to what has been dismissed as the hopelessly idealist history of ideas with which, fairly or not, Arthur Lovejoy is said to have burdened American scholarship. What they have in mind would not be premised on any sort of idealist metaphysics, and would certainly not be limited to a sacred canon. It would explore continuities and ruptures in ideas over much wider temporal stretches than we find in most current scholarship, and it would assess them in a way that allows us to engage them for present purposes, perhaps even to evaluate their truth claims. At the same time contextualism itself is being reconceived as we ask how the social can be returned to intellectual history without falling back into a crude reductionism, making ideas a function of the interests of structural blocs like classes and professional groups.24 Can we practice an intellectual history that explores the integration of representations and social practices? Can we recover the social meaning of ideas by seeing how they worked, sometimes with surprising suppleness, in processes of social exchange?
How these two ways of refashioning the field might be combined is an open question. In an effort to intertwine seemingly divergent positions, I read texts as the performances of rhetorical personae.25 Performance in this sense is a subset of my notion of the “performance” of intelligence, but focused now on writing and print. I do not have in mind rhetoric as a formal academic discipline, based on classical texts and central to the academic education of boys and young men for centuries (though it is highly relevant that rhetoric in that sense was an exclusively male realm of public action). My approach is somewhat akin to Quentin Skinner’s idea of the performance of “illocutionary acts.” But whereas Skinner was concerned exclusively with historicizing the study of political thought, I want to broaden his idea to encompass the performed qualities of all kinds of intersubjective exchange in language.26
My working use of the term “rhetorical” may seem so broad as to be meaningless. For my purposes, however, it has the advantage of having a reach that is at once specific and capacious. In several of my selected texts—Shaftesbury’s essays, for example, or Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature—the performance selfconsciously enacts the art (or arts) of language use, particularly in the practice of a literary genre, the choice of authorial voice, and the presentation of authorial character in style. In some cases the practice of the art was quintessentially public, as oratory was in the ancient polis; the aim was to constitute or renew a civic culture. With other texts, I have extended the notion of rhetorical performance to writing that was not intended to be art, and indeed in some cases was not intended to be read by others. I have in mind, for example, Shaftesbury’s solitary exercises in Stoic askesis and Mme Necker’s voluminous journals, as well as the private correspondence of figures like Hume and Diderot.
I will hazard the claim that any verbal trace of an individual’s subjectivity is a rhetorical representation of it. Even the most intimate revelation in a diary entry is a performance, if only as a dialogic effort to convince oneself. It is always, in Richard Holmes’s apt phrase, “evidence that is witnessed,” which is to say that the subject produced it with some awareness of the witnessing. And that is a way of saying that the traces are always “transactions of the social realm,” ways of “giving social expression to the subjective interior.”27 The retreat to labor in solitude, so often considered essential to a manly mind, was a social act with a social message.
Approaching a text as a rhetorical performance does not require positing a unitary subjectivity, or a wholeness of the writing self. The performance may reflect a yearning for the absent, for an unachievable wholeness; and in any case—as Shaftesbury’s and Diderot’s texts demonstrate—it can be done in two or more voices in counterpoint. At the same time, this approach avoids what Fritz K. Ringer has called the “identificationist” fallacy, which he sees as a failure to maintain “hermeneutic distance.”28 The fallacy lies in assuming that in an intuitive act of empathy, one can relive the subject’s inner states, the “experience” behind the text, and make those states immediate to the reader. There is an illusory premise, a notion of self-emptying, or self-abandonment, that purports to short-circuit the unavoidable fact that we must translate from the subject’s meaning to our own. We are left with no way of recognizing when, in our effort to intuit the subject’s self-understanding, we’re really indulging in a presentist reading of ourselves into the historical Other. An effort to plumb alterity all too easily becomes a way of erasing it.
The only verbal access we have to the subjectivity of the historical subject is through rhetorical mediations. That means, of course, that we have to practice self-denial; but if we take an emphatically contextual approach, the mediations themselves abound in meaning. The performance of a rhetorical persona is situated in various directions, and as we examine its situatedness we engage in an interactive recovery of meaning, with the text pointing us to contexts that bear on it, and with contexts illuminating the historical meaning of the text. The rhetorical persona, by the very nature of its mediating function, has an intended audience. The social implications are, of course, obvious if the intended audience is an actual group of readers, as in much polite literature written for le monde. But authors often imagine audiences as rhetorical communities in the making, as Hume did in celebrating a middle station, or they try to constitute such communities, as Shaftesbury did in his essays, and in these cases too the question of audience has a social dimension. The other contextual strategy is biographical. To say that contextual biography is an inherently reductionist approach to ideas is to ignore the way the genre has been evolving. There are ways of practicing it that avoid one of the crudest forms of reductionism, making ideas instruments of social interests. In constructing a biographical narrative we can see class and status not as reified structural entities to which ideas are attached, but as relational processes in which we can learn more about what ideas meant by seeing what work they did in social exchange. In these ways, and in others, biography is in a state of creative experimentation; it has become one of the main ways of restoring the social to intellectual history.29
Though five of the book’s chapters focus on single figures, they are obviously not full-scale contextual biographies. I have selected biographical episodes in which the themes of the book become sharply etched: Poullain de la Barre’s disillusionment with university scholasticism; Malebranche’s relationship to his own tortured body, which played no small role in his conversion to Cartesianism; Mme de Lambert’s disgust with what she saw as the shameless decadence of false gallantry under the Regency; the life crises that led Shaftesbury to undertake Stoic exercises; David Hume’s turn to polite essay writing in the wake of the failure of his Treatise to find a readership; the treacherous terms on which Thomas ascended to literary celebrity; Diderot’s anxious efforts to find a husband for his daughter as he conceived his essay “On Women”; Louise d’Épinay’s troubles with her prodigal son.
Can we read texts rhetorically, as I have done, and at the same time connect our reading to a refashioned intellectual history encompassing the longue durée? Perhaps the point is simply that the two approaches offer intellectual history a needed contrapuntal division of labor. But I find more possibility of convergence, or at least of the subfields touching on each other fairly habitually. The logic of situatedness takes us into the author’s biographical circumstances, her passage through webs of social relations, the immediate field of argument she is addressing. But rhetorical readings also by necessity require a wide-angle lens, if we are not to remain on the textual surface. If we pay close attention to a text’s rhetorical properties—its figurative language, its
