Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image

Reading Andrew Burstein’s Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image is a disconcerting and frustrating experience. Published in 1999, the book seems to have been written in the language of, and with a methodology, from the 1950s; disavowing "scientific analysis" (xviii), the author yet strives to make grandly ambitious claims about sensibility, patriotism, and United States history; resistant to "theoretical speculation" (xviii), the author still feels free to cite Benedict Anderson and to allude to some of the recent work on eighteenth-century sensibility.

The book’s dissonance can, perhaps, be traced to a problem of audience. Published by Hill and Wang (a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux), it was seemingly intended for a mass-market audience. Thus, Burstein claims in the Preface that his "purpose is less to indulge in theoretical speculation than to narrate the story of America’s romance with itself" (xviii). Narrative sells, or at least it has a much better chance of selling than does academic analysis or theoretical speculation. The problem is that there is very little narrative here to satisfy that audience. True, most chapters are built around discrete chunks of time (e.g., "Chapter 4. The American Dream: 1776"; "Chapter 6. Tormented by Phantoms: 1789-1800"), and the first chapter is titled "Beginnings," while the final chapter is titled "Legacies of National Character." Sounds like a narrative to me. Beginning, middle, end. But a narrative of what, exactly? There’s the rub.

Most fundamentally, Burstein imagines that he is narrating the "transformation of sensibility into patriotism, into the romantic self-image that republicans had devised for their new nation" (297). This transformation is driven, at least at times in Burstein’s account, by political and social events: wars, taxes, legislation, the problem of slavery, the problem of the native tribes, the changing economy, etc. But the events themselves--the stuff of most mass-market narrative histories--are not the focus. Instead, those events merely initiate, haphazardly and without a clear sense of causation, the subtle changes in American self-conception over the course of one century, from the sensible colonists of 1750 to the brash sentimental democrats of 1840. I may be wrong, but a book that traces the shift in a term like "sensibility" in ten-year increments over the course of one century needs one hell of a marketing campaign. It’s just not compelling history for most readers in your local Barnes and Noble.

It should be compelling literary history for readers like me, however, if it is done well. But, unfortunately, Burstein’s book neither breaks new ground, nor synthesizes in an interesting way the work that has been done in, say, the last twenty years on sensibility, sympathy, and affect. For scholars working in the long eighteenth century, Burstein’s book will simply be short on theory, method, and originality. Again, in terms of theory, Burstein states up front that he is not very interested in "theoretical speculation" about the meaning of America’s self-conception. Fair enough in some histories. However, it seems to me that "theoretical speculation" is inseparable from the United States’ sense of itself. In the penultimate sentence of this book, Burstein quotes Bill Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union Address: "‘America is far more than a place. It is an idea’" (340). Burstein emphatically agrees, explicitly arguing that "material change" often has "little effect" on peoples’ sense of themselves (337). But if "America" is an idea, then where else does it exist than in "theoretical speculation"?

Perhaps this is quibbling. Burstein seems to mean that he wants to describe, rather than analyze, the emergence and development of Americans’ self-conception as a sentimental people. And indeed, the book resists textual, cultural, and social analysis at every turn. Complex, rhetorically-rich texts like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers are reviewed in a paragraph or two; they are reduced to several specific, (supposedly) representative quotations and a few clichés. Hence, for example, after two paragraphs of "analysis," Cooper’s The Pioneers is offered to us in summary judgment: it is "consistent with the visions of Franklin, Crèvecoeur, and Jefferson, painting a picture of progressive agrarian comfort, invariably glorifying America" (275). That’s not my reading of The Pioneers, but I’d be happy to consider it if Burstein actually offered such an analysis of the novel. These sorts of quotations and summary judgments are lined up in each chapter and lobbed at the reader, a "description" through time of comments on sensibility and its variations by writers who are, in some indefinable way, "American." Such a method--the term can only be used loosely--is unclear, undefined, and unsatisfactory. There is simply too little sense of direction within each chapter. There’s no sense of where we’re going, or why. There’s no delimited subject, as it were, just texts and quotations that are concerned with some idea of some aspect of "America." One could just as easily imagine a collection of quotations and non-analytical judgments that "proves" that the United States has been and is opposed to sensibility: if you can draw from any sources whatsoever, with no method to delimit the subject matter, you can make a case for just about anything.

The relationship between real-world events and discursive change is similarly undertheorized and underexplained. Because of this, Sentimental Democracy has the feel of a 1950s "myth and symbol" study, or a "history of ideas" study. Big social and cultural changes occur without explanation or analysis. Burstein’s typical historical assertion uses the passive voice and suggests a kind of helplessness before forces that cannot be explained: "A new era of debt evolved, though not without fits and starts" (258). At other times, such assertions are so general and so abstract as to be completely useless: "Democracy lay ahead [after the 1790s], while a traditional concept of stately honor was unwilling to yield to it" (195). When events, in turn, put pressure on ideas, the human motivations behind language use are inconsistently explained. Thus, "sensibility" can be a strategy "to further cultural cohesion" for Mercy Otis Warren (295), while it is a belief, or a literary device, or a discursive pattern, or a psychological theory, or a mask for other writers. There is no clear sense of what language means in Burstein’s study; there is no underlying theory of how human beings create, use, and alter language. This undertheorizing and lack of method leads Burstein to adduce ideas that seem oddly out of time, or at the very least to cast his ideas in a language that seems oddly innocent of contemporary theory and politics: "[Jefferson and Hamilton] both expressed equally the resiliency of the American imagination" (308); "the established American creed elevat[es] practical freedom and independence" (xvii); "the restless, romantic male self . . . was preparing, like America itself, to surge ahead" (314). Metaphorical generalizations such as these may once have been stirring, but today they cry out for intellectual analysis.

Burstein has clearly read widely in the primary sources, and he has read some, at least, of the large body of scholarship on sensibility, sentiment, and affect produced in the last twenty years. But he seems curiously untouched by that scholarship.  At one point, late in his study, Burstein mentions (in one brief sentence) Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an imagined community, and comments that "[Anderson’s] definition [of the nation] seems apt for this study" (334). That’s it for Anderson, whose book, Imagined Communities, has been an incredibly important meditation on the emergence of the concept of nationhood: Burstein writes his own study as if Anderson’s work could have provided no help in thinking about the question of when and how colonists became "American," or about how and why a sense of national "purpose" could have been formed at any particular historical moment, or about what modes of communication enabled these Americans to fashion a sense of national purpose. The same is true for the work of Jay Fliegelman, G. J. Barker-Benfield, Sacvan Bercovitch, and other scholars cited by Burstein, as well as many more, like J. G. A. Pocock, who are not cited by him. Andrew Burstein seems to have stepped into a conversation, but--while he knows what the other participants have said--he simply has not listened very carefully. Sentimental Democracy is, finally, an unhappy book, containing as it does neither compelling narrative nor insightful analysis, neither mass-market drama nor scholarly investigation.