The Luxury of Skepticism: Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere; 1660-1740

In The Luxury of Skepticism, Timothy Dykstal charts the history of political dialogue in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England, exploring how a typically philosophical form comes to serve the purposes of modern political debate. The individual chapters of his study present focussed readings of dialogues by the most famous practitioners of the form, and together they amount to a substantial contribution to our understanding of political and philosophical discourse in this period, thanks largely to Dykstal’s rigorous critical method and lucid prose. This is not so much a study of dialogue as a genre than as a political idea. Dialogue—candid, reasonable, doubting—emerges in this period as the vehicle for fashioning a new political consensus. Eschewing the monologic authority of oratory and the strife of direct controversy, political theorists in dialogue staged for their readers a fashioning of consensus in a polite social setting. Much of the analytical framework of this study is drawn from Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Dykstal argues that his political dialogues model the free and open exchange of thought and the challenges to state power that Habermas describes. But Dykstal is also sensitive to some complexities of power and social life in England that eluded Habermas. Indeed, what is perhaps most admirable in this study is Dykstal’s willingness to probe, and lay bare, the tensions and contradictions in the dialogues he examines, recognizing that, then as now, philosophy and politics are at odds, and that skepticism must, ultimately, fall away if a new political consensus is to emerge.

Dykstal begins with Hobbes, two late dialogues, The Common Laws of England (1681) and Behemoth (1682). These texts, he argues, exemplify “counsel” (24): the mode of political exchange before the emergence of a public sphere, where a sovereign seeks, from a counsellor, knowledge of those he governs. Ostensibly, Hobbes here reaffirms the representative publicness of absolute monarchy, but, as Dykstal observes, by setting these scenes of counsel down on paper for common consumption, Hobbes concedes the wrenching shifts in political power that he had witnessed through his long life. However much Hobbes abhors the prospect, there is a new sovereign on the scene, “the sovereign reader” (51) who must be conciliated and persuaded in the course of these dialogues. Against Hobbes’s work, Dykstal pits two famous republican dialogues: James Harrington’s Valerius and Publicola (1659) and Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus (1681). These dialogues, predictably, “take the debate about the commonwealth out of the king’s private chambers . . . and place it in the public sphere” (52), but both thinkers are keen to insulate political thought from the daily demands of political action. The senate, not the commons, becomes the proper scene of dialogue’s polite and disinterested exchange about the larger good of the commonwealth.

Harrington and Neville’s ideal of aristocratic disinterestedness in political exchange finds an eager proponent in the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who writes extensively about dialogue in his Characteristicks (1711) and includes, in that miscellaneous work, an example in the form of The Moralists. Shaftesbury is, as has been widely recognized, a political idealist, unsuited to the demands of public life; where Neville and Harrington envisioned a philosophical elite who could seek truth for the good of all, Shaftesbury sees dialogue as an end in itself, as a genial embodiment of the sociable impulses which form the core of his philosophical system. Dykstal shows how Shaftesbury readily departs from true dialogue to dialogue with the self, to the staged scenes of “rhapsody” he so loved and which are, of course, predicated on an aristocratic prerogative for whimsy. Generous as he is with Shaftesbury, Dykstal is unflinching about the consequences of Shaftesbury’s ultimate abandonment of dialogue: “The liberal defender of toleration in the political realm turns out to be as intolerant of difference in the philosophical realm as the most ardent dogmatist” (95).

Bernard Mandeville proves, in The Fable of the Bees (1714-29), to have a position on dialogue that is radically different from Shaftesbury’s, but is, if anything, even more conflicted. Reading dialogue and conversation as discursive versions of the commerce of self-interest that binds society together in Mandeville’s thought, Dykstal shows how Mandeville, even as he makes dialogue more socially inclusive, robs it of the power to seek truth: “if commerce is conversation, it is a dissimulative, deceitful kind, not the free and open communication that Habermas says the bourgeois champions of civil society translate into political power” (106). Perversely, however, when Mandeville actually turns his hand to dialogue writing in the second part of the Fable, he offers us an ideal exchange that his political philosophy should surely preclude: a lucid, logical, and polite debate. In rounding on this “discrepancy between philosophical speculation and practical dissimulation” (131) in Mandeville’s thought, Dykstal reveals, intriguingly, the alarming instabilities of Mandeville’s ironic mode. Ultimately, like Shaftesbury, Mandeville seems to reserve speculation about the true nature of the commonwealth to a handful of leisured thinkers, cut off from the busy brutal world of private vices.

Dykstal closes with a reading of George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732), a long and frequently quite snarky Tory riposte to a host of freethinkers, including Shaftesbury and Mandeville, designed to “rehabilitate a preconscious respect for authority and tradition that can only be called prejudice” (133). Berkeley’s dialogic mode is less enlightened exchange and more catechism, and his defence of natural and revealed religion aims less to prove the truth than to demonstrate the utility of Christianity. This pragmatism ironically aligns Berkeley, more than any other thinker in this study, with the practical, common-sense concerns of the middle classes, but his deeply conservative method seems the antithesis of the mutual enlightenment predicated of the public sphere.

The closing pages of The Luxury of Skepticism take Alciphron as symptomatic of a diminishment at mid-century of both political dialogue and the public sphere it sustained, and Dykstal proposes as an explanation the relative calm of the Walpole years, where political practice became more important than political thought. This is plausible enough, but, churlish as it might seem to ask more of this richly informative book, I could not help wanting to hear how Dykstal might write the dialogues (and dialogic writing) of Astell, Hume, Johnson, and Burney into this history. Perhaps Hobbes and Berkeley might better serve not as bookends, marking the infancy and dotage of the public sphere, but simply as proof of the many, sometimes competing publics in early modern Britain. Dykstal’s probing and deeply challenging readings of all these dialogists prove, beyond a doubt, that there is a widely shared commitment to public exchange at the highest level throughout this period, as well as a shared conviction in the importance of dialogue to the health of the commonwealth. But even more important, he shows a wide range of ways in which this sustaining dialogue could be imagined and practised.