Not World Enough

Chapter five looks at William Godwin’s 1793 novel, Caleb Williams. It argues that this novel depicts the ways in which denser patterns of settlement destabilized notions of responsibility and accountability, by making it possible for neighbors to harm each other through otherwise innocent actions. The novel is thus a gothic tragedy that serves as rejoinder to utopian, anti-property schemes such as those advocated by Thomas Spence. In this text antagonism is a naturally-occurring fact, created by the absence of a coherent legal theory of easement, the area of law that attempts to deal with what economics knows as the problems of social cost by articulating our rights to necessarily shared goods like air, water, and light.

Nothing Personal

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.

Castes of Exception

Chapter three looks at James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It argues that the book criticizes both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism for their incoherent theories of identity. Both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism imagine identity as an unchanging property or state that individual persons inherit and possess regardless of their actions in the here and now. The debilitating consequences of this position are shown in the Sinner’s sense that, though he lives in the world, he doesn’t act in it.

The One and the Manor

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.

Introduction: Personification and Its Discontents

No man, if he had his choice, would be the angel Gabriel to-morrow! … He might as well have an ambition to be turned into a bright cloud or a particular star. … He would rather remain a little longer in this mansion of clay, which, with all its flaws, inconveniences, and perplexities, contains all that he has any real knowledge of or any affection for....

Everything Counts (Frankenstein)

The epilogue reads Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a novel centered around the paradoxical relationship between scientific or materialist accounts of causality and the causal calculations of justice. For if science—like justice—means nothing but understanding the chain of events that led to a given state of affairs, Victor Frankenstein’s understanding of the natural world as an essentially infinite set of interlinked causes makes the assignment of responsibility to any particular entity seem like a nonstarter. The novel, on this view, is not, as we’ve often said, a morality tale about science taken beyond prescribed limits but about the unlimited—and therefore meaningless—nature of scientific causality. The chapter argues that the novel thus operates as a prescient diagnosis of both the materialist science of its own moment and the currency of materialist perspectives (such as in posthumanism and a growing interest in systems-level change—e.g. climate change) in our own.

The Pursuit of Guilty Things

Chapter one charts out three separate but interrelated nineteenth-century histories: the return and subsequent rise of the corporation as a business entity after 1825; the challenges industrialism posed to tort law; and the problems both eighteenth-century science and Romantic aesthetics had in understanding the identity of collectives. The goal of the chapter is to transform our understanding of the nineteenth-century as a period committed to individualism by seeing the prevalence of collectives within even apparently liberal or individualistic spheres (the law, economics, Romanticism) and the challenges they posed to the basic assumption of liberalism and justice that individual persons can be meaningfully correlated with particular actions and effects.