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It is virtually a commonplace to observe that the confrontation between Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft over the morality of the French Revolution concerns manners as much as politics or morals. Neither Burke nor Wollstonecraft believes that manners can be considered in isolation, and for both writers, the term “manners” works as shorthand for a larger system of power. In the end, manners reflect moral objectives: just as the construct of female modesty is designed to secure female virtue, so manners more generally secure moral or political ideals. Responding to the revolutionary call for complete sincerity and openness, Burke and other conservative British writers deliberately reclaim certain kinds of insincerity, re-establishing the merits of terms that had come under suspicion in the preceding decades, including modesty, chivalry and politeness. Yet even as the ideal of sincerity falls into disrepute with conservative writers because of its revolutionary associations, some radical writers on manners hold on to and further strengthen the evangelical call for sincerity that can be heard throughout the criticism of Chesterfield's letters. The contours of this debate form the main subject of this chapter, which will compare and contrast arguments about manners and insincerity made by Burke, Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, considering the consequences of each position for subsequent arguments about virtue and politeness, particularly as they affect women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who favor manners often prefer not to admit that the word politeness itself may be found controversial. Politeness can be synonymous with civility, tact or decorum, all terms whose valence is generally positive. But mid-eighteenth-century British writing lacks a consensus on politeness. When supporters of politeness use the word civility, for instance, their opponents are quick to redefine civility as hypocrisy and to condemn it on moral grounds. The word politeness proves equally vulnerable to the process of hostile redefinition. An easy way to refute an argument for politeness is to argue that politeness is a euphemism for something more insidious: politeness means tact, and tact equals lying; politeness means gallantry, and gallantry equals adultery. The anxieties that permeate mid-eighteenth-century Britain's conversations about politeness coalesce around the question of whether a polite education is equivalent to enshrining hypocrisy, as some adversaries charge, or whether politeness can be protected from contamination by its close analogue dissimulation. Where Swift, Mandeville and Locke associated civility's most obvious problems with the question of whether it should be extended to all social classes (particularly the class of servants), however, writers over the decades that followed would come increasingly to believe that gender posed far more pressing questions than class for the ethos of politeness. The writers of mid-eighteenth-century Britain ask a series of questions about women, politeness and insincerity. Can politeness safely be extended to women as a group, or do women simply facilitate and/or benefit from the advancement of masculine politeness? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often asserted that Mansfield Park (1814) attacks theatricality and condemns insincerity, and the novel's goal is described by one critic as “[to establish], in the person of Fanny Price, a virtuous and immutable transparency.” The question asked here rests on a very different assumption about Mansfield Park: what if the novel represents Austen's most fully elaborated argument for hypocrisy? Ruth Bernard Yeazell has suggested that female modesty is necessarily hypocritical, its nature always to be at once a security for virtue and a technique of seduction. I hope to show that Fanny Price is hypocritical not just in this but in other important ways as well, and that her hypocrisy is central to the goals of Mansfield Park. In the modest figure of Fanny Price, I will argue, Austen defends those forms of insincerity that are produced by dependence. As a heroine supposed to embody the moral argument of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price has elicited little affection from readers and critics. Lionel Trilling sets the tone with his well-known pronouncement: “Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.” Accounts of what makes Fanny Price unlikable differ, but it may have something to do with her inferiority. Avrom Fleishman attributes to Fanny the “moral aggressiveness” that is the submissive person's only way to express hostility towards those on whom she depends; Kingsley Amis describes Fanny as “a monster of complacency and pride … under a cloak of cringing self-abasement”; Claudia L. Johnson identifies Fanny as Mansfield Park's “most obsequious and most disastrously indoctrinated inmate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a letter of 20 October 1755, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes with disapproval of Richardson's latest heroine that Harriet Byron “follows the Maxim of Clarissa, of declaring all she thinks to all the people she sees, without refflecting [sic] that in this Mortal state of Imperfection Fig leaves are as necessary for our Minds as our Bodies, and tis as indecent to shew all we think as all we have.” Montagu's objection to Sir Charles Grandison hinges on the question of whether it is wise to promote a rhetoric of transparency when decency in social interactions depends on concealment. Is the openness of Richardson's (usually female) first-person narrators sincere and principled, as Richardson and his supporters assert, or obscene and manipulative, as his detractors charge? Both Clarissa (1747–48) and Grandison (1753–54) were written in part to refute the accusations of readers who had singled out in Richardson's first novel Pamela (1740–41) what they perceived as technical and moral crudities, identifying Pamela herself as a hypocrite, and the Pamela controversy of the early 1740s offers eighteenth-century Britain's most fully worked-out debate on the problem of hypocrisy. Many of Richardson's readers found it impossible to separate their doubts about Pamela's sexual integrity from those about her rhetorical integrity, and I will approach Pamela as an experiment in which Richardson explores the rhetorical risks and payoffs of writing an epistolary fiction in which the personal safety of the primary letter-writer depends on her being able to persuade readers within the world of the novel that she is not a hypocrite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining the limits of a historical period always entails an element of arbitrariness. There are good reasons, however, for setting the conclusion of the first cycle in the reception of Kant's critical program at August 7, 1799, just under twenty years after the first appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason. The date marks the publication of Kant's open letter in which he repudiated Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and other attempts at bringing his transcendental philosophy to completion. His own critical work, which in the Critique he had claimed to be only of an introductory nature (A 11 / B 25), he now declared to constitute the system of pure reason itself. From that date onward the very reception of Kant became a problem, itself the subject of interpretation and reception. Moreover, at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had predicted that, following the path laid out by his program, one could “secure for human reason complete satisfaction” in regard to all its metaphysical preoccupations, and that this goal could be achieved “before the end of the present century” (A 856 / B 884). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what may be his single most famous passage, the first sentence of which was even inscribed on his tombstone, Immanuel Kant concluded his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) thus: 'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first starts at the place that I occupy in the external world of the senses, and extends the connection in which I stand into the limitless magnitude of worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, as well as into the boundless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the pillars of Kant's philosophy, and of his transcendental idealism in particular, is the view of space and time as a priori intuitions and as forms of outer and inner intuition respectively. The first part of the systematic exposition of the Critique of Pure Reason is the Transcendental Aesthetic, whose task is to set forth this conception. It is then presupposed in the rest of the systematic work of the Critique in the Transcendental Logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]