The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume

This engaging and insightful book explores the fate of eloquence in a period during which it both denoted a living oratorical art and served as a major factor in political thought. Seeing Hume's philosophy as a key to the literature of the mid-eighteenth century, Adam Potkay compares the staus of eloquence in Hume's Essays and Natural History of Religion to its status in novels by Sterne, poems by Pope and Gray, and Macpherson's Poems of Ossian.

Potkay explains the sense of urgency that the concept of eloquence evoked among eighteenth-century British readers, for whom it recalled Demosthenes exhorting Athenian citizens to oppose tyranny. Revived by Hume and many other writers, the concept of eloquence resonated deeply for an audience who perceived its own political community as being in danger of disintegration. Potkay also shows how, beginning in the realm of literature, the fashion of polite style began to eclipse that of political eloquence. An ethos suitable both to the family circle and to a public sphere that included women, "politeness" entailed a sublimation of passions, a "feminine modesty as opposed to "masculine" display, and a style that sought rather to placate or stabilize than to influence the course of events. For Potkay, the tension between the ideals of ancient eloquence and of modern politeness defined literary and political discourses alike between 1726 and 1770: although politeness eventually gained ascendancy, eloquence was never silenced.

Adam Potkay is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas.

This highly recommended study manifests a sure grasp of political and cultural history, familiarity with current critical approaches, and a lucid and often witty style.

Alan T. McKenzie:

Potkay's treatment of Johnson and Hume's encounters, lives, and selected works is even-handed, indeed eudaimonic. Slight and instructive adjustments illuminate various biographical and intellectual parallels.

Potkay sees in Hume and in the period, a deep ambivalence toward eloquence.... While Hume is at the center of this book, much of Potkay's analysis concerns other writers, notably Pope, Thomas Gray, Sterne, and Macpherson.... Potkay's work is ambitious, capacious, and erudite by any standard; as a first book it is astonishingly so.

Potkay is thorough, methodical, and very very serious.

Potkay aspires to reach beyond the groves of academe to a wider reading public. Certainly, the aim of affording readers a glimpse of a less fragmented learned world... is an admirable one, and Potkay's efforts are to be applauded.... Potkay offers a perspective on the Enlightenment that is at the same time fresh and yet reaffirming of its special character.

Leo Damrosch, Harvard University:

Literary scholars have long recognized a widespread eighteenth-century interest in 'eloquence,' but while theories of language have been thoroughly studied, theories of rhetoric have been ignored or treated as marginal. Potkay's book splendidly opens up this area of neglect, working from a persuasive political account of why people once cared so much about it. The book is exceptionally well written, both in local felicities and in energy and clarity of exposition.