SOURCE: Warburton, Penny. “Theorising Public Opinion: Elizabeth Hamilton's Model of Self, Sympathy and Society.” In Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, pp. 257-73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Warburton addresses references to Adam Smith in A Series of Popular Essays and compares Smith's concept of “sympathy,” as defined in Theory of Moral Sentiment, to Hamilton's idea of the “Selfish Principle.”]

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas argues that a bourgeois reading public capable of rational, critical debate and competent to form its own opinions emerged over the course of the eighteenth century within the context of a developing market economy. In his seminal account, he claims that there are two forms of public: a literary public sphere and a political public sphere. In general, according to Habermas, these two publics blended together as ‘a public consisting of private persons whose autonomy based on ownership of private property wanted to see itself represented as such in the sphere of the bourgeois family’.¹ However, they were divided along class and gender lines:

The circles of persons who made up the two forms of public were not even completely congruent. Women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere, whereas female readers as well as the prentices and servants often took a more active part in the literary public sphere than the owners of private property and family heads themselves. Yet in the educated classes the one form of public sphere was considered to be identical with the other; in the self-understanding of public opinion the public sphere appeared as one and indivisible.²

Habermas's claim that women were ‘factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere’ needs clarification. He is correct insofar as women were formally excluded from politics—they could neither vote nor stand for parliament.³ However, in order to comprehend the full range of women's extensive engagement in politics during this period we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the political public sphere as a fluid and complex entity whose boundaries were continually shifting. From the electoral canvassing of élite aristocrats such as Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire to the food riots of starving plebeian labourers, women of all classes gave voice to their political beliefs through whatever means they could appropriate for this purpose.⁴ As Linda Colley and others have argued, although the adherents of the ideology of separate spheres became increasingly prescriptive during the 1790s, at the same time: ‘The half-century after the American war would witness a marked expansion in the range of British women's public … activities’ so that ‘even the most conventional British women would come to accept that formal exclusion from active citizenship did not exclude them from playing a patriotic role—and a political role of a kind.’⁵

According to Habermas, the ‘self-interpretation of the function of the bourgeois public sphere crystallised in the idea of “public opinion’” during the late eighteenth century. During this process of crystallisation, he claims, the term ‘public opinion’, first documented in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1781, assumed its modern referent of a public ‘competent to form its own opinions’.⁶ In Habermas's account of the ideology of the ‘public sphere’ within the history of ‘great thinkers’ from Hobbes through to Locke and Rousseau, then Kant, Hegel, Marx and Mill, it is Kant who provides the most developed theory of public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth. However, Habermas's discussion of the idea of public opinion can be criticised for failing to take into account a more representative group of writers and thinkers. Public opinion was hotly debated during this period in a diverse array of genres including newspapers, political speeches, sermons, novels, plays, criticism, reviews and other writings. For example, Wordsworth's description of an urban public whose ‘discriminating powers of the mind’ were reduced to a ‘state of almost savage torpor’ through the ‘uniformity of their occupation’ in the ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ clearly reflects a grave concern at the ability of the public to form its own opinions on the value of literature.⁷ In this essay I focus on the work of Elizabeth Hamilton, arguing that her reflections on the problem of ‘public opinion’ via a rethinking of Adam Smith's theory of moral values are an important manifestation of female intervention into the political public sphere during the early nineteenth century.

Hamilton is probably most familiar to us as the author of Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), a satire on contemporary radical thinkers, in particular William Godwin and Mary Hays, portrayed unflatteringly as ‘Mr. Myope’ and ‘Bridgetina Botherim’. However, she also wrote on a number of different subjects including education, history, biography, taste and ethics. In her salon at Edinburgh she played host to local literati including Dugald Stewart the philosopher, Joanna Baillie the playwright, and Mrs Grant of Laggan.⁸ Gary Kelly has described her project as one of counter-revolutionary feminism, arguing that she intellectualised ‘women's culture by popularizing, novelizing, and thereby disseminating philosophy, theology, and history, and doing so in a way that offered herself as model for the new intellectual-domestic woman.’⁹ However, Hamilton's engagement in what Kelly has categorised as ‘masculine’ subjects can also be read within the context of the Scottish common-sense school of philosophy and as a continuation of the Enlightenment project to create a ‘science of man’.¹⁰

A gifted child with a lively intellect, Hamilton demonstrated an early interest in moral philosophy but suffered from considerable social pressure not to display her superior knowledge in case she was accused of pedantry.¹¹ In her journal she recalls: ‘Do I not well remember hiding Kames' Elements of Criticism, under the cover of an easy chair, whenever I heard the approach of a footstep?’¹² A philosophical spirit of inquiry pervaded her writing. She experimented with different genres such as historical biography to illustrate the speculative principles that she deduced from her work on education. However, she worried about whether this was the proper vehicle for philosophy. Intending her Memoirs of Agrippina (1804) to be read as philosophy, she was disgusted with its reception as a historical romance: ‘Agrippina is preposterously classed with novels; and an opinion has been commonly entertained that it is, in reality, a sort of biographical romance.’¹³

In 1813, Hamilton published A Series of Popular Essays Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination and the Heart. Dedicated to her friend Archibald Alison, it was in generic terms her most ‘philosophical’ book. The work consists of five lengthy essays and an introduction in which she attempts to prove a set of specific axioms. In the first essay she speculates on the purpose of philosophy and suggests that women have a particular contribution to make to the discipline. In the second, she posits that faculties of the mind such as perception are developed in direct proportion to the degree of attention focused on them by the subject's mind. In the third she goes on to argue that this faculty of attention also affects the imagination and thereby produces emotions of taste. It is in the last two essays that her main theme is developed—the idea of the ‘selfish principle’ and its role in the formation of the self.

Hamilton's theories of the mind and desire were derived from observations she made in her educational writings. Here she argued, firstly, that all knowledge is constructed through associations; secondly, that this process begins in early infancy; and thirdly, that the first ideas generated from association are the strongest and the most permanent. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, she pushed associationist psychology to its extreme limits, arguing that the mind has no innate sex. Yet at the same time her associationist stance is challenged by her religious beliefs about the existence of original sin, producing an inherent tension in her work.

Throughout the book, Adam Smith is a constant point of reference, and she comments on both the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments, at times directly, at others indirectly. When she agrees with him she tends to mention his name, but when she is critical of his work she is oblique in her references to his ideas. This tentative textual relationship to Smith suggests that Hamilton is anxious to legitimise her writing as part of the Scottish tradition of moral philosophy that she is simultaneously attacking.

In her introduction she makes it clear that her project is philosophical: not ‘didactic precept, or grave admonition’ but:

a serious examination of the obstacles which impede our progress, and which must be surmounted, before either the heart or the understanding can be effectually improved. The obstacles to which I allude are not created by external circumstances: they are to be found within, and can only be discovered by an actual survey of our common nature; such as may, however, be taken by every person capable of observation and reflection.¹⁴

Philosophy here becomes, to use Hamilton's expression, ‘popular’, because in principle philosophy, like science, is a practice open to everyone, including women. It does not have to base itself, theoretically, on a tradition of learned writing but can proceed of and in itself. Indeed, she asserts that her lack of formal philosophical training is a positive advantage, as she is no slavish disciple of any school of thought. Furthermore, she argues that truly great philosophical authorities will respect the integrity of her project and read her without prejudice. While acknowledging the importance of works that diffuse ‘the observations or discoveries of superior minds’ she claims that her design is an original one:

However I have availed myself of the light derived from the investigations of our eminent philosophers, as the object at which I have aimed is distinct from theirs, the assistance afforded has been only partial. Of my design the prominent feature is an attempt to deduce, from a consideration of the nature of the human mind, proofs, that revealed religion offers the only effectual means of improving the human character.

(vol. I, p. xix)

As noted above, her writing can be seen as the continuation of an Enlightenment project to create a ‘science of man’ founded on experience and observation, through the systematising eye of reason, which would in turn be the foundation of all other sciences. However, Hamilton's philosophy is only scientific insofar as it is part of what she describes as the ‘natural progress of society’ and the unfolding of providential divine wisdom. As such, her project is curtailed by her religious beliefs, and her hypotheses about the working of the mind are selected in the first place according to how far they support biblical ‘truths’.

She calls for a ‘revolution in public taste’, arguing that philosophy could become part of the general education of both gentleman and ladies, for:

may it not reasonably be hoped, that when a superficial acquaintance with other branches of science has become too common to confer distinction, the science of mind may be resorted to as a desideratum of polite education?

(vol. I, p. 5)

She goes on to suggest that the lack of a classical education, which most women would not have received, is no impediment to instruction in philosophy. Comparing it to other sciences such as chemistry, she argues that in time the results of research into the ‘science of mind’ will yield comparable benefits to society. Striving to make her work open to all readers she claims that her language will be one sanctioned by custom rather than abstruse metaphysical learning. The central aim underlying Hamilton's project is a pedagogical one: by understanding the working of the mind she posits that it will be possible to use these insights to intervene at an early stage in order to improve pupils' abilities. However, this is not to suggest that ‘every village dame, and every parish domine, and every master and mistress of a charity school’ should study the philosophy of the human mind, for according to her definition, they should already possess the requisite knowledge through their experience of teaching (vol. I, p. 74).

HAMILTON'S SCIENCE OF MIND: ‘A PROPENSITY TO MAGNIFY THE IDEA OF SELF’

In this section I focus on Hamilton's main proposition—the existence of a mental property which she terms the ‘selfish principle’ and identifies as the ‘propensity to magnify the idea of self’. This principle is defined only in negative terms, so its exact meaning is initially elusive (and, I shall argue, subsequently confused). It is not to be equated with self-love, which is defined as:

simply desire of happiness; a desire which we may observe to be regulated and controlled by the intellectual powers, and consequently, as to the nature of its operations, dependant on the direction given to the power of attention.

(vol. II, p. 120)

Nor should it be conflated with ‘selfishness’, which she describes as:

inordinate desire of self-gratification, not dependant on the operation of the intellectual faculties … but originating in associations that connect the idea of happiness with appropriating the objects that appear desirable to the heart, and thus obtaining enjoyments in which none can participate, and in which none can sympathize.

(vol. I, p. 274)

The ‘selfish principle’, manifested as the propensity to enlarge the idea of self, is distinct from both ‘self-love’ and ‘selfishness’ as it operates independent of any ‘peculiar direction of attention for its development’:

Besides the appetites which direct to the preservation of life, there are certain desires or propensities interwoven in the frame of our nature which operate spontaneously, and arrive at mature strength long before the intellectual faculties … this active principle is still without a name … I take the liberty of describing it from its operations, as a propensity to magnify the idea of self.

(vol. I, pp. 271-2)

It is a faculty of mind which is general in its projection outwards onto the world, as every object is potentially an object of desire. As a faculty, the ‘selfish principle’ is something that is constitutive of the self. Yet Hamilton makes it clear that it is to be resisted. It is tempting to conceptualise it as a precursor to Freud's unconscious as it is both the basis of self-awareness and its debased component. As we shall see, this principle threatens the mechanism of Smith's impartial spectator, since for Hamilton disinterested action is not possible without the impartiality of the divine.

She uses this principle to explain the basis of class, gender and racial conflict, as well as smaller disputes within the domestic sphere and in the local community. Furthermore, she sees it as the prime mover in every instance of an action seemingly motivated by pride or vanity, arguing that there is

not one of the operations of the human mind in which it may not mingle … even among notions which we may deem completely virtuous, it may sometimes be found to have insinuated itself.

(vol. I, p. 277)

As early as 1808, she writes in her journal that she sees pride as the root of all the passions expressive of hatred, including malice, envy, jealousy and so on. The problem she was struggling to address was how to describe the operation of pride. She writes:

the best I can at present think of, is that of a resistless propensity to extend the idea of self. This propensity leads every man to create around himself a sort of circle, which, in imagination, he completely fills, and which he perpetually endeavours to enlarge, by carefully stuffing into it as many objects as he can possibly find means to appropriate.¹⁵

Five years later, in the Series of Popular Essays, Hamilton sees the ‘selfish principle’ as distinct from pride but operating alongside it, as a first cause, ‘the most active of all the principles inherent in the mind of man’ (vol. I, p. 279). Her theory describes a self which is split, does not know itself, and acts from hidden, underlying causes.

She applies it in criticising both barbarian and cultivated societies; for example, she analyses the oppression of women through the lens it provides, writing that:

(women) by the legislators of Europe, have been generally contemplated, as having no other existence than that they have derived from being identified with their husbands, fathers, brothers, or kinsmen … for ages an heiress was considered in no other light than as a sort of promissary note, stampt with the value of certain lands, tenements, and hereditaments, and disposable at the will of the sovereign.

(vol. I, p. 303)

In effect, she argues that men oppress women in order to magnify their own sense of self. In the eighteenth century property was passed down through a line of male relations, from the father to the first male heir, on whom the estate was entailed. The status of women as legal subjects and property-owners was severely limited, as Susan Staves has shown.¹⁶ Through marriage, the wife became one person in the law with her husband, and as William Blackstone commented, ‘the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage’.¹⁷ The marriage settlement or jointure became the most common form of married women's separate property. Gradually over the course of the eighteenth century it came to replace the dower rights women held in common law over their husband's property. Staves argues that this change in property rights was deeply detrimental and disadvantageous for women. Hamilton was deeply critical of a society in which marriage was often no more than a business transaction, and in which the woman was reduced to a mere commodity. She refused her brother Charles's offer to join him in India so that he might find her a husband. In A Series of Popular Essays her claim about female oppression is further developed in her analysis of male domination: in early periods she suggests it is exercised through superior strength, and in modern times, through ‘a complete subjugation of the intellectual powers of the feebler sex’ (vol. II, p. 84).

Her position is not dissimilar to that of Wollstonecraft's: they both criticise primogeniture and the substandard education offered to women. They differ, however, on the correct response to civil injustice. While Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman suggested change for women through new legislation and political representation, Hamilton was fiercely opposed to party politics of any kind. In particular, she saw women who engaged in party politics as bigoted, because their party zeal encouraged them to accuse all men of injustice and tyranny. She also argued that such women were prevented from being able to see the peculiar privileges of their sex. She writes:

every circumstance which marks their situation in society is considered as a grievance. By looking merely to what would promote the gratification of the selfish principle, they overlook or despise the advantages which the sex, in some respects, in a superior degree enjoys, in this probationary state of existence.

(vol. II, p. 81)

Here, in direct contrast to Wollstonecraft, she implies that the double standard of morality and chastity, which discriminates against women, is actually beneficial because it causes women to behave more virtuously than men. Suffering can be advantageous because it directs a penitent mind towards God.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN SMITH'S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

Hamilton quoted copiously from several Enlightenment figures such as Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames and Edward Gibbon to support her arguments, but, as noted above, she drew more heavily on Adam Smith in A Series of Popular Essays than on any other writer in her conceptualisation of ‘public opinion’. Sometimes her reading of Smith is confused, but it is not difficult to see how one might read into Smith's impartial spectator a kind of enlightened public opinion, even though, as Maria Luisa Pesante has argued: ‘the reflective elaboration of the natural sentiment of sympathy which in Smith's view produces our articulate moral judgements may only with difficulty be subsumed under the law of opinion’.¹⁸ In this section I shall recall Smith's general argument in order to review precisely how Hamilton responds.

Writing against Mandeville's vision of a world ruled by social hypocrisy, Smith contends that moral judgements are not informed solely by self-interest and that we do not behave well simply because it is in our advantage to be seen to do so. For Smith, the ethical is inextricably bound up with the social, and moral judgements are reached through a consensus of public values. Social bonds are created through the operation of sympathy; the word referring not to compassion or pity felt for the other, but to the manner in which we can identify ourselves with each other by imagining ourselves to be in each other's situation. In this way we can sympathise both directly with the motives of the person who acts and indirectly with the gratitude or resentment felt by the recipient of an action. There is, therefore, a kind of relay of sympathy which relates the spectator to the sentiments felt surrounding an action. Sympathy, as Smith defines it, is a complicated concept, which we must be careful to distinguish from the modern term—empathy—a non-intellectual, spontaneous communion of feeling.

It is sympathy which enables Smith to explain how we arrive at a consensus of moral judgements. He introduces the concept of the ‘impartial spectator’ to elucidate the way people can reach a consensus by envisioning actions from a limited set of perspectives. It explains the work of conscience, as we are said to judge ourselves through the eye of the impartial spectator. He writes:

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve it or condemn it, it is evident in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.¹⁹

The idea of selfhood draws on a range of metaphors including a language of theatricality in which subjects are figured as spectators who become spectacles for each other.²⁰ The idiom of theatricality in relation to the self is anticipated by Hume's discussion of identity. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) he argues: ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle to an infinite variety of postures and situations.’²¹ Like Smith, he uses the image of mirrors as a comment on the way that the minds of men ‘reflect each other's emotions’ and ‘sympathize’ with each other. According to Hume, sympathy is the sharing of pleasure or pain, though for Smith sympathy is extended to refer to the sharing of any feeling.

Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments constructs a world of social relations in which we depend entirely on others for our happiness, as the correspondence of our emotions with those of others creates our sense of self-esteem. At times, Smith appears to use ‘sympathy’ in the modern sense of empathy, even though he has said explicitly that sympathy is a purely intellectual operation, in which we relate to others by imagining ourselves to be in their situation. For example, on watching tragedy he writes: ‘If we shed any tears, we carefully conceal them, and are afraid, lest the spectators, not entering into this excessive tenderness, should regard it as effeminacy and weakness.’²² His theory implies that we must practice the virtue of self-command so that others, even complete strangers, can sympathise with us when we suffer an injustice. We must also have a lively imagination so that we can properly participate in the feelings of others and be capable of expressing sensibility. Furthermore, we must be capable of imagining our own actions with as impartial an eye as possible, restraining any tendency to self-deception.

Smith's model is an explicitly gendered one in which men are seen to exert themselves positively in generous, public-spirited actions motivated by rational judgements whereas women merely give in to their natural feelings of sympathy. Thus he distinguishes between the two sexes:

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. The fair-sex, who have commonly much more tenderness than ours have seldom so much generosity. That women rarely make considerable donations, is an observation of the civil law. Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune. The most humane actions require no self-denial, no self-command, no great exertion of the sense of propriety. They consist only in doing what this exquisite sympathy would of its own accord prompt us to do. But it is otherwise with generosity. We are never generous except when in some respect we prefer some other person to ourselves, and sacrifice some great and important interest. The man who gives up his pretensions to an office that was the great object of his ambition, because he imagines that the services of another are better entitled to it; the man who exposes his life to defend that of his friend, … neither of them act from humanity … They both consider those opposite interests, not in the light in which they naturally appear to themselves, but in that in which they appear to others.²³

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft later took issue with Smith's depiction of women arguing that they were deficient in both generosity and humanity. Drawing instead on Smith's analysis of the relationship between class and morality, where virtue is rewarded in an upwardly mobile middle class through the acquisition of positions of public responsibility, she posited that the entire female sex was analogous to Smith's obsolete and effeminate aristocracy. Unlike middle-class men, women, she claimed, could not strive to succeed in public office but had to prepare themselves for marriage. As both Lucinda Cole and G. J. Barker-Benfield have argued, the implied subject of the Theory of Moral Sentiments is always a middle-class male. Smith's moral philosophy presents us with a vision of society in which the ideal relationships—masculine, heroic and stoic—exist between boys and their tutors.²⁴

HAMILTON ON SMITH AND ‘PUBLIC OPINION’

Referring indirectly in her Series of Popular Essays to the opening passage of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Smith describes the identification we feel with our fellow creatures in terms of bodily pains, Hamilton writes:

some philosophers have been led to conclude, that our sensations on witnessing any species of bodily suffering, is the result of an exercise of the imagination, by which we have placed ourselves in the situation of the sufferer, and made his case our own.

(vol. II, p. 279)

Questioning Smith's description of the operation of sympathy, she suggests that the imagination is not a sufficient cause in every case, particularly in those instances when the object of sympathy is one suffering from the sensations of bodily pain. Her contention is that there is a significant difference between the emotions we feel on seeing a moth extinguished in a candle flame, and those we feel in merely hearing about a moth being extinguished. These reflections on the nature of pain were inspired by a visit to the theatre to watch the tragedy of Jane Shore, performed by Sarah Siddons. During the climax of the play when all emotions had been wound up to a pitch, Siddons's fingers were crushed in a doorframe and she uttered a piercing shriek, which destroyed all the ‘sympathies of imagination’. In response, the audience transferred their sympathies from the plight of Jane Shore, the part, to the physical agonies of the actress, Sarah Siddons. Clearly, Hamilton has not entirely understood Smith's explanation of the operation of sympathy: it does not matter whether the object is Jane Shore, or the actress who plays her, the mechanism of sympathy as Smith sees it would still work in the same manner. However, Hamilton's reflections on sympathy are interesting not so much because they are philosophically rigorous but rather because of what they indicate about her political and religious beliefs.

Her claim is that ‘sympathy’ is not always produced through ‘imagination’, but can occur spontaneously, in and of itself, as a response to the pain of others. Furthermore, she argues, we are compelled to act immediately to relieve these feelings of pain. Yet this account of sympathy is not always consistent. Sometimes she makes this distinction between ‘sympathy’ as a product of the imagination and raw pain as a sensation over which we have no control:

the emotions of sympathy may, by a lively imagination, be produced at pleasure, being invariably consequent on pursuing certain trains of thought: But over our sensations we possess no similar power; we can neither excite them by an effort of imagination, nor can we destroy them by any effort of the will.

(vol. II, p. 285)

At other times she lets the distinction lapse, using them equivalently, as does Smith: again, ‘sympathy’ is conflated with what is now understood by empathy.

Hamilton claims that sensibility without action is worse than useless. It is not the degree to which sympathy is experienced but the habitude with which it is felt and the actions it gives rise to that matter. She chastises women in particular for their inadequacy in the face of suffering, and commends the actions of a young surgeon who is so intent on operating that he is oblivious to the screams of his patient. Here, her praise for the virtues of self-command and courage recall the masculine sensibilities of Smith's ideal spectator.

Another point on which Hamilton sought to differentiate her position from Smith's was his model of conscience. As noted above, his theory of the impartial spectator explains the way our conscience affects us when we judge ourselves. The ‘man within’ is said to weigh up our actions through the eyes of others, and take into account the special knowledge we have of ourselves that others do not. We then arbitrate and pass sentence on ourselves. Smith admits that we are often more biased towards our own actions than we are aware, but insists that this is how conscience works. For Hamilton, as for Wollstonecraft, conscience cannot be imposed from within by any ‘impartial spectator’ but must be enforced from without by the laws of God, the only just tribunal. The false sensibility and sympathy of public opinion aggrieve her as they impose a false and degraded set of values. In particular, she is shocked by the treatment of fallen women as still respectable: ‘we may infer’, she writes, ‘that the period is not far distant when the adulteress and chaste matron will be universally received upon equal terms’ (vol. II, p. 314). The danger is that with no strict moral code, backed up by religious laws, public opinion could become subject to the vagaries of taste, nothing more than the latest fashion. She regards the rise in taste for novels of sensibility as indicative of this dangerous tendency, remarking on the correspondence between poor, dependent and abused heroes and the prevalent sympathy for persons situated in similar positions. ‘Public opinion’, she claims, ‘though a respectable tribunal, is not the highest nor the last tribunal at which those who offend the laws of religion and morality are to appear’ (vol. II, p. 321). However, a close reading of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests that he was also worried about declining standards of taste. The recurrent images of an ‘effeminate’ culture which does not foster the necessary self-control by which people can ‘judge’ themselves imply the existence of an educated male élite who will transcend public opinion to produce a more impartial judgement.

Hamilton's conception of the self is intrinsically different from that of Smith. For the latter, the self is often motivated by self-interest or self-love but may have purely disinterested feelings, as well. For the former, the self is deeply motivated by the ‘selfish principle’, the tendency ‘to magnify the idea of self’; the self is egocentric, acting from hidden motives. She suggests that the only solution to the viciousness of the ‘selfish principle’ is the cultivation of the benevolent affections, which occurs in two ways: via parental affection, and from knowledge of God through divine revelation:

With the knowledge of God communicated by divine revelation, the first idea of perfect holiness was presented to the idea of mind of man; an idea that it is impossible to contemplate without emotions which tend at once to elevate and purify the heart.

(vol. II, p. 377)

She asserts that religion has failed for several reasons: religious practice has lapsed, and we have proved fallible as interpreters of the Bible. Faith has been directed away from God towards man-made inventions of religion, represented by the various parties of the Christian church. A more direct relationship with God through prayer is recommended as salutary. In the Essays a progressivist, ‘Enlightenment’ history of religion, corresponding to her vision of the progress of knowledge, is presented, moving from paganism through the heathen theologies to Christianity as the superior religion. Her rejection of the impartial spectator in favour of divine law implies a rejection of public opinion formed through conversation and commerce. Ultimately, this is an extremely conservative ideology, which appears to conflict with her earlier statements about the openness of philosophy as a science for everyone. Hamilton's theory is a hybrid entity, the product of both empirical, rationalist science, and evangelist religion as something always already present.

Hamilton and Smith are to some extent both preoccupied with questions of social reproduction; they ask how moral values are created and then imposed on society. Smith, arguing against Mandeville, emphasised that men act from a variety of motives, and respond with different combinations of self-love and sympathy, to suit a whole range of possible forms of public life. As Edward Hundert writes:

The primary object of his theory of morals is to show how self-interest, mitigated by sympathy and self-command, can result in prudent and sometimes beneficent actions, even … in the inescapably utility-maximising exchange relationships of contemporary commercial societies.²⁵

Modern commentators on the Theory of Moral Sentiments have sometimes misunderstood the work, arguing that the ideas in the earlier work which focus on sympathy are incompatible with the later focus on self-interest in The Wealth of Nations.²⁶ Smith was concerned with sentiments, however, not actions. He admits that beneficence can result from actions motivated purely by self-interest: the rich

are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society.²⁷

In contrast to Smith, Hamilton was deeply pessimistic in her prognosis and rejected the compatibility of a society driven by commercial activity with one in which virtue counted. In A Series of Popular Essays she reviewed the ways in which political economy had effected revolutions in public opinion about ‘national wealth’. For example, she points out the impact of Smith's ideas on mercantilist orthodoxy:

The connexion between national wealth and national happiness, has in all periods seemed so indisputable, that whoever can by his policy augment the national resources, is certain of obtaining the meed of public applause … At length, in consequence of attending to circumstances that had before escaped observation, it was discovered that all this labour had been better spared, and that commerce never flowed so prosperously as when left to itself.

When we take a view of these revolutions in opinion, concerning the methods of promoting national happiness and prosperity, it does not seem chimerical to suppose, that a time may arrive when it shall be discovered, that the most inseparable of all connexions is that between happiness and virtue.

(vol. II, p. 352)

She appears to end the passage by dismissing political economy—the science which has had so much impact on her own thinking—as ultimately lacking in moral probity with its emphasis on material rather than spiritual gain.

Hamilton's reflections on intellectual history and issues such as the current condition of the public, are, I have argued, a striking example of a woman in the public sphere, reflecting on the nature of that of which she was herself a part. Hamilton's reputation as a writer was considerable and critics and readers alike generally respected her. The Monthly Review praised her Essays as a work on female education, which could be recommended to mother, daughter and the general public for its ‘sage, benevolent and familiar exhortations’. They were suitable to be read ‘not merely in the parlour but to be proclaimed from the pulpit’ as a work which would simultaneously instruct and entertain.²⁸ Hamilton's writing can be seen as part of a larger project to recoup ‘philosophy’ from its association with dangerous, revolutionary ideals. Despite her work's conservatism, however, a conservative ‘male’ critical public could only digest her philosophy by domesticating it into an acceptable ‘female’ genre such as that of education.

Notes

1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 55. Originally published in German under the title Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, in 1962.

2. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 56.

3. However, women were not legally excluded from voting until the 1832 reform bill which ‘by the introduction of the word “male” before the word “person” definitely excluded women from the privileges that Act conferred’. A. E. Metcalfe, Woman's Effort: A Chronicle of British Women's Fifty Years' Struggle for Citizenship (1865-1914), (Oxford, 1917), p. 1.

4. See E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 71-2, and Amanda Foreman's Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper Collins, 1998) for two very different accounts of women and politics.

5. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London and New York: Yale University Press, 1992).

6. Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 89-90.

7. William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 284. Originally published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.

8. Stewart was Adam Smith's student and chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1795 onwards.

9. Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 265.

10. See David Hume's ‘Introduction’ to his A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin Books, 1985). First published in 3 vols. in 1739 and 1740.

11. From now on when I refer to ‘philosophy’ I will be using the term as shorthand for ‘moral philosophy’. In the eighteenth century ‘philosophy’ was a more fluid and inclusive term which was used to refer to several different areas of inquiry including natural philosophy and moral philosophy.

12. Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger, ed., Memoirs of Elizabeth Hamilton (London: Longman, 1818), vol. ii, p. 31.

13. Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, vol. i, p. 160.

14. Elizabeth Hamilton, A Series of Popular Essays Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination and the Heart, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1813), vol. i, p. xv.

15. Elizabeth Hamilton, reprinted in Benger, ed., Memoirs, vol. iii, p. 83.

16. See Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), for a discussion of women's property rights in the long eighteenth century.

17. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (Oxford, 1765-69), vol. i, p. 430.

18. Maria Luisa Pesante, ‘An Impartial Actor: The Private and the Public Sphere in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, eds., Shifting the Boundaries: Transformations of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995), pp. 172-95, p. 181.

19. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Liberty Fund, Minneapolis, 1982), p. 113 (iii.i.6).

20. See David Marshall's ‘Theatricality of Moral Sentiments’ in Critical Inquiry, 10 (June 1984), 592-613, for a detailed reading of the implications this language of theatricality has for Smith's theory.

21. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, p. 301.

22. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 46 (i.iii.9).

23. Ibid., p. 191 (iv.ii.2).

24. See G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility—Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), in particular pp. 132-41; and Linda Cole, ‘Anti-feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft and More’, ELH 58 (1991), 107-40. Wollstonecraft's advocacy of marriage as a friendship between intellectual equals also owes much to Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

25. Edward Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 225.

26. This perceived incompatibility between Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations—the so-called Adam Smith problem—was posited by a series of German thinkers in the mid-Victorian period who argued that Smith made a u-turn in his philosophy from altruism as the basis of action to egotism. See the editors' introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 20.

27. Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 185 (iv.i.2).

28. Monthly Review 74 (August 1814), pp. 402-6.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Books and Pamphlets

Benger, Elizabeth Ogilvy, Memoirs of Elizabeth Hamilton (London: Longman, 1818)

Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-9)

Hamilton, Elizabeth, A Series of Popular Essays Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination and the Heart (Edinburgh, 1813)

Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin Books, 1985)

Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1764), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) reprinted by the Liberty Fund in 1982

Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, ed. by Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Wordsworth, William, Selected Prose ed. John O. Hayden (London: Penguin Books, 1988)

Secondary Sources

Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Castiglione, Dario and Lesley Sharpe, eds., Shifting the Boundaries: Transformations of the Language of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995)

Cole, Linda, ‘Anti-Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft and More’, ELH 58 (1991), 107-40

Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London and New York: Yale University Press, 1992)

Foreman, Amanda, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998)

Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); originally published in German under the title Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962)

———, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 421-62

Hundert, Edward, The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Kelly, Gary, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)

———, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1995)

Marshall, David, ‘Theatricality of Moral Sentiments’, Critical Inquiry 10 (June 1984), 592-613

Metcalfe, A. E., Woman's Effort: A Chronicle of British Women's Fifty Years Struggle for Citizenship (1865-1914) (Oxford, 1917)

Staves, Susan, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Harvard University Press, 1990)

Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963)