Uncivil Mirth

Historians have long been interested in the laughter of the past: the subjects that people saw fit to laugh at can provide a window into historical cultures like no other. In recent years, however, there has been growing attention to the act of laughing itself, how it has been understood in the past, and what its effects might have been. Ross Carroll’s book follows this line of inquiry, exploring debates in eighteenth-century Britain about the practice of ridicule, that is, the uses and abuses of laughing at something or someone. The focus is at the level of intellectual and philosophical debate, as Carroll mines the writings—published and unpublished—of some of the period’s leading thinkers, beginning with the third earl of Shaftesbury and concluding with Mary Wollstonecraft. This is particularly fertile ground: as Carroll argues, the eighteenth century ‘saw philosophical scrutiny of the subject rise to a pitch and intensity rarely matched before or since’ (p. 2). Time and again, ridicule was celebrated as a tool of critique and inquiry, though it never entirely shook its latent potential to foster contempt and fractiousness. None of those who advocated the use of ridicule did so without reservation and ambivalence is a theme throughout. As the introductory chapter makes clear, Carroll is writing for political theorists: he casts the book as ‘an exercise in historical recovery’ (p. 19), which is intended to shed light on present-day concerns about civility (or lack of) in public debate and the effects of reaching for ridicule in this context. Yet, there is plenty here, too, for those whose primary concern is historical, and especially those whose interests lie in eighteenth-century Britain. Carroll makes a convincing case that this ‘Age of Reason’ was also an ‘Age of Ridicule’ in which laughter was a prominent part of enlightenment intellectual culture

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Civility · Contempt · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Ideology · Laughter · Literature · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Scrutiny · Sociology · Subject (documents · Theme (computing · History · Humor Studies and Applications · Law · Philosophy · Psychology