Interdisciplinary Seminar 2024-26 'The Politics of the Sociable Self: Theories and Practices (1650-1850)'

The seminar series will investigate the changing meaning and theorisation of the ‘sociable’ self in various discourses (political and moral philosophy, anthropology, medical science, economic theory …). It will also explore the dissemination of these meanings and theories as well as attempts to put them into practice in different contexts and through different means, such as journalism, clubbing, debating societies, fiction writing, travel writing, and life writing. We will seek to identify key moments and events that triggered changes in how the sociable-self was conceived of and put into practice. The seminar series will also examine the broadening of the meaning of sociability from referring to a personal trait (‘fellowlike’, ‘friendly’) and a natural inclination (to ‘keep company’) to referring to mutually beneficial social interactions and a desire to forge the ‘general interest’. To what extent does the theory of the ‘sociable self’ provide a new perspective to understand the tensions at work between the motives and aspirations of the individual and the constraints and interests of the social group. 

Thinking about the politics of the ‘sociable self’ will also raise questions about the centrality of sociability in Enlightenment culture, the tensions with individuality, the changing representations of solitude, and the embodied, material and emotional aspects of the interpersonal constitution of ‘sociable selves’. The COVID pandemic heightened our awareness of the need for social interactions and social bonds, especially among young and elderly people. The renewal of academic interest in theories of the 'self' and on social attachment attests to the ongoing relevance of this important topic. Moreover, the predominant culture of ‘the self’ in our contemporary societies is inevitably affecting how we imagine and maintain sociability. 

THEMATIC SESSIONS

* SESSION 3

Sociability and Animality - 8 November 2024 at Université de Rennes 2, from 17:00 to 19:00 (French time)

- Silvia Sebastiani (EHESS Paris) - A social orang-utan? Enlightenment Debates on the borders of humanity

- Jane Spencer (University of Exeter) - A 'fellowship of sense with all that breathes': the representation of human—animal bonds in eighteenth-century and Romantic writing

Session chaired by Sophie Mesplède and Kimberley Page-Jones

* SESSION 4

Educating the Sociable Self - 29 January 2025 in London at the National Archives, from 16:00 to 18:00 (UK time)

- Géraldine Lepan (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3) - L'éducation morale selon Rousseau : de la solitude de l'enfance, à l'éveil de l'humanité

- Matthew Grenby (Newcastle University) - Delight in Friendship: managing the sociable self in early British children’s literature

Session chaired by Michele Cohen and Mascha Hansen

Primary sources:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 'livre 4' (1762)

Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy (1749)

Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89)

* SESSION 5

The Language and Grammar of  the Sociable Self - 21 March 2025 at UBO Brest (room C204), from 16:30 to 18:30 (French time)

- Dr. Ross Carroll (Dublin City University) - Laughing with (and at) our Fellows: The Search for a Sociable Humour in Eighteenth-century Moral Philosophy 

- Dr Mary Fairclough (University of York) - ‘We neither laugh alone nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?’: Contagious sociability and Dissenting public worship, 1770-1800

Session chaired by Alain Kerhervé & Kate Davison

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86481991710?pwd=66XkUN3NJnpRKCbqb82l6YykzR2p0b.1

Presentation of talks:

'Laughing with (and at) our Fellows: The Search for a Sociable Humour in Eighteenth-century Moral Philosophy'

Discussions of laughter in eighteenth-century moral philosophy were haunted by Thomas Hobbes’s infamous declaration that to laugh was to express “sudden glory” at the expense of another person. This made laughter (and all associated forms of humour) appear deeply unsociable. For Hobbes’s philosophical opponents, such as Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, the task was to rehabilitate laughter by demonstrating that it could be a resource for sociability rather than a threat to it. For Shaftesbury, gentle raillery could lubricate social interactions in the coffee house and salon, while for Hutcheson the contagiousness of laughter pointed to its sociable nature. Often missed in scholarly accounts of this project in rehabilitation, however, is that the anti-Hobbesians did not disarm humour altogether because they recognised its use as a critical and pedagogical tool. Once this is appreciated, I argue, then the gap between Hobbes and his critics narrows considerably. To develop the sociability of oneself and others requires a style of humour (Stoic in origin) that will often cause offense to the person it is directed at, even if the ultimate pedagogical purpose is benign.   

‘We neither laugh alone nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?’: Contagious sociability and Dissenting public worship, 1770-1800

In 1792 Anna Laetita Barbauld responded to an attack on public worship by fellow Protestant Dissenter Gilbert Wakefield, asking ‘why… should we pray alone?’ Barbauld celebrated the powerful force of devotional feeling prompted by sociable public worship: ‘So many separate tapers burning so near’, she declared, ‘must catch, and spread into one common flame’. In the combustible political context of Britain in the 1790s, such language risked accusations of political as well as religious enthusiasm, commonly used to attack Dissenting communities. But in this paper I show how Barbauld, alongside contemporaries like Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Hays, defended the sociability of public worship. Their treatises staged striking defences of shared devotional feeling using vocabularies of sympathy, contagion, fire, and electric forces, and in so doing, gestured to a grammar of sociability in which the core subject is collective rather than individual.

* SESSION 6

Policing (radical) sociabilities - 21 May 2025 at Université Paris Cité

- Charles Walton (University of Warwick) - – 'Policing the Seat of Sovereignty: Controlling Speech in the National Assemblies of the French Revolution (1789-1794)'

- Katrina Navickas (University of Hertfordshire) - 'The Urban Commons and Resistance to the Enclosure of Public Space in England, 1760-1848'

Session chaired by John-Erik Hansson and Chris Fletcher

Presentation of talks:

“Policing the Seat of Sovereignty: Controlling Speech in the National Assemblies of the French Revolution (1789-1794)”

This paper discusses the problem of regulating sociability within the revolutionary national assemblies in France between 1789 and the Terror (1793-94). It explores how several factors combined to frustrate the assemblies’ ability to secure the principles of loyal opposition, political compromise and free speech all at once. These factors include the Revolution’s abolition of corporations, which used to have the right to police their own internal affairs. In the post-corporate world of the Revolution, regulations were expected to be generalisable and grounded in the law. The advent of the freedom of expression in 1789, however, complicated the passing of such laws. In the absence of corporate and legal regulations, the internal policing of the national assemblies’ sessions became increasingly subject to the ‘will of the people’. This development jeopardised the national assembly’s autonomy by making it increasingly vulnerable to the external pressure of crowds gathered outside the assembly. This paper offers case studies of the expulsion of national deputies for perceived speech offences between 1789 and the Terror, showing how punitive measures and crowd pressures intensified, culminating in the execution of several deputies in 1793. The paper also examines three proposals advanced by deputies during the Terror to reduce tensions by establishing internal censorship mechanisms. The proposals failed in the face of free speech commitments, insurrectionary crowds and lethal polarisation.

“The Urban Commons and Resistance to the Enclosure of Public Space in England, 1760-1848”

This paper draws from the opening chapters of my next monograph, Contested Commons: a History of Protest and Public Space in England. It argues that urbanisation and industrialisation in England during the long eighteenth century created new public spaces that facilitated political sociability and new sites for popular protest. These sites can be understood as an urban commons. In reaction to the new working-class radical and trades’ movements, the political and social elites sought to control and police such spaces. The enclosure of the agricultural commons in this period was paralleled by a process of urban enclosure, whereby any collective activity in public spaces was increasingly policed or moved out by property owners. The new police introduced in the 1830s and 1840s employed a strategy of ‘move on’ for any groups that did not fit the conservative, capitalist modes of using public space encouraged by propertied elites. The urban commons was enclosed through a process of dispossession. The new political movements, notably the Chartists in the 1840s, resisted urban enclosure by mass occupation and communal uses of such sites. The paper examines a variety of archives from the Home Office, metropolitan police, local government and radical newspapers to show the rapid development of modes of organisation and protest in this period. 

* SESSION 7

The Revolutionary Self - 8 July 2025 at Université Paris Cité, from 16:00 to 18:00

- Lynn Hunt

- Sarah Knott

Session chaired by Charles Walton