Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France by Meghan K. Roberts is an interesting new take on the individuals who participated in the Scientific Revolution during the 17th and 18th centuries. Meghan K. Roberts is an associate professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She has a Bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary, a Master’s degree from Northwestern University, and she earned her PhD from Northwestern University in 2011. She is currently teaching courses on Culture Wars in the Age of Enlightenment and Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Early Modern Europe. She has several journal articles published on different major philosophers during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. She is currently writing a book on media, masculinity, and medicine (http://www.meghankroberts.com/, https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/mroberts/).
Meghan Roberts in Sentimental Savants aims to show how the family as an institution played a vital role in the Scientific Revolution in developing their public image and discovery and dissemination of new knowledge. This is an especially interesting contribution to the scholarship because the academic community and general public both perceive the “Age of Reason” as being a time of unique thought. Emotional consideration and appeals to authority have been finally gotten rid of and logic and reason have prevailed. Roberts pushes back against this by using sources such as eulogies and biographical compendiums. She documents the debates philosophers were having with regard to whether they should have families or remain celibate, and the author connects the consequences of their conclusions to other issues such as inoculation.
The book is organized in a way that is easy to follow and the sort of materials it contends with are directly relatable to subjects that the average lay reader can sympathize with, such as love, family, friendship, and emotional health. For this reason, the audience of this book can be a popular audience, not just academic. In Chapter 1 she documents how Men of Letters were moving into a new era of thinking about family life and love. Instead of thinking of that aspect of life as being a distraction from their work, as had previous generations of philosophers, they now believed that they could be both men of letters and men of emotions. They also believed it was important for them to practice what they preached by living a virtuous family life. Chapter 2 talks about the role that their family members played in adding to their intellectual work. Roberts documents how oftentimes wives would act as research assistants and how when a philosopher lived a good family life this reflected well on their reputations.
Chapter 3 built upon the different lifestyles these thinkers chose and how they related to the public debates surrounding public health evolved. The author specifically engages with the questions surrounding inoculation against diseases like smallpox. She explains how one philosopher used emotional logic to convince the public of his point of view surrounding inoculation. “La Condamine manipulated cultural trends, most especially sentimentalism, as a way to bolster the public appeal of inoculation. He used the language of feeling to mediate between the public and medical community. She also talks about the concept of “enlightened love” which is “the complex blend of reason and sentiment that characterized the French Enlightenment.” Chapter 4 expands into the realm of children and the roles that philosophers played as parents. This allowed them to engage in “intimate empiricism“ to test certain ideas of the Enlightenment and garner further positive reputations with the general public. Chapter 5 uses the case study of Antoine Lavoistier to demonstrate the principles of sentimental paternalism and agricultural reform.
I believe that Meghan Roberts succeeds in what she set out to do. She utilizes her sources well and her analysis of different thinkers and their circumstances stand out in a way that is easy to picture. She states, “I argue that a new intellectual ideal emerged in the eighteenth century. Bachelorhood (if not necessarily celibacy) continued to appeal, but family life also beckoned. How lovely it would be, thought some philosophers, to have a devoted wife and affectionate children.” She demonstrates her arguments through the utilization of secondary sources, but mostly through the correspondence of her sentimental savants to show what was going on in their heads and their personal lives. She uses several different example philosophers and their families to show that this new image of what it meant to be a man of letters meant. The only critique one could have that other historians seem to do, is she never outlines the limitations of her sources. Presumably, there is only so much that correspondence can depict, and one would imagine that many letters have been lost to the void of time. Having methodological humility is important in scholarship. This is especially important when presenting new research in a monograph. This is especially true when the author is making such claims as are being made in this piece. However, Roberts does do a good job of illustrating where in the historiography her research fits in. This gives a good landscape of how the discipline has been approaching these issues in the past, and it develops a helpful framework that enables academics and lay people alike to get their bearings as they enter into the pages of research that she has put together.
Overall, Sentimental Savants serves as a fascinating contribution to the history of science and history of emotions. It reveals how scientists and critical thinkers of the time were not so cold and detached as many of us may seem to think. Indeed, for these figures, emotions did not need to be a hindrance and close connections were not just distractions. In her Conclusion, Roberts states, “The stoic, unmarried philosopher remained a powerful ideal during and long after the Enlightenment, but married men of letters discovered they had a bag of tricks unavailable to the unattached…Married men of letters drew attention to their loving families as proof that they were men of virtue more than qualified to make themselves useful to the public, to stand as role models as well as men of learning.”
