Jenny DAVIDSON, Breeding. A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
Irvington, Columbia University Press, 2008, 312 p.
ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9
RÉSUMÉ
The Enlightenment commitment to reason naturally gave rise to a beliefin the perfectibility of man. Influenced by John Locke and Jean-JacquesRousseau, many eighteenth-century writers argued that the propereducation and upbringing—breeding—could make any man a member of thecultural elite.
et even in this egalitarian environment, theconcept of breeding remained tied to theories of blood lineage, castedistinction, and biological difference. Turning to the works of Locke,Rousseau, Swift, Defoe, and other giants of the British Enlightenment,Jenny Davidson revives the debates that raged over the husbandry ofhuman nature and highlights their critical impact on the development ofeugenics, the emergence of fears about biological determinism, and thehistory of the language itself. Combining rich historical research witha keen sense of story, she links explanations for the physicalresemblance between parents and children to larger arguments aboutculture and society and shows how the threads of this compellingconversation reveal the character of a century. A remarkableintellectual history, Breeding not only recasts the fundamentalconcerns of the Enlightenment but also uncovers the seeds of thoughtthat bloomed into contemporary notions of human perfectibility.
BIOGRAPHIE
Jenny Davidson is an associate professor of English and comparativeliterature at Columbia University. She is the author of two novels, Heredity and The Explosionist, and a critical work, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen.