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Michael Frazer contends that the liberal idea of autonomy is "perhaps the most important legacy of the Enlightenment" (181). The Enlightenment case for autonomy, for moral and political self-legislation, includes the condition that we be reflective, or capable of self-examination and revision. Frazer observes that the Enlightenment produced two competing accounts of reflective autonomy: one guided by reason and one based on moral sentiments, or more precisely on the "reflectively refined feelings shared among individuals via the all-important faculty of sympathy" (4). Frazer's book offers a compelling case for recovering the long-neglected second account, which he labels "sentimentalism." Through his analysis of some of the eighteenth century's leading sentimentalists, and especially David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. G. Herder, Frazer hopes to "reclaim the sentimentalist account of reflection as a resource for enriching political science, political philosophy, and political practice today" (5).
In Frazer's telling, sentimentalism has much to recommend it. Unlike the Enlightenment rationalists, who separate the faculties of the mind in order to subject some faculties (including our emotions and imagination) to others (reason), the sentimentalists develop an "egalitarian view in which normatively authoritative standards are the product of an entire mind in harmony with itself" (6). Frazer also lauds the sentimentalists for their empirical bent, and defends them against the perennial rationalist charge that they are unable to generate authoritative normative standards. This last point is especially significant, as Frazer emphasizes the extent to which sentimentalists agreed that our moral feelings must undergo a rigorous process of reflection and refinement. "Only those moral sentiments that have endured when we reach reflective equilibrium can be treated as authoritative" (9). Interestingly, something resembling this process of testing and improvement can be found in...