The Age of Melancholy: The Imagination in the History of Modern Political Thought

The aim of this article is to set out a research agenda centered on the many descriptions and evaluations of the nature and powers of the imagination that have been made in Europe and the Americas over the past quarter-millennium. Its starting point is an examination of the phrase “the age of melancholy” coined by the Franco-Swiss writer Germaine de Staël in her De la littérature of 1800. As the article shows, the phrase can be situated at the junction of a number of different assessments of the imagination made initially by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and subsequently by Immanuel Kant, Dugald Stewart, Friedrich Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. All these assessments were known to Staël. This is why reconstructing their various meanings and purposes throws new light not only on the relationship between the imagination and the emotions, but also on the subjects of ideology, social science, political allegiance, and political motivation as these were described and discussed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In these discussions the imagination seemed to be both a source of values and a solvent of values. The research agenda outlined in this essay aims to indicate how this problem was discussed from the time of Condillac and Rousseau to that of Foucault and Derrida.