How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain
used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition,
and political justice The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the
turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires,
caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule
unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt
public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as
a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the
powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period
searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes
of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the
dismantling of patriarchal power. Ross Carroll brings to life a
tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was
subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. He shows how the Third Earl of
Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate
byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on
pretension and authority. Drawing on philosophical treatises,
political pamphlets, and conduct manuals of the time, Carroll
examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came
after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight
against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris. Casting Enlightenment
Britain in an entirely new light, Uncivil Mirth demonstrates how
the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our
current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.
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