This text aims to revise the understanding of 18th-century British culture and its relation to the rational culture of present-day economics and social science. Wendy Motooka explores a rich variety of 18th century literary writing, including Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, and moral philosophy/political economy, including Adam Smith. In joining imaginative literature, moral philosophy and the emerging scientific rationalism, Motooka examines the meaning of reason and of its putative opposite, sentimentalism, arguing controversially that the legacy of sentimentalism is social science.

Wendy Motooka contends that 'the Age of Reason' was actually an Age of Reasons. Joining imaginative literature, moral philosophy, and the emerging discourse of the new science, she seeks to historicise the meaning of eighteenth-century 'reason' and its supposed opposites, quixotism and sentimentalism. Reading novels by the Fieldings, Lennox and Sterne alongside the works of Adam Smith, Motooka argues that the legacy of sentimentalism is the social sciences. This book raises our understanding of eighteenth-century British culture and its relation to the 'rational' culture of economics that is...