In the latest horrible news, book bans are coming back into fashion—a Cold War relic, now de rigeur for any conservative activist (and/or presidential hopeful). The overwhelming majority of books singled out for cleansing are recently-published works that focus on LGBTQ themes or race. But a handful of classics still make the cut to be cut, as it were: from Vonnegut in Gladwin, MI and James Baldwin in Clay County, FL all the way back to Chaucer in Wentzville, MO. Nottaway County, Virginia’s list of “sexually explicit” books to be avoided includes Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Beowulf, and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Academics and op-ed columnists have been wringing their hands over what this means for America’s youth. I have my own, entirely selfish concerns. After looking through a masochistically large number of these lists, I can report that I have not encountered a single work from the eighteenth century. As someone who teaches eighteenth-century literature, I know I should be happy about this. But on some level, it feels like a slight. Are there really no eighteenth-century texts as edgy or boundary-pushing or “sexually explicit” as Beowulf? Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels features attempted rape, public urination, plus a detailed description of pubic hair. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders could hardly contain more bannable material. Likewise for Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Yet none of these eighteenth-century texts get a mention. What do you have to do to get cancelled in this town?
One reason to be nervous about this is that the period’s absence from conservative ban lists seems to align somewhat uncomfortably with the pop-academic idea that eighteenth-century texts and ideas are naturally right-wing friendly. A number of progressive writers have been pushing such claims recently. One laments “the present-day impact of ideals forged in the 1600s and 1700s” (to wit: the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict was “due to America’s Founding Fathers embracing Locke’s absurd ideas”); another suggests that the “legacy” of the eighteenth century is “Enlightenment ideas of race and white supremacy.”
Serious academics have long issued more nuanced versions of this argument. Roger Eatwell argued that “fascism is …a product of the Enlightenment”; Stanley Payne suggested that “[a]ll of Hitler’s political ideas had their origin in the Enlightenment”; Isaiah Berlin concluded that “Hitler and Mussolini [were Rousseau’s] heirs.” And of course, Adorno and Horkheimer famously argued that the oppression underlying right-wing authoritarianism is built on Enlightenment values: the suppression of nature and emotion in favor of rationality leads to a world built around prediction and control.
A parallel position has been floating around among modern far-right thinkers. Remember the “Dark Enlightenment”? It was a real concern a few years ago. At a time when a number of our political leaders began openly questioning democracy, here was a movement arguing that authoritarian rule was the way forward—and finding support for this position in eighteenth-century thought. This wasn’t just another sad alt-right subset; it seemed to have real reach and influence. Steve Bannon was a fan. Tucker Carlson talked about it on his show. Various eighteenth-century ideas and texts started to circulate in worrying ways. Curtis Yarvin, the de-facto intellectual leader of the school, described himself as a “Jacobite.” Over at Breitbart, columnists discussed Edmund Burke and quoted Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as justifications for Trumpian anti-immigration policies.
For a moment, it felt possible that the eighteenth century might go the way of medieval studies: a newly notorious academic field linked in the popular mind with neo-Nazi thought. It didn’t happen, of course: for the moment, eighteenth-century studies remains a safely obscure area of academic activity—the kind of field that elicits polite, slightly confused nods and awkward pauses when people ask what you do.
Nevertheless, one continues to encounter a weirdly unshakeable belief in the essential, inherent conservatism of eighteenth-century thought—in the idea of the “EnRightenment,” to use an unfortunate term that I overheard at a conference and have been trying to forget ever since.
It’s one thing, however, to suggest that the eighteenth century is friendly ground for anti-progressives, and another to suggest that anti-progressives actually have any real interest in the period, that the absence of the eighteenth century from book ban and challenge lists is intentional. Happily (and I use the word loosely), there are ways to measure actual right-wing enthusiasm for eighteenth-century texts. Consider, for example, the surge of “approved books” lists, issued both by (mainly Republican) state education boards and (mainly conservative) NGOs. Do eighteenth-century books make it on to these lists at statistically significant rates?
We might begin with the one that has received the most media attention lately: Florida’s “Stop-W.O.K.E. Act”-inspired “approved books” list, with its 350 scrupulously DEI and progressivism-free titles. Here is the complete list of eighteenth-century literary works approved for grades 10–12: the “Poetry of Robert Burns” and something called “The Chimney Sweepers poems from Songs of Innocence.” There are no eighteenth-century novels, plays, or satires (Swift’s “Modest Proposal” is included in the approved books for the “Nineth [sic] Grade”).
There are, however, several works of political philosophy on the 10th–12th grade list: Two Treatises of Government; On the Social Contract; The Spirit of the Laws by Montesqieu; “Doctrine of Right,” from Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; Common Sense; The Federalist Papers, George Washington’s “Farewell Address,” and Sinners in the Hands by Jonathan Edwards. Not much of a list—but even this small selection does indeed represent an unusually robust crop of Enlightenment works, relatively speaking. Normally, in such official reading lists, the eighteenth century is invisible.
A number of states focus entirely on modern works (the books on California’s recommended text date all the way back to the late Obama era), but even those states that include older texts generally steer clear of the eighteenth century. New York’s list includes a total of zero works of fiction published in the 1700s (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is as close as we get), and one work of poetry: William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger” (not actually the title of the work, by the way, but let’s go ahead and count it). The Jordan School District in Utah features Gulliver’s Travels along with Voltaire’s Candide and two works by Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer and Vicar of Wakefield—but that’s out of a list of 512 works.
So, do conservative state education boards, school districts, and parents’ groups recommend eighteenth-century works at a higher rate than progressive, liberal, and centrist lists? In terms of political and philosophical texts, perhaps (although not strikingly so). But conservative reading lists, on the whole, rarely include literary works from the period.
The Mississippi Department of Education’s recommended books list for grades 9–12, which includes works by Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and numerous other pre-modern authors, mentions only the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Candide (Frankenstein is a near-miss). The Texas Education Agency? It recommends King Lear and Pride and Prejudice, but avoids the eighteenth century entirely. The Arkansas Education Alliance’s list of works that home-schooled students should “have some level of familiarity with” has one eighteenth-century literary work: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (not in their main list, but in the second-tier “Other Notable Books”). Focus on the Family’s list of recommended books for teens includes no eighteenth-century works (adjacent periods are represented by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe). The Young America Foundation includes The Federalist Papers and the Constitution, but no eighteenth-century literature at all (they do find space for two novels by George Orwell…and twelve by Brad Thor).
So much for mainstream conservative groups. What about the actual, self-proclaimed “heirs to Hitler and Mussolini”? Are members of the far right any more enthusiastic about eighteenth-century books than moderate conservatives? Again, we can turn to reading lists (and yes, such lists do exist; there are book clubs for the polos-and-khakhis set). The kind of eighteenth-century texts recommended by the far right tend, again, to be works of political science. The “Free Man’s Reading List” includes John Locke’s Second Treatise, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke (as well as Thomas Paine and Immanuel Kant). No literature, though.
Neo-reactionary reading lists include very few eighteenth-century literary authors. The r/neoreactionary subreddit’s list of books to be familiar with mentions Burke, again, plus de Joseph de Maistre, but no literature. The kids over at 4chan’s /lit/ board? Their Top 100 Books of All Time includes only one eighteenth-century work (Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, from out of nowhere). Milo Yannopoulous’s and Michelle Malkin’s extensive “America First Reading List”? Only Robinson Crusoe (“one man’s struggle to find his faith”), along with Swift’s “Modest Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels (“a novel satirizing various aspects of human culture”) make the cut. Again, there is a level of interest in eighteenth-century thought in their list (Burke, Smith, and Alexis de Toqueville are on there), but in terms of literature, not much makes it. Douglas Murray, writing in the Spectator, claims that a UK government ministry had a few years ago composed a “red-flag” list of literature that indicated a movement toward right-wing radicalization, and that this list included Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France, and select works by Smith. No literary works were mentioned.
Given the polite level of respect for eighteenth-century conservative thinkers on these lists, why aren’t more eighteenth-century literary authors featured? Are they not “Stop-W.O.K.E.”-ish enough? Well, no. It’s not as though the period’s literature lacks for anti-progressive options: anti-democratic and authoritarian writing, xenophobic works, homophobic works—it’s all there. There are plenty of isolationist, nativist poems, for example, from John Gilbert Cooper’s England-First-ish “The Genius of Britain” (“Learn, Britons, hence you want no foreign friends, / the Lion’s safety on himself depends”) to Charles Churchill’s “The Times,” which argues that homosexuality, brought in mainly from “the soft luxurious EAST” via Italy (“nurse of ev’ry softer art”), has ruined the native English manliness that once upheld the nation. There are poems complaining about the lawless poor avoiding taxes while the decent, wealthy sort have to pay them (Mary Alcock’s “Instructions, Supposed to Be Written in Paris, for a Mob in England” is a treasure trove of this sort of sentiment). There are Islamophobic works a-plenty. Conservatives of the more extreme type are spoiled for reading choices, really.
And, of course, even more mainstream eighteenth-century works could be made to fit an alt-right agenda, if a reader is determined enough. The “America First Reading List” includes Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (“a novel about…spiritual awakening”), after all. Were you aware, for example, that Jane Austen has become a favorite author for white supremacists? She has, you know. Compared to Pride and Prejudice, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas—a work that features a nation safely ensconced behind an impermeable border wall, watched at all times by “sentinels,” that only opens its gate once a year, holding auditions for a small number of talented new immigrants—feels like a natural pick for a certain type of reading list. But nary a mention of it anywhere.
The question remains: why is the alt-right not recommending more eighteenth-century literature?
One answer that has been gleefully forwarded innumerable times over the past few years is the “scientific” claim that literature is naturally unappealing to conservatives because it is too deeply connected to empathy, and empathy is an inherently progressive emotion. Now, those of us who teach literature for a living understand the appeal of this argument. We rarely push back too hard against the highly dubious assertion that conservatives (who adopt children and donate to charity at higher rates) are measurably less empathetic than progressives. It’s certainly pleasant to think that the literature business is driven by empathy, and that anyone teaching literature is automatically a player in the empathy game. But let’s face facts here: more than a million copies of Ayn Rand’s novels are sold in an average year, and they are among the least empathetic documents ever fashioned by human hand. Also: there are brilliant authors and literary critics out there who aren’t exactly renowned for their empathy. And however we look at it, we still run up against the fact that there are vast numbers of conservative readers of literature of all sorts. Shakespeare gets plenty of conservative love, and he’s as empathetic an author as our species has produced, surely.
So again: why so little eighteenth-century literature? A mid-1990s Modern Language Association poll, taken at the height of the Culture Wars (first wave), asked members of the general public what they thought about English professors. Finally, MLA members were promised, we would get some answers. Did the average person think of English professors as anti-American communists, or as well-meaning but ineffectual nerds? The results were clear: the average person didn’t think about English professors at all.
Something similar is plainly going on with eighteenth-century literature. People simply don’t think about it much any more. In an age of disappearing English majors and a defunct canon, eighteenth-century literature no longer possesses enough cultural capital to justify its presence on politically-minded reading lists. Political and philosophical texts from the period arguably continue to hold on to some vestiges of prestige: Burke and Kant are still names to conjure with, for a fringe-right movement looking for historical and cultural legitimization. This is not to say that the alt-right are actually reading Burke and Kant, any more than would-be medievalist neo-nazis are reading Julian of Norwich and the Venerable Bede (if they’re reading anyone, they’re reading Tolkien and other purveyors of cosplay medievalism). But at least there is some capital in the names and reputations of “Burke” and “Kant.” What capital do Pope and Gray and Richardson still possess? None. It’s like William Beckford is trying to get banned in Vathek. But who now reads Vathek?
Years ago, I attended a symposium of artists and scholars working on surveillance. Everyone talked about the fear of finding out you were under surveillance. A Chinese artist explained that for him, and for most artists he knew at home, the real fear was finding out that you were not the target of surveillance. It meant you didn’t matter. It meant no one was worried about your work. The fact that eighteenth-century books are not being targeted by the book-banners is not encouraging. It means we’re not worth the energy to cancel. We can’t even get into the game to be thrown out of it.
I don’t have the space here to explore the larger question of why the literature of the period has lost its cultural capital. (It certainly doesn’t help that many of the great prose works of the century are thousand-page picaresques and epistolary novels that don’t necessarily lend themselves to modern, bingeable adaptations.) In any case, we needn’t lose hope. It’s not beyond our power to change this situation. These book challenges don’t emanate from a scattering of random readers around the country. They are usually highly coordinated, if not outright Astro-turfed; a Facebook group or the like identifies a thematically-troubling book; the offending title becomes the focus of strategy sessions; not long after, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is challenged in multiple Utah counties simultaneously (this happened).
If we can raise the profile of one or two eighteenth-century books, we might be able to gain this kind of traction, and finally get the eighteenth century back into the public conversation. I’d like to suggest Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random as a test case. It has gay characters. It contains anti-military and anti-church themes. It has anti-racist language (admittedly a stretch: Random describes his experience in slave trading as “disagreeable,” but we can sell it). If just one person decides that these themes are objectionable, Roderick Random might find its way onto an offensive book list, at which point it will almost certainly be officially challenged and at least temporarily banned, possibly across dozens of school districts. Suddenly, a work of eighteenth-century literature will have made it into the game. It will, technically speaking, be relevant to modern American life and political discourse. And why stop there? We can get Moll Flanders onto these lists! We can get people up in arms about Richardson’s Pamela!
And if we work hard enough, we can have people from coast to coast worried about the spectre of Enlightenment values, and about the idea of our children encountering works written in the spirit of egalitarianism, toleration, and liberal reason.
Aaron Santesso is Professor of Literature at Georgia Tech.