The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization

History of Emotions

by Rob Boddice

In his Descent of Man , Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

198 pages, Hardcover

Published November 11, 2016

About the author

Rob Boddice (PhD, FRHistS) is a Senior Researcher at HEX, Tampere, Finland. He has previously held positions at Harvard University, McGill University, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Freie Universität Berlin, and has been funded extensively by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Horizon2020 programmes of the European Commission. Boddice has published widely in the history of medicine, the history of science and the history of emotions. His recent books include The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilization (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Pain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press, 2018), and A History of Feelings (Reaktion, 2019). With Mark Smith he has written Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and his Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge University Press) will be published in 2021. Boddice serves on the editorial board of the history-of-emotions book series at Bloomsbury Academic, and on the editorial board of Emotion Review. At HEX he is beginning an experiential history of placebo and completing a four-volume set on scientific knowledge production in the long nineteenth century called Experiment, Expertise, Experience (Routledge, 2022).