ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author investigates the instabilities within the concept which can be ascribed to philosophical and ideological differences and the ways in which they are played out in discursive and imaginative literature. The demise of Sensibility was principally due to its association with French principles as the Revolution degenerated into the Terror and the rise of a despot. This and the wartime suppression of radical ideas in Britain revealed the schisms in the school of Sensibility. A radical Sensibility continued to trust to innate emotional response to provide the basis of a beneficial social order, and embraced a philosophy which proposed to liberate individual energies. The proponents of radical Sensibility, referring back to the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, attacked not only Burke, but particularly Adam Smith, who’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, reached its sixth edition in 1790.
