ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Confessions of a Justified Sinner mounts a powerful critique of the Scottish philosophical account of sympathy as the foundation of moral sentiment, the ethical system that regulates civil society. It describes the consideration of sympathy to James Hogg’s treatment of fanaticism, the trope of a radical antagonism to civil society and what contributors would call its liberal values. Hogg’s struggle with the conditions of his modernity in Confessions of a Justified Sinner generates the imaginative energy that has kept the novel alive relatively obscure entrance into the world. Hogg’s own status as a social outsider who never quite gained a secure foothold in polite Edinburgh provided the condition of possibility for his profoundly unsettling novel. Fanaticism acquires the fully modern form through the French Revolution. Confessions of a Justified Sinner understands fanaticism as the dialectical product of objective historical processes of modernization — as a more radical ideology of modernity rather than some primitive moral force.
