The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

The activity of professional agencies, especially those within the legal system, as they participate in the co-Creation and co-Production of a trans individual’s new legal persona is the main focus of this chapter. Yet for all the talk of change and transition associated with transgender identity, the more common account given by transgender people themselves is one of coming to live as the person they have always been. This process of ‘coming to live as’ is in part transformative, but it is also in part confirmatory. The confirmatory character of the trans person’s process of transition can be regarded as being in two key senses a process of making a new social persona. The first sense is making in terms of personal development or growth. According to the definitions set out in earlier chapters, this is making in the sense of Creation. The second sense is making in terms of presenting or performing the new persona in society before the scrutiny of a public audience. This is making in the sense of Production. This chapter explores the implications for talk of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ when we think of trans identity in terms of a legal persona as a thing that is ‘made’.

In a Confectionary Performance as that term is used in this chapter, the maker and the spectator will both appreciate that the performance is a deliberate one of making something by combining other things. ‘Synthesis’ and ‘articulation’ would serve as satisfactory synonyms for ‘confection’, but the advantage of ‘confection’ as a description of making processes that persuade spectators is the word’s association with pleasing sweetness. The very word persuasion originates in the idea that a person is moved ‘through sweetness’ (per-suade). Paying attention to the use of culinary and other sensory affective Confectionary Performances, this chapter highlights the significance in our post-truth age of political performances that bypass our logical thought processes in order to influence us through our feelings.

Judicial law-making has frequently been likened to arts and crafts of various sorts, from minting coins to writing novels. While considering these analogies and how they demonstrate the reality of the law’s fabricating processes, the deeper aim of this chapter is to challenge the assumption that facts and truths established in law courts are ‘found’ and ‘discovered’. It is only by acknowledging that legal facts and legal truths are made by judicial crafts that we will come to appreciate the merits of those crafts and to discern the attributes of truth-making in courts that set the standard by which to judge the quality of truth claims in other contexts.

J. S. Mill’s protest at ‘vulgar’ uses of the past gave way in the 1830s to an eclectic science of history which drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Saint-Simonians, and Auguste Comte. Book VI of A System of Logic (1843) sketched a theoretical outline of progress whose scientific conversion came about when it was connected, indirectly, to the ultimate laws of psychology. The triumph of sociology reflected Mill’s settled view that society was increasingly a historical phenomenon, shaped less and less by the psychological laws from which Thomas Hobbes, Bentham, and the ‘geometric’ reasoners had deduced their political ideas. This realisation, Barrell argues, pulled in two directions. While it provided a logic and vocabulary of historical relativism, its theoretical sketch of progress was neither relative nor concretely historical because it encompassed the ‘whole previous history of humanity’ as a progressive chain of causes and effects. This double consciousness, I have argued, can be profitably situated within German historicism, French science sociale, and English utilitarianism, all of which acknowledged the logical dissonance between historical facts and their theoretical reconstruction.

J. S. Mill in the 1830s and early 1840s, Barrell argues, thought extensively about the practical problems of historical enquiry. His progressive theory of historiography, sketched in the article on Jules Michelet, rejected presentism and the resort to ‘everyday experience’. This rejection was bolstered by his reception of German Historismus, Romanticism, and ‘Continental’ philosophy, all of which set out to de-familiarise and imaginatively reconstruct the past. The best modern historians, J. S. Mill argued, were more attentive than their eighteenth-century predecessors to the past’s animating uniqueness, and it is significant that Hume, Gibbon, and other eighteenth-century luminaries barely featured in his account. At the same time, his defence of general principles provided continuities with Scottish philosophical history and the utilitarian tradition in which he was raised. Thomas Carlyle’s account of the French Revolution, while innocent of presentism, was ultimately conjectural and uncritical, whereas Grote’s History of Greece combined criticism with philosophical insight, placing it somewhere between the second and third stages of historical enquiry.