This article provides an analysis of the role played by competing conceptions of pleasure in European cultural politics during the 18th century. Beginning with the `onanism' panic, which gripped western Europe in 1712, and with the apparent paradox that new concern about masturbation developed at a time when the pursuit of pleasure was increasingly legitimized in intellectual discourse, this article suggests that the panic can be understood as part of a wider process. This was a process in which a legitimization of pleasure was accompanied by a series of battles to define the concept in more socially useful ways. These battles can be traced across a range of literary fields from theology and aesthetics to physiology and political and moral theory.
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