The Political Ideas Of The English Romanticists

A pioneer in legal and political theory, Schmitt traces the prehistory of political romanticism by examining its relationship to revolutionary and reactionary tendencies in modern European history. Both the partisans of the French Revolution and its most embittered enemies were numbered among the romantics. During the movement for German national unity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, both revolutionaries and reactionaries counted themselves as romantics. According to Schmitt, the use of the concept to designate opposed political positions results from the character of political romanticism: its unpredictable quality and lack of commitment to any substantive political position. The romantic person acts in such a way that his imagination can be affected. He acts insofar as he is moved. Thus an action is not a performance or something one does, but rather an affect or a mood, something one feels. The product of an action is not a result that can be evaluated according to moral standards, but rather an emotional experience that can be judged only in aesthetic and emotive terms. These observations lead Schmitt to a profound reflection on the shortcomings of liberal politics. Apart from the liberal rule of law and its institution of an autonomous private sphere, the romantic inner sanctum of purely personal experience could not exist. Without the security of the private realm, the romantic imagination would be subject to unpredictable incursions. Only in a bourgeois world can the individual become both absolutely sovereign and thoroughly privatized: a master builder in the cathedral of his personality. An adequate political order cannot be maintained on such a tolerant individualism, concludes Schmitt.

First published in 1986. It is often suggested that the great first generation of Romantics, after the first flush of their revolutionary enthusiasm, ‘sold out’ to the forces of conservatism and reaction. This book starts from the thesis that the ideas of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey did always contain powerful radical and reformist implications that set the tone of liberal and left-wing discussion for several generations. The message of the French Revolution and Wordsworth’s youthful enthusiasm continued to imbue the thought of Carlyle, and his disciples Ruskin and Kingsley, and its characteristic articulations are still visible in later socialists such as Keir Hardie and Blatchford. This thoughtful book not only shows how surprising are the original roots of some great socialist thinkers, but also argues for a strong continuity in the English tradition of political thought from the 1780s to the early years of the twentieth century. Both students of politics and of literature and Victorian ideas will be stimulated by The Romantic Tradition in British Political Thought.

'I was exhausted at the end, & yet I am sure that if ever I saw & heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.'So wrote Isaiah Berlin's secretary Lelia Brodersen to a friend in 1952, after hearing one of Berlin's Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE ROMANTIC AGE, written in preparation for these lectures, was heavily revised by Berlin afterwards, though he never brought it to final published form. But it is a work of the greatest interest, both for what Berlin says about his subject and for what it tells us about his own intellectual development. It is the only text he ever wrote in which he laid out in one connected account most of his key insights about the history of ideas in the period which he made his own - the 'romantic age'- the bridge between the eighteenth and ninetheenth centuries. This is also the mine from which Berlin quarried many of his well-known later publications, including 'Two Concepts of Liberty', 'Historical Inevitability' and his essays on Vico and Herder; the continuities and changes that appear when the earlier and later versions of his ideas are compared throw new light on his thought. Written in Berlin's characteristically accessible style, the book also contains much that is not to be found elsewhere in his writings. It is a distillate of his formative early work in the history of ideas, and the longest continuous text he ever wrote. The often problematic script left by Berlin has been edited for publication by Henry Hardy. Joshua Cherniss contributes an introduction setting the work in its context in Berlin's life and work, and a bibliography of related works by Berlin and others.

The Politics of Romanticism examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. She argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory, which shaped the literature of Romantic Britain, as well as German Idealism, the philosophical tradition through which Romanticism is more usually understood. Beenstock locates the Romantic movement's coherence in contract theory's definitive dilemma: the critical disruption of the individual and the social collective. By looking at the intersection of the social contract, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and canonical works of Romanticism and its political culture, her book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism of the last century.

Romantic writers responded to the challenges of reform and revolution by rethinking the scope of political reason. What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim to know anything in a field as complex as politics? And how can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? These are the questions that occupied a group of British poets, philosophers, and polemicists in the years following the French Revolution. Timothy Michael argues that much literature of the period is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, the historical sequence of revolution, counter-revolution, and terror in France—and radicalism and repression in Britain—occasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of these figures must be understood, Michael contends, in the context of their philosophical thought. Major poems of the period, including The Prelude, The Excursion, and Prometheus Unbound, are in this reading an adjudication of competing political and epistemological claims. This book bridges for the first time two traditional pillars of Romantic studies: the period’s politics and its theories of the mind and knowledge. Combining literary and intellectual history, it provides an account of British Romanticism in which high rhetoric, political prose, poetry, and poetics converge in a discourse of enlightenment and emancipation.

Redefines Romantic sociability through a reading of social contract theoryThe Politics of Romanticism examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. She argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory, which shaped the literature of Romantic Britain, as well as German Idealism, the philosophical tradition through which Romanticism is more usually understood. Beenstock locates the Romantic movement's coherence in contract theory's definitive dilemma: the critical disruption of the individual and the social collective. By looking at the intersection of the social contract, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and canonical works of Romanticism and its political culture, her book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism of the last century. Key Features Develops new understanding of Romanticism as political movementOffers fresh readings of canonical works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Mary Shelley and Carlyle by tracing their implicit dialogue with the political philosophy of Rousseau and other Enlightenment political theoristsShows that the philosophical routes of Romanticism and its ties to German Idealism originate in empiricism Carries important consequences for the contemporary understanding of the self, an understanding that is partly rooted in notions that originated with the Romantics