Description
Book SynopsisRomantic 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 Franceand radicalism and repression in Britainoccasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of
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Michael offers extraordinary insights into many other matters, including the philosophy of Shelley, Coleridge and Kant... Deserve[s] a place on the bookshelf on anyone interested in British politics, American history, the history of India, philosophy (both ancient and 18th/19th century), poetry, the development of ideas and much else. Sun News Miami This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasingly clear manner. English Oxford Journals Michael's book effectively shows how, during the Enlightenment, the political was not a fixed point or concept. AmeriQuests This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasing clear manner. English Not the least of the strengths of this work is the lucidity of its author's style: the clarity with which he presents and prosecutes his thesis, summarizes or elaborates particular intellectual positions and debates as he sets out their bearings on his discussion, adds considerably to the force of his insights. European Romantic Review
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Discipline of Political Knowledge
Context
Cases of Romanticism
Conceptual Orientations
1. Kant and the Revolutionary Settlement of Early Romanticism
Revolutions, Copernican and French
Prophetic History and Moral Terrorism
Independence from Experience
The Rhetoric of Hurly-Burly Innovation
2. Burke and the Critique of Political Metaphysics
Hypotaxis
Paradox
3. Wollstonecraft and the Vindication of Political Reason
Ratiocinatio
Stale Tropes and Cold Rodomontade
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
4. The Government of the Tongue
The Power of Mere Proposition
Constructing a Form of Words
Resisting "Incroachment"
The Literature of Justice and Justification
5. Coleridge and the Principles of Political Knowledge
Hume and the Highest Problem of Philosophy
Structures of Mind and Government
The Symptom of Empiricism
6. The State of Knowledge
Rational Resistance
The Limits of Experimental Philosophy
Trying French Principles
Poetry and Poetics of the Excursive and Unbound Mind
7. The Dwellers of the Dwelling
Epistemic Hedonism
Tranquil and Troubled Pleasure
Building Social Freedom
The Inner Citadel of the Spirit
8. P.B. Shelley and the Forms of Thought
The Case for Skeptical Idealism
Historical Epistemology
The Atmosphere of Human Thought
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
