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 periods 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.
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
""British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason will be read in any case with absorbing interest by scholars of an earlier period who may have imagined that the eighteenth century concluded on or about the year 1789.""
