Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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John Morrow
marred Godwin’s optimistic rationalism. Poetry enlightened the mind and
galvanised the will; to ‘know’ through poetry was to feel the need to realise
this knowledge in the moral and political world. Underlying the differences
between Byron’s antique republicanism, Hazlitt’s democratic libertarianism
and Shelley’s philosophical anarchism was a shared commitment to identify-
ing political forms which reconciled the tension between romantic interests
in both active individuality, and in forms of sociability which appealed to
the aesthetic, the emotional and the moral forces within human beings.
Not only was this problem a distinctly romantic one, but so too were the
conceptions of harmony, symmetry, imagination and love that were brought
to bear upon it.
3 Romanticism and modernity, 1815–1850
In 1833, looking back from the vantage point of his sixty-fifth year,
Chateaubriand, a veteran of the ancien r
´
egime, the early stages of the Revolu-
tion, the Empire, the Restoration and the final overthrow of the Bourbons
in 1830, mused that
I have found myself caught between two ages as in the conflux of two great rivers,
and I have plunged into their waters turning regretfully from the old bank upon which
I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore at which the new
generation are to land. (Chateaubriand 1902, i, p. xxiv)
A willingness to contend with the swirling currents of modernity charac-
terised the outlook of a number of romantic writers whose most important
political writings were a product of the years 1820–50. While they lacked
the iconoclastic glamour of the radical romantics, their views were dis-
tinctly modern and progressive. Whether responding to the restoration of
the Bourbons in 1815, to the failure of legitimism and the Revolution of
1830, or to the impact of rapid industrial change, the writers discussed in
this section accepted the fact of the Revolution, rejected emphatically the
application of eighteenth-century ideas to the nineteenth-century world,
and sought to find new and vital solutions to the political and social problems
they perceived in post-revolutionary Europe.
Shelley and his coterie were hostile to German thought because they
believed that it was reactionary, but Thomas Carlyle used its critique of
materialism and utilitarianism as the basis for an influential form of radi-
cal political romanticism (Ashton 1980,pp.95–8;Butler1988,pp.38–9;
Harrold 1963; La Valley 1968;Lasch1991,pp.226–43;Morrow2006,
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
pp. 56–70; Vanden Bossche 1991). Carlyle identified this critique with a
group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German writer s
that included Novalis and Schlegel and in which Goethe had a special posi-
tion. Goethe was seen as the inspiration for an approach to the challenges
facing modern humanity that depreciated indulgent self-consciousness and
extravagant railing against the world, and focused attention on stern com-
mitment to transformative action. Carlyle’s attempt to promote German
literature so as to distinguish his position from that of his British contempo-
raries was signalled emphatically in the clarion call, ‘Close thy Byron;open
thy Goethe’(Carlyle1893j, p. 132). This call was part of a radical intellectual
and political compaign in which Carlyle sought to stake his own distinctive
claim for cultural authority.
The radical thrust of Carlyle’s thought can be seen in his ambivalence
towards Coleridge. Although Carlyle defended Coleridge against charges
of incomprehensible mysticism he exhibited a marked animus to the ‘sage
of Highgate’s’ conservatism (Carlyle 1893d, pp. 183–4, 1893i, p. 52). For
Carlyle, the erosion of traditional Christianity, the growth of industrial
society and the redundancy of traditional institutions of government were
not necessarily causes for alarm. They only became so because spiritual
malaise, social disorder and the cruel deformities of life in modern industrial
centres were indicative of a failure to identify an intellectual, moral and
political basis from which to utilise the progressive possibilities opened up
by the passing of the old order.
Carlyle sought to fill this lacuna by identifying ideas and institutions
which expressed and acknowledged the infinite, spiritual dimensions of
human experience. Although he believed that Enlightenment thought had
been of great critical importance, Carlyle rejected attempts to forge a con-
structive world-view out of this philosophy. The dangers of doing so were
explored in Sartor Resartus. This partly autobiographical work traced the tor-
tured journey of the modern spirit from blind obedience through agonizing
alienation (‘the Eternal Nay’) to self-affirmation (the ‘Everlasting Yea’). The
reaffirmation symbolised by the ‘Everlasting Yea’ required human beings to
accept what Carlyle described as ‘the God-given mandate, Work thou in
Welldoing’. This mandate was framed in terms of a view of the importance
of particular approaches to human action, or ‘labour’, that was of profound
importance in Carlyle’s social and political thinking. Commitment to it,
however, also involved a transformation of humans’ view of their world
that softened and invigorated social feeling and gave an optimistic cast to
Carlyle’s message to his contemporaries. In terms of many contemporary
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discourses, these aspects of Carlyle’s position involved a high degree of para-
dox. He insisted that neither social feeling that recognized the distinctive
features of shared humanity nor a brave determination to face the future,
should be confused with commonplace notions of happiness, least of all
those conceptions that involved self-worship. To the contrary, life was to be
approached in a spirit of ‘renunciation’ that required a clear sense of duty
and an unbending adherence to its requirements:
There is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness,
and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach-forth this same HIGHER
that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times have spoken and suffered;
bearing testimony, through life and through death of the Godlike that is in Man, and
how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom. (Carlyle 1893j, pp. 132–3)
Human duty entailed a commitment to what Carlyle termed ‘the gospel
of labour’. ‘Labour’ encompassed a wide range of activities – not just pro-
ductive work but also literature, prophetic religious leadership, military
command, intellectual, social and political responsibilities – through which
all human beings fulfilled their obligation to reduce chaotic nature to the
condition of beneficent order that was immanent within it. Carlyle seemed
to hold the view that God’s creation was deliberately incomplete and that it
was humanity’s role to fulfil itself by perfecting it. The challenges posed by
a chaotic but orderable world were tasks that destiny had contrived to foster
the cultivation of the human spirit, and to give expression to humanity’s
infinite status.
Carlyle regarded work as the key value in a secularised metaphysics
addressing fundamental religious instincts that could not be presented to
modern humanity through the medium of Christian doctrine. Work was the
means of salvation and the only source of consolation, one that held out
the prospect of immortality because its fruits might survive to form part of
the consciousness of future generations. Carlyle’s statement of this position
was one of the revelations offered in Sartor Resartus and there, and in Char-
tism (his first direct contribution to what he called ‘the condition of England
question’), unemployment, underemployment and the degradation of the
misnamed ‘workhouse’ system were attributed to elites’ failures to assume
their obligations to the lower classes of Britain and Ireland. Governmental
and social leadership was prescribed by the gospel of labour, and neglect
of the duties imposed by it was seen to lie at the core of the problems
facing Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. These themes were
explored most fully in Past and Present (1843).
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
In this work Carlyle sought to bring back to life the labouring achieve-
ments of Abbot Samson, the late twelfth-century head of the monastic
community at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. The medieval focus of parts of
Past and Present was not a symptom of nostalgia, far less of reaction; rather, it
reflected Carlyle’s search for images from the past that were both inspiring
and salutary because they gave vivid expression to universally significant
ideas that were of particular importance in light of the social, political and
spiritual crisis facing his contemporaries. Samson seemed to exemplify in an
admirably non-selfconscious way the timeless implications of the medieval
exhortation, laborare est orare (to work is to pray). While his predecessor had
been conventionally devout in the sense that he was committed to the life
of the cloister, and the practices (‘the rule’) of his order, Samson concerned
himself with all aspects of the well-being of the community for which he
was responsible, re-establishing the economic strength of the Abbey, restor-
ing its buildings, recovering and guarding its privileges (the ‘liberties of St
Edmund’), and bringing discipline, order and just purpose to its internal
life. Samon’s conduct was contrasted with that of modern elites, committed
either to materialism or to forms of self-indulgent, highly self-conscious
piety that prevented effective action and left the community prey to avarice,
to the chance ordering of the market and to anarchic reactions of a working
class deprived of the moral, psychological and material benefits of effective
leadership. He also provided a model of leadership to inspire modern elites
to commit themselves to the gospel of labour and to reaffirm it as the core
of individual life and social interaction. Such a commitment entailed the
essence of worship since it prompted active, positive engagement with the
divinely created order of the universe.
Like Novalis, whose ideas were of particular interest to him, Carlyle
stressed the need for his contemporaries to give due weight to the ‘dynamic’
forces at work in human history. These impulses, reflecting the ‘primary,
unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love
and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetr y, Religion’, were aspects of a
world regulated by a system of natural law which brought human conduct
into conformity with God’s purposes (Carlyle 1893h, pp. 240–1; Simpson
1951). Carlyle claimed that the ‘science of mechanics’ had blinded many of
his contemporaries to fundamental stipulations of natural law that enjoined
just regulation and leadership. The first of these requirements was a conse-
quence of the belief that the spiritual dimensions of human life could only
be satisfied within an organic community; the second reflected Carlyle’s
belief that hierarchy was necessary for such a community. An indifference
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to justice was apparent in mechanical conceptions of human society, in
the attention focused on the outward condition of the population and
in the equally dehumanising assumptions that underlay both government
policy and the attitudes of employers to their employees. These injustices
pointed to a failure in leadership, one that was reinforced by the doctrine
of laissez-faire, and was reflected in popular agitations for democratic par-
liaments, in trade union activity and in less well-directed acts of popular
violence.
What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowing . . . [but] inarticulate cries of a
dumb creature in rage and pain; to the ear of wisdom they are articulate prayers: ‘Guide
me, govern me! I am mad and miserable and cannot guide myself.’ (Carlyle 1893b,
p. 144)
The progressive cast of Carlyle’s thought is clearly apparent in his insistence
that the hierarchy of contemporary society must differ radically from that
of the old order. He thus identified a modern surrogate for the Church in
men of letters; he also placed particular emphasis on the responsibilities of
the emerging industrial elite, the ‘captains of industry’. Captains of industry
should use their economic power to maximise the populace’s opportunities
for labour and to participate thereby in ordering the material universe. They
should also ensure that the conditions in which their troops worked and
lived reflected their humanity and reinforced the interdependent, organic
character of genuine forms of sociability. In so far as landholders retained
a real role in modern society, they too were to resume the responsibilities,
and not just the privileges, of leadership. Like other putative leaders in
the modern world, the landholding classes were to be ‘heroic’ rather than
merely traditional figures (Carlyle 1893f, p. 246, 1893e).
Carlyle insisted that heroic leaders should play a commanding role in the
state. This institution symbolised the moral community and possessed the
power necessary to foster co-operation and to facilitate human progression.
Carlyle’s conception of the state was underwritten by his belief that because
political heroes grasped at least some of the underlying realities of the
universe they could understand the requirements of their own age. Such
figures, a Cromwell in the past and perhaps a Sir Robert Peel in the future,
should not be hindered by bureaucracy, by the outmoded forms of the old
world or the panacea of parliamentary democracy. In Latter Day Pamphlets
(1850) Peel was pictured as the central figure in the ‘New Downing Street’, a
system of administrative leadership which would direct the state by reference
to the realities of the modern world (Carlyle 1893c, p . 78;Seigel1983).
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
The only role that Carlyle could see for democratic institutions in this
essentially authoritarian political environment was that of the sounding
board: they would provide the governor of the New Downing Street with
popular responses to his leadership which would allow him to determine
which courses of action were feasible in the circumstances (Carlyle 1893c,
pp. 204–5; cf. Rosenberg 1974,pp.176ff .).
Carlyle’s strictures on what he saw as the gross political delusions of his
contemporaries, appeared originally in a series of denunciatory essays can-
vassing the characteristic follies of the age in sweeping, dismissive and often
savage terms. Other targets included the philanthropic ethos prompting the
emancipation of slaves in the West Indies and the United States and the
remodelling of penal institutions at home; modern literature and drama;
and the religious ethos of the modern world. The tone of these pamphlets
reflected Carlyle’s frustration at what he saw as the obtuseness of his con-
temporaries in the face of the moral corruption of their culture. They
were not merely mistaken in their views but seemed to have deliberately
embraced falsehood as a way of thought and life: ‘All arts, industries and
pursuits...aretaintedtotheheartwithfatalpoison;carrynotinthemthe
inspiration of God, but (fruitfulest to think of !) that of the Devil calling
himself God; and are smitten with a curse forevermore’ (Carlyle 1893c,
p. 271). Despite this jeremiad, Carlyle did not jettison completely the air
of hope that he associated with Goethe’s message: with appropriate heroic
leadership the residual heroism of the ordinary population might yet prompt
them to put their hands to the wheel and chart a safe if unavoidably arduous
course into the future.
Within English romanticism Carlyle was in some respects the heir of
Robert Southey (Eastwood 1989,p.315). Both Carlyle and Southey wrote
extensively and sympathetically on the material and spiritual impact of
industrialisation upon the common people and both expressed themselves
in harsh, authoritarian tones. However, despite Carlyle’s admiration for
Southey, his progressive perspective placed the revival of pre-industrial values
such as loyalty, deference and an organic and hierarchically ordered society,
into a political framework that was quite different from the traditional one to
which Southey appealed. In this respect, his position resembled that of post-
war French romantics, but they moved towards positions whose liberal and
democratic aspects stood in sharp contrast with Carlyle’s authoritarianism.
The progressive concerns of French romantic writers are apparent even
in their criticisms of the irreligious tenor of Enlightenment thought. They
deplored what Carlyle termed the ‘practical atheism’ of the Enlightenment
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because they thought that it impeded the liberating and progressive ten-
dencies which were the hallmarks of the modern age. Chateaubriand, for
example, claimed that Roman Catholicism had always been the guardian
of liberty and he related the philosophes’ enmity towards Christianity to
their fundamental intolerance: ‘the true spirit of the Encyclopedists was a
persecuting fury and intolerance of opinions, which aimed at destroying all
other systems than their own, and even in preventing freedom of thought’
(Chateaubriand 1815,pp.388–9).
Militant atheism was a species of fanaticism, and it was this, and not
Christian doctrine and practice, which was the real enemy of liberty.
Chateaubriand’s claim that Christianity and liberty went hand-in-hand was
echoed in Lamennais’ observation that the humanitarian impulses of the
Enlightenment had been stifled by the philosophes’ antipathy to Christianity
(Guillou 1992,p.10; Reardon 1985,p.13). Lamennais rejected the one-
sidedness of Enlightenment thought because it was incompatible with his
belief that human life was set in a context structured by immutable, God-
given laws. These laws could be known and implemented only if human
beings approached them with the full range of their cognitive and active
faculties. He therefore called for a renewal of the ‘intimate union of faith
and science, of force and law, and of power and liberty’ (Lamennais 1830–1c,
p. 476; Oldfield 1973,p.220).
Lamennais’ stress upon the unification of human experience was echoed
in Lamartine’s writings, but here it was related to the nature of poetry and
the role of the poet. Although Lamartine’s conception of Christianity had a
strongly rationalistic flavour it was leavened by his belief that the intuitions
or feelings of the ‘soul’ played an essential role in overcoming the limita-
tions of unaided human reason. Rather than abandoning either reason or
the emotional impulses of Christianity, Lamartine sought to fuse the two.
While relig ion was to be stripped of its supernatural trappings, reason was
to be infused with ‘mystical resonances’ sustained through the influence
of romantic poetry (Charlton 1984a, pp. 24–6, 1984b, p. 56; Kelly 1992,
p. 187; Toesca 1969,p.281). Lamartine thought that the post-war period was
distinguished by the diffusion of liberty. However, he evaluated this devel-
opment in religious terms; liberty was a ‘mysterious phenomenon whose
secret belongs to God, but whose witness is the conscience, and whose evi-
dence is virtue’ (Lamartine 1860–6,p.361; Fortesque 1983,pp.78–9; Kelly
1992,p.196). In the modern era the pursuit of liberty had produced a new
kind of politics, one which sought to transpose freedom into a systematic
form of social organisation. Lamartine thought that poetry would help his
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
contemporaries to embrace and to reintegrate the intellectual, political and
spiritual impulses that were glimpsed in the Enlightenment but had been
fragmented by its narrow conception of rationality. Poetry was the ‘music of
reason’ and Lamartine believed that it would make transformation possible
by imbuing politically engaged minds with images of charity, compassion,
generosity and morality (Dunn 1989,p.293).
The French romantics’ attempt to fuse reason and religion in the interests
of social and political progress was closely related to their perception of the
French Revolution. Unlike conservative romantics in both England and
Germany, they gave the Revolution a verdict of qualified approval. Thus
while Chateaubriand was aligned with the ‘Ultra’ majority in the notori-
ous Chambre Introuvable, his defence of both the Restoration and its first
elected assembly contained favourable judgements on aspects of the Rev-
olution (Lom
´
enie 1929, i,pp.63ff.). Although he condemned the ‘moral’
interests thrown up by the Revolution – obedience to de facto government
and an indifference to honesty and justice – Chateaubraind insisted that the
Restoration must preserve the proprietorial and political rights that were
its most valuable ‘material’ contribution to posterity (Chateaubriand 1838c,
p. 208). The key to this process was the general acceptance of a representative
form of monarchy.
In De Bonaparte et des Bourbons (1814), Chateaubriand’s harsh character-
isations of Napoleon’s regime were given a distinctive edge by his earlier
association with it. He described the Empire as the ‘saturnalia of royalty’. Its
‘crimes’, ‘oppression’, ‘slavery’ and ‘folly’, contrasted with the ‘legitimate
authority’, ‘order’, ‘peace’ and ‘legal liberty’ of representative monarchy
(Chateaubriand 1838b, pp. 13, 31). Such a regime needed the support of
a hereditary aristocracy, not the complicity of a pseudo-imperial clique.
Above all, it required an Established Church (Chateaubriand 1838c, p . 172).
Chateaubriand insisted that this institution should not be modelled on the
state-salaried clergy of the Napoleonic era. Rather, it must possess finan-
cial independence on the lines of the English Church. This conception
of the Church was very similar to that of Coleridge, but Chateaubriand’s
view of its importance was closely related to the peculiar needs of Restora-
tion France. A respected and viable church establishment would endow
the new regime with the sanctity of traditional religion and underline the
connection between liberal values and Christianity: ‘The liberty which is
not derived from heaven will seem the work of the Revolution; and we
shall never learn to love the child of our crimes and of our misfortunes’.
(Chateaubriand 1838c, p. 250).
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John Morrow
Representative monarchy incorporated aspects of tradition but it also
required certain liberal innovations. For example, Chateaubriand rejected
the use of police powers for political purposes, and he also argued that a
free press was necessary for a system of government founded on enlight-
ened public opinion (Chateaubriand 1838c, pp. 175–6, 1838d, pp. 379–80).
However, the feature of representative monarchy which most interested
Chateaubriand was the idea of ministerial responsibility. Chateaubriand’s
support for this idea reflected in part t he commonly held view that it would
facilitate the effective criticism of the executive by allocating responsibility
to removable ministers rather than to the monarch (cf. Constant 1988a,
pp. 227–42). In addition, however, he claimed that this convention gave
the monarch a distinctive status. By assigning the Crown a ratifying rather
than an initiating role, the idea of ministerial responsibility endowed the
monarch with an air of divinity: ‘His person is sacred, and his will can
do no wrong’ (Chateaubriand 1838c, p . 163). Since the monarch only
spoke with absolute author ity when he ratified (and thus completed and
perfected) laws produced by representative assemblies, he possessed a sym-
bolic importance which was not available to other political actors or to
the powerful but tarnished sovereigns of despotic states (Chateaubriand
1838c, pp. 170–1).
In discussing ministerial responsibility Chateaubriand dwelt on the
monarch’s symbolic role and utilised a romantic interpretation of a liberal
constitutional mechanism to convince his ‘Ultra’ allies that representative
government captured the essence of monarchy. However, Chateaubriand
did not regard the legitimist majority in the Chamber merely as a stalking
horse for the liberalisation of French government (B
´
ed
´
e 1970,pp.40–2;
R
´
emond 1969,pp.42–4, 73). To the contrary, he believed that since the
Chamber had been elected it was an authentic expression of the feelings of
the nation. It thus symbolised the fusion of the old world and the new, the
symbiosis of legitimist values, liber ty and popular government that formed
the core of representative government and was one of the most important
products of the Revolution.
Lamartine’s and Lamennais’ understanding of the implications of the
Revolution were ultimately more radical than that of Chateaubriand. In the
Restoration period Lamennais’ attention was focused upon the damaging
effects of Gallicanism upon the liberty of the Church. The interference of
the state in religious matters was very damaging because freedom was central
to the reconciliation of the individual’s conscience with God and humanity.
Lamennais’ failure to persuade either French elites or the papacy of the evils
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
of state control pushed him towards a more general critique of traditional
political and social structures (Guillou 1969). He came to regard the Rev-
olution of 1789 was an assertion of popular liberty against repressive and
disharmonious political and social structures, and that of 1830 was a reasser-
tion of the same tendency. Lamennais described the July Revolution as:
a popular reaction against absolutism . . . an inevitable effect of an already ancient impul-
sion, the continuation of a great movement which, having projected itself from the
regions of thought into the political world in 1789, announced to the slumbering
nations of a corrupt civilisation and an outdated order, the fall of that order and the
birth of a new order. (Lamennais 1830–1b, pp. 161–2; Oldfield 1973,p.187)
A society that combined both liberty and order had to be built anew
from the isolated individuals who were the sole repositories of eternal
justice and the only possible focus for Christian liberty. Since the French
population had been atomised, its members could only be combined in a
democratic republic (Oldfield 1973,pp.188–90). This message (spelt out
in L’Avenir of 1830–1) became the basis for an increasingly strident call to
action in Lamennais’ subsequent political writings. However, he insisted it
was necessary for liberty to be a general feature of a reconstr ucted society,
and also for this society to embody the principles of eternal justice. The
new order would have to recognise not only political rights but also a wide-
ranging set of ‘social rights’ which specified the social and material basis
of an orderly, harmonious Christian society. As Lamennais wrote in Paroles
d’un Croyant of 1834:
Liberty is not a placard that one sees at a street corner. It is a living power that one
feels in oneself and around oneself, the true protective spirit of the domestic threshold,
the guarantee of social rights, and the first of all these rights. (Lamennais 1834,ch.20,
p. 45; Ireson 1969,pp.27–9)
Lamartine also thought that his contemporaries must complete the recon-
struction that had begun with the French Revolution. This event had been
a ‘tocsin to the world’:
Many of its phases are accomplished, but it has not yet concluded; nothing is fin-
ished in these slow, internal and everlasting movements of the moral life of man . . . In
the progress of societies and ideas, the end is ever but a new starting-point. The
French Revolution, which will hereafter be called the European Revolution . . . was
not only a political revolution, a change of power, one dynasty set up in place of
another, a republic substituted for a monarchy – all these things were but the accidents,
symptoms, instruments and means. (Lamartine 1856,p.496;cf.Lamartine1848, iii,
pp. 541–6)
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