Timothy Michael. British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason.

Michael, Timothy

Timothy Michael. British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. 283. $54.95.

In British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason, Timothy Michael argues that crises of political knowledge are not aberrations in modernity but, instead, one of its foundations. After the bloody turn taken by the French Revolution, writers and artists from across Europe had to cope with widespread failure of Enlightenment ideals--rationalism, secular governance, and the rhetoric of liberation--to live up to their Utopian promises. One name for this coping strategy was Romanticism, the aesthetic and political movement whose figures, Michael says, had to undertake "an assessment of what [could] be rescued from Enlightenment models of rationality and an evaluation of how what remains of them might be deployed in postrevolutionary political contexts" (3). According to Michael, the models of knowledge that Romantic writers rescued after the breakdown of Enlightenment politics were numerous. They included the preservation of reason (now tempered by sensation and pleasure), a conservation of the idea of the "autonomous" poet by placing her in the messy cultural conditions in which she lived, and a recommitment to a style of inwardness that accommodated history and institutions (instead of avoiding them) (5). If all of this sounds very Burkean, then the governing thesis of British Romanticism is more radical. Michael argues that, at root, questions of political knowledge inevitably become in the Romantic imagination questions of freedom (5). The critique of existing models of understanding--be it a hard-nosed English empiricism or "the dream of pure reason"--could still be in the service of liberation (38).

Michael's book participates in a long tradition in Romantic studies that sees Romanticism as a negotiation--and not an outright repudiation--of Enlightenment rationalism and secularization. It includes texts such as James Engell's The Creative Imagination, Frances Ferguson's essays and book on Romantic-era utilitarianism, and Colin Jager's work on religious thought and institutions after the disenchantment brought on by a secular age. However, if British Romanticism reframes the epistemology of political thought in this transitional period, it's also an unusually old school book: Michael constructs a traditional intellectual history that avoids the cultural materialist methodologies that we've come to expect in most first monographs written under the rubric of the New Historicism. Instead, Michael concentrates on ideas themselves, as well as the fertile connections between them. While reading, I regularly thought about historians of Romantic ideology from the early to mid-twentieth-century, such as A. O. Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin, by whom Michael admits to being influenced (19). But Michael's analyses are less linear and more dialectical than Lovejoy's or Berlin's. He is not telling a story about the evolution of ideas, but building a network out of their recurrence and reappraisal. Indeed, Michael's emphasis on pure concepts--his "commitment to the history of philosophy, especially philosophies of mind and knowledge"--seems to echo the reconstructed idealism of the authors whose work he analyzes (24). In other words, the intellectual history of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century laid out in British Romanticism parallels a disciplinary history currently unfolding in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Both speak to an attempt to recover some sort of theory after the intervention of history.

The tour de force comes early in the book. It is Michael's first chapter on Kant, which considers the philosopher's Copernican "revolution" in thinking alongside the unfolding French Revolution (34). While Michael takes on several texts--the first and third Critique, The Conflict of the Faculties, as well as some illustrative excerpts from Wordsworth--his central question is "the status of the a priori as a political problem at the end of the eighteenth century" (35). Typically, Kant's a priori refers to the metaphysical principles that underpin thinking itself; it is the foundation upon which the exercise of reason can be performed. While Kant famously interrogates the a priori in a series of antinomies, Michael resituates the problematic of foundationalism within the hangover of the Revolution and Thermidor, when mass persecution threatened to undermine both principles and institutions that had hitherto seemed inviolable. Because the a priori severs knowledge "from experience... [it] either promises the only true kind of freedom or threatens the most real kind of subjective and objective terror" (51). Pivoting between these extreme positions--between the promise of liberation and the fear of mayhem--Romantic authors had to question their commitment to epistemologies that they had previously cherished. The a priori is no longer a basis for certainty, but a catalyst for skepticism about one's political and aesthetic positions.

As Michael shows, this skepticism appears in a range of different texts and takes many forms. In Political Justice, Godwin sees the a priori as the collection of existing state institutions, those structures that arc removed from individual experience and whose authority becomes

a tyrannical imposition to freedom (109). And yet Godwin is also devoted to foundational moral conditions: "obligation, duty, resistance, liberty, and equality" (108). For someone like Wordsworth, on the other hand, the restrictions imposed by the a priori encourage freedom instead of constraining it. Consider, Michael says, the poet's famous sonnet, "Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room," where self-regulation becomes the prerequisite for emancipation (54-55). (With this emphasis Michael recalls another recent monograph that argues for the liberating qualities of artistic limitation, Anahid Nersessian's Utopia, Limited). Even Noam Chomsky shows up, as Michael finds in Chomsky's linguistic and political philosophy another iteration of the dialectic of the Romantic a priori: motivated by "the data of experience" (52), Chomsky also stands "against strict empiricism" (54) and proposes a set of rules upon which language and civic society can be formed. For me, these readings of Kant are refreshing in their (mostly) historical focus. If recent studies of Kant have placed him in conversation with Marx, then Michael's book revisits Kant's role in the tenuous formation of bourgeois liberal knowledge during the very time that it was being shaped.

In his review of British Romanticism for Literature and History (25, no. 2), Orrin N. C. Wang describes Michael's analysis of Kant as a promising "reformulat[ion of] an old chestnut in Romantic studies: the division between mind and world" (217). Another way to frame this division is the split between intellectual certainty and the unknowable motions of history. (According to Michael, this is one of the central aporias of British Romanticism: "a desire for universal knowledge... [that] at the same time ... confronts... the fear of knowledge that is never fully adequate to present circumstances [57]). Such a dynamic is playing out in current debates about progress, its inevitability, and the so-called "Whig" view of history. Critics such as Saree Makdisi, for instance, have started to trace the uneven progress of modernity in spaces commonly found in Romantic poetry and prose: the old preindustrial village, the foreign outpost, and the urban hovel.

This kind of work is bound up with a more general anxiety about the systemic limits to progress in our own age, or a sense that progress has become more of an ideology than a verifiable historical condition. (Wolfgang's Streeck's new book How Will Capitalism End details one such systemic limit--and it provides a timely counterpoint to intellectuals such as Jiirgen Habermas, who have argued that incremental regulation could keep the dream of European unity alive). Michael addresses the progressive notion of history by locating it in the years directly following the Revolution, when optimism about the future was part of a new regime of knowledge implemented by the Jacobins (42-43). However, while Michael mentions the role of political prophecy in Romantic writing--Blake's America: A Prophecy; Burke's rhetorical flourishes in the Reflections--I was surprised to see less attention paid to the category of the "speculative," or the event that falls outside the purview of existing epistemologies. Take, for example, the "shape all light" in Shelley's Triumph of Life, a figure that is classically read as a sign that eludes historical reference. This may have been an ideal object of analysis in Michael's closing chapter on Shelley and the "discontinuous and radically indeterminate" nature of historical knowledge (228). But perhaps Michael avoids the speculative because he has a slightly different goal: to show how Romantic writers assessed the premises of the politics that they knew, not the politics that they could never foresee.

Or perhaps what I call "speculation" Michael might call "contingency," the circumstances to which knowledge must adapt, especially if it is to be put into practice (146). In a medial chapter on Coleridge's Statesman's Manual, Michael examines how contingency and circumstances can be wedded to pre-existing principles. This section is haunted by the ghosts of American pragmatists, especially Richard Rorty, who appears in the epigraph. However, while Rorty and Coleridge were both committed to "a prudential politics based on the understanding" of their circumstances, there is another connection that goes unmentioned: their approval--either overt or tacit--of a liberalism rooted in markets (146). Of course, the political economy of pragmatism is usually avoided. For instance, any recognition of the inherent instability of capitalist democracy was curiously absent from discussions of a recent meme derived from an essay of Rorty's, in which the late philosopher predicts the rise of a western demagogue who feeds on cultural resentment and the convergence of incomes globally.

Romanticists, intellectual historians, and philosophers will benefit immensely from Michael's work. But we might all benefit from adopting one of Michael's goals: to understand the "legitimacy of political knowledge as a... scientific discipline," one that can "reconcile the claims of scientific description with those of ethical or political normativity" (12-13). Postwar Anglo-American democracy has been built on an epistemology communicated by one such discipline: political science. The quantification of thick, mutable opinion into big data and polling trends is our own blessed structure of political reason. But what happens when all the polls are wrong? Where is the accurate formula for deception--for the political lie that is told and the lie that one tells oneself? Who can quantify the partisan bile that rises and falls spasmodically? To live through the disruption of a machine of understanding is to live, as Michael shows us, through another phase of Romantic modernity.

Jamison Kantor

Ohio State University