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Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity

June 11th, 2010 JackCragwall No comments

Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity. New York: Routledge, 2007. 280pp. $148.00 (Hdbk; ISBN 978-0-415-77142-9).

Reviewed by
Tobias Menely
Willamette University

Since when has public debate—about the state’s responsibility for the indigent, about foreign wars and homeland security, about the regulation of international commerce—been so thoroughly informed by issues of financial speculation and public debt? Since the eighteenth century, argues Robert Mitchell, when the parasitic greed of speculators and the dangerous expansion of national debt were the subject of plays and poems, pamphlets and speeches. Mitchell describes his ambitious, fascinating, and timely book Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era as an example of a “new economic literary criticism” (206). Literary critics, he maintains, have as much to teach us as economists do about finance capitalism, a phenomenon (as we have recently learned) that reflects the exigencies of social psychology and imaginative speculation no less than the materialities of production and consumption. Mitchell links the development of a theoretical language of sympathetic identification with the crises in state finance that periodically rocked Britain in the century and a half after the establishment of the Bank of England. Elaborating on Thomas Haskell’s seminal work, “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,” Mitchell shows that financial speculation, social sympathy, and humanitarian reform politics share a cognitive style defined by its “open sense of the future” (vii).

Ever since Benedict Anderson identified the eighteenth-century rise of the nation with “homogeneous empty time,” the steady forward movement and social simultaneity of newspaper reading, scholars have been drawing our attention to the period’s other forms of time consciousness. In Mitchell’s account, the eighteenth-century present was bound by promises made and debts accrued in the past just as it was oriented by speculations about what was to come. Finance capitalism relied on “investment instruments that located value in the future” (14), but there was also a parallel sense that communities mediated by imaginative sympathy are themselves lived in the future tense. This open relation to futurity was enabled by a novel conception of “society” as a contingent and variegated “system” of relationships. Britons perceived an increasingly intricate and extensive collective life, in which the economy, the government, and “collective psychology” were growing more inseparable as they grew more complex. Mitchell argues that social systems, and particularly a financial system in which shared opinions establish value, became acutely visible during economic crises. Financial calamity and constraint turned people’s attention to the mediating forms that undergird collective belief, as they sought means of reflecting on and intervening in economic systems (5). Moreover, the writers studied by Mitchell—David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, the antislavery poets of the 1780s, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley—drew on the speculative temporality and systemic contingency of finance capitalism in order to reconceive the social order.

Renaissance thinkers, Mitchell reminds us in Chapter One, would have been perplexed by the modern idea of imagination as a form of cognitive projection that produces virtual community by enabling a self to enter another’s situation. Before the eighteenth century, imagination was “a quasi-corporeal faculty that mediated between animal spirits and intellect,” only producing social factions of a dangerously enthusiastic or otherwise aberrant nature (29). It is, Mitchell argues, only with the financial crises of the early eighteenth century, and particularly the South Sea Company stock panic of 1720-1, that imagination came to explain “affective relationships between individuals” (29). This etymological shift is paralleled by a new interest in the relation between the circulation of images through mass media and the collective sentiments that determine stock prices and the availability of public credit. While political economists soon turned away from the problem of imagination, moral philosophers did not, because imaginative speculation offered a way of conceptualizing the formation and maintenance of social systems. In the second half of the chapter, Mitchell argues that David Hume identified the specific imaginative mechanisms of sympathy as a way of explaining how “social stability” is possible without “epistemological certainty” (48). For Hume, sympathy—the self’s capacity to speculate about another’s speculations about itself—produces the intersubjective domain, a kind of affective gift economy in which we come to know ourselves. Mitchell distinguishes Hume from conservatives like Bolingbroke, who attributed social cohesion to the sedimenting influence of past experience. Hume defines two temporalities of social formation, one linked to the closed futurity of “the promise,” which is dependent on the continuity of convention, and one linked to the open futurity of speculative acts that inaugurate “new forms of sociability” and new systems (55).
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Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime

January 19th, 2009 JackCragwall No comments

Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, no. 63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 280 pp. $80.00. (Hdbk; ISBN: 0512854008).

Reviewed by
Dana Van Kooy
University of Colorado at Boulder

Just as Mont Blanc has been central to the Shelleyan canon, so too the sublime as an aesthetic discourse has been pivotal to our understanding of Percy Shelley as a poet, a philosopher, and a radical. Cian Duffy’s Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime challenges the “critical orthodoxy which assumes not only that there is such a thing as a generic ‘romantic sublime’, but also that this ‘sublime’ rehearses the transcendentalist paradigms of [Kant's] Critique of Judgment” (5). Eschewing Burke and Kant, Duffy reorients the Shelleyan sublime through two other texts: C.F. Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires (translated into English in the early 1790s) and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-88). Both texts, according to Duffy, embody the eighteenth-century idea of “ruin-sentiment” (38-9), a term which links imperial collapse to moral decadence and, as a discourse of political and social reform, offers to resolve the terrifying prospect of ruin through an appeal to moral restraint. Shelley, Duffy argues, takes this causal formulation a step further; the sublime provides the means of representing the inevitable imperial failure as a natural cultural process that mirrors society’s moral and political corruption. Shelley’s sublime landscapes—significantly, inhabited by volcanoes, avalanches, and other events marking geological catastrophe—signify the natural necessity of revolution. This essentially inverts the traditional theistic discourse of the natural sublime; instead of pointing to God as the organizing principle of life, Shelley’s sublime exposes “the artificiality, the un-naturalness of contemporary social structures” (9). Duffy’s study places a new emphasis on the catastrophic imagery of the natural sublime while it also redefines the Shelleyan sublime as an “aesthetic ideology” in order to be attentive to the figurative power of the natural sublime to change the observer’s conception of what is “natural” or what is “right.”

Organized chronologically, the first two chapters focus on the philosophical and literary influences that shaped Shelley’s early figurations of the natural sublime in the Esdaile poems, Queen Mab, The Assassins, and Alastor. Tracing Shelley’s early “radical, rationalist distrust of the imagination,” and his reactions to the theistic structure of the sublime in works like Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Duffy maps Shelley’s shifting skepticism regarding the sublime and how it might be used in poetry as a discourse of political reform. In the first chapter, Duffy’s main concern is to identify the conflict between Shelley’s “gradualist politics and the revolutionism of his engagement with the discourse on the sublime” (48). He also shows how Shelley uses the sublime in Queen Mab to argue for Necessity and its ability as a natural process to bring about “a political and environmental utopia” (34). With chapter two, Duffy follows Shelley’s growing concern with the politics of the imagination and its relationship to the increasingly politicized notions of the natural sublime. Duffy’s reading of The Assassins is suggestive. Here, Duffy uses Gibbon and Delisle De Sales’ 1799 novel, Le Vieux de la Montagne to explore Shelley’s interest in incorporating the sublime to describe social bodies and their political activities. This transforms the sublime from a merely descriptive language into a means of visualizing political change. As with his work on Laon and Cythna in chapter four, here is a point where Duffy breaks new ground with regard to the texts and the contexts of the Shelleyan sublime. As with his reading of Alastor, he stresses Shelley’s disillusionment with Rousseau and with the post-Excursion Wordsworth, especially their politics of what Keats referred to as “egotistical sublime.”

Chapter three follows the traditional pairing of Mont Blanc with the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. This familiar ground—inhabited mostly by Byron, Coleridge, Rousseau, and Wordsworth—reveals Shelley’s growing awareness of the ideological power wielded by the sublime in travelogues, poetry, and in the works on natural history. Duffy also provides us with a view of how this super-saturated landscape was disfigured by the consumerism of tourists and by the imperial demands for natural resources such as rock (taken from ancient ruins and from the local landscape) to build roads. Responding to these unwieldy forces, Shelley, Duffy argues, pursues the need to develop a praxis for the “cultivated imagination.” A term introduced in chapter two, the cultivated imagination amounts to a means of using the sublime to reform an individual’s ideas about social and political questions. This is a central premise in Duffy’s narrative regarding Shelley’s evolving deployment of the sublime. Duffy invokes Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in order to define intellectual beauty not as a platonic idea but rather as “a product, and a defining characteristic” of the cultivated imagination (99). This pragmatic view of intellectual beauty takes it out of the idealistic realm too often associated with Shelley and makes clear the transformative power of the Shelleyan sublime as an experience and as a discourse.
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