This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men as staging not merely a political argument with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but a political economic one. By exhuming the obscured economic substrata of Burke’s work, Wollstonecraft exposes the injustices of the socio-economic order which he sought to naturalise and attacks the economic order on which late eighteenth-century society was founded. Wollstonecraft shows how Burke weaponises ‘specious’ human feeling in defence of existing structures, and how he defends a political economy which subjugates human feeling to a defence of the status quo. In contrast, Wollstonecraft resists the separation of political economic concerns from questions of liberty, equality, and happiness. By insisting that sympathetic feeling for others should be used to reform human community and to motivate political actions to sustain human happiness, she asserts human feeling as an alternative ground of value.

This essay challenges the historiographical myth of salutary neglect on many levels, beginning by exploring how it came to its current, dominant interpretive status. I argue that it grows out of a desire to see the colonies as relatively democratic and independent, but that such a perception is deeply problematic. The levers of imperial control were powerful throughout the colonial period; colonial political systems did not develop “in a state of nature”; the tendrils of legal control were invidious and far-reaching; and force–the power of empire–was never far away. British navies, in particular, supplemented by occasional armies and colonial militias under the command of the Governor, along with all the mechanisms of legal control–sheriffs and executions, heads on stakes at the public crossroads–lurked always on the horizon, ready to intervene if necessary, sometimes only in the public imagination, but often in fact. This chapter is a call to think deeply about the power of empire during the colonial period. Doing so will lead to a richer understanding of what broke down between 1763 and 1776, but also of what came before. Salutary neglect it was not.

This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

In the decade after Warren Hastings’ departure (1785–98), his idea of conciliation encountered new and formidable opposition. He relied on the idea in his defense against impeachment in parliament, but his principal accuser, Edmund Burke, identified it with corruption. Conciliation also acquired a bad name in India, where Hastings’ acting replacement, John Macpherson, made it the watchword of his scandalous administration. Hence, it fell to Lord Cornwallis to rid the idea of its unsavoriness, as part of his attempt to restore metropolitan faith in the Company state. The governor-general’s alliance with Sir William Jones helped in this regard. In the 1790s, pressure on the Company state and on the idea of conciliation abated. Yet this was to be a temporary reprieve. Soon, both would be challenged afresh by the governor-generalship of Lord Wellesley.

“Indulgence: The Stuart Declarations of Indulgence and Their Afterlives,” analyzes the concept and procedure of indulgence during the Restoration and its persistence in the eighteenth century. It argues that the Stuart Declarations of Indulgence as mechanisms of religious liberty were not superseded by toleration; rather, they articulated a formal and affective structure for political and personal relations that persisted as a minor form in the eighteenth century, as exemplified in the writing of David Hume, Edmund Burke, Samuel Richardson, and Olaudah Equiano. While tolerance is a policy and a practice grounded in a theory of formal equality, indulgence persists as a way to imagine relationships with women, with children, and with enslaved and colonized people.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

This chapter focuses on some of the principal ways in which the family has been viewed, or theorized, in political-economic thought, but focuses in particular on the legacy of Edmund Burke’s conservative defense of that institution against radical challenge on the grounds that inheritance materially underpins moral and cultural continuity. Tracing the the complex evolution of this essentially elitist argument in relation to Malthusianism, as well as through both the discourse of eugenics and literary responses to the emergence of a “mass society,” the chapter also highlights the role of Burkean traditions in affirming an orthodox heteronormativity against sexual liberationist movements, theorists, and writers. Ultimately, though, the conclusion demonstrates that the commodification of queer sexuality has contributed to new forms of sociocultural tension at the heart of our contemporary politics.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

This chapter explores the high hopes for Irish commerce that were aroused by the American Revolution, and their complex interactions with British attempts to reform and consolidate the remnants of its mercantile empire following its American debacle. Irish campaigns for ‘free trade’ and ‘legislative independence’ were animated by the hope that the liberation of the Kingdom’s foreign trade would enable it to chart its own course in a more peaceful Europe. This vision clashed fundamentally with a rival, British reform agenda, embodied in William Pitt the Younger’s unsuccessful Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785, which balanced an extension of imperial trading privileges to Ireland with its closer integration into the British market. The rejection of Pitt’s proposals by the Irish parliament, after their heavy modification by British slaving and manufacturing interests, produced an unstable equilibrium, dominated by patronage and executive power, that was ripe for criticism by the more radical forces that would take up the fallen mantle of Irish ‘patriotism’ in the 1790s.

This chapter identifies the emergence of an Enlightenment critique of empire in Ireland. This laid the intellectual foundations for the Union of 1801 by connecting the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation. For thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and David Hume, the suppression of Irish commerce was striking evidence of how British policy carried ‘jealousy of trade’ to extremes that jeopardised the security of the empire. For Charles O’Connor, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, and Adam Smith, meanwhile, the Penal Laws had ruined Ireland’s prospects for ‘improvement’ by alienating the Irish majority from property and the state. It was Smith who linked these two problematics together, creating a new kind of argument for a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.

Arguments for the 1801 Union of the British and Irish parliaments drew on the intellectual resources of the later British Enlightenment to implement a new system of economic and political regulation of Irish society. Proponents of Union articulated a renewed belief in the ability of commercial integration with Britain to act as a solvent to the confessional and ethnic tensions laid bare by the United Irish rising and attempted French invasions of 1796-8. The 'diffusion' of British capital to Ireland would give Ireland’s shattered Anglican aristocracy the opportunity to re-establish its political legitimacy, while forcing them to share power with a rising Catholic mercantile and professional class. The case for Union was interpreted in a broad European context of state competition and reform. The leading continental defender of British policy, the Prussian diplomat and publicist Friedrich von Gentz, hailed the legislative unification of the British Empire as a model for a necessary consolidation of the European states-system in the wake of French revolutionary violence.

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Chapter 2 introduces selections from Aristotle, Polybius, William Blackstone, and Edmund Burke, and lays out the basic tenets of classical republicanism. By focusing on the “res-publica”, the common good, republicanism embraces a corporatist and organic vision of both the people and the state. The political community is envisioned as a human body, suggesting that the body politic grows naturally; each organ or member contributes a different task and the health of the whole depends on the well-being of each member. Moreover, republican theorists suggest the need to adapt political institutions to the character and changing circumstances of the people. Selections from Aristotle focus on the organic origin of the political community and on the mixed regime. Polybius introduces the idea of checks-and-balances and the importance of religious beliefs for the stability of the political order. Blackstone and Burke tried to accommodate some of the new liberal ideas in their theoretical framework, attempting to reconcile theoretically opposed visions—an approach that would prove particularly popular during the American founding.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass changed his opinion on the proslavery character of the U.S. Constitution. Most scholarship seeks to locate the core of Douglass’s politics in the critical patriotism of his post-change of opinion oratorical and literary output. However, if we keep the occasion for Douglass’s change of opinion firmly in view, that is, his critical engagement with the question of the pro- or antislavery character of the Constitution, there is a possibility not only of appreciating an experience of crucial significance to the development of his politics, but also of relocating the core of his politics in an ongoing ambivalence about the “moral power” of the United States. This chapter situates Douglass as a political thinker participating in a transatlantic paradigm shift in the rhetoric of sociopolitical change, a shift that gave rise to a new modern dilemma as to which form of change, reform or revolution, best suited one’s problem-solving needs.