Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination

Abstract

At Margaret hatcher's funeral, in 2013, attendees received a program with William Wordsworth's Immortality Ode printed on the back. This was unsurprising. he ode has always been popular with igures who champion liberal capitalist democracy as the most efective form of governance, one that delivers reform through incremental change and pragmatic policies rather than revolutionary idealism. Framed by the current unrest in Western civic life, this essay paints a darker picture of this reigning political order. Considering readings of the ode by John Stuart Mill, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, I suggest that the poem allowed liberal intellectuals to romanticize reformist politics. For these readers, Wordsworth reveals a core of sublime possibility within systems built on routinized order. However, idealizing a gradualist approach to reform allows progress to be pushed into the future indeinitely. Tracing the commitment to practical sublimity may reveal an emergent theory of liberal technocracy, in which citizens are compelled to operate under a vast, incomprehensible array of protocols that never quite deliver meaningful social change.