The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits ofthe past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language...In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit ofthe new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use ofthe