The Political Possibilities in the Long Romantic Period

Abstract

1 THE ASSERTION OF A LONG PERIOD OF ANY MOVEMENT OR TRADITION IS an act of interpretative resistance. What does it resist? Dichotomies, of course, such as, say, Romantic and Classical, and the tidy periodizations they generate. This much is obvious. But beyond the obvious, when it comes to Romanticism, the assertion of a longer than standardly periodized span is not merely an act of resistance of this familiar kind--it is, in one sense, an attempt to describe a form of resistance. If Harold Bloom had his way, the long Romantic period would begin with the Gnostics and it would be found in nothing less than an implicit and loosely defined Gnosticism that is recurrently glimpsed--in both canon and periphery--through the literary ages of the West, down to Melville at least. (1) It is never far from the surface of this sweep of Bloom's visionary readings that they are intended to describe the trajectory of a resistance. How could they fail to do that? That is, how could the syncretic practices and the strange and fascinating metaphysical doctrines that were so pervasive till they were stamped out by an increasingly orthodox Christianity recur so often in the visions of writers and thinkers for twenty hundred years, and fail to be viewed as an abiding, if ineffectual, form of resistance? I don't want to particularly dwell on the Gnostic tradition, nor on Bloom. I begin with him only to mention how a long period can be conceived and also to express a frustration that nothing in this great length, which he presents with such originality and panoramic ambition, is then integrated by him into the metaphysical and political themes that it suggests. So if, for instance, one were to ask for a diagnosis of its sustained and repeated defeat at the hands of orthodoxy and even if one were to make a (too) simple initial stab at answering with the thought that those who are better organized, as orthodoxy always is, are always bound to win and that some outlooks and doctrines--exemplified in this version of the long Romantic tradition--are by the very nature of their metaphysical and political commitments bound to fall short on the relevant forms of organization, we are already on the path to the kind of integration of themes I just mentioned. But whether by will or by temperament, Bloom has withheld himself from integrations of this kind, and we must look elsewhere for the political possibilities of Romanticism than in its most influential theorist. By contrast, Isaiah Berlin very self-consciously brought a deliberate mix of Romantic metaphysical and political ideas to the attention of English speaking philosophers (2); yet (by a second contrast with Bloom), he has no conception of a periodization that is longer than a starting point roughly in Rousseau and going then to the German Romantic tradition from its Jena origins to the flowering of German Idealism. The reason for this focus is quite simply that the fascination he has for these thinkers is in equal parts accompanied by the anxieties they create in him and his liberal political commitments. This explains not only the lack of interest in a longer period, it explains too his studied indifference to the English counterpart in Romanticism which, we must suppose, did not prompt in him the same anxieties. So, for instance, we must suppose that Shelley's political radicalism no doubt seemed to him to be something that could be domesticated within his own cherished liberal ideals, which were capacious enough to accommodate Shelley's atheism, his egalitarianism, his feminism, his commitment to the early stirrings of what would later come to be called Irish Home rule.... In Berlin's mind this was a politics that was innocent of the underlying metaphysical ideas of History and of Consciousness or of the Dionysian instinct erected into a source of ideals of nationalist unity; it was innocent, that is, of the claims of what he called positive liberty that led to vanguardist slogans such as forcing people to be free. …