The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature by Zoe Beenstock

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature by Zoe Beenstock Kir Kuiken (bio) Zoe Beenstock. The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. 256. $105 cloth/$29.95 paper. The title of Zoe Beenstock’s recent book—The Politics of Romanticism— cannot be faulted for its lack of ambition. After a wave of criticism that sought to position Romantic authors in terms of their flight from history and politics, recent studies have endeavored in various ways to reconstruct the precise nature of the political ideas and engagements of Romantic authors. Beenstock’s book clearly places itself within this development, focusing on how Rousseau’s idea of the social contract continued to fuel Romantic critiques and conceptions of community. The Politics of Romanticism addresses an important lacuna in the field; while Rousseau’s general influence on Romanticism is well established, the influence of his social contract theory remains underexamined. One issue with Beenstock’s approach, however, is hinted at already in the generality of her title, which simply cannot be sustained over the course of her study, constantly threatening to outrun the focus on Rousseau that she attempts to maintain throughout. Her study is at its best when it painstakingly traces the ways in which Rousseau’s social contract theory is disseminated, refracted and rethought in specific Romantic texts. It is less effective when it sets about to survey in broad terms Rousseau’s legacy, and to exhaustively catalogue all the possible ways in which Rousseau lives on in the Romantic period. A good example of the latter tendency is evident in Beenstock’s first chapter, where she juxtaposes Rousseau with a variety of other thinkers of the social, including Hobbes, various Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, and German Idealists. As this would be a tall order in a larger study, much less in a single chapter, Beenstock is thus forced to start from a highly general basis of comparison, arguing that “the common ground among these otherwise varied ideologies is the new understanding of society that begins with individuals in a state of nature, who form agreements to serve their private interests” (17). In short, the question that unites them, in Beenstock’s account, is how cohesion between individuals is achieved, how sociability is established, in the midst of the emergence of conflicting and potentially agonistic demands within the polis itself. For Beenstock, each tradition reconciles what Rousseau calls the individual with the general will, providing various accounts of how this is possible, and of the difficulties and dangers involved. While her first chapter yields some important insights (such as the claim that Rousseau inherits Hobbes’s focus on the fragmentation of the social, which is held together by a surreptitious violence) its focus is simply too diffuse to provide an effective introduction to what follows. On a single page, for example, we move from a discussion of [End Page 143] the Enlightenment philosophies of Ferguson, on to Mandeville, and then to Hume, in the space of three paragraphs (25). The result reads more like a broad survey of a set of tendencies than a focused argument about how aspects of these writings remain germane to our understanding of the politics of Romanticism. The book acquires a sharper focus in the second chapter, which is devoted to what Beenstock calls Rousseau’s “literary politics.” The chapter’s task is twofold. First, it shows how “an alienated persona migrates from Rousseau’s political theory, through his literary texts, and into Romanticism” (45). Second, it shows how literature, in Rousseau, “replaces the society which has produced such a passionate need for fragmentation and aesthetic withdrawal, forming a new contract among its members” (51). The first aspect of this twofold task sets up what will become the main focus of the chapters that follow—namely, how Rousseau’s Romantic literary and philosophical descendants adhere to or disavow Rousseau’s conception of the social contract. The second aspect constitutes one of the book’s most promising and interesting claims: that literature itself becomes the site for rethinking this problematic, for developing a new form of “contract” that supercedes or replaces the social one. Beenstock’s...