Reforming Ideas in Britain Between 1789 and 1815 Britain faced a surge of challenges brought about by the French Revolution. Growing tensions with France, then the outbreak of war, exacerbated domestic political controversy, giving rise to new forms of political protest, to which the government responded with ever-increasing severity. Reforming Ideas in Britain brings together a series of essays to provide a vibrant historiography of Britain s political thought and movements during the 1790s and beyond. Challenging traditional perceptions of the period, prompts us to reconsider the weight of various ideas, interpretations and explanations of British politics and language, showing us instead that this dynamic world of popular politics was at once more chaotic, innovative and open-minded than historians have typically perceived it to be. This is an essential interdisciplinary text for scholars of history, political theory and romanticism that offers a fresh perspective on radicalism, loyalism and republicanism in Britain during the French Revolution. mark philp is Professor of History and Politics in the Department of History, University of Warwick.
Reforming Ideas in Britain Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789 1815
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. Information on this title: /9781107027282 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 9781-1-070-2728-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLsforexternalorthird-partyinternetwebsites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
G. A. C. 1941 2009 Pauca tecum velim
Contents List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements page viii ix x Introduction 1 1 The fragmented ideology of reform 11 2 Vulgar conservatism 1792/3 40 3 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s 71 4 English republicanism in the 1790s 102 5 Failing the republic: political virtue and vice in the late eighteenth century 133 6 Paine s experiments 158 7 Revolutionaries in Paris: Paine and Jefferson 187 8 Godwin, Thelwall and the means of progress 210 9 Politics and memory: Nelson and Trafalgar in popular song 232 10 The elusive principle: collective self-determination in the late eighteenth century 260 11 Time to talk 287 Index 313 vii
Figures Figure 6.1 Exercises in globes: the use of candle and globes to demonstrate the motions of the planets page 167 Figure 6.2 Tree and fountain 175 viii
Tables Table 3.1 Types of explanation page 77 Table 3.2 Classification of accounts by type of explanation 78 ix
Acknowledgements My thanks are registered in many of these essays to those who were helpful at the time of writing, and I wish to reiterate those thanks while also singling out several people with whom I have worked and argued over the time it took to write these essays. Richard Fisher at Cambridge University Press was involved in the first of these essays and has been a stalwart supporter subsequently, enabling this collection to appear. My 1790s colleagues especially John Barrell, Martin Fitzpatrick, Kevin Gilmartin, Harriet Guest, Iain McCalman, Jon Mee, David O Shaughnessy and Gillian Russell have been a long-standing and endlessly stimulating group to work with, and have introduced me to new generations of scholars from whose work I have also learnt much. I also learnt a great deal from the reading group set up initially by Bonnie Honig from Northwestern and involving my politics colleagues, Lois McNay, Liz Frazer, Michael Freeden, and Mark Stears. My family, especially my children, Joe, Ruth and Hannah, who used to distract me from work, have graduated into some of my sharpest critics, for which I am doubly grateful. I especially want to thank Jo Innes, who has been an Oxford half-colleague (given our different disciplinary locations) but who has consistently prodded me to think more carefully about a range of topics over the last twenty years, and has been unfailingly up for talking through new ideas and projects. Some of the fruits of our joint project Re-imagining democracy 1750 1850 are evident in the later essays in this volume. I have also benefited from support from the Department of Politics and International Relations in the final months of the completion of this book, and would like to thank Dustin Kramer and Robert Cane for help preparing some of the text. Thanks are also due to Cambridge University Press s Mike Richardson for his scrupulous attention to the text and Gaia Poggiogalli for her tolerance. Several of these essays were first published elsewhere. They remain essentially unchanged, save for the correction of mistakes and adjustments to create a uniform style in the footnotes. Chapters 5, 10 and 11 have not previously been published. My thanks are due to the publishers x
Acknowledgements xi and the editors for allowing me to reprint them. The details of how the essays appeared previously are as follows. Chapter 1: The fragmented ideology of reform, in, ed., The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50 77. Chapter 2: Vulgar conservatism, 1792 3, English Historical Review 110 (1995), 42 69 ( Oxford University Press). Chapter 3: Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s, in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism, 1550 1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157 89. Chapter 4: English republicanism in the 1790s, Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998), 235 62 ( Wiley-Blackwell). Chapter 6: Paine and science, Enlightenment and Dissent 17 (1998), 210 49 ( University of British Columbia). Chapter 7: Revolutionaries in Paris: Paine, Jefferson and democracy, in Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). Chapter 8: Godwin, Thelwall, and the means of progress, in Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers, eds., Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism (University of Toronto Press, 2011), 59 82. Chapter 9: Politics and memory: Nelson and Trafalgar in popular song, in David Cannadine, ed., Trafalgar in History: A Battle and Its Afterlife (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 93 120.