Conclusion: ‘A sublime humanity’

Abstract

The aim of this book has been to explore some of the ways in which Hazlitt’s work seeks to recover the lost cultural, intellectual, and political legacies that were central to his identity as a Dissenter. The antiquarian scholar who introduces The Eloquence of the British Senate is thus a peculiarly apposite figure for the historicising practices that dominate Hazlitt’s work. In mining the rich veins of cultural history that informed his own upbringing, Hazlitt looked to employ the legacies of Dissent to reinvigorate the corrupted spirit of his age, to polemicise against the intellectual and political ‘euthanasia’ that he saw advancing at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his hands the past became a weapon with which to combat the legitimising forces of the present, not, as it was for Edmund Burke, a means of consolidating the authority of historical precedent. But, just as the spirit of the past pervades Hazlitt’s critical imagination, so too does a strong sense of the liberating power of the future. In projecting one’s self forward into the future, in embracing the imaginative fecundity of future possibility, in identifying sympathetically with one’s future self, or other future selves, Hazlitt believed that humankind is emancipated from the tyranny of the senses that dominate present consciousness. As a result, the present moment, the now, is always inherently dissatisfying: the present is, he suggests, a corrupted, degenerate temporal wasteland defined by the claims of self-interest, as opposed to disinterested benevolence. As such it can never live up to the glory of the past, nor realise the latent potential of the future.