Abstract
If Hazlitt’s philosophical writings, ultimately, find their origin in his deep-seated antipathy to the ethics of self-love, his political writings are defined by a sustained and impassioned opposition to the theory of the divine right of kings (itself the ultimate political manifestation of self-love). Against the divine-rights theory of kingship Hazlitt pitted the principle of popular sovereignty: the view, as Benjamin Franklin declared, that ‘In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors amp; sovereigns.’1 It was the one political idea on which Hazlitt staked everything; it dominated all of his writings on politics from Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806) to The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1830). In the latter, Hazlitt offered perhaps the most candid assessment of his political thought:
I have nowhere in anything I may have written declared myself to be a Republican; nor should I think it worth while to be a martyr and a confessor to any form or mode of government. But what I have staked health and wealth, name and fame upon, and am ready to do so again and to the last gasp, is this, that there is a power in the people to change its government and its governors. That is, I am a Revolutionist […] 2
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Notes
Ralph Ketcham, ed., The Political Thought ofBenjamin Franklin ( Indianapolis, IN, 1965 ), 398.
Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (London, 1776), 6.
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Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 356, 386; Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, 3–5, 138–9.
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Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789– 1832 ( Cambridge, MA, 1988 ), 142–57.
Timothy Whelan, ‘William Hazlitt and Radical West Country Dissent’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 38 (2011), 111–27.
Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996), 227.
James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994).
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Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born under Saturn: A Biography of William Hazlitt (New York, 1943), 211–12.
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Tom Paulin, Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics ofDissent (London, 2005), 164–78 (168,178).
William Hazlitt, The Eloquence of the British Senate; or, Select Specimens from the Speeches of the Most Distinguished Parliamentary Speakers, from the begin-ning of the Reign of Charles I to the present time. With Notes Biographical, Critical, and Explanatory, 2 vols (London, 1807), I, 14, 19, 3 1.
Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History ofPolitical Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 221–406 (308–9).
Connell, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’, 200–5. See also Peter Spence, The Birth of Romantic Radicalism: War, Popular Politics and English Radical Reformism, 1800–1815 (Aldershot, 1996), 14–33.
See Timothy Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt (Basingstoke, 1999), 83–4.
Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Romanticism (Cambridge, 2005), 139–62 (139).
Anthony Michael C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics, and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge, 1991), 26. Malthus’s commitment to Whig values was strengthened by his early exposure to liberal Dissenting circles in Warrington, Cambridge, and London.
James P. Huzel, The Popularization ofMalthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Martineau, Cobbett, and the Pauper Press (Aldershot, 2006 ), 15–16.
see Virgil R. Stallbaumer, ‘Hazlitt’s Life of Thomas Holcroft’, American Benedictine Review, 5 (1954), 27–44.
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© 2014 Stephen Burley
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Burley, S. (2014). Retrospective Radicalism: Pitt, Patriotism, and Population. In: Hazlitt the Dissenter. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364432_5
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