Citation:
Date Published:
6 January 2022Abstract:
Recent scholarship on the systemic militarism of post-Enlightenment Europe has complicated the traditional picture of Romanticism as the Age of Revolution, but relatively little attention has been paid the way in which the Romantics themselves understood the relationship between war and radical political upheaval. Focusing on Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, the first section of this essay asks why the very word “revolution” is curiously difficult to control, as if using the term were always a matter of pitting competing paradigms of change against one another. The second section considers Percy Shelley’s attempt, in A Philosophical View of Reform, to show that military programs were more consequential for the conflicts of his day than revolutionary ones. The final section describes the legacy of Romantic reflections on war and revolution in 19th- and 20th-century political thought.
October 2021: Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Reed College. He is the author of Crises of the Sentence (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Watching War (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Labors of Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2006). His recent articles explore a range of topics in Romanticism, Modernism, and critical theory. He has also published and lectured widely on the spectacles of the military-industrial complex. Mieszkowski is currently at work on a book about post-colonial botany.