his hat. Who: What: When: Where: Why: the Devil? Options:

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1 At length the hour of shutting up the counting house arrived. With an ill will Scrooge dismountedd from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerkk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat. "You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?'' said Scrooge. Who: What: When: Where: Why: Alberta Bair Theater Department of Education and Community Outreach Society of the Industrial Revolution: Why Was Ebenezerr Scrooge a Bah Humbug?? Thursday, December 19, from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. 5:30 7:00 p.m. at the Moss Mansion and 7:30 9:30 at the Alberta Bair Theater This seminar will plumb the depths of the British Industrial Revolution at the time of Charles Dickens and his contemporaries: Which specific cultural and socioeconomic factors changed the Social Contract of Thomas Hobbes ( ) into an early 19 th Century Deal with the Devil? Why was the so called Romantic Era a study in stark contrasts faith vs. the supernatural, good vs. evil and tyranny vs. freedom? Options: $40.00 for all participants wishing too earn six (6) OPI credits, OR.33 MSU B party/seminar at Graduate Credit, including the 5:30 Dickens pre performancee Moss Mansion AND the 7:30 performance of A Christmas Carol, OR $10.00 for non credit participants (Dickens party/seminar only)

2 Contact: Dr. William Mouat, Director of Education and Community Outreach Alberta Bair Theater for the Performing Arts P.O. Box 1556 Billings, Montana Phone: E Mail: wmouat@albertabairtheater.org I. SEMINAR LECTURE OUTLINE by Dr. William Mouat "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way." (A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens) A. Economics, Science, Mathematics and Social Studies: Who could have summed it up better than Charles Dickens in this quote? In the first segment of this seminar, we will discuss the varying and conflicting tenets of Romanticism and the Age of Industry, while addressing the following questions: Why did the French Revolutionary Government presume that the age of enlightenment should start with the year zero? What socioeconomic ramifications would the Republican Calendar have had on the rest of Europe had the revolution spread to England between the years of 1792 and 1805? Announce to your class that they must operate within the confines of the Republican Calendar, and have them convert it to the year 2013, OR Have them design their own Revolutionary Calendar (with specific confines of months, days and years that THEY (the students) invent. How would this be converted from the present Gregorian Calendar? Another type of application for this unit or project would be for an economics class to design an Original Economic System (using a current day model, ie. the EEC or a system of the past) and to project possible Geopolitical consequences of such an action. Have your students name at least one cultural group that operates on its own calendar and has for centuries. (Hints: Start with Eastern Orthodox Christianity or Judaism and have the class or study groups extend these topics into sociology projects.) B. English Literature, History and Composition: Have your students re imagine the character of Scrooge to be living in the 21 st Century. How many elements of the storyline would apply and which elements would have to be altered? Use the following examples or devise other examples: In the original time frame of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge s father is sentenced to a debtor s prison where he presumably perished. How would Scrooge s father

3 be recreated in the modern era. (One possible solution might be to re define the father figure as a former Enron employee, perhaps? Perhaps a Gulf War or Afghanistan casualty? Could it be a different family member, ie. an older brother or mother? How would these alterations affect Scrooge s life long obsession or obsessions?) Ask the students to explore the modern day equivalents of Urban workhouses and/or orphanages. (Dickens was so obsessed by this Industrial Revolution aberration that it frequently appears as a major theme, most notably in Oliver Twist.) Have the students devise their own Scrooge Story using a modern day friend, relative, real life character or modern fiction example as the main character. Does the protagonist continue on a collision course with himself, and cause his own sad ending, or does the story end happily? What lessons can be learned from the new story s outcome, whether tragic or happy? If the character himself does not learn from experience, what does the reader learn? C. Music History, Art History and History of Literature: Why did Romantic idealism ultimately fail? Or did it survive? Have the students provide an example of one or more Romantic ideals that ran across the grain of the stark and frequently horrible socioeconomic realities of the industrial revolution. An exercise for students: How do the redemptive characters in the music, literature and popular historical fictions of the Romantic era actually survive the confines of their tragic circumstances? If they do NOT survive, what tragic flaw creates or causes their demise? Use one or more of the following characters or use a different example within the same period: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Victor Hugo Charlotte Bronte Alexandre Dumas Jane Austen Faust Jean Valjean Jane Eyre Lady of the Camillias (Marguerite Gautier) Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy Have the students choose a literary, musical or other artistic genius from the Romantic Era and explain how this Era was closely mirrored in the actual life of the artist. Examples may include these and other Giants of Romanticism: Georges Bizet (Music) Giuseppe Verdi (Music) Johannes Brahms (Music) Eugene Delacroix (Painter) William Waterhouse (Painter) Francisco de Goya (Painter) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Literature) Lord Byron (Literature) Ralph Waldo Emerson (Literature) Edgar Allen Poe (Literature)

4 II. ONLINE RESEARCH PACKET FOR TEACHERS: The Republican Calendar 1792: It s 1 Vendémiaire of An I in the French Revolutionary Calendar, the first day of fall and the first day of the first month of the first year of the First Republic of France. It s the day the National Convention proclaimed France a republic, but no one would know about the new system of marking time for another year, when the calendar was imposed retroactively. When people who study the French Revolution read about the Uprising of Vendémiaire or the Insurrection of 12 Germinal An III, most simply scratch their heads and wonder, Vendémiaire? Germinal? An III? What s that all about? Few ever bother to learn what these dates mean. In fact, they are part of the French Republican Calendar, aka Revolutionary Calendar, which replaced the Gregorian Calendar in France from 1793 to The idea of a new calendar was suggested as early as 1785, before the revolution. France s anti clerical Enlightenment rationalists saw the Gregorian Calendar, filled with saint s days, as a dying vestige of the Ancien Régime. Conversion to the new metric system of weights and measures was already under way when the measurement of time was taken up by the National Convention in The French were already speaking of the first year of liberty or the first year of the republic. Gilbert Romme, president of the Committee on Public Instruction, was in charge of drafting the calendar. Aiding him were mathematicians Gaspard Monge and Joseph Louis Lagrange and the poet Fabre d Églantine. The new calendar became law on Oct. 5, The date on the Republican Calendar was 14 Vendémiaire An II (Year 2). It went into effect and became compulsory on Nov. 24 (4 Frimaire An II). The calendar was regarded as beginning more than a year earlier on Sept. 22, That was not only the birth date of the republic, but rather conveniently, it turned out the autumnal equinox in The calendar struck a direct blow against the Catholic Church and its clergy, who had been the powerful First Estate prior to the revolution. It swept away all the festivals and observances, including Sunday and its weekly prayer and rest. The year was divided into 12 egalitarian months of 30 days each. The months were divided into three décades of 10 days each. The 10th day was a day of rest, thus leaving non agricultural workers with only three days off each month instead of four. Some folks resented that. Five extra days at the end of each year were set aside for the Festivals of Virtue, Genius, Labor, Opinion and Rewards. These days stood outside any month. Together with the last day of the previous month, they made for six consecutive holidays. That s nice. Leap year occurred on the third year of every Franciade, as the four year cycle was called. This created a sixth year end holiday, the Day of the Revolution (making for seven days off). The Revolutionary leap day thus occurred in the autumn before the Feb. 29 leap day of the Gregorian Calendar.

5 Everything was different. Gone was the week and gone were Sunday to Saturday. D Églantine numbered the 10 days of the décade: Primedi, Duodi, etc., up to Décadi. D Églantine s names for the months poetically reflected the seasons: Autumn Winter Spring Vendémiaire, month of the vintage (starting approximately Sept. 22) Brumaire, month of fog (Oct. 22) Frimaire, month of frost (Nov. 21) Nivôse, the snowy (Dec. 21) Pluviôse, the rainy (Jan. 20) Ventôse, the windy (Feb. 19) Germinal, the month of buds (March 21) Floréal, the month of flowers (April 20) Prairial, the month of meadows (May 20) Summer Messidor, the month of reaping (June 19) Thermidor, the month of heat (July 19) Fructidor, the month of fruit (Aug. 18) Revolutionaries even attempted a metric day of 10 hours of 100 minutes each of 100 seconds each. With 100,000 seconds per day, this metric second was about 14 percent shorter than the one we know, of which 86,400 make a complete day. Metric timekeeping was even less popular than the Calendrier Révolutionnaire. Clocks and watches are considerably more expensive than paper calendars and ledger books. But all new legal documents were given dates in the new calendar. History was recorded by it. Businesses remained open nine days and closed on the 10th. The only public holidays were the year end festivals. The Republican Calendar was a major bother to French merchants trading with other countries and to foreign merchants and diplomats inside France. Converting dates from one system to the other was not easy. The approximate Gregorian dates for the beginnings of Revolutionary months varied from year to year because of Revolutionary leap days in 1795, 1799 and 1803, and Gregorian leap years in 1796 and 1804 (but not 1800, which was a century year). The only solution was to use a cumbersome conversion chart, listing each day of each year next to its counterpart in the other calendar.

6 Emperor Napoleon, who d already abolished the republic itself, abolished the Republican Calendar in September The Gregorian Calendar resumed in France and the rest of Napoleon s empire on Jan. 1, 1806, which would otherwise have been 11 Nivôse An XIV. (Randy Alfred) Thomas Hobbes: Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). The description contains what has been called one of the best known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state mankind would be in, were it not for political community: [14] In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. "Chapter XIII.: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.", Leviathan In such a state, people fear death, and lack both the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to toil to obtain them. So in order to avoid it people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population beneath a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede some rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority are to be accepted as the price of peace. There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes's discussion. [15] According to Hobbes, the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial, and ecclesiastical powers. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau Thomas Hobbes, , lived during the most crucial period of early modern England s history: the English Civil War, waged from To describe this conflict in the most general of terms, it was a clash between the King and his supporters, the Monarchists, who preferred the traditional authority of a monarch, and the Parliamentarians, most notably led by Oliver Cromwell, who demanded more power for the quasi democratic institution of Parliament. Hobbes represents a compromise between these two factions. On the one hand he rejects the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, which is most eloquently expressed by Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings, (although it would be left to John Locke to refute Filmer directly). Filmer s view held that a king s authority was invested in him (or, presumably, her) by God, that such authority was absolute, and therefore that the basis of political obligation lay in our obligation to obey God absolutely. According to this view, then, political obligation is subsumed under religious obligation. On the other hand, Hobbes also rejects the early democratic view, taken up by the Parliamentarians, that power ought to be shared between Parliament and the King. In rejecting both these views, Hobbes occupies the ground of one is who both radical and conservative. He argues, radically for his times, that political authority and obligation are based on the individual self interests of members of society who are understood to be equal to one another, with no

7 single individual invested with any essential authority to rule over the rest, while at the same time maintaining the conservative position that the monarch, which he called the Sovereign, must be ceded absolute authority if society is to survive. Hobbes political theory is best understood if taken in two parts: his theory of human motivation, Psychological Egoism, and his theory of the social contract, founded on the hypothetical State of Nature. Hobbes has, first and foremost, a particular theory of human nature, which gives rise to a particular view of morality and politics, as developed in his philosophical masterpiece, Leviathan, published in The Scientific Revolution, with its important new discoveries that the universe could be both described and predicted in accordance with universal laws of nature, greatly influenced Hobbes. He sought to provide a theory of human nature that would parallel the discoveries being made in the sciences of the inanimate universe. His psychological theory is therefore informed by mechanism, the general view that everything in the universe is produced by nothing other than matter in motion. According to Hobbes, this extends to human behavior. Human macro behavior can be aptly described as the effect of certain kinds of micro behavior, even though some of this latter behavior is invisible to us. So, such behaviors as walking, talking, and the like are themselves produced by other actions inside of us. And these other actions are themselves caused by the interaction of our bodies with other bodies, human or otherwise, which create in us certain chains of causes and effects, and which eventually give rise to the human behavior that we can plainly observe. We, including all of our actions and choices, are then, according to this view, as explainable in terms of universal laws of nature as are the motions of heavenly bodies. The gradual disintegration of memory, for example, can be explained by inertia. As we are presented with ever more sensory information, the residue of earlier impressions slows down over time. From Hobbes point of view, we are essentially very complicated organic machines, responding to the stimuli of the world mechanistically and in accordance with universal laws of human nature. In Hobbes view, this mechanistic quality of human psychology implies the subjective nature of normative claims. Love and hate, for instance, are just words we use to describe the things we are drawn to and repelled by, respectively. So, too, the terms good and bad have no meaning other than to describe our appetites and aversions. Moral terms do not, therefore, describe some objective state of affairs, but are rather reflections of individual tastes and preferences. In addition to Subjectivism, Hobbes also infers from his mechanistic theory of human nature that humans are necessarily and exclusively self interested. All men pursue only what they perceive to be in their own individually considered best interests they respond mechanistically by being drawn to that which they desire and repelled by that to which they are averse. This is a universal claim: it is meant to cover all human actions under all circumstances in society or out of it, with regard to strangers and friends alike, with regard to small ends and the most generalized of human desires, such as the desire for power and status. Everything we do is motivated solely by the desire to better our own situations, and satisfy as many of our own, individually considered desires as possible. We are infinitely appetitive and only genuinely concerned with our own selves. According to Hobbes, even the reason that adults care for small children can be explicated in terms of the adults own self interest (he claims that in saving an infant by caring for it, we become the recipient of a strong sense of obligation in one who has been helped to survive rather than allowed to die). In addition to being exclusively self interested, Hobbes also argues that human beings are reasonable. They have in them the rational capacity to pursue their desires as efficiently and maximally as possible. Their reason does not, given the subjective nature of value, evaluate their given ends, rather it merely acts as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired (139). Rationality is

8 purely instrumental. It can add and subtract, and compare sums one to another, and thereby endows us with the capacity to formulate the best means to whatever ends we might happen to have. From these premises of human nature, Hobbes goes on to construct a provocative and compelling argument for why we ought to be willing to submit ourselves to political authority. He does this by imagining persons in a situation prior to the establishment of society, the State of Nature. According to Hobbes, the justification for political obligation is this: given that men are naturally selfinterested, yet they are rational, they will choose to submit to the authority of a Sovereign in order to be able to live in a civil society, which is conducive to their own interests. Hobbes argues for this by imagining men in their natural state, or in other words, the State of Nature. In the State of Nature, which is purely hypothetical according to Hobbes, men are naturally and exclusively self interested, they are more or less equal to one another, (even the strongest man can be killed in his sleep), there are limited resources, and yet there is no power able to force men to cooperate. Given these conditions in the State of Nature, Hobbes concludes that the State of Nature would be unbearably brutal. In the State of Nature, every person is always in fear of losing his life to another. They have no capacity to ensure the long term satisfaction of their needs or desires. No long term or complex cooperation is possible because the State of Nature can be aptly described as a state of utter distrust. Given Hobbes reasonable assumption that most people want first and foremost to avoid their own deaths, he concludes that the State of Nature is the worst possible situation in which men can find themselves. It is the state of perpetual and unavoidable war. The situation is not, however, hopeless. Because men are reasonable, they can see their way out of such a state by recognizing the laws of nature, which show them the means by which to escape the State of Nature and create a civil society. The first and most important law of nature commands that each man be willing to pursue peace when others are willing to do the same, all the while retaining the right to continue to pursue war when others do not pursue peace. Being reasonable, and recognizing the rationality of this basic precept of reason, men can be expected to construct a Social Contract that will afford them a life other than that available to them in the State of Nature. This contract is constituted by two distinguishable contracts. First, they must agree to establish society by collectively and reciprocally renouncing the rights they had against one another in the State of Nature. Second, they must imbue some one person or assembly of persons with the authority and power to enforce the initial contract. In other words, to ensure their escape from the State of Nature, they must both agree to live together under common laws, and create an enforcement mechanism for the social contract and the laws that constitute it. Since the sovereign is invested with the authority and power to mete out punishments for breaches of the contract which are worse than not being able to act as one pleases, men have good, albeit self interested, reason to adjust themselves to the artifice of morality in general, and justice in particular. Society becomes possible because, whereas in the State of Nature there was no power able to overawe them all, now there is an artificially and conventionally superior and more powerful person who can force men to cooperate. While living under the authority of a Sovereign can be harsh (Hobbes argues that because men s passions can be expected to overwhelm their reason, the Sovereign must have absolute authority in order for the contract to be successful) it is at least better than living in the State of Nature. And, no matter how much we may object to how poorly a Sovereign manages the affairs of the state and regulates our own lives, we are never justified in resisting his power because it is the only thing which stands between us and what we most want to avoid, the State of Nature. According to this argument, morality, politics, society, and everything that comes along with it, all of which Hobbes calls commodious living are purely conventional. Prior to the establishment of the basic

9 social contract, according to which men agree to live together and the contract to embody a Sovereign with absolute authority, nothing is immoral or unjust anything goes. After these contracts are established, however, then society becomes possible, and people can be expected to keep their promises, cooperate with one another, and so on. The Social Contract is the most fundamental source of all that is good and that which we depend upon to live well. Our choice is either to abide by the terms of the contract, or return to the State of Nature, which Hobbes argues no reasonable person could possibly prefer. Given his rather severe view of human nature, Hobbes nonetheless manages to create an argument that makes civil society, along with all its advantages, possible. Within the context of the political events of his England, he also managed to argue for a continuation of the traditional form of authority that his society had long since enjoyed, while nonetheless placing it on what he saw as a far more acceptable foundation. John Locke For Hobbes, the necessity of an absolute authority, in the form of a Sovereign, followed from the utter brutality of the State of Nature. The State of Nature was completely intolerable, and so rational men would be willing to submit themselves even to absolute authority in order to escape it. For John Locke, , the State of Nature is a very different type of place, and so his argument concerning the social contract and the nature of men s relationship to authority are consequently quite different. While Locke uses Hobbes methodological device of the State of Nature, as do virtually all social contract theorists, he uses it to a quite different end. Locke s arguments for the social contract, and for the right of citizens to revolt against their king were enormously influential on the democratic revolutions that followed, especially on Thomas Jefferson, and the founders of the United States. Locke s most important and influential political writings are contained in his Two Treatises on Government. The first treatise is concerned almost exclusively with refuting the argument of Robert Filmer s Patriarcha, that political authority was derived from religious authority, also known by the description of the Divine Right of Kings, which was a very dominant theory in seventeenth century England. The second treatise contains Locke s own constructive view of the aims and justification for civil government, and is titled An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government. According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one s life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others. This does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: one is not free to do anything at all one pleases, or even anything that one judges to be in one s interest. The State of Nature, although a state wherein there is no civil authority or government to punish people for transgressions against laws, is not a state without morality. The State of Nature is pre political, but it is not pre moral. Persons are assumed to be equal to one another in such a state, and therefore equally capable of discovering and being bound by the Law of Nature. The Law of Nature, which is on Locke s view the basis of all morality, and given to us by God, commands that we not harm others with regards to their life, health, liberty, or possessions (par. 6). Because we all belong equally to God, and because we cannot take away that which is rightfully His, we are prohibited from harming one another. So, the State of Nature is a state of liberty where persons are free to pursue their own interests and plans, free from interference, and, because of the Law of Nature and the restrictions that it imposes upon persons, it is relatively peaceful.

10 The State of Nature therefore, is not the same as the state of war, as it is according to Hobbes. It can, however devolve into a state of war, in particular, a state of war over property disputes. Whereas the State of Nature is the state of liberty where persons recognize the Law of Nature and therefore do not harm one another, the state of war begins between two or more men once one man declares war on another, by stealing from him, or by trying to make him his slave. Since in the State of Nature there is no civil power to whom men can appeal, and since the Law of Nature allows them to defend their own lives, they may then kill those who would bring force against them. Since the State of Nature lacks civil authority, once war begins it is likely to continue. And this is one of the strongest reasons that men have to abandon the State of Nature by contracting together to form civil government. Property plays an essential role in Locke s argument for civil government and the contract that establishes it. According to Locke, private property is created when a person mixes his labor with the raw materials of nature. So, for example, when one tills a piece of land in nature, and makes it into a piece of farmland, which produces food, then one has a claim to own that piece of land and the food produced upon it. (This led Locke to conclude that America didn t really belong to the natives who lived there, because they were, on his view, failing to utilize the basic material of nature. In other words, they didn t farm it, so they had no legitimate claim to it, and others could therefore justifiably appropriate it.) Given the implications of the Law of Nature, there are limits as to how much property one can own: one is not allowed to take so more from nature than oneself can use, thereby leaving others without enough for themselves. Because nature is given to all of mankind by God for its common subsistence, one cannot take more than his own fair share. Property is the linchpin of Locke s argument for the social contract and civil government because it is the protection of their property, including their property in their own bodies, that men seek when they decide to abandon the State of Nature. According to Locke, the State of Nature is not a condition of individuals, as it is for Hobbes. Rather, it is populated by mothers and fathers with their children, or families what he calls conjugal society (par. 78). These societies are based on the voluntary agreements to care for children together, and they are moral but not political. Political society comes into being when individual men, representing their families, come together in the State of Nature and agree to each give up the executive power to punish those who transgress the Law of Nature, and hand over that power to the public power of a government. Having done this, they then become subject to the will of the majority. In other words, by making a compact to leave the State of Nature and form society, they make one body politic under one government (par. 97) and submit themselves to the will of that body. One joins such a body, either from its beginnings, or after it has already been established by others, only by explicit consent. Having created a political society and government through their consent, men then gain three things which they lacked in the State of Nature: laws, judges to adjudicate laws, and the executive power necessary to enforce these laws. Each man therefore gives over the power to protect himself and punish transgressors of the Law of Nature to the government that he has created through the compact. Given that the end of men s uniting into common wealths ( par. 124) is the preservation of their wealth, and preserving their lives, liberty, and well being in general, Locke can easily imagine the conditions under which the compact with government is destroyed, and men are justified in resisting the authority of a civil government, such as a King. When the executive power of a government devolves into tyranny, such as by dissolving the legislature and therefore denying the people the ability to make laws for their own preservation, then the resulting tyrant puts himself into a State of Nature, and specifically into a state of war with the people, and they then have the same right to self defense as they had before making a compact to establish society in the first place. In other words, the justification of the authority of the executive component of government is the protection of the people s property

11 and well being, so when such protection is no longer present, or when the king becomes a tyrant and acts against the interests of the people, they have a right, if not an outright obligation, to resist his authority. The social compact can be dissolved and the process to create political society begun anew. Because Locke did not envision the State of Nature as grimly as did Hobbes, he can imagine conditions under which one would be better off rejecting a particular civil government and returning to the State of Nature, with the aim of constructing a better civil government in its place. It is therefore both the view of human nature, and the nature of morality itself, which account for the differences between Hobbes and Locke s views of the social contract. Jean Jacques Rousseau Jean Jacques Rousseau, , lived and wrote during what was arguably the headiest period in the intellectual history of modern France the Enlightenment. He was one of the bright lights of that intellectual movement, contributing articles to the Encyclopdie of Diderot, and participating in the salons in Paris, where the great intellectual questions of his day were pursued. Rousseau has two distinct social contract theories. The first is found in his essay, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, commonly referred to as the Second Discourse, and is an account of the moral and political evolution of human beings over time, from a State of Nature to modern society. As such it contains his naturalized account of the social contract, which he sees as very problematic. The second is his normative, or idealized theory of the social contract, and is meant to provide the means by which to alleviate the problems that modern society has created for us, as laid out in the Second Discourse. Rousseau wrote his Second Discourse in response to an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. (Rousseau had previously won the same essay contest with an earlier essay, commonly referred to as the First Discourse.) In it he describes the historical process by which man began in a State of Nature and over time progressed into civil society. According to Rousseau, the State of Nature was a peaceful and quixotic time. People lived solitary, uncomplicated lives. Their few needs were easily satisfied by nature. Because of the abundance of nature and the small size of the population, competition was non existent, and persons rarely even saw one another, much less had reason for conflict or fear. Moreover, these simple, morally pure persons were naturally endowed with the capacity for pity, and therefore were not inclined to bring harm to one another. As time passed, however, humanity faced certain changes. As the overall population increased, the means by which people could satisfy their needs had to change. People slowly began to live together in small families, and then in small communities. Divisions of labor were introduced, both within and between families, and discoveries and inventions made life easier, giving rise to leisure time. Such leisure time inevitably led people to make comparisons between themselves and others, resulting in public values, leading to shame and envy, pride and contempt. Most importantly however, according to Rousseau, was the invention of private property, which constituted the pivotal moment in humanity s evolution out of a simple, pure state into one characterized by greed, competition, vanity, inequality, and vice. For Rousseau the invention of property constitutes humanity s fall from grace out of the State of Nature.

12 Having introduced private property, initial conditions of inequality became more pronounced. Some have property and others are forced to work for them, and the development of social classes begins. Eventually, those who have property notice that it would be in their interests to create a government that would protect private property from those who do not have it but can see that they might be able to acquire it by force. So, government gets established, through a contract, which purports to guarantee equality and protection for all, even though its true purpose is to fossilize the very inequalities that private property has produced. In other words, the contract, which claims to be in the interests of everyone equally, is really in the interests of the few who have become stronger and richer as a result of the developments of private property. This is the naturalized social contract, which Rousseau views as responsible for the conflict and competition from which modern society suffers. The normative social contract, argued for by Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762), is meant to respond to this sorry state of affairs and to remedy the social and moral ills that have been produced by the development of society. The distinction between history and justification, between the factual situation of mankind and how it ought to live together, is of the utmost importance to Rousseau. While we ought not to ignore history, nor ignore the causes of the problems we face, we must resolve those problems through our capacity to choose how we ought to live. Might never makes right, despite how often it pretends that it can. The Social Contract begins with the most oft quoted line from Rousseau: Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains (49). This claim is the conceptual bridge between the descriptive work of the Second Discourse, and the prescriptive work that is to come. Humans are essentially free, and were free in the State of Nature, but the progress of civilization has substituted subservience to others for that freedom, through dependence, economic and social inequalities, and the extent to which we judge ourselves through comparisons with others. Since a return to the State of Nature is neither feasible nor desirable, the purpose of politics is to restore freedom to us, thereby reconciling who we truly and essentially are with how we live together. So, this is the fundamental philosophical problem that The Social Contract seeks to address: how can we be free and live together? Or, put another way, how can we live together without succumbing to the force and coercion of others? We can do so, Rousseau maintains, by submitting our individual, particular wills to the collective or general will, created through agreement with other free and equal persons. Like Hobbes and Locke before him, and in contrast to the ancient philosophers, all men are made by nature to be equals, therefore no one has a natural right to govern others, and therefore the only justified authority is the authority that is generated out of agreements or covenants. The most basic covenant, the social pact, is the agreement to come together and form a people, a collectivity, which by definition is more than and different from a mere aggregation of individual interests and wills. This act, where individual persons become a people is the real foundation of society (59). Through the collective renunciation of the individual rights and freedom that one has in the State of Nature, and the transfer of these rights to the collective body, a new person, as it were, is formed. The sovereign is thus formed when free and equal persons come together and agree to create themselves anew as a single body, directed to the good of all considered together. So, just as individual wills are directed towards individual interests, the general will, once formed, is directed towards the common good, understood and agreed to collectively. Included in this version of the social contract is the idea of reciprocated duties: the sovereign is committed to the good of the individuals who constitute it, and each individual is likewise committed to the good of the whole. Given this, individuals cannot be given liberty to decide whether it is in their own interests to fulfill their duties to the

13 Sovereign, while at the same time being allowed to reap the benefits of citizenship. They must be made to conform themselves to the general will, they must be forced to be free (64). For Rousseau, this implies an extremely strong and direct form of democracy. One cannot transfer one s will to another, to do with as he or she sees fit, as one does in representative democracies. Rather, the general will depends on the coming together periodically of the entire democratic body, each and every citizen, to decide collectively, and with at least near unanimity, how to live together, i.e., what laws to enact. As it is constituted only by individual wills, these private, individual wills must assemble themselves regularly if the general will is to continue. One implication of this is that the strong form of democracy which is consistent with the general will is also only possible in relatively small states. The people must be able to identify with one another, and at least know who each other are. They cannot live in a large area, too spread out to come together regularly, and they cannot live in such different geographic circumstances as to be unable to be united under common laws. (Could the present day U.S. satisfy Rousseau s conception of democracy? It could not. ) Although the conditions for true democracy are stringent, they are also the only means by which we can, according to Rousseau, save ourselves, and regain the freedom to which we are naturally entitled. Rousseau s social contract theories together form a single, consistent view of our moral and political situation. We are endowed with freedom and equality by nature, but our nature has been corrupted by our contingent social history. We can overcome this corruption, however, by invoking our free will to reconstitute ourselves politically, along strongly democratic principles, which is good for us, both individually and collectively. Charles Dickens and Social Allegory In the eighteen fifties, Charles Dickens was concerned that social problems in England, particularly those relating to the condition of the poor, might provoke a mass reaction on the scale of the French Revolution. In a letter written in 1855, for example, he refers to the unrest of the time as follows: I believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering, instead of blazing openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned into such a devil of a conflagration as never has been beheld since. (qtd. in I. Collins 42) At the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens once again expresses his concern. The novel opens in 1775, with a comparison of England and pre revolutionary France. While drawing parallels between the two countries, Dickens also alludes to his own time: "the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only" (1; bk. 1, ch. 1). The rest of the chapter shows that Dickens regarded the condition to be an 'evil' one, since he depicts both countries as rife with poverty, injustice, and violence due to the irresponsibility of the ruling elite (1 3; bk. 1, ch. 1). As the novel unfolds, however, England becomes a safe haven for those escaping the violence perpetrated by the French Revolution. In this paper, I shall argue that A Tale of Two Cities reflects the popular confidence in the stability of England in the eighteen fifties, despite Dickens's suggestions at the beginning. A Tale of Two Cities thus becomes a novel about the England and the English of Dickens's time. And yet, many people today would believe that the novel is essentially about the French Revolution, which brings me to my second point. If in the nineteenth century the novel served to affirm the stability of Britain, in this

14 century it has been greatly influential in the formation of the popular image of the French Revolution, mainly thanks to film and television adaptations. The purpose of this paper is to look at the popular reception of the novel from the time of its first publication in 1859 to the nineteen nineties. A Tale of Two Cities and the Contemporaries of Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities proved a disappointment even to critics who had received Dickens's earlier works favourably. In The Life of Charles Dickens (1872 4), orchbook, 1961, 130] "To his friend and biographer, John Forster argued that "there was probably never a book by a great humorist, and an artist so prolific in the conception of character, with so little humor and so few memorable figures" (qtd. in P. Collins 422). However, Forster praised the novel when it was first published, referring in particular to the "subtlety with which a private history is associated with a most vivid expression of the spirit of the days of the great French Revolution" (qtd. in P. Collins 424). This comment suggests that Dickens successfully integrated fiction and history, but it is clear from what Forster says later that he prefers the fiction to the rendering of history in the novel: "But in his broadest coloring of revolutionary scenes, while he gives life to large truths in the story of a nation, he is working out closely and thoroughly the skillfully designed tale of a household" (qtd. in P. Collins 424). Forster's preference may be connected to the growing feeling of indifference towards the French Revolution in the eighteen fifties. Dickens was not the first to draw attention to England's social and political problems by using the French Revolution as a point of reference. As David Lodge explains, several Victorian writers, particularly Thomas Carlyle, had used this "rhetorical strategy" to emphasize the severity of the condition of England (129). And yet, such a strategy would no longer impress itself on Dickens's readers in the eighteen fifties, because mass demonstrations and riots of the previous decades, which were encouraged by reform movements like Chartism, and which worried writers like Carlyle and Dickens, had by this time become a spent force. In Victorian People and Ideas, Richard Altick points out that Chartism virtually came to an end in 1848, and summarizes the socio political condition of England in the following years as follows: As throne after throne was overturned on the Continent, England's remained secure. Now, finally, even those most fearful of a proletarian takeover began to concede that it probably would not happen here. The clinching proof came three years later[in 1851], when throngs of workingmen and their families, among them many erstwhile Chartists, poured into London to see the Crystal Palace. Despite predictions of rampant crime and disorder, nothing untoward happened; "the people" proved to be orderly, sober, and good humored anything but revolution minded. (94) France and England in A Tale of Two Cities What, then, could A Tale of Two Cities signify for Dickens's readers, if the writer's fears of a massive uprising similar to the French Revolution appeared groundless? The answer may be found by a closer look at the contrasts, and not the similarities, between France and England as they are depicted in the novel. Rather than drawing readers' attention to the current problems of the country through a comparison with the condition of pre revolutionary and revolutionary France, these contrasts serve to reaffirm the stability of England.

15 To illustrate, when Lucie Manette finds her father Dr. Manette in Paris after his eighteen year imprisonment in the Bastille, she tells him that they will "go to England to be at peace and at rest" (44; bk. 1, ch. 6). Charles Darnay, while explaining his decision to renounce his title and privileges as a member of the aristocratic Evrémonde family, refers to England as his "Refuge" (119; bk. 2, ch. 9). Jarvis Lorry complains about the difficulties of communication brought about by the Revolution between the London and Paris branches of Tellson's Bank: "At another time, our parcels would come and go, as easily as in business like Old England; but now, everything is stopped" (226; bk. 2, ch. 24). In contrast, France becomes more and more dangerous as the novel unfolds. The acts of violence committed by the revolutionary mob are among the most memorable scenes in the novel. To give but one example, when the Bastille is stormed, the mob kill the governor "with a rain of stabs and blows," and Madame Defarge decapitates him "with her cruel knife" (209; bk. 2, ch. 21). It may be argued that Sydney Carton's silent prophecy about the future on his way to the guillotine compensates for the negative image of revolutionary Paris and France in the novel. "I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss," (357; bk. 3, ch. 15) thinks Carton to himself. And yet, his prophecy seems to be inappropriate, as the novel has never given a sense that Paris is likely to become a 'beautiful' city that ennobles or is ennobled by its people. Carton's "solemn interest in the streets along which the sixties rolled to a death which had become so common and material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among the people out of all the working of the Guillotine " (298; bk. 3, ch. 9) is one of the best examples of the feeling of revulsion that is associated with Paris and its people throughout the novel. Nor has the novel shown any characters who may become the 'brilliant people' of France who will make their country rise from "this abyss" in the future. Dr. Manette comes closest; he has suffered the evils of both the ancien régime (a term referring to the rule and the way of life in France before the Revolution) and revolutionary France, but his future is clearly with his daughter and son in law in England. None of them is likely to return after their escape, not only because it will be politically unwise, but also because a happy and safe future awaits them in England, as Carton prophecies: "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more" (357; bk. 3, ch. 15). The future awaiting the "villains of the piece," on the other hand, is death in France. In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Madame Defarge, who has been driven by a desire to see each and every descendant of the Evrémonde family executed, dies by accidentally shooting herself in a struggle with Miss Pross, Lucie's faithful maid. Although the deaths of the other "villains" are not narrated directly in the novel, Carton foresees their fate on the guillotine: "I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, the Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument [the guillotine], before it shall cease out of its present use" ( 357; bk. 3, ch. 15). It is interesting to note that Carton's list contains not only those French characters associated with the Revolution, but also two English characters, Barsad and Cly. Their careers as spies have finally brought them to Paris, where they work for the revolutionary French government. The pattern is one of poetic justice: the characters who have been depicted sympathetically will end up in England, whereas the villains, both French and English, will finally pay for their crimes on the guillotine in France. The only character to contradict this pattern is Sydney Carton, who is executed on the guillotine in Paris. However, his death is not rendered as part of the workings of poetic justice, as in the case of the villains, but rather as a divine reward. From the moment that he decides to sacrifice himself by dying on the guillotine instead of Darnay, he repeats the lines from the Scriptures, beginning with "I am the

16 Resurrection and the life." This theme of resurrection reappears with Carton's prophecy, where he envisions a son to be born to Lucie and Darnay, a son who will bear Carton's name (357 8; bk. 3, ch. 15). Thus he will symbolically be reborn through Lucie and Darnay's child. This vision serves another essential purpose, however. In the early parts of the novel, Lucie and Darnay have a son, who dies when yet a child (201; bk. 2, ch. 21). Why the vision of another child, and a son, apart from the continuation of the theme of resurrection? If the Darnay\Carton family is to survive into the future, they need a son to bear their name. But much more importantly, this second son will be born free of the aristocratic stigma that has almost destroyed his father Darnay's life. In this way, the descendants of Lucie and Darnay will live as English citizens free of any association with France and its violent past. When viewed from this perspective, A Tale of Two Cities becomes a novel not about the French Revolution, but about the reaffirmation of England as a safe haven and English citizenship as something to be proud of. As Miss Pross says, "the short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third and as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!" (276; bk. 3, ch. 7) Victorian Images of the French Revolution That the English should be proud of their country and nationality, which finds its most straightforward expression in Miss Pross's words, is a message which many of Dickens's contemporaries would readily endorse. The merit of such a message becomes unquestionable when considered in relation to a historical event i.e. the French Revolution which is depicted as pure and simple carnage. As John Gross points out, the novel "doesn't record a single incident in which it [the French Revolution] might be shown as beneficent, constructive, even as tragic" (191). It is this image of the French Revolution that has influenced subsequent generations of English readers, particularly in our century. Most of book 3, which comprises the climactic episodes of Darnay's condemnation to death and Carton's execution, takes place during the Terror of , the period which witnessed the most violent events of the Revolution. According to the historian Eric Hobsbawm, British people have generally tended to associate the French Revolution with the atrocities committed during the Terror only: In Britain. this was the image of the Revolution that came closest to entering public consciousness, thanks to Carlyle and Dickens's (Carlyle inspired) A Tale of Two Cities, followed by pop literary epigones like Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel: the knock of the guillotine's blades, the sansculotte women knitting impassively as they watched the counterrevolutionary heads fall. Simon Schama's Citizens, the 1989 bestseller written for the English language market by an expatriate British historian, suggests that this popular image is still very much alive. (5) Dickens, The French Revolution, and the legacy of A Tale of Two Cities It is a commonplace of Dickensian criticism that the writer was influenced by Carlyle's The French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Taking Dickens's comment that he read Carlyle's history "five hundred times" (I. Collins 46) as a starting point, many critics have discussed Carlyle's influence on several aspects of the novel, such as the narrative technique (Friedman 481 5), the imagery associated with the Revolution (I. Collins 52; Baumgarten 166; Lodge 131 2), and the narration of the historical episodes (Lodge 134; Friedman 489). And yet, Dickens's outlook on revolutionary violence differed significantly from that of Carlyle. As Irene Collins points out, Dickens "dislikes the violence of the revolutionaries,

17 both in its popular form (the mob) and in its institutionalised form (the Terror). Unlike Carlyle, he can no longer see justice in the violence" (53). Moreover, it is Dickens's novel, rather than Carlyle's history, which is responsible for the popular image of the French Revolution in England in our century, not least due to the popularity of A Tale of Two Cities on film and television. The most famous adaptation of the novel is the 1935 MGM production, directed by Jack Conway. The film capitalised particularly on scenes depicting the revolutionary mob: the film critic Derek Winnert describes it as "a wildly extravagant production" with "17000 extras in the Paris street scenes" (1009). The novel was again filmed in 1958 by the British director Ralph Thomas. This production again used a "lavish staging" (Winnert 1009). The novel has proved to be a popular source for television adaptations as well: it was adapted in 1980 and 1989, the first being an ATV production directed by Jim Goddard and the latter an Anglo French production directed by Philippe Monnier. A Tale of Two Cities promoted the image of a stable England by using revolutionary France as a setting to highlight the contrasts between the two countries, although Dickens seemed to believe in the eighteen fifties that England was heading towards an uprising on the scale of the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, we see the French Revolution used as a 'lavish' setting in film and TV productions of A Tale of Two Cities. In the preface to the novel, Dickens says "It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time" (xiii). It seems that, through the popular media, our century has fulfilled Dickens's intention, perhaps even more so than the previous century. What remains to readers and film/tv audiences is to decide whether this 'popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time' through A Tale of Two Cities does justice to that momentous historical phenomenon called the French Revolution. Works Cited Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature. New York: Norton, Baumgarten, Murray. "Writing the Revolution." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): Collins, Irene. "Charles Dickens and the French Revolution." Literature and History 1.1 (1990): Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, Conway, Jack, dir. A Tale of Two Cities. MGM, Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens Oxford: Oxford UP, Friedman, Barton R. "Antihistory: Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities." Dickens's Later Work: Assessments since Ed. Michael Hollington. East Sussex: Helm, Goddard, Jim, dir. A Tale of Two Cities. ATV, Gross, John. "A Tale of Two Cities." Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

18 Hobsbawm, E. J. Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution. London: Verso, Lodge, David. "The French Revolution and the Condition of England: Crowds and Power in the Early Victorian Novel." The French Revolution and British Culture. Ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small. Oxford: Oxford UP, Monnier, Philippe, dir. A Tale of Two Cities. Granada TV/Dune Production, Thomas, Ralph, dir. A Tale of Two Cities. Rank, Winnert, Derek. Radio Times Film and Video Guide London: Hodder and Stoughton, What Is Romanticism? Ask anyone on the street: "what is Romanticism?" and you will certainly receive some kind of reply. Everyone claims to know the meaning of the word romantic. The word conveys notions of sentiment and sentimentality, a visionary or idealistic lack of reality. It connotes fantasy and fiction. It has been associated with different times and with distant places: the island of Bali, the world of the Arabian Nights, the age of the troubadours and even Manhattan. Advertising links it with the effects of lipstick, perfume and soap. If we could ask the advertising genius who, fifty years ago, came up with the brilliant cigarette campaign, "blow some my way," he may have responded with "it's romantic." These meanings cause few problems in everyday life indeed, few of us wonder about the meaning of Romanticism at all. Yet we use the expression freely and casually ("a romantic, candle lit dinner"). But literary historians and critics as well as European historians have been quarreling over the meaning of the word Romanticism for decades, as Lovejoy's comment above makes abundantly clear. One of the problems is that the Romantics were liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Some were preoccupied with God, others were atheistic to the core. Some began their lives as devout Catholics, lived as ardent revolutionaries and died as staunch conservatives. The expression Romantic gained currency during its own time, roughly However, even within its own period of existence, few Romantics would have agreed on a general meaning. Perhaps this tells us something. To speak of a Romantic era is to identify a period in which certain ideas and attitudes arose, gained currency and in most areas of intellectual endeavor, became dominant. That is, they became the dominant mode of expression. Which tells us something else about the Romantics: expression was perhaps everything to them expression in art, music, poetry, drama, literature and philosophy. Just the same, older ideas did not simply wither away. Romantic ideas arose both as implicit and explicit criticisms of 18th century Enlightenment thought (see Lecture 9). For the most part, these ideas were generated by a sense of inadequacy with the dominant ideals of the Enlightenment and of the society that produced them. ROMANTICISM appeared in conflict with the Enlightenment. You could go as far as to say that Romanticism reflected a crisis in Enlightenment thought itself, a crisis which shook the comfortable 18th century philosophe out of his intellectual single mindedness. The Romantics were conscious of their unique destiny. In fact, it was self consciousness which appears as one of the keys elements of Romanticism itself.

19 The philosophes were too objective they chose to see human nature as something uniform. The philosophes had also attacked the Church because it blocked human reason. The Romantics attacked the Enlightenment because it blocked the free play of the emotions and creativity. The philosophe had turned man into a soulless, thinking machine a robot. In a comment typical of the Romantic thrust, William Hazlitt ( ) asked, "For the better part of my life all I did was think." And William Godwin ( ), a contemporary of Hazlitt ˉs asked, "what shall I do when I have read all the books?" Christianity had formed a matrix into which medieval man situated himself. The Enlightenment replaced the Christian matrix with the mechanical matrix of Newtonian natural philosophy. For the Romantic, the result was nothing less than the demotion of the individual. Imagination, sensitivity, feelings, spontaneity and freedom were stifled choked to death. Man must liberate himself from these intellectual chains. Like one of their intellectual fathers, Jean Jacques Rousseau ( ), the Romantics yearned to reclaim human freedom. Habits, values, rules and standards imposed by a civilization grounded in reason and reason only had to be abandoned. "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," Rousseau had written. Whereas the philosophes saw man in common, that is, as creatures endowed with Reason, the Romantics saw diversity and uniqueness. That is, those traits which set one man apart from another, and traits which set one nation apart from another. Discover yourself express yourself, cried the Romantic artist. Play your own music, write your own drama, paint your own personal vision, live, love and suffer in your own way. So instead of the motto, "Sapere aude," "Dare to know!" the Romantics took up the battle cry, "Dare to be!" The Romantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to march to the tune of a different drummer their own. The Romantics were passionate about their subjectivism, about their tendency toward introspection. Rousseau ˉs autobiography, The Confessions (1781), began with the following words: I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. Romanticism was the new thought, the critical idea and the creative effort necessary to cope with the old ways of confronting experience. The Romantic era can be considered as indicative of an age of crisis. Even before 1789, it was believed that the ancien regime seemed ready to collapse. Once the French Revolution entered its radical phase in August 1792 (see Lecture 13), the fear of political disaster also spread. King killing, Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, and the Napoleonic armies all signaled chaos a chaos which would dominate European political and cultural life for the next quarter of a century. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution in full swing in England since the 1760s spread to the Continent in the 1820s, thus adding entirely new social concerns (see Lecture 17). The old order politics and the economy seemed to be falling apart and hence for many Romantics, raised the threat of moral disaster as well. Men and women faced the need to build new systems of discipline and order, or, at the very least, they had to reshape older systems. The era was prolific in innovative ideas and new art forms. Older systems of thought had to come to terms with rapid and apparently unmanageable change. In the midst of what has been called the Romantic Era, an era often portrayed as devoted to irrationality and "unreason," the most purely rational social science classical political economy carried on the Enlightenment tradition. Enlightenment rationalism continued to be expressed in the language of

20 political and economic liberalism. For example, Jeremy Bentham s ( ) radical critique of traditional politics became an active political movement known as utilitarianism. And revolutionary Jacobinism inundated English Chartism an English working class movement of the 1830s and 40s. The political left on the Continent as well as many socialists, communists and anarchists also reflected their debt to the heritage of the Enlightenment. The Romantics defined the Enlightenment as something to which they were clearly opposed. The philosophes oversimplified. But Enlightenment thought was and is not a simple and clearly identifiable thing. In fact, what has often been identified as the Enlightenment bore very little resemblance to reality. As successors to the Enlightenment, the Romantics were often unfair in their appreciation of the 18th century. They failed to recognize just how much they shared with the philosophes. In doing so, the Romantics were similar to Renaissance humanists in that both failed to perceive the meaning and importance of the cultural period which had preceded their own (see Lecture 4). The humanists, in fact, invented a "middle age" so as to define themselves more carefully. As a result, the humanists enhanced their own self evaluation and prestige in their own eyes. The humanists foisted an error on subsequent generations of thinkers. Their error lay in their evaluation of the past as well as in their simple failure to apprehend or even show a remote interest in the cultural heritage of the medieval world. Both aspects of the error are important. With the Romantics, it shows first how men make an identity for themselves by defining an enemy, making clear what they oppose, thus making life into a battle. Second, it is evident that factual, accurate, subtle understanding makes the enemy mere men. Even before 1789, the Romantics opposed the superficiality of the conventions of an artificial, urban and aristocratic society. They blurred distinctions between its decadent, fashionable Christianity or unemotional Deism and the irreligion or anti clericalism of the philosophes. The philosophes, expert in defining themselves in conflict with their enemy the Church helped to create the mythical ungodly Enlightenment many Romantics so clearly opposed. It was during the French Revolution and for fifty or sixty years afterward that the Romantics clarified their opposition to the Enlightenment. This opposition was based on equal measures of truth and fiction. The Romantics rejected what they thought the philosophes represented. And over time, the Romantics came to oppose and criticize not only the Enlightenment, but also ideas derived from it and the men who were influenced by it. The period from 1793 to 1815 was a period of European war. War, yes, but also revolutionary combat partisanship seemed normal. Increasingly, however, the Romantics rejected those aspects of the French Revolution the Terror and Napoleon which seemed to them to have sprung from the heads of the philosophes themselves. For instance, William Wordsworth ( ) was living in Paris during the heady days of 1789 he was, at the time, only 19 years old. In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, he reveals his experience of the first days of the Revolution. Wordsworth read his poem to Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( ) in 1805 I might add that The Prelude is epic in proportion as it weighs in at eight thousand lines. By 1805, the bliss that carried Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s, had all but vanished. But for some Romantics, aristocrats, revolutionary armies, natural rights and constitutionalism were not real enemies. There were new enemies on the horizon, especially after the Congress of Vienna ( ). The Romantics concentrated their attack on the heartlessness of bourgeois liberalism as well as the nature of urban industrial society. Industrial society brought new problems: soulless individualism,

21 economic egoism, utilitarianism, materialism and the cash nexus. Industrial society came under attack by new critics: the utopian socialists and communists. But there were also men like Benjamin Disraeli ( ) and Thomas Carlyle ( ) who identified the threat of egoism as the chief danger of their times. Egoism dominated the bourgeoisie, especially in France and in England. Higher virtues and social concerns were subsumed by the cash nexus and crass materialism of an industrial capitalist society. Artists and intellectuals attacked the philistinism of the bourgeoisie for their lack of taste and their lack of an higher morality. Ironically, the brunt of their attack fell on the social class which had produced the generation of Romantics. Romanticism reveals the persistence of Enlightenment thought, the Romantic s definition of themselves and a gradual awareness of a new enemy. The shift to a new enemy reminds us that the Romantic Age was also an eclectic age. The Enlightenment was no monolithic structure neither was Romanticism, however we define it. Ideas of an age seldom exist as total systems. Our labels too easily let us forget that past ideas form the context in which new ideas are developed and expressed. Intellectuals do manage to innovate and their innovations are oftentimes not always recombinations of what they have embraced in their education. Intellectual and geographic contexts differ from state to state even though French culture seemed to have dominated the Continent during the early decades of the 19th century. England is the obvious exception. Germany is another example the movement known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was an independent cultural development. National variations were enhanced when, under the direct effect of the Napoleonic wars, boundaries were closed and the easy international interchange of ideas was inhibited. But war was not the only element that contributed to the somewhat inhibited flow of ideas. Profound antagonism and the desire to create autonomous cultures was also partially responsible. This itself grew out of newly found nationalist ideologies which were indeed characteristic of Romanticism itself. And within each nation state, institutional and social differences provided limits to the general assimilation of a clearly defined set of ideas. In France, for example, the academies were strong and during the Napoleonic era, censorship was common. Artists and intellectuals alike were prevented from innovating or adopting new ideas. In Germany, on the other hand, things were quite different. The social structure, the heavy academism and specific institutional traits blocked any possibility of learning or expressing new modes of thought. Most important were the progressive changes in the potential audience artists and intellectuals now faced most of them now had to depend upon that audience. Where the audience was very small, as in Austria and parts of Germany, the results often ranged between the extremes of great openness to rigid conservatism. Where the audience was steadily growing, as in France or England, and where urbanization and the growth of a middle class was transforming the expectations of the artist and intellectual, there was room for experiment, innovation and oftentimes, disastrous failure. Here, artists and intellectuals could no longer depend upon aristocratic patronage. Popularity among the new and powerful middle class audience became a rite of passage. At the same time, intellectuals criticized the tasteless and unreceptive philistine bourgeoisie. Ironically, they were criticizing the same class and the same mentality from which they themselves had emerged and which had supported them. In this respect, the Romantic age was similar to the age of Enlightenment. A free press and careers open to talent provided possibilities of competitive innovation. This led to new efforts to literally train audiences to be receptive to the productions of artists and intellectuals. Meanwhile, literary hacks and Grub Street writers produced popular pot boilers for the masses. All these characteristics placed limits upon the activities of the Romantics. These limits could

22 not be ignored. In fact, these limits often exerted pressures that can be identified as causes of the Romantic movement itself. There were direct, immediate and forceful events that many British and European Romantics experienced in their youth. The French Revolution was a universal phenomenon that affected them all. And the Napoleonic wars after 1799 also influenced an entire generation of European writers, composers and artists. Those who were in their youth in the 1790s felt a chasm dividing them from an earlier, pre revolutionary generation. Those who had seen Napoleon seemed different and felt different from those who were simply too young to understand. The difference lay in a great discrepancy in the quality of their experience. Great European events, such as the Revolution and Napoleon, gave identity to generations and made them feel as one a shared experience. As a consequence, the qualities of thought and behavior in 1790 was drastically different from what it was in In the Romantic era, men and women felt these temporal and experiential differences consciously and intensely. It is obvious, I suppose, that only after Napoleon could the cults of the hero, of hero worship and of the genius take full form. And only after 1815 could youth complain that their time no longer offered opportunities for heroism or greatness only their predecessors had known these opportunities. The intellectual historian or historian of ideas always faces problems. Questions of meaning, interpretation and an acceptance of a particular Zeitgeist, or climate of opinion or world view is serious but difficult stuff. Although we frequently use words like Enlightenment or Romanticism to describe intellectual or perhaps cultural events, these expressions sometimes cause more harm than good. There is, for instance, no 18th century document, no perfect exemplar or ideal type, to use Max Weber s word, which can be called "enlightened." There is, unfortunately, no perfect document or ideal type of which we may pronounce, "this is Romantic." We have seen that one way to define the Romantics is to distinguish them from the philosophes. But, for both the philosophes and the Romantics, Nature was accepted as a general standard. Nature was natural and this supplied standards for beauty and for morality. The Enlightenment s appreciation of Nature was, of course, derived wholly from Isaac Newton. The physical world was orderly, explicable, regular, logical. It was, as we are all now convinced, a Nature subject to laws which could be expressed with mathematical certainty. Universal truths like natural rights were the object of science and of philosophy. And the uniformity of Nature permitted a knowledge which was rapidly accumulating as a consequence of man s rational capacity and the use of science to penetrate the mysteries of nature. The Enlightenment defined knowledge in a Locke ian manner that is, a knowledge based on sense impressions. This was an environmentalist psychology, if you will, a psychology in which men know only what their sense impressions allowed their faculty of reason to understand. The Enlightenment was rationalist it glorified human reason. Reason illustrated the power of analysis Reason was the power of associating like experiences in order to generalize about them inductively. Reason was a common human possession it was held by all men. Even American "savages" were endowed with reason, hence the 18th century emphasis on "common sense," and the "noble savage." Common sense revealed by reason would admit a groundwork for a common morality. As nature was studied in order to discover its universal aspects, men began to accept that what was most worth knowing and what was therefore most valuable, was what they had in common with one another. Society, then, became an object of science. Society revealed self evident truths about human nature self evident truths about natural rights.

23 Social and political thought was individualistic and atomistic. As the physical universe was ultimately machine like, so social organization could be fashioned after the machine. Science pronounced what society ought to become in view of man s natural needs. These needs were not being fulfilled by the past for this reason, the medieval matrix and the ancien regime inhibited man s progress. The desire was to shape institutions, to change men and to produce a better society knowledge, morality and human happiness. The intention was at once cosmopolitan and humanitarian. The Romantics felt all the opinions of the Enlightenment were fraught with dangerous errors and oversimplifications. Romanticism may then be considered as a critique of the inadequacies of what it held to be Enlightened thought. The critique of the Romantics sometime open, sometimes hidden can be seen as a new study of the bases or knowledge and of the whole scientific enterprise. It rejected a science based on physics physics was inadequate to describe the reality of experience. "O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," wrote John Keats ( ). And William Blake ( ) admonished us all to "Bathe in the waters of life." And Keats again, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The Romantic universe was expanding, evolving, becoming it was organic, it was alive. The Romantics sought their soul in the science of life, not the science of celestial mechanics. They moved from planets to plants. The experience was positively exhilarating, explosive and liberating liberation from the soulless, materialistic, thinking mechanism that was man. The 18th century had created it. The Romantics found it oppressive, hence the focus on liberation. Listen to the way Percy Bysshe Shelley ( ) put it in Prometheus Unbound: The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation not to be confined! Ha! Ha! The animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind. The Romantics returned God to Nature the age revived the unseen world, the supernatural, the mysterious, the world of medieval man. It is no accident that the first gothic novel appears early in the Romantic Age. Nature came to be viewed historically. The world was developing, it was a world of continuous process, it was a world in the process of becoming. And this continuous organic process could only be understood through historical thought. And here we have come almost full circle to the views expressed by Giambattista Vico (see Lecture 10) a century earlier. This is perhaps the single most revolutionary aspect of the Romantic Age. An admiration for all the potency and diversity of living nature superseded a concern for the discovery of its universal traits. In a word, the Romantics embraced relativism. They did not seek universal abstract laws as Immanuel Kant ( ) had. Instead, they saw history as a process of unfolding, a becoming. Was not this the upshot of what G. W. F. Hegel ( ) had argued in his philosophy of history? And look at the time frame: Kant 1780s, Hegel 1820s and 30s. The Romantics sought Nature s glorious diversity of detail especially its moral and emotional relation to mankind. On this score, the Romantics criticized the 18th century. The philosophe was cold, mechanical, logical and unfeeling. There was no warmth in the heart. For the Romantics, warmth of heart was found and indeed enhanced by a communion with Nature. The heart has reasons that Reason is not equipped to understand. The heart was a source of knowledge the location of ideas "felt" as

24 sensations rather than thoughts. Intuition was equated with that which men feel strongly. Men could learn by experiment or by logical process but men could learn more in intuitive flashes and feelings, by learning to trust their instincts. The Romantics distrusted calculation and stressed the limitations of scientific knowledge. The rationality of science fails to apprehend the variety and fullness of reality. Rational analysis destroys the naïve experience of the stream of sensations and in this violation, leads men into error. One power possessed by the Romantic, a power distinct and superior to reason, was imagination. Imagination might apprehend immediate reality and create in accordance with it. And the belief that the uncultured that is, the primitive know not merely differently but best is an example of how the Romantics reinterpreted the irrational aspect of reality the Imagination. The Romantics did not merely say that there were irrational ways of intuiting reality. They rejected materialism and utilitarianism as types of personal behavior and as philosophies. They sought regeneration a regeneration we can liken to that of the medieval heretic or saint. They favored selfless enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which was an expression of faith and not as the product of utilitarian calculation. Emotion unbridled emotion was celebrated irrespective of its consequences. The 18th century life of mind was incomplete. The Romantics opted for a life of the heart. Their relativism made them appreciative of diversity in man and in nature. There are no universal laws. There are certainly no laws which would explain man. The philosophe congratulated himself for helping to destroy the ancien regime. And today, we can perhaps say, "good job!" But after all the destruction, after the ancient idols fell, and after the dust had cleared, there remained nothing to take its place. In stepped the Romantics who sought to restore the organic quality of the past, especially the medieval past, the past so detested by the pompous, powdered wig philosophe. Truth and beauty were human attributes. A truth and beauty which emanated from the poetic soul and the artistic heart. If the poets are, as Shelley wrote in 1821, the "unacknowledged legislators of the world (society)," it was world of fantasy, intuition, instinct and emotion. It was a human world.

25 III. ADDITIONAL Topics for Class Discussion, Break Out Groups and/or Reflections Essays 1. Jeremy Bentham ( ) is one possible archetype for the Scrooge character, in that he at first believed that enlightened and public spirited d statesmen would overcome conservative stupidity and institute progressive reforms to promote public happiness. When disillusionment set in, he developed greaterr sympathy for democraticc reform and an extension of the franchise. He believed that with the gradual improvement in thee level of education in society, people would be more likely to decide and vote on the basis of rational calculation of what would be for their own long term benefit, and individual rational decision making would therefore, in aggregate, ncreasingly tend to promote the greaterr general happiness. Thus, Bentham, like Scrooge, attempted to quantify and/ /or create a formula for happiness, thus becoming a hapless miser in the long run. Please expand on this idea OR find another character in A Christmas Carol or A Tale of Two Cities and provide an actual historical analog. 2. Which aspect or theme of Romanticism personally inspires you the most? Is it the music? The literature? You can begin by identifying a Romantic work that you are intimately familiar with ie. Jane Austen s Pride and Prejudice and then explore the various tenets of Romanticism in context of this work. How can this be integrated into your classroom lesson or unit planning? 3. Select a topic from the following list of Romantic characteristics and expand into a classroom teaching objective: Unrequited Love Occultism Nationalism The Subjectivee Self Exoticism Transcendentalism (Northeastern United States) Idealism vs. Realism Emotionalism Awe of Nature Individualism 4. Please give specific historical, sociopolitical and economic reasonss for the ultimate failure of the Century Old Hobbes Social Contract model to apply to the 19 th Century European Industrial Revolution. Dr. William M. Mouat Director of Education and Community Outreach (406) wmouat@albertabairtheater.org