The relationship between language, thought, and reality was a topic of intense discussion among eighteenth-century philosophers, the source of which was Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The author argues that Locke’s empiricism created a tradition of study due more to the philosopher’s inaccuracies/contradictions than to his correct insights. For Locke, humans are born without innate ideas and their knowledge is determined by experience derived from perception. He wanted to cancel scholastic language and the belief in faculties of mind capable of directly apprehending reality: instead, the mind is a clean slate which gets imprinted with simple sensory data, becoming more complex through further experience. Initial (nuanced) reactions to his theories came from Leibniz and Berkeley. But language remained theoretically external to understanding/reason until Condillac. For him language was fundamental in the evolution of reason and research had to begin with the historical origins of language in society. Condillac’s work was extended through critiques (Rousseau, Monboddo, Maupertuis, Girard, Diderot). Some also argued that language emerged through dialogue and that meanings were developed differently by communities (relativism). Finally, conservative reactions against empiricism (Harris, Reid, Herder) reaffirmed the belief that language could not be explained without some inherent human faculty.

From his earliest publications in the 1730s, Johnson expressed unwavering abhorrence of slavery as well as antagonism to the racial division of humankind. Even with the rise of abolitionist writing in the 1760s, however, Johnson’s public statements on these issues are scattered through several works or recorded by Boswell in the Life of Johnson, who himself opposed the abolition of the slave trade. We can explain Johnson’s failure to intervene more fully and publicly in the debate over slavery by considering that he feared connections between abolitionism and extensions of “human rights” to a broader platform of political reform. His longest statement on the status of slaves in Britain in Boswell’s Life is carefully worded and legally narrow compared with the more sweeping condemnations of slavery in contemporary abolitionist publications. On the issue of “race,” however, Johnson remained committed to the idea of the common and equal humanity of all people.

The Literary Magazine

Although the publication of the Dictionary made Johnson an established literary figure, it did not lead to renewed happiness or prosperity. Drained both emotionally and physically, he entered a long period of frequent lethargy and indolence. After an energetic start, he neglected work on his next big project, a contracted edition of Shakespeare, to the point where he was publicly ridiculed in the early 1760s. His lonely house in Gough Square had been soon filled after Tetty's death with two new inhabitants who attest to Johnson's support for the lowly and downtrodden. The first was a young black man, Francis Barber, who had been born a slave to the father of Johnson's Ivy Lane Club friend Richard Bathurst. The second was Robert Levet, a coarse-mannered physician to the poor. Financially, Johnson seemed unconsciously inclined to repeat his father's improvidence and bankruptcy. The author of A Dictionary of the English Language was arrested for debt on 16 May 1756, and had to be sprung by a friend who knew better how to count his pennies, the novelist and printer Samuel Richardson. The printer of the Dictionary, William Strahan, was suspiciously ‘not at home’ when Johnson sent a message from the bailiff's house.

This date is interesting because Johnson had begun pouring out material for a new journal, the Literary Magazine, just the previous month. Politics, along with the immediate lack of money, could spur Johnson into activity if longer term projects could not.

Thoughts on the Late Transactions respecting the Falkland's Islands

Johnson's political writing and commentary during the last fourteen years of his life are overshadowed by the great and paradoxical outcome of Britain's evolution during the eighteenth century. As the result of the Seven Years War, Britain had become what was now widely acknowledged to be an ‘empire’. Imperial expansion was not, however, an entirely happy state of affairs. Having accumulated a National Debt that historians estimate between £128 and £133 million, British politicians became preoccupied with the problem of how to balance public finances and lower taxes.1 The attempt to meet this financial goal through extraction of colonial income from America to India nonetheless met with repeated objection, complication and finally outright rebellion. The new first minister in charge of navigating this unprecedented endeavour, Lord North, would probably have flourished in a different era. He emerged from the Middlesex election crisis as the perfect royal servant, harmonious with the king yet able through wit and his unassuming style to impress the independent ‘country’ members who sustained the government's majority. He disdained the title of ‘Prime Minister’ and tried to create consensus in cabinet and in parliament by attending to financial details. The necessity of exerting British sovereignty over its territories nonetheless generated not only practical problems but a series of theoretical questions concerning the nature of imperial power itself.

Among T. B. Macaulay's strongest and most consistent criticisms of Johnson was that he actually cared little about politics and thus knew little about them: ‘He was himself a Tory, not from rational conviction – for his serious opinion was that one form of government was just as good or as bad as another – but from mere passion’. When Macaulay wrote this judgment in 1856, he meant that Johnson's supposed demotion of politics sealed his irrelevance except as the entertaining literary character ‘Dr Johnson’ he found in Boswell's Life. Under the influence of ‘political economy’ and the reform-minded obsessions of their age, Victorians had come to understand politics as not peripheral but as central to the well-being of every individual. Donald Greene, for all the strong criticisms advanced in this book against his interpretations, corrected this widespread impression that Johnson was an irrational and ignorant commentator on political events of his time. Greene inaugurated the current debate, and did much to establish Johnson's political canon. Macaulay was nonetheless right in pointing to Johnson's frequent tendency to relegate politics to an inferior position in what truly mattered in life. As he wrote to Robert Chambers in 1783, ‘The state of the Publick, and the operations of government have little influence upon the private happiness of private men, nor can I pretend that much of the national calamites is felt by me’.

Debates in the Senate of Lilliput

Johnson's early writings in London indicate considerable dismay with the corruption and disorder of the capital. The experiment had also failed to secure him a steady income and evidently placed a strain on his marriage. In August 1739 he left for the Midlands without Tetty to apply personally for the position of master in Appleby, about a dozen miles from Lichfield, and would not return until the following spring. He had nonetheless impressed some important people. Alexander Pope had been so struck by ‘London’ that, unknown to Johnson, he wrote to the dominant politician in Staffordshire, the Tory Lord Gower, asking him to support Johnson's application to Appleby School. Additionally encouraged by Johnson's very high reputation for scholarship in the area, Gower wrote to a friend of Jonathan Swift wondering if the Dean of St Patrick's would arrange for an honorary MA from Trinity College. When nothing came of this application, Johnson returned to London to find Edward Cave eager to give him advanced responsibilities at the Gentleman's Magazine.

Johnson did not come back to rejoin the political battle that he had previously viewed with scepticism. His contributions to the magazine in the early 1740s included his first piece of literary criticism, ‘An Essay on Epitaphs’ (1740) and entirely non-political biographies of Barratier and Sydenham.

Perhaps only the glamour shed by the name Jacques Derrida could explain recent claims about his ‘lifetime engagement with the eighteenth-century archives’. For the body of his writing devoted to this century is in fact very small. Besides scattered references to Kant, Sade and some others, there are the long and famous chapters in De la grammatologie devoted to an unpublished work by Rousseau; a little discussed book on a largely neglected French philosopher, Condillac; a largely ignored essay about the origins of writing according to an eighteenth-century Anglican apologist, William Warburton. But even this meagre corpus does not fully measure Derrida's neglect of one of the most robust periods in Western philosophy, particularly in France. The most telling lacuna in Derrida's supposed ‘lifetime engagement’ with the eighteenth century lies in his almost entire failure to deal with this era's reigning philosophical tradition, empiricism. Even in the works mentioned above, Derrida has virtually nothing to say about empiricism itself. The pre-eminent empiricist philosophers of this age – Locke, Berkeley, Hume, just to start – all merit hardly a mention in the entire corpus of Jacques Derrida.

This neglect is not surprising. It is a repeated and imperative assertion in Derrida's writing that empiricism is not in fact ‘philosophy’ at all: ‘empiricism always has been determined by philosophy, from Plato to Husserl, as nonphiliosophy : as the philosophical pretension to nonphilosophy, the inability to justify oneself, to come to one's own aid as speech’. That this very statement draws a kind of institutional plasma from empiricism (consider: ‘from Plato to Husserl’) is just the point: Derrida's deconstructive career drove an invasive, contraband journey along the border of a territory he called ‘non-philosophy’, the outland of empiricism. A philosopher who built his career on evidence gathered from archival texts across history clearly had links to this country, as little as he liked to admit this affinity. In other ways, as well, he sometimes sounded, suspiciously, like an empiricist. Empiricists have historically denied the relevance of ontology, and the reality of ‘being’ as anything except a verbal abstraction. Particularly during the eighteenth century, empiricists insisted that human consciousness is fundamentally semiotic, and that all human approaches to experience are mediated through signs.

Among the fields that authors of the eighteenth century attempted to improve into a system of rational principles was the criticism of literature and the other fine arts. Evidently inspired by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, D'Alembert and Montesquieu, this project of making criticism into a science was pursued with particular enthusiasm by Scottish authors such as Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames and Hugh Blair.

According to Kames in The Elements of Criticism (1762), for example, ‘the fine arts, like morals, might become a rational science; and, like morals, may be cultivated to a high degree of refinement’. In lectures that he first delivered about the same time, Blair contended similarly that ‘there are principles of reason and sound judgment which can be applied to matters of Taste, as well as to subjects of science and philosophy’. Not all British philosophers agreed that ‘taste’ could be reduced to incontrovertible rational principles. David Hume adopted a characteristically sceptical view of abstract philosophical principles in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757). In the first volume of his An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), Joseph Warton expressed positive hostility towards ‘that philosophical, and systematical spirit much in vogue, which has spread itself from the sciences even to polite literature’. Across a wide range of authors, however, eighteenth-century criticism was breaking away from the neo-classical belief that Aristotle and Homer exemplified, ‘Nature Methodiz'd’, turning instead to the psychological experience of reading or viewing literary art.

What was Samuel Johnson's response to the proposition that literary criticism could be made into a ‘science’, defined in his Dictionary (1755) as ‘Art attained by precepts, or built on principles’? Major figures in early twentieth-century criticism, including T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and René Wellek, placed Johnson firmly in the tradition of neo-classicism. From in the 1950s, scholars began to reassess this placement, stressing Johnson's Lockean empiricism, though they continued to stress his ‘resistance to theory’.

Irene and Political Tragedy

Johnson had come to London armed with a partially completed tragedy, Mahomet and Irene, which he hoped to have accepted for performance on the stage. In the event, he could not even find someone to print the play when he tried in 1741. The renamed Irene would not be staged until 1749 with the help of David Garrick. There no evidence that this lack of enthusiasm resulted from political objections to the play, which is rather ‘provincial’ in its stolid Christian morality, as we will consider. The evident political blandness of Irene has not, however, deterred modern scholars from opposed ideological readings of this play. Donald Greene drew attention in particular to Cali Bassa's speech in act 1, scene 2, where he reflects on ‘the woes when arbitrary pow'r,/And lawless passion, hold the sword of justice’. In Johnson's original version, which we have in the form of rough notes and heavily corrected speeches, he was planning an even stronger paean to liberty in which Cali ‘launches into the misery of absolute governments’, and praises the freedom of countries ‘he has heard of in the North’ (YE, vol. 6, p. 121). This speech, Greene writes, is ‘pure Locke’. According to Paul Monod, on the contrary, the situation of Irene cries out for a Jacobite interpretation. Demetrius and Leontius are Jacobite conspirators attempting to free their country from the Sultan, George II. Cali is a crypto-Jacobite minister.

Samuel Johnson never held political office and cannot be said to have exerted influence as an insider in eighteenth-century government. From his own lifetime to the present, however, his writings and conversation on political topics have raised enormous controversy. In the decades after his death in 1784, hostility or allegiance to his memory could virtually define a person's position as either a Whig or a Tory, a radical or a conservative. Two major participants in the Reform Bill debate in 1831, the Whig Thomas Babington Macaulay and the Tory John Wilson Croker, made Johnson the battleground for their opposed ideologies. In the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay mauled Croker's new edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, excoriating the editor's supposed mistakes, but also characterizing Johnson as ‘a bigoted Tory’. Of Johnson Macaulay wrote that ‘The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great powers with low prejudices’. Sceptical of false claims on most matters, Johnson was overtaken by irrational passions when faced with political ideas that Macaulay regarded as progressive. Croker replied in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, mostly defending his accuracy but also indicating that Macaulay's savage review reflected his own inveterate prejudices. As Croker scoffed in the voice of a comic rustic, ‘Fee! faw! fum! I smell the bluid of a pairty man’.

The Political Point of View of Boswell's Life of Johnson

By the early 1760s, Johnson was an established writer and a famous man whose conversation and letters were being preserved and passed down to us as never before. From this point on, we can consider an unprecedented wealth of biographical detail.

Our reading of Johnson's development over his last twenty years is nonetheless complicated by his retreat from the political journalism that had for so long been his main vehicle of expression. With the exception of four substantial pamphlets published between 1770 and 1775, our perception of his politics during these later years is heavily mediated by others. Above all, he became known to later generations through the biography of the twenty-two-year-old Scot who met him in May 1763. Amongst the most controversial questions in Johnson studies is the degree to which James Boswell may have coloured or even distorted our vision of this middle-aged veteran of a previous era in English politics.

Donald Greene's attempt to rescue Johnson from his traditional image as an intolerant Tory or even Jacobite was inevitably linked with his assault on Boswell as a reliable biographer, for it was indeed the Life that most influenced the perception of his politics from the nineteenth well into the twentieth century. According to Greene, Boswell was simply not equipped by background, education and temperament to understand Johnson's politics.

The Political Culture of Lichfield

The cathedral city of Lichfield, where Johnson was born on 18 September 1709, in many ways epitomized the political tensions of eighteenth-century English politics. It was on the one hand a model of politeness and prosperity during a period when Britain remained under the control of a small elite while advancing towards being a great economic and imperial power. Although Lichfield had little industry until the nineteenth century, it was visibly prospering. Indeed, the fine house where Johnson was born on the market square, built by his father Michael, a bookseller and local worthy, attested to its well-being. The city's corporation built a new townhall, lighted the streets and planted gardens. The shallow water that surrounded the cathedral close, once described by Horace Walpole as a ‘bog’, was reshaped into an elegant lake. Called by Daniel Defoe in the early century ‘a Place of good Company, above all the Towns in this or the neighbouring Counties’, Lichfield produced or was home to some of the most eminent cultural figures of the century. Besides Johnson himself, the great actor and theatre-manager David Garrick came from Lichfield. Joseph Addison lived in Lichfield between 1683 and 1685 when his father was Dean of the Cathedral. The inventor Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the great nineteenth-century biologist, settled there in 1756. Johnson had reason to call his hometown ‘a city of philosophers’.