Chapter 7 explores the concept of nihilism in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. While the Danish thinker examines the issue in several different texts, this chapter is confined to his treatments in The Concept of Irony, the “Diapsalmata” from Either/Or, and “At a Graveside” from his collection Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. In the first work he criticizes the different forms of Romantic irony that can be seen as expressions of nihilism. Kierkegaard’s critical point is that the Romantics offer nothing positive after they have eliminated all truths and values with their negative critique. In the “Diapsalmata” he provides a portrait of the modern nihilist in the aphorisms of the anonymous aesthete. Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside” focuses on the issue of death and what kind of a disposition one should have towards it. He introduces the concept of the earnestness of death, which means thinking about one’s own demise. He claims that death is both indefinable and inexplicable, and thus it is important not to pretend that we know anything about it. One should thus remain in “the equilibrium of indecisiveness,” although this is difficult.

George’s remarkable popularity among Irish-Americans is used as a lens through which to review the cultural force of ‘Irishness’ as a potent subaltern category. Here, the intersections of class and culture that shaped the distinctive form of Irish-American social radicalism are examined by looking at the enmeshed nationalist, pan-Celticist, anarchist, socialist, agrarian, journalistic, commercial, charitable, and ethno-religious networks that constituted Irish-American associational culture, and the political and poetic discourses they utilised. The political uses and resonances of the American past, and how these mapped on to contemporary political disagreements is examined, particularly the idea of slavery in the politics of land redistribution. The chapter also offers an analysis of the Irish National Land League of America, its support across different regions and among different social groups, and its internal political and ideological tensions. Finally, it considers the use of romantic and poetic imagery in the sustenance of the agrarian political ideals that animated radical agitation and broader conceptions of Irish identity in the United States.

The impact of Wittgenstein’s work on lyric poets, literary critics, and philosophers has been well documented. Philosophers and literary scholars, including Charles Altieri Stanley Cavell, Richard Eldridge, Michael Fischer, Walter Jost, and Joshua Wilner, have drawn on Wittgenstein to consider poetry from the Romantics to the present. Numerous poets from the mid-twentieth century on – among them Barbara Köhler, Marjorie Perloff, Lyn Hejinian, John Koethe, Charles Bernstein, and Ingeborg Bachmann – discuss or reference Wittgenstein, to say nothing of the authors like Perloff, David Rozema, Christopher Norris, or Benjamin Tilghman who contend that Wittgenstein’s writing is itself “poetic.” This chapter takes a different approach: it argues that Wittgenstein’s work illuminates the central questions of the theory of the lyric, namely questions about what lyric poetry is and what it does. As questions of essence and existence, these are the kinds of question Wittgenstein helps us understand – not, primarily, by answering them but by prompting us to consider why and how we ask them. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s attention to the ways poems use language and what we do with them shows how both poetry and the ways we respond to poems rest on his view of language as emerging from and constituting a form of life.

This introduction offers an account of Jacobi’s importance for intellectual history and describes how he positioned himself at the centre of critical debates in a way that would shape the intellectual terrain for coming generations.

Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This interlude pivots from the neofeudal to the neoliberal, terms that are sometimes used synonymously in contemporary political theory. It addresses two popular film adaptations of Austen and Scotts novels: Clueless and Rob Roy. Released during the mid-1990s, an era of hyperactive economic speculation, both films dramatize the perils of a quantifiable form of social relations made possible by mass financialization. However, while the films critique financialized honor, this time it is an aesthetic derived from Austen, and not Scott, that deftly undercuts honor codes premised on credit and debt.

Not just embraced by reactionaries, aristocrats, or committed duelists, the idea of honor had widespread cultural and sociopolitical purchase in the Romantic era. As a master value – or a value so prolific that it is becomes the hidden assumption of a range of different theories and practices – honor, this introduction argues, addresses three major developments in modernity: the growing split between private and public selves, the development of new kinds of civic virtue, and the ascendent place of affect in cultural production. Placing Keats, Coleridge, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Burke, Kant, and Hegel in conversation with contemporary critics such as Wai Chee Dimock, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Achille Mbembe – all of whose recent work is concerned with honor and mutual recognition – this introduction further reveals Romantic cultures diagnosis of the limits of liberal republican notions of liberty when faced with the social necessity of material forms of dignity.

Known for its brutal descriptions of punishment – and the resistance of its narrator – The History of Mary Prince is usually read as a slave narrative that argues for abolition by way of affective appeals. While its explicit set pieces of violence and sexual humiliation played upon the sentiments of British readers, provoking an instinctual repulsion towards slavery, these scenes may have also encouraged readers to identify the enslaved as permanently degraded. Mary Prince and her editor Thomas Pringle, however, challenge this acceptable debasement of slaves by connecting the concept of honor to Prince’s physical character. In doing so, the History addresses a prejudice long-held by both abolitionists and colonialists towards the black female body and demonstrates how Romantic abolitionism could pivot from the bourgeois liberal ideal of freedom – or the negative right of non-restraint – to dignity, a positive, material affirmation of social worth. A concluding section treats the History as a prospectus – or, perhaps, Afrofuturist manifesto – for the political subject that can exist outside of the state, capitalist institutions, and even the bounds of recognizable sovereignty.

In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.

Addressing a chronology of texts – the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, the Preface to its second edition, the ballad Michael, and the “Residence in France” sections of the 1805 Prelude – this chapter reconsiders Wordsworth’s great decade as a struggle between two types of honor: a commercial value of hierarchy that operated within the day’s market for “dignified” literary productions, and a social value of egalitarianism that allowed poetry to appeal to the “native and naked dignity” inherent in all humankind, regardless of economic status. Addressing a legacy of criticism on Wordsworth’s canonicity and self-fashioning, this chapter demonstrates how honor refigures Romantic cultural capital, inasmuch as Wordsworthian honor pits society against commerce. Such a tension between honorable egalitarianism and commercial success reframes the poet’s politics. Addressing claims that Wordsworth became more conservative as his career progressed, this chapter shows how he also stages a classic paradox inherent in liberalism: the conflict between market distinction and social equality.

Prompted by what he perceived as the chaotic tendencies of the Jacobins, Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, proposes a modern revival of honor, a virtue derived from the time-tested principles of chivalry, hierarchy, and, above all, the shared sentiments that bound together the social order. William Godwin’s preeminent Jacobin novel Caleb Williams represents one outcome of living under Burkes sentimentalist honor code: its relentlessly skeptical protagonist is cowed by the emotional demands of chivalry and is ultimately left unable to think about anything but his master, with whom he shares a psychic bond. Instead of eliminating a sense of honor from public life, however, Godwin offers an alternative version of honor. Sharing with Burke a similar fear of post-revolutionary atomization, Godwin presents what he calls “true honor,” a virtue that avoids the sentimentalism and obsession with rank that characterized Burkean chivalry. In commiting to the general good whose circumference expands beyond white, propertied citizens, Godwin presupposes – or even exceeds – the ideals of liberal social democracy by more than a century.

This interlude argues that Percy Shelley’s closet drama The Cenci reunites honor with affect. Refiguring Godwin’s “true honor,” Shelley suggests that the artistic depictions of his degraded heroine Beatrice Cenci prompt a different form of universal dignity – and intersubjective connection – without succumbing to a dichotomy between “concrete,” perhaps chauvinist, solidarity and feminine care. Crucial here is Shelleys suggestion about drama, which, through its logic of iterative re-enactment, reveals the material persistence of archaic honor codes, as well as the insistence of new modes of dignity.

The Romantic theory of war described in this chapter is the product of a group of highly educated Prussian officers trying to grasp the new conditions of politics and warfare that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. They had studied the philosophy of enlightenment, the history of warfare, and the mathematics of probability, they had read the works of the Classical and Romantic poets of their time, and they had fought in the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars. In order to define the nature of war, one of the most eminent of these thinkers, Carl von Clausewitz, relied on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Describing the reality of war, he also relied on three new sciences that had played a role in Kant’s philosophy: the science of static and mechanics, the science of electro-magnetism, and the science of population statistics. The chapter argues that while Clausewitz was not a precursor of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, one of the most consequential moments of the digital revolution, he does, however, remain relevant to this day as one of the first theorists of irregular warfare.

Was demythologization a response to the Third-Century Crisis? With the empire reeling from the combined pressures of civil war, barbarian invasion, plague, and economic depression, perhaps Rome’s elite were drawn to bucolic, seasonal, and philosophical scenes for the allegorical tranquility they offered, as a form of refuge from the turmoil of real life? This chapter interrogates this thesis, with far-reaching implications for how we understand similar arguments launched about other periods in world art.

This view of the relationship between philosophy and history has been remarkably enduring. It flourished in the early-modern period, as I show in the case of Spinoza; but it also retained an influence within analytical philosophy, as some of Russell’s early work illustrates. I propose that contemporary advocates of the Separation Thesis remain motivated by the exclusive image of philosophy embodied in the Classical Conception, and the concomitant desire for a transcendent form of knowledge. As long as this is so, the relationship between history and philosophy will remain uneasy.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.

The literary context of Tolstoy matters because his works not only emerged in concrete literary and historical circumstances, but expressed in their own ways shared concerns, ideas, fears, and aspirations, characteristic of the respective periods and, in particular, of the generation affected by the humiliating outcome of the Crimean War, the collapse of the decades-long isolationist conservative “scenario of power” of Nicholas I, and a series of forthcoming profound social and political reforms that changed the emotional and ideological outlook of Russian culture. The chapter primarily focuses on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace within its actual literary and ideological contexts, including fierce contemporary debates on the most pressing issues of the 1860s, unleashed in powerful, tendentious “thick” journals. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s final sentence of the novel, the epistemological value of seeing Tolstoy in conversation with his contemporaries (Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Grigoriev, Dmitry Pisarev, Surikov, Musorgsky, etc.) lies both in the renunciation of vision of his “unreal immobility in space” (generally taken for granted) and concurrently in the recognition of his dependence on other writers and literary contexts “of which we are unaware.” Gulliver is determined by his bonds.

The chapter outlines the impact of romantic philhellenic and Slavophile thought on the emerging grand narratives in southeastern Europe. Its focus is the formative phase in the national historiographical canons of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania during the nineteenth century and the interpretations of Byzantium intrinsic to these narratives. The Greek historiography devoured the empire and its cultural heritage wholesale, turning it into an integral part of national continuity and assimilating the canonical (and teleological) European division of history into classical, medieval and modern periods. For the Bulgarians, Byzantium, which they equated with contemporary Greeks, featured as the main adversary in confrontation with whom the Bulgarian national state and identity crystallised and were sustained. The Serbian historians foregrounded the significance of the medieval empire of Stefan Dušan as an actual heir and improved version of the Eastern Roman empire. Romania, the latecomer on the medieval political scene, reconfirmed its claims to represent the Latin West in the (post-)Byzantine East.