Cultura inglese II

Cultura inglese II

Edmund Burke & The function of criticism at the present time

Edmund Burke has been called ‘the first modern Conservative’. He’s an Anglo-Irish philosopher. Burke’s attack was upon democracy, as we now commonly understand it. The event which drew his fire was the Revolution in France, but his concern was not only with France; it was, perhaps primarily, with the running of a similar tide in England.

In politics he’s a great recommender of prudence as the primary virtue of civil government. He brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought. Burke is one of that company of men who learn virtue from the margin of their errors, learn folly from their own persons. It is at least arguable that this is the most important kind of learning.

The criticism that Burke made was what he considered enemy of simplicity. Burke’s vision of human beings is negative, an animal and the society are good instead of Rousseau’s theory. For Burke the society is a sort of particular corporation, a partnership of generation. Burke’s writing is an articulated experience and as such it has a validity which can survive even the demolition of its general conclusions. He served the causes of his day, and in particular the cause of opposition to democracy.

He argued that tendency of democracy was to tyranny. This again is an observation from experience. As the argument has gone since Burke’s day, his position has come to seem paradoxical. It is commonly argued, in this kind of criticism of democracy, that the individual is oppressed by the mass, and that, generally speaking, virtues are individual in origin and are threatened by mass society.

Burke’s position is that man as an individual left to himself is wicked; all human virtue is the creation of the society, and is in this sense not ‘natural’ but ‘artificial’: “art is man’s nature”. The embodiment and guarantee of the proper humanity of man is the historical community. The eloquence would be worthless. What survives is an experience, a particular kind of learning; the writing is important only to the extent that it communicates this. It is finally, a personal experience become a landmark.

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will no suffer us to be superficial. It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. Moreover, the connection between the quality of this process in individuals and the quality of civil society is major and indisputable.

He speaks from the relative stability of the 18th century against the first signs of the flux and confusion of the 19th century, but he speaks also against those rising doctrines which the 18th century had produced, and which were to become the characteristic philosophy of the change itself. In doing so, he prepared a position in the English mind from which the march of industrialism and liberalism was to be continually attacked.

He established the idea of what has been called an organic society, where the emphasis is on the interrelation and continuity of human activities, rather than on separation into spheres of interest, each governed by its own laws. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind.

Immediately after Burke, this complex which he describes was to be called the ‘spirit of the nation’; by the end of the 19th century, it was to be called a national ‘culture’. Burke condemned the new society in terms of his experience of the earlier society.

Matthew Arnold is one of the political heirs of Burke.

The function of criticism at the present time

• Comparison between French (practice) and English revolution (theory).
• Pure ideas could move a mass of people = revolution.
• Practical sense of pragmatism.
• Metaphysical spirit of revolution, the love of ideas (French revolution).
• Difficulties like an instructor, like a friend to improve.
• Importance of cooperation, team work, a slow process where there is a comparison of ideas. The importance of working together.
• Complex thinking of politics.
• The first who elaborate a concept of culture is Burke.
• “Culture was the best that was taught and learned in the world” says Arnold.
• Burke: people instead of the idea of individualism.
• People = Society.
• People International Language Culture-bound → →.
• Enclosures.

William Cobbett

William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was an English pamphleteer, farmer, journalist and member of parliament born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament, including abolishing “rotten boroughs”, would ease the poverty of farm labourers. Relentlessly he sought an end to borough-mongers (ridisegno dei sobborghi/quartieri/collegi) sinecurists and “tax-eaters” (meaning a wide class of overpaid or corrupt bureaucrats). He opposed the Corn Laws, which imposed a tax on imported grain.

Early in life he was a loyal devotee of King and Country, but he later pushed for radicalism, which helped the Reform Act 1832 and his election that year as one of two MPs for the newly enfranchised borough of Oldham. He strongly advocated of Catholic Emancipation. His polemics cover subjects from Rural Rides political reform to religion. His best known book is (1830, still in print). Hansard.

• Cobbett like a countryman, the transformation of the country.

Cobbett looked very carefully at this, and made a familiar distinction between a resident native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from his childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost.

And a gentry having no relish for country-delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil only its rents, viewing it is a mere object of speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage, but upon the dread of their power.

Negro-drivers = people who worked in the slave-trade.

Small free-holder = someone who possesses the land. They are different from the lease-holders, who pay a lease, for a determinate period of time in order to use the land or the properties.

The people of Peterloo

• The 3 Lake Poets are William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.

The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known.

Difference between bill and act.

Enclosures acts atti di privazione.

Difference between the philosopher and the journalist

Central to Cobbett’s comments on slavery was his hatred of Wilberforce, who he saw as self-righteously promoting anti-slavery abroad while acting against the interests of the oppressed in Britain, on behalf of whom Cobbett spent his life campaigning.

Cobbett’s criticisms of Wilberforce were well founded – Wilberforce voted for the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1795, for Pitt’s ‘Gagging Acts’, opposed rights to set up unions, opposed an enquiry into the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ and supported the subsequent’ Six Acts’ (banning ANY meeting for radical reform). Cobbett and other radicals were highlighting the hypocrisy of upper class anti-slavery campaigners supporting ‘white slavery’ in factories – they were not supporting black slavery.

Farnham Gilbert White, William Cobbett and Jane Austen.

Idea of country is quite different in their works new kind of consciousness.

Rediscovery of the local, traditions etc...

William Cobbett is ‘the first great tribune of the industrial proletariat’, with Burke, they attacked the new England from their experience of the old England, and, from their work, traditions of criticism of the new industrialism were powerfully begun: traditions which in the middle of the 20th century are still active and important.

Cobbett was sufficiently younger to live through the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, and to see the first effects in country and town of the whole complex of changes which we call the Industrial Revolution. He had an extraordinary sureness of instinct. There is more in common between Cobbett the anti-Jacobin and Cobbett the Radical than is usually supposed; there is the same arrogance, crudeness, appetite for a class of men that he could hate. Divested of his sureness of instinct, Cobbett is, the type of the very worst kind of popular journalist.

“Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names”, is the motto for Cobbett, and he was even helped in his wisdom, at this particularly confusing time, by his relative indifference to ideas. The terms of Cobbett’s social criticism so much resemble later and more organized critiques that it is easy to forget the basis of experience from which he worked, and the values by which he judged.

He called the new class system, most significantly, ‘unnatural’. In controversy, he accused an opponent of trying to cut off the chain of connection between the rich and the poor. Unnatural is the constant emphasis, and the word is the keystone of a continuing tradition of criticism of the new industrial civilization.

Cobbett’s reaction is for two main kinds. There is the reaction of the countryman, which has become a major English tradition. Faced with the new industrial economy, and its kind of products and way of satisfying needs. He didn’t want violence, but he expected resistance. He expected, and watched with sympathy, all the efforts of the labouring poor to improve their conditions by their own action.

Cobbett had discovered the essential weakness, the inherent contradiction, in the theories of economic individualism. It might be more true to say that he had stumbled on it, in the coming together of his inheritance from the 18th century and of his attachment by instinct and experience to the labouring poor.

Another aspect of Cobbett’s work in his surprising share of responsibility for that idealization of the Middle Ages which is so characteristic of 19th century social criticism. As a literary movement, mediaevalism had been growing since the middle of the 18th century. Its most important aspect, for Cobbett, was its use of the monasteries as a standard for social institutions: the image of the working of a communal society as a welcome alternative to the claims of individualism.

For Cobbett, as for many others, the attachment was one of instinct; the originating emotion was simply recoil from the very different social ideals of the rising industrialism.

Put together the names of Burke and Cobbett is important, not only as contrast, but because we can only understand this tradition of criticism of the new industrial society if we recognize that it is compounded of very different and at times even directly contradictory elements.

William Cobbett & Jane Austen

Cobbett and Austen are two important writers of a period full of developments and both through their writings, novels etc described the country society, especially around Farnham and its surroundings, both are native to this place. We have a new kind of consciousness, an idea of country that is quite different in their works.

Cobbett as countryman who he is, said that nobody tells the tale of the labourer, the essential preparation for transition from the sympathetic poem to the realistic novel, he explains how the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers. The social basis of his opposition to enclosures is about what happened in detail, to the people and the land.

Through this place, Cobbett observes another proof of the truth, the split between rich land and poor labourers. There is a rediscovery of the local, the traditions etc. On the other side we have Jane Austen with a different point of view instead of Cobbett.

For her there is an active, complicated, sharply speculative process, while Cobbett is focused on the labourers and their conditions of life, Austen is focused on the land. The land is seen primarily as an index of revenue and position. There is a visible order and control that are a valued product, while the process of working it is hardly seen at all. In literature we have a complex of different ways of seeing even the same local life.

Humanism

• Renaissance: the intellectual movement that was later known as “renaissance humanism” first appeared in Italy. This movement has greatly influenced western culture up until the modern day. Italian scholars discovered Ancient Greek thought, particularly that of Aristotle, through Arabic translations.
• Thomas More as political figure in the Renaissance period.

Robert Southey

Robert Southey as a fainter figure. He goes on to praise and criticize Owen. He was the stock butt as a turncoat and a reactionary, he remains an influential if unacknowledged figure.

Southey, with Burke and Coleridge to the new conservatism. The ‘Colloquies’ remains Southey’s most important work in this field, he advanced the kind of criticism of the new manufacturing system which later became axiomatic in a number of different schools, and which is almost identical with the later observations of Owen.

Southey’s affirmation is a characteristic as his indictment, and is again a very early example of a position which has become general. The contrast with mediaeval society is one of its elements. The very form of the ‘Colloquies’ the bringing of More to question the new society indicates a conscious continuity with the first phase of the humanist challenge, in which many of the ideas now concentrated in the meaning of ‘culture’ were in fact laid down.

The comment indicates also a central feature in Southey’s attitude, and one which ranges him firmly with Owen. Criticizing orthodox political economy, on the grounds of its exclusion of moral considerations. Complementary with this, Southey insists on the positive functions of government.

The word ‘culture’ indicates here the line which was to be so extensively pursued: the setting-up, in opposition to the laissez-faire society of the political economists, of an idea of active and responsible government, whose first duty was the promotion of the general health of society. Southey also puts forward a view of the humanizing effects