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 the 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 not 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

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 (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 deisobborghi/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 trasformation 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

Nel diciannovesimo secolo, come gruppo, non seguivano una singola "scuola" di pensiero o pratica letteraria allora conosciuta. Differenza tra disegno di legge e legge. Gli atti di chiusura atti di privazione. Differenza tra filosofo e giornalista. Al centro dei commenti di Cobbett sulla schiavitù c'era il suo odio per Wilberforce, che vedeva come un promotore autoreferenziale dell'abolizione della schiavitù all'estero, mentre agiva contro gli interessi degli oppressi in Gran Bretagna, per conto dei quali Cobbett trascorse la sua vita a fare campagna. Le critiche di Cobbett a Wilberforce erano ben fondate: Wilberforce votò per la sospensione dell'Habeas Corpus nel 1795, per le "Leggi di Gagging" di Pitt, si oppose ai diritti di creare sindacati, si oppose a un'inchiesta sul "Massacro di Peterloo" e sostenne le successive "Sei Leggi" (che vietavano QUALSIASI incontro per la riforma radicale). Cobbett e altri radicali stavano mettendo in evidenza l'ipocrisia dei sostenitori dell'abolizione della schiavitù della classe alta che sostenevano la "schiavitù bianca" nelle fabbriche.

– 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 is 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.