Carlyle (1834–1840); Alternative Revolutions

Abstract

The melancholy experience of isolation united Mill and Carlyle in the years after the 1832 Reform Bill. The originality of Mill’s intellectual quest was fed by, and contributed to, his solitude. As the prospects for peaceful reform became less hopeful, and the Radicals a less effective force, so did Mill’s role as sympathetic critic of the group become less viable. He redefined the nature and function of speculation and found for himself a new role. Productive though his associations with the neo-Idealists and the Saint-Simonians temporarily were, they ultimately re-accentuated his solitary position. He could not exchange allegiance to Benthamism for adherence to another system. The middle of the road was a lonely, albeit fruitful, position. Mill’s isolation was, however, to some exent, a shared one, for the Radicals as a group came to experience an isolation akin to Mill’s after the 1837 election. In the 1830s, Carlyle, like Mill, was concerned with a critique of logical method closely allied to a contemplation of Radicalism. Carlyle’s isolation was, however, more profound than Mill’s. His nurturing within Scottish Dissent had encouraged his role as a propagandist for Idealism.

As human nature is eternally active, the innovator is but the conservative with more perplexing facts before him, and the conservative only the upholder of revolution who has now, at length, no more worlds to conquer.¹