Abstract
Regardless of the difficulties it would cause librarians, Herbert Read insisted in a letter to T.S. Eliot in 1949, that the title ‘Reason & Romanticism’ was perfect for a fresh edition of his collected essays. Sent to Eliot in his capacity as editor at the publishing house Faber and Faber, Read added that the phrase was ‘in a way prophetic’. The confusion for the ‘card cataloguers’ would stem from the fact that this was a title Read had used before, gracing the frontispiece and spine of his first edition of essays, Reason and Romanticism: Essays in Literary Criticism (1926).1 His return to it hints at a certain circularity, but, as he wrote to Eliot, its true value in 1926 lay in its powers of prophecy, revealing the extent to which the tension between ‘reason’ and ‘romanticism’ he had pondered at the dawn of his career, remained vital at its zenith. Returning to this theme at the dénouement of the definitive version of his autobiography, The Contrary Experience (1963), he repeated the idea that the expression ‘reason and romanticism’ was ‘at once descriptive and prophetic’:
In this story of the growth of my mind, every advance has been due to the exercise of the faculty of reason; but that advance is not uniform, unimpeded … The very bases of reason, the perceptions of an unclouded intellect, are continually … contradicted by the creative fictions of the imagination … It is the function of art to reconcile the contradictions inherent in our experience … In this fact lies the … inescapable justification of romantic art, and it is to the … illustration of this truth that I have devoted my intellectual energy.
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Notes
Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (London, 1963), 353, 350.
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (London, [1965] 2000), 97.
For a useful discussion, see: Peter Ryley, Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain (New York, 2013);
Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, 2011), 256–277.
Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976), 166–167;
Rodney Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain (London, 1978), 42 passim.
H. Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London, 1983), 136; see also: 92, 132–137. For a discussion of the significance of the Congress,
see: Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012), 136–139.
W. Tcherkesoff, Let Us Be fust: (An Open Letter to Liebknecht) (London, 1896), 7.
The report offered short biographies of Francesco Merlino, Gustav Landauer, Louise Michel, Amilcare Cipriani, Augustin Hanion, Élisée Reclus, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Bernard Lazare, and Peter Kropotkin. N.A., Pull Report of the Proceedings of the International Workers’ Congress, London, July and August, 1896 (London, 1896), 67–72.
Matthew S. Adams, ‘Herbert Read and the fluid memory of the First World War: Poetry, Prose, and Polemic’, Historical Research (2014), 1–22; Janet S.K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004), 226.
Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War in English Culture (London, 1990), 353–382.
Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2011), 88–94.
Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York, 2008), 3.
Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2001), 1–2.
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 2008), 75, 76.
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 1 (2002), 89 passim.
For an overview, see: Paul Kelly, ‘Rescuing Political Theory from the Tyranny of History’, in Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (eds) Political Philosophy versus History?: Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought (Cambridge, 2011), 13–37.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1978), xi.
Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994), 19.
For an excellent overview of the current state of scholarship on anarchist history, see: Carl Levy, ‘Social Histories of Anarchism’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 4:2 (2010), 1–44.
George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (London, [1962] 1970), 414.
John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse (London, 1978), ix–xv; Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement.
Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London, 1993), xiii.
See also: April Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (London, 1971);
R.B. Fowler, ‘The Anarchist Tradition of Political Thought’, The Western Political Quarterly, 25: 4 (1972), 738–752;
Roderick Kedward, The Anarchists (New York, 1971);
D. Novak, ‘The Place of Anarchism in the History of Political Thought’, The Review of Politics, 20: 3 (1958), 307–329;
Quail, Slow Burning Fuse; Woodcock, Anarchism. On the exclusion of anarchism from histories of socialism, a good example is: Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London, 2010).
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA, 1961).
Consider: Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London: 1880–1914 (Liverpool, 2013); Ryley, Making Another World Possible;
Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolution Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Edinburgh, 2009).
Consider: Ruth Kinna, ‘Guy Aldred: Bridging the Gap between Marxism and Anarchism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 16:1 (2011), 97–114;
Ruth Kinna Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, 2005);
Carissa Honeywell, ‘Bridging the Gaps: Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Anarchist Thought’, in Ruth Kinna (ed.) The Continuum Companion to Anarchism (London, 2012), 111–139;
Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms (Edinburgh, 2006);
Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (New York, 2012).
For this critique, see: Allan Antliff, ‘Anarchy, Power and Post-Structralism’, in Duane Rouselle and Süreyyya Evren (eds) Post-Anarchism: A Reader (London, 2011), 160–167;
Benjamin Franks, ‘Post-Anarchism: A Partial Account’ in Post-Anarchism, 168–180. For works of this nature, see: Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh, 2011);
Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (Pennsylvania, 1994);
Andrew M. Koch, ‘Post-Structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism’, in Duane Rouselle and Süreyyya Evren (eds) Post-Anarchism: A Reader (London, 2011), 23–40 (39).
Carissa Honeywell, A British Anarchist Tradition: Herbert Read, Alex Comfort and Colin Ward (London, 2011);
Ryley, Making Another World Possible. See also: David Goodway. While he is more hesitant about anarchism’s claims for ‘tradition’ status, suggesting that the presence of a ‘shared community’ of thought is debatable, his book nevertheless suggests that this existed. David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool, 2006), 11–12.
Keith Michael Baker, ‘Introduction’, in Baker (ed.) The Trench Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: Volume 1 : The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), xi–xxiv (xii).
See also: Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘History of Political Theory in the Federal Republic of Germany: Strange Death and Slow Recovery’, in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds) The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001), 40–57.
John Dunn, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1996), 19.
George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Bakunin and Kropotkin (Oxford, 1991);
Koch, ‘Post-Structuralism and the Epistemo-logical Basis of Anarchism’; May, Poststructuralist Anarchism; David Miller, Anarchism (London, 1984); Newman, Politics of Postanarchism;
Richard Sonn, Anarchism (New York, 1992).
Herbert Read, Poetry and Anarchism (London, [1938] 1947), 61.
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Adams, M.S. (2015). Introduction. In: Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392626_1
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