Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era (review)

In this intellectually audacious work, Leon Chai engages in a historically situated exploration of how 'theory' emerged as an object of investigation for Romantic thought. In doing this, Chai's aim is to provide the contemporary theoretical scene with the resources to escape what he identifies as 'our present theory impasse' — namely, the failure of post-1990 theory to come up with any new forms of theoretical reflection. Chai's response to this situation is to return to the birthplace of modern theory — the Romantic era — in the hope of uncovering modes of meta-theoretical reflection that may be capable of stimulating present-day theoretical activity. At a practical level, he achieves this by undertaking a survey of a variety of Romantic discourses that highlights the way in which these discourses posit theory as an object (rather than a means) of reflection. While synthetic surveys of this kind are of obvious scholarly interest in their own right, what makes Chai's particularly compelling is its sheer range: along with canonical Romantic texts like Percy Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life', Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Chai also considers such 'texts' as Napoleon's battle plan at Jena, the scientific writings of Humphry Davy and Évariste Galois's treatise on the solvability of polynomials. In each case, what Chai shows is how individual theoretical discourses succeed in escaping their association with local empirical circumstances by deriving a broader, developmental consciousness of themselves as theoretical discourses. The net result of this, according to Chai, is a form of theorizing that not only responds to its object of inquiry, but to an equal degree constitutes this same object on the basis of meta-theoretical prescriptions. Of the many admirable features of this book, the most striking is undoubtedly Chai's eclecticism in his approach to his topic. At a time when inter- and trans-disciplinarity are frequently only given lip service as useful paradigms for study in the humanities, Chai makes a very real effort to penetrate into disciplines that are traditionally classed as falling outside Romantic studies. In this connection, Chai's engagement with Galois Theory is particularly impressive. Although non-mathematically inclined readers are likely to find this chapter heavy going, it nevertheless speaks to Chai's seriousness of purpose and methodological rigour that he is prepared to explore a complicated topic in abstract algebra in its full formal detail. On the negative side, the only reservation I would have is with Chai's claim that the last great moment of universal theoretical reflection was that of Paris structuralism. Since the heyday of structuralism, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, cognitive science and sociobiology have all emerged as discourses with universalizing ambitions, and if these do not count as 'theory,' then Chai should at least say why. Nevertheless, I would unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the history of thought impinges on current theoretical concerns.