In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

142 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW the outlook of the essays to that of early Realist writers like Stendhal. Hazlitt, in The Spirit oftheAge, which climaxes this most productive period, defined his titleterm as "the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities." Kinnaird comments that "an 'intellectual refinement' that might itself become a knowledge of the 'natural infirmities' with which it is warring—this would appear to be Hazlitt's last and modest hope fora progressive 'humanity' ..." A long book, dealing with Hazlitt's philosophical, political, literary, and art criticism as well as with the personal essays. Critic ofPoweris heavy going, partly because of the demanding style, with sentences commonly running over six or eight lines, and paragraphs a page or more. But it seems overlong only in the section of the conclusion which searches Hazlitt's works for evidence of his religious devotion: there is none. So far I have followed the tradition of describing Hazlitt as a radical (see especially Terry Eagleton, "William Hazlitt: An Empiricist Radical," New BlackFriars , March, 1973, which ought to be reprinted). But Kinnaird indicates a need to qualify the use of this term. In the largest sense of course Hazlitt earned it in his courageous struggle against the Tory press, but it best describes him in the period of the underratedPoliticalEssays, with Sketches ofPublic Characters, ca. 1813 to 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre and the hated Six Acts against labor. At that time, Kinnaird shows, Hazlitt was writing as the conscious cultural voice of a movement, Westminster Radicalism. In these essays Hazlitt expresses his contempt for those of "a certain respectability" who claim that "truth lies in the middle between the extremes of right and wrong." Later, in 1824, he himself betrays the posture of respectable liberalism toward the radical: "[Shelley] gave great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet ..." Even Hazlitt's greatest writings of the 1820's convey a disturbing mixture of Enlightenment optimism and the misanthropy that always seems to accompany liberalism; perhaps it was the recent overthrow of the Bourbons once more in 1830 that tipped the balance in the end and inspired him to utter his reputed last words, "Well, I've had a happy life." Patrick Story SOCIALISM AND SEXUAL POLITICS Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics ofEdward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. London: Pluto Press, 1977. 198pp. $3.95 paper. Some of the most substantive contributions of contemporary marxist and feminist thought have been in the area of daily life. Seeing the personal as political, both movements have offered dialectical approaches to the issues of sex roles, the sexual division of labor, and sexuality. This is not the first time such issues have been 143 REVIEWS thought about, but rather this process has been building from an already rich heritage on the left. One of the links to this heritage is the early socialist movement in Britain, from 1880 to 1895, which was not only able to reveal how bourgeois ideology permeated private life, but was also able to demonstrate alternate ways of living by redefining sex roles and by exploring and challenging traditional notions of sexuality. Their chief success was one of political imagination, which affected both socialist theory and practice. However, as late nineteenth and early twentieth century marxist politics hardened into dogma, as state domination increased and as economic conditions declined, this socialist imagination proved fragile and expendable. It also proved to be the heart of the socialist movement, an organ that politics too often ignores. The study before us offers a balanced and subtle picture of those days; it is part of a tradition of historical and political reappraisal by younger marxist, feminist, gay, and new left historians in Britain. By concentrating on what might first appear to be marginal figures but whom the authors describe as "socialist pioneers," Rowbotham and Weeks have taken an important step towards a renewed understanding of the virtues and...

pdf

Share