A “huge colossal constable”: Liberalism and International Law in Joseph Fawcett’s The Art of War
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Brian Folker is an Associate Professor at Central Connecticut State University. He has an additional essay forthcoming in the Arizona Quarterly.
Footnotes
1. The proposed biography is alluded to by Charles Lamb in a letter to Hazlitt dated 15 January 1806; see The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, E. V. Lucas, ed. (New York: AMS P, 1968) 374.
2. Joseph Fawcett, War Elegies (London: J. Johnson, 1801) iii–iv.
3. Joseph Fawcett, Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1798) vii–viii; a copy of this text is available online at www.archive.org. Hereafter cited in the text by page in the 1798 text. Wordsworth’s reminiscence is cited in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–49) Vol. 5: 375.
4. Quoted in Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. 1 (London: 1876) 17. The other three instructors are Thomas Holcroft, George Dyson, and Samuel Coleridge.
5. Gentleman’s Magazine of February 1804, quoted in Edmund G. Miller, “Hazlitt and Fawcett,” The Wordsworth Circle 8 (1977): 377.
6. William Hazlitt, Complete Works, P. P. Howe, ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930– 34) Vol 3: 171.
7. William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Early Years, 1787–1805, Ernest de Selincourt, ed, C. L. Shaver, rev. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 447.
8. Jerome Christiansen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000) 146.
9. J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1797–1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1982); see especially 1–29. I make extended use of Cookson in the argument that follows; also valuable is Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c 1780–1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995); see especially 31–73 and 96–107. Wahrman describes how, during the 1790s, the rhetoric of a besieged English political middle became conflated with the rhetoric of a social middle. He accuses Cookson, however, of inconsistency in his descriptions of the state of middle class support for the war with France. My essential concerns, however, are not with the precise historical extent of either support or opposition to the war. Rather, I am concerned with the terms used by Fawcett and others to imagine the possibility of peace and how these terms resonate in mature forms of liberalism.
10. See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–18; Fukuyama quotes extensively from Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Allan Bloom, ed. (New York: Basic, 1969). He expands his argument (and abandons the question mark) in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free P, 1992).
11. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Shocken, 1968) 260.
12. Fawcett, The Art of War, lines 384–407. The most readily available text of this poem is in Arthur Beatty, “Joseph Fawcett: The Art of War. Its Relation to the Early Development of William Wordsworth,” University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature 2 (1918): 224– 69. Beatty provides a full reading text of the 1795 version of the poem. In addition to its comparative availability, I’ve chosen to work with this version of the poem (rather than the revised version that appears in the 1798 Poems) because of its proximity to the hottest period of the Revolution controversy, and because it appears to be the version with which Wordsworth was familiar. All further references to The Art of War are to the line numbers of this text and are cited parenthetically in the text.
13. For the commitment of the Friends of Peace to this argument, see Cookson 41–42, 61–68. Its classic expression is Kant’s Perpetual Peace, which appeared (in German) in 1795, the same year as The Art of War. More recent exponents of this thesis include: David Mitrany, A Working Peace System: An Argument for the Functional Development of...
