The Private Life of Radicalism

For radicals such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, the work of transforming the world was deeply personal. Revolution wasnt simply something they did; it defined them. If that seems naive or melodramatic, its because it is. One might even argue that such a naive and melodramatic understanding of the self and of the world was essential to their particular philosophical and political interventions. Such personal investment may have been necessary to generate the kind of energy required to foment revolution. The personal price of radicalism is one of the major themes of both Andrew Cayton’s biography of Wollstonecraft, Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (2013) and Seth Cotlar’s exploration of Paine’s symbolic role in the formation of American political culture, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Romanticism in the Early Republic (2011). Both books approach their central figures as agents of Revolution who would quickly become a victim of their own revolutionary fervor. Paine and Wollstonecraft, who developed a friendship during the time they were both in Paris working on behalf of the French Revolution, would often collapse the boundary between their lives as individuals and their roles as advocates and agitators for equality and social justice. They were not mere advocates for revolution; they turned themselves into symbols of the kind of radical transformations they sought to engender. Such overidentification would cost them both dearly. Paradoxically, the failure to separate themselves from their politics limited both their effectiveness and their audience, even as it also animated their work and won them devoted followers.

One way to describe the problem would be to say that Wollstonecraft and Paine overestimated the impact they could have. They invested too much of themselves because they thought they could singlehandedly create the change they wanted. If we were judgmental, we might say that their egos got the best of them, and that may be true, but we might also say, more generously, that they misunderstood the limits of their own agency. Revolution demands total commitment. Without radicals like Paine and Wollstonecraft, largescale transformational change would not be possible. At the same time, revolution is greater than any one individual, and the structural shifts that create the opportunity for agents of change like Wollstonecraft and Paine almost always supersede their agency. Russ Castronovo has recently suggested, in an essay that explores the analogies between the public dissemination of state secrets in 1776 and in the current US, that “liberal subjects … may be most revolutionary when they cease to be identified or act as subjects at all” (426). Drawing from network theorists such as Manuel Castells (The Rise of the Network Society [1996]) and Friedrich Kittler (Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [1990]), Castronovo tempers the importance of individual agency, contending that changes in infrastructure not only precede individual agency but also ultimately enable it. In a lovely irony, he finds that “networks do not so much disperse agency as consolidate and safeguard it” (428). Human agency, while necessary to fomenting revolution, becomes an effect of or a supplement to the structural changes that make revolution possible.

The dynamics of agency and infrastructure, as Castronovo’s timely essay shows, remain a crucial issue for the analysis of revolutionary change. What enables transformation on such a large scale? How do individual actors and broader social, political, cultural, and economic forces interact? The key figure for thinking about these questions is none other than the radical, because radicals are by definition most fully engaged with the forces of change shaping their historical moment. They exert their agency, as Castronovo reminds us, yet their capacity for agency is shaped and made possible by the new possibilities made available by deeper changes in the infrastructure, whether they be new economic fluidity, changes in systems of communication, or revisions to legal notions of rights and...