Thomas Carlyle and the Political Universe: From American Transcendentalism to an Elusive Post-Liberalism

by Brian Wolfel

Overview

Thomas Carlyle and the Political Universe: From American Transcendentalism to an Elusive Post-Liberalism recognizes and reckons with Thomas Carlyle’s broad and deep influence on politics, on a global scale. Having influenced and inspired iconic and impactful political thinkers and actors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr., among so many others, Carlyle is a captivating persona in modern political history. In this way, if there is one person who could be said to be the central figure of what may be called the “political universe,” all that the term politics comprises, Brian Wolfel argues that it is Thomas Carlyle. As the point of nexus of so many political figures embodying such a diversity of political persuasions, Carlyle is also a significant philosopher in Plato’s lineage whose ideas can be further constructed and developed in the context of the work of prominent 20th-century political thinkers such as John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Ellul, and Sayyid Qutb. Carlyle’s conceptualization of transcendentalism in Sartor Resartus was a foundation for Emerson, Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism. In the midst of ideological battle in the 20th and 21st centuries, among such ideologies as liberalism, communism, fascism, and Islamism, Carlyle’s transcendentalism largely went unnoticed as a potential ideological competitor. Carlyle’s transcendentalism can be developed and constructed in the contexts of modern political theory and religion, and can be defended and promoted as a potential post-liberalism, a refinement of and evolution from liberal democracy and capitalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666954234
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/16/2024
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Brian M. Wolfel is postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University Fort Wayne, and he has previously taught at Hamilton College and SUNY 'swego.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Scope of Thomas Carlyle in the History of Political Thought

Chapter 2: Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and the Limits of Political Theory

Chapter 3: Carlyle’s Transcendentalism as a Platonic Political Philosophico-Religion: A Comparison of Transcendentalism with Islam and Islamism

Chapter 4: The Antagonism of Thomas Carlyle and John Rawls

Chapter 5: Carlyle’s Construction of Justice and Contemporary Political Philosophy

Chapter 6: Carlyle, Ellul, and Their Critiques of Modernity

Chapter 7: Carlyle’s Theory of the Phoenix and the Dissolution of Liberalism?

Conclusion: Carlyle’s Transcendentalism and a New Stage of Political Development?

Editorial Reviews

In this book, the first of its kind to analyze Thomas Carlyle systematically as a political theorist, Brian Wolfel provides a view of Carlyle’s anti-liberal legacy which is a timely and useful contribution to scholarship. Carlyle’s neo-Platonic approach to spirituality exposes the vulnerabilities and diminishing returns inherent to dogma and materialism. In Wolfel’s analysis, the decline of attention to this aspect of his legacy reflects the decline of the humanities as a whole, and Carlyle’s re-positioning formulates their defense by offering a post-liberal vision beyond capitalism and individualism.”

Zoe Beenstock

Bringing Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus into dialogue with the work of Rawls, MacIntyre, Ellul, Qutb, and others, Brian Wolfel argues thoughtfully and provocatively for the twenty-first century relevance of Carlyle’s transcendentalist philosophy, conceived here as an anti-dogmatic, post-liberal political ideology with the potential to move us beyond the limitations hyper-consumerism and political factionalism.”

John M. Ulrich

In this refreshingly thoughtful and uninhibited study, Wolfel distinguishes Carlyle from his Victorian contemporaries by emphasizing his heroic resistance to the materialist blueprints of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. The Sage of Chelsea emerges from this study wearing clothes that might surprise his modern detractors: in his prescient attacks against the environmental, political, and economic degradation of his times, Wolfel’s Carlyle reclaims the mantle of a prophet.”

David R. Sorensen