Bulletin n. 2-3/2012
October 2012-February 2013
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Hamilton Paul
    ‘Realpoetik’: Revolution by Other Means in European Romantic Restoration Thought
    in History of European Ideas , Volume 38, Issue 3, Special Issue: Republican Exchanges, c.1550–c.1850/Intellectual Exchanges: In Theory and in Practice . ,  2012 ,  370-386
    This essay speculates about the degree to which a counter-image of Europe imagined by Romantic period writers showed them to be transforming an inherited idea of the republic of letters for political purposes. While Anglophone romanticists recognise that the French Revolution is an indisputable agent in shaping the contemporary English literary imagination, they then usually ignore the role played by the Restoration which followed. Romantic criticism can perhaps learn an appropriate sensitivity here from the work of critics of English Restoration writing of the seventeenth century. That epochal uncertainty, when the regicides beheaded the King and then wondered what to do politically, was succeeded in the Restoration by a kind of Dissenting determination to continue under or memorialise that uncertainty, not as a dilemma but as the experience of political opportunity. A similar pattern of pursuing revolution by other means is visible in the political revisionism and literary experimentation of post-Revolutionary Romantic radicals. In my picture, then, the Romantic transformation of the republic of letters recovers an older literary republicanism. In what is here dubbed Realpoetik the battle for what is to be political reality is fought on a rhetorical field whose free speech is exemplary of what politics should be like.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016