“The Bloody Poetry of War in Clausewitz”

Janis Langins (University of Toronto)

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) lived during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the blossoming of Romanticism in science and philosophy. His major work On War is considered a classic of military literature. Contrary to the views of some excitable laymen and admirers of war in the abstract, the professional soldier Clausewitz did not think there was anything “romantic” about war. Yet a reading of On War suggests an affinity between its author and the Romantic German philosophers of his time. This paper will attempt to identify a few of these themes and provide a summary presentation of some of the eighteenth-century context of military writing, especially of the image of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), against which Clausewitz reacted.

“Mill and Coleridge on the Commercial Spirit in Economics”

Margaret Schabas (University of British Columbia-Vancouver)

In 1834, John Stuart Mill remarked in private that, “on the whole, there is more food for thought—and the best kind of thought—in Coleridge than in all other contemporary writers . . . Few persons have exercised more influence over my thoughts and character than Coleridge.” Mill and Coleridge make for odd bedfellows. Not only were they at opposites ends of the political spectrum, Mill a liberal if not a socialist, and Coleridge a staunch conservative after a jejeune brush with the Jacobites, but they also drank from two different philosophical streams, Mill from British empiricism and Coleridge from German idealism. Mill endorsed the forward march of Newtonian physics, and argued that economics was a science in the same manner. Coleridge, a Romantic, found the reductionist appeal to atomism and the deductive theory of Ricardo almost repulsive. Mill was respectful of Christian belief but kept his economics entirely secular. Coleridge was deeply religious and built his economics on a duty to care for the poor and destitute. For some forty years, Coleridge wrote extensively on the political and economic debates of his day, both as a journalist and as an essayist. While there is nothing that approximates the theoretical depth offered by Mill’s economics, I will argue that there is nonetheless evidence of Coleridge’s imprint, for example the fostering of individual freedom, strong dislike of the “commercial spirit” and romantic appeals to the end of economic growth.

“’These can not all have an interest for England’: Symmetry, Beauty and Poetry Unrealisable in Nature”

Gordon McOuat (University of King's College)

By mid-nineteenth century, it was not advisable to begin (or end) a work on natural philosophy in Britain with a discussion of beauty and the sublime – in any case, not in a serious scientific work. Although Poetry might be "Realised in Nature" in the first half of the century (Levere), by the 1830s and 40s that Romantic route was well blocked (pace Richard Owen's lingering resonances in his transcendental morphology). This paper is about one or two of those circumstances, examining the unhappy reception of Ørsted's Soul in Nature and Oken's Elements of Physiophilosophy as examples of the ways and methods in which Romantic science was given the heave-ho in English corridors of science and the consequences for science in the second half of the century and beyond.

“Mobile Technologies of the Sublime: The Balloon and the Guillotine”

Mi Gyung Kim (North Carolina State University)

Historians of science are familiar with the performance of pneumatic chemistry as spectacle. However, the newly discovered “airs” mostly entertained the literate “public.” In contrast, the balloon mania that swept across Europe in the 1780s engendered crowds of uneducated “people.” The balloon ascent became a problematic political experiment where the authorities had to contend with the imagined, aerial empire that infused enthusiasm for science among the composite crowd. While they wished to discipline the crowd as well-behaving citizens of a scientific nation-empire, or a mass “public,” a failed balloon ascent incited a riot to challenge the status quo. Popular science in the modern sense – designed to educate the mass – began with the balloon experiment, rather than the earlier demonstration lectures. Through pneumatic studies and balloon ascents, chemistry became a frontier field of natural philosophy and consolidated a mass public to brew a cult of reason just before the French Revolution. The guillotine as a scientific killing machine mobilized this resonance of mass veneration and enthusiasm for science the balloon had generated as a “mobile theater.” Our understanding of the French Revolution should consider the continuity in state technologies, especially in mobilizing the crowd as potential citizens, as well as the discontinuity in elite ideology. Proto-romantic sentiments of the sublime and the terror were conveyed through the mobile machines – the balloon and the guillotine – that traveled to incite and to consolidate such intense sentiments for composite collectives.