During our current great period of cultural Thermidor, we bear more than a little resemblance to the England of the 1820s. Now, as then, the star of political reaction is in the ascendent. The worst kinds of corruption, abuse, and authoritarianism are welcomed on the political right. And meanwhile, the response from the left has been strangely muted. We are slightly mortified now by what seem like the excesses of an earlier political age of idealism and sweeping plans; and so we feel we have no leg to stand on as we watch our hopes be destroyed and betrayed.
By the 1820s, most of the British intelligentsia—who had once hailed the French Revolution as the dawning of a new age and the clarion call of the liberation of humankind—had either converted to the cause of reaction and "Legitimacy"—or died or gone abroad. Even those who remained loyal to the cause of "Reform" felt that they could not defend it quite as naively as they had done in the 1790s. So it is with us today: liberals are mostly a tad embarrassed by the language they used just five years ago. All the heroes of 2020 are now either derided on the right or quietly ignored on the left as a sort of family shame.
All of which makes it a fitting time to read more Hazlitt—as I have been doing off-and-on all my politically-conscious life.
In my teenage years—when I first discovered Hazlitt—he seemed to me the hero of left-wing "consistency" that I had been needing. In an era when everyone I met told me that I would eventually ripen into a conservative with age; when every adult quoted to you that apocryphal line (often misattributed to Churchill) about how if you aren't a conservative by thirty-five, you have no brain; when the Trotskyites of yesteryear all seemed to have become apologists for the new Neoconservative Imperium—Hazlitt was one of the few historical models who suggested to me that it was possible to remain loyal to a single set of ideals and commitments across one's whole political and intellectual lifespan. I therefore clung to him for dear life.
I must confess, though, that my teenage love of Hazlitt was more for the idea of Hazlitt than the reality. When I tried to read him, I often got bogged down in the repetitions and the verbiage (with the exception of such outstandingly approachable essays as "On Persons With One Idea" or "On the Ignorance of the Learned"). And when I encountered Hazlitt's political writings—in particular—they often breathed a spirit of moderation and magnanimity that was galling to me. I wanted to see Hazlitt lay into and anathematize the monsters of my youth. If his whole reputation was founded on the idea that he had been loyal to the cause of liberal reform, when everyone else had turned away, I wanted to see him flog all the apostates and turn-coats, the way Browning would go on to do in the "Lost Leader." But here he was instead conceding that Burke, for instance, sometimes had a point.
Now that I am actually thirty-five, though—the critical year, according to the made-up "Churchill" quote that every Republican was sure to parrot at you, if you happened to be a liberal teenager in a red state during the Bush years—I have not in fact ripened into a conservative; but I do have a lot more patience for the stately pace at which Hazlitt unfolds his liberal polemics. I realize now that Hazlitt often does anathematize the people who most deserve it—the editor of the Quarterly Review, say—and that those he treats with more even hands—Southey and Burke, e.g.—are damned more effectively by this method than if he had simply attacked them with unmixed vitriol. When the critic shows himself willing to acknowledge their good points—their flaws stand out all the more sharply.
Besides, I see now that Hazlitt's relative moderation (and his opponents in the 1820s I'm sure would not have attributed that quality to him; but that just tells you exactly how much splenetic rage my teenage self was hoping to find in him), was actually part of what enabled him to achieve political consistency. Precisely because he had never assumed that all the points—all the advantages and arguments—were on one side of the question (as so many others had done), he could not be surprised with age to discover that there were actually points on the other. This saved him from having to make the sudden and embarrassing type of political volte-face that so many others of his era did—Southey, Wordsworth, etc.
The problem with someone like Southey—Hazlitt writes in the Spirit of the Age (his collection of contemporary character sketches)—is that he was utterly blinkered in the radicalism of his youth. He could see only arguments in favor of the French Revolution and human perfectibility and reason and enlightenment. And so, when his hopes failed him, he became an equally blinkered partisan of reaction. The through-line in both stages was Southey's need to have all good on one side.
"Mr. Southey has not fortitude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the nature of things," writes Hazlitt. Which is fascinating—because many people would think that a fundamentally conservative sentiment; except that Hazlitt uses it to defeat the conservative excesses of his opponents. Hazlitt's point is that if one never expected one side of the political coin to be perfect—then the discovery of its imperfections—the failure of the French Revolution or the realization that one's republican heroes have feet of clay—would not prompt one to immediately turn the coin over in disgust.
For this reason, Hazlitt's famous political "consistency" is affirmed rather than defeated by his willingness to concede the good points in alternative positions. This is where he differs from so many other partisans. In his essay on Malthus in the same collection—for instance—he takes issue at one point with Godwin for trying to refute the dismal clergyman by contradicting all of his premises. Hazlitt suggests that it would be far more effective, as an argumentative strategy, to admit some of Malthus's premises—and then to show how his preferred conclusions do not inevitably follow from them ("we think [Godwin] has judged ill in endeavouring to invalidate the principle, instead of confining himself to point out the misapplication of it"). His point is that Malthus's worst offense was not to point out some logical limit to the increase of population; but rather to unwarrantably infer from this the extraordinary leap that all possible forms of poor relief or social justice must be doomed to fail.
Hazlitt makes the same response to Burke—in the earlier collection, the Table-Talk. There, he chooses to rebut Burke not by denying all the latter's premises, but by denying their application to the present instance. Burke no doubt raised a valid point that many forms of liberty must have an organic growth in the institutions of their own societies, etc. Hazlitt didn't deny it; he merely denied that the same fact of human nature doomed all schemes for reform and social improvement, or required passive submission to the reigning social order. "That which, if applied as a general observation on human affairs, is a valuable truth suggested to the mind," writes Hazlitt, "may, when forced into the interested defence of a particular measure or system, become the grossest and basest sophistry."
One thinks here of how J.D. Vance, say, often appropriates some broad human truths; true, no doubt, up to a point—about how charity begins at home, say; or about how human affections extend outward in concentric circles, rather than reaching all at once to embrace the entirety of humanity—and uses them to defend unconscionable evils. When Vance cites the concept of the Ordo Amoris to say that it is too much to ask of human nature to expect us to instantly "love" every stranger on the opposite side of the globe—the most effective rebuttal is not to deny him in this premise. No doubt, up to this point, he's right. But the insane leap is that Vance then applies this premise to justify locking up innocent people without due process in a prison camp in the Everglades or a torture dungeon in El Salvador. And that's where an idea that worked well enough "as a general observation on human affairs" suddenly becomes "the grossest and basest sophistry"—because it has been applied as an "interested defense of a particular measure or system."
This is also Hazlitt's approach to the subject of William Godwin, except in reverse. Godwin, he notes, had gone from being the hero of the 1790s to falling into the blackest obloquy. And perhaps, Hazlitt concedes, Godwin's philosophical radicalism—his anarchistic belief in the perfectibility of all human nature and the ultimate superfluity of any forms of coercion or restraint—seemed impossible to maintain in the same starry-eyed form in the 1820s. But—just because it had been wrong in its most extreme consequences—Hazlitt asks—did that mean it had been wrong entirely? "[I]t by no means follows," Hazlitt points out, "because reason is found not to be the only infallible or safe rule of conduct, that it is no rule at all; or that we are to discard it altogether with derision and ignominy."
One doesn't actually have to choose between being an anarchist or a monarchist; a Jacobin or a Tory, with nothing in between. Having discovered that human beings are not imminently going to be perfected is no reason not to try to improve them. To discover that every scheme of human melioration will still contain some elements of evil is no reason to tolerate every present abuse, inequity, and ill. The answer to the discovery that there are flaws in the diamond of liberalism is not to suddenly become "a conservative at thirty-five"—just as the best argument against conservatism would not be to deny that it has any strength or force at all in its underlying premises (for that would be absurd), but rather to point out that they don't inevitably lead to the quietist position of "passive obedience" and "Legitimacy" that Hazlitt deplores; still less to "anticipatory obedience" toward a would-be Trump dictatorship today.
Southey's evolution from believing that "whatever is, is wrong" to "whatever is, is right," as Hazlitt puts it—misses rather a great deal of middle ground in the transition. Political convictions are not contracts of adhesion—handed to us in one lump on a "take it or leave it" basis. They are always negotiable instruments. To A.H. Clough's point in a great poem—the temporary defeat of liberal hopes in one domain does not mean that therefore, "as things have been, they remain" ever afterward. Clough was talking about the failure of the liberal revolutions on the Continent in 1848, over which the "Legitimists" crowed. But they would not be crowing still if they could see that—a century later—most of those same continental countries would be liberal democracies. Clough and Hazlitt were proved right in the event—even if it took a while; whereas those who pointed to the failure of the French Revolution as proof positive against all reform would be bitterly disappointed to see the gradual extending of the franchise and the rise of social democracy over the next centuries.
America as a whole is now of course going through a kind of Southey-esque volte-face on a collective scale. We all cringe at the slogans of just five years ago—"abolish the police," etc.—in the same way that the intellectuals of 1820 were all embarrassed at the recollection of their own Godwinian enthusiasms of 1790. And now, as then, we have catapulted ourselves to the opposite extreme while bypassing plenty of reasonable way-stations in the middle. I think most of us now realize that society cannot do without some form of coercion to give force to the law. But now the Trump administration is utterly dismantling every sensible reform that would have at least reduced and mitigated police violence—and liberals are too scared to say boo about it, because we are ashamed of our own excesses from the 2020 protests.
No one in the Trump era has made the Southeyan volte-face more conspicuously and illustratively than Vice President J.D. Vance. Here, as we know, is someone who went in a matter of years from declaring himself a "Never Trump Guy"—to trying to prosecute anyone who had ever said the same. Here is someone who depicted Trump as a would-be dictator in 2016—and then tried to sic the Justice Department on a columnist who had dared to say the same thing in 2023. Tell me truly if Hazlitt's character sketch of Southey does not go some length toward elucidating this otherwise inexplicable behavior:
Of all mortals he is surely the most impatient of contradiction, even when he has completely turned the tables on himself. Is not this very inconsistency the reason? Is he not tenacious of his opinions, in proportion as they are brittle and hastily formed? Is he not jealous of the grounds of his belief, because he fears they will not bear inspection, or is conscious he has shifted them? Does he not confine others to the strict line of orthodoxy, because he has himself taken every liberty? Is he not afraid to look to the right or the left, lest he should see the ghosts of his former extravagances staring him in the face? Does he not refuse to tolerate the smallest shade of difference in others, because he feels that he wants the utmost latitude of construction for differing so widely from himself? Is he not captious, dogmatical, petulant in delivering his sentiments, according as he has been inconsistent, rash, and fanciful in adopting them? He maintains that there can be no possible ground for differing from him, because he looks only at his own side of the question! He sets up his own favourite notions as the standard of reason and honesty, because he has changed from one extreme to another! He treats his opponents with contempt, because he is himself afraid of meeting with disrespect! He says that "a Reformer is a worse character than a house-breaker," in order to stifle the recollection that he himself once was one!
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