Human Nature Review

“When the significance of poverty was realised”, writes Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, “the stage was set for the nineteenth century.” (2001, 116) Indeed, the transformation from the “Age of Rights” (Dagger 1989, 301) of the late 18 century – exemplified by Declaration of Independence in 1776 in the United States and Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens in 1789 in France – into, in the words of Hegel, the “bürgerliche Gesellschaft” of the 19 century brought social problems to the forefront of politics as well as of theory. A society of equals by rights necessarily laid bare the existing inequalities in wealth, birth and education. As Lorenz von Stein argued in 1850, the development of the constitutional state and thus of human rights was bound to change the very nature of society and state into one dominated and legitimized by social demands and their satisfaction. (See, e.g., 1959, vol. 3, 335-338) It is thus not a coincidence that the ideas of culture and education evolve out of this socio-political context as counterparts to rights. The traditional view holds that the British Romantic literary tradition played crucial role in developing a largely conservative idea of culture (see summary of these arguments in this book 276-284). As, e.g., E. P. Thompson argues, most of the British education movements of the early 19 century – mutual improvement societies, mechanics institutes, Sunday lectures etc – left “the customary experiential culture of the people” behind (1997, 19); that is: they were ideologically biased. It is arguable, however, that the same is true for the view of Romanticism as an opposition to liberal ideology, “identified above all with the reductive, calculating rationality of utilitarianism and economic science.” (vii) The book under review, originally a doctoral thesis at the University of