Culture and Politics from Puritanism to Enlightenment

Index viii PREFACE ture, science, and art. They include consideration of great and lesser individual figures, ensembles of ideas, and various cultural situations. The result, I think, is a collection of exceptional merit and interest. Culture and politics, the terms that keynote the general theme of the collection, do not lead us toward divided and distinguished worlds, nor to a simple parallelism, but to intricately connected domains whose separate boundaries are extraordinarily hard to demarcate. This is obviously the case in the anthropological conception of culture, which has no normative implications. Here culture, taken as the determinate patterns and ways of life of any human community, envelops politics, giving it its assumptions, values, and ideals. But our engagement in these essays is primarily with culture in its more restrictive normative meaning: if not necessarily in the perfectionist sense of Matthew Arnold, then as that, at any rate, which designates the intellectual and imaginative creations of civilization. Perhaps we might then want to say that politics is the domain of power and of collectivities-of rulers and ruled, the strong and the weak, of classes, interests, and parties-while culture is the domain of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic values in their immediate relation to individual development and consciousness. No doubt, this way of putting it seems to get at a valid distinction, which is nevertheless quite plainly inadequate. For how can we deny that politics too is a realm of values, at least of moral ones, or that normative culture is also subject to the play of power and that its shaping role is directed toward collective as well as to individual consciousness and development? The difficulties we thus encounter in delimiting culture and politics may perhaps cause us to conclude that the two are pure abstractions impossible to disengage from one another. Just as politics bears the stamp of culture in the values, aspirations, goals, and even the styles of political actors, so culture responds to relations of power in the values it projects, the institutions that serve it, and in such of its forms as high and popular, aristocratic and bourgeois, or elite and mass culture. Whatever the complications in defining the respective limits of culture and politics, no one familiar with the English society that appears in these essays would be tempted to dissociate the two. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the age of the Stuart PREFACE xi teenth centuries. J. G. A. Pocock's essay ranges widely in religious and republican thought in its pursuit of the character and sources of the Enlightenment in England which distinguished it from that elsewhere in Europe. The following three papers are all devoted to significant single figures. John M. Wallace's essay offers a discerning interpretation of Dryden's plays which enables us to see their closeness to contemporary preoccupations and demonstrates Dryden's debt to Stoic ethics in his commitment to heroic, noncommercial values. Richard S. Westfall's paper gives a striking portrait of Isaac Newton's career at Cambridge together with an incisive analysis of the conditions that made the university unpropitious to scientific activity. Robert M. Adams's essay on Lord Somers achieves a lively resuscitation of the Whig lawyer, politician, and patron that places him in representative relation to the post-1688 era and incidentally suggests his possible connection with Swift's Tale of a Tub. The two concluding papers look to the later eighteenth century and beyond. Isaac Kramnick, in his examination of the emerging genre of children's literature, suggests that its themes and content are infused with bourgeois values and the socialization needs of burgeoning industrial capitalism. The final essay by Ronald Paulson deals with both art and literature, with Rowlandson and Blake, as well as Paine, Burke, and Rousseau, and with unconscious as well as conscious motives, in a stimulating exploration of the responses of thinkers and artists to the great French revolution. This recital should sufficiently indicate the fine variety of the following essays, from which I trust the reader will derive the same instruction and enjoyment as did the audience to which they were first addressed. I recall with pleasure the monthly occasions when the seminar met, all present seated around a long table in the Clark Library's large baroque salon, faculty and graduate students of the University of California and other institutions in attendance, as well as some regular nonacademic guests who joined us. The papers invariably inspired discussion and argument, after which we adjourned for tea and conversation in the library's garden amidst the late afternoon sunshine; and as a sign of nature's benevolence on these occasions, I can testify that during the 1975-1976 academic year I spent in Los Angeles, the sun never failed to shine on the day of a seminar. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.