William B. Warner

If This Is Enlightenment Then What Is Romanticism

Building on our published argument that Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation (This Is Enlightenment, 2010), this essay ventures into the problem of periodization by putting Romanticism into that history. Arguing that Kant’s famous 1784 formulation of a self that dares to know is less a description of Enlightenment than a product of it, we examine the specific mediations that yielded that product – including changes in infrastructure, genres and formats, associational practices, and protocols. We show how Enlightenment emerged as a historical event from those changes as the very medium of mediation – its architecture of forms and tools, people and practices – became load‐bearing: a “platform” for a cumulative, collaborative, and ongoing enterprise. And, we argue, what happened after that event, happened on that platform. The relationship of the Romantic period to Enlightenment is that of an eventuality to an event: Romanticism took shape as a contingent possibility, a coming to terms with what had just happened in the terms that event had platformed – that is, had turned into a platform. We offer the American Revolution as a particularly useful example of the event of Enlightenment becoming a platform for Romantic eventualities. By thus extracting Romanticism from the history of ideas, we can offer new kinds of arguments about the period we call Romantic (the Romantic subject is, from the perspective offered by the history of mediation, the self on the platform of Enlightenment) and periodization itself (all changes and thus all periods are not the same – if this is Enlightenment scaled to a hierarchy of change [open hands wide] then this is Romanticism [open hands not as wide].

Communicating Liberty: The Newspapers of the British Empire as a Matrix for the American Revolution

Warner.communicating.liberty-1 Communicating Liberty: the Newspapers of the British Empire as a Matrix for the American Revolution William B. Warner “I beg your lordship’s permission to observe, and I do it with great concern, that this spirit of opposition to taxation and its consequences is so violent and so universal throughout America that I am apprehensive it will not be soon or easily appeased. The general voice speaks discontent… determined to stop all exports to and imports from Great Britain and even to silence the courts of law…foreseeing but regardless of the ruin that must attend themselves in that case, content to change a comfortable, for a parsimonious life,…” Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina, Wm. Bull to Earl of Dartmouth, July 31, 1774. [Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, Ed. K. G. Davies. (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1975) VIII: 1774, 154.] Momentous historical events often issue from a nexus of violence and communication. While American independence from Britain ultimately depended upon the spilling of blood on the battlefields of Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown, the successful challenge to the legitimacy of British rule in America was the culmination of an earlier communications war waged by American Whigs between the Stamp Act agitation of 1764-5 and the Coercive Acts of 1774. In response to the first of the Coercive acts--the Boston Port Bill--Boston Whigs secured a tidal wave of political and material support from throughout the colonies of British America. By the end of 1774, the American Secretary at Whitehall, Lord Dartmouth, was receiving reports from colonial Governors of North America, like the passage quoted above from the Lieutenant-Governor of South Caroline, William Bull. These official private letters to Whitehall confirmed a catastrophic unraveling of British authority in America: colonial legislatures

The Enlightenment: A (French) Restoration

A review of Dan Edelstein’s The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

The Invention of a Public Machine for Revolutionary Sentiment: The Boston Committee of Correspondence

While the American Revolution is often attributed to certain ideas or ideologies, it is often forgotten that the blend of feelings and ideas necessary for moving men and women to revolution requires the action of groups and the development of new genres for articulating sentiment. This article traces the innovations of the Boston committee of correspondence as it developed the committee form, shaped a new form of public communication (the popular declaration) and mobilized the towns of Massachusetts to resist the administrative initiatives of the British administration. Crucial to the success of this communication initiative is the text of The Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston and the way it performs a new species of emotional liberty, one that depends upon a new kind of distributed politics.