Abstract
Whatever the interminable discussions regarding the true meaning and import of Hobbes’ political philosophy, one key question it poses to post-Restoration society is this: if the state is indeed an artificial man that requires the sacrifice of a natural portion of our being to enter, what—beyond pure violence and doctrine to shape the drive to self-preservation—is capable of holding it together? If bodies are themselves composites, refashioned and maintained by the material quest for pleasure and vainglory, what parts must be sacrificed to polity, and what happens to those parts necessarily excised in becoming part of a polity? These questions precipitate a crisis in the thought, experience, and acts of individuals. Libertinism is one of the attempted solutions to this crisis. It is, moreover, a paradoxical solution that, in explicitly exacerbating the aporias of materialism—that is, in literally digging its own grave—offers new possibilities for embodied action that are taken up by subsequent thinkers, anticipating (if in a wittier and less prolix fashion) the writings around ‘sensibility’ from Sterne to Sade. This article argues that the acts and writings of John Wilmot (1647–1680), the Earl of Rochester, exemplary libertine, poet and courtier, show him to be a crucial negative precursor for the theories of ‘sensibility’ that dominated the following century.
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Notes
- 1.
Wilmot 1999.
- 2.
- 3.
Courthorpe 1903, 465.
- 4.
The critical commentary on Rochester’s Satyr is voluminous, in stark contrast with the rest of his poetic output. See, for instance, Moore 1943, 393–401; Fujimura 1958, 582; Berman 1964, 364–365; Knight 1970, 254–260; Johnson 1975, 365–374; Robinson 1973, 108; Cousins 1984, 429–439; and Russell 1986, 246.
- 5.
Robinson 1973, 108.
- 6.
Robinson 1973, 109.
- 7.
In the same year that Robinson’s summary appeared, Jeremy Treglown published an article on Rochester’s debt to English sources, leaving Hobbes altogether aside, while locating Rochester in an older English poetic tradition. See Treglown 1973, 42–48.
- 8.
See Chernaik 1995. Chernaik’s important contribution to the Hobbes/Rochester relationship pays sharp attention to the cultural work performed by the Restoration wits’ appropriation of Hobbesian philosophy in a society undergoing a destabilising shift from a culture of status to one of contract. Chernaik, however, leaves no room for the possibility that Rochester was engaging Hobbes in anything but a haphazard, careless, and inconsistent fashion. Other contextualising works, in their emphasis on the performative dimension of a Hobbes-inspired libertine lifestyle, similarly fail to elaborate on a more specific engagement with Hobbes’s political philosophy. See Webster 2005; Turner 2002; Combe, 1998.
- 9.
Parkin 2007, 1.
- 10.
For a critique of Rochester scholarship that takes issue with the critical tendency to dismiss the seriousness of Rochester’s works, seeing them as the idle amusements of a spoiled, attention-seeking rake, see Combe 1998 . While we agree with Combe on the need to read the poetry and performance as contributions to political argument and theory, Combe, however, doesn’t extensively address Rochester’s engagement with Hobbes’s political theory of sovereignty.
- 11.
Kahn 2004, 21–24.
- 12.
Kahn 2004, 23.
- 13.
See Bartlett 2011.
- 14.
- 15.
Lacan 1966, 645.
- 16.
On the popularity of St. James’s Park among court wits and its reputation for amorous intrigue, see Narain 2005, 559.
- 17.
Wilmot 1999, Lines 9–10.
- 18.
Sharpe 1987, 168.
- 19.
For a brilliant reading of the ambiguous nature of poetic references to these two mythic figures of civilisation in early-modern poetry, see Greene 1982, 233–241.
- 20.
Waller 2001, 500–503, Line 98.
- 21.
Wilmot 1999, Lines 13–18.
- 22.
Wilmot 1999, Line 25.
- 23.
Sawday 1992, 171.
- 24.
Sawday 1992, 171.
- 25.
It is striking to us that ‘Restoration’ has so rarely been thought as a philosophical concept. In this regard, the remarks of Alain Badiou in a French context are at once illuminating and somewhat lacking insofar as the English elements are not considered: ‘Since a restoration is never anything other than a moment in history that declares revolutions to be both abominable and impossible, it comes as no surprise that it adores number, which is above all the number of dollars or euros […]. Most importantly, every restoration is horrified by thought and loves only opinions; especially the dominant opinion, as summarized once and for all in François Guizot’s imperative: “Enrich yourselves!” The real, as the obligatory correlate of thought, is considered by the ideologues of restorations—and not entirely without reason—as always liable to give rise to political iconoclasm, and hence Terror. A restoration is above all an assertion regarding the real; to wit, that it is always preferable to have no relation to it whatsoever’ (Badiou 2007, 26).
- 26.
- 27.
For an interesting discussion on Rochester’s use of highly conventional generic categories to convey his destabilising, levelling narratives, see Sanchez 2005, 441–459.
- 28.
- 29.
Achinstein 1994, 96–101.
- 30.
According to Tuck, ‘Hobbes by 1651 […] was a kind of utopian. Leviathan is not simply (and maybe not at all) an analysis of how political societies are founded and conduct themselves. It is also a vision of how a commonwealth can make us freer and more prosperous than ever before in human history, for there has never yet been a time (according to Hobbes) when the errors of the philosophers were fully purged from society, and men could live a life without false belief’. Tuck 1993, 137–138.
- 31.
Tilmouth 2007, 259.
- 32.
- 33.
Narain 2005, 560–562.
- 34.
Wilcoxon 1976, 277.
- 35.
Wilmot 1999, Lines 97–100.
- 36.
Wilmot 1999, Line 113, 114.
- 37.
- 38.
See Klein 1994.
- 39.
See McKeon 2005.
- 40.
Vila 1998, 2.
- 41.
Farley-Hills 1972, 194.
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Chua, B., Clemens, J. (2013). Rochester’s Libertine Poetry as Philosophical Education. In: Lloyd, H. (eds) The Discourse of Sensibility. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02702-9_3
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