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Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry

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Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 3-5-2019 12:00 PM Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry Jonathan Stillman The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Faflak, Joel The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Jonathan Stillman 2019 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Stillman, Jonathan, "Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry" (2019). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 6061. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/6061 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Abstract Eighteenth-century, British georgic poetry’s shift away from its conventional theme of agriculture is often discussed as justifying Britain’s commercial imperialism and a broader commitment to progressivist Whig history. I argue that such approaches neglect its participation in the intellectual history of the liberal state itself. Georgics are exemplary texts to read alongside politico-economic treatises like Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) moralizes personal industry and innovation while veering from detailed examples of natural phenomena, to vast ecological networks, to nature’s determinative, physical and moral laws. Given georgics’ expanding, scientific and economy-adjacent interests, they notably omit the role of government in administering socio-economic order. Such poems indirectly communicate a moral philosophy amenable to the system of natural laws and natural rights in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) which gave rise to economic and political liberalism. In light of the groundbreaking economic science of François Quesnay which Smith influentially revised in his more historically-informed, open-ended analysis, states were increasingly regarded as serving rather than served by their subjects who now best fulfilled their natural law-based obligation to thrive by freely pursuing their rational self-interests. I provide case studies of georgics that indirectly justify liberalism’s own depreciation of the state. These poems primarily undermine a conception of state government as a locus of moral authority and social order by presenting alternative, nominally natural sources of socio- economic stability. William Mason’s The English Garden (1782) asserts that proprietors possessing enough wealth and taste to landscape their estates in a naturalistic style thereby prove their fitness to participate in liberal government. Scientist-poet Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of ii Nature (1803) rigorously argues for emergent order by presenting a physiological model in which a universal pleasure principle drives all organisms to imitate and synthesize ideas which enable innovation and self-transformation. He defines liberty as immanent to organisms’ volitional capacity and locates potential progress in his model’s innate operations. In Darwin, as elsewhere, government becomes an imperfect, refinable technology subservient to a nation’s economy. Keywords British Literature, Eighteenth Century, Georgic Poetry, Natural Law, Natural Rights, Property, Political Economy, Natural Philosophy, Gardens, John Locke, James Thomson, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, William Mason, Erasmus Darwin iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank my Supervisor, Professor Joel Faflak for his support throughout this project. He unfailingly comforted me when things felt difficult and was exceptionally helpful during the final push. Professors Mary Helen McMurran and Matthew Rowlinson also provided helpful advice in the early stages of my project. I also benefitted from the support of various other people including Leanne Trask who answered innumerable questions over the years and helped extricate me from more than one jam of my own creation. Professor Kim Solga was also enormously supportive, alternately acting as advisor, friend, landlord, and therapist. My family, particularly Mom and Uncle Wake, have been tolerant and supportive beyond anything I had any right to expect. I would also like to thank the English Departments at both the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the University of Western Ontario for offering me the chance to pursue my research. iv Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………….i Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..…1 The georgic tradition…………………………………………………………………………...1 Political economy’s contexts…………………………………………………………………...4 1 Volition and Appropriation in John Locke’s Labor Theory of Property………………............26 1.1 Something that is his own………………………………………………………………....26 1.2 Natural law and natural rights…………………………………………………………....31 1.3 The two models…………………………………………………………………………....40 1.4 Volition, calculative rationality, and liberty……………………………………………...44 2 Natural Law, Economy, and the State in James Thomson’s The Seasons………………..........54 2.1 The Seasons: Background and the argument…………………………………………......54 2.2 Physico-theology and the gap between nature’s laws and human knowledge…………....60 2.3 The virtue of love………………………………………………………………………….65 2.4 Physical laws analogized with natural laws……………………………………………...71 2.5 Human labor and technological progress………………………………………………...82 2.6 Statecraft………………………………………………………………………………….87 2.7 State apparatuses and the life spans of polities…………………………………………..91 v 3 Repetition and Difference: Adam Smith’s Historicizing Revision of François Quesnay’s Political Economy……………………………………………………….……………………….97 3.1 Economic laws and political economy…………………………………………………....97 3.2 Quesnay’s agrarian economy and his vision of Chinese statecraft……………………..106 3.3 Adam Smith and the open-ended power of liberal states………………………………..125 4 Naturalistic Landscaping, Georgic Gardens, and the Proprietor-Politician…………….........141 4.1 Gentleman gardeners…………………………………………………………………....141 4.2 Modern tastes, timeless virtues………………………………………………………….147 4.3 Garden management…………………………………………………………………….158 4.4 Two faces of the genius………………………………………………………………….167 5 “Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection!”: The Pleasures of Physiology and Mythopoeia in Erasmus Darwin’s Georgic Gardens……….........177 5.1 Darwin’s origins………………………………………………………………………....177 5.2 Pleasure, imitation, and volition in the sensorium……………………………………....183 5.3 Mythopoeia and georgic gardens………………………………………………………..198 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….......211 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………214 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………………….229 1 Introduction The georgic tradition The georgic is an antique, poetic genre fundamentally concerned with the production of order. Both in its classical form and in many of the versions written during its resurgence in eighteenth-century Britain, this production of order primarily appears in terms of humans confronting the problem of food scarcity by understanding and harnessing nature’s own productivity through agronomy and farming. Hesiod and Virgil (70 BCE-19 BCE) wrote the exemplary, classical Georgics. Hesiod’s Works and Days, written at the end of the eighth century BCE, argued for the moral value of industry while also functioning as a guide for managing a thriving oikos. The oikos was a self-sufficient, productive, social-unit with nominally natural power relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants. The oikos’s prosperity depended in part on the farmer’s sophrosyne, meaning the frugality and efficiency required to free the family from scarcity and to free the proprietor to participate in public politics. Like Hesiod’s poem, Virgil’s Georgics (29 BCE) venerated toiling farmers and the beauty and utility of nature’s physical forces and material resources. Both poems’ narrative tension arose from nature’s frequent intractability and from economic and political insecurity caused by years of civil war and governments’ inability to ensure socio-economic order. Virgil developed Hesiod’s less explicit analogy between farmers’ technical, though largely manual labor and the georgic poets’ own intellectual, literary labor. Georgics was the second poem in a triad of literary genres including the pastoral and the epic called the rota Virgiliana, which allowed poets to hone their professional skills on subjects of increasing world-historical 2 importance. These two poems established conventions which would persist through British elaborations of the form. Thus, georgic authors practice a high, literary style by applying it to nominally low subjects, which arguably become ennobled in the process. The poetry makes burdensome manual labor performed on fruitful soil a fit subject for the consideration of the upper ranks of society from whom poets sought approval and patronage. Georgics moralize industry by clothing it in beautiful figures and reiterate the physical
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