Hazlitt, Napoleon, and Literary Disinterestedness

Abstract

Chapter five examines the ‘strong intellectual affinity’ (Uttara Natarajan) between William Hazlitt’s early work and German philosophy, and in particular Kant, in the light of Robinson’s work on the philosopher and the meetings with Hazlitt that Robinson recorded in his unpublished manuscript diaries. Doing so reveals that a paradigm shift – from the imagination establishing disinterestedness diachronically to the ‘formative’, or synthesizing, mind along the lines of Kant – occurred in Hazlitt’s metaphysics around 1806, and that Robinson facilitated this paradigm shift. The chapter then looks at Robinson’s critical transmission of, and preface to, Gustav von Schlabrendorf’s Napoleon, and the French People under His Empire (1806), and how Robinson and Hazlitt began to drift apart as a result of their opposing views on Napoleon and the intensifying war with France. Ultimately, chapter five aims to demonstrate that Robinson’s critical admiration of Hazlitt the writer prevailed in accordance with Robinson’s theoretical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. The originality and stylistic finesse of Hazlitt’s works opened up the kind of ethical discourse whose underlying philosophy – Dissenting disinterestedness amplified by Kant – Robinson continued to share.