Vitalism’s Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics

This essay examines how John Thelwall, the notorious political radical inspired by the French Revolution, deployed scientific vitalism in order to promote economic and political change in late eighteenth-century Britain. In adapting Agamben’s notion of “economic theology” to revolutionary contexts, this piece argues that “economy” in several senses serves to mediate between Thelwall’s vitalist conception of the human body and its availability for creating more equitable socioeconomic relations. In the case of The Peripatetic (1793), Thelwall’s sprawling, multi-generic novel, his commitment to systemic openness—both physiological and economic—produces a story oriented around the principle of what he calls “susceptibility,” which generates three crucial reformist features: an acute sensitivity to suffering of all kinds (both animal and human), a relentless unmaking and remaking of systemic constructs, and ultimately a recasting of traditional notions of political sovereignty by radically distributing it throughout the natural and human world.