William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice. As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice: the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse, but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion, to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.
“Strike not from Law’s firm hand that awful rod”: Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain and the Penalty of Death
This essay argues that Wordsworth’s attitude toward the death penalty is more consistent than is usually recognized. Both the early and late versions of the Salisbury Plain poems, for instance, identify the importance of personal responsibility and accept that execution is sometimes, as the oft‐derided Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death put it, the only “fit retribution.” This perspective was, however, complicated by Wordsworth’s awareness of the excesses of the Bloody Code, his antipathy to the authoritarian policies of Pitt’s government, and by his allegiance, during the mid‐1790s, to the philosophy of Godwin’s Political Justice. A close analysis of the Salisbury Plain poems in the context of popular calls for penal reform reveals not only Wordsworth’s long‐standing interest in the issue of capital punishment and his determination to participate in the contemporary debates about the matter, but also the extent of his growing estrangement from Godwin’s necessarian principles during the composition of Adventures on Salisbury Plain.
Industrial Relations in 1988
Undoubtedly, the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983 marked a turning point in Australian industrial relations. To a large extent industrial turbulence receded, helped along by global econ omic instability and the influence ofthe Prices and Incomes Accord between the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU). Arguably, the apparent success of the Accord owed something to a widespread concern within unions that the election of a Liberal-National Party government at the federal level would have resulted in a major pro gram of economic regulation, especially in relation to the institutions ofthe labour market. During 1988, despite an increasingly buoyant economy, the continuing influence of these economic and political conditions ensured that the level of industrial disputation remained subdued by historical stan dards, though those opposed to the nascent corporate state or centralised wage fixing may have been heartened by signs that wage restraint was fraying at the...