The Early Reception of Kant's Thought in England 1785-1805

ABSTRACT: The object of the present research is the picture of Kant which people had in England in the time of the French Revolution. In England in this period Kant and his philosophy were spoken of more than is generally thought, not in the universities as in Germany, but outside them, in cultural and political circles especially those of the capital. Information about the new philosophy and about the vehement discussion which it was provoking on the Continent, in the first place in Germany but also in Holland and later in France, first reached educated public opinion by means of the literary reviews. Here the information could be read jumbled up with innumerable other items of news taken mainly from the world of letters and science but also from the events of the day both at home and abroad. The context in which information about philosophy was presented by the literary journals to a great extent conditioned its reception. In the journalistic reports opinions about Kant, about his philosophy and about German thought and culture in general were linked with elements of earlier philosophical tradition, such as the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley’s idealism, Hume’s scepticism, or the new lines of thought emerging at that time such as the Scottish school. But it was above all the political context that conditioned the first reception of Kant’s thought in England. The expectation of radical changes in the political, social and religious field which were particularly widespread among the middle class which represented the larger part of the readership of the reviews, constituted the climate in which the picture of Kant and of the new German culture was being formed. The turbulent course of event and political situation in the last decade of the century, as they changed the context in which the reception took place, provoked in their turn a change in the picture of Kant, and more generally of German culture, in English public opinion. This research examines the works on Kant, of various kinds, published in England in this period. Some of them (thought not all) have been reviewed by René Wellek in his monograph, now a classic. But in the present work the attention is concentrated on the reception of these early writings rather than on the texts themselves taken out of their context: on the discussions aroused by them, on the arguments which they provoked, and more particularly on the use made of them in the cultural and political battles of this twenty year period of English history. This period, opening a century after the Glorious Revolution under the sign of the hopes for constitutional reforms, was to conclude with England’s withdrawing into herself, and with the closing of her culture to Continental influence, firstly for the fear of ‘Jacobin’ contagion and then because of the long war against Napoleonic France.