ABSTRACT
It should cause no surprise to define the discursive formation of Englishness mainly in relation to empiricism. After celebrating the historical realisation of theory and practice by the French Revolution, Hegel turns to ask whether the English were ‘too backward’ to understand such general principles (1956, p. 454). His response is that the English already had or thought they had a free constitution in 1789 though it was one based on local and particular rights in contrast to the state centralisation of France. ‘Consequently,’ Hegel concludes, ‘abstract and general principles have no attraction for Englishmen’ (p. 455). The Marxist tradition has pursued Hegel’s insight while lending it a more substantial explanation. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels make it a basis on which to discriminate two otherwise similar national cultures divided by the Channel. These differences derive from the contrasted experiences of ‘the bourgeois revolution’ in England 1642-60 and in France after 1789. Hobbes and Locke, founders of the English tradition ‘had before their eyes both the earlier development of the Dutch bourgeoisies…and the first political actions by which the English bourgeoisie emerged from local and provincial limitations’; French Enlightenment thinkers were confronted by a bourgeoisie ‘still struggling for its free development’ (1974, p. 111). Hence, Marx and Engels propose, ‘the theory which for the English still was simply the registration of fact becomes for the French a philosophical system’ (p. 112), and this difference between historical achievement and aspiration, fact and system, explains the development of an English empiricist as against a French rationalist tradition. Whether it does or not, these speculations have been very productive.
