ABSTRACT
Hazlitt is fascinated throughout his career by the many forms of selfishness and prejudice in his contemporary society. His specific focus in numerous essays on selfishness, which derives from prejudice, partisanship and passion, constitutes a major exploration of one of the key concerns of his Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805). Here Hazlitt attempted to establish the possibility of a moral imagination which enabled him to defend human action from utilitarian claims of its essential selfishness. This would later be developed, particularly in his aesthetic writings on literature and the fine arts, into his own specific version of the sympathetic imagination. The question of passion's selfishness features strongly in Hazlitt's writing long before the publication of Liber Amoris in 1823. His major achievement in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action is his refutation of the utilitarian argument that the mind is essentially selfish. His response to his opponents is to turn the idea of selfishness on its head. He confirms the individual's basis in self-interest, but by referring to the way in which the self has to see itself into the future, he short-circuits selfishness and turns it into a form of benevolence, or, at least, disinterestedness. Any self-projecting into the future must contemplate a self not yet in existence and can do so only through recourse to that agent of sympathetic projection, the imagination. Looking at oneself in the future, Hazlitt argues, is equivalent – as an act of sympathetic knowledge – to a disinterested consideration of another being. While one might rightly celebrate the ingenuity of Hazlitt's argument here (his undermining of the utilitarian argument from within), his strategy also constitutes a potential fragmentation or at least discontinuity of the self at the same time as it argues for the moral schema of that self. This brand of philosophically conceived, inevitable disinterestedness, as compared to the more familiar disinterestedness of Matthew Arnold, is a formulation which admirably suits Hazlitt's own constitution as a passionate radical: a man who can revel in heated argument, even appreciate the pleasure of hating and the fierce commitment of partisanship alongside the capacity for imaginative sympathy. 1
