ABSTRACT
This chapter shows something of William Hazlitt’s distinctive understanding of his own society. This demands an engagement with the political dimension of his work because it is the pressure of a political conjuncture — the French Revolution and its aftermath — which gives Hazlitt’s writings their distinctive accent. The French Revolution might be described as a remote but inevitable result of the invention of the art of printing. The development of democracy was, in Hazlitt’s view, the product of expanded means of communication. Hazlitt wants to establish ‘Revolution’ as the necessary outcome of a certain sequence of events and thereby to counteract the effects of Burke’s influential description. The language of the description places Hazlitt in the radical tradition which construed the political and social conflicts as a struggle between tyranny and liberty. A more complex example of Hazlitt’s appropriation of Edmund Burke comes in his account of the source of the idea and the term ‘Legitimacy’.
