ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the tradition of connecting anthropological persuasions and images of “human nature” on the one hand and political beliefs about how a society should be organized on the other. Taking its cue from influential twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars and their historicization of debates about liberty, republicanism, polarization and anti-democratic tendencies in Western democracies, it shows that probing reflections on “Democracy’s Discontent” (Sandel) and two different “concepts of liberty” (Berlin) also lie at the heart of the two texts discussed here – Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shelley’s essay “A Philosophical View of Reform.” Following the Platonic notion of the body politic, both texts tie liberty to anthropological convictions: The belief in a correspondence between a hierarchy of the mental faculties within the individual on the one hand and the body of society and the form of government on the other hand, as well as the equally Platonic pessimism about people’s average potential to act responsibly, lead both Milton and Shelley to remarkably sceptical conceptions of liberty and surprisingly conservative political persuasions. This connection has recurred with remarkable consistency with the most unlikely of writers and political thinkers and can also be shown to be central to present-day political debates.
