The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats through unseen among us, -- visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, --
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, --
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, --
Like memory of music fled, --
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
This certainly sounds like Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand," or Hayek's Spontaneous Order. Most striking is that Shelley connects this to beauty:
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, -- where art thou gone?
In connection to this, I would direct you to my posting where I connect beauty and spontaneous order.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the poet who said that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his A Defense of Poetry should have had this insight.
5 comments:
In the "Hymn," Shelley presents his reading of Neo-Platonism. To the extent to which Shelley held any coherent political beliefs, he espoused a quasi-socialism. He was certainly no follower of Smith. Your attempt to read Shelley in terms of classical economics is strained and somewhat banal.
The myth of Shelley's quasi-socialism is based almost entirely on one bad poem from his juvenalia. Paul Cantor, in an essay published in "Literature and the Economics of Freedom" definitely demonstrates from a nonfiction essay Shelley wrote that he supported property rights, markets, and the gold standard and that he opposed the accumulateion of government debts. To claim that Shelley was a quasi-socialist based on his juvenalia is strained and somewhat banal. It would be much like proving that I'm a lifelong interventionist because of a letter I wrote the President when I was a teenager. Like Shelley, I grew out of such nonsense. So rather than dealing with myths, deal with the actual evidence I present and the arguments I make.
Troy:
More so than to suggest that Shelley was not the defender of liberty you obviously wish him to have been, in my comment I meant to suggest that your reading of the "Hymn" is reductive and silly. In fact, it hardly functions as a reading. It is merely your imposing an idea which interests you ("spontaneous order") on Shelley's poem.
(By the way, is Queen Mab the "bad poem" to which you refer? Or do you mean the Mask of Anarchy?)
I tracked down "Shelley's Radicalism: The Poet as Economist" by Cantor, and I see where you are coming from. Nevertheless, I find his reading heavy-handed; his argument is too slight to be of any interest to the literary critic and his subject obscure and pointless to the serious economist. Shelley's approval or disapproval of the gold standard is completely irrelevant to our understanding of the "Hymn" and the rest of his verse, and Shelley adds nothing to any conversation about spontaneous order, other than perhaps offering, in lines like the initial stanza of the "Hymn" (or, say, paragraph 40 of the "Defence"), an interesting epigraph.
Of course, the same sort of sentiment could be culled from, say, Tennyson's "Ulysses" when the speaker, according to the kind of a-contextual logic you employ, addresses the concept of "marginalism": the economy, one could say, is "is an arch wherethrough/ Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades/ For ever and for ever when I move."
Does that make the good baron a mouthpiece for the "marginal revolution"?
No: but it's a nice quote.
What Cantor's article proves is that Shelley was no socialist, quasi- or otherwise. Especially as an adult.
I was talking about Queen Mab. Mask of Anarchy is a specifically anti-government poem.
Now,I do not deny that Shelley's poem may have neo-Platonism all over it. However, I will note that when Nietzsche attempted to reconcile Platonism with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, he ended up with something in his will to power that, in how he described it, sounded a lot like self-organizing systems theory. So we may not be surprised if Shelley ends up describing something that sounds like spontaneous order theory. One could do little better to describe the influence of spontaneous orders as the "shadow of some unseen Power" that "Floats through unseen among us".
Did you read my article on the relationship between beauty and spontaneous orders? If you had, you would see that one can use the same description for each. I posit that if you have two terms that have the same definition, you have the same thing. Thus, if Shelley is talking about beauty, he cannot but help but talk about spontaneous order-- and that's why he begins the poem with an image of spontaneous order at work.
Still, you do not actually address my claim, which is that what he describes *sounds like* spontaneous order. I didn't say that he was consciously making a reference to it or the invisible hand. I never made any such claim.
Troy:
There's nothing to address.
Apart from its potential as a kind of epigraph, Shelley's poem does not lend itself well to a discussion of spontaneous order.
The poem is about the phenomenon of "intellectual" or spiritual beauty. It is a Wordsworthian and Rosseauian meditation on the imaginative power of the human spirit.
You may see in such virtues something like spontaneous order--though for Wordsworth, certainly, spontaneity in poetry is necessarily tempered by a kind of Neoplatonic anamnesis, and one questions to what extent the author of Prometheus Unbound approves of any kind of "order," spontaneous or otherwise.
Here your "interdisciplinary" approach doesn't work.
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