The very rigour of his environmental and mechanical materialism meant that he must either despair or proclaim a secular chiliasm.
The problem was to indoctrinate the youth in ‘habits of attention, celerity, and order’.
It is sometimes less an argument than an affirmation, an imprecation, a leap of feeling.
This is why Cobbett (and John Fielden, his friend and fellow Member for Oldham after 1832) came so close to being spokesmen of the working class. Once the real condition of the working people – for Cobbett, the labourer, for Fielden, the factory child – is made, not one, but the test of all other p…
Such opportunism made impossible the development of any systematic political theory out of Cobbettism. And his economic prejudices were of a piece with this kind of evasion. Just as he developed, not a critique of a political system, nor even of ‘Legitimacy’, but an invective against ‘Old Corruptio…
