Thomas Carlyle: Extreme Right Ferment

Résumé :

Thomas Carlyle remains a great name in the history of English letters, whose reputation has hardly ever been questioned in Britain, although it has been exposed in continental Europe and America. On reason for that may be that the United Kingdom has de facto remained unscathed politically by twentieth-century barbarism, for which this article argues that Carlyle bears a large share of responsibility in the history of ideas. Carlyle, remembered as a Romantic essayist par excellence in spite of his Goethean contempt for the Romantics, has also brought water to the mill of a tradition that views romanticism as a prelude to fascism. By revisiting Carlyle’s philosophy, it is possible to show how, by a peculiar hybridization of the heritage of British Calvinism with German idealism, the “sage of Chelsea” has done much to herald and conjure up extreme-right totalitarianism in Europe, by his style as well as by his thoughts.