Contents: Introduction: new sites of cultural conflict in the Romantic period; Cultural theory and the Habermasian public sphere; Cultural leadership in 'North Britain' and the making of the Scottish Enlightenment public sphere; Formations of popular English cultural politics and the making of the radical plebeian public sphere; Scottish philosophic Whiggism and Romantic cultural critique; post-Enlightenment intellectual politics in the Edinburgh Review; Radical Englishness in the Romantic period: intellectual leadership and popular cultural resistance in the plebeian public sphere; Afterword: national cultural history, cultural studies, and the Romantic public sphere; Selected bibliography; Index.

Alex Benchimol is lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK

Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period maps the intellectual formation of English plebeian radicalism and Scottish philosophic Whiggism over the long eighteenth century and examines their associated strategies of critical engagement with the cultural, social and political crises of the early nineteenth century. It is a story of the making of a wider British public sphere out of the agendas and discourses of the radical and liberal publics that both shaped and responded to them. When juxtaposed, these competing intellectual formations illustrate two important expressions of cultural politics in the Romantic period, as well as the peculiar overlapping of national cultural histories that contributed to the ideological conflict over the public meaning of Britain's industrial modernity. Alex Benchimol's study provides an original contribution to recent scholarship in Romantic period studies centred around the public sphere, recovering the contemporary debates and national cultural histories that together made up a significant part of the ideological landscape of the British public sphere in the early nineteenth century.