Lord Byron's Preposterous Liberalism

Abstract

In the current context within the critical humanities, where liberalism is routinely identified with the degradations of neoliberalism, global capitalism, and the bad affect of a complacency that subtends things as they are and is “worse than conservatism”—as Amanda Anderson puts it in her rich critical history and “reframing” of twentieth-century liberalism—this essay recalls a historical moment when liberalism signified a progressive political disposition and when the claim to liberalism might be something worth arguing about.