More than Justice

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins by noting the involvement literariness and persuasion in Hazlitt’s writing and develops two lines of interpretation from there. First, the chapter examines the importance of mobility—or, more specifically, the refusal of stasis—to Hazlitt’s conception of sound reasoning. Second, the chapter shows how this emphasis on cognitive movement entails a radical reconception of the ways in which balance may (or may not be) a virtue of judgment. Balance, for Hazlitt, is a dynamic, potentially precarious condition rather than a settled state to be achieved by means of rhetoric (as it had been, for instance, in the classical rhetorical tradition). The chapter discusses a number of Hazlitt’s works, including his A Letter to William Gifford and Political Essays, focusing in particular on his engagement with Edmund Burke; it opens by contextualizing the opposition between literariness and persuasion through recourse to comments by John Stuart Mill, W. B. Yeats, and Theodor W. Adorno.