Sartor Resartus as reactionary political theory: Thomas Carlyle and the metaphysics of modernity

Abstract

In recent years, conservatism and reactionism have witnessed a renewed surge of interest in both popular and scholarly literature. Whether conservatism represents a distinct coherent political ideology or simply a reflexive stance remains a matter of ongoing debate, as does its relationship to reactionism. This paper aims to contribute to this discussion by confirming the ideological character of conservatism and framing reactionism as a typology within conservatism. For this, I examine the intellectual genealogy of reactionary thought as it crystallises in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. I propose that Sartor serves as a foundational text for understanding the philosophical basis of reactionary political theory and its relationship to conservatism, offering an evaluative stance on the proper ordering of society that extends beyond nostalgia. By foregrounding the political nature of Carlyle's social vision and his critical stance towards the metaphysical premises of modernity, this paper also contributes to Carlyle scholarship by refining Carlyle's political categorisation and contesting the view that his later political writings represent a rupture with his earlier work, proposing instead that Sartor lays the philosophical foundations for his later reactionism.

Introduction

Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) defies clear classification, being at once poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, satire and philosophy. Tennyson described it as ‘a novel that is also an anti-novel’ (1965: 173), whilst Jessop termed it a ‘metaphysical poem in prose’ (1997: 13), both characterisations capturing the inherent difficulty of assigning Sartor to any single genre. Nevertheless, that Sartor has long been, and continues to be, examined chiefly as a work of literature or fiction rather than of political philosophy should occasion no surprise to those familiar with Carlylean scholarship. Lasch already speculated that ‘By replacing political, ethical, and religious categories with aesthetic categories, literary historians have attempted to modernise Carlyle, to divert attention from his embarrassing “messages”, and to make him acceptable to an audience that believes only in “myths” and “metaphors”’ (1991: 242). A quintessential example of this tendency is LaValley's study (1968) of Carlyle's critique of modernity, presented less as a political critique than as an artistic embodiment of its challenges and anxieties. Challenging the portrayal of Carlyle as situated within ‘Burkean communitarianism’, which he attributes to Raymond Williams, Lasch finds in the Scottish writer a thinker profoundly distrustful of custom and habit, whose intellectual inheritance is better understood in the light of the Calvinist tradition of ‘Christian prophecy’ (1991: 227, 241). Although Calvinism, most especially in its Puritan form, has drawn no little attention as a formative influence upon Carlyle's ethical framework, and indeed as a force in the transmutation of his ‘native religious culture’ into a ‘cosmopolitan spiritual idiom’ (Malecka, 2024: 487), there exists nonetheless a clear danger in over-relying on Calvinism as a blanket explanation for his thought. As Jordan observes, Carlyle's ideas were nourished by a far wider confluence of traditions, including, beyond the well-known German Idealism, classical Greek and Roman philosophy, Stoicism or the social theories of the Saint-Simonians (2015: 9–10).

Therefore, it may well be affirmed that the situating of Carlyle within a conservative intellectual lineage – tracing its origins to Burke, passing through Coleridge, and finding later expression in Ruskin and Arnold – as Williams did (1960: 77–93), is not wholly at odds with the fact that he was, at the same time, rooted in a Calvinist tradition or in the philosophical currents of 18th- and early nineteenth-century Scotland, as Jessop (1997) so eloquently brought to light, nor with the considerable influence exerted upon him by early French socialists, as Jordan (2015) has shown. One finds, in fact, that many of Carlyle's central concerns in Sartor – society as an organic totality composed of interdependent parts; the necessity of guidance and restraint for a social being whose instincts are far from self-preserving or wise; the limits of reason and the perils of utopian promises; the ontological weight of tradition, habit, and custom over artificial contract – are profoundly conservative. Nonetheless, albeit grounded in kindred premises and convictions, Carlyle's conservatism veers into reaction, since unlike Burke or Coleridge, he perceived little left worth conserving. This article, consequently, contends that Sartor, particularly its ‘Philosophy of Clothes’, formulates a profoundly reactionary vision: a coherent, if contentious, antimodern political philosophy born from communitarian conservative sensibilities intensified by a sense of apocalyptic rupture. Carlyle's open reactionism in his defence of slavery (1849) or in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) is therefore not a departure from a reformist youth, as Heyrendt-Sherman (2021/2022) implies, nor ‘far removed’ from it, as Campbell suggests (2012: 2). Rather, his reactionary political views, implicit or explicit, pervade his work from the outset, with Sartor laying the philosophical foundation for his later social critique.

Lamb observes (2010: 282) that in Sartor, Carlyle articulates a political vision in which order is to be restored by transforming ‘external compulsion’ into ‘internal impulse’ through aesthetic cultivation (Bildung). Toremans extends this, arguing that the tension between Carlyle's aesthetic and political thought ‘is nowhere explored more fully and relentlessly than in Sartor, and it will condition Carlyle's later writings’ (2012: 25). Wolfel (2023/2024), too, identifies the ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ as a foundation for a Romantic political ideology with practical stakes. Following this line, Sartor, I contend, must be read as a political text – and a reactionary one at that. Attempts to isolate its revolutionary fervour from the reactionary gloom of Carlyle's later writings fail to reckon with the deeper continuity of his political thought and intellectual trajectory. This reflects broader uncertainty about how to situate reactionary thought within political typologies. Ira Livingston, for example, observes a ‘fascistic certainty’ in Sartor as a response to the modern ‘confusing flux’ (1997: 84). Carlyle, it is true, seeks a way out of modern existential instability; even so, to characterise it as ‘fascistic’ risks an anachronistic misreading. ¹ More recently, Goldstein (2021/2022) describes Carlyle as a ‘radical conservative’ who seeks rupture and regeneration through the resources of the past, without lapsing into nostalgia.

Political reactionism and Carlyle

To reduce reactionism to nostalgia is to misconstrue its nature. What moves it is frequently perceived as a naive longing for the past, when in truth it is a principled rejection of modernity's metaphysical and moral foundations. The distinction from conservatism lies less in social ontology than in orientation towards modernity: the conservative seeks its redemption, the reactionary its negation. But, in effect, these positions are not discrete or oppositional so much as dialectically entangled. At this juncture, we may recall Mannheim's distinction between traditionalism as an instinctive psychological attachment to habit or the familiar, and conservatism, which he presents as a historically specific, self-aware, structurally contextualised response to a perceived overemphasis on progress and the dismissal of the value and wisdom inherent in tradition and the past (1986: 72–7). Conservatism, so understood, emerges once tradition becomes conscious of itself as tradition, once its continuity must be asserted rather than presumed, wherefore it is inherently post-traditional: it is the defence of inherited forms under conditions in which their inheritance is no longer self-evident. Yet this reflexive moment is common to the conservative and the reactionary. What divides them is not whether tradition is reasserted – both positions agree that it should –, but whether this can occur within modernity or against it. This boundary is nonetheless a porous one at best: the conservative may drift into reaction when reconciliation seems impossible – hence Huntington's description (1957: 460) to the effect that the reactionary is an ‘unsuccessful conservative’ – just as the reactionary may take refuge in conservatism when rupture appears unfeasible. These are, properly speaking, less fixed than fluid categories, interchangeable in accordance with circumstance, though united by, as McManus (2024) argues, a similar unease with the egalitarian tenets of modernity.

Among self-ascribed conservative writers, there exists a tendency to depict conservatism as non-ideological, grounded in a disposition towards preservation and a wariness of future-oriented abstractions. Thinkers such as Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton thus describe conservatism as temperament, an appreciation of ‘what is available’ (Oakeshott, 1962: 168), an effort to ‘live fully in the present’ despite ‘all its imperfections’ (Scruton, 2007: 194). On this view, institutions and customs possess inherent worth by virtue of their familiarity, endurance and tacit or latent functionality. Time is seen as a legitimating force; change, by contrast, demands prudence, lest it unsettle the delicate fabric of social order. However, the person satisfied with the present, immersed in inherited life-forms, does not call themselves a ‘conservative’; they are simply living tradition. It is only when the prevailing doxa is imperilled that one becomes a conservative in the political sense. Far from being the continuation of tradition, conservatism then is a reactive and reflective response to its purported disruption. Following Robin's argument, it is born from a sense of threat or loss, certainly not from satisfaction with the present (2011: 58). This sense of loss reconfigures temporal consciousness: all complacency towards the present vanishes, and time, once a ‘natural ally’, now looms as a potential ‘enemy’ (Robin, 2011: 48). More kinetic than inertial, conservatism is animated by a reactive energy that impels it to dynamic intervention. Backward-looking though it may appear, it remains determinately future-oriented, guided by what Koselleck called a ‘horizon of expectations’, which ultimately shapes conservatism's internal morphology. Positional ideologies remain ideologies nonetheless, since they inevitably materialise into normative frameworks of their own; opposition to doctrine gives rise to doctrine, however tacit. Their normative or ideological character, not infrequently obscured by appeals to lived experience, is thus central.

Freeden asserts that conservatism qualifies as an ideology due to its ‘substantive core’, around which its morphological patterns of political concepts are organised. Central to this core is the belief that ‘social and political activity, and its articulated defence, should be geared to preventing non-organic, disruptive change by invoking an extra-human order’. This order is deemed ‘extra-human’ in that it stands beyond the immediate reach of human design or manipulation. Freeden's model emphasises conservatism's reactive and contingent use of outside substantive concepts always in service of protecting its core. Accordingly, its ‘structural intricacy, rather than the substantive units comprising it’, defines its identity (1996: 340–1). Though Freeden's account has found recent support in studies like Edmund Neill's historical survey (2021) of conservatism, it invites a subtle yet critical reconsideration. Freeden's definition, as the reader might infer, presents the ‘extra-human order’ as ancillary to the goal of resisting disruptive change, when this order is, in truth, the more fundamental principle.

Regulation of change, to borrow Freeden's terms, is ‘adjacent’ or ‘peripheral’, serving the deeper moral purpose of preserving a transcendent order where tradition is embraced as an active, organising force within society. Change itself need not be problematic for conservatism, so long as it does not threaten this order. In fact, every ideology grapples with the regulation of change, resisting some forms whilst embracing others, for to change is also to preserve, and to preserve is necessarily to change; these are not opposites but interdependent forces. Moreover, what counts as ‘non-organic’ or ‘disruptive’ necessarily involves a normative judgement that presupposes a higher, organising telos, without which conservatism can only be defined in negative terms, and as such ceases to be an ideology. This higher reference absent, conservatism is reduced to obstinacy, pragmatism or nostalgia, its deeper ontological foundations obscured and its animating force misunderstood or overlooked. If this extra-human order is the defining telos of conservatism, then its identity shifts from structural to moral, from reactive preservation to a deeper, normative commitment. In this light, if the minimal core is a shared reverence for a transcendent order, with regulation of change flexible and contingent, then conservatism and reactionism can be understood as closely related strands within the same conceptual family. This complicates the boundary between conservatism and reactionism: both are future-oriented, normatively laden responses to loss, differentiated more by approach than foundational commitment. These tensions are exemplified in Carlyle, to whom we now return.

No longer a site for perennial truths, Carlyle confronts the present as a historically situated mode of being. In this, he is unmistakably modern. ² The existential crisis portrayed in Sartor, the ‘Everlasting No’, can scarcely be described as an account of the timeless anguish inherent to the human condition; it bespeaks a historical rupture, a crisis inscribed in time. By naming it a ‘state of crisis, of transition’, Carlyle situates the existential disarray of his age within a temporal liminality: a juncture caught in-between dissolution and reformation, where ‘mad Pilgrimings’ and ‘aimless Discontinuity’ testify to the spectres of a past to be overcome and a future not yet come into being (Carlyle, 2000: 120). For Carlyle, modernity is, in essence, ‘Revolution’; or, as Hogan more precisely observes (2001: 150), it is the ‘longer term macrophenomenon of revolution’ that, in Carlyle's view, ‘defines modernity as historical epoch’. Political convulsions such as the English and French Revolutions were surface manifestations of a deeper and continuous revolutionary impulse which lies at the heart of modernity. This underlying process permanently unsettles traditional symbols, reconfigures social relations, and alters the collective unconscious. When the inner momentum of this transformation outpaces external adaptation, crises ensue, with violence if need be. Like Tocqueville in his L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856), Carlyle regarded such revolutions not as beginnings, for they were, in truth, the consummation of long-maturing forces and contradictions (Mendilow, 1993). The true Revolution – with a capital R – is a constant presence within the modern condition.

Carlyle's celebration of historical change in Sartor and especially in The French Revolution (1837) – his condemnation of stifling traditions and the privileged elites, his sympathy for the downtrodden – may suggest radical emancipatory fervour, yet beneath it lingers a darker reactionary hue. His intention was not, as one scholar puts it (Cowlishaw, 1996: 59), a ‘never-ending cultural revolution’. Rather, it was to bring that very Revolution to a close using the instruments which it itself had unleashed. Carlyle embraces revolution from a desire to sweep away a desacralised order and reconstitute a world, though different from the old, where tradition, no longer a hollow façade, is once more endowed with real and binding ontological weight. His is a radical assertion of tradition: not so much a return to the status quo ante as a transfigurative recovery of tradition, though it be wrought by rupture.

In this view, Carlyle's blend of conservative and revolutionary language is no contradiction; it reflects a conservatism driven to preserve by means of interruption, where preservation by gradual adaptation has become meaningless or inaccessible. McManus's depiction of Carlyle as both ‘conservative’ and ‘reactionary’ is then well founded (2024: 83, 87). Here, contrary to a discrete category, reactionism appears as an intensity or modality within conservatism, one that seeks to turn modernity's fluidity against itself in an effort to restore order. Carlyle epitomises this fluidity: he speaks as readily of continuity as of rupture, of creation as of destruction, of reverence as of revolt. It is this logic that confers Sartor its political-philosophical salience, prefiguring Carlyle's later political thought as a normative project aimed at restoring a transcendent moral structure, wherein symbols and traditions regain their power to mediate, bind and orient in the face of existential dislocation and the relentless momentum of Revolution. According to Tennyson, Sartor seeks to ‘denude’ society, exposing the artifice of its forms and appearances (1965: 286). Yet for Carlyle, such denudation is not iconoclastic nor an end in itself; it is reconstructive, a purgative clearing that prepares the ground for stronger, more vital social forms. As Vanden Bossche (1991) notes, in Sartor and in his other books, Carlyle was responding to a crisis of authority in which traditional symbolic structures could no longer command reverence. Sartor marks the philosophical basis of his normative project to recover such structures.

Carlyle's social critique in early essays

Before composing Sartor, Carlyle authored a series of essays for the Foreign Review and Edinburgh Review. Among these, Signs of the Times (1829) and Characteristics (1831) stand out as significant works of social criticism. Written on the threshold of Sartor, they shaped its political philosophy and critique of modernity. In Signs of the Times, Carlyle anticipates themes later articulated by Adorno and Horkheimer: the ‘Mechanical Age’, under the guise of rational emancipation and progress, ushers in a new form of ‘worship’ – a ‘true Deity’, both creative and destructive, that penetrates the individual's psyche and from ‘thence sending up, over his whole life and activity, innumerable stems – fruit-bearing and poison-bearing’. As society increasingly gravitates towards the logic of ‘adapting means to ends’, human beings, in turn, grow ‘mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand’ with ‘hope and struggle’ geared at ‘external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions – for Mechanism of one sort or other’. What masquerades as emancipation and progress, then, is the substitution of autonomy with systemic dependence, growing economic inequality and the erosion of humanity's ‘Dynamical nature’ by a totalising rationality, as man is reduced to a cog in the machinery that claims to set him free. To counterweight the flattening force of ‘Mechanics’, Carlyle calls for a ‘science of Dynamics’, attentive to the hidden, generative energies that animate human life beneath its static forms (Carlyle, 2022a: 3–22).

In Characteristics, Carlyle asserts that the vitality of any organism, individual or societal, is marked by unconscious functionality. Incessant self-scrutiny signals dysfunction. ‘The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick’, he writes, framing modernity itself as pathological: afflicted by reflexive introspection, doubt, and the erosion of spontaneous ‘vital action’ (Carlyle, 2022b: 23–5). This ‘fever of Scepticism’ fragments society, as competing ‘Philosophies of Man’ negate one another, annihilating shared foundations for belief and action. The result is a disjunction between ‘Thought’ and ‘Deed’, where excessive rationalism displaces intuitive knowing, faith, reverence, and the capacity for admiration, qualities Carlyle deems essential for confronting the mystery of existence (Carlyle, 2022b: 46–51). Life, he insists, is a ‘bottomless boundless Deep, whereon all human things fearfully and wonderfully swim’ (Carlyle, 2022b: 25). Carlyle argues that ‘Mechanical’ thinking, by reducing reality to malleable, material causality, fosters the illusion that suffering is externally caused and thus solvable through institutional reform. As he already wrote in Signs of the Times, we come to believe that ‘our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances’, and that inner strength is merely their effect (Carlyle, 2022a: 11).

Yet this worldview breeds unfading disappointment, for ‘in no time was man's life what he calls a happy one; in no time can it be so’. The modern pursuit of a painless world erodes the very conditions of human flourishing, which require a deeply ingrained acknowledgment that ‘Suffering, Contradiction, Error, have their quite perennial, and even indispensable, abode in this Earth’. ‘Evil’, far from a removable defect, is ‘the dark, disordered material out of which man's Freewill has to create an edifice of order, and Good’. Carlyle speaks of ‘perpetual dreams’ of ‘Paradise’ and ‘Lubberland’ that are little short of destabilising, generating sempiternal Revolution and unmet expectations. Every partial improvement intensifies a sense of lack, deepening alienation as the structures necessary for human rootedness are continually displaced. Efforts to abolish suffering, contradiction and imperfection are not without their own afflictions. Ease, conceived as abundance and the absence of labour, becomes self-defeating: ‘Labour, Effort, is the very interruption of that Ease, which man foolishly enough fancies to be his Happiness’. The pursuit of comfort is perpetual unease writ large. For Carlyle, existence is flux, not stasis. ‘Truth’, quoting Schiller, ‘immer wird, nie ist; never is, always is a-being’. Any static resolution or promise of a better world is illusory; the world resists closure. Fulfilment lies in continuous striving, through duty, labour and an unflinching engagement with reality as it is, not as it can be (Carlyle, 2022b: 42–50).

In Signs of the Times and Characteristics, Carlyle expounds a social critique of modernity that is deeply reactionary in essence, a modern anti-modern critique. The disintegrating forces of a nihilistic society, he suggests, dismantle far more swiftly than they can rebuild. Carlyle affirms the necessity of both visible and invisible constraints to temper subjective impulse. He critiques social or political reformism as insatiable and self-defeating, trapped in a cycle of unmet promises and chronic dissatisfaction. Reform, in this vision, is insufficient sans spiritual renewal. The community ontologically precedes the individual – not as a contractual aggregate, rather as the only ground of meaning, identity and legitimacy, which is threatened by calls for individual agency and autonomy. Against the atomising thrust of modernity, Carlyle mourns the collapse of an organic, hierarchical and spiritually saturated world, flawed yet deeply human, now supplanted by a mechanised order. Moreover, if, as Eagleton implies, materialism may be broadly linked to humanistic egalitarianism given its emphasis on shared embodiment and vulnerability (2016: 2–6), then Carlyle's critique of materialism entails a deeper rejection of modern egalitarianism, for in Carlyle's eyes all qualitative distinctions and hierarchies are subsumed into the functional uniformity of the ‘Machine’. All of these themes are essentially reiterated and given philosophical depth in Sartor, through the fictional character Teufelsdröckh's ‘Philosophy of Clothes’. Indeed, by way of the clothes metaphor, Sartor moves past a reflection on consciousness to advance a political diagnosis of the ‘Era of Unbelief’ (Carlyle, 2000: 87).

Consciousness in a disenchanted age

Narrated through the framing voice of an editor commenting on the writings of the enigmatic German philosopher Teufelsdröckh, professor at the University of Weissnichtwo (‘Know-not-where’), much of Sartor revolves around the ‘Philosophy of Clothes’. For Carlyle, clothing serves as a rich metaphor for the symbolic forms – institutions, customs, language and beliefs – that constitute the fabric of social and political life. ‘All Symbols are properly Clothes’ and ‘all Forms… are Clothes’, he writes (Carlyle, 2000: 198). ‘Clothes’ then are social constructs that are animated by a deeper, generative force, the ‘Spirit of Clothes’ (Carlyle, 2000: 27–8). Precisely in their mediating function, symbols both reveal and conceal: ‘In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here, therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a doubled significance’ (Carlyle, 2000: 162). This doubleness arises from the interplay of expression and opacity, since all understanding depends on symbolic forms that simultaneously taint the phenomena they mediate. Symbols, thus, shape what we see and what we are.

Symbols do not convey meaning autonomously; they require the creative and interpretive power of imagination. Since we live through symbols, and since imagination both generates and sustains them, Carlyle insists that ‘not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us’. In this light, he critiques the ‘Motive-Millwrights’ – those who reduce human behaviour to calculable motives – arguing that motivation is opaque, layered, affective and resistant to simplification (Carlyle, 2000: 163). Language also is ‘the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought’, and it is imagination that ‘wove this Flesh-Garment’ (Carlyle, 2000: 56). Because thought is expressed through language, and language is born from metaphor and symbolism, our rational faculties are inescapably shaped by imagination. It is not reason in toto that Carlyle rejects; far from it, what he rejects is its false antithesis with myth and imagination. For him, reason is born within, and reshaped by, a symbolic order the imagination first sets in motion. Through symbols, ‘Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith’, that is, it is through symbols that imagination enters into, transforms and becomes inseparable from our sensible experience (Carlyle, 2000: 162). For all intents and purposes, Reality is Fantasy: ‘of the Idea made Real’. It is always ‘Fantasy that superadds itself to Sight’ (Carlyle, 2000: 108).

Imagination and symbols exist in an integral reciprocity, wherein imagination gives birth and sustains symbols, even as these symbols come in turn to shape the operations of imagination itself. On the one hand, symbols are created by imagination to clothe the unseen in form, for ‘must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed…?’ (Carlyle, 2000: 55–6). On the other hand, symbols constitute the very structure within which human imagination operates, for ‘It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being’ (Carlyle, 2000: 164). Humanity, immersed at all times in a symbolic milieu, produces meaning, identity and action by means of ongoing acts of symbolic interpretation. To be human, on this account, is to dwell within an ever-shifting web of symbols, mediated by imagination and constitutive of all understanding and experience. Much as Carlyle inherits the Kantian insight that experience is mediated, he rejects the idea that something beyond or beneath that mediation is ontologically primary. For him, symbol is not just heuristic – it is constitutive, it is substance, it is reality. Imagination is not, as in Kant, a mediator interposed between sensibility and understanding; sensibility, understanding and intuition, are all part of it. This allows Carlyle to approach Hegel's interpretation of consciousness as dynamic, historical and culturally contingent, without adopting his strict rationalism.

Carlyle's account of consciousness stands in stark contrast to the rationalist ideal of a self-originating subject governed by pure reason and unmediated by tradition, myth or custom. The ‘naked’ self he regards as solipsistic as it is fatally destabilising. ‘Thought without Reverence’, he warns, ‘is barren, perhaps poisonous’ (Carlyle, 2000: 52). Modernity's repudiation of its ‘old clothes’ – the inherited forms of tradition, religion, myth and ritual – leaves consciousness disoriented, bereft, so to speak, of the imaginative wherewithal to weave new, more enduring, world-ordering ‘garments’. Symbols, for Carlyle, are not trappings that confine an autonomous interiority but the indispensable conditions of reality and selfhood. Wanting in them, the individual is thrust into existential alienation and ambient conformity, ‘A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude’, cast adrift in a world grown too vast and intricate to manage or relate to (Carlyle, 2000: 123–4). The modern exaltation of self-creation – that man is defined by what he autonomously creates, not what he inherits – thus dissolves the symbolic infrastructure that makes individuality possible. In so arguing, Carlyle repositions the self from its modern throne as sovereign origin to its conditional place as symbolically embedded, always historical, always particular. All creation is, in truth, re-creation; imagination breathes life back into worn-out symbolic forms and brings forth the new from the old.

The social importance of symbols

Rousseau opens The Social Contract with the paradox: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ (2012: 163). Carlyle reorients this formulation: man is born naked, and everywhere clothed, not in Rousseau's chains of repressive convention but in traditions that constitute freedom itself. Far from impediments, these ‘chains’ embody the preconditions of sensibility, thought, action and expression. As one scholar observes, they represent, for Carlyle, ‘sociability as providing both intimacy and constraint’ (Beenstock, 2016: 25). Teufelsdröckh's ‘grand Proposition’ – ‘that Man's earthly interests “are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes”’ (Carlyle, 2000: 40) – presents the inescapability of social and symbolic embeddedness: whether by ‘soft binding of Love’ or ‘iron chaining of Necessity’, to be human is to be bound (Carlyle, 2000: 181). To Carlyle, the so-called natural state – man as a ‘Naked Animal’ (Carlyle, 2000: 4) – is not one of liberty but of existential indeterminacy. Unlike instinct-driven creatures, man is a ‘Tool-using Animal’, a cultural being who, absent symbolic structure, is constrained by the boundlessness of possibility (Carlyle, 2000: 31). Clothes, metaphorically, denote the forms that render chaos intelligible and action possible. Without structure, there is no orientation; without orientation, no autonomy, much less liberty. As Carlyle writes, ‘Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust's Mantle… and without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless depths, or mount to inane limboes, and in either case be no more’ (Carlyle, 2000: 40).

Carlyle distinguishes between symbols of ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ value. A symbol of ‘intrinsic value’, he writes, ‘is of itself fit that men should unite round it’. By contrast, symbols of ‘extrinsic value’ function as ‘accidental Standards’ around which people gather. We may make use of Max Weber's oft-quoted distinction between Zweckrational (instrumental rationality) and Wertrational (value-rationality) to digest Carlyle's argument. Instrumental rationality subordinates ends to higher, more central ones, so that their value is ‘extrinsic’, wholly contingent on their role within an overarching chain of ends. This, however, presupposes the existence of ends whose significance arises from their own necessity, viz. ends of ‘intrinsic value’ towards which value-rationality is oriented. For Carlyle, symbols with intrinsic value answer to pre-reflective human needs: for orientation, belonging and connection to something beyond the here and now – the ‘Godlike’ and ‘Eternity’. Most symbols are of extrinsic value, yet this obscures the fact that they may simultaneously bear an inherent intrinsic value (Carlyle, 2000: 164–5). Carlyle's critique of utilitarian modernity lies precisely in its inability to recognise intrinsic value. Governed by the ‘Genius of Mechanism’ – what might be termed instrumental reason – modern man ‘can see nothing but Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else’ (Carlyle, 2000: 163). As a result, symbols, traditions and institutions come to appear as arbitrary conventions, reduced to pragmatic utility. The conservative core of Carlyle's vision lies then not in nostalgia for this or that institution, but in resistance to a desacralised order that has lost its capacity to venerate anything for its own sake, a world where symbols are banalised and existence is ‘stripped bare’ (Carlyle, 2000: 173).

Carlyle's ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ critiques mechanistic social theories that dismiss symbols, traditions and rituals as malleable artifices, irrational or obsolete once deemed functionally redundant according to more ‘real’ interests. Godwin (1976: 437), for instance, spoke of an ‘artificial state of man’ sustained by ‘imposition’ and ‘fiction of policy’, in the form of institutions and traditions, preventing human mind ‘from settling upon its true foundation’. Against this logic, Carlyle asserts that artificiality is not opposed to reality – it is reality, tout court. Human reality is constructed through symbolic artifice: institutions, rituals, identities and beliefs, though artificial, ‘gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us’ (Carlyle, 2000: 31). ‘All visible things are Emblems’, he writes, ‘what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant’. However, rooted in necessity or ornament, clothing in its historical course becomes that which structures human life around a coherent, symbolically mediated order, thereby constituting a ‘manifold cunning Victory over Want’ (Carlyle, 2000: 55). In the ‘Church Clothes’ chapter, Carlyle laments that religious symbols, discarded as obsolete, remain in fact vital cultural tissues through which moral intuition, collective belief and cultural sensibility are sustained – elements that, though unseen, collectively animate the social body. Even the humblest vestments, he suggests, may imperceptibly contribute to society's ‘inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue’. As these symbolic garments are discarded in pursuit of progress and efficiency, the individual loses connection to a shared moral order, becoming ‘no longer Social, but Gregarious’ (Carlyle, 2000: 159). What ensues is suffocation: ‘The Genius of Mechanism smothers him… and only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains’ (Carlyle, 2000: 163).

For Carlyle, society is an intricate symbolic totality, an organic fabric of bonds irreducible to rational comprehension. Even if ‘Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible’, Carlyle argues ‘First, that Man is a Spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to All Men; Secondly, that he wears Clothes, which are the visible emblems of that fact’. Clothes, whether literal or metaphorical, serve as the medium through which the self is articulated, given structure, and made legible to the world. The external, being at once symbolic of and integral to the internal, is neither arbitrary nor dispensable; and though it may be conceptually distinguished from the internal, such a distinction does not imply separation (Carlyle, 2000: 44–7). A king's robe is not the king himself, yet without it, his authority is unrecognisable: ‘Who ever saw any Lord my-lorded in tattered blanket…?’ (Carlyle, 2000: 177). A lord is not ‘lorded’ with inherent qualities, only with the symbols he wears. In other words, authority must be visibly manifested to be legitimate. The ‘vestments’ individuals wear are emblematic forms of status, identity and belonging, through which the social and moral order is both revealed and reaffirmed. Traditions, rituals and roles, though external to the self, are essential to its intelligibility and recognition. In Carlyle's view, therefore, appearances matter because they manifest the attachments and bonds that hold society together; without visible forms, those bonds remain inert, and inert, dissolve or, conversely, their disappearance may signal that the bonds themselves have already begun to decay.

‘Philosophy of Clothes’ affirms a conservative vision wherein tradition and institutions precede the individual, as well as a reactionary critique of modernity's faith in emancipation and reform. The drive to cast off ‘chains’, in seeking to liberate mankind and realise its fullest potential, paradoxically leaves it ever more disoriented, fragmented and discordant. Modern alienation, he contends, springs less from inequality as such than from the dissolution of social distinctions that once sustained coherence and belonging. The ‘political effects of Nudity’ lie in the effacement of those symbolic appearances – roles, duties and traditions – by which individuals apprehend their place and purpose. It is through symbols that man is ‘guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched’. The ‘noblest’ ages, we are told, are those ‘which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?’ (Carlyle, 2000: 157–64). In Sartor, where the phrase ‘meaning of life’ first appears, such meaning remains inextricable from symbolic vesture (Carlyle, 2000: 137); stripped of these, man stands metaphysically and politically ‘naked’, exposed yet isolated and powerless. Hence, Carlyle denounces the ‘universally-arrogated Virtue’ of ‘Independence’, seeing the ‘only possible freedom’ in reciprocal obedience and reverence within a stratified social order (Carlyle, 2000: 172). As he sees it, ‘in these days, man can do almost all things, only not obey. True likewise that whoso cannot obey cannot be free… he that is the inferior of nothing, can be the superior of nothing, the equal of nothing’ (Carlyle, 2000: 184).

Carlyle challenges the false division between matter and imagination, between reality and artifice. One might say that Sartor's ultimate purpose is to dissolve such oppositions and reveal their unity. Politically, it denies the idea of an innate essence, ‘born free’ in Rousseau's sense, that must be liberated from all ‘artificialities’ that constraint it. By contrast, Carlyle's ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ argues that the instrumental scrutiny of symbols, seeking to separate the useful from the superfluous, together with the pursuit of emancipation, ultimately undermine the symbolic and institutional foundations upon which meaning, identity and freedom depend. This vision is of a piece with a longer strain of conservative thought, broadly conceived. Hume warned that unchecked critical reflexivity could undermine the ‘moral prejudices’ that sustain common life and make meaningful inquiry possible in the first place. ³ Burke likened tradition, custom, manners, social institutions and even illusions to the ‘veil’ or ‘drapery of life’, without which society descends into disarray (1987: 17, 67). Coleridge similarly likened morality to a ‘house of cards’, resting on a delicate and unseen web of cultural, societal and institutional facets, where ‘each is supported by all’. In this, he suggests that morality is ‘foundationless’, no self-sustaining absolute, to the extent that it draws its strength from the social order as an inheritance established over time (1990: 101). German Romantics such as Novalis and Schlegel envisioned the state as an organic whole, sustained by invisible, historically rooted forces (Beiser, 1996: xxvi–xxvii). Similarly, De Maistre extolled ‘age-old customs’ as the true foundations of law, cautioning that abstract reason, should it be absolutised, becomes a ‘universal dissolvent’, breaking down the symbolic bonds that hold society together (1965: 109–10).

The ‘everlasting no’ as modernity

Much of Book II of Sartor traces Teufelsdröckh's existential journey from the ‘Everlasting No’ to the ‘Centre of Indifference’ and thence to the ‘Everlasting Yea’ – a movement from nihilism and despair, through detachment and introspection, towards renewed purpose, viz. from ‘idle Suffering into actual Endeavouring’ (Carlyle, 2000: 141). The ‘Everlasting No’ is not an abstract existential state but a historically situated crisis, marked by the collapse of inherited beliefs and the corrosive force of unrelenting questioning: ‘Doubt had darkened into Unbelief … till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black’, where ‘no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To such length has the spirit of Inquiry carried him’. ‘But what boots it (was thut's)?’ Carlyle asks, ‘it is but the common lot in this era’. Teufelsdröckh confronts a world where God no longer dwells, where everything is ‘like thee, sold to Unbelief’, and the ‘Temples of the Godhead… crumble down’. Symbols, no longer ‘rainproof’ against corrosive scrutiny, are hollowed out by relentless questioning (Carlyle, 2000: 121–2). The ‘Everlasting No’, rather than just despair, is a militant repudiation of all that cannot justify itself in material or utilitarian terms, so by the same token God becomes superstition, morality a convention, tradition an anachronism. This is not a shift in opinion but a total existential reconstitution, an upheaval that ‘pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME’ (Carlyle, 2000: 126).

Teufelsdröckh recounts the spiritual desolation of an age in which symbols have lost their transcendence: ‘Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable, Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb’. Where Faust's Devil embodied at least a form of purpose, albeit a dark one, Teufelsdröckh finds a world in which even evil has lost form, a world devoid of intrinsic meaning, higher struggle or existential purpose. What remains is a lifeless, mechanised universe governed by brute indifference, with ‘nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness’ (Carlyle, 2000: 124). Elsewhere, he likens the ‘Body Politic’ to a ‘venerable Corpse’, destined at last to be consumed upon the ‘funeral-pile’ by ‘Liberals, Utilitarians, or whatsoever they are called’, who ‘will ultimately carry their point, and dissever and destroy most existing Institutions of Society’ (Carlyle, 2000: 172).

Annihilation of the self

The axiom that ‘Nothing can act but where it is’ implies that action and existence require an awareness of one's concrete social embeddedness within a determinate social and historical fabric (Carlyle, 2000: 42, 47). Only those who are aware of that to which they belong are capable of acting with deliberation. Carlyle, with characteristic irony, asks ‘How wilt thou sail in unknown seas; and for thyself find that shorter, Northwest Passage to thy fair Spice-country of a Nowhere?’ (Carlyle, 2000: 101). Bereft of symbolic ‘clothing’, individuals are ‘Nowhere’ and thus powerless. In Sartor, this principle underlies Carlyle's broader philosophy of Work and Heroism: the great individual is one who embraces symbolic form with purpose, acting decisively within a historically situated role. In contrast, the ‘Dandy’, whose ‘“trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes”’, embodies the degeneration of symbolism into empty display. The ‘Dandiacal Sect’, worshippers of appearance and ritual devoid of substance, represents Carlyle's critique of a society in symbolic decay (Carlyle, 2000: 200–2). In such a world, ‘Once sacred Symbols’ endure only as ‘empty Pageants, whereof men grudge even the expense’, hollowed of meaning and animated by inertia in place of reverence. Indeed, ‘Solemnities linger as Ceremonies, sacred Symbols as idle Pageants, to the extent of three hundred years and more after all life and sacredness had evaporated out of them’.

In inherited forms ‘no living Figure or Spirit any longer dwells’; only ‘spiders and unclean beetles’ remain, and these vestiges, stripped of their vital force, no more suffice to organise the moral order. Instead, they obscure ‘The Poor perishing, like neglected, foundered Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Overwork; the Rich, still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Overgrowth’. Lacking the ‘clothes’ that can visibly delineate social order, distinctions blur, wealth hoarding and corruption hides, and those in power, now appearing indistinguishable from those without, cast off their responsibilities towards the ‘Poor-Slaves’ or ‘Drudges’, that is, the lower classes. Deprived of any recognised moral or social claim upon their rulers, the poor are reduced to mere instruments of exploitation, an argument that later becomes pivotal in Carlyle's book Past and Present (1843). As symbols grow hollow in the name of individual autonomy, mutual obligations give way to voluntary transactions, and so relationships between classes, ranks and even institutions like the state are reframed as exchanges, where each party seeks maximal gain for minimal contribution: ‘each, isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries “Mine!”’ (Carlyle, 2000: 160–75).

In a world stripped of symbolic depth, tradition reduced to aesthetic curiosity, Carlyle contends that its restoration must begin with the spiritual regeneration of the self. The book's title, Sartor Resartus – The Tailor Retailored – points both to Teufelsdröckh and society itself as in need of re-stitching, yet the latter must follow the former. For Carlyle, inasmuch as symbols are the tangible expressions of a society's inner self, reflecting both its moral orientation and its place in the cosmos, their erosion marks a profound spiritual crisis, not a failure of policy. True transformation, therefore, must begin within. As Carlyle insists, ‘the Ideal is in thyself, the Impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of’. The external is not to be reformed prior to the self, being rather the raw material upon which the self inscribes meaning, and so any revolution that fails to transform the self merely reinscribes old patterns in new forms. Reform then proves insufficient; what is needed is metamorphosis – the overcoming of spiritual inertia through what Carlyle calls a ‘Spiritual New-birth’. This process begins with the ‘Annihilation of Self’, a metaphorical death of ego whereby one awakens to the paradox that freedom lies not in the absence of necessity but in its conscious affirmation. ‘Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force’. If this be so, true freedom is found in discipline, labour and duty, achieved by the willed engagement with life's limits and contradictions, hence ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee’. Herein, the individual transcends social alienation and returns to communal life as a conscious participant in the shaping of its moral and symbolic order (Carlyle, 2000: 126–45).

Sartor is a proto-existentialist, yet profoundly anti-modern manifesto against what Carlyle perceives as the nihilism of the age, itself a consequence of ideologies that subordinate symbols and institutions to political or economic ends, stripping them from their underlying raison d’être – ‘the omnipotent virtue of Clothes’ –, reducing all to the merely material. This is the condition he terms ‘Adamitism’, a radical ‘state of Nakedness’ wherein the external markers of identity, rendered fluid and superfluous to the point of volatility, cease to signify anything and ‘are dissolved, in wails and howls’ (Carlyle, 2000: 45–8). No government, policy or institution can remedy this; only an inner spiritual reformation can achieve that end. Carlyle thus sarcastically ridicules the liberal promise of parliamentary democracy: ‘To rebuild your old House from the top downwards… what better, what other, than the Representative Machine will serve your turn? Meanwhile, however, mock me not with the name of Free, “when you have but knit up my chains into ornamental festoons”’ (Carlyle, 2000: 184). Like Burke and other figures associated with the early formation of Anglo-conservative thought, Carlyle views top-down reformist impulses with deep distrust. In its place, he advocates for ‘Natural Supernaturalism’: that the miraculous, though seemingly beyond the world, exists within it, that divinity inheres in the natural, and new meaning emerges only when the world is re-sacralised through inward vision (Carlyle, 2000: 187–95).

Change and transformation

Time itself is a symbolic garment necessary for human experience, yet not ultimate in essence. ‘There is no Space and no Time’, Teufelsdröckh declares; they are ‘but a mode of our human sense’. We are beings who dwell in the ‘æther of Deity’, which is ‘Omnipresent and Eternal’. Only the ‘FOREVER’ and the ‘EVERYWHERE’ exist (Carlyle, 2000: 43). Time, then, is the medium through which Eternity becomes manifest: ‘Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity we stand on made manifest’ (Carlyle, 2000: 87). Time is the phenomenological condition that mediates transcendence and immanence, enabling human participation in history and meaning-making. Like all other symbols, both an illusion and a necessity. ‘Our whole terrestrial being is based on Time, and built of Time; it is wholly a Movement, a Time-impulse; Time is the author of it, the material of it’ (Carlyle, 2000: 98). Nothing is static; history itself is a process of ‘perpetual metamorphoses’, in which institutions, beliefs and symbolic forms wear out like old clothes and must be reimagined until ‘Time’ merges with ‘Eternity’. Change is organic renewal, wherein the ‘organic filaments’ of the new are already spun beneath the skin of the old. Carlyle writes, ‘change is wont to be gradual: thus, while the serpent sheds its old skin, the new is already formed beneath… Creation and Destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves’. Carlyle's Phoenix metaphor captures this dialectic of death and rebirth, where renewal and continuity form organically within (Carlyle, 2000: 171–80).

Carlyle posits a deeply conservative model of renewal: instead of the rejection of tradition, its imaginative reactivation. The vitality of tradition rests less on its fixity than on its capacity to be spiritually recharged, lest it become paralysing, for ‘are not the tatters and rags of superannuated worn-out Symbols… threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce suffocation!’ (Carlyle, 2000: 166). Tradition, contrary to a static inheritance, is a dynamic organism. It is both foreground and horizon, rather than the antithesis of change, its medium. In this vision, the human being is always embedded in historical continuity, shaped by past and future. Carlyle writes, ‘Hast thou ever meditated on that word, Tradition: how we inherit not Life only, but all the garniture and form of Life…?’ To exist is to be symbolically clothed in the labours, thoughts and institutions of the past. The ideal of absolute autonomy – the dream of emancipation from all non-chosen bonds – is, for Carlyle, spiritually barren. Instead, he calls for a reverent embrace of inheritance, a conscious participation in the historical story that made us. As Teufelsdröckh reminds us, ‘a Thought did never yet die; that as thou… hast gathered it and created it from the whole Past, so thou wilt transmit it to the whole Future’. Carlyle invites his readers to see themselves as the inheritors and stewards of symbolic order: ‘It is thus that the heroic Heart, the seeing Eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us… the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses… a living, literal Communion of Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World’ (Carlyle, 2000: 181–2). Change becomes indeed necessary when symbols grow vacant and social forms lose their force. However, this is not progress in the modern sense; it is always a return – a return to vitality of forms and symbols, of tradition quickened anew. Therefore, the danger lies not so much in change per se as in rupture that discards tradition altogether rather than revivifying it.

Tradition provides the frame for temporal forms to arise, decay, and be reconstituted, yet the need for transcendental meaning – the Eternal – persists. What endures is not the form itself but the symbolic vitality that allows the Eternal to manifest within the flux of Time. For Carlyle, modernity – defined as materialism, scepticism and permanent Revolution – is nothing less than an impediment to the restoration of such symbolic vitality, a loss of tradition and sense of historical time. In this light, true transformation is counter-revolutionary in the deepest sense: not so much a restoration of ‘old clothes’ as an imaginative reconstruction of a symbolic order capable of halting endless destabilisation. The aim is less to oppose Revolution than to supersede it by constructing what it lacks: a living symbolic and moral structure rooted in duty, reverence and work. The implication is that any genuine counter-revolution must be metaphysical in nature.

This is why Carlyle, like other reactionary thinkers, in lieu of a nostalgic return to the status quo ante, advocated a metaphysical renewal, a ‘new Mythus’ (Carlyle, 2000: 144). As De Maistre observed, counter-revolution ‘will be not a contrary revolution, but the contrary of revolution’ (1974: 169). Similarly, De Lamennais insisted that, more than superficial reform or nostalgic returns, society, metaphysically, must pass ‘through the tomb in order to arrive a second time to life’ (1895: 183). For Karl Ludwig von Haller, as for Carlyle, the revolution is a purgative ‘trial by fire’, which, though destructive, may burn away the corruptions of the old order, so that, ‘like a new phoenix arisen from the ashes’, a truer form can re-emerge as organic renewal (1816: xiii. Translation mine). In this sense, reactionism, far from backward-looking, is future-oriented through rupture. If conservatism seeks to reconcile tradition with modernity, reactionism is its intensified form when pushed to an existential edge, at which tradition appears recoverable only through its re-founding in opposition to modernity, understood not merely as a chronological epoch but as a condition marked by symbolic impoverishment.

Final remarks

Carlyle anticipates one of the central concerns of so-called communitarian philosophers: that liberal modernity supplants a tradition-bound moral order with faith in autonomous reason – the ‘darkness’ of the past with ‘guiding light’ of reason (Carlyle, 2020) – whence the individual is imagined as a self-originating source of value. At the heart of this view lies the notion of an ‘uncontaminated’ self, stripped, as it were, to its natural form – Carlyle's ‘naked’ self – which must be set free from all those constraints on individual freedom and self-expression that reason cannot defend. Tradition, so conceived, cannot be held as a legitimate source of authority, being, as it is, unchosen, artificial, and wanting in any presently affirmed rational basis; hence must it be accounted an impediment for emancipation, a burden that prevents an existence that is both authentic and self-determined. For this reason, Carlyle declares that ‘Independence, in all kinds, is rebellion’ (Carlyle, 2000: 172) – rebellion from hierarchies, inherited symbols or any non-chosen bond. Creativity thus often consists in the displacing of tradition by systems based on reason, empirical evidence and efficiency. Yet Carlyle is acutely aware that these new systems may themselves harden into sets of beliefs and values transmitted with the same unexamined fidelity as the traditions they sought to displace. They become, in Shils’ terms (1981: 235–39), ‘positive antitraditional traditions’, since their origin and purpose still lie in the rejection, and eventual replacement, of all other traditions whose only claim to legitimacy rests on inherited authority. Carlyle captures this in the figure of ‘monster UTILITARIA’, who, ‘with her broad hoof’, treads down ‘old ruinous Palaces and Temples’ so that ‘new and better might be built!’ (Carlyle, 2000: 174). This image functions as a critique of modernity's own dogmatic impulses: its unreflective faith in progress, rationality, and utility. Accordingly, when Carlyle, through Teufelsdröckh, bids us look beyond ‘Custom’ (Carlyle, 2000: 190), it is a call to scrutinise the new forms with a scepticism equal, if not greater, to that which we reserve for the old. In short, modernity's scepticism must be turned inward, made to interrogate itself.

As has become clear, in Carlyle's view, the exaltation of autonomous reason corrodes shared moral life, whence emerges a reflexive destabilisation wherein every claim is relativised, each justification met with counter-justification. In this vacuum, symbolic mediation – those tradition-bound forms through which humans interpret, inhabit and act within the world – enters into decay. As symbols erode, so too do identity, authority, legitimacy and meaning, leaving the self-disoriented and anxious. It is this condition that leads Carlyle to observe, ‘The World… is under a process of devastation and waste… [that will] effectually enough annihilate the past Forms of Society’ (Carlyle, 2000: 173). Ricoeur, reflecting on modern literary depictions of characters ‘ultimately nonidentifiable’, argued that the subject confronted with loss of identity is, in fact, facing ‘the hypothesis of its own nothingness’ (1992: 166). This nothingness is by no means non-being, it rather represents the collapse of narrative coherence that sustains selfhood. Carlyle, from a broader socio-political perspective, articulates a cognate diagnosis, to wit: the erosion of symbolic frameworks, those which had formerly sustained both personal and collective identity, makes identity a matter of contingency and choice, such that the individual encounters a selfhood that is stripped of the familiar supports of sameness or character. Borrowing Ricoeur's terminology, the ‘what’ of identity (idem), the readily identifiable characteristics and shared symbolic meanings, becomes unstable, leaving the ‘who’ (ipse) to confront its own existential ‘nothingness’. For Carlyle, modernity's ideologies prove radically inadequate to redress this condition, which he recognises as nihilism: unceasing questioning, utilitarian ends, and the levelling of all qualitative distinctions.

Nihilism, as Carlyle sees it, does not liberate man; it consigns him to conformity, alienation, and inertia to boot. In its wake, society and the self alike become mechanised, that is to say efficient and adaptable, to be sure, yet emptied of spirit. Not moral orientation alone withers away; the very capacities for reverence, awe, inwardness and equanimity are lost with it, all essential to the ethical and political integrity of social life. It is this spiritual crisis – wrought by modernity's relentless dissolution of symbols, whether through scepticism, commodification, banalisation or ossification – that Sartor confronts. Its conservatism is evident not in spite of rupture but precisely through it; an attempt to restore tradition-bound symbolic order through a counter-rupture that contests modernity's anti-traditional rupture. Carlyle's enemies then are twofold: those who mistake continuity for vitality, preserving what is dead rather than creating new life; and those who confuse artificiality with superficiality, reducing the justification of social constructs to their utility alone. Both, in their own ways, hasten the erosion of symbolic depth. Against them, Carlyle defends a world rich in ‘Clothes’ through which human life becomes legible, ordered and morally charged. Far from constraining the individual, such symbolic richness constitutes the very condition of genuine freedom – understood as ‘blessedness’, not unbounded choice, which, in the eyes of Carlyle, paralyses, isolates and suffocates in a ‘stern Monodrama, No Object and no Rest’ (Carlyle, 2000: 94).

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor challenges ‘subtraction stories’ that frame modernity as the substitution of new beliefs for old, or the shedding of superstition, illusions or limitations, to reveal a more authentic human nature beneath (2007: 22). What Taylor proposes instead is that modern secularity must be understood as a radical reconfiguration of human subjectivity and moral life, a transformation of ‘the whole context of understanding’, indeed of the very ‘conditions of experience’ (2007: 3). From this framework, the position of reactionary figures like Carlyle may be seen as a response not to political shifts or cultural decline in themselves but to a more fundamental metaphysical rupture. Reaction, in this sense, becomes counter-ontology. Taylor himself, in a more recent book, has described ‘phenomenologies of reenchantment’ as modern efforts to recover a sense of connection to ‘metaphysico-moral cosmic orders’ in an age of ‘disenchantment’ (2024: 86–90). This is precisely Carlyle's ambition: to reanimate symbolic vitality and transcendence within a disenchanted modernity. His aim is to re-establish the conditions for individuality, social cohesion and cultural flourishing by restoring a metaphysical framework in which, in Carlyle's view, life regains purposiveness, orientation and accountability to something beyond itself. This restoration entails the revitalisation of tradition, institution, ritual, custom and hierarchy as mediating structures interposed between the human and the transcendent, and among individuals. The foundational premise of this essentially reactionary project, which underwrites Carlyle's intellectual trajectory, is articulated in the ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ of Sartor.

Bourke (2018) maintains that conservatism is not so much a coherent ideology as a ‘belated construction’ devoid of any fixed definitions, stable cores or unified traditions. All ideologies, insofar as they rely on narrative constructions, are ‘invented traditions’, to use Hobsbawm's phrase, and conservatism is no exception. To Bourke, the pretensions of ideologies to integrity and temporal consistency are dubious at best; he apprehends them as fluid constructs, shaped by circumstance and employed retrospectively or with polemical intent. Though Skinner (1969), like Bourke, rightly warns against projecting onto historical actors meanings unavailable within their conceptual world, an ‘exhaustive contextualism’, as Gordon (2014) contends, may obscure the long-term transformations and semantic continuities whereby ideas travel through time. Koselleck also emphasised the ‘semantic “carrying capacity”’ of concepts, understood as ‘spaces of meaning’ shaped by contemporary debates yet also layered with historical residues and future projections (2004: 76–9). A concept's interpretation, then, may extend beyond its immediate or particular usage to incorporate broader past and future developments and alignments. It is therefore important to cover what Koselleck termed a ‘zone of convergence’ (2004: 91), where past and present understandings flow into one another, with an approach that takes account of both the specific conditions of historical moments and the larger patterns of development unseen by those within them. Ideologies then are not coherent monoliths that persist through time, but scattered fragments retrospectively assembled into genealogies, shifting yet animated by familiar or historically related logics and impulses. A single work or actor may simultaneously feed multiple ideological genealogies.

The aim is neither to replicate an actor's self-description nor to impose anachronistic categories but to situate their thought within evolving conceptual and semantic structures, as it later became visible. In this light, Carlyle's work, though not explicitly ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ in self-identification, exhibits recurring or interconnected themes, anxieties and rhetorical strategies that later became characteristic of the reactionary variant of conservative thought, such as an abiding concern with metaphysical rupture, an organicist conception of society, critique of reform and progress, and a defence of tradition, authority and hierarchy. Rather than claiming a fully formed or systematic ideology in Carlyle, this article seeks to locate Sartor within a historically emergent repertoire of reactionary political thought. To describe it as reactionary is no whit to overlook its complexity; if anything, it is to acknowledge its participation within an emerging mode of conservative response to modernity, one that anticipates more systematic ideological expressions to come. Sartor Resartus thus may be read as a noteworthy articulation in effect, if not in name, of reactionary political theory, laying the philosophical groundwork for Carlyle's later and more overtly reactionary writings. At the same time, it offers a valuable case study by which the obscurities of reactionary thought, not least the normative vision that ultimately animates it and its often-misunderstood kinship with conservatism, might be brought to clearer light.