Matthew Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution

It is perhaps a bit disconcerting to find “antinomianism” resurfacing in the mid-2020s. Matthew Mauger’s William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution presents the thesis that “sustained interest in the antinomian resonances of Blake’s corpus effectively distracts us from his consistent aspiration for the law as a framework which affords protection for Humanity against incoherence, dissolution, and despair” (8). This modification signals his point of departure from Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (1992), Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003), and G. A. Rosso’s The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (2016), the leading exponents of tracing antinomian ideologies in Blake.