“Bringing Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus into dialogue with the work of Rawls, MacIntyre, Ellul, Qutb, and others, Brian Wolfel argues thoughtfully and provocatively for the twenty-first century relevance of Carlyle’s transcendentalist philosophy, conceived here as an anti-dogmatic, post-liberal political ideology with the potential to move us beyond the limitations hyper-consumerism and political factionalism.”

John M. Ulrich, West Chester University and co-editor of the Strouse edition of Carlyle's Essays on Politics and Society

“In this book, the first of its kind to analyze Thomas Carlyle systematically as a political theorist, Brian Wolfel provides a view of Carlyle’s anti-liberal legacy which is a timely and useful contribution to scholarship. Carlyle’s neo-Platonic approach to spirituality exposes the vulnerabilities and diminishing returns inherent to dogma and materialism. In Wolfel’s analysis, the decline of attention to this aspect of his legacy reflects the decline of the humanities as a whole, and Carlyle’s re-positioning formulates their defense by offering a post-liberal vision beyond capitalism and individualism.”

Zoe Beenstock, University of Haifa

“In this refreshingly thoughtful and uninhibited study, Wolfel distinguishes Carlyle from his Victorian contemporaries by emphasizing his heroic resistance to the materialist blueprints of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. The Sage of Chelsea emerges from this study wearing clothes that might surprise his modern detractors: in his prescient attacks against the environmental, political, and economic degradation of his times, Wolfel’s Carlyle reclaims the mantle of a prophet.”

David R. Sorensen, Saint Joseph's University