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This chapter examines the contribution of Isaac Butt in the agitation for Irish self-government in 1870. Butt proposed not only the dismantling of the United Kingdom but its federalisation, with England, Scotland, and Ireland having local parliaments subordinate to Westminster. He also envisaged the Irish parliament having a house of lords with veto powers. Though the home rule of 1874 failed, it was a considerable achievement for Butt because it was particularly important in keeping the land question alive. The chapter discusses the split of the home rule party in parliament during the 1877 political campaign, and describes the conflict between Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell.

This chapter discusses fenianism, a form of militant Irish American nationalism after the failed 1848 rebellion in Ireland. The first section of this chapter describes the attempts to combine north and south Ireland for the public end. This development owed everything to an unusual friendship between two rather different and very remarkable men, Charles Gavan Duffy and Dr. James McKnight. The second section looks at the rebirth of the Irish revolutionary tradition. Fenianism, as the new movement came to be called, linked the concerns and passions of patriotic young men in the homeland with the Irish-born of America and of England and Scotland. The third section examines the transition of fenianism from military elitism to popular politics. The fourth section reports on Isaac Butt, and the case for home rule.

This chapter explores neoclassical assumptions in the modern academy and constructs an intriguing case for the significance of post-Romantic literature addressing itself to desires and feeling in the formation of the new economic subject in the 19th century. Considering the Chapters of College Romance by the Irish politician, lawyer, and writer on economics, Isaac Butt (1813-1879), together with some of Thomas De Quincey's economic writing, this chapter argues that Butt's ‘romantic’ narratives offer a model of human subjectivity that requires the re-orientation of traditional economic analysis. That model involves rejecting a theory of the market based on rational calculation to insist on an emotional and spiritual principle at work in economic life. It is literary writing, particularly the gothic and supernatural, which suggestively emerges from this account of the genealogy of the 19th-century economic subject as the peculiarly serviceable cultural form for the construction of an economic identity defined by desire.