Matter of Revolution

John Rogers is Associate Professor of English at Yale University.

An important book... Rogers draws a vivid picture of an intellectual movement with implications that cut across the ideological spectrum, and he offers an ingenious account of how those implications were worked out... Students of the intersections of poetry, politics, and science cannot afford to miss this book.(Modern Philology) Rogers, who moves easily between obscure scientific treatise and the poetry of Milton and Marvell, shows how thinking about physical motion—the relation between objects and systems—was enmeshed with thinking about political action, and suggests that the Vitalist Moment helped spawn what would become political liberalism.(The New Yorker) This is one of the most original and prospectively seminal studies to date of a particular era, the brief period between 1649 and 1666, the so-called 'Vitalist Moment,' which encompasses the English civil wars, the interregnum, and the onset of the Stuart Restoration.... Rogers is always decorous, deeply insightful, cogent, and lucid. The deeper value of this book... derives from its astute analysis of an intellectual climate. Intellectual history at its best. Most highly recommended.(Choice)