This epigraph, taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, departs from characterisations of humankind as inherently social, and produces a contingent account of the political. Society happened by accident. Uprooted from an antecedent Aristotelian totality, humans lose their integrity, making them evil in Rousseau's terms – consumed by aggressions which develop from social interactions. Modern culture has remained fascinated with Rousseau's arbitrary account of the social, and with his sceptical notion of nature as an ideological fiction. This book has argued that Romantic literature is one of the first cultural movements to pursue the costs of this change. Within Romantic texts, truncated elements of the body politic subvert Aristotelian ideals of holism. This reading of Romanticism through a model of internal conflict provides an alternative understanding of the Romantic movement to current distinctions which are organised by genre and by revolutionary and counterrevolutionary political orientation. Readings by genre overlook Coleridge's engagements with Rousseau in his essays, letters and poetry, and the significant overlap of philosophy and fiction in Godwin's writings. The breaking down of standard political distinctions provides a keener sense of Romanticism's ideological diversity. Hence, Wordsworth's shift from a concern with friction between individual and general wills towards his later utopianism emerges with greater clarity in this reading, as well as the different cultural contexts of the 1818 and 1831 Frankensteins. The coherence of Romanticism is to be found in the critical disruption of the relation between individuals and the social body, played out in the tension between literary and philosophical texts.