Extensive research has been devoted for understanding the concept of genius in the context of aesthetics, yet its use and meaning in the political context of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was usually neglected. Eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century theories of genius were valued for their contribution to discussions on literary and artistic creativity and to relevant concepts such as taste, originality, and imagination. Close reading of English thinkers of the 19th century reveals however that the concept of genius was never regarded as merely a literary concept. This Paper will like present the political use of the concept of Genius in the 19th century trough the writings of two prominent Victorian intellectuals: John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle.
