Published in 1819, two days before the Peterloo Massacre, the work spans the final years of the Napoleonic Wars and the social and economic strife that followed.

Included are attacks on monarchy, defences of Napoleon, and critical essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Edmund Burke.

[6] For Paul Hamilton, the aim of Political Essays was to combat the reactionary "superstitions, prejudices, traditions, laws, usages" which are (quoting Hazlitt's preface) "enshrined in the very idioms of language".

[7] Hazlitt's essays had appeared in periodicals of the liberal "middling sort", and for Gilmartin their author was "removed from the day-to-day activity of political organization" associated with writer-publishers such as William Cobbett and Thomas Wooler.

Nonetheless, the periodical essay had a "dynamic presence in radical print culture", and Hazlitt made use of "vigorous and direct address", "self-dramatization", "irony and disguise", and "rapid and improvised movement through a range of topical and occasional matter".

[13] Enemies attacked in Political Essays include the Duke of Wellington, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Castlereagh, Edmund Burke, William Pitt and Thomas Malthus.

[18] Jonathan Bate describes Political Essays as: a fine introduction to the sharpness of Hazlitt's prose and the spice of his convictions—his faith in Napoleon, his hatred for Pitt, his uneasy admiration of Burke, his dismay at the apostasy of Coleridge and Southey[2]