Cultural nationalist
Davis has been seen as an early exponent in Ireland of what has since been understood as cultural nationalism. In contrast to the Painite republicanism of the 1790s, and to the mix of Benthamite utilitarianism and Catholic devotionalism that characterised O'Connell's leadership of the national movement, Davis promoted the Irish language as a means of reconnecting with the Gaelic past.
Davis drew inspiration from the civic and enlightenment ideas promoted by the United Irishmen prior to the 1798 Rebellion. One of Davis's first major projects was a collection of the bar, and parliamentary speeches, with a "Memoir and Historical Notices", of John Philpot Curran. Karl Marx was to recommend it to Friedrich Engels on the basis of being able to find there "quoted there all the sources for the United Irishmen".
Davis was also the source of a hagiography of The United Irishmen, centred on the figure of Wolfe Tone. In 1843, he published his elegiac poem Tone's Grave, and with the blessing Tone's widow Mathilda (in American exile), organised the first Bodenstown Tone memorial. With for his fellow Young Irelander (and Protestant) John Mitchel, Tone for Davis was an "alternative national hero" to O'Connell, "the Liberator", with whose solicitation of Whig government favour and Catholic clericalism he was increasingly at odds.
It was a turn toward a romantic nationalism, in which Davis was influenced by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). For Herder nationality was not genetic but the product of climate, geography, history and inclination. Davis did write of an "unsaxonised" Ireland, but this was not an Ireland ethnically cleansed of those of his own British ancestry and reformed religion. Rather it was an Ireland in which Catholic and Protestant alike, find sufficient unity and strength in their education and in their "recollections, ancestral, personal, national" to resist England's "unnatural", "cosmopolite" influence.
Davis decried the new liberal political economy, more closely associated in England with O'Connell's friends among the Whigs, than by the more tradition-bound Tories. Ireland would never attain nationhood so long as it remained in thrall to what he described as "modern Anglicanism: i.e. Utilitarianism . . ., Yankeeism, Englishism, which measures prosperity by exchangeable value, measures duty by gain, and limits desire to clothes and respectability". As a barrier to this anglicisation, Davis looked not to the majority Catholic Church, but to Irish, which by the 1840s was fast becoming a minority language.
In September 1842, with Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon, Davis began publication in Dublin of The Nation. While designed to support O'Connell's campaign for repeal of the 1801 Union, Davis made the weekly a vehicle for promoting Irish, a language "inseparably mingled", in his view, with the history and "soul" of the Irish people. While a Gaeilgeoir himself, for O'Connell this meant little. He declared "the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication" too great a consideration for him to regret "the gradual abandonment " of Irish.
