Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Daniel Pick

Evolutionism as such was not necessarily a materialist philosophy, but

Darwin’s frequently was (Sanderson 1990). Had he given full vent to the

ideas in the notebooks he might have expected a more stormy response

than the somewhat bland reception that his ﬁrst communication on natural

selection, alongside that of Alfred Russel Wallace (1832–1913), received

at the Linnean Society in 1858.

Later, Wallace would join the ranks of

those who balked at the materialist implications of evolution. It is worth

setting out Wallace’s intellectual formation and social position here as they

were so strikingly different to Darwin’s own background. Indeed Darwin’s

comfortable social origins and status (be it as the well-connected young

voyager, or the settled country squire in Kent) has often served to deﬁne a

broader image of the leisured, gentleman evolutionist. Wallace had a very

different start to life. He was the eighth of nine children, born in Wales

and brought up in genteel but very modest circumstances. He left school at

fourteen. His knowledge of botany, astronomy, evolution and politics was

picked up ‘on the hoof’, as he proceeded, not without difﬁculty, to make

his way in the world. If Wallace was untypical in his exceptional qualities

as a thinker, traveller and writer, his desire for intellectual betterment and

for enlarged moral horizons was also exemplary of a large world of self-

taught working-class and lower-middle-class workers, whose leisure time

was devoted to political clubs, institutes and lecture halls, and who devoured

an ever-expanding popular scientiﬁc literature.

When his family moved to London, young Alfred and his brother John

began to frequent the ‘Hall of Science’ in central London where they

learnt about the ideas of Robert Owen and Thomas Paine. Alfred began

an apprenticeship as a surveyor in 1837, but gradually, despite family pres-

sures, and a chequered career as surveyor and schoolteacher, it was his love

of travelling, nature writing and scientiﬁc speculation that won out. An

invitation to accompany the naturalist Henry Walter Bates to the Amazon

in 1848 was but the start of a remarkable adventure that took him to the

wilder spots of South America and Asia. He studied the latest works on

42 The Darwin–Wallace presentation (made in the absence of both men) had consisted of a short essay

by Wallace, extracts from a sketch by Darwin from 1844 and from a letter to Asa Gray of 1857.The

lack of opposition expressed may well have owed something to the intimidating presence of Charles

Lyell and Joseph Hooker (Loewenberg 1959,p.33). The President of the Linnean Society, Thomas

Bell, was later to remark that the year which has passed ‘has not, indeed, been marked by any of

those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science on

which they bear; it is only at remote intervals that we can reasonably expect any sudden and brilliant

innovation which shall produce a marked and permanent impress on the character of any branch of

knowledge, or confer a lasting and important service on mankind’ (Bell 1859, pp. viii–ix).

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The politics of nature

plants and animals, and was an avid admirer of Darwin’s Journal of the Voyage

of the Beagle (which he read in the early 1840s), Humboldt’s narratives of

his travels in South American, Coombe’s studies in phrenology and, per-

haps most crucially, Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population.Hehada

taste for political radicalism and could never accept that it could be just or

acceptable for one child to be born a millionaire and another into a life of

pover ty. He called this a crime against God. Wallace became a fellow of the

Royal Society in 1893 and continued to write proliﬁcally on a large range

of subjects, from evolution to spiritualism. His readers would ﬁnd him at

one point speculating about the outer reaches of the universe, at another,

discoursing on the iniquities of this world and pondering the nitty-gritty of

social policy reform. In 1881, at the start of a decade in which his espousal

of socialism was becoming far more pronounced, he was appointed as the

founding president of the Land Nationalisation Society.

The degree to which natural selection could explain our fundamental

humanity was an issue which would soon pull apart the temporary conver-

gence of thought between Wallace and Darwin in the 1850s. ‘Natural selec-

tion’ had apparently come to the former whilst in a fever, and increasingly

he sought to hedge in this potentially pathological argument with important

caveats. Wallace distanced himself from the shared approach with Darwin,

moving progressively towards a ‘spirit’-centred evolutionism (as well as rad-

ical land reform projects and other intriguing political hobby-horses) which

Darwin found deeply worrying: ‘I hope you have not murdered too com-

pletely your own and my child’, he wrote to the erstwhile fellow parent

of natural selection. On seeing a piece in the Quarterly Review, outlining

Wallace’s revisionist ideas in the late 1860s, Darwin had added and triply

underlined the word ‘No’. Wallace concluded that the human mind could

not be explained in materialist, evolutionary terms; a gorilla’s brain would

have sufﬁced for our needs, he argued, whilst the human being had an excess

capacity, for which selection, dealing only with the utility of the here and

now, could not account. Wallace came to recognise an unseen spiritual hand

and admitted to Darwin that his views had been altered by studying ‘the

existence of forces and inﬂuences not yet recognised by science’ (quoted in

Desmond and Moore, 1991,p.569).

Philosophical unease with the imperialist claims, missionary zeal and

quasi-religious fervour of natural science can be picked up in a variety of

settings in the late nineteenth century. Rationalism and empiricism were

themselves placed under the intellectual microscope, as we saw earlier in

the case of Nietzsche.

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Daniel Pick

But at stake was not simply the adequacy of one method over another,

in the scrutiny of humanity, or the animal world, but growing dread about

the nature of the human mind itself , and the dire consequences of bringing

those minds together in new, politically powerful aggregates. In England,

commentators divided as to whether national character might free the nation

from the extremes of disorder and convulsion evident on the continent, for

instance most recently in the Paris Commune of 1871. Walter Bagehot

(1826–77), author of Physics and Politics (1872), inﬂuenced many of his con-

temporaries with his exploration of the power of imitation and instinctual

reﬂexes in the formation of national character. Bagehot drew upon Darwin

as he warned that politics was a delicate science. In his work, society appears

a fragile organism and civilisation a rare achievement, not some inevitable

destiny. ‘Only a few nations’ he warned in 1872, ‘and these of European

origin, advance; and yet these think – seem irresistibly compelled to think –

such advance to be inevitable, natural and eternal’ (Bagehot 1872,p.42).

Whilst they castigated radical and popular political movements of the past

and present for their delusions of rationality, the new ‘scientiﬁc’ historians

and political theorists often glossed over questions about the rationality or

neutrality of their own procedures and assumptions. Yet reason itself was

now sometimes seen as an altogether frail instrument. For the inﬂuential

French historian, Anglophile and keen student of modern science, Hip-

polyte Taine, it had an unmistakable responsibility – with its sins of omis-

sion and commission – for the horrors of the French Revolution. Whilst he

reviled Rousseau, Taine was as committed as anyone to the proposition that

the nature of society could be laid out and investigated upon the philoso-

pher’s table. But for Taine, dry and abstract eighteenth-century ‘reasoning’

had been overtaken by the ‘scientiﬁc’ ﬁndings of investigators such as Broca,

Lombroso and Charcot. He was intent on getting to the violence out there

in the revolution and diagnosing the psychopathology of the crowd. As he

baldly admitted: ‘J’ai horreur de la foule.’ Eighteenth-century philosophy

was viewed as something sterile and systematic, an artiﬁcial imposition upon

reality. Science on the other hand derived from observation, experiment and

induction; it accepted incompleteness and the provisional nature of conclu-

sions. For all the ambition of cool scientiﬁc appraisal, his own descriptions

sometimes erupted into passion and fear. There was nothing provisional

about Taine’s evolutionary verdict on French revolutionary atavism as he

glimpsed springing forth ‘the barbarian’, ‘the primitive animal’, ‘the grin-

ning, sanguinary, wanton baboon, who chuckles while he slays, and gambols

over the ruin he has accomplished’ (Taine 1878–85, i,pp.52–3).

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The politics of nature

In political theory as in historiography, there was growing attention to

the psychological incoherence and hysterical propensities of massed popu-

lations. Huge gatherings and militant (let alone violent) protest movements

came increasingly to be portrayed in quasi-psychiatric terms. Indeed in the

thirty-year period after the Paris Commune in 1871,arangeofhistorians

and crowd psychologists wrote deeply critical, forensic, analyses of group

hysteria or psychosis, convinced that there was no real ‘moral economy’

to be found in the crowd. Le Bon, Tarde, Sighele and a variety of sim-

ilar commentators explained at length why the reader had every reason

to be worried that we were now living in what was quickly dubbed ‘the

age of the crowd’. The anti-democratic leanings, clich

es, sensationalism,

self-promotion, snobberies, racial tropes and gender prejudices that r un

through this literature have been amply contextualised and appropriately

analysed since (see, for example, Barrows 1981; Ginneken 1992;Nye1975).

But even leaving aside Le Bon and company’s original intellectual signif-

icance, the course of subsequent mass g roup phenomena (the spectacle

of the Nuremberg rallies being but the most notorious case in point)

means that such pioneer enquirers remain complex and often double-

edged sources, not simply one-dimensional ﬁgures to be dismissed with

mirth.

Collective ‘unreason’ and ‘atavism’, much raked over in the political

theory, history-writing and social psychology of the ﬁn de si

ecle, were also

to be the launching pad for new probing ﬁctions about the uncanny. The

ﬁeld of the primitive and the regressive, as well as the ghostly and the

telepathic – horrors and wonders of heaven and earth insufﬁciently dreamt

of in nineteenth-century scientiﬁc naturalism – returned to the fore in those

ﬁnal decades. Such pursuits often had a borderline quality; the investigator

poised between scepticism about and enthusiasm for the ﬂeeting and the

fantastic. It was the age of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. In the mid-

1890s, Henry’s elder brother William would become the president of the

Cambridge society established for the pursuit of psychical research. In The

Varieties of Religious Experience William James declared ‘the exploration of

the subliminal region’ the essential task. The Society for Psychical Research,

now much studied, recognised the limits of conventional science and sought

to probe ‘beyond’. But whether this was to be a rationalist pursuit of the

unknown or whether the methods of enquiry would themselves need to be

in some sense ‘irrationalist’ remained very much in question. Freud (who

was to become a corresponding member of the Society) would provide a

dynamic route out of this particular conundrum, but his contribution to

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Daniel Pick

political thought will have to await the next volume of this series.

Freud

famously declared that Copernicus and Darwin had struck the ﬁrst two

great blows against human narcissism; psychoanalysis, he suggested, had

provided the third, showing that even the ego was not master in its own

house. Let man visit the orang-utang in captivity, Darwin had declared in

one of his private notebooks much earlier, let him see its expressive whine,

its intelligence, its affection, passion, rage, sulkiness and despair and then

‘let him dare to boast of his proud preeminence’.

In these years, new understandings of the ‘unconscious’ were emerg ing,

often poised between a kind of ‘ape in man’ post-Darwinian trepidation

and intuitions of unconscious meaning, whose exploration went beyond

biological concerns with ‘selection’, struggle and survival. Novels such as

Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde (1886), Du Maurier’s Tr i l by

(1894) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), entangled in the nomenclature

of apish spite, racial endowments or criminal brains, were also able to

popularise a new shadowy language of dream and desire. Shaw’s theatrical

work, Man and Superman (1903) illustrates the difﬁculty in hunting out

straightforward Darwinian inﬂuences and beliefs in the work of novelists or

dramatists. The title itself played on a very contemporary nerve and Darwin

himself was cited in the preface. But in solemnly cataloguing references,

we may fail to see the comedy, the intellectual ferment, the ‘playing with’,

rather than simply endorsing of, the author of The Origin,or,forthatmatter,

in this playwright’s case, Nietzsche, Wagner and Ibsen, not to mention Don

Juan himself upon whose myth he aimed, without concessions to prudery

or stultifying convention, to cast a new and open light. The ﬁn-de-si

ecle

creative thinkers and artists whose work has survived to be appreciated by

later generations surely displaced and hybridised, as much as they absorbed

and condensed, the familiar Darwinian debates of their day.

I will leave aside here the question of whether the ‘two culture’ division

implied immediately above between scientists and artists is quite tenable for

this period, and merely note that a concern with limitations and misappli-

cations of natural selection were to haunt no small number of the theorists

of evolution itself. Thus Darwin’s supposed one-time intellectual bedfel-

low, Alfred Russel Wallace, turned increasingly away from the theme of

natural selection, in search of other forms of knowledge and explanation.

A preoccupation with the invisible and the ineffable, the eter nal and the

43 Hughes 1979a. On Freud’s relationship to Darwin, see Ritvo 1990.

44 ‘C Notebook’, line ref. C79,Grubar1974,p.449.

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The politics of nature

cosmic marked his late work. Wallace’s study Man’s Place in the Universe: A

Study of the Results of Scientiﬁc Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality

of Worlds (1903) was characteristic of this shift of focus. It was not simply

a question of seeking a new vista – the stars above, rather than the earth

below – but of politics, ethics and the meaning of science. Wallace had

become dissatisﬁed with the hegemony of ‘utilitarian’ ideas in Darwin’s

account (Wallace 1891,pp.35, 89, 188–94). For all his copious imag-

inative and reasoning powers, perhaps Darwin had illuminated but one

side of life and its struggles, f ailing to attend sufﬁciently to others. Even

Friedrich Lange, in his very admiring history of materialism, had painstak-

ingly drawn attention to the blind spots in our capacity to see. He included,

tellingly, a reference to the theory of the blind spot, suggesting perhaps

by way of analogy the hole that needed to be punched in our conﬁdent

vision of nature (Lange 1925, ii,p.224). Attempts to rewrite materialism

in more complex and adequate forms or to challenge it decisively prolifer-

ated. Later nineteenth-century psychologists, for instance, sought to move

beyond romantic intuitions, and also beyond what has subsequently come

to be known as ‘psychiatric Darwinism’, towards new and still mysterious

accounts of ‘automatism’, ‘multiplex personality’, hypnotism and other very

puzzling psychic phenomena. Thus a new intense concern with meaning

and language, dreams and fantasies, and above all with the dynamic rela-

tionship of conscious and unconscious mental functioning, rather than a

preoccupation with hereditary taints and lesions of the brain, marked the

central clinical shift from Charcot to Freud. A vision of the interior world,

already presaged earlier, crystallised around 1900, dealing not so much with

the visible ‘expression of the emotions’, still less with the degenerate body,

but rather with the intra-psychic complexity of the subject.

Victorian readers who had sought to have the last word on the politics

and ethics of Darwinism found themselves quickly superseded, as rivals

emerged to claim the science. The Origin has always suffered its inadequate

snap ‘verdicts’. Harriet Martineau, who knew the Darwin family, quickly

offered her own endorsement: ‘What a book it is! – over throwing (if true)

revealed Religion on the one hand, and Natural (as far as Final Causes and

Design are concerned) on the other. The range and mass of knowledge

takes away one’s breath.’

Her ardent message was sufﬁciently indiscreet as

to cause her to add: ‘Please burn this scrawl.’ But our resting place should

45 Martineau 1859 to her fellow campaigner, George Holyoake, British Library Add. Ms 42, 726 f. 26.

She regretted the theological elements which remained.

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not be Martineau’s decisive statement, but rather her caveat, ‘if true’. This

was perhaps more faithful to Darwin, who never quite got over his own

burning doubts. His letters are punctuated by the fear of imperfection, ﬁts

of the ‘wibber-gibbers’, the terror of scandal, of prematurely rushing into

print; the dread of being ‘horridly imperfect and with many mistakes, so

that I groan and tremble when I think of it’ (Darwin 1990,pp.109, 135–6,

142). If his hesitating nature could be deemed a personal afﬂiction, it was

also a prerequisite for his exceptional talent, and for the sophistication of

his synthesising endeavour. His capacity to move boldly back or forth across

ideas, and to tolerate, despite misgivings, their open expression, provided

the royal road to his extraordinary intellectual achievement.

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Conservative political thought from the

revolutions of 1848 until the ﬁn de si

ecle

lawrence goldman

1 The emergence and deﬁnition of the conservative tradition

Like so much of the vocabulary of modern politics and social science, the

term ‘conservative’ can be traced back to the early nineteenth century

(Vierhaus 1973, i,pp.477–85). Its ﬁrst use was apparently in the title of the

weekly journal founded in 1817 by Francois Ren

e de Chateaubriand (1768–

1848) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), Le Conservateur. Its declared mission

was to uphold ‘religion, the King, liber ty, the Charter and respectable

people [les honn

etes gens]’.

InBritainthetermwasﬁrstusedasasynonym

for the Tory Party in 1830.

It rapidly became a part of the vocabulary

of politics during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831–2. Daniel O’Connell,

the political leader of Ir ish Catholicism, noted the new coinage in 1832:

‘Conservative – that is the fashionable term, the new-fangled phrase now

used in Polite Society to designate the Tory ascendancy.’

It was being used

pejoratively against conservatives in Germany by the late 1830s, but there, as

elsewhere, the political formations opposed to change came to accept and

employ the term themselves. By the middle of the nineteenth century the

term was in universal use and it is the purpose of this essay to explain the

different ideological positions, groups and individuals who were embraced

by it. The essay will consider the different conservative reactions to the

mid-century European revolutions and the emergence of mass politics. It

will also examine the ways in which conservatism changed over time from

the anti-revolutionary creed of 1848 to the more complex, intellectualised

1 Le Conservateur, 5 October 1818,p.7.

2 ‘We now are, as we always have been, decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the

Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative Party.’ ‘Internal Policy’,

Quarterly Review, 42,January1830,p.276. The quotation has been attributed traditionally to the

Tory politician and journalist, J. W. Croker, but there is some doubt about this. See Houghton 1966,

p. 709, and Blake 1985,p.6.

3 Daniel O’Connell, ‘Public Letter to Edward Dwyer’, Freeman’s Journal, 25 May 1832, O’Connell

1977, 418n.

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Lawrence Goldman

and yet irrational forms it had adopted by the end of the century. Because

there was no single, dominant conservative thinker in this period the essay

will examine different variants of the creed from the United States to

the Russian Empire – from the South Carolina of John C. Calhoun to the

St Petersburg of Dostoevsky. And because it will be argued that conservatism

was more a set of attitudes generated by speciﬁc historical situations than a

systematic ideology, the treatment will closely relate conservative thought

to the history of the era.

The conservative intellectual tradition can be traced back to the eigh-

teenth century and to related reactions against Enlightenment optimism

and the French Revolution. In France, Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)and

Louis de Bonald gave it a distinctively catholic and legitimist character,

based, in Maistre’s case, on a Christian pessimism about human nature,

expressed most famously in his Consid

erations sur la France, written in the

mid-1790s at the height of the Revolution. God’s authority over men, and

the beneﬁcent forces of tradition and f amily, were elevated all the more by

Maistre in the light of man’s evident inability to rule himself. Scepticism,

not to say contempt in Maistre’s case, for human social arrangements and

the capacity of men to govern themselves, was a deﬁning feature of the con-

servative mentality in this era (Lebrun 2001). In Maistre’s view, men should

be governed by absolute authority, to which they should offer absolute obe-

dience. In conformity with this view Bonald was an apologist for both the

Napoleonic Empire and the Bourbon Restoration which followed. He also

took the part of the artisan and craftsman whose livelihoods were threatened

by encroaching mass production: the defence of traditional communities,

and of traditional social relations within them, was a characteristic theme

of nineteenth-century conservatism in France, as elsewhere (see Godechot

1970). Conservatism in Germany on the other hand had a secular rather

than theological basis in its respect for, and subservience to, the state as the

embodiment of human will and the vehicle for social emancipation. In the

century deﬁned by the emergence of the nation state, the idealist tradition

generated another variant of conservatism distinguished by its loyalty to

constituted authority and its intolerance of liberal individualism (Berdahl

1988;Epstein1966). In Britain, meanwhile, the conservative tradition was

formalised by Edmund Burke (1729–97)inhisReﬂections on the Revolution in

France (1790) which was different again. Indeed, not only did Burke predate

the emergence of conservatism, but he was himself a Whig with a consis-

tent record of support for reform in his approach to imperial questions in

the 1770sand1780s (America, India and Ireland) and to the composition

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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848

and functions of the British Parliament. Burke’s conservatism owed lit-

tle to the obedience humans must show their maker, as in the French

tradition; nor did it elevate obedience to the state. Rather, it derived the

anti-revolutionary case on empirical grounds, from the observation of what,

in Burke’s view, was conducive to social stability, political order and human

contentment (Cobban 1960; O’Gorman 1973; Pocock 1982,pp.331–49).

Burke was not as widely read or admired in the nineteenth century as

in the twentieth: he was less of a presence than is sometimes imagined.

Nevertheless, his ideas recur in many different forms of conservatism in this

period, whether acknowledged or not. He countered the disorientating

effects of liberty which he believed he saw in the very earliest stages of

the French Revolution (and which were undoubtedly present in its later

stages) with an emphasis on order, tradition and gradualism. He countered

social levelling and equality with hierarchy, deference and the acceptance

of self-evident human (and thus social) differences. The friends of liberty

welcomed a new age of reason: Burke reminded his readers of the foibles

and intellectual limitations of humankind. Against the twin French dis-

eases of statism and internationalism, Burke famously lauded localism, the

attachment to community ﬁrst and foremost, for this was the natural and

original location of the spirit of civic-mindedness. ‘To be attached to the

subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the ﬁrst

principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections’ (Burke 2003,p.40).

His was a cautionary message – an attempt to remind mankind that as

morally ﬂawed and intellectually limited creatures, they should not seek to

over throw the inherited wisdom and the institutions of the ages. But Burke

was not, in the manner of Maistre, a reactionary, or a conservative utopian

seeking a return to the past. In this he helps us differentiate between con-

servatism and or thodoxy which latter position rejects all change and the

calculus of human advantage that might lead the conservative to accept

moderate reform. Burke accepted social progress based on due respect for

custom and tradition: as he recognised, ‘a state without the means of some

change is without the means of its conservation’ (Burke 2003,p.19). But he

emphasised that slow-maturing change based on collective wisdom would

prove more durable and beneﬁcial than change dictated by the theories of

‘sophisters, economists, and calculators’ (Burke 2003,p.65). As he wrote

elsewhere in relation to ‘the French revolutionists’, ‘to innovate is not to

reform’ (Burke 1991,p.156). Legislation would not make men good, nor

lead to lasting improvement: ‘Manners are of more importance than laws.

Upon them, in great measure, the laws depend’ (Burke 1904,p.310). He

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