Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Lawrence Goldman
liberal parliamentarianism and democratic procedures (though he remained
sympathetic to the common worker and even the deluded Chartist radical)
his rejection turned to a new faith in the capacity of the great man and
leader to bring order and reason through a benevolent authoritarianism to
the generality of inadequate humans incapable of governing themselves.
Carlyle’s remarkable essay, ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), demonstrated his
intuitive understanding of the dehumanisation intrinsic to the processes of
industrial civilisation and a ‘mechanical age’: ‘men are grown mechanical
in heart as well as head’. Past and Present, published fourteen years later, was
a torrent of hostility and invective at what he had earlier called ‘the cash
nexus’
14
and its destruction of human relations and moral conduct, care-
fully counterposed to an idealised picture of life in a utopian twelfth-century
community. To ‘work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary,
yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal Laissez-faire’ was the lot
of everyman in the present (Carlyle 1903,pp.210–11). By the time that his
essays were published in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) Carlyle was implacably
critical of self-government, even in Britain where it might be said to have
established the strongest and longest roots, and prepared to endorse slavery
itself as more desirable than an alienated and aimless freedom. Editing the
letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) and writing his biography
of Frederick the Great (1858–65) were more than exercises in historical
scholarship, therefore: liberalism was a dangerous delusion and the role of
the great man in history was to save us from ourselves.
Carlyle’s erratic insights, which were so arresting to his contemporaries
but sometimes so difficult to discern amidst the recalcitrant written style of
an Old Testament prophet, informed and coincided with the development
of other conservative movements and thinkers. The rejection of laissez-faire
was an especially strong theme in British conservative thought between the
1830sand1850s, and the Young England movement through which Disraeli
(1804–81)expressedhisviewsintheearly1840s echoed Carlyle’s invocation
of a better, juster and moral past in their equally idealised view of medieval
paternalism (Blake 1966,pp.167–89;Faber1987). For Young England, not
only were the social arrangements of pre-Reformation England superior to
the flux and social instability of the present, but their animating spirit was
taken as a model by which to outflank the bourgeoisie, both ideolog ically
and politically. The accommodation of the aristocracy and the people, who
14 ‘In these complicated t imes, with C ash Payment as the sole nexus between man and man . . . ’,
Carlyle 1904,pp.168–9.
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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848
would follow the conserving paternalism of their superiors, was held up,
half-seriously and half-fancifully, as an alternative to liberalism. That this
was also a quite specific critique of the leadership of the Conservative
Party by the liberal-tending Sir Robert Peel, a son of the middle classes
who seemed to revert to type as prime minister between 1841 and 1846,
and thus had a narrow party-political rationale, should not obscure the
imaginative hold of a romanticised Tory benevolence over many opponents,
both rich and poor, of industrial civilisation and laissez-faire. Disraeli’s trilogy
of novels, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred (1844–7) gave substance and form
to this outlook and strategy: while scholars will continue to debate their
relevance for an understanding of his political thinking, they doubtless
embody an important, though unrealised and unrealisable strain in the
Conservative tradition (Blake 1966,pp.190–220; Vincent 1990,pp.81–
104).
Coincidence with Carlyle’s ideas can also be discerned in the work of
John Ruskin (1819–1900) who famously described himself as a ‘violent
Tory of the old school’
15
– though an earlier self-description that he was
‘by nature and instinct a Conservative, loving old things because they are
old, and hating new ones merely because they are new’
16
may be more
faithful to Ruskin’s true spirit, and helpful also in understanding the general
conservative psychology. Ruskin is unusual in the history of social thought
(where he has a place, but in which he is not usually included), for his social
and political ideas developed from his aesthetic sensibility and his vocation
as a critic of art and architecture. But the deadening reach of laissez-faire
liberalism extended very f ar – even to the quality of Victorian design and
craftsmanship and the nature and experience of work itself under capitalism.
As Ruskin came to see that the architectural record provided a moral history
of mankind – that how and what we build and make are projections of our
deepest values and reflections of the organisation of our society – so he
became more critical of the shallow materialism of Victorian style, the
destruction of the natural environment, and the exploitation of men and
women that were each the cause and effect of this moral degeneration.
17
His
magnificently original essays on political economy, Unto this Last, published
in 1862, were paradoxical. They emanated from an enraged conservative
spirit that presented the social and economic philosophy of liberalism as
15 Fors Clavigera, 1st Letter, January 1871,inRuskin1903–12, xxvii,p.14.
16 Ruskin to Henry Acland (27 April 1856), in Ruskin 1903–12, xxxvi,p.239.
17 Ruskin’s moral-historical ideas were set out first in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)andThe
Stones of Venice (1853). See Hilton 1985; Hunt 1982.
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ungodly and inhumane, but they became classical among the emerging
labour movement at the end of the nineteenth century, and inspired the
ethical anti-capitalism that animated the founders of the British Labour
Party. Ruskin was the single most widely read author among the first cohort
of Labour Members of Parliament elected in 1906 (Goldman 1999,pp.57–
86). That Ruskin (and Carlyle also) were revered by working men of a later
generation should not surprise us, however : the conservative and the socialist
could find common ground in their shared protest at the consequences of
economic and social liberalism – though in what they proposed to do about
it they differed widely. No self-conscious and politically astute working man
could be drawn to the static, hierarchical and paternalistic society beloved
of the conservative critics.
Ruskin thus exemplifies another theme within the conservative tradition,
so-called ‘cultural conservatism’ whose focus was less on the political effects
of modernity and more on its consequences for public taste, learning and
behaviour. In some degree it may be seen as a retreat: having lost the battle
against political liberalism in the 1840s, during which period the Conserva-
tive Party was torn apart by internal disputes over its responses to social and
economic change, many conservatives turned instead to the preservation of
traditional values in art, religion and education. It is a strain of conservatism,
running from Coleridge through Carlyle to Ruskin and Matthew Arnold,
which is best exemplified in a specifically English context, and it has attracted
notable and influential scholarly attention.
18
Like his contemporary, John
Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was a self-confessed liberal who
believed in many of the progressive principles of the age: democracy, self-
improvement, reform and the administration of experts.
19
But in Culture
and Anarchy (1869), his flawed and opinionated lectures from the end of the
1860s, he presented the most famous, if not necessarily the best account
of cultural conservatism in the English-speaking tradition. Accepting that
democracy was now embedded (and it is noteworthy that the essays were
stimulated by some minor disturbances caused by a public demonstration
in Hyde Park in July 1866 in support of the extension of the suffrage)
20
18 Williams 1958,pt.1, ‘A Nineteenth-Century Tradition’.
19 Arnold 1960,p.41: ‘I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and
renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.’ See also, M. Arnold, ‘The Future of
Liberalism’, 1880 in Complete Prose Works, ix,p.138. See, in general, Collini, 1988; Honan 1981.
20 See the allusion to the ‘Englishman’s right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes,
meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes’
in Arnold 1960,p.76. On the so-called ‘Hyde Park Riots’of 22–23 July 1866 see Harrison 1962,
pp. 354–6.
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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848
Arnold’s theme was how to make it tolerable, how to make it cultured. As
he had written somewhat earlier, ‘The difficulty for democracy is how to
find and keep high ideals.’
21
Though culture itself was never very satisfacto-
rily defined in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold presented it as an inheritance of
order, stability and civilised values which the finest art embodies. ‘Without
order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human
perfection.’ Culture was, indeed, ‘a study of perfection’, and ‘the best that
has been thought and said’ (Arnold 1960,p.45). But few aspired so high in
mid-Victorian Britain. Arnold was especially critical of the vulgarity and
‘the bad civilisation’ – the philistinism – of the nonconformist (i.e. Protes-
tant non-Anglican) middle classes, slaves to what he termed ‘Hebraism’, a
doctrine and lifestyle of materialism, provincialism and confining biblical
moralism, of ‘money and salvation’. To this he counterposed the spirit of
‘Hellenism’, derived from the classical sense of the complete, balanced and
fulfilled life.
22
Arnold was no snob: no man who was for thirty-five years an inspector of
schools, travelling the country in the dutiful pursuit of social improvement,
and who passionately advocated the elevation of the quality of secondary
education in England, can be dismissed in this way.
23
But Arnold, though
humane, high-minded and a political realist, demonstrated nevertheless the
weakness of the conservative case for culture. For his famous lectures were
delivered in his own univer sity, Oxford, barely a decade after it had been
opened up to non-Anglicans in 1854 for the first time since the Refor-
mation, and at a time when teaching and professorial posts there, and in
Cambridge also, were still closed to all but members of the Established
Church. If high culture was threatened by philistinism; if the lower classes
lived unenlightened and spiritually impoverished lives; if anarchy threat-
ened (though in nineteenth-century Britain of all places, it did not) what
responsibility did cultural elitism and deliberate exclusion bear for all this?
Arnold was convinced of the harm done to national culture by the ‘isolation
from the main current of thought’ of dissenting communities (Arnold 1998,
p. 382). But as one ‘philistine’ put it in reply, Oxford ‘might look down
with regret, no doubt, upon the flippancy and thoughtlessness, upon the
gigantic Philistinism, which everywhere prevail, but they have no right to
regard it with scorn unless they are prepared to deliver us from it’ (Watson
21 Matthew Arnold, The Popular Education of France (1861), in Arnold 1960–77, ii,p.17.
22 ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’ in Ar nold 1960,pp.129–44.
23 On secondary education see The Popular Education of France (1861)andA French Eton or Middle-class
Education and the State (1864) in Arnold 1960–77, ii,pp.3–211,pp.262–325.
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Lawrence Goldman
1871,pp.365–6).
24
It must be allowed that Arnold, through exemplary
public service and writing was so prepared. But the paradox of cultural
conservatism, and its great disability, was that the very thing it feared – the
dilution of high culture by the masses – was caused by the very thing that
defined and characterised it, the preservation of high culture by means of
social and intellectual exclusion.
4 The conservative tradition in America
These varieties of conservatism within a British context show considerable
variation in the way they were expressed, in the focus of their concern –
whether religious, aesthetic, social or cultural – and in the solutions sug-
gested. But they were articulated within a stable political culture where the
spectrum of ideological difference was relatively narrow, and in a society
that experienced only minor disturbances to its social order from the 1840s
onwards. Conservative ideas could be advanced in the safe assumption that
the deluge was unlikely. This was not the case in either the United States
or continental Europe. In America, their centrality to the defence of sec-
tionalism and the ‘peculiar institution’ of black, chattel slavery, gave them
an altogether different significance: they provided the basis for the South’s
defence of its society and its secession from the Union. In continental
Europe, where the threats to social order were demonstrably more serious,
conservatism took a more virulent form.
It has sometimes been contended that America has no true conservative
tradition.
25
In an argument made famous by Louis Hartz, the absence of a
monarchy, of a feudal class and of an established church in the United States
gave conservatism no natural institutional or social focus (Har tz 1955). In
addition, democracy and industry emerged in the early nineteenth cen-
tury and developed together as natural ways of American life, conformable
with the liberal spirit, political individualism and representative institutions
which, in this interpretation, had led the Revolution and been enshrined
in the federal and state constitutions at the end of the eighteenth century.
Given the relative weakness of social radicalism among a ‘people of plenty’
with remarkable resources to exploit, there was no substantial challenge
from the left to give rise to an indigenous conservatism (Sombart 1906).
24 Spence Watson, from the north-east of England, was a leading figure in late Victorian provincial
liberalism.
25 On the difficulty of defining conservatism in the United States see Crick 1955,pp.359–76.
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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848
But this view has been challenged by a more recent generation of scholars
for neglecting the essential conservatism of the American Revolution, a
conflict undertaken by the colonists to preserve a status quo under threat
from British administrative and fiscal innovation in the 1760sand1770s. In
that conflict, the strongest arguments were those founded on the traditional
rights of subjects of the Crown, and on an older understanding, based on
Whig ideology of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, of the
powers of government to tax the people (Bailyn 1967). In turn, the found-
ing fathers of the republic who framed the federal constitution in 1787,
demonstrated a wholly cautious psychology based on a realistic appraisal
of human nature. They feared the accretion of centralised power, which
was therefore divided between different branches of government and offset
by the authority of the states; they ensured that the unmediated power of
popular election applied to only one branch of the central legislature, and
not to the executive or judiciary; they designed a political structure that bal-
anced carefully between individual freedoms and restraints; they accepted
that men were driven by cupidity and sought to harness that selfishness for
the good of the Union in systems of public credit.
26
While the label ‘conservative’ has sometimes been applied to the social
philosophies that emerged in the United States to validate the monopoly
capitalism of the late nineteenth century, the commitment to economic
individualism and laissez-faire that they all shared placed them securely within
the liberal tradition. But in the antebellum South a true American conser-
vatism took root, compounded of agrarianism, racism and paternalism, and
the style (if not the substance) of seigneurialism (Genovese 1996,pp.22–
3, 31, 98). Southern conservatism was premised on a belief in the natural
inequalities of races and classes. Though the great planters were themselves
great capitalists, investing in land and cotton to produce essential com-
modities for a world market, and amassing great profits in the process, the
Old South was loudly critical of the ‘free labour’, laissez-faire system of the
Northern states which, it contended, was careless of the welfare of the new
urban and industrial workers employed there. Northern individualism and
exploitation were contrasted with Southern organicism and paternalism. In
the South, it was argued that labour and capital had identical interests and
were not at war. How could it be otherwise, when labour – slaves – were
literally capital in themselves, valuable assets which it would be irrational to
26 Hofstadter 1973,ch.1. ‘The Founding Father s: An Age of Realism’. See also Elkins and McKitrick
1971.
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treat other than humanely? It was claimed as well that the social structure of
the South, with its leisured class of wealthy planters, provided for a higher
and nobler civilisation than that which had emerged in the venal, liberal
North. According to the self-generated legend of the ‘Old South’, ‘its social
pattern was manorial, its civilisation that of the Cavalier, its ruling class an
aristocracy coextensive with the planter group’ (Cash 1991, p. xlix).
Some of these arguments were designed to dignify and justify the hold-
ing of slaves; nevertheless, the Southern conservative tradition was authentic
rather than simply self-serving. It can be traced back to the agrarian repub-
licanism of Thomas Jefferson, expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia
(1787), which hymned the life on the land as morally superior to any
other – though Jefferson endorsed a society of yeoman farmer s rather than
one dominated by a ‘plantocracy’, and in so many other respects was a
quintessential revolutionary liberal (Shalhope 1976,pp.529–56). It was car-
ried forward into the nineteenth century by, among others, John Taylor of
Caroline (as he was known) (1753–1824)inhisInquiry into the Principles and
Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), and by John Randolph of
Roanoke (1773–1833) through his speeches in Congress. They were critical
of the growth of a commercial society in the North whose accretions of
wealth and influence over government threatened the liberties of the peo-
ple; they defended the agrarian, patrician order of the South from which
they came; they were both increasingly anxious about the fate of slavery in
a modernising republic; and for these reasons they opposed the growth of
federal power, falling back to the doctrine of state sovereignty. By the 1840s
the Southern defence of its ‘difference’ had mutated into the argument that
slavery was a ‘positive good’, both for slaves, who wanted for nothing on the
plantations, and slaveholders. It had also been transformed into an agg ressive
critique of the ills of Northern political economy. Among the many South-
ern conservatives of the mid-century who developed these ideas, George
Fitzhugh (1806–81) and John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), Senator for South
Carolina and former Vice-President, stand out.
Fitzhugh, a lawyer, author and journalist, was influenced by his reading
of Carlyle and of British periodicals in the 1840s from which he formed
his view of the immoral, exploitative and unstable nature of industrial
capitalism. He also admired Disraeli. In Sociology for the South; or the Failure
of Free Society (1854)andCannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters (1857)
he took further the conservative critique of atomistic liberalism, defending
slavery by reference to the degraded, immiserated condition of the ‘wage
slaves’ in the North and vindicating Southern paternalism in comparison
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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848
to the social anarchy of the free states (Genovese 1969,pp.118–244). To
Fitzhugh, liberty was ‘an evil which government is intended to correct’
(Fitzhugh 1854,p.170). Free labour placed ‘all mankind in antagonistic
positions, and put(s) all society at war’ (Fitzhugh 1854,p.23), whereas
slavery was ‘a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives
not according to his labour, but according to his wants’ (Fitzhugh 1854,
p. 29). Once again we note the anti-liberal kinship of conservatism and
socialism: indeed, arguments very similar to Fitzhugh’s, using the same
terms, were deployed by Northern working men in New York and Boston
in the 1840s in their complaint that the wage slavery of the North was more
exploitative than chattel slaver y in the South (Goldman 2000,pp.177–233).
But Fitzhugh was no nostalgic: though he denounced the cities of the
North, he could see the need for numerous small towns in the South to
complement a rich countryside and to provide both a home market for
Southern commodities and a domestic manufacturing base to relieve the
region’s reliance on imports.
Fitzhugh was interested in social organisation and the diverging social
values of the two sections. Calhoun, on the other hand, was a politician and
political theorist who sought to defend the South’s peculiarity by finding
a means to preserve minority rights within a democracy. The defence of
minorities was a classically liberal theme at this time (as Mill’s work makes
clear): the paradox of mid-century America was that this principle was
required to defend conservative interests. Calhoun’s defence of Southern
difference had begun in 1828 when he justified the right of a state to ‘nul-
lify’ a federal law which threatened its vital interests – in this case a new
tariff – in his papers drafted for South Carolina’s legislature and known as
the South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828). In his Fort Hill Address of
1831 (‘On the Relations of the States and Federal Government’) he first
proposed the idea of a ‘concurrent majority’ to protect minorities by grant-
ing significant interests the power to veto the enactment or implementation
of a public law. In his posthumously published Disquisition on Government
and Discourse on the Constitution (both 1851) he took this idea further, devel-
oping a political theory applicable to a plural society with many different
economic and social interests that would protect those differences from fed-
eral interference and the tyranny of the numerical majority (Calhoun 1992;
Niven 1988). Given that the political, economic and territorial ‘balance’ and
‘equilibrium’ of the Union had been progressively upset to the detriment of
the South, he proposed in the Discourse a dual executive to represent both
slave and free states, and argued for the right of a local majority to withhold
711
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consent to the laws of the numerical majority in Congress (Hartz 1955,
pp. 158–66;Niven1988,pp.328–34;Spain1951). The problems with such
rights and mechanisms in practice are obvious, and would have disabled any
coherent national government, be it in the United States in the 1850sor
elsewhere at any time. But though Calhoun died in 1850, his ideas more than
those of any other Southerner generated and legitimated the secession of
the Southern states from the Union in 1860–1 after Lincoln’s election. The
Civil War that followed was about many things and had complex roots: but
at some level it was about the struggle of a more conservative society against
a more liberal one. It was, as J. Barrington Moore has argued, a type of
modernising revolution in which a backward, agricultural and paternalis-
tic society was vanquished by a more dynamic, industrial and commercial
one.
27
As Eugene Genovese has argued, the South was the one society
in the nineteenth-century world to have actively resisted liberal capitalism
(Genovese 1992). Its military and political defeat did not end that ideolog-
ical resistance, as the history of the failure of Northern ‘reconstruction’ in
the South after 1865 and the institutionalisation of Southern racism in the
1880sand1890s demonstrate.
5 The ‘revolt against positivism’: conservative irrationalism
in late nineteenth-century Europe
Southern conservatism developed in very different political and economic
contexts from those in which nineteenth-century British conservatism took
root, though the two movements shared ideological positions and social
instincts, as is clear. But in its overt racism, which actually seems to have
grown in virulence with the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and
the attempted introduction of free labour after it, and in the crude justifi-
cations of the racism that underpinned the entrenched system of legalised
discrimination under the ‘Jim Crow’ laws from the 1890s, the South shares
some characteristics with types of conservatism found in continental Europe
from the 1870s. Partly this is a question of a shared tone – virulent, uncom-
promising and intolerant – and partly a question of the type and style
of argument advanced: as several authors have noted, European conser-
vatism became increasingly anti-rational and vulgar (by the distortion and
cheapening of ideas) towards the end of the century, emphasising instinc-
tive behaviour, intuition rather than reason, and the subconscious, where
27 Moore 1966,ch.3, ‘The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution’.
712
Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848
formerly it had placed its greatest emphasis on epistemological empiricism,
political realism and naturalistic explanations of human conduct.
28
H. Stuart
Hughes has referred to this as ‘the revolt against positivism’ (Hughes 1979a,
pp. 29–30, 37).
The vulgarisation of ideas was evident in the movement known as Social
Darwinism. Natural selection as explained by Darwin in On the Origin of
Species (1859) was a random and amoral process: the capacity of a species
or an organism to survive and thrive depended on the chance possession
of certain favourable characteristics. This was one of several reasons why
Victorians who held to the belief that they lived in a universe in which
justice was assured, found the doctrine so deeply shocking. But Social Dar-
winism, adapting natural science to provide a basis for social science, made
explicit linkage between worldly success and the supposedly superior fea-
tures, attributes and talents of those – be they individuals, classes, nations,
races or species – who came out on top. In this way, the ‘fittest’ – those
most deserving – survived and prospered, while the morally, intellectually
or racially degenerate did not. It was a crudely circular argument, designed
to rationalise existing social and political structures, including rule by elites
and the control of inferior peoples by their supposed superiors, by defend-
ing inequality or subordination as ‘scientifically’ determined. While the
emphasis on competition and struggle in Social Darwinism would suggest
a natural affinity with laissez-faire liberalism – and its most famous expo-
nents like Herbert Spencer were extreme partisans for that creed – it was a
malleable doctrine that could be employed in many different situations, and
which influenced a diverse range of political theorists, including socialists.
But it was especially useful to elites attempting to ‘conserve’ their position,
be they American ‘robber barons’ justifying their wealth, or imperialist
statesmen justifying colonialism (Burrow 1979; Dickens 2000;Hawkins
1997; Hofstadter 1955b; Jones 1980).
One source of ideological conservatism unlike anything within the
Anglo-Saxon world was papal orthodoxy, which sought to dictate the
thinking of millions of Roman Catholics worldwide, and was notorious
in the second half of the nineteenth century for its implacable hostility to
liberalisation and nationalism. Pius IX had seen Rome occupied by a suc-
cession of foreign armies since 1848, his papal domains annexed by the new
Italian state, his political authority challenged. In retaliation he denounced
liberal Catholicism, the attempt to bring the Church into some sort of
28 Burrow 2000; Hughes 1979a, pp. 17, 35–7, 63–4;Weiss1977,p.106.
713