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

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Lawrence Goldman

relationship with the world around it, as a heresy. In 1854, in the face of a

more sceptical, empirical and materialist age, he promulgated the doctrine

of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary (Coppa 1998,p.96). A

decade later came the papal encyclical, the Syllabus of Errors, condemning

socialism, liberalism, modern scientiﬁc thought, and even Bible societies,

and asser ting the absolute authority of the pontiff (Coppa 1998,p.108).

There followed in 1871 the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, designed to sti-

ﬂe all discussion – and hence to smother liberalism – within the Church

(Coppa 1998,p.111).

Rome had declared war on the age itself and would

not reconcile itself to earthly powers or the march of mind.

Another source of uncompromising conservatism was the nationalism of

right-wing governments and movements after about 1870. If the revolutions

of 1848–9 had ﬁrst shown how nationalism might counter rather than com-

plement liberalism, and had opened up the possibility of right-wing manip-

ulation of the national idea for ulterior political ends, the multiplication of

national movements throughout Europe in the second half of the century,

and especially within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had two consequences.

First, there were more, and more serious, challenges to the very integrity of

the European empires in the late nineteenth century; and second, there was

increasing competition, friction and antagonism between national groups

themselves. Both developments allowed reactionary statesmen to pursue

conservative policies designed to suppress disorder and impose uniformity,

be that uniformity linguistic, cultural or religious. They were assisted by

ideologues in all nations whose support in print and at the lectern could

be assured. Heinrich von Treitschke’s historical lectures at the University of

Berlin in the 1870sand1880s were attended by the imperial elite. As a pro-

fessor, a member of the Reichstag (1871–84), and editor of the Preussische

Jahrb

ucher, Treitschke was the apotheosis of German nationalism (though

under Prussian control), militarism, authoritarianism, anti-socialism and

anti-Semitism (Davis 1973; Dorpalen 1957). Tactically it was easy to play

off one national minority against another, or to refocus partisan feeling

on alien groups resented by all: it is no coincidence that anti-Semitism

developed at this time (and was often encouraged by the authorities, as in

Russia) as a type of diversionary manoeuvre, a form of negative integra-

tion designed to keep otherwise divergent political and ethnic groups in

harmony. Loyalty to the state and regime could be enhanced by encourag-

ing chauvinism at home and prejudice abroad. A movement like Russian

29 For a sympathetic portrait of Pius IX, see De Mattei 2004.

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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848

pan-Slavism as exempliﬁed by Fyodor Dostoevsky was characterised by

hostility towards speciﬁc national, ethnic and religious groups (Poles, Jews,

Roman Catholics); towards socialism, liberalism and the middle classes; and

towards the West in general. Dostoevsky’s travels in Europe in the early

1860s led to a conservative, Russophile, reaction.

In The Brothers Kara-

mazov (1880) Western rationalism was famously counterposed by a deeper

tradition of Russian spirituality and mysticism. With such a pedigree, pan-

Slavism was absorbed easily into the reactionary state ideology of Alexander

III and Nicholas II from the 1880s (Kohn 1953).

In similar fashion the optimistic and enlightened ideas about race that

the nineteenth century had inherited from the eighteenth were transmuted

from the 1850s into a pseudo-science premised on the natural inequal-

ity of races and the moral right of the supposed superior to control the

inferior (Poliakov 1974; Stocking 1968). Eighteenth-century environmen-

talism had encouraged the belief that racial difference was neither geneti-

cally determined nor permanent, and that Africans might indeed be turned

into Englishmen given the right education and opportunities. The ‘noble

savage’ was different certainly, and intellectually undeveloped, but he was

not morally or personally inferior to the European. But later nineteenth-

century racial theory emphasised a strict hierarchy of races, each with its

distinct abilities, and with Aryan whites at the top. In part this change was

the consequence of greater anthropological investigation and information

at this time, which seemed to suggest remarkable racial diversity and which

gave credence to the view that Englishmen and Africans were inassimil-

able. It also owed something to the prevalence of Social Darwinist theories

premised on competition, and to the belief that only the most accom-

plished and adaptable races would survive that competition. Racism could

also be employed to justify imperialism: the backwardness of some races

provided the excuse for European colonisation and the ‘civilising mission’.

Interestingly, the so-called ‘father of racism’, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau

(1816–82), author of the four-volume Essai sur L’In

egalit

e des Races Humaines

(1853–5) had been chef de cabinet to Tocqueville when the latter was brieﬂy

Foreign Minister in the Second French Republic in 1849 – and Tocqueville

was among his sharpest critics (Biddiss 1970; Gobineau 1970). Gobineau

abhorred democracy for the usual conser vative reasons, but was concerned

further that it would encourage racial mixing, and hence the moral and

30 Dostoevsky 1965, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. This was originally published as an article in

Dostoevsky’s own journal, Vremya (‘Time’) in 1863.

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Lawrence Goldman

intellectual degeneration of the higher races and the extinction of civili-

sation in an age of uniformity and mediocrity. Tocqueville’s response was

impassioned and prescient:

Don’t you see how inherent in your doctrine are all the evils produced by permanent

inequality: pride, violence, the scorn of one’s fellow men, tyranny and abjection in

every one of their forms? . . . There is an entire world between our beliefs.

Though Gobineau complained bitterly that he was ignored by his contem-

poraries, his ideas were subsequently inﬂuential, notably and ominously in

Germany (Gobineau 1915).

In Maurice Barr

es (1862–1923) the spirit of conservative irrationalism

found a characteristic proponent among ﬁn-de-si

ecle men of letters. Along

with the historian and commentator Hippolyte Taine and Louis-Franc¸ois

Veuillot, the editor from 1843 of the newspaper L’Univers Religieux, Barr

forms a link between Maistre at the beginning of the nineteenth century

in France and Charles Maurras, the extreme right-wing editor of L’Action

Franc¸aise (and Nazi collaborator) in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Barr

es mixed the individualism and instinctivism of his trilogy Le Culte

du Moi (1888–91) with protest against the moral decline of France under

the liberal Third Republic in the sequence of novels entitled Le Roman

de l’

Energie Nationale. The ﬁr st of these, and the best known, Les D

eracin

(‘the uprooted’), was published in 1897 and depicted a group of students

‘uprooted’ from their religion and traditions, in part by secular education.

In this series he contrasted the values of provincial France, ﬁxed in the

land and the church, and in contact with ancestral tradition through them,

with the cosmopolitan hypocrisy and corruption at the nation’s political

and ﬁnancial centre (Hughes 1979a, p. 54). Unsurprisingly, liberals, Jews

and Germans were among his favourite targets: the foreigner in general,

as a threat to French tradition, was scorned (Doty 1976). A supporter of

General Boulanger (who had brieﬂy threatened to overwhelm the republic

in a quasi-Bonapartist coup at the end of the 1880s), Barr

es represented

several different constituencies in the French chamber, including Les Halles

in Paris, until his death in 1923.

InGustaveLeBon(1841–1931) meanwhile, the irrational found its

pre-eminent social theorist. Like Gobineau, Le Bon was a natural racial

31 Alexis de Tocqueville to J. A. de Gobineau (17 November 1853), in Tocqueville 1959a, p. 229. See

also de Tocqueville 1959b.

32 On the French conservative tradition see Nisbet 1978,pp.80–117.OnBarr

es see Tiryakian 1978,

pp. 209–10.

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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848

hierarch who asserted the scientiﬁc superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race

over all others, and the inferiority of groups he did not favour or held in

contempt, including socialists. Trained in medicine and with strong interests

in archaeology and anthropology, he turned to what would now be called

social psychology, and his most important work in this ﬁeld, The Crowd,

appeared in 1895 (Pick 1989,pp.90–3). Le Bon’s theory is premised on

the essential irrationalism of social life: ideas become inﬂuential not because

they are true or good, but by virtue of their psychological hold over us. That

hold can be established by techniques of repetition, or by the submission of

the crowd to mass persuasion and mass suggestion – ‘mental contagion’ as

he called it. Masses – be they nations, religions, races or social groupings –

react in ways different from the reactions of individuals, establishing thereby

a ‘collective mind’. They are suggestible and come to deﬁne themselves

through their shared sentiments and beliefs: this was the ‘law of the men-

tal unity of crowds’ (Le Bon 1979,pp.58–9;Merton1963, pp. v–xxxix).

And these beliefs determine how social institutions function, rather than

the reverse: institutions reﬂect rather than determine consciousness. One

implication of these ideas is that political arrangements must harmonise

with national or group psychology if they are to be successful. Another is

that the attitude of the crowd, or of the masses over longer periods of time,

can be manipulated towards a desired end. Hence Le Bon focused on the

persuasive power of the leader. His fear, and the anxiety of those inﬂuenced

by him, was of the socialist agitator capable of subverting the reason of

individuals and substituting for it the dangerous mentality of the levelling

crowd (Le Bon 1898). In the event, Le Bon’s insights into collective hysteria

and its manipulation were as useful to the right as the left in the twentieth

century. As the sociologist Roberto Michels observed in 1930, ‘Although

public opinion may lose its balance and become extremely radical it has

been correctly called the headquarters of conservatism. Public opinion is

always fanatic and devoid of all basis of real thinking’ (Michels 1930,p.231).

European history in the next few years was to demonstrate this only too

dramatically.

The conservative theorists of the mid-nineteenth century had tried to

counter liberalism in terms of its own discourse: they had questioned the

belief in natural human rights, debated the impact of democracy, tried

to refute the iron laws of political economy, lamented the destruction of

paternalistic social relations, worried about the dilution of high culture. In

Britain these issues and styles of exchange continued to characterise the

native conservative tradition into the twentieth century (Quinton 1978). In

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Lawrence Goldman

the United States we can discern continuity from the antebellum Southern

conservatism of the 1830s through to the so-called Southern Agrarians

of the 1930s, including Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and

Allen Tate, who continued to champion the lost cause of a Jeffersonian

South, most notably in their co-authored volume of 1930, I’ll Take My

Stand. But continental European conservatives of the late nineteenth century

rejected any engagement with the forces of change, and rejected the very

social and economic categories used by their opponents. In opposition

to the reasoned and systematic forms taken by liberal political economy

and ‘scientiﬁc socialism’, they threw up arbitrary and highly individualistic

categories like the will, instinct and faith. They justiﬁed their conservatism

without reference to facts or examples, but in relation to the soil on which

they lived, the nation for which they spoke, the spirit in which they would

do battle, the blood they were willing to shed.

In their irrationalism it must be acknowledged that they were part of

a more general trend in European thought at the end of the nineteenth

century. Writers and thinkers of all types were subject to these changes

as the very concept of the calculating and self-conscious individual, who

had been placed at the heart of nineteenth-century political economy and

liberal theory, was broken down. Theorists became more interested in the

behaviour of groups as subjects of study and as the dominant force in

mass politics (Biddiss 1977). The model of the rational individual was also

undermined by new medical and psychological studies of the unconscious,

with consequent effects on art and literature: the fragmentation of per-

sonality and consciousness is as much a theme in Cubism as in the mod-

ernist writings of James Joyce. But the change in the nature of conservative

thought may also be related to the more fraught position in which con-

servatives found themselves at this stage, as the challenge from the masses,

now organised in trade unions and socialist parties, grew more threaten-

ing; as the international situation became more unstable from the 1880s;

and as the economic downturn from the mid- 1870s began to undermine

their incomes and the integrity of their estates. At this stage they seem

to have given up rational engagement with their critics, and turned to

the manipulation of public opinion and national politics through the use

of a new and dangerous vocabulary of struggle and hate (Hughes 1979a,

pp. 65–6).

There are respectable academic arguments for treating European fascism

after the Great War as sui generis and hence unrelated to preceding national

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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848

and intellectual history.

But in so far as fascism and Nazism strove to con-

trol and direct the masses in the interests of conservative elites by using the

new techniques of modern mass politics, we can see the roots of this manip-

ulation in the late nineteenth century in continental Europe. Conservative

theorists there and then attempted to analyse mass psychology and explain

how it might be inﬂuenced; conservative regimes used explosive forces like

nationalism, religious difference and racial prejudice in their efforts to hold

off democracy and socialism. That the dictators of the 1920sand1930s

were the more effective in exploiting such factors should not blind us to

the continuities.

33 Richard J. Evans, ‘Wilhelm II’s Germany and the Historian’ and ‘From Hitler to Bismarck: Third

Reich and Kaiserreich in Recent Historiography’ in Evans 1987b.

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Modern liberty redeﬁned

james thompson

1 Introduction

This chapter is devoted to British liberalism in the latter part of the nine-

teenth century. These years have commonly been viewed as an era of

transition. Mid-Victorian liberalism has been widely seen as individualistic,

and suspicious of state intervention. The close of the century, however,

saw the emergence of a new liberalism, which departed from the earlier

individualism, and advocated an enhanced role for state action.

The historiography of new liberalism has been much informed by con-

temporary political and theoretical concerns. It has been suggested that the

presumed dichotomy between liberalism and communitarianism in recent

political theory can be transcended through the examination of the new

liberal reconciliation of the two (Simhony and Weinstein 2001). Similar

claims have been made for new liberalism as a fruitful marriage of liberal

and social democratic priorities (Clarke 1978). Later nineteenth-century

liberalism, including the later Mill, has been depicted as a powerful fusion

of liberal and republican perspectives (Biagini 2003). Dialogue between the-

ory and history in accounts of new liberalism is not, however, novel. New

liberals were themselves concerned to demonstrate the evolutionary nature

of their relationship to earlier thinkers, often in response to attempts by

libertarian critics to categorise the new collectivism as a betrayal rather than

an extension of the liberal tradition.

The historiographical battle lines were largely laid down in the early

1880s. Legislation passed by Gladstone’s second government aroused an

agitated response from those individualist liberals who regarded themselves

as the keepers of the true faith. The Ground Game Act, the Employer s’

Liability Act and the Ir ish Land Act were vigorously castigated as a dan-

gerous assault on property rights and freedom of contract. In 1884,the

evolutionary philosopher Herbert Spencer published a series of articles in

the Contemporary Review, subsequently issued as a book, in which he argued

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Modern liberty redeﬁned

that the current political tendency meant that ‘most of those who now pass

as Liberals, are Tories of a new type’ (Spencer 1969,p.63). Individualist crit-

ics of constructive liberalism were similarly unimpressed by the extension

of the franchise to the agricultural labourers in 1884 and the subsequent

redistribution of parliamentary seats in 1885. H. S. Maine’s jeremiad on

Popular Government reﬂected his distance from the governing liberalism of

the mid-1880s, but its distressed diagnosis of the implications of democracy

for the conduct of politics resonated with individualists who continued to

identify themselves as liberals (Maine 1885).

In a famous lecture on freedom of contract, delivered in 1881,theOxford

philosopher and activist T. H. Green responded to parliamentary critics of

the Ground Game Act and the Employers’ Liability Act. He acknowledged

the apparent departure from mid-century liberalism, and recognised the

role household suffrage had played in fostering g reater inter ventionism.

However, Green asked his listeners to question the notion that these Acts

ran counter to the cherished liberal value of freedom. ‘True freedom’,

he urged, was extended rather than extinguished by the elimination of

circumstances that prohibit ‘the free exercise of human faculties’ (Green

1885–8, iii,p.371). Green’s case was that statutes restricting freedom of

contract actually advanced real freedom, and hence did not destroy, but

instead developed, liberal principles. The argument that enhanced state

action advanced rather than retarded liberalism was to become a recurring

motif of new liberalism, which received extended enunciation in L. T.

Hobhouse’s celebrated account of Liberalism (Hobhouse 1911).

Both individualists and collectivists produced assessments of mid-

Victorian liberalism coloured by their own preoccupations. The preser-

vative claims of late nineteenth-century individualist liberals and the

modernising rhetoric of their opponents have had an enduring impact

on the historiography of Victorian and Edwardian liberalism, not least

because many of the founding works in that historiography were them-

selves part of this debate. Taylor has plausibly suggested that this inheritance

has encouraged historians to underestimate the novelty of individualist argu-

ment and to present new liberalism as a natural and appropriate deepening

of liberal thought in response to the revival of the condition of England

question in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (Taylor 1992,

pp. 38–9).

The pivotal ﬁgure in narratives of late nineteenth-century liberalism has

undoubtedly been John Stuart Mill. Mill presented himself in the Autobi-

ography as a radical, often embattled ﬁgure, but there is a palpable sense in

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James Thompson

much of the book of his intellectual evolution personifying larger trends and

anticipating future developments (Mill 1989a, p. 190). In much turn-of-the

century writing, Mill’s status, for better or worse, as a transitional ﬁgure

in the history of liberalism came to be ﬁrmly established. This picture of

Mill was most inﬂuentially drawn in the work of Barker, Dicey and Leslie

Stephen in the twenty years before the First World War (Barker 1915b,

p. 20;Dicey1981,p.432; Stephen 1894,pp.398–9).

This narrative of late Victorian liberalism proved hugely inﬂuential. In

recent years, it has come under increasing pressure. Dicey’s depiction of

an individualist mid-century consensus, heavily indebted to utilitarianism,

has been subjected to considerable criticism. Many historians have stressed

the limited purchase of utilitarian ideas, and, in the work of Collini espe-

cially, a differing portrait of mid-century liberalism, as more concerned with

the cultivation of character than the maximisation of utility or justice, has

emerged (Collini 1993,p.189). Important work on the moral language of

nineteenth-century liberalism (Collini 1993,pp.91–128), the signiﬁcance

of the radical inheritance (Biagini and Reid 1991), and the intellectual sub-

stance of Whiggism (Parry 1993) has signiﬁcantly revised older accounts,

especially of mid-Victorian liberalism. The emergence of a more complex

and convincing account of the relationship between and development of

utilitarianism and idealism has deepened our understanding of the philo-

sophical underpinnings of late nineteenth-century liberalism (Den Otter

1996,pp.88–119; Simhony and Weinstein 2001,pp.159–84; Weinstein

2007).

While much recent writing has challenged the stylised contrasts that

ordered earlier portraits of nineteenth-century liberalism, real differences

remain over how best to narrate nineteenth-century intellectual history.

Some emphasise the legacy of the eighteenth century and the endur-

ing search for ‘a science of politics’, whereas others stress the novelty of

nineteenth-century arguments and the deﬂating impact of evolutionary

modes of thinking upon mid-century political philosophy (Collini et al.

1983; Francis and Morrow 1994). Differing approaches can lead to con-

trasting chronologies. While the late nineteenth century has been seen as

heralding a revival of formal political theory, others have focused more upon

continuities in underlying moral vocabulary extending into the twentieth

century (Francis and Morrow 1994; Collini 1993).

This chapter provides a multidimensional analysis of late nineteenth-

century liberalism. It builds upon previous work revealing the limitations

of atomistic accounts of mid-century liberalism; but it also stresses the

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Modern liberty redeﬁned

enduring diversity of liberal argument throughout the period. Rather than

treat the close of the century as merely the prelude to the new liberalism, it

demonstrates the variety of liberalisms in these years. While due attention

is paid to the disputes over liberty and the remit of the state tackled by the

ﬁrst historians of late Victorian liberalism, proper consideration is also given

to debates about the health of representative government and the qualities

of the citizenry.

While the discussion is organised thematically, it pays careful attention

to questions of chronology. Three phases receive particular scrutiny: the

mid-Victorian period often seen as the high-water mark of nineteenth-

century liberalism; the 1880s debates about representation and state action;

and the charged conﬂicts of the 1900s which did so much to shape the

historiography. In each of these cases, the range of issues discussed is

emphasised and the interaction between ideas and contexts examined. The

body of the chapter falls into three parts. The ﬁrst section analyses late

Victorian debates about liberty, good government and state intervention.

The second part examines ideas about citizenship, democracy and the

constitution. In the ﬁnal section, an assessment is provided of change and

continuity in liberalism during these years.

2 Liberty, good government and the state

Arguments about the meaning of ‘liberty’ were at the heart of discussions

among late nineteenth-century liberals. The most celebrated account of

the history of ideas about liberty is undoubtedly Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two

Concepts of Liberty’ (Berlin 2002b, pp. 166–218). Berlin adumbrated a

contrast between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty that has been the subject

of much discussion, both theoretical and historical, in the ensuing years.

His essay draws upon the history of liberalism in the nineteenth century.

There are, however, grave difﬁculties in casting late nineteenth-century

debates in terms of his two concepts of liberty. These difﬁculties are both

historical and theoretical. References to ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty can

certainly be found in the period, but their appearance was less frequent

than is often suggested, and likely to involve the distancing use of quota-

tion marks. Where they did deploy these terms, contemporaries were, as

Marc Stears has noted, generally adopting them as shorthand for complex

positions importantly different from those made familiar by Berlin (Stears

2002,p.25). These considerations do not entail the impossibility of using

Berlin’s concepts as a heuristic device for organising late nineteenth-century

723