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

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Andrezj Walicki

ideological direction to the Constitutional Democratic Party. Social

Democrats at the Second Congress of the Party (1903) divided themselves

into Mensheviks, who remained faithful to Plekhanov’s deterministic Marx-

ism, and Bolsheviks, who embraced Lenin’s voluntaristic credo – which had

evolved by then into his pre-totalitarian conception of the vanguard party.

834

European political thought and

the wider world during the

nineteenth century

christopher bayly

As this volume demonstrates, Western political and social thought in the late

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a vibrant area of study. Yet scholarship

has for the most part remained conﬁned to political and philosophical

developments in the European and American heartlands. This is strange

because one of the most impor tant dimensions of European thought during

this period was the manner in which it achieved an international reach,

and in some areas, a near hegemony over the minds of extra-European

intellectuals. To an extent even greater than in the case of earlier expanding

‘world religions’, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, European stage-theory

ideology, liberalism, and later, integral nationalism, ‘scientiﬁc’ racism and

communism, became the currency of political debate for elites across the

world. These ideas also inﬂuenced a wider range of popular movements, so

that, by 1900, the leaders of anti-government protests in places as far distant

as Santiago, Cape Town and Canton invoked the notion of their ‘rights’ as

individuals and as representatives of nations.

This is not to suggest that historians of European empires and extra-

European nations or language groups have failed to produce powerful stud-

ies of political ideas. John Pocock early and resolutely set his study of late

civic republicanism within an Atlantic framework. In British imperial his-

tory, the study of the appropriation by administrators of utilitarianism and

liberalism in extra-European contexts, begun by Eric Stokes (1989), has

been developed by Mark Francis (1992), Lynn Zastoupil (1994) and Uday

Mehta (1999), among others. David Armitage (2000) has extended the study

of imperial ideology backward in time to its roots in ideas about British

domestic sovereignty. Historians of legal norms, such as Lauren Benton

(2002), have demonstrated how Whig ideas about the primacy of private

property were generalised across the world and were in turn modiﬁed by

the expansion of European empires.

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Christopher Bayly

There are also to hand expert studies of liberalism and republican ideo-

logies in one country or cultural area. Notable among these are Albert

Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939 (1970)andDavid

Brading’s The First America (1991). Finally, throughout the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries Asian, African, European and American scholars con-

tinued to consider the great bodies of political and social theory which

emerged from the classical traditions of Asian and Islamic civilisation. These

remained of signiﬁcance even for those extra-European intellectuals who

began to use and adapt Western ideologies. Typical here was P. V. Kane’s

massive History of Dharmasastra (1960–8) which provided an exhaustive

analysis of classical Indian political theory and social thought. Similarly,

the Reverend James Legge and many later Chinese commentators revised

and interpreted the ‘Analects of Confucius’, while Middle Eastern schol-

ars continued to study and comment on the works of the classical Arabic

theorists, such as Ibn Khaldun.

It remains true, however, that while the history of science, economics and

political practice have already taken the ‘global turn’, the ‘global history’

of Western political thought remains quite fragmented and localised. By a

global history of Western political thought I mean a study of the generation,

reception and transformation of European and American political ideas

by intellectuals and administrators in public debates across the rest of the

world. The ﬁeld would also encompass the reception and transformation

of non-European social, religious and political ideologies in the Western

world. This chapter can do little more than suggest some directions which

might be taken to remedy that deﬁciency. It represents an initial survey,

rather than a substantive study. The longer-term aim of historians must

be to begin to bring together the large quantities of excellent work in

nineteenth-century political thought, which lie isolated in different national

historical traditions. First, however, it will be useful to consider some of the

difﬁculties of this project and suggest some ways in which they could be

negotiated.

Ironically, the reason for the European- and American-centred character

of the history of political thought seems attributable, in part, to one of

the ﬁeld’s great strengths. The ‘hermeneutic turn’ in political thought,

associated with Pocock and the ‘Cambridge School’, insisted on the need

to understand the intentions of the authors of major political ideas – and the

wider meaning of their writings – in context. These ‘great works’ had to

be seen against a rich canvas of recessed ideology and what today would be

called ‘political discourse’. It was no longer good enough to reduce political

836

European political thought and the wider world

thought to the study of the lineages of inﬂuences on major thinkers, on the

one hand, or to see it mainly as a reﬂection of broad social and political

conditions, on the other.

In theory, this approach should be very congenial to historians of the

non-European world. As early as 1979, J. Ayo Langley began to try to apply

the ‘hermeneutic turn’ to the wider world in his valuable work, Ideolo-

gies of Political Liberation in Black Africa, 1856–1970 (1979). Langley showed

that pan-Africanist thinkers appropriated European liberal ideologies and

adjusted them to deeply held ideas of African religious or ‘racial’ uniqueness.

Previously, if they had considered the extra-European world at all, historians

of political thought often seem to have assumed that there occurred a rela-

tively simple process of diffusion. In this process, the doctrines of Western

thinkers were slowly spread across to those elite members of non-European

societies who knew European languages. The power of persuasion lay in

the ideas themselves rather than in the meanings attributed to them by the

Asian or African thinkers who received them.

If the ‘hermeneutic turn’ is taken for global intellectual history, how-

ever, great conceptual, cultural and linguistic problems come into view. We

have ﬁrst to understand the meaning of authors such as Mill, Spencer or

Comte and how European and American intellectuals and political lead-

ers understood them. We have then to analyse the reception and trans-

formation of such ideas by extra-European intellectuals and the publics

to which they spoke. Extra-European intellectuals operated in a complex

conceptual space. Most, though not all, read English, German or French.

But they interpreted what they read with reference to indigenous con-

cepts and moral sensibilities. These were rooted in ancient ideological and

religious systems and inﬂuenced by popular discour ses of morality and vir-

tuous practice. In order to achieve the transformation, Asian, African and

Latin American thinkers reinvented and adjusted these traditional concepts.

The whole process, therefore, involved at least three transformations of

meaning.

Where, again, do differentials of power ﬁt into these transformations?

Western ideas gained wider currency during the nineteenth century, in part,

because they were a reﬂection of Western military and economic power.

They were imposed by colonial regimes through educational institutions,

newspapers and public political debate. Asian, African and Latin American

minds were undoubtedly ‘colonised’ to some degree. Even in these cases,

however, intellectual domination was not a simple process. To be adopted,

Western doctrines had to be persuasive. They had to speak to people’s

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Christopher Bayly

conditions, but they also had to be translated, metaphorically as well as

literally, and adjusted to modes of debate in other societies. Even where

Western political ideas and languages of debate were quite novel, rupturing

previous understandings of political good, they were subtly altered, adjusted

and set to new purposes by indigenous writers and intellectuals.

Sometimes, appeals to the ideas of Western intellectuals acted merely

as symbols of modernity for new classes of lawyer s and state servants. In

other cases, though, as for instance with Hind Swaraj (‘Free India’) and M.

K. Gandhi’s other early writings, non-European intellectuals were able to

blend ideas from Western thought with themes or motifs from Asian or

African ones. This produced bodies of hybrid doctrine, which were politi-

cally empowering because they had the capacity to subvert colonial claims

to authority, but at the same time resonated with indigenous sensibilities

and even bodily practices. The case of Gandhi is particularly signiﬁcant.

Quentin Skinner appears to suggest that, from Thomas Hobbes broadly

through to Henry Sidgwick at the end of the nineteenth century, politi-

cal liberty in Britain was generally understood as a negative good. Liberty

consisted of an absence of restraint or coercion. Earlier thinkers from Aris-

totle, through the Church Fathers to the Renaissance moralists had associ-

ated liberty with a more active form of virtue, he implies (Skinner 2002,

p. 104).

Yet liberty, or its analogues, had always been an active good in the

major non-Western tradition of political and social thought. Gandhi him-

self was writing for Western as well as Indian audiences when he insisted

on an active interpretation of liberty in Hind Swaraj. For him, self-rule

or independence (swarajya or swatantrata) could only exist as a corollary

of moral self-making (satyagraha, often loosely translated as ‘soul force’).

Here Gandhi had interwoven themes taken from European concepts of the

good society with Hindu ethics.

The point, however, is that this was a

transformation at the international and not simply the European level. An

Asian intellectual interpreted Western ideologies in the context of Indian

traditions and had then redeployed them in the Western arena of public

debate (Kapila 2011;Skaria2002).

In the longer term, indeed, one of the consequences of the interna-

tionalisation of European political ideologies was to de-centre intellectual

authority and restart a ﬂow of political doctrine from Asia, Africa and Latin

America back into Europe and America themselves. Since the late Middle

1 Gandhi 1997, editor’s introduction.

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European political thought and the wider world

Ages, when Greek political philosophy and science had been received in

Europe from Arab sources in a modiﬁed form, there had been little direct

intellectual inﬂuence passing from the East or the South to the West. It was

not until the early twentieth century, with the reception of Gandhianism,

Maoist Marxism and the pan-Africanism of Franz Fanon and others, that

the East–West ﬂow of political ideas was initiated once again. In the nine-

teenth century, only theosophy and some other forms of spiritualism among

Western doctrines reﬂected the impact of Eastern religion and philosophy.

Theosophy could perhaps be regarded as a political as well as a religious

system but, while it was typical of the period, it was hardly central to its

thought.

Non-European inﬂuences did, however, act on and react with European

thought in less direct ways. From William Robertson through to the works

of Marx and Gobineau, closer obser vation of non-European societies and

their forms of knowledge inﬂected the way the evolution of polity and soci-

ety was understood by European theorists. German and French scholarship

which used oriental texts also inﬂuenced the development of European

historiography. So, even if the ﬂow of ideas in the nineteenth century was

more unidirectional than it was in earlier or later centuries, those ideas were

changed in quite novel ways when they moved to Asia, Africa and Latin

America, just as they were constantly being transformed within Europe and

America themselves.

This chapter builds on and generalises approaches that are drawn from

the history of science. Not only was physical science itself a critical back-

drop to non-Western appropriations of European political thought during

this period, but historians of science have been relatively more successful in

inscribing indigenous agency into a picture of Western ideolog ical domi-

nation than most other sub-disciplines. The chapter aims, then, to account

for the reception and rejection of radical concepts derived from the learned

and political worlds of Europe with reference to the intellectual formation

of different societies across the world. Liberalism, socialism, positivism and

social evolutionism obviously spread initially from Western sources. Yet they

widely mingled with and were empowered by ideas derived from indige-

nous rationalistic and ethical traditions. The chapter also considers how

intellectuals and activists in Asia, Africa and Latin America created radical

ideologies for change which spoke directly to their own condition, with-

out a similar degree of indebtedness to Western ideas. The chapter ends

with two case studies, on South Asia and the Caribbean-African worlds

respectively.

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Christopher Bayly

1 Righteous republics worldwide

In the later eighteenth century, scholars and administrators across the world

continued to interpret the abstract political ideas embedded in the great

Asian and African traditions: Islam, the Indian Sanskrit tradition, the Con-

fucian and the Buddhist traditions, among others. Many of the most famous

of these works were expositions of state craft and realpolitik addressed to

kings and generals. In these civilisations, as in the West, there was, however,

another and more practical style of moral and political thinking that bore

on local governance and administration. One quite general preoccupation

was the form of the ‘righteous city’ and the dangers to good government

posed by corruption and tyranny. This was a widespread theme through-

out Eurasia, Africa and the Americas. Developments since the 1970sin

the historiography of Western political thought have made it easier to see

both linkages and analogies in global political thought during the age of

revolution and the ﬁrst period of worldwide imperial expansion. It is worth

brieﬂy considering these varied understandings of righteous society, because

they provided, as it were, the matrix of doctrine and sensibilities to which

modern liberalism and rights theories were later adjusted.

John Pocock and Bernard Bailyn argued that thinkers in the civic repub-

lican tradition

emphasised the importance of the patriarchal household

rather than the market and highlighted the obligation of the individual

citizen and of the republic to pursue virtue. In the civic republican tra-

dition, the enemies of virtue were corruption and luxury, particularly the

corruption and vices of the royal court and its mercenary hangers-on. In

the British and North American worlds, this tradition was associated with

what Pocock called the ‘country party’ which opposed the tyranny and

idolatrous religion of the ‘court party’. Rather than being the harbingers of

a free market commerce, the tradesmen, the usurer and the hoarder were

ﬁgures of detestation to many American and French radicals.

In a similar vein, David Brading, writing in 1991, discerned an older

tradition of ‘creole patriotism’ working within the movement to Latin

American emancipation from Spanish rule. This persisted even while the

early liberal economists were constantly on the lips of the leaders of opinion

2 I emphasise the European civic republican tradition here not because it was the only or even the

dominant tradition of political and social thought which predated the liberal age. Traditions of

realpolitik, divine monarchy or millenarian levelling, were equally important. What has come to be

called civic republicanism was in many ways, however, the lowest common denominator of European

thought and the one most commonly invoked by its dominant oligarchies.

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European political thought and the wider world

and the Church Fathers continued to inspire conservatives. Figures such as

the mercy-g iving Mexican Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and a

myth of descent from the old Aztec Empire were prominent symbols of this

tradition. Creoles, such as Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, the Dominican

theologian and patriot (Brading 1991,pp.582–602), based their case on an

ideology of righteous conquest and summoned up the spirit of the land in

their support. These were themes which sit uneasily with modern liberal

political theory based on individual rights of property.

This re-evaluation of political theory and its representations in Europe and

its former American colonies is an important development for the writing of

global history. It has the effect of diminishing the distance between Western

ideas and the major strands of non-European political thought. Indeed, ideas

analogous to European traditions of civic republicanism had ﬂourished in

many world societies. Anthropologists, for example, have shown how pre-

colonial Africans used ideologies of good kingship to justify the over throw

of wicked and ineffectual rulers. J. D. Y. Peel (2000) has demonstrated this

particularly effectively in the case of the West African Yoruba, a people who

recorded their struggles to maintain a harmonious society and wise kingship

through bardic myths which stressed the role of the honourable householder

and the role of friendship in structuring the polity. Wise counsel, care for

the toiler and the desire to be ruled by virtuous patriarchs were, quite

understandably, the social goods sought by intellectuals in all agrarian and

early commercial societies before industrialisation. In contrast, what was

perceived as corruption, although understood differently in the various

traditions, seems to have legitimised dissent almost universally.

In Japan, the violation of the rights of the ‘noble peasant’ by a cor-

rupt court, which had diverged from the norms of the classic Confucian

writings and their respect for the ancestors and the workings of nature,

was a potent theme. Ogyu Sorai, probably the most inﬂuential thinker of

eighteenth-century Japan, attacked samurai corruption and merchant vio-

lations of moral economy. He saw this as a way of safeguarding the regime

(Totman 2000,pp.264–5;cf.Yashinaga1992). His early nineteenth-century

followers elaborated this critique at the same time as they became aware of

the need for self-strengthening against the West. In China, the rise of royal

despotism and corrupt ofﬁcials were taken to be the outward signs of the

decay of a political order. Before the impact of Western ideas was regis-

tered, nineteenth-century Chinese intelligentsia, working within a Confu-

cian framework, called for the monarchy to relinquish some of its autocratic

power in the interests of the body politic. They argued that ofﬁcials should

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Christopher Bayly

be able to admonish the rulers in cases of bad government. Intellectuals

such as Wang T’ao (1828–97) drew on ‘A Plan for the Prince’ of Huang

Tsung-hsi (1610–95). This work in turn looked back to the consensual form

of government that supposedly characterised the Han period, rather in the

way that European civic republicans looked back to the Roman Republic

(Cohen 1974,pp.43–4). The theme of the improvement and empowerment

of a civil bureaucracy stands in contrast to the European classical notion of

res publica, of course. But it is noteworthy that Wang T’ao also wished to

consult ‘public opinion’ on the promotion and transfer of ofﬁcials. This was

on the grounds that ‘ordinary people might be simple, but they were the

most fair-minded’ (Cohen 1974,p.41).

These are cases where we can ﬁnd analogies to Western ideas of the

good city in other complex, non-Western polities which sought to inﬂect

the principle of power with a concern for justice. Elsewhere, as in the

case of Islam, the connections were more direct. In Muslim polities, the

doctrine of holy war, the ‘lesser jihad’, was always at hand for rebels and

resisters against European rule. Yet scripture tightly constrained its invo-

cation. Instead, much early Muslim nationalist and pan-Islamic thought

harked back to the medieval Arab and Persian scholars’ attempts to rec-

oncile Aristotle’s civic morality with the Prophet’s norms of the godly life.

These had been expressed in the ethical literature of the Islamic world (in the

akhlaq tradition) (cf. Thompson 1839 and Tusi 1969). One feature of what

has been called the ‘Ottoman renaissance’ of the seventeenth century was

the translation of Aristotle into the Ottoman language. Many editions of his

works were printed in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century Arab,

Persian and Javanese (cf. Florida 1995) thinkers argued that Western invasion

and corrupt forms of indigenous governance spread the evils of bad counsel,

usury, the violation of men’s homes and the dishonouring of women.

Here one can glimpse a direct, if distant connection between the archaic

European traditions of civic republicanism and the political ethics of an

extra-European society. Aristotle was common to both civilisations. Even

radical conservative ideologies within the Muslim world, such as purist

Wahhabism, which emerged in eighteenth-century Arabia, looked to the

restoration of the ideal madina or polis, governed by God’s revelation. Abdul

Wahhab and his followers across the Muslim world sought to purge the

cities of polytheistic innovation (Al-Rashid 2002).

But their doctrine was also directed to ending the oppression of the

poor by the rich and reinstating the Prophet’s traditions of charity and

benevolence. It was this tradition within Islam of ‘purging the city’ which

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European political thought and the wider world

made Aristotle so congenial to its medieval thinkers and their eighteenth-

and nineteenth-century interpreters. As in the thought of American patri-

ots, so too, some traditions of Islamic thought, especially within its Shi’a

branch, held that since religious authority was eternal, it should be protected

from the intr usion of the state.

There are good reasons for treating these varied political traditions as

analogues to, or even distant relatives of European civic republicanism.

Though they were inﬂected with religious ideas and imagery, all these

traditions were distinct from the millenarian religious ideologies that existed

in most cultures. Though they could accommodate kings, and in the case

of the akhlaq tradition were patronised by kings, to one degree or another

they sought to limit royal power by emphasising the king’s pivotal role in a

wider republic of vir tue. Of course, the similarities between them lay more

in their application, than in their overarching cosmology. Hindu Buddhist

ideas of ‘cosmic retribution’ (karma), for instance, or Confucian ideas of

‘harmony’ stood on quite distinct ideological foundations from those of the

Aristotelian polis or Christian commonwealth. Yet benevolent patriarchy,

good council, the idea of humoral balance in land and people along with

hatred of corruption and luxury were common to all.

This was not because the political thought of all traditions ‘evolved’ in

a similar direction. It was instead because these traditions of thought were

reappropriated and reinvented in different societies to ﬁll similar ‘ecological

niches’, in Ian Hacking’s phrase (Hacking 1998). With the global spread of

commerce, luxury and large-scale states in the early modern period, people

across the world perceived similar moral and political dangers. They feared

respectively courtly corruption in Europe and the American colonies, the

‘reign of King Silver’ in China and the pollution of the land by the ‘drunken

butlers of the Europeans’ in India. Arguments for the restoration of the

‘virtuous city’ spoke to people’s conditions in all these now interlinked

contexts. In the course of the nineteenth century, they bonded with and

transformed incoming Western ideologies.

2 The advent of liberalism

The ideas of liberalism, nationalism, secularism and the self-determination

of peoples were closely connected in that they all presupposed the action

of rational individuals singly or as collectivities. A new language of politics

was created by the French and British thinkers of the eighteenth century

and its practical implications were made clear in the ﬁrst libertarian spring

843