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

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Jose Harris

1961,pp.19–48, 2007,pp.253–7, 285–97, 299–304; Sorel 1916,pp.107–

16; Sternhell 1996,pp.32–89). Throughout Western Europe the growing

provision of public social services from the later decades of the nineteenth

century appeared to some contemporaries as the distinctive hallmark of a

new democratic age; whereas to others it signalled a dangerous relapse into

an earlier epoch of stagnation, patriarchalism and serfdom (Belloc 1912,

pp. 29, 143–6, 148–53, 179–94; Spencer 1982,pp.487–518;Webb1910,

pp. 730–65; Weber 1994b, pp. 68–9). And in all Western countries there

were political commentators who assumed that female emancipation had

already advanced to its furthest limits, whilst others emphasised the contin-

uing legal, constitutional and practical exclusion of women from all aspects

of the public sphere.

Turn-of-the century opinion about who had been the key political

thinkers and philosophers of the previous hundred years was similarly

divided. Benthamite utilitarianism as a touchstone of moral philosophy

had largely fallen out of fashion since the 1860sand1870s. But the rigorous

analytical positivism associated with Jeremy Bentham’s legal and administra-

tive ideas remained inﬂuential among lawyers and social reformer s in many

parts of Europe, the British Empire, Latin America and the United States;

while Bentham’s famous ‘feliciﬁc calculus’ (designed to chart the collective

sum of individual human happiness) came to be seen as an important strand

in the rise of ‘marginalist’ political economy (Hutchison 1953,p.14;Stark

1946,pp.583–608). John Stuart Mill was still widely revered as a pioneer-

ing feminist and public moralist, with The Subjection of Women remaining

his most internationally famous work; but by 1900 Mill’s views on lib-

erty and the scope of ‘state intervention’ had come to be viewed in many

progressive circles as unduly ‘negative’ and old-fashioned (Collini 1993,

pp. 328

–36). The

Communist Manifesto continued to circulate widely among

socialists and radicals, and Karl Marx’s more theoretical writings attracted

increasing attention among continental philosophers; but most turn-of-

the-century readers, including many socialists, dismissed Marx’s vision of

the post-revolutionary eclipse of the state as belonging to a now largely

vanished age (Hughes 1958,pp.68–89; Tudor and Tudor 1988,pp.45–6,

84–5, 90–5, 218–23; Wells et al. 1912,pp.21–4). Indeed in much of West-

ern Europe and North America the very term ‘socialism’ had come to be

identiﬁed, for good or ill, with state provision of public social services:

a prospect derided by Lenin as ‘pompous projects for miserable reforms’

(Lenin 1961–6, v,p.354). The late nineteenth-century upsurge of philo-

sophical ‘idealism’ in Britain, France, Italy and the USA had reawakened

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interest in the writings of Hegel and Kant, but as reference-points in current

political thought both remained secondary to the abiding inﬂuence of Plato

and Aristotle; and many turn-of-the-century idealist thinkers were in any

case less interested in the political powers of states than in the moral char-

acter and duties of good citizens (Caird 2002,pp.20–37; Den Otter 1996,

pp. 47–50, 168–75; Nicholson 1990,pp.23–39). Amongst other nineteenth-

century schools of thought, the evolutionary positivism of Herbert Spencer

continued to command a wide following in India, Japan and parts of the

United States and Latin America, but after 1900 Spencer’s works in his

native Britain were increasingly unread and ignored. A more all-pervasive,

though often under-acknowledged, inﬂuence throughout Western Europe

and both North and South America was that of the French positivist philoso-

pher, Auguste Comte, whose ideas on science, modernity and the ‘religion

of humanity’ permeated the thinking not just of self-confessed ‘positivists’,

but of many progressive Christians, social reformers, internationalists and

ethical socialists as well (Godard 1900,pp.17–103;Harp1995,pp.5–6,

58–60, 212–14; Levy-Bruhl 1903;Wright1986, passim). The works of the

Swiss federalist theorist Jacob Bluntschli had been adopted as path-breaking

exercises in modern political science when the subject was ﬁrst introduced

into the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1870s. But Bluntschli

had largely receded from public debate by the early twentieth century (sug-

gesting perhaps that dons were bad judges of intellectual signiﬁcance, or

else that ‘modernity’ itself was changing faster than many had imagined).

The writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Sta

el, Harriet Martineau,

Harriet Taylor, George Sand, and more recently Millicent Fawcett and Eliz-

abeth Cady Stanton, were acknowledged even by their detractors to have

made powerful contributions to debate on the political status of women.

But before the 1890s there were few contemporaries, even among active

feminists, who identiﬁed such works not simply as brilliant campaign lit-

erature but as part of a long-standing intellectual tradition of systematic

political theory (below, pp. 919–21).

More recent historians of nineteenth-century political thought have like-

wise tried to identify certain seminal themes and ‘classic’ philosophical texts,

on a par with those believed to have sparked the English revolutions of the

1640sand1680s, the American Revolution of the 1770s, or the French

1 Bluntschli’s work was dropped from the Oxford political thought syllabus in favour of Rousseau’s Du

Contrat Social in 1908, though he continued to be a major inﬂuence in international law and in the

early genesis of ideas about a possible ‘federal’ Europe.

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Jose Harris

Revolution of 1789. But consensus about such core themes and texts has

again proved elusive and contentious. On the contrary it has been suggested

that, although nineteenth-century political conﬂicts certainly provoked a

ceaseless torrent of both systematic and polemical ideas, they produced –

by contrast with earlier centuries – no grand theoretical paradigms, com-

parable with those found in the writings of Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau

or the founding fathers of the American republic. Instead, so one recent

commentary on British thought has argued, nineteenth-century political

debate constituted a mere ‘patchwork quilt’ of many distinct and disjointed

narratives, often of major historical interest in their own right but pro-

viding no magic clue to the overarching political character of the epoch.

There were thus no ‘Machiavellian moments’ in nineteenth-century British

politics, no crucial points of intellectual engagement when major theorists

of many different persuasions joined battle, in ways that crucially deﬁned

and shaped the history of their own times (Bevir 1996,pp.114–27,and

passim; Francis and Morrow 1994,pp.1–8). Historians of political thought

in nineteenth-centur y Europe have been no more able to agree on the great

master narratives of the period, but have focused instead upon the diversity

of ideas and controversies within different national cultures (Castiglione and

Hampsher-Monk 2001,pp.1–9,andpassim; Di Scala and Mastellone 1998,

pp. 15–143). Even more surprisingly, the powerful ideological strands that

clashed in the American Civil War produced no great classic work of polit-

ical analysis comparable with the Federalist Papers of eighty years before.

And from a rather different perspective another critic has suggested that the

‘strange death’ of modern political theory, often associated with Western

culture after 1945, had already been well underway in Britain and North

America during the later nineteenth century, precipitated in part by the loss

of a sense of politics as a ‘philosophic’ activity and its replacement by a quest

for political knowledge as a form of exact social and behavioural science

(Tuck 1993,pp.72–3, 76–9).

Such posthumous critiques of nineteenth-century political thought

clearly bear some relation to the dense and diverse character of the period.

Nevertheless the negative tone of such judgements (as though something

else much more ambitious and coherent ought to have happened) may

perhaps be called into question. One obvious caveat is that some of the

most powerful generators of nineteenth-century political ideas (among them

Mill, Marx, Ricardo, Tocqueville, Nietzsche and Weber) were not to ﬁnd

their fully-ﬂedged mass audiences until a much later era (with many of

Marx’s most subtle political writings, for example, remaining substantially

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unpublished until the fourth decade of the twentieth century). Another

is that these judgements relate to a time when throughout Europe and

the wider world, many new institutions and ideologies were bursting out

of the inherited structures of past centuries, while many older ones were

being dissolved or drastically reconstituted under the impact of industriali-

sation, science, migration, international trade and both formal and informal

empire. Both the range of political ideas and the public auditoriums in

which they were being acted out were therefore potentially much vaster

and more variegated in the nineteenth century than had been the case even

in 1789, let alone in the much more narrowly circumscribed contexts of

the American Revolution or the English civil wars. Moreover, throughout

the century the discourse of political thought in many countries was mov-

ing simultaneously in a number of quite contrary and clashing directions.

Theorising about politics was becoming, at one and the same time, both

more academic and more populist, more international and more intensely

nationalistic, more deeply penetrated by other theoretical disciplines and

more self-consciously informed about its own intellectual heritage, than

had been the case in earlier centuries. In much nineteenth-century political

writing (including that of many author s and movements discussed earlier in

this volume), an enhanced awareness of the multitudinous forms of human

difference – in the shape of class, nationhood, race, sex, culture and basic

individuality – was emerging simultaneously, and often in deep tension,

with both older and newer notions of an overarching common humanity.

Thus theorists of politics who for many centuries had plausibly been able to

work with the model of a single ‘republic’, ‘commonwealth’ or ‘state’ as a

self-contained unit of analysis, now found themselves having increasingly to

take account of the diversity of the globe. The absence of the kind of well-

honed abstraction found in the writings of Thomas Hobbes is therefore

unsurprising.

Given these many complicating pressures, what is perhaps most striking

about the political thought of the nineteenth-century epoch is not that

it seems less focused and coherent than that of earlier periods, but that –

however precariously – so many familiar benchmarks of classical, early

modern and ‘Enlightenment’ thought did remain recognisably intact. As in

earlier centuries, political theorists in many countries continued to engage

with long-standing questions about laws, property, religion and civic virtue,

whilst at the same time relating those themes to much newer concerns

about public opinion, evolution, mass democracy, market forces, cultural

nationalism and advancing knowledge about the individual human psyche.

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Jose Harris

As in many earlier periods, ‘geometric’ models of ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ (in

the works of Ricardo or James Mill, for example) competed with those

that engaged with rough historical reality (as in the accounts of Joseph de

Maistre, Ludwig Feuerbach or Sir Henry Maine). Answers given to such

questions by different thinkers over the course of the nineteenth century

have been explored in detail in earlier chapters of this volume. This con-

cluding essay will aim to pin down some of the most important of those new

developments, and ways in which they were incorporated into (or broke the

mould of) the images and languages of more traditional political thought.

And since it is now a commonplace that the ‘long nineteenth century’ did

not end until 1914, some attention will also be paid to the torrent of new

trends, policies, problems and prophecies that were emerging after 1900,

during what may be called the ‘long ﬁn de si

ecle’.

2 Issues and problems

Despite the continuities identiﬁed above, by 1900 both the context and

content of political thought in Europe, America and the wider world, were

in many respects unrecognisably different from the familiar landmarks of a

hundred or even ﬁfty years before. A ﬁeld of enquiry that had long ﬂour-

ished largely outside formal academic institutions (other than in Scotland

and northern Germany) had become since the 1870s a standard compo-

nent of university degree courses in history, law, philosophy and political

and social science throughout Europe, the United States, Britain and the

British dominions (Burrow et al. 1983,pp.341–63;Karl1974,pp.44–

7). Over the course of the century the authors of many classic political

texts, from Aristotle to David Hume, whose writings had once been virtu-

ally inaccessible except in private libraries of the well-to-do, had become

potentially available to a much wider readership through numerous cheap

editions, scholarly commentaries, popular summaries and translations into

many languages. And the same was increasingly true of theorists of con-

temporary political processes, both academic and more populist. The rise

of representative institutions, organised political parties, revolutionary and

reform movements, and ever-expanding opportunities for paid government

employment, had all in their different ways generated new popular audi-

ences for sustained political argument, far more extensive than anything

that had existed even at the time of the French Revolution of 1789. This

latter event, with all its competing connotations of liber ty and democ-

racy, tyranny and terror, had nonetheless continued to act throughout the

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nineteenth century as a major imaginative catalyst for the trickling down-

wards of a discourse that had once been the exclusive province of courtiers,

lawyers, learned country gentleman and coffee-house pamphleteers.

Over the same period the disciplinary content and frame of reference of

political thought had also been modiﬁed or transformed in numerous differ-

ent ways. Many core political concepts (such as ‘citizenship’, ‘sovereignty’,

‘civil society’ and ‘policy’) had subtly shifted in meaning; while many newer

ones (such as ‘public opinion’, ‘pluralism’, ‘feminism’, ‘social justice’ and

‘social welfare’) had been added to the vocabulary of politics in many lan-

guages. The word ‘citizen’, for example, which in England in the early

1800s was often equated with sympathy for Jacobinism and radical subver-

sion, a hundred years later had become a signal for notions of respectability,

civic duty and devotion to the public good (Harris 2004a, pp. 84–6). The

concept of ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ had likewise acquired several fresh nuances

over the course of time. Traditionally in continental Europe a ‘liberty’ had

meant a special ‘privilege’ (as in ‘freedom of the city’), and even in the

Declaration of the Rights of Man it had carried overtones of ‘a special

privilege that everyone ought to have’, rather than the more ‘negative’

connotation of freedom as the right to do anything not explicitly prohib-

ited, more common in Anglo-Saxon parlance. And with the rise of idealist

discourse a third nuance came into play in the form of ‘positive’ liberty,

which implied freedom for a higher purpose such as self-improvement or

performance of duty or the ‘desire of perfection for its own sake’ (the latter

a notion that in turn harked back to classical and biblical understandings of

the term, as in the Stoics and Saint Paul) (Green 1911,pp.2–27; Hobson

1901b, pp. 29–30).

The very terms ‘political thought’ and ‘political the-

ory’ were themselves neologisms of the later nineteenth century. They had

crept unobtrusively into French and English usage, as less formal alternatives

to the more contentious notions of ‘political philosophy’ and ‘political sci-

ence’ (the latter label being increasingly identiﬁed in some quarters with the

attempts, mentioned above, to align the study of politics with ‘positivism’

and natural science) (Bonnot de Mably 1849; Cornewall Lewis 1832;Haigh

1878; Kawakami 1903;Merriam1903).

Moreover, some major strands of political thought had shifted their iden-

tity over the passage of time and by the later nineteenth century had

become attached to causes with which allegiance would earlier have been

2 A theme that deser ves much closer historical documentation and scrutiny than there is space for here,

but the classic (retrospective) formulation is in Berlin 1998. For the ongoing debate see Skinner 2001.

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Jose Harris

unthinkable. ‘Republicanism’, for example, which in 1793 had seemed

inextricably linked with Jacobinism and regicide, was to re-emerge over the

following century in alliance with a much wider spectrum of both older

and newer meanings. A ‘Roman’ model of republicanism, derived from the

writings of Livy and Cicero, pervaded nineteenth-century constitutionalist

thought in many European countries, and was by no means incompatible

with the vogue for constitutional monarchy – provided always that indi-

vidual kings and queens practised civic virtue and obeyed popularly ratiﬁed

laws.

And a more idealised version of ‘republicanism’, emphasising the

prime duty of rulers to care for the welfare of their people, was inspired

by Plato’s Republic and the Laws. These two powerful foundation texts of

European political philosophy were to become increasingly available both

in Greek and in vernacular languages, and their ideas impregnated ‘mod-

ern’ educational, civic and welfare policies through numerous unexpected

channels (Biagini 1996a, pp. 21–44;Harris2004a, pp. 343–60;Ruskin1903–

12, xxix,pp.177–8, 226–41, 253–4; Turner 1981,pp.369–446). All three

visions of a republic – Jacobin, Roman and Platonist – together with some

new ones were present in Latin America, where throughout the continent

from Cuba to Peru diverse strands of republican thought grappled with

the intractable problems of post-colonial nation-building (Bela

unde 1938,

pp. 63–100, 148–68; Collier 2003,pp.3–20, 145–6;Jaksic2001,pp.124–8,

153, 176–7, 219–20; Posada-Carbo 1998,pp.1–33, 61–106). In the United

States, by contrast, the republican tradition (once deeply hostile to such

‘old world’ corruptions as cosmopolitanism and ‘moneyed interests’) had

been absorbed over the course of the nineteenth century into an organised

Republican party that was increasingly linked, not just to local communi-

ties and notions of the ‘common weal’, but to protectionism, big business

and industrial and ﬁnance capital (Merriam 1923,pp.25–9;Meyers1960,

. 3–15, 24–8, 74–97, 207–12).

Other important bodies of ideas that appeared outwardly similar likewise

often signiﬁcantly diverged within different national cultures. Liberalism

itself, although still widely associated with personal freedom, internation-

alism, free trade and laissez-faire, had acquired during the latter half of the

3 See Bertrand Russell’s account of his upbringing by his grandfather, Lord John Russell, who was

himself the great-great-grandson of one of the regicides of 1649, and twice Queen Victoria’s Prime

Minister: ‘I was taught a kind of theoretic republicanism which was prepared to tolerate a monarch

so long as he recognised that he was an employee of the people and subject to dismissal if he proved

unsatisfactory. My grandfather, who was no respecter of persons, used t o explain this point of view

to Queen Victoria’ (Russell 1956,pp.7–8).

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century increasingly ‘state-interventionist’, ‘social-reformist’ and/or

‘nationalist’ wings in Germany, Britain, France and the United States

(Brouilhet 1910,pp.71–163; Freeden 1978, passim, 2005,pp.60–77;Karl

1974,pp.61–81; Sheehan 1966,pp.64–94, 155–77, 1978,pp.189–218, 260–

7, 272–83). Likewise in much of ‘Latin’ Europe Roman Catholic politi-

cal thought continued throughout the nineteenth century to be closely

attached to conservatism and the ‘party of order’. But elsewhere in Europe

and the wider world, Catholic theorists had become increasingly engaged

with the assertion of personal liberties, rights of free association, and resis-

tance to statist or entrepreneur ial oppression (Nitti 1895,pp.180–98, 214–

33, 242–57, 267–310;Vidler1964b, pp. 14–18, 35–51, 126–7). Protestant

thought embraced an even wider spectrum of political ideas within different

national contexts, varying between groups who supported a very close liai-

son between church and state through to those for whom any suggestion of

secular interference in church affairs was anathema. Indeed in some coun-

tries (most notably in the four kingdoms of the British Isles) the strongest

pressures for institutional ‘secularisation’ in the nineteenth century came

not from principled opponents of religion but rather from devout Congre-

gationalists, Methodists, Quakers, free Presbyterians, and both Roman and

Anglo-Catholics: all wanting to separate their conception of true Chris-

tianity from the coercive power of the state and secular society (Brown

1982,pp.292–349; Figgis 1914,pp.3–53;Laski1917,pp.27–210; Skinner

2004,pp.101–22, 133–8).

Indeed for some British theorists the vision of

a secular state had itself a quasi-religious signiﬁcance, as a body that could

transcend confessional divisions by forming ‘a new and larger City-State,

having everlasting foundations and whose builder and maker is God’ (Amos

1883,p.483). Likewise Freemasonry, which in much of continental Europe

remained a social philosophy closely attached to free thought, rational-

ism and (reputedly) radical subversion, in Britain, the British Empire and

North America had developed along quite different lines, as a philanthropic,

civic and paternalist movement whose patrons included lord mayors, cap-

tains of industry, public school headmasters and royal dukes (Gould 1931;

Hazareesingh and Wright 2001; Sherren 1914). The militant women’s suf-

frage movement, which in Germany and Russia was primarily a socialist

or revolutionary cause, in late nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, France

and North America also included many liberals and conservatives (Caine

1992,pp.131–72; Caine and Sluga 2000,pp.130–6; Hause and Kenney

1984,pp.61–7, 81–6; Stites 1978,pp.89–154, 233–77). Socialism also had

evolved along what appeared to be a range of mutually exclusive routes,

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Jose Harris

which stretched from big-statism to anti-statism, from religious millen-

nialism to scientiﬁc positivism, and from the archaic communitarianism of

Fourier and William Morris to the technological ultra-modernism of Lenin,

H. G. Wells and Georges Sorel.

At its most abstract and ambitious level, theorising about politics remained

in the nineteenth century what it had always been, as in the writings of

Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke; this was a discourse concerned less with

substantive institutions and policies than with trying to articulate certain

‘universal’ truths about the nature of government, law, political obligation,

human association and individual psychology. And bisecting these concerns

was a long-standing current of methodological debate, about whether such

truths were best discovered by a priori reasoning, or by empirical inves-

tigation of laws, commands, customs, institutions and history – or by a

dialectic between the two. Such debates had raged with unabated force –

in many other spheres of knowledge no less than in political thought –

throughout the nineteenth century (Burrow 1979; Lively and Rees 1984;

Mill 1865b; Seward 1909). But, even for theorists who insisted that politi-

cal theory was about axiomatic truths, the empirical details of institutional

and material life had become much more pressing and wide-ranging than

those addressed by earlier generations. Down to the later eighteenth cen-

tury much systematic political-theory writing had been largely a juridical

and/or theological exercise. It had deployed concepts and examples bor-

rowed from civil, common and canon law, and its only major material

concerns had been with the use of force and the rights and duties of prop-

erty – the latter exempliﬁed by Archdeacon Paley’s Principles of Moral and

Political Philosophy, which remained by far the most widely circulated work

of political thought in England until the early 1850s (Paley 1785,pp.91–

105).

These juridical and theological roots were to remain strong in many

nineteenth-century treatises, including some that vigorously disclaimed any

such ancestry. But nonetheless political theorists of all complexions had been

increasingly obliged to take account of many newer kinds of information and

explanation.

4 Paley’s preface acknowledged his debt to Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, portraying his own

work as a more ‘practical’ exposition of Locke’s principles. But Paley’s work was to run into nineteen

editions between the 1780sand1850s, together with many reprints, whereas over the same period

there were only two editions of the Two Treatises. Paley’s extensive readership stemmed from the fact

that his work was a prescribed text on moral and political philosophy for candidates for Holy Orders

in the Church of England. By the 1870s his book had been replaced on ordinands’ reading-lists by,

surprisingly, J. S. Mill’s ASystemofLogic.

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The most important of these new bodies of knowledge related, ﬁrst to the

ever-expanding impact of material production and ‘markets’, and second to

the emergence of the new and somewhat mysterious phenomenon known

as ‘society’ (an entity to be discussed in more detail below). Assumptions,

material examples and a model of human rationality borrowed from political

economy had been increasingly incorporated into political writing since the

time of Hume and Adam Smith, and were to be progressively reinforced over

the nineteenth century by developments in other ﬁelds of knowledge such

as psychology, anthropology, ethnology and evolutionary biology. Under

the inﬂuence ﬁrst of Herbert Spencer and later of Darwin, biology came

to be viewed by writers on politics as much more than just a convenient

‘organic metaphor’, but as a concrete determinant of human behaviour and

of differential outcomes in private and public affair s (Burrow 1979,pp.97,

112–13, 187–90). And ‘history’ likewise became an increasingly powerful

category of political explanation, not just as an empirical discipline that

helped to explain the origins of organised human life, but – in the eyes

of some – as a disembodied, almost metaphysical force, that was actively

driving and shaping the destinies of individuals, cultures, classes, races and

nations.

These shifts of emphasis in ways of analysing political life had been com-

pounded throughout the nineteenth century by the massive accumulation

of knowledge about alternative political cultures. Even the political systems

of classical Greece and Rome – an abiding template for European polit-

ical thought since the early Middle Ages – had become known about in

much greater depth and detail through advances in academic scholarship

(stemming particularly from the universities of Germany). The growth of

historical, archaeological and philological research, the widespread post-

Napoleonic extension of Roman law, and the proliferation of critical and

popular editions of major Greek and Latin texts, all vastly extended knowl-

edge about the ancient world and its political, philosophical and religious

ideas, far beyond the limited range of classical texts previously available

(Jenkyns 1980; Mommsen 2007;Stein1999,pp.104–32; Turner 1981). The

imaginative impact of such scholarship on contemporary thought had gone

far beyond mere ‘futile classicism’, derided by critics like Thorsten Veblen

as designed simply to throw sand in the eyes of the lower orders (Veblen

1970,pp.252–8); indeed many of its exponents were among the master the-

orists and protagonists of advanced political moder nity. J. S. Mill’s vision of

modern ‘representative institutions’, for example, was explicitly designed to

inseminate into the prosaic and privatised culture of mid-Victorian Britain

903