Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Jose Harris
the disciplined, altruistic, public-spirited values that Mill associated with the
Athenian polis (Biagini 1996,pp.21–44; Mill 1960,pp.205, 210, 216–17,
310, 319–20); while Karl Marx’s analysis of private property borrowed not
just many underlying ideas but much technical terminology (‘alienation’,
‘expropriation,’ etc.) from Roman civil law. John Ruskin’s advocacy of
public ‘social welfare’ policies in Unto this Last was likewise derived, not
just from its obvious sources in the Old and New Testaments, but from the
models of enlightened paternalism set out by Plato in the Republic and t he
Laws (Ruskin 1903–12, xvii,pp.1–114). Didactic novels and treatises writ-
ten in the form of ‘Platonic’ dialogues about virtuous government, social
justice and the ‘good life’ became a popular literary and political medium
throughout Europe during the later nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies; while, even at the very end of the period, a classical education
was still widely regarded as no mere antiquarian exercise, but the very
‘cradle of modern statesmanship’ (Feiling 1913; HMSO Special Reports
1910,pp.1–56; Lowes Dickinson 1905; Mallock 1975;Soloviev1915,
pp. 5–179).
Nor was the quarrying of political concepts from earlier times con-
fined to the classical era. Similar appropriations of historical models were
derived from works such as Sismondi’s history of the late-mediaeval Italian
republics, Burkhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, new editions of
the Icelandic Eddas and Norse sagas, anthropological studies of early village
communities and the roots of the Indo-European family, and the massive
body of historical scholarship on the English common law (Burckhardt
1958;Maine1871,pp.128, 1893,pp.185–224; Palsdottir 2001; Pollock and
Maitland 1895; Sismondi 1832;Wawn1994, 2000). Late nineteenth-century
studies of medieval and early modern constitutional history were deployed
by radicals and feminists to suggest that early political franchises had been
by no means so exclusively arms-bearing, landowning and masculine as
many modern commentators had previously believed (Rogers 1885;Stopes
1907a). And in Ireland in particular a powerful synthesis of themes drawn
from classical republicanism, European romanticism and the Gaelic cultural
revival had continually fuelled the political ideology of the Irish nationalist
movement (Lyons 1979
,pp.31–52;M
oran2006; Small 2002,pp.31–52, 59–
83). Such reference-points supplied political theorists throughout Europe
and beyond with a cornucopia of historical data, modes of argument and
visionary myths about older political cultures, together with a wide range
of critical and sometimes revolutionary perspectives on current political
arrangements of the nineteenth century.
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No less important than these models from past times had been the
impact of new knowledge about political cultures of the contemporary age
beyond the boundaries of Europe. Since classical times Western political
thought had, unsurprisingly, been overwhelmingly Eurocentric in outlook,
with extra-European polities such as Persia, China, Turkey, Utopia, even
America, all being invoked mainly to illustrate various political stereotypes
both adverse and favourable. Political writings of the early modern era had
on the whole been sympathetic to the view that ‘civilised’ political struc-
tures could be found in well-ordered non-European polities (though not,
by definition, in ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ ones). For much of the eighteenth-
century British, French and Dutch transactions with the residents of China
and India, though on occasion brutal and violent, had not generally been
construed as encounters with ‘inferior’ civilisations (sometimes indeed quite
the reverse). But the growth of more detailed information about remote cul-
tures, together with the rapidly widening technology gap between ‘Western’
and other nations, had made it increasingly difficult to sustain the one-size-
fits-all model of politics and civil government earlier employed by theorists
such as Hobbes and Locke. During the early and mid-nineteenth century
some European ethnolog ists had used evidence of ‘backwardness’ to ques-
tion the common species-identity of the human race; but by the end of the
period this belief was far less common than the view that ‘backward’ peoples
and their institutions were in process of scaling the lower rungs of the same
evolutionary ladder that had once been ascended by nations of the ‘progres-
sive’ West (Burrow 1979,pp.128–34, 242–51; Stocking 1987,pp.259–73).
Such assumptions were in turn called into question, however, by disturb-
ing extra-European phenomena, such as the dynamic political regime of
post-Meiji Restoration Japan. In Japan from the 1860s ‘modern’ bureau-
cratic, military, scientific and educational institutions, together with notions
of ‘rights’ and ‘personal freedom’, and even Marxian and Christian social-
ism, had coexisted with the survival of ancient political, religious and family
codes quite different from anything known in the nineteenth-century West
(Kawakami 1903,pp.93–106, 114–45, 187–93; Tsunoda et al. 1958,pp.131–
210). Russia too, with its strange conjunctions of the medieval mir and a
rapidly developing oil industry, its absolute monarchy and self-governing
zemstvos, its liberal penal reforms and savage racial pogroms, its mass illit-
eracy together with its extensive system of higher education, and its deep-
rooted penchant for both nihilism and Christian piety, all constantly baf-
fled and confounded the expectations of political observers from countries
further west (Drage 1904,pp.18–42, 70–1, 125–33, 167–9, 585–7, 642–6;
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Kovalevsky 1902; Mitzakis 1911,pp.11–13, 62–9; Thompson 1896,pp.265–
72). And the United States in particular, formerly depicted in early modern
thought as little more than a convenient museum of primitive humanity (‘in
the beginning all was America’), now figured in nineteenth-century Euro-
pean works in a quite different and much more complex fashion. Down to
the 1840s America was widely viewed as a burgeoning paradise of equality,
self-government and rough-hewn civic virtue (flawed only by petty cor-
ruption). But then, as the century progressed, it re-emerged in much more
ambiguous terms – still as the land of ‘freedom’ for migrants and refugees
from Europe, but also increasingly as a powerhouse of aggressive economic
expansionism, materialism and future world domination (Cox 1902; S eeley
1883; Tocqueville 1968, i,pp.58–105, 271–9, 290–8; Wells 1906). More-
over, in Japan, China, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile and elsewhere,
scholars, lawyers and intellectuals by the latter half of the century were gen-
erating systematic accounts of political norms and behaviour within their
own regimes, that certainly showed evidence of interaction with European
thought, but were nevertheless also culturally distinctive and sui generis.
Indeed by the end of the nineteenth century there were many signs that the
avant-garde in such speculative activities was migrating away from Western
Europe, to the major universities of the USA, to dissident and revolutionar y
groups in imperial Russia, China and Latin America, and to the new mod-
els of ultra-nationalism and disinterested public service being advanced by
Samurai intellectuals in Meiji Japan
5
(Bary et al. 1960,pp.51–97; Kawakami
1903; Tsunoda et al. 1958,pp.147–50, 158–93, 252–7).
3 New wine in old bottles
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century these multifarious
global developments had posed challenges for contemporary theorists in
many countries, as they strove to make sense both of the dynamic and
decaying elements in their own cultures and of an ever-changing and
expanding wider world. In the great metropolitan centres of the world,
from Berlin, Paris and London to St Petersburg, Kyoto and New York,
coteries of intellectuals, underground activists and defenders of established
order had continually reflected upon modern variants of the questions clas-
sically posed by Aristotle: namely, who should wield political power, for
5 Not to be confused with H. G. Wells’ Samurai in A Modern Utopia who, though also a dedicated order
of superior human beings, saw their mission as global, not nationalistic (Wells 1905,pp.258–317).
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what purposes, and whether the norms and practices contained in power
politics were unique to particular cultures or (like the laws of physics) were
everywhere fundamentally the same.
One of the most pressing of these newer versions of old problems related
to how far established regimes should resist, incorporate or surrender to
the burgeoning new socio-economic classes and under-classes created by
commercial and industrial expansion, most spectacularly in Western Europe
and North America, but to some degree throughout the international trad-
ing and imperialised world. Class conflict of a ‘factional’ kind had a long
history in political thought as far back as ancient Athens and beyond. But
the post-Napoleonic war period had seen the appearance of seminal works
by several major European theorists such as Guizot, Hegel and Ricardo
who, though in other respects profoundly differing from each other, nev-
ertheless concurred in highlighting a new kind of ‘functional’ class division
as a central building-block of modern political economies and hence of the
social relations of modern states (Guizot 1997,pp.31, 53, 128–32; Hegel
1991,pp.261–7, 453–4;Ricardo1973, pp. xvii, 52–63). By the mid-century
the analytical category of ‘class’, most powerfully purveyed in the writings
of Marx and Engels but by no means confined to them, had everywhere
come to permeate the language of political thought (though often compli-
cated and blurred by the fact that many subtle nuances of class terminology
were lost or distorted in translation from one culture to another).
6
And
closely linked to the theme of class was debate about the relation between
political rights and ‘property’, as definitions of the latter subtly shifted over
time to include not just the ancient notion of possession of land, offices
and privileges, but commercial and industrial capital, the fruits of labour
both physical and intellectual, and – more speculatively and contentiously –
the primal notions of selfhood, self-development and human ‘personality’
(Herbert 1893,pp.1–8; Proudhon 1994,pp.5–6, 10–12, 52–4, 124–5;Ryan
1984,pp.5–6, 10–12, 53–4, 124–5;Stein1964,pp.47, 59, 166–7). It was this
latter dimension that offered most scope for development of a specifically
‘feminist’ political thought, a point implicit though not always fully spelt out
in much political writing by women (Caird 1913,pp.1–11;Stopes1907b;
Wills 1913). Class issues thus affected the very nature of the state, as eco-
nomic and political pre-eminence in many countries increasingly migrated
6 Thus terms like B
¨
urger, bourgeois, middle-class, proletariat, lumpen-proletariat, working-class, peu-
ple, menu-peuple, ti
`
eres-
´
etat, gentleman – to name but a few – not only carried different shades
of meaning when transposed into other languages, but also shifted over time within their original
cultures.
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away from hereditary ruling castes, whose status had for many centuries
been generically defined by ownership of land as the exclusive qualification
for defence, honour, public order and the holding of public office.
Other related issues had likewise cropped up again and again in political
theory both within and across the boundaries of many political cultures.
These included such themes as the nature and limits of ‘state intervention’;
the competing loyalties and identities of ‘kinship’, ‘community’, ‘nation-
hood’ and wider ‘humanity’; the totally new kind of human culture and
civilisation being widely generated by large-scale industry and the growth
of great cities; and the impact of economic change upon patriarchy, gender
roles, and the structures of family life (T
¨
onnies 2001,pp.24–9, 34–5, 48–51,
209–10, 252–3). And looming on the mental horizon of thinkers in many
countries over the latter half of the century was the political integration or
exclusion of individuals and peoples belonging to ‘alien’ or ‘minority’ races.
This issue had been brought to the fore in practical politics by the Amer-
ican Civil War, by the rise of ethnic and linguistic nationalism in Europe,
Asia and Latin America, and by the epoch of unprecedented international
mass migration that had been set in train since the 1870sand1880s. But it
had been addressed most systematically as a problem in social and political
theory by writings on the much older question of the role and status of
European Jews, and the many divergent strategies proposed on this theme
over the course of the nineteenth century. These had included various forms
of religious and cultural pluralism; the total immersion of all separate ethnic
and religious identities within a wholly inclusive secular state; the nascent
vision of a Jewish territorial homeland; and the collective incorporation of
Judaism as a sect within the Roman Catholic Church – the latter a solu-
tion at one time contemplated by Theodore Herzl, the later theorist of
Zionism (Marx 1974,pp.212–41; Schorske 1981,p.121; Sombart 1913).
No other single issue demonstrated more sharply the profound ambiguities
that lurked in contemporary political thought on racial questions, nor more
clearly foreshadowed the seismic shifts involved in the long-drawn-out tran-
sition from the era of feudalism and dynasticism through to the politics of
nation-statism, democracy and mass modernity.
All these newer questions coexisted and to some extent intersected with
the continuing salience of many much older themes. These included the
rights and duties of different forms of citizenship; the nature of territorial
‘sovereignty’; and the relation of national politics to the international claims
of the papacy (the latter a particularly pressing problem after the pope’s loss
of territorial power through Italian unification). The issue of sovereignty
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Epilogue
(in the sense of a state’s right to defend itself against encroachment by
other powers)
7
had become increasingly divorced over the course of the
nineteenth century from notions of personal kingship. But ‘sovereignty’
was nonetheless a central tenet both of the positivist jurisprudence that
permeated constitutional thought in many Western countries, and of
early twentieth-century ‘rational-liberal’ theories of the state (Dicey 1885,
pp. 134–76;Laski1917,pp.1–25). It was also a deeply contested notion in
a political environment shaped by large-scale expansion of empires, nation-
alist liberation movements, mass migration across national frontiers, and the
continual expansion of free trade in capital and consumer goods. And it
was further challenged by ideas dimly emerging in some quarters during
the latter half of the century about the erection of regulatory powers above
and beyond those of the individual nation state. Such ideas included move-
ments for the setting-up of an international court, compulsory arbitration
in interstate disputes, codification of the ‘laws of war’, and the very tenta-
tive formulation of notions about supra-national sovereign authorities and
inviolable ‘human rights’ (Comte 1865; Holland 1908; Hook 1891;Laity
2001).
For many writers and theorists about politics, the major theatre of action
throughout the nineteenth century had nevertheless remained the cluster
of institutions known as ‘the state’. This was true no less of Great Britain
than of any other contemporary polity, despite the oft-repeated (though
almost wholly unfounded) claim that nineteenth-century Britons had little
or no conception of ‘the state’ or contact with its institutions.
8
The century
had seen the construction of many new states, involving very diverse con-
stitutional structures, in Europe, Latin America and the settler territories
of the British ‘commonwealth’; and, despite the rise of ‘internationalist’
discourse towards the end of the century, there seemed little reason to
suppose that, in any foreseeable future, the state would ever be seriously
superseded as the apex of political life. Indeed – notwithstanding libertarian
and radical critiques of state power – by the end of the century the role of
the state appeared to have become more rather than less important in the
lives of nations, as more and more subordinate communities began to claim
7 On the related but separate issue of internal sovereignty – of who held ultimate power within an
independent state – see below.
8 A claim classically made by Taylor 1965,p.1, despite the fact that the number of nineteenth-century
British authors, from Gladstone downwards, who wrote about ‘the state’ in one or other of its many
guises is almost uncountable, and that around 50 per cent of the population at some time in their lives
were claimants for public relief under the statutory Poor Laws.
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self-government and national autonomy from older supra-national dynastic
and territorial empires (see below).
Nevertheless, though states grew in number (and some of them in size)
there was ever-increasing diversity of opinion about their proper functions
and powers. From the writings of Bentham at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury and of John Austin in the mid-nineteenth century through to those of
Max Weber in the early twentieth, there was a powerful strain in the cross-
national culture of political thought that defined the essence of the state in
implicitly Hobbesian terms: as a ‘political society’ ruled by whichever power
held ultimate or ‘absolute’ command over the use of force within a given ter-
ritory (Austin 1965,pp.212–93; Bentham 1970b, pp. 5–6, 18–30, 196–208,
289; Weber 1954,pp.338–48, 2005, 126–49).
9
This model of state power, as
rooted in ‘sovereignty’ (and in the cognate though not identical concepts of
‘domination’, ‘rulership’ or ‘Herrschaft’) was widely disseminated by many
British and continental theorists, who saw it not as an endorsement of state
tyranny but as an objective, ‘scientific’ account of ordered political existence,
even in a polity where the mass of the people was sovereign, and as inex-
orably ‘true’ of any constitutional order as the law of gravity in Newtonian
physics (Comte 1851–3,pp.432–5; Stephen 1892,pp.16, 30; Tocqueville
1968,pp.68–71). As even J. S. Mill, celebrated as the prophet of personal lib-
erty, put it, ‘government is always in the hands . . . of the strongest power in
society,and...whatthisisdoesnotdependoninstitutions,butinstitutions
on it’ (Mill 1981,p.169). This so-called ‘Hobbesian’ perspective had been
regularly criticised, however, from many quarters, as despotic, historically
outmoded or logically flawed. Such criticisms came, not just from classical
liberals like Lord Acton, who denied that properly constituted states ever had
need of ‘absolute’ or arbitrary powers. They came also from representatives
of various strands of philosophical ‘idealism’, ranging from Immanuel Kant
earlier in the century who – despite largely endorsing Hobbes’ account –
thought that formal rationality required sovereign rulers to be bound by uni-
versal moral law; through to T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet and the young
John Dewey at the end of it, who emphasised the state’s role as the medium
of collective moral life, rather than (or at least in addition to) organised legal
coercion (Bosanquet 1910,pp.172–8; Dewey and Tufts 1910,pp.473–
85; Green 1911,pp.121–5, 206–16, 230–47;Kant1998/9, pp. xxvi–ix).
Dissent came likewise from some late nineteenth-century feminists, who
9 Bentham’s treatise on this subject was not published until the 1940s, but his views were widely known
in utilitarian circles, and were closely replicated by Austin.
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interpreted the claim that the state was an institution inherently rooted in
force as part of the false reasoning that excluded the so-called ‘weaker sex’
from substantive political power (Caird 1897,pp.190–1). And similar objec-
tions were raised by many romantic conservatives and liberal nationalists,
who portrayed the state not as the crude mediator of superior brute strength
but as the institutional embodiment of a nation’s historic, linguistic, corpo-
rate and religious identity (Moran 2006,pp.96–114; Seton-Watson 1915,
pp. 5–31).
10
Pressures upon the state of a quite different kind had also come from
a range of theorists, many of whom fully or partly endorsed its legitimate
‘coercive’ role, but who nevertheless looked to public authorities to perform
a much more extended range of ‘welfare’ functions than in past eras, going
far beyond the traditional boundaries of public order and national defence.
Since the late eighteenth century nearly all ‘civilised’ governments had
continually extended their ‘police’ activities: ‘police’ being a term that
originally implied not just powers of arrest and surveillance, but provision
of public services such as highway maintenance, street-lighting, drainage
and primary education, all of which helped to make communal living more
civilised, ordered, healthy and ‘polite’ (France 1992,pp.60–4;Gordon
1994,p.72).Itwasonthisplane–inthecreationofaninfrastructureof
social, economic and environmental services to support and civilise their
growing populations – that many nineteenth-century nations had seen the
most dramatic expansion in the role, functions and (in the eyes of some)
fundamental identity of the modern state, even during decades supposedly
committed to economic liberalism and administrative laissez-faire.
In this process of state-expansion, political theorists and publicists in
many countries had been sometimes merely the interpreters of institu-
tional change, sometimes its active agents, often a mixture of the two. Such
involvement was by no means confined to any one point on the politi-
cal spectrum, but had included conservatives, liberals, socialists, national-
ists, Bonapartists, revolutionaries and other dissidents (including some who
were in principle profoundly hostile to the very notion of state power).
11
10 It may be noted that proponents of this latter view did not always preclude domination over others
when practised by their own favoured nation. One of Moran’s most bitter complaints about Britain
was that British rule in Ireland had prevented the Irish from establishing their own overseas empire.
And Serbian nationalism was likewise notably hard-headed about the romantic nationalist aspirations
of lesser minority groups.
11 For examples of contemporary authors who were both theorists and active protagonists of state-
building processes, see Emminghaus 1870; Simon 1897;Stein1962.
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Moreover, very disparate ideological groups often unexpectedly echoed
or borrowed political ideas from each other. In France, for example, the
(deeply Catholic) Society of St Vincent de Paul, whose English branch in
the 1850sand1860s had inspired the family-welfare theories of the (strongly
anti-statist) Charity Organisation Society, went on in the 1880sand1890s
to provide a working model for the public–private social welfare partner-
ships that were a feature of the (militantly secularist) French Third Republic
(Layet 2005,pp.30–40;Vidler1964b, pp. 24–5, 52, 64–7, 89; Zeldin 1977,
pp. 1015–21). And, no less paradoxically, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, more
unswerving than Karl Marx in his belief in the corruption of all current
states and redundancy of future ones, had nonetheless put forward theories
of welfare reform that were to form the bedrock of French ‘solidarism’ and
the long-term development of French state social security (Hayward 1960,
pp. 33, 39; Jabarri 1999,pp.12–16). Likewise in Germany, Lorenz von Stein,
whose pioneering writings on French socialist movements had anticipated
and influenced Marx, had been a prime author of the new fiscal, social
and administrative structures introduced from the 1840sand1850sbythe
Prussian ‘welfare monarchy’; while later in the century such state-building
policies were further fostered by both the protagonists and the bitter ideo-
logical critics of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine empire (Steinmetz 1993,
pp. 123–45). In Britain a long line of very diverse populist theorists over
more than a hundred years, from Tom Paine in the 1790s, William Cobbett
in the 1820s and John Ruskin in the 1860s, through to New Liberals and
Fabians in the 1890sand1900s, had advanced a long series of proposals for
using state power to regenerate the economy through public employment
schemes, social services and progressive redistribution of income and wealth
(Money 1905,pp.291–325;Paine1989a, pp. 223–6, 232–54, 259;Ruskin
1903–12, xv
ii,pp.1905, 21–114). Until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, however, the guiding philosophy of central government in Britain
had owed less to such economic populism than to the more austere doc-
trines of Ricardo, who had believed there was nothing that states could
do to boost national prosperity, other than maintaining a strong currency,
keeping supply lines open, pursuing global ‘comparative advantage’ and fos-
tering civic peace. It was the tacit acting out of these rigorous doctrines of
fiscal and monetary management (involving strict central controls over local
government expenditure rather than direct provision of new public services)
that had played the most important role in developing and fine-tuning the
deceptively invisible infrastructures of the nineteenth-century British state
(Gladstone 1971,pp.132–57).
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It will be noted that many of these newer conceptions of state power
related directly or indirectly to the ‘social’ sphere; and although the state
remained central to political thought, its role as the overarching institution
in collective human life had been progressively modified over the course of
the nineteenth century by the emergence of the much more elastic and elu-
sive phenomenon of ‘society’. The significance of this latter development,
though often ignored or misinterpreted, can scarcely be overemphasised.
Although ‘society’ was a very ancient term (derived from the Latin word
societas), prior to the late eighteenth century it had usually referred to the
coming together of human beings in small, finite groups, set up for some
particular purpose, such as business partnerships, charity, art and learning, or
for mere neighbourliness and ‘sociability’.
12
Within this frame of reference,
the state itself was often seen as simply another form of societas. It was that
‘society’ charged with the special civic role of maintaining public order,
hence its characterisation as what was known as ‘civil society’ (Cornewall
Lewis 1832,p.240;Harris2003,pp.12–19;Kant1998/9,p.119). These
precise and limited meanings of ‘society’ remained in use throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and indeed have continued to do so
down to the present day). In writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and
French revolutionary eras, however, there had emerged a newer and much
more ambitious understanding of ‘society’, as a phenomenon that embraced
the multiplicity of human relationships on a much grander scale, extend-
ing throughout a whole national polity or even potentially throughout the
whole of humanity. This was what Adam Smith had called the ‘great society’
or, more evocatively, the ‘great chess-board of human society’, on which
individuals were not just passive ‘pieces’ but autonomous ‘players’, subject
to ‘rules’ but at the same time working out their own private moves within
the complex totality of interlocking human affairs (Smith 1974,p.234;
Merz 1896–1914, iv,pp.182–4).
This newer, more macroscopic conception of society had been slow to
penetrate the language, and indeed the imagination, of political thought,
and was to be the subject of continuing confusion and perplexity to many
thinking people throughout the nineteenth century (Merz 1896–1914, iv,
12 E.g. Mr Darcy: ‘In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying
society’ . . . Mrs Bennet, ‘As to not meeting many people in this neighbourhood, I believe there
are few neighbourhoods larger. I know we dine with four and twenty families’ (Jane Austen, Pride
and Prejudice, 1954 [1813], pp. 49–50). Mrs Bennet, though deemed socially deficient in many other
respects, here perfectly understood the meaning of ‘society’ in late eighteenth/early nineteenth-
century vernacular usage.
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