Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Jose Harris
pp. 545–90). Its all-encompassing existential reality in many cultures was
often better captured by novelists, painters and imaginative writers (by Eliz-
abeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh, for example, or by the novels of
Balzac, Dostoievsky and Dickens) than by mere political or even ‘social’,
theorists. Lorenz von Stein, one of the fir st theorists to grasp the impor-
tance of this new form of human grouping, had nevertheless emphasised
in the 1840s its still very sketchy and imperfectly formed identity, both
as a social phenomenon and as a sociological idea (Stein 1956,pp.17–
51;T
¨
onnies 1974,pp.121–82). John Stuart Mill had aspired to write a
great work on the subject, as a sequel to his A System of Logic, but noto-
riously failed to do so; while his colleague Herbert Spencer was to spend
a lifetime of largely fruitless effort in trying to uncover the workings of
society’s causal laws. Its most effective exponent in a specific historical con-
text was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America very graphically
portrayed the workings of a polity in which, not a ‘great society’ but hun-
dreds of ‘small societies’ appeared to be spontaneously performing at a very
low-key level many of the co-ordinating and policing functions elsewhere
authorised by an overarching ‘state’ (de Tocqueville 1968, i,pp.78–81, ii,
pp. 657–76).
A very different account of recent socio-political change was given a
generation later by the German theorist Ferdinand T
¨
onnies. Writing in the
1880s, T
¨
onnies sharply differentiated between ‘society’ and ‘community’,
as terms that in everyday speech were often used interchangeably, but more
properly referred to two starkly contrasting kinds of collective organisation,
each involving two quite different forms of human rationality and subjectiv-
ity. T
¨
onnies suggested that ‘communities’ were rooted in relationships that
evolved incrementally and unselfconsciously, and were ‘given’ or ‘grown
into’ rather than ‘chosen’; whereas ‘societies’ were the product of conscious
construction, ‘atomistic’ social relationships and individual rational choice.
This antithesis he portrayed as penetrating all layers of human culture, from
government, politics, law and economic exchange, through to religion,
aesthetics, sexual relations and modes of subjective perception. All human
interaction in all historic periods, T
¨
onnies argued, combined elements of
both these models. But the enormous explosion of markets since the early
eighteenth century, together with the rise of rational-positivist theories
of politics and law, had tipped the balance dramatically against ‘commu-
nity’ and in favour of ‘society’, the latter being a way of life that would
ultimately merge into a single homogeneous ‘global civilisation’ (T
¨
onnies
2001,pp.247–61).
914
Epilogue
The idea of ‘society’ as a self-regulating network of interlocking human
relationships, operating independently of the rise and fall of governments,
and subject to its own generic behavioural laws, had been most fully articu-
lated in France, where from the 1830s the Positivist movement and particu-
larly the writings of Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte had generated
the notion of a new ‘science of society’ or ‘sociology’. This was a science, so
its protagonists claimed, that not only made it possible to identify law-like
regularities in social behaviour, past, present and to come, but also revealed
the extent to which all other, seemingly autonomous, historical movements,
intellectual disciplines and forms of knowledge were simply the products
of societal processes and laws, summed up in the philosophy of Positivism
(Comte 1975,pp.91–2, 195–217, 248–52; Saint-Simon 1976,pp.18–19,
38, 108–9). Many contemporaries were sceptical, however, not simply of
the claims of positivist sociology, but about whether ‘society’ in this larger,
more all-encompassing sense really existed at all. Without a framework of
government ‘there would be no such thing as society’, affirmed the British
jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen; instead there was simply the aggregate sum
of exchanges and interactions between individual human beings (Stephen
1892,p.74).
13
And the German sociologist George Simmel likewise argued
that, unlike the world of nature, society was cumulatively ‘invented’ by
the purposive thoughts and acts of individuals (and was thus beyond the
reach of French-style positivist social science). Nor in Simmel’s view was
society an all-embracing phenomenon. On the contrary, individual human
beings lived in deep tension between private identities and ever-changing
social forces; while society itself was constantly defined and redefined by
people on its margins who were patronised, ostracised or excluded by
mainstream social groups. Among those excluded, or teetering on the edge,
were migrants, strangers, adventurers, prostitutes and the poor – the lat-
ter not confined to the working classes, but occurring in all social strata
(Simmel 1971,pp.36–40, 121–6, 143–9, 161–73, 187–94). Nevertheless,
during the 1840s, 1850sand1860s the newer conception of society as
an all-encompassing collectivity had become a colloquial commonplace in
much of Europe and North America; suggesting that, at some spontaneous
and intuitive level, many people in those countries had clearly begun to
13 There is no reason to suppose that Fitzjames Stephen’s point (made in an article on Thomas Hobbes)
was being consciously echoed in the later and much more famous use of this phrase by Margaret
Thatcher (Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987). But there can be little doubt that the then prime minister
was endorsing exactly the kind of ‘aggregative’, rather than ‘organic’, sociability that Stephen (and
indeed Thomas Hobbes before him) would have had in mind.
915
Jose Harris
think of themselves as living in a ‘society’ in the enlarged Adam Smithian
sense of the term. And in the writings of Comte and his disciples in many
countries, theorising about politics had itself become a branch of sociol-
ogy, with government being redefined as the educational and ‘organizing’
branch of ‘society’, charged with ‘co-ordinating’ rather than ‘commanding’
its citizens, who would themselves be imbued with a sense of ‘spontaneous
order’ that precluded the need for either force majeure or juridical right
(Comte 1975,pp.195–217, 274–5, 334–71, 429–41).
4 Political thought on the brink of the twentieth century
By the end of the nineteenth century political thought in one guise or
another had thus become an activity that was much more diverse and
multilayered than it had been a hundred years before. Although Western
political cultures were still extensively transplanting their ideas across the
globe, theorists and political activists in many non-European settings were
now vigorously adapting various strands of European thought to their own
purposes, and at the same time discovering alternative traditions within
their own historic cultures (Bary 1960,pp.60–93;Owen2003,pp.149–75;
Weiming 1996,pp.21–91, 132–54). And just as non-European intellec-
tuals in Japan, India, China, Persia, Turkey, Latin America and elsewhere
were asserting the validity of their own political ideas, so there were many
theorists in ‘advanced’ countries who were seeking to recover or emulate
the past traditions and cultural purity of so-called ‘backward’ ones. Iceland,
Albania and Serbia, for example, as well as Greece, Rome and the high
Middle Ages, all figured as idealised models and reference points in British
utopian writings of the turn-of-the centur y period (Flanagan 2006;Morris
1896–7; Palsdottir 2001). And, conversely, a strangely prescient lecture on
the recurrent spectre of ‘decadence’ that haunted advanced societies in every
epoch was delivered in Cambridge in 1908 by the philosopher and former
British prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Balfour suggested that Western states
could no longer assert their hegemony over ‘decayed’ or ‘backward’ nations
on cultural, religious or even political grounds. Their claims to ascendancy
lay if anywhere solely in the ‘material’ sphere – in superior scientific knowl-
edge, greater efficiency in reducing scarcity, and more effective advanced
technology (Balfour 1908,pp.38–41, 46–59).
The global penetration of ‘Western’ political thought as a form of cultural
discourse did not therefore necessarily entail a ‘global’ frame of reference
about substantive political, philosophical or moral ideas. Indeed there were
916
Epilogue
certain respects in which political-theory writing of the 1890sand1900s
appeared more localised and culture-specific, less engaged with great uni-
versalist themes, than had been the case a century before. One reason for
this, as indicated above, was simply that observers and theorists now knew
far more about the sheer diversity and complexity of other people’s cultures
than in former times, thus making confident generalisation about statecraft
and about social and political justice much more problematic. At the start
of the nineteenth century a powerful focus for ‘universalist’ thought had
been the still very recent American Declaration of Independence and the
even more recent French Declaration of the Rights of Man, both of which
had inspired (or provoked) political theorists and activists in many countries
over a whole generation. Half a century later a similar impetus to universal-
ist ideals among liberals, romantic nationalists and revolutionaries had been
supplied by the intense political struggles of 1848 and the perception at
that time that many peoples, movements and nations were sharing a unique
common moment in world history (a perception dramatically symbolised by
the great surge of international hero-worship bestowed on Garibaldi). The
predictions made by Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte – that the countries
of Western Europe would one day merge into a single unitary republic,
regulated by ‘law’ rather than ‘government’ – were nowhere at the time
seen as a practical proposition. But they nevertheless captured a certain
spirit of cosmopolitan internationalism and universalism, which had char-
acterised both elite and populist thinking in many Western countries at
the mid-centur y (Comte 1865,pp.66–101, 427–33; Saint-Simon 1976,
pp. 83–98).
At the fin de si
`
ecle, however, the widespread pessimism and political unease
that lurked in many quarters took a much more defensive and nationalistic
turn, and the cross-national culture of shared political ideas seemed much
more disparate and fragmented than in earlier decades of the nineteenth
century. For all the rising concern about a European-wide ‘arms-race’,
for example, the movement for promoting international peace through
the Hague conventions remained largely a minority concern. It was sup-
ported by feminists and by a small handful of lawyers and liberal interna-
tionalists, but national governments unanimously rejected any suggestion
of compulsory arbitration, particularly where questions of ‘vital interests’
and ‘national honour’ were involved (Holland 1908,pp.76–9;Laity2001,
pp. 145–215;Swanwick1915,pp.3–11). Indeed many political commen-
tators throughout Europe and beyond appeared much more preoccupied at
this time by localised issues within their own national polities (in France, for
917
Jose Harris
example, by the Dreyfus case and endemic conflicts between the state and
the Catholic Church, in Britain by the Boer War and the crisis of ‘physi-
cal deterioration’, in Germany by unresolved tensions within the imperial
constitution).
Moreover, although since the 1870s ‘political thought’ or ‘political sci-
ence’ had been taught under various labels in the world’s leading universities,
by the start of the new century the study of ideas about politics had not
fully established itself as a major international discipline with a public voice
and strong lines of communication between theorists in different countries.
In Germany at the turn of the century there were many university chairs in
political science, but these had become increasingly confined to candidates
of a strongly ‘nationalist’ persuasion (with socialists and other critics of
government, even of a purely ‘ethical’ kind, being largely excluded from
university posts) (Mitzman 1987,pp.114–18, 121–2). In Britain the subject
had got off to an auspicious start in the 1870sand1880s, with major
philosophers like Sheldon Amos, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Edward
Caird, D. G. Ritchie, Henry Sidgwick, and even the young Bertrand
Russell, lecturing to large audiences on aspects of political thought in
London, Oxford, Cambridge and the Scottish univer sities (Amos 1883;
Bradley 1988;Caird1897; Green 1911; Russell 1896; Sidgwick 1891).
During the 1900s, however, the cutting-edge in Anglo-Saxon philosophy
appeared suddenly to move away from concern with problems in political
theory, as several brilliant young practitioners of the subject switched their
allegiance either to sociology or to more technical questions of language,
mathematics and logic.
14
Thereafter, although political thought continued
to be widely taught in British universities it was increasingly as a historical
or cultural discipline rather than as a direct engagement with current
political and philosophical issues. In France during the same period there
was intense academic involvement with the political, philosophical and
constitutional questions generated by the Third Republic, but this took
place mainly under the auspices of faculties of law and sociology (Jones
1993,pp.29–54, 149–50, 162–3; Lukes 1973,pp.320–409). Only in the
United States did the term ‘political science’ embrace a wide range of
independent senior professorships, a nationwide professional organisation,
14 Thus Russell had lost interest in political theory as a formal philosophical discipline by around
1900. Two brilliant young Oxford graduates, E. J. Urwick and R. M. MacIver, set out on careers
as would-be political philosophers, respectively at the LSE and the University of Aberdeen, in the
early 1900s. But both soon migrated into sociology, and both moved to chairs of sociology at the
University of Toronto.
918
Epilogue
specialist academic journals, and a body of young doctoral scholars some of
whose work remains of interest to historians after more than a century (e.g.
Calkins 1905; Kawakami 1903). But even in the USA much of the teaching
of the subject remained strongly ‘national’ and even parochial in focus,
having only limited contacts with wider international scholarship. This was
in marked contrast to developments in the social sciences, which in the first
decade of the twentieth century gave all the appearance of being the great
new academic growth-area of the epoch, marked by a series of major con-
ferences taking place in Chicago, St Louis, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Paris and
Berlin. The meeting at St Louis in 1904 attracted the attendance of some of
the great European ‘founding fathers’ of the modern social sciences, among
them Max Weber, Wernher Sombart and Ferdinand T
¨
onnies. But there
were no comparable international gatherings in academic political theory.
A historical overview of new departures in political ideas at the start of the
twentieth century must therefore look for portents of change largely beyond
the confines of university-based faculties of political science or political
philosophy. Instead, such developments were taking place, partly in non-
academic and more ‘activist’ settings, and partly under the umbrella of other
scholarly disciplines, such as history, law, psychology, economics, sociology
and evolutionary biology. Not all such trends can be fully reviewed here,
but a few of the most seminal for the future evolution of the subject may
be highlighted. One of the most dramatic developments of the period was
the almost simultaneous emergence (or re-emergence) in Britain, Europe,
North America and the Far East of a much more politicised form of femi-
nism, after several decades during which members of women’s movements
had been deeply involved in education, charities, local government and
trade unionism, but had singularly failed in any country to gain the parlia-
mentary vote.
Reasons for the sudden upsurge of female suffragist activism after 1900
remain contentious, and appear initially to have been more closely linked to
contemporary crises in practical politics than to more abstract questions of
political theory. But the fact that the Dreyfus case in France, the Boer War
in Britain, and movements for legal and constitutional reform in Germany,
Russia and China, all served to propel women into their various national
suffrage movements, suggests that many were already attracted by wider
questions of politics, quite apar t from the core issue of the right to vote.
Moreover, for English-speaking readers an important intellectual event of
the early 1890s was the first republication for nearly half a century of
the full text of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
919
Jose Harris
(1792), a work that remained the single most powerful ‘theoretical’ statement
by a female author, of the case for equality between the sexes and for
women’s full participation as citizens in the public sphere (Wollstonecraft
1892).
15
Another catalyst was the 1899 London congress of the (Washington-
based) International Council of Women, which published seven volumes
of papers on all aspects of the ‘gender’ question, highlighting particularly
the political significance of women’s subordinate economic position, and
the key role that was being played by women’s groups in current campaigns
for international peace (Gordon 1900). And a further precipitating factor
was the emergence in some quarters of a totally new kind of cross-national
fin de si
`
ecle feminism that claimed for women exactly the same kind of
personal freedoms as had long been enjoyed by men. This new feminism
totally rejected the claim of many mid-nineteenth-century suffragists that
women deserved the vote because of their superior moral qualities. Instead,
like men – so argued the post-1900 ‘New Woman’ in London, Paris, New
York and Berlin – women should be enfranchised for their status as free
adult persons and citizens, quite regardless of questions of devotion to civic
duty, motherliness or private morality (Caine and Sluga 2000,pp.117–42;
Caird 1897,pp.126, 190–1;Hamilton1909). Indeed, it should not be
forgotten that the fin de si
`
ecle was also the period of la belle
´
epoque,inwhich
a small minority of women was transgressing settled boundaries of politics,
art, religion, aesthetics and sexual identity, in ways that were still to remain
contentious throughout the following century.
One effect of the ensuing debate on women’s suffrage was to recapitulate
some of the classic controversies which over many earlier centuries had
characterised civic debate on the rights and duties of men. But it was also
to bring into this debate certain generically new issues, which threatened to
redefine the long-established boundaries of classic political thought. These
new issues were partly about a total recasting of the conventional division
of roles between the sexes; but more commonly they were concerned
with the claim that some traditionally female functions, such as home-
making and child-rearing, were no less significant for the flourishing of the
wider body politic than more traditionally masculine ones. Arguments about
property rights, taxation, the capacity to bear arms, the marriage relation,
childbirth and motherhood, sexual psychology, and the very nature of the
15 Published in London with an informative introduction by the well-known art historian, Elisabeth
Robins Pennell. Pennell also drew attention to the recent rediscovery of the works of ‘the almost
forgotten’ seventeenth-century feminist political theorist and theologian, Mary Astell (Buhlbring
1891).
920
Epilogue
state: all were to be mobilised both by turn-of-the-century female suffragists
and by their opponents, the latter often deeply embedded in the once-
radical ideology of classical republicanism, which still heavily stressed the
military, bread-winning, head-of-household, and tax-paying qualifications
for full adult citizenship (Woolsey 1903,pp.3–113;Wright1913,pp.13–
14, 32–5). A full exploration of these debates is beyond the scope of this
chapter, but some mention should be made of the many different ways
in which feminist demands impinged upon the subject-matter of wider
political theory. In France, Britain and North America, female suffragists
were deeply divided on such questions as resort to civil disobedience, the use
of violence, and the extent to which women activists should seek support
from sympathetic males. And there were also widely varying visions of
ultimate goals. To some women suffrage campaigners the vote was an end
in itself, with attainment of formal civic equality being the main issue. To
others, however, the vote was primarily a means to various more complex
ends: either enhancement of the status of women’s existing roles as home-
makers, wives and mothers; or a transformation of those roles through the
opening-up of education and wider influence in public life (Wills 1913).
And to a significant minority in all countries the vote for women was
primarily important as part of wider political engagement, whether in party
politics, trade unionism, peace movements, or – particularly in Germany,
China and Russia – in revolutionary political change (Caine and Sluga
2000,pp.117–42; Hause and Kenney 1984;Reagin1995; Soong 1995;
Stites 1978).
The organised suffrage movement was merely the most dramatic and con-
spicuous of the many turn-of-the-century movements that fused together
previously disparate or antagonistic schools of thought and whose activi-
ties challenged or redefined traditional theoretical conceptions of politics
and the state. In Britain new ideas about the future of state and society
could also be found in the rival literatures of imperialism, anti-imperialism
and imperial federation (the latter in particular was deeply engrossed in
the 1900s with promoting the contentious notion of a ‘common citizen-
ship’ for the peoples of the British Empire (Bridger 1906;Parkin1892)). In
Germany ongoing debates between revisionist and revolutionary socialism
were paralleled by various new forms of radical conservatism (often linked
by little more than a shared hostility to market capitalism), that flourished
among opponents of the imperial ‘Civil Code’, in agrarian, military and
naval leagues (Coetzee 1990,pp.30–43, 50–8; Herwig 1973,pp7–8, 151–
3; John 1989,pp.108, 43;Steinberg1964,pp.102–10). And in France the
921
Jose Harris
‘Catholic royalism’ of the disciples of Charles Maurras similarly converged
with notions of patriotism, public spirit and ‘civic virtue’ that would once
have been the characteristic province of the republican left (Weber 1962,
pp. 6–16, 77–82).
New political ideas also abounded in the sphere of culture and aesthetics.
The international ‘modernist’ movement of the early twentieth century
stretched from Russia to Catalonia, from high art to the hard sciences;
and under its auspices scarcely a poster, a poem, a papal encyclical or a
prosaic scientific textbook failed to include some oblique reference to the
sphere of political and social theor y. Such works often included a great
deal of ecstatic futurology, both benign and malign, linked together by
common anticipation of a world both dominated and liberated by the
impact of advanced technology. At one extreme they included the vision
of Roger Fry and H. G. Wells, of the construction of a ‘Great State’ where
toilsome labour would be largely abolished, unpleasant tasks that could
not be mechanised would be discharged by universal conscription, and
‘amateur’ self-government would replace ‘the trite omniscience of the stale
official’ (Fry 1920,pp.39–54; Wells et al. 1912,pp.31–41). And at the
other extreme lay F. T. Marinetti’s paean to the universal triumph of speed,
violence, masculinity and the motor-car, outlined in the 1909 Futurist
Manifesto. (‘We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world...We
want to demolish all museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and
all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice’; Marinetti 1983.) Modernism also
bore witness to a very widely diffused sense of living in a newly unified world
where – under pressure from massive industrial and intellectual change – all
settled landmarks of social, economic and political identity were realigning
or dissolving. And similar strains could be heard in the extensive war-scare
literature of the period, where writers in many countries gave vent to the
fear that advances in military technology were out of control, and had
outrun the regulatory capacities of conventional politics and governments
(Angell 1909,pp.82–6, 98–114; Geppert 2008).
Developments in political thought under the umbrella of neighbouring
academic disciplines likewise shared in this alternating culture of grandiose
over-ambition and nervous apprehension about the future of the state, the
world and of traditional socio-political arrangements. An influential work of
social psychology published on the eve of the First World War, but composed
several years earlier, was Graham Wallas’ The Great Society: A Psychological
Analysis, a study based primarily on American data, but used by its author
to interpret what he saw as wider trends in international civilisation. Wallas
922
Epilogue
reported on substantially rising living standards in many advanced countries,
that coexisted with increasing alienation from work, mounting social and
economic insecurity, disintegrating ‘human material’ and psychic ‘malaise’,
leading to widespread breakdown of ‘trust’ in national and civic leaders,
and violent political unrest. And, far from running itself with a minimum
of state supervision (in the way classically envisaged by Adam Smith), the
‘Great Society’ of the early twentieth century seemed to be moving in
exactly the opposite direction: in all countries it was generating demands for
‘increased national armaments’, ‘increased internal coercive authority’, and
increased discretionary powers ‘in the hands of an undemocratic executive’.
Everywhere, in Wallas’ view, there was a fundamental clash between the
constraints and pressures of modern life and the inherited human psyche:
expressed in a failure to harness ‘Instinct’ to ‘Thought’. And everywhere
there was a secret yearning for what he called ‘the Extreme’, by which
he meant not necessarily extremist politics, but some kind of transcendent
vision or principle of ‘excellence’ to counteract the shallowness and dreari-
ness of life in the ‘Great Society’ (Wallas 1914,pp.3–16, 171–6, 182–4,
236–45, 341–94).
New trends in economic thought taking place during the 1900s likewise
impinged on political thought from a number of quite contrary direc-
tions. On the one hand, classical-liberal notions of a slim-line, largely non-
interventionist state – where questions of value and distribution were settled
mainly by market choices – were seen by some as strongly reinforced by the
theory of ‘final’ or ‘marginal’ utility, developed in the 1870s by theorists in
Britain, Austria and Switzerland (Gide and Rist 1915,pp.517–44; Hutchi-
son 1953,pp.1–17). But some decades later the notion that the ‘utility’
of material goods impinged with similar degrees of intensity upon ratio-
nal individuals whether rich and poor was being deployed by reformers in
support of graduated tax rates on wealth and income. It led to a strategy of
using taxation, not just for the traditional purpose of ‘raising revenue’, but
to relieve poverty, to stimulate consumer demand and to assert ‘the supe-
rior nobility of the collective over the private use of wealth’ – outcomes
that certainly had not been envisaged by the theory’s original progenitors
(Gide and Rist 1915,pp.474, 521–8; Marshall 1926,pp.130–1, 136–7,
247–9;Jackson2004,p.508). Similarly the arguments of French solidarists,
‘revisionist’ German socialists and English ‘new liberals’ and Fabians – that
private wealth-creation was only possible within the supportive framework
of a well-ordered political community, which was therefore entitled to levy
a share of that ‘social increment’ – all pointed towards a relationship between
923