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

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Jose Harris

state, economy and society quite different from that maintained by even the

most ‘interventionist’ governments of the mid-nineteenth century (Baldwin

1990,pp.1–31; Brouilhet 1910,pp.71–82;GideandRist1915,pp.558–9;

Hayward 1960,pp.17–33; Hobson 1901,pp.146–54). J. M. Keynes’ early

work on the Indian currency question likewise questioned orthodox con-

victions about the sovereignty of the market, by suggesting that monetary

values were not part of a predetermined order of things, but the (somewhat

precarious) product of subjective judgement, state intervention and positive

law (Keynes 1912,pp.15–36, 256–9). Such redistributive and interventionist

arguments were only of limited impact before 1914. But they fundamentally

challenged earlier liberal preconceptions about both the role of the state and

the very nature of social and economic policy. And they implicitly drew up

the battle-lines for the great economic Methodenstreit that was to dominate

public policy in democratic countries for much of the twentieth century

(Durbin 1949; Robbins 1932; Schumpeter 1944; Von Mises 2005).

Political thought in many contexts and in many countries was permeated

even more closely by ideas borrowed from sociology; a relationship fostered

by the fact that many prominent intellectuals of the turn-of-the-century

period thought of themselves, and were seen by others, as practitioners of

both disciplines (Weber, Durkheim, T

onnies, L. T. Hobhouse and Graham

Wallas, were among the most prominent examples). The explosion of stud-

ies on the sociology of poverty in many Western European countries led to

an enlarged conception of the state’s role in relation to social welfare, even

among theorists who were otherwise deeply averse to the growth of state

power. The English ‘new liberal’, Charles Masterman, for example, strongly

supported collectivist social welfare reforms whilst at the same time deplor-

ing the ‘ant-heap or beehive’ character of much modern state intervention

(Masterman 1911,pp.295–300, 1920,p.28). Such interventionism was not

usually sought on grounds of ‘social justice’ (though there were some argu-

ments of that kind) but more often in terms of improving the health and

safety of the wider ‘body politic’, with poverty itself being viewed in some

quarters not just as a personal fault or social misfortune but as a symptom

of ‘inefﬁciency’, malfunctioning and even ‘degeneration’ within the wider

‘social organism’ (Masterman 1902,pp.1–17, 42–8; Simon 1897,pp.434–

50). The very term ‘organism’ signiﬁed both the impact of positivist social

science, and a more intangible shift of the way in which collective social

identity during the period was being subjectively conceived and imag-

ined. It was accompanied throughout Europe, North America and much

of the British Empire by a widespread vogue for remedial and reformatory

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institutions designed to assist, shelter, segregate or coerce those deemed

unable or unwilling to cope with the encircling pressures of modern mass

society (Dawson 1910;Pinker1966). And sociology and political thought

also shared certain increasingly close afﬁnities to the biological sciences,

with both Darwinian and Lamarckian models of evolution being invoked

to explain the ‘inherited’ character of social ‘problems’ and the relative suc-

cesses and failures of different individuals, families, classes and nation states.

Social and political theorists from across Europe were present, along with

many of the world’s leading biolog ical scientists, at the large-scale interna-

tional celebrations in Cambridge in 1909 to celebrate the ﬁftieth anniversary

of The Origin of Species; and although there was much sceptical disagree-

ment among delegates about the exact nature of the biological parameters

of politics and society, there appeared to be little doubt of their omnipresent

salience and power (Seward 1909,pp.152–70, 446–7, 529–42).

Sociologists also penetrated into what would earlier have been seen as

the speciﬁcally ‘political science’ territory of the study of state institutions

and public order. Max Weber’s classic identiﬁcation of the categorically

‘coercive’ role of the institution known as ‘the state’ (a view that directly

linked him, as suggested above, to the lineage of Bentham and Hobbes)

was not to be fully articulated until after the First World War (Weber

2005). But, though virtually unknown outside Germany until a much later

period, Weber’s earlier work on bureaucracy, rationality and administrative

‘routinisation’ – as processes peculiarly characteristic of ‘modern’ states and

mass par ties – underlined the fact that states were social and administrative

‘systems’, as well as clusters of abstract rules and powers (Weber 1998,

pp. 361–6, 2005,pp.150–234, 157–60, 753–5). And in a rather different

sociological sphere, there had been since the early 1890s a stream of specialist

investigations, particularly in France and Italy, into the phenomenon of the

urban ‘crowd’ or ‘mob’ and the outbreaks of contagious ‘hysteria’ that

were increasingly seen as dangerous and pathological attributes of modern

mass societies (Le Bon 1908,pp.25–88; Masterman 1902,pp.1–8, 63–

71;Tarde1901,pp.159–213).

Emile Durkheim, supposedly the doyen of

post-Comtean positivist social science and a critic of idealist and ‘Hegelian’

theories of the state, nevertheless diagnosed the malady in terms that bore

marked afﬁnities with both older and more recent traditions of idealist

political thought. He ascribed it to the condition of anomie or normlessness

brought about by disintegration of the functions, beliefs and authority

systems that had once automatically (or ‘mechanically’) deﬁned roles and

identities for people living in more traditional communities: the set of

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guiding, intuitive, ‘common-sense’ assumptions that the English idealist

F. H. Bradley had evocatively conjured up as ‘my station and its duties’

(Bradley 1988,pp.160–206).

Durkheim’s prescription for social estrangement was to reintegrate alien-

ated individuals back into ordered social relationships, not ‘mechanically’

but ‘organically’, by restructuring modern societies on the basis of func-

tional and vocational corporations. This strategy was to be supplemented by

educational programmes of public and civic morality, designed to ‘dispute

the postulate that the rights of the individual are inherent’. It was to insist

instead that ‘the institution of these rights is in fact precisely the task of

the State’, whose main purpose was to ‘liberate . . . individual per sonalities’

(Durkheim 1933,pp.1–31, 70–132, 1992,pp.42–71). Durkheim’s recipe

for the social and political reintegration of both isolated individuals and

the ‘unattached’ masses became for a time part of the semi-ofﬁcial public

doctrine of the French Third Republic, and carried him and other ‘cor-

poratist’ theorists of the period far beyond the conﬁnes of mere academic

sociology (Hayward 1960,pp.17–33, 185–202; Lukes 1973, 46–8, 320–7,

350–69, 376–7, 530–46). Very similar themes were to be echoed or par-

alleled in many other contexts and languages during the period between

the 1890s and the First World War. Indeed throughout Europe the ﬁrst

decade of the twentieth century produced numerous ideas and experiments

in what might be thought of as ‘virtuous fascism’, had not later events

in history seemed to render any such notion a contradiction in terms. In

Germany these included strategies for the systematic incorporation of work-

ers (including many previously excluded and ostracised Social Democrats)

into the management of municipal schools, labour bureaux, state social

insurance and many other organs of civic life (Dawson 1912,pp.72–4, 258–

64, 278, 1914,pp.76–80; HMSO Special Reports 1904; Steinmetz 1993,

pp. 126–7, 132–3, 194–7). They could be found also in Sidney and Beat-

rice Webb’s early vision of a trade union-based, self-governing, ‘Industrial

Democracy’

that would supplement and in part replace the sphere of remote

and unresponsive British parliamentary institutions (Webb and Webb 1902,

pp. 806–50). And similar goals could be seen in Pope Leo XIII’s proposals for

the corporate reorganisation of work, welfare and family life set out in the

famous papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum,of1891 (Nitti 1895,pp.399–422).

All these programmes envisaged the reconstitution of civic and community

life, and its reabsorption into the wider life of the nation, by means of a

modernised version of medieval-style, self-governing vocational corpora-

tions: a model that Durkheim claimed also to have derived from the early

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Roman republic (Durkheim 1992,pp.17–35). And in many parts of West-

ern Europe in the 1890sand1900s very similar ideas were being promoted

on a voluntary and philanthropic basis. They were the leitmotiv of many

artists’ and craftsmen’s guilds, women’s co-operative workshops, friendly

societies, civic guilds, social-service organisations, and numerous other reli-

gious, secular and vocational ‘corporate’ bodies (Cole 1920,pp.41–77,

103–6; Hobson 1920; Penty 1906).

Not all corporatist theorists, however, shared the Durkheimian vision of

using vocational corporations to contain or counteract mass violence, or

to reabsorb estranged citizens more closely into the structures of modern

industry and the bureaucratic state. On the contrary, there were several rival

strands within the ‘corporatist’ movement that aimed at just the opposite;

they sought to defuse and downgrade the directive powers of the state and

to encourage pluralism and functional autonomy. In Britain one of the most

theoretically powerful defences of this latter model of ‘corporatism’ came

from the legal historian, F. W. Maitland, and the Anglican theologian, J. N.

Figgis. Both Maitland and Figgis denounced the Hobbes–Bentham model

of unitary ‘sovereignty’ as enabling the modern state to swallow up and dic-

tate to a wide range of communal, cultural and vocational activities (such

as religion, local government, crafts, professions and higher learning): all of

which in earlier times had been independently managed and self-regulated

by participants and practitioners within those spheres. In the view of Figgis

and Maitland, the proper role of the state itself was merely to act as one

specialist corporation alongside many others. Its peculiar task was simply to

maintain peace and public order so that all other bodies could perform their

generic functions without fear of violent disruption (an approach which

they portrayed as in direct opposition to the Hobbesian view that the state’s

peace-keeping functions took absolute priority over and above the rest). In

Figgis’ political thought, the main thrust of this argument was to defend the

corporate autonomy of churches, which – alike in Bismarckian Germany,

Third Republican France, Risorgimento Italy and Edwardian Britain –

he saw as subject to continuous illegitimate constraints and encroach-

ments from the secular power (Figgis 1914,pp.3–93; Maitland 1911,

pp. 110–11).

Very similar claims were being advanced in the 1900sfromavariety

of quarters – from trade unions, guild socialists, anarcho-syndicalists and

other socio-political movements – which sought, not to absorb citizens

more closely into the structures of state or church, but to limit or replace

parliamentary government ‘from above’ by vocational or functional direct

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democracy ‘from below’ (Cole 1913,pp.344–69). In Britain such pressures

came primarily from trade unionists whose main objective was to resist

legal restrictions upon the rights of workers to combine, strike or perform

collectively any action that would have been legal if practised by a single

individual – such as withdrawal of labour, mass picketing and peaceful per-

suasion and demonstration. Beyond these fairly limited objectives, British

trade unionists before 1914 largely accepted, and in many cases strongly

endorsed, the wider legal framework of conventional parliamentary democ-

racy. It was far otherwise, however, in much of France, Italy, Spain and the

USA, where a third powerful strand within the corporatist tradition took

up the political doctrines associated with the French anarcho-syndicalist

theorist George Sorel. Sorel, whose R

eﬂections sur la Violence (1908) was one

of the most eloquent and impassioned (if wholly utopian) theoretical works

of the period, called for the dissolution of plutocracy by mass resort to the

‘general strike’. This was to be a moment of secular ‘theophany’ (or divine

visitation), whereby a single brief act of disinterested mass violence would

purge both state and society of their endemic inequalities and corruption,

and replace traditional politics by a state-free regime of direct workers’

control (Sorel 1969,pp.119–29, 151–215, 248–9).

5 Conclusion and postscript: rationality and violence

Political thought in the ﬁn-de-si

ecle era therefore appeared as a discipline – if

indeed ‘discipline’ it may be called – pulling simultaneously in many con-

trary directions. Far-reaching futuristic visions were everywhere ﬂoating in

the air, ranging from the stateless apocalypse of post-revolutionary social-

ism, through to predictions of a world where unlimited state sovereignty

would have given way to the universal dominion of abstract legal norms (the

latter goal hinted at in the works of Kant, and more recently by the young

Austrian legal philosopher, Hans Kelsen (Kant 1887,pp.224–5;Kelsen

1911, pp. i–vii)).

In the world of real politics, by contrast, states were

everywhere acquiring more extensive practical functions and discretionary

powers. Yet, despite the global explosion of new political ideas, the nature of

change both within and between nation states appeared to be widely elud-

ing the grasp of much systematic political theory. Newer disciplines such

as economics and sociology in part made up for this gap, by contributing

16 Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), one of the authors of the Austrian constitution of 1919, and subsequently

the most inﬂuential jurisprudential theorist of the twentieth century.

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substantially to debates about the functions of states in relation to economic

and social policy. But neither discipline was able to explain or take account

of the structural realities of political power, as embodied in such spheres as

armaments programmes, imperialism, militant nationalism, disputed polit-

ical identities, ﬁscal and constitutional crises and mass democracy. Thus in

many contexts there appeared to be a deep hiatus between political systems

as described by contemporary theorists and the ways in which those sys-

tems worked in everyday life (perhaps conﬁrming Hegel’s ironic aside of a

hundred years earlier, that political philosophy was forever doomed to be

wise only after the event). State governments as the embodiment of inher-

ited power structures, for example, often seemed strangely at odds, both

with contemporary visions of the state as an integrated ‘moral community’

and with more hedonistic notions of the citizenry as ‘shareholders’ in a

‘company or business ﬁrm’ (Bosanquet 1910,pp.6, 298–91, 302; Mallock

1910,p.1). So it was perhaps no coincidence that the early years of the

twentieth century were marked by acute constitutional, territorial and

ideological disputes and conﬂicts in many parts of the world – conﬂicts

that ranged from Great Britain and Ireland, France, Germany, Austria-

Hungary and Russia, through to China, Mexico, Latin America and the

various constituent territories of the decaying Ottoman Empire (Harris et al.

2008).

Later historians have sometimes identiﬁed this cacophony of political

thought during the ﬁn-de-si

ecle era as a signiﬁcant causal element in the

sleep-walking of politicians and political actors in many nations into the

avoidable tragedy of the Great War. In particular, the ideology of ‘violence’,

common to radical protest movements of both left and right (and even to

some degree in the usually law-abiding ‘centre’)

has often been cited as

symptomatic of a much wider ‘revolt against reason’ that characterised West-

ern society and culture during the pre-war decades. This revolt has been

seen as directed against both the predominance of ‘liberal-constitutionalism’

in politics and law, and against ‘rationalism’ as a style of thought that had

characterised the Europe-dominated world for much of the nineteenth cen-

tury. A very extended spectrum of turn-of-the-century thinkers, ranging

from die-hard defenders of the ancien r

egime through to anarcho-syndicalists,

romantic nationalists and militant suffragettes, has been identiﬁed as

17 The support given in 1914 to potentially unconstitutional activities in Ulster by A. V. Dicey, the

outstanding authority of the period on liberal constitutionalism and the ‘rule of law’, was a case in

point.

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Jose Harris

complicit in this movement; whilst in the cultural sphere Freudians, intu-

itionists, religious visionaries and avant-garde intellectuals of many kinds

have all likewise been depicted as sharing in and stoking up a widely dif-

fused anti-rationalist reaction (Burrow 2000, pp. xiii–xiv; Dangerﬁeld 1936;

Stern 1974, pp. xvii–xix, 97–8; Sternhell 1996,pp.11–29, 70–86, 365–71).

And an inﬂuence perceived as lurking behind those tendencies was the

thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose contempt for the rationalism of

Platonist and Enlightenment thought, and role in popularising the more

ecstatic and subliminal ideas of the ‘pre-Socratic’ Greek philosophers, have

often been pinpointed as a powerful element in the pre-history of European

fascism (Barker 1914;Stern1974;Wolin1989,pp.133–7).

Addressing the full ramiﬁcations of this argument lies far beyond the scope

of this chapter. But, as suggested above, violence, irrationalism and social

disorder were certainly major concer ns of several prominent turn-of-the-

century sociologists and social theorists, who in turn helped to shape and

deﬁne the anxieties and priorities of contemporary politics. The question

therefore arises of how far that anti-rationalist ‘turn’, seemingly so pervasive

in many spheres of early twentieth-century life and thought, was also part

of the culture and methodology of contemporary political theory.

This question is more multifaceted than it seems at ﬁrst sight, and contains

several assumptions that invite closer attention. Just how far peaceful liberal-

constitutionalism as a form of government had in fact become the assumed

‘norm’ in Europe and elsewhere, over the course of a century shaped by

the French Revolution, the two Napoleons, the uprisings of 1848,the

Paris Commune, global imperialism and the autocratic constitutions of

Germany and Russia, seems at least open to question. And a similar point

may be made in the intellectual sphere. Despite the nineteenth-century

vogue for Positivism and political economy, earlier chapters in this book

have recorded many instances over the course of the whole century of total

or partial rejection of the ultra-rationalist inheritance of the Enlightenment

epoch. John Stuart Mill’s famous ‘mental crisis’ of 1826 was one conspicuous

example; but such a reaction was not uncommon among intellectuals of

many different kinds throughout Europe over the course of the nineteenth

century (Mill 1960, 137–91;Berlin1996,pp.168–93).

A second point relates to the exact nature of the ‘anti-rationalism’ ascribed

to the political thought of the ﬁn-de-si

ecle period. Whether the intellectual

culture of t he 1890sand1900s was in fact any more prone to ‘irrationalist’

reaction than that of earlier decades seems at least open to question, par-

ticularly in view of the ultra-rationalist developments that were occurring

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during precisely the same turn-of-the-century period in such related areas as

jurisprudence, formal logic, neo-classical political economy and many areas

of natural science. And, conversely, although many sociologists, nurtured

in the positivist tradition, saw ir rational thought and behaviour as some-

thing that was inherently deviant and abnormal, there were some spheres

of intellectual enquiry and creative thought that took a quite different view.

In music, poetry, psychoanalysis and Bergsonian philosophy, for example,

‘intuition’ and the ‘subconscious’ came increasingly to be seen as legitimate

parts of the everyday subject-matter of these disciplines and as an authentic

route into the discovery of deeper and different forms of truth. Similarly

social anthropology had begun to shed its roots in evolutionary positivism,

and to treat human behaviour, wherever found, as something to be studied

on its own terms, rather than through the corrective lens of the detached

and ‘objective’ social observer (Jane Harrison, in Seward 1909,pp.494–511;

Stocking 1996,pp.63–83, 179–232).

Moreover, to some social and political theorists of the period it seemed

that an element of the instinctive, transcendent or ‘non-rational’ was pre-

cisely what held complex political societies together. This was a view unex-

pectedly expressed by Graham Wallas – himself a man of notoriously ‘ratio-

nalist’ outlook – both in his conclusion to The Great Society, and in his earlier

study Human Nature in Politics. To Wallas it seemed that it was precisely the

neglect of more ‘instinctive’ and ‘customary’ human traits by the rational

imperatives of economic and administrative ‘modernity’ that was driving

many early twentieth-century citizens into angst and social isolation. More-

over, the would-be political theorist was faced with the problem that his or

her primary data was ‘human experience’, and that much of the experience

of even the most ‘rational’ individuals was unique and varied and subjective

and therefore irreducible to the kind of rationalist formulae suggested by

either utilitarians or Kantians a hundred years before (Wallas 1914,pp.376–

94, 1962,pp.138–82). A similar approach was to be found in the writings

of J. A. Hobson, who throughout his career as an eclectic but nonethe-

less highly creative political thinker, struggled with the problem of how to

reconcile rationalistic humanism with the burgeoning empirical evidence

that human behaviour was also driven by instinct, intuition and subjec-

tivity (Freeden 2005,pp.107–28). And, most powerfully and persuasively,

such a model was approved by Max Weber who unexpectedly portrayed

eruptions of ‘ecstasy’ and ‘charisma’ in the leadership of social groups,

not as inherently pathological, but as characteristic of recurrent patterns

of political life throughout human history (Weber 1947,pp.358–73, 2005,

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Jose Harris

pp. 454–563).

Indeed, in Weber’s view, what was commonly deemed

‘irrationality’ was not a deviant or abnormal symptom but an inescapable

feature of human thought and action, and therefore of central concern to

social and political science (Weber 1975,pp.120–32, 191–2, 190–207).

A third problem relates to the implied (and often explicit) suggestion that

irrationality was inherently linked to political extremism and ‘violence’,

whereas rationality was the corollary of liberal constitutionalism and peaceful

legal order. That some political activists of the 1890sand1900s deliberately

linked rejection of reason to their own strategies of violence cannot be

denied, most notably in the cases of Sorel, the Futurists, many anti-Semites,

and some militant suffragettes. Indeed, for Georges Sorel, the cult of the

irrational was no mere strategy but an end in its own right – it was an

intrinsically preferable alternative to what he perceived as the appalling

cultural triumph of rationalistic humanism (Sorel 1916,pp.61–2, 89–92,

101–5). Nevertheless, the suggestion that there was a generic and necessary

link between interest in the ‘irrational’ and resort to political violence, or

between constitutionalism and rejection of violence, seems very much open

to question. Once again the writings of Max Weber, perhaps the greatest

theorist of the power-politics of the ﬁn-de-si

ecle epoch, are of relevance here.

Weber focused upon the categorical element of systemic violence inherent

in the inner structures of even the most legitimate, well-ordered and peaceful

states; indeed the very existence of social and political order in Weber’s

view was predicated upon force and violence being exclusively at the state’s

disposal (Weber 1954,pp.338–42). Lenin likewise offers an instr uctive,

though rather different kind of, example. In his 1902 treatise What is to

be Done? Lenin advanced the case for giving absolute priority in politics

to exact science over muddled intuition and pragmatism, to ‘organisation’

rather than ‘spontaneity’, to precise calculation of the relation of means

to ends, and to control of political strategy by a ‘small, compact core’

of highly trained political experts rather than by well-meaning democrats

and blundering amateurs (Lenin 1961–6, v,pp.370–5, 422–5, 430, 433–4,

459–65). This tightly reasoned, indeed ultra-rationalist, approach to politics

was to be the hallmark of Lenin’s lifelong career as a systematic political

theorist (apparent in this earlier period no less than during the October

Revolution of 1917) (Lenin 1961–6, xxvii,pp.323–54, xxxi,pp.17–118).

The success of his analysis in winning away Russian social democratic and

18 More fully set out in Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922–5), but central to his thought from a

much earlier period (Weber 2005,pp.454–9).

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populist support from emerging movements for moderate and gradualist

constitutional reforms must make What is to be Done? one of the most

practically inﬂuential works in the long history of political theory. Yet the

case of Lenin scarcely supports the view that ‘reason’ was the intimate

partner of liberal constitutionalism, or that ‘rational calculation’ necessarily

offered a virtuous alternative to revolutionary violence and terror. A more

plausible assessment is that of the classic study of the period by H. Stuart

Hughes, who concluded that the ‘greatest’ political thinkers of the turn-of-

the-century epoch were those who, ‘while ﬁghting every step of the way

to salvage as much as possible of the rationalist heritage’, nevertheless took

full account of ‘the new deﬁnition of man as something more (or less) than

a logically calculating animal’ (Hughes 1979a, p. 17).

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