The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century 9781316160855, 9781108677462, 2018046335, 9781107097759, 9781107097780

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t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of

MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT *

VOLUME I:

The Nineteenth Century This first volume of The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought surveys late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual history, focusing on the profound impact of the Enlightenment on European intellectual life. Spanning twenty chapters, it covers figures such as Kant, Hegel, Wollstonecraft, and Darwin, major political and intellectual movements such as Romanticism, Socialism, Liberalism, and Feminism, and schools of thought such as Historicism, Philology, and Decadence. Renouncing a single “master narrative” of European thought across the period, Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon establish a formidable new multifaceted vision of European intellectual history for the global modern age. W A R R E N B R E C K M A N is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1995. He is the author of Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (1999), European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (2008), and Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy (2013). He served as co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas (2006–2016), and co-edited the volume The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory (2008), also with Peter E. Gordon. P E T E R E. G O R D O N is Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a resident faculty member at Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and has held fellowships from the Princeton Society of Fellows and the Davis Center at Princeton University. He is the award-winning author of Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003), Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010), and Adorno and Existence (2016) and coeditor of several books, including The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, with Espen Hammer and Axel Honneth (2018).

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t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of

MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought is an authoritative and comprehensive exploration of the themes, thinkers, and movements that shaped our intellectual world from the late eighteenth century to the present. Representing both individual figures and the contexts within which they developed their ideas, this two-volume history is rich with original interpretive insight, and is written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field. Renouncing a single “master narrative” of European thought across the period, Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon establish a formidable new multi-faceted vision of European intellectual history for the global modern age.

VOLUME I The Nineteenth Century edited by warren breckman and peter e. gordon VOLUME II The Twentieth Century edited by peter e. gordon and warren breckman

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT *

VOLUME I

The Nineteenth Century *

Edited by WARREN BRECKMAN University of Pennsylvania PETER E. GORDON Harvard University

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University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108677462 D O I: 10.1017/9781316160855 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Breckman, Warren, 1963– editor. | Gordon, Peter Eli, editor. T I T L E: The Cambridge history of modern European thought / edited by Warren Breckman, Peter Gordon. D E S C R I P T I O N: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2019– | Includes bibliographical references. Contents: volume I. The nineteenth century. I D E N T I F I E R S: L C C N 2018046335| I S B N 9781107097759 (vol. 1) | I S B N 9781107097780 (vol. 2) | I S B N 9781108677462 (set) S U B J E C T S: L C S H: Europe – Intellectual life – 19th century. | Europe – Intellectual life – 20th century. | Philosophy, European – History. C L A S S I F I C A T I O N: L C C D359 .C 226 2019 | D D C 190–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046335 N A M E S:

Two Volume Set I S B N 978-1-108-67746-2 Hardback Volume I I S B N 978-1-107-09775-9 Hardback Volume II I S B N 978-1-107-09778-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Contributors page viii Preface xiii

Introduction 1 warren breckman and peter e. gordon 1 . German Idealism: The Thought of Modernity terry pinkard

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2 . European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch 40 nicholas halmi 3 . History, Tradition, and Skepticism: The Patterns of Nineteenth-Century Theology 65 david fergusson 4 . The Young Hegelians: Philosophy as Critical Praxis 88 warren breckman 5 . Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation from Locke to Sidgwick 111 philip schofield 6 . Capital, Class, and Empire: Nineteenth-Century Political Economy and Its Imaginary 131 francesco boldizzoni

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Contents

7 . Positivism in European Intellectual, Political, and Religious Life 151 mary pickering 8 . European Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century jerrold seigel

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9 . European Socialism from the 1790s to the 1890s gareth stedman jones

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10 . Conservatism: The Utility of History and the Case against Rationalist Radicalism 232 jerry z. muller 11 . The Woman Question: Liberal and Socialist Critiques of the Status of Women 255 naomi andrews 12 . Darwinism and Social Darwinism 279 gregory radick 13 . Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche 301 john toews 14 . Philology, Language, and the Constitution of Meaning and Human Communities 330 tuska benes 15 . Decadence and the “Second Modernity” mary gluck

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16 . Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Conditions of Modernity 372 christian j. emden 17 . Civilization, Culture, and Race: Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century 398 adam kuper 18 . The Varieties of Nationalist Thought 422 erica benner

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Contents

19 . Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy jennifer pitts

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20 . Rethinking Revolution: Radicalism at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century 470 claudia verhoeven Index

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Contributors

N A O M I J . A N D R E W S is Associate Professor of History at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (Lexington, 2006). Her recent work includes “Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation,” Journal of Modern History (2013) and “The Romantic Socialist Origins of Humanitarianism,” Modern Intellectual History (2019). T U S K A B E N E S is Associate Professor of History at The College of William & Mary. She is the author of In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2008). E R I C A B E N N E R was formerly Fellow in Political Philosophy at Yale University and currently lives in Berlin. Her books include Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford University Press, 1995; Verso, 2018) and Machiavelli’s Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2009). F R A N C E S C O B O L D I Z Z O N I is Professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Means and Ends: The Idea of Capital in the West, 1500–1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton University Press, 2011). W A R R E N B R E C K M A N is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of Modern European Intellectual History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013), and he was the executive co-editor of Journal of the History of Ideas from 2006 to 2016.

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List of Contributors

C H R I S T I A N J . E M D E N is Professor of German Intellectual History and Political Thought and Chair of the Department of Classical and European Studies at Rice University. Among his publications are Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2008). D A V I D F E R G U S S O N is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and editor of the Blackwell Companion to NineteenthCentury Theology (Blackwell, 2010). M A R Y G L U C K is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016) and Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Harvard University Press, 2005). P E T E R E . G O R D O N is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. His more recent books include Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016). N I C H O L A S H A L M I is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the author of The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford University Press, 2007) and the editor, most recently, of the Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton, 2013). A D A M K U P E R teaches in the Anthropology Department of Boston University and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author, most recently, of Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Reinvention of Primitive Society (Routledge, 2005). J E R R Y Z. M U L L E R is professor of history at the Catholic University of America. His books include, as editor, Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton University

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List of Contributors

Press, 1997) and The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (Knopf, 2002). M A R Y P I C K E R I N G is Professor of Modern European History at San José State University. She is the author of Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography (three volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009), and the editor of Love, Order, and Progress: The Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Auguste Comte (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). T E R R Y P I N K A R D is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. His most recent books are Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). J E N N I F E R P I T T S is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Harvard University Press, 2018) and A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University Press, 2005). G R E G O R Y R A D I C K is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. His books include The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and, as coeditor, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 2003; second edition 2009). P H I L I P S C H O F I E L D is Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought in the Faculty of Laws, University College London, and Director of the Bentham Project and General Editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (Athlone and Clarendon Press, 34 vols., 1968–2019, and continuing). J E R R O L D S E I G E L is Kenan Professor of History emeritus at New York University. Among his books are Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Viking, 1986) and The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005). G A R E T H S T E D M A N J O N E S is Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is also a Director of the Centre for History x

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List of Contributors

and Economics, Cambridge, and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His most recent book is Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Penguin, 2016). J O H N T O E W S is professor of History and the Comparative History of Ideas emeritus at the University of Washington. He has held a number of endowed professorships and was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. His publications include Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2004). C L A U D I A V E R H O E V E N is associate professor of history at Cornell University. She is the author of The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell University Press, 2009) and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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Preface

When one steps back to reflect upon the historical course of modern European thought since the French Revolution, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the old master narratives have lost all credibility. It is one of the characteristics of the modern condition that our stories and conceptual schemes have grown increasingly pluralistic: fragmentation, not unity, is the sign of the modern. In this regard, cultural and intellectual activity followed a general trend of modernity toward greater differentiation of spheres and tasks. Relations between workplace and home, public and private, state and society, secular and sacred all changed as modern Europe redefined or created new boundaries between these domains. Likewise, modernity has witnessed an ever more complex division of labor. Just as much as other members of society, intellectuals and artists have been affected by these changes, which have drawn (or blurred) anew the lines between producers and consumers of ideas and between mental and manual labor, even while they have also spawned new subcultures of expertise and disciplinary practice. These larger societal conditions and the torsions they produced are an important factor in the extraordinary creativity of European intellectual life in all fields during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Political ideologies have multiplied, and so too have the various fields of philosophical, theological, and scientific inquiry. Intellectual and cultural movements have waxed and waned; various schools have come into being, declaring themselves as avant-garde before hardening into new orthodoxies. Intellectuals announce a breakthrough only to be overtaken in turn by new currents of restoration or rebellion; and yet even those phenomena that seemed to vanish without a trace have in fact left an enduring mark on future generations. Nothing is ever truly past. Our present intellectual and cultural life remains unintelligible without some awareness of the persistent force of debates, problems, and styles of

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Preface

thought that emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought offers a capacious and detailed survey of this rich and varied intellectual terrain. It combines state-of-the-art research with accessible presentations that can serve as both touchstones for the seasoned scholar and points of entry for students both beginning and advanced. Individual chapters trace crucial movements and figures across a broad range of disciplinary fields and domains of thought; they do so with sensitivity to the complexities both of the internal debates and traditions of intellectual life and of the larger contexts within which writers and artists have pursued their work. The focus is on intellectual concerns that fall roughly into the domain of humanistic inquiry and artistic practice – questions of the self, knowledge, and truth, human nature, the political order, ethics, justice, religion, ontology, psychology, and the symbolic modes whereby humans represent their ideas and experiences. More or less absent are the natural sciences and medicine. While these did of course exercise an important influence, they have their own deep and complicated histories. Their inclusion might have toppled the scale of even the most ambitious compendium of European thought in this period. The two notable exceptions, however, are the Darwinian revolution and the twentiethcentury revolution in physics, both truly paradigmatic shifts that found strong resonances in the broader culture. The focus is also narrowed to emphasize the major countries of Western and Central Europe, chiefly but not exclusively France, Germany, Austria, and Great Britain. These were the national cultures that, during the modern era, could be said to have exercised the greatest influence on the intellectual life of the European continent and beyond. But the volumes and chapters also recognize the many entanglements across time and space that must defeat any attempt to narrate a merely provincial history of European ideas. Especially in the modern era during the age of imperialism and decolonization, the intellectual history of Europe cannot be confined within the boundaries of a single nation or geography. Ideas travel, and they also travel back, enriched and transformed by their peregrinations around the globe. Absent from The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought is any master narrative that would tightly unify all of the numerous strands that thread through these volumes. If the French Revolution brought to an end the feudal age of absolutist monarchy, we would do well to recognize that in the history of ideas there is likewise no sovereign theme that wields all of the xiv

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Preface

threads of intellectual history in its powerful hands. But differentiation does not entail chaos. Even as we recognize the manifold of themes and ideas we also understand that nothing in intellectual history can remain wholly apart from the world. Amply present in this volume is an awareness of the irreducible complexity – the ambiguity but also the creativity – of European intellectual life during these two centuries, alongside a recognition that intellectual history shares in whatever has been good and bad in modern European history. As we embark on the twenty-first century we trust that the ideas of the past may still provide us in some modest way with guidance for the future no matter how formidable its challenges.

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Introduction warren breckman and peter e. gordon

It is something of a truism that each age must work through the legacy of its predecessors. In the case of the nineteenth century, this obvious statement gains poignancy when one considers the novel challenges and possibilities of the eighteenth century, which was, after all, the age of the Enlightenment. In its many guises and national variations, the Enlightenment asserted provocative and epoch-making claims about the role of reason, science, and criticism vis-à-vis the traditional authority of religion, state, and received knowledge. It drew new roadmaps for the conscious and reflexive reform of society and the betterment of people. At its core, it articulated a new emancipatory project – at once philosophical and political – chiefly oriented toward the ideal of individual autonomy. The cultural, social, and political configuration that shaped the Enlightenment came to something of an end in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, partly through processes of internal critique but also, spectacularly, through the political collapse of the Old Regime. In the changed circumstances of the early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment fragmented into a multitude of contests over the meaning of its legacy. What is the status of reason, and what is its proper relationship to other modes of knowledge? What of religion? What is the key discipline or cultural form that will, depending on one’s perspective and priority, advance, hinder, or deepen the impulses of enlightenment? What are the promises and perils of the project of emancipation, and how might it be continued, radicalized, or restrained? Are there limits to the pursuit of individual autonomy? What is the proper relation between the past and the future, tradition and innovation? None of these questions admitted definitive answers, but they fueled creative efforts, debate, and conflict across a great range of intellectual and cultural pursuits. The shaping legacy of the Enlightenment intertwined with the ramifications and reverberations of the great political upheaval that brought the eighteenth century to a close. Or, if we are to follow recent historians in 1

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warren breckman and peter e. gordon

speaking of the long nineteenth century, we would be just as correct to say that the French Revolution in 1789 opened the new century. Across nineteenth-century Europe, the ideal of popular sovereignty and national selfdetermination, the emergence of nationalism and democratic republicanism, struggles to open up political participation to greater numbers and extend suffrage, efforts to impose constitutions upon truculent monarchs – all drew inspiration from the revolution that toppled the old regime in France. Just as readily, the politics of restoration and conservation struggled against these impulses throughout the century, striving at times to reverse the processes opened by the Revolution and at other times to channel new political demands into stabilizing social and political hierarchies where they might be contained and tamed. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm reminded us decades ago that the nineteenth century in fact opened with a dual revolution, not only the political but also the industrial revolution.1 Yet while the first was a series of dramatic and often violent events, the second, with roots reaching back into the mid-eighteenth century, was a process unfolding across many decades in Europe and throughout the world. The centrality of the economy in the intellectual preoccupations of the age is attested by the lively and innovative discipline of political economy, from early nineteenth-century successors to Adam Smith such as David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus to the Marginal Revolution spearheaded by William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras in the 1870s. No greater statement of the prodigious dynamism of industrial society as well as its risks and costs can be found than the Communist Manifesto published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. Capitalism, they argued, was the real agent of revolutionary change in the modern world, sweeping away traditional hierarchies and belief structures, propelling the society toward undreamt powers of production, concentrating populations in enormous cities, and pulling the entire globe into an ever-tighter network. Yet they believed that bourgeois society, like a sorcerer who conjures spirits from the nether world, was losing control of the social forces it had unleashed, careening from crisis to crisis. Thus Marx and Engels predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism in a social revolution that would dwarf the political revolution of the eighteenth century. Written at the mid-point of the nineteenth century, as Europe stood on the brink of another series of revolutionary convulsions from France to the 1 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962).

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Introduction

borderlands of Russia, the Communist Manifesto could point to an already quite elaborate history of conflict over this emerging capitalist world while foreshadowing the socialist and communist struggles that were to gain greater and greater power in the latter half of the century. The intellectual history of the nineteenth century participated in these great currents of political and social contest. The first part of the century witnessed an intense period of reflection on the new political and social world opened up by the French Revolution. Conservatives tried to hold back the tides of change, and in the process fashioned new theoretical accounts of society, as did Edmund Burke in his seminal 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France. Liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill recognized the inevitable development of the principle of equality – Tocqueville called it a “providential fact” – but they worried about the possible excesses of democracy, seeing threats to individual liberty posed both by majoritarian governance and by informal pressures of conformity in a society of equals. Republicans and democrats strived to keep alive the political ambitions of the Revolution, some even embracing its most extreme, Jacobin phase. Socialists such as Robert Owen, Henri Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier predated Marx and Engels by decades as they worried about the breakdown of solidarity in the individualistic society inaugurated by the Revolution and tried to steer political energies toward the so-called “social question,” namely the array of problems created by new forms of social inequality that were emerging from the industrial reorganization of labor, society, and the economy. Some of these socialists, including Saint-Simon and his followers, would flirt with nondemocratic ideas of social organization in the hope of better distributing the resources of the new economy. Marx, by contrast, saw the collective ownership of society’s productive means as the sine qua non of true democracy. If Marx and Engels famously believed that history is driven by class struggle, thinkers of other stripes offered quite different generalizations about the engine of history. Some liberals reduced history to a perennial struggle between the individual and the state. Nationalists in the first half of the century, such as J. G. Fichte and Giuseppe Mazzini, often imagined the course of human affairs as an equally perennial contest between sovereign (or ethnically unitary) peoples and dynastic – frequently foreign – overlords, whereas nationalists in the second half of the century saw it as a contest between rival peoples; pioneering feminists wavered between seeing the subordination of women as the grounding fact of the existing order or as one dimension of more general social and political inequities. The former position anticipated critiques of patriarchy that became familiar in twentieth3

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warren breckman and peter e. gordon

century feminism; the latter opened complicated and often tense relations between feminism and other progressive movements such as socialism or democratic reformism. The core issue of European political thought in the nineteenth century was emancipation: for whom, to what extent, and by what means? The French Revolution opened up this recognizably modern political landscape; but, in the broadest sense, the issue of emancipation formed the ground tone of the Enlightenment.2 The most famous statement of Enlightenment values was perhaps Immanuel Kant’s 1784 answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”: “Enlightenment is man’s exit from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such minority is self-incurred if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”3 Centered in western Europe and Britain, radiating out to the peripheries of Europe and the New World, and spanning the decades from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment was too complex to be adequately contained in this or any other definition. Kant’s rousing call for the achievement of human autonomy can and should be balanced by recognition that the Enlightenment also advocated for more prosaic, though by no means trivial, causes – for a greater degree of civility and polish in social life, moderation and tolerance in matters of belief, skepticism toward superstition, and the employment of empirical evidence and rationality in weighing truth claims. The impulses of the Enlightenment can be detected in practical projects aimed at the improvement of the living conditions of people as well as in the conscious application of science and technology to ameliorate suffering. 2 The historical literature on the Enlightenment is vast. Some older overviews remain valuable, even if dated in many assumptions. See especially Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966–1969). For excellent examples of newer approaches, see Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment, trans. W. E. Yuill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, 2nd edn. (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3 Immanuel Kant, “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment,” in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. Thomas K. Abbott (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 135.

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Introduction

The greatest undertaking of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia launched by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert in 1751 and concluded in 1772, eventually included almost 72,000 articles restructuring the world of knowledge and human endeavor according to the ambitions of the siècle des lumières: from entries on revelation, clergy, atheists, natural law, natural equality, invention, hydrodynamics, cosmology, and reason, to theocracy, torture, the slave trade, and intolerance, to farm laborers, cotton, mining, metallurgy, commerce, and inoculation, the world was to be reformed in the light of rational, systematic, and empirically grounded knowledge.4 The reformist and ameliorist impulses of the Enlightenment continued to course through the nineteenth century. That is also true of the Enlightenment’s most provocative claims for the power of human reason to discover truth and propel progressive change. Kant’s insistence in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit”5 found strong resonance long after history had drawn a shade on the age of Enlightenment itself among thinkers ranging from Kant’s student J. G. Fichte, who saw his philosophical account of human freedom to be an exact counterpart to the French Revolution, to the first generation of German Romantics, to the radical followers of Hegel such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, Marx and Engels, to the Frenchmen Auguste Comte, founder of Positivism, and Charles Baudelaire, possibly the greatest French lyric poet of the century, to the English liberal John Stuart Mill, to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, to Friedrich Nietzsche, who imagined himself to be thinking with a hammer. Yet what critique meant, what it aimed to achieve, and what were its best instruments were issues that preoccupied many thinkers in the nineteenth century, and positions staked out in the Enlightenment themselves came under critical scrutiny. By way of examples, consider more closely three areas where these issues played out across multiple fields of philosophical and artistic endeavor. The cutting edge of eighteenth-century theories of knowledge rooted the development of reason in an empiricist psychology, that is, the development of increasingly complex ideas from an original basis in sensations. Kant blew this empiricist epistemology apart when he proposed his “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy,6 namely by insisting that, even though “There 4 See The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert: Collaborative Translation Project (https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/) for a fully searchable online English version. 5 Immanuel Kant, “Preface to First Edition,” in The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 9. 6 Kant, “Preface to Second Edition,” Critique of Pure Reason, 22.

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warren breckman and peter e. gordon

can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience,” it “does not follow that it all arises out of experience.”7 A thousand philosophical ships were launched by this hypothesis, and in many ways they are still under sail today. If Kant contended that the something else that supplements the data of the senses was a conception of pure reason, replete with a priori concepts and structures, others gave very different answers. Poets such as Goethe and Schiller, fresh out of their involvement in the so-called Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s when Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appeared, offered the passions and creative imagination as the crucial supplement or perhaps even guide of reason. In the case of Kant’s greatest immediate philosophical successor, G. W. F. Hegel, reason became an emphatically historical and social phenomenon, developing higher and higher articulations that promised to overcome the divisions between human and human, between human and nature, and even between human and divine. By the mid 1790s, Romantics in France, Britain, and Germany had subjected Enlightenment rationality to critical scrutiny; though instances of Romantic hostility toward the Enlightenment and indeed rationality itself can be found, the more characteristic positions were to expand the conception of reason beyond what Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Friedrich Schelling judged to be a narrowly construed base in analysis and experience or to balance the claims of reason against other human faculties – imagination, feeling, empathy, intuition. With this broadening and revaluation of human faculties went some shifts in the status of the natural sciences. Arguably, the greatest cultural hero of the Enlightenment was Isaac Newton. To be sure, the nineteenth century saw no diminishment in the centrality of the natural sciences. Indeed, it witnessed bounding leaps forward in almost every field of science and medicine; and to Newton, it added another icon of scientific mastery, Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species (1859) opened the modern epoch of biological research but also an era of dubious evolutionary metaphors applied to social and cultural matters. The interweaving cultural significance of these two figures is amply attested by Friedrich Engels’s 1884 graveside eulogy for his friend Karl Marx, when he praised Marx as both the Newton and the Darwin of the social world. And, accompanying the many scientific advances of the period, the nineteenth century even witnessed a kind of cult of science, the philosophy of Positivism launched by Comte. But alongside the undeniable rise of the natural sciences, the nineteenth century saw robust debates 7 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 41.

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Introduction

about the validity of other disciplines and modes of knowledge, from metaphysics to historical study, from poetry and art to theology. A single watchword might sum up the Enlightenment’s stance on religion, namely avoid fanaticism. But beyond that plea for moderation, the Enlightenment counted in its ranks theists, rationalist deists, and radical atheists. Despite this plurality of religious positions, earlier generations of historians readily believed that in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, Europe witnessed a steady secularization of the mind and a decline of the public significance of religion.8 Contemporaries of the nineteenth century often expressed similar views: In 1843, Marx declared the criticism of religion completed; Comte believed that the “age of theology” had yielded to an “age of metaphysics” and now, in his own lifetime, to a “positive age,” by which he meant to signal the triumph of science. Mill suggested he lived in an “age of weak beliefs”;9 Matthew Arnold lamented in the poem “Dover Beach” that “The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled./But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/Retreating . . .”; two years later, in 1869, Thomas Huxley, the first great champion of Darwin and the author of the first work placing humans in the evolution of species, coined the term “agnosticism”; in 1834, the poet Heinrich Heine admonished his reader “Hear ye not the bells resounding? Kneel down. They are bringing the sacraments to a dying God”; the radical Hegelian Bruno Bauer declared in 1841 that “God is dead for philosophy”; and a few decades later, Friedrich Nietzsche went the full distance and had his mad prophet Zarathustra declare “God is dead.”10 In the last two or three decades, historians have grown skeptical of the image of a steadily secularizing European world, finding ample signs of the robust perseverance of belief in private life, society, and politics.11 The same goes for intellectual life. For one thing, where the image of an implacable conflict between science and religion once dominated the historiography of 8 See, above all, Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 9 John Stuart Mill, “Utility of Religion,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), vol. X, 403. 10 Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. John Snodgrass (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 103; Bruno Bauer, Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1841), 77; and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181. Nietzsche used this phrase in numerous texts, but most influentially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 11 For an influential example of this revisionist scholarship, see David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Knopf, 1994).

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the nineteenth century, two generations of scholars have now discovered a much more flexible and resilient relationship.12 Indeed, the nineteenth century was a period of great creativity in religious thought, in large measure, perhaps, precisely because modernity posed so many challenges to the traditional religions. Protestant theologians from Friedrich Schleiermacher at the opening of the century to Albrecht Ritschl at its close recast theology in terms that spoke to the most advanced thinking of their times. The poet François-René de Chateaubriand reimagined Catholicism in Romantic terms, celebrating it not for its doctrinal truth but for the splendors and aesthetic satisfactions of its rituals. The Tübingen School of Catholic Theology rethought doctrinal issues as well as the relationship of the historical faith to philosophy. More generally, the revival of Thomism among Catholic thinkers reinvigorated the intellectual life of the Church and reverberated well into the twentieth century. Søren Kierkegaard underscored the irrational reservoirs of faith in works that were to find resonance among the existentialist thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s, while Russian writers and thinkers like Solovyov and Dostoevsky turned to a mystical religion that melded community and God through the body of Christ. Even the critics of religion frequently approached belief from an angle quite at odds with the most radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, who had tended to view religion as a zero-sum game, either true or false. So, for example, the Young Hegelians of the 1830s and 1840s viewed religion as a stage in the development of consciousness, bearing a kernel of truth even if the religious person misrecognized this truth. From a very different starting point, Mill readily conceded the utility of religion, while strenuously disputing its truth. He even presented secular commitments like his own youthful attachment to the Utilitarian movement as “in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings, and (with the same aid from education) still better calculated to ennoble the conduct . . .”13 The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church but nonetheless believed that humans could not exist without religion, insofar as humans ask why they exist and how they are connected to the universe. By the turn of the century, the Harvard psychologist William James could explore the varieties of 12 For a recent survey of this issue, see Frederick Gregory, “Science and Religion,” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 329–358. 13 Mill, “Utility of Religion,” 420. Mill uses the same phrasing to describe his conversion to Utilitarianism upon reading Jeremy Bentham as a teenager in “Autobiography,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), vol. I, 69.

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Introduction

religious experience, asserting that their value lay not in their legitimacy but in their pragmatic effects. In a world experiencing rapid social change and new political challenges, intellectual and cultural life branched into many different paths. The nineteenth century witnessed an ever-increasing proliferation of intellectual tendencies, movements, concerns, and currents. Pluralization is not the same thing as pluralism, in which multiple positions coexist harmoniously. Conflict could – and often did – accompany the pluralization of intellectual life: rival schools of philosophy, socialist versus bourgeois thought, anarchists against socialists, Romantics against realists, symbolists against realists, feminists against patriarchy, the emerging artistic avant-garde against the dominance of the academy, Nietzsche contra almost everyone. The rhizomic expansion and differentiation of intellectual and cultural activity went hand in hand with important shifts in the social conditions of knowledge. Long gone were the days when the patronage of the Church was key to the prospects of intellectuals. Aristocratic support of writers and artists remained significant in the eighteenth century, as attested by the importance of the Parisian salon for the advance of Enlightenment ideas. But aristocratic patronage was on the wane, as the proliferation of voluntary associations and academies dedicated to the spread of knowledge suggests. As importantly, in the eighteenth century, some writers were already able to live from the sales of their works. The Encyclopedia, we were reminded years ago, was a business venture, whatever else it was.14 By the end of the eighteenth century, the number of readers in countries like England, France, and Germany was increasing rapidly, and with the growth of readership came an ever-expanding literary marketplace and steam-driven printing machines that could meet the rising demand.15 To be sure, it was still a great struggle to eke out an existence dependent on this market. Novels like Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43) and Gustave Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education (1869) open windows onto a Parisian world of aspiring writers, dreaming and destitute. But the dynamics of this expanding print market stamped the period, producing the conditions for various kinds of intellectual entrepreneurship, offering intellectuals incentives and possibilities 14 See Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 15 See Reinhard Wittmann, “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). See also Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, revised edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

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warren breckman and peter e. gordon

for the creation of journals and other publishing ventures, and tempting some to tailor their works for the market and provoking others to insist on the noncommercial purity of their creations. In the expanding capitalist world of western Europe, the rapid growth of cities fueled the commodification of cultural life and created important new contexts of intellectual and artistic life. Perhaps the most indelible impression of this new urban culture remains bohemianism – rebellious, eccentric, non-conformist, creative and spontaneous, decidedly anti-bourgeois and, typically, dirt poor.16 Already emerging in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, bohemianism would replicate itself in cities great and small; but the association with Paris is strong enough that to this day a certain kind of tourist is drawn to the epicenter of nineteenth-century bohemian life, the Parisian neighborhood Montmartre, to indulge in nostalgia for days of absinthe, ribaldry, and artistic frenzy. Bohemians were often non-political in the ordinary sense of politics, but there were elective affinities between Bohemia and revolution. In the cultural underworld of the big city, bohemians and revolutionaries frequently rubbed shoulders or even joined ranks, as we see in Baudelaire’s poems depicting Paris during the Revolution of 1848.17 The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a figure with no precedent in European history, the professional revolutionary. Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Vladimir Lenin, and Auguste Blanqui were just some of the men and women who dedicated their lives to the theory and practice of revolutionary activism. Toward the end of the century, with expanding manhood suffrage and the advent of the era of mass democratic politics, powerful socialist parties emerged, and with them, the sometimes conspiratorial and almost always marginalized revolutionary was supplemented by yet another new type, destined to have a long career in the twentieth century: the party intellectual. Bohemians and revolutionaries are undoubtedly compelling figures, but it may be that the real heroes of nineteenth-century intellectual history were the professors. Universities throughout Europe had fallen into considerable disrepute in the eighteenth century. Certainly, they were not engines of innovation in any field, and in some cases they were havens of 16 From a large literature, see Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1987); and Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 17 Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 126. In Traverso’s book, see especially the chapter “Bohemia: Between Melancholy and Revolution.”

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Introduction

nepotism, incompetence, and dogmatic traditionalism.18 Prussia, smarting from its defeat by Napoleon in 1806, spearheaded a renovation of university life that would eventually transform higher education throughout Europe and, eventually, the Americas. Wilhelm von Humboldt was tasked with the challenge of creating a new university in the heart of Berlin, known as the University of Berlin at the time it opened in 1809, now called the Humboldt University. In the process, Humboldt articulated a new ideal of the university as a site where students and teachers alike were embarked on a shared voyage of original research and creative thought that would enhance personal cultivation and bring benefits to mankind in general and the nation in particular.19 This new university ethos marched in tandem with the emergence and consolidation of disciplines both in the humanities and in the natural sciences. Indeed, by the years around 1800, advocates of natural science and technology were already challenging the dominance of the traditional humanities, in which theology had sat at the pinnacle of a pyramid built of law, medicine, the liberal arts, and finally the mechanical arts.20 The nineteenth century saw the rise of physics, geology, biology, psychology, and mathematics in the natural sciences, philosophy, philology, and history in the humanities, various branches of medicine, and, by the fin de siècle, anthropology, sociology, and political science in the social sciences.21 The emergence of modern disciplines, with their internalized sense of appropriate subject matter and methods of inquiry, in turn contributed to an ever-intensifying specialization of knowledge. Though there were some extraordinary polymaths in the period as well as some philosophers like Hegel who tried to conceptualize all the realms of knowledge, the century saw the birth and rise of experts and 18 For a colorful, brief description, see Paul Reitter, “The Business of Learning,” The New York Review of Books, LXV(3) (February 22, 2018), 30. 19 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin” (1810), in Werke in fünf Bänden. Band 4: Schriften zur Politik und zum Bildungswesen, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, 3rd edn. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 253–265. For an assessment, see C. McClelland, “To Live for Science: Ideals and Realities at the University of Berlin,” in The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, ed. Thomas Bender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 181–197; for an interesting case study of the spread of this university model, see Emily J. Levine, “Baltimore Teaches, Göttingen Learns: Cooperation, Competition, and the Research University,” The American Historical Review, 121(3) (June 2016), 780–823. 20 Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, Volume II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 256. 21 See David Cahan, “Introduction,” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 4.

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warren breckman and peter e. gordon

specialists.22 With specialization came a proliferation of professional journals and, especially in the last decades of the century, the growth of foundations and institutions supporting the research agendas of the new disciplines. Innovative and important intellectual work in all fields happened in these emerging contexts of disciplines, specialized research, teaching, and institutionalization. But specialization undoubtedly came with costs. Even the early modern period suffered from “information overload,” but with the nineteenth-century explosion of knowledge, the possibility of mastering much more than a small part of the vast territory of learning dwindled to the vanishing point.23 Moreover, as disciplines became more technical and distinctive, talking across disciplines, let alone bridging the gulf between experts and lay readers, became challenges that persist to this day. At the extreme lay the possibility that learning becomes an end in itself, detached from larger questions of meaning. This peril Nietzsche readily seized on in accusing academics of lapsing into a kind of nihilism: “How much does learning hide these days, or, at least, how much does it wish to hide! The solidity of our best scholars, their automatic industry, their heads smoking night and day, their very skill and competence: all these qualities betoken more often than not a desire to hide and suppress something. Haven’t we all grown familiar with learning as a drug?”24 The political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth century produced a sense of caesura in many contemporaries, who recognized that the world would never be the same. It was not uncommon for contemporaries to remark on what seemed to be an acceleration of history. Marx and Engels, once again, gave unparalleled expression to this in The Communist Manifesto when they wrote that “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air . . .”25 Inevitably, for some, this sense of acceleration stirred melancholic 22 On the few polymaths of distinction in the nineteenth century, see Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 161f and, on specialization, Chapter 6. 23 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor, 1956), 285. 25 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 476.

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Introduction

longing for the past; for others, the break with the past confirmed their optimism that the world could be made anew.26 Others could bring these positions together, as in the declaration of the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel that “the historian is a backward prophet.”27 “Progress and historicism,” writes the historian Reinhart Koselleck, “apparently mutually contradictory, offer the face of Janus – the face of the nineteenth century.”28 It is not surprising, given the acute sense of historical transition with which the century opened, that many thinkers considered history to be the royal road of knowledge. Hegel exemplifies this in the realm of philosophy; Darwin in the realm of biology. Historians, most notably the pioneer of modern historical methods Leopold von Ranke, approached their craft with a sharpened sense of the specific nature of historical knowledge and the ethical imperatives of careful research. Philology, a key discipline of the period, rested on an acute sense of the historical nature both of language and of texts.29 One of the most important of philologists, Jakob Grimm, brought the same rigorous historical method to his four-volume work on the German language (1819–1837) and to the fairy-tale collection he published with his brother Wilhelm in 1812. Various historical schools of economics came to vie with the classical models of political economy created by Adam Smith and immediate successors such as David Ricardo. Nineteenth-century theology would be incomprehensible unless one recognizes the intersections, often very vexed, between abiding interest in divine revelation and new research interests in the history of biblical times. This was the great age of the historical novel, as literary monuments like Tolstoy’s masterpiece War and Peace attest. Even the visual arts bore witness to a sharpened sense of history, both in the development and popularity of secular history painting and in the self-conscious emulation of earlier styles, such as one sees in the German Nazarenes at the opening of the century or the British Pre-Raphaelites in its middle.30 To describe 26 On the former, see Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 27 Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäums-Fragmente,” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, 35 vols. (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), vol. II, 176. 28 Reinhart Koselleck, “Historical Prognosis in Lorenz von Stein’s Essay on the Prussian Constitution,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 60. 29 See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008). 30 For an example of this historicism in painting, see Cordula Grewe, The Nazarenes: Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

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this pervasive feature of the nineteenth-century imagination, Stephen Bann coined the term “historical-mindedness,” while Michel Foucault goes so far as to call the nineteenth century “the age of History.”31 The other face of Janus, belief in progress – an inheritance of the Enlightenment and seemingly confirmed by steady advances in commerce, knowledge, and European domination in the world – persisted right up to the outbreak of war in August 1914. Yet the later decades of the nineteenth century brought a creeping sense that the optimism of the bourgeois world might be hollow. In the opening years of the century, Weltschmerz and malaise were certainly postures adopted by Romantics – indeed, the most famous of all the Romantics, Lord Byron, was a connoisseur of both – but allencompassing pessimism of the sort expressed in Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1819), reaching from the futility of human endeavors to the meaninglessness of the universe, was rare and had little resonance among contemporary readers. By the end of the century, Nietzsche, who had encountered the work of Schopenhauer in his youth, decried the belief in unstoppable progress, and he was not alone. On the periphery of Europe, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) poured bile on a world that reduced complexity to formulas and indulged the fantasy that it might master man and nature. In Europe’s cultural center, Paris, Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846 of the denizens of the bourgeois city as if they were gloomy heroes in a tragedy of fate: “The black dress-coat and the frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul – an immense cortege of undertakers, political undertakers, amorous undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We are all celebrating some funeral. A uniform livery of despair bears witness to equality.”32 In an essay written in 1860, Baudelaire would go on to coin the term “modernity” to describe “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, . . . transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid . . .”33 Though he coupled this ephemeral dimension with the presence and power of the “eternal and immutable,” there can be no doubt that it was the description of modernity, as well as the

31 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 217f; and Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995). 32 Charles Baudelaire, “De l’héroisme de la vie moderne,” in Salon de 1846, ed. David Kelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 180–181. 33 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 13.

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Introduction

black heroism of enduring it, that captivated readers from the Parisian circle of poets and artists in the so-called Decadent and Symbolist movements of the 1870s and 1880s to Nietzsche. It is certainly what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas had in mind when he wrote in 1981 of the trend exemplified by Baudelaire that, “In the course of the 19th century, there emerged . . . that radicalized consciousness of modernity which freed itself from all specific historical ties.”34 For the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes that would begin to proliferate around the year 1900, that could mean exhilarating liberation, but it could also bring disorientation, an even more intense sense of acceleration than that which had marked the opening of the nineteenth century. By 1900, some of the most sensitive spirits of Europe detected a crisis. Nietzsche, who had been virtually ignored during his active life, steadily gained readers after he had succumbed to madness in the late 1880s. Foundational figures in the twentieth-century social sciences registered a sense of crisis. Émile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) traced the rise in suicide in France to a general and pervasive sense of alienation, anomie, endemic to modern life; Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) offered sober sociological analysis alongside a diagnosis of emptiness at the heart of a capitalist “cosmos” devoted to accumulation and the endless circuit of labor and consumption that rivals anything Nietzsche wrote about nihilism; and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900 but completed in 1899, undermined confidence that the conscious rational mind was in command of unconscious irrational, libidinal drives. Broad political and cultural trends reinforced the sense of unease that had crept into the sensibility of European intellectuals. Nationalism, which at the beginning of the century had been closely aligned with progressive democratic movements, had by the 1880s largely become a monopoly of the right-wing, which readily reimagined the nation not as a sovereign political entity but as an integral, homogeneous ethnic unit rooted in history, language, culture, and even biology. Mass political parties of both the left and the right pressed and distorted the liberal center. Nagging doubts began to shadow European imperialist expansion, which proceeded apace at the end of the century with a scramble for control in Africa and competition in the Far East. From the liberal criticisms of J. A. Hobson, to Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin’s socialist interpretations of imperialism as the highest and final stage of capitalism, to the grim descent 34 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, No. 22 (Winter 1981), 4.

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warren breckman and peter e. gordon

of a colonial administrator into madness and bestial cruelty chronicled in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Europe’s tightening hold on the world looked like grotesque but ultimately frail overreach. Purveyors of nowadays fully discredited theories of biological degeneration and atavistic devolution endowed cultural and political anxieties about the working class, criminals, other races, and, at times, the entirety of western culture with the illusory authority of science and medicine.35 A certain kind of socialist at the time would have seen all of this as just so many symptoms of a bourgeois crisis, one that reinforced their own conviction that history was ultimately on the side of socialism. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century, even socialists were undergoing their own crisis, sparked by the German Eduard Bernstein’s claim that Marx and Engels had wrongly forecast the course of history and had so mesmerized activists with visions of a final apocalyptic overthrow of capitalism that the Left had lost sight of its real progress won not on the barricade, but at the ballot box. If the long nineteenth century opened with the French Revolution, it ended with the conflagration of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Great War and the Russian Revolution opened an era dominated politically by the ideological struggles of communism, capitalism, and fascism. Many threads of continuity connect the intellectual and cultural life of the twentieth century with that of the nineteenth. In any case, the intellectual concerns of the twentieth century would be unintelligible without the background of the long nineteenth century; and many of the institutional and cultural milieux that emerged as novelties in the era after the dual revolution of the late eighteenth century became the familiar, seemingly natural habitats in which twentieth-century intellectuals, writers, and artists pursued their activities. History never sees absolute breaks regardless of the scale of the event or calamity that befalls a society. Yet the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution undoubtedly inaugurated a new era in European intellectual history, marked by new concerns, new approaches, and new dilemmas. 35 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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1

German Idealism: The Thought of Modernity terry pinkard German idealism developed as the prelude to the French Revolution, as the expression of the Revolution as it was unfolding, as the end of the Revolution with its Napoleonic coda, and finally as the summation of the restoration European world after the Congress of Vienna. Almost all the practitioners and almost all the critical commentators saw this connection to the events of the time, and it formed the unofficial backdrop to its development. The philosophical revolution predated by a few years the political and social revolution. In 1781 in the Baltic city of Königsberg – in Prussia but beyond even the borders of the Holy Roman Empire – Immanuel Kant finished the Critique of Pure Reason and had it published in Riga. It was a dense book full of intricate theories about mathematics, consciousness, logic, the status of natural science, and metaphysics; and yet, despite its density, it almost immediately changed the shape of intellectual life in Europe. Kant provided both a defense of Enlightenment reason and an equally strong case for the impossibility of human reason itself actually satisfying the metaphysical projects it had set itself. It also provided the means for Kant to establish one of the most ringing defenses of freedom and human rights of all time, and it laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about aesthetic experience. The themes of self-consciousness, spontaneity, freedom, aesthetics, and the possibility of a progressive teleology of historical development formed a combustible mix in Kant’s thought. We might say that it was with Kant, and not just the French Revolution, that the long nineteenth century began its march.

Kant’s Philosophical Revolution Pure Reason Turned on Itself There is no dispute that Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason (with a second, crucially reworded version appearing in 1787) is a demanding book. Since its publication, even mentioning its title has become a bit of a cliché for 17

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difficulty. For that matter, even Kant himself in his preface noted that “this work can never be made suitable for popular consumption.”1 Nonetheless, after a brief stumbling beginning, the book took off, such that within a matter of just a few years, pro- and anti-Kant factions had sprung up all over the German-speaking lands, and the implications of Kant’s philosophy were even being discussed by some of the leaders of the French Revolution itself, with Napoleon himself coming into the picture at one point to speak on Kant’s relevance (negatively, so it turned out).2 The book’s immediate impact had to do with what people saw as its implications for the growing anxiety about the relation between religion and science. Already by the late 1780s, a renowned protestant theologian at Tübingen, Gottlob Storr, had begun using it (or rather misusing it) to buttress his arguments for a kind of biblical literalism based on divine revelation, whereas in 1788 a renowned Jesuit theologian, Benedikt Sattler, published his own work, Anti-Kant, which had as one of its goals the demonstration of the incompatibility of Kantianism with Christianity. Others argued that Kant had in fact settled the debate about science and religion since he had shown that both had equal claims in distinct regions of thought and life. Kant’s book begins with a famous assertion, noted for its sad and even tragic tone: “Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”3 As Kant saw it, for most of our history, we had been living in a kind of illusion where we thought, even when we had not quite put it that way, that human reason, once unencumbered by tradition, or by the senses, or by all of the other “conditional” factors of human life, was nonetheless capable on its own part of reaching the deeper, “unconditioned” truths about the world (such as those of God, freedom, and immortality). The employment of such “pure” reason, Kant sadly noted, had ended up merely in the production of mutually contradictory metaphysical systems. This suggested, in Kant’s rather pungent example, that the history of metaphysics presented only “the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve 1 Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 13 (Axix). 2 See the summary in Ferenc Fehér, “Practical Reason in the Revolution: Kant’s Dialogue with the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, ed. Ferenc Fehér (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 201–214. See also Jean Quillien (ed.), La réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1994). 3 Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 7 (Avii).

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underneath.”4 That in itself might have seemed to have one of two obvious conclusions: first, a kind of resigned skepticism about our ability to know anything about the ultimate at all, which Kant adamantly rejected, calling it a “euthanasia of reason”;5 or, second, an idea that we could somehow circumvent reason altogether and employ some other non-rational faculty to grasp those truths, which Kant thought amounted to simply another type of illusion. Kant’s counter-proposal was daring. The history of recent philosophy, he suggested, had been a see-saw struggle between empiricists and rationalists. The empiricists were correct in holding that all knowledge of the world came from the senses, but the rationalists were right in holding that the mind has cognitive powers independent of such empirical knowledge. Our senses provide us, as it were, the raw data of knowledge, but raw data cannot organize itself. The organization of the data has to come from the intellect, which in its pure form is fully spontaneous in organizing the sensible “data” under concepts to form judgments. There were, moreover, certain concepts (which Kant called the pure categories) that were indispensable for such organization and which could not be derived from the “data” itself. Two of these were the concept of individual existing, enduring substances possessing alterable properties and the concept of causality itself. Kant claimed to show that these categories were not generalizations from experience but rather necessary for there to be self-conscious experience at all, and the unity of selfconscious experience was itself a necessary condition of any cognitive experience of ourselves and the world. If one did not have a concept of oneself as a unity of experience, there would be no cognition at all but only a buzz of unrelated “data.” Kant’s radical claim was that all consciousness of the world (as awareness of distinct objects of experience) was always, already self-consciousness (as awareness of what we were doing in being so aware). To complicate matters further, Kant rejected the obvious two-stage interpretation of this, as if, first, we have experiential “data” and then, second, we organize it by conceptual categories. Kant’s view was far more radical: Without both intuitions and concepts working together at once, there was no cognitive experience at all. This self-consciousness was not itself, however, as it might seem, a matter of there being separate reflective acts, as if, in seeing a chair, one also had to be separately thinking to oneself that one was seeing a chair. It had to do with the way in which one knows, for example, that one is reading this sentence by 4 Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 97 (A58 = B83). 5 Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 385 (A407 = B434).

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consciously reading this sentence and without necessarily having to draw any further inferences to know this (such as: I am reading this sentence, not gardening, not cooking dinner, etc.). Unlike sense-experience of objects, which is purely receptive, this selfconsciousness is a matter of spontaneity on our part. It is what we each bring to the receptivity of experience, and without the full cooperation of “receptivity” and “spontaneity,” there is no real human experience of ourselves and the world at all. Spontaneity without receptivity is empty. Without receptivity, spontaneity is merely a faculty that produces formal logic. When combined with the faculties of sensibility in their spatial and temporal structure, these spontaneously generated logical forms take on substantive meaning as the basic categories of knowledge (such as substance and causality). Kant called this a philosophical version of the Copernican revolution. Rather than thinking that the mind was receptive only to sensible objects and eternal intelligible forms existing far away in Platonic heaven, the mind was itself spontaneous, ordering experience into an intelligible form rather than simply reading it off of experience. Just as the earth was now seen to orbit the sun (and not the other way around), the mind can now be seen to order its experience of objects (rather than objects ordering the mind). The picture that emerged was that of self-conscious subjects living in a world that necessarily had to appear to them as a realm of interacting physical substances following causally deterministic laws. Now, however, Kant drew another conclusion. This was indeed the way in which the world had to appear to us, but it was not in any way the way the world was “in itself,” that is, apart from the conditions under which we could experience it. We know that the world of things in themselves is not the world as it appears to us because when we try to think of such a world in itself apart from our experience of it (using pure reason), we necessarily fall into contradictions. This had been the fate of all traditional metaphysics. All that we can in fact know of things in themselves is that they do not contradict themselves, and thus we know that we do not know anything at all about what things are in themselves except that they exist and are the grounds of our experience. Kant realized that this was in one deep sense unsatisfactory, since reason – that is, us – must by its own nature seek to know such things in themselves, but what it (i.e., we) must realize is that this deepest want on our part is unrealizable in principle. Kant called his philosophy “transcendental idealism” since it claimed that we know only a world of appearances that we had in part constructed (hence that world was “ideal” and required our spontaneity), and this appearance had a necessary metaphysical structure to itself 20

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that was limited to itself because we, as it were, constructed it. (Hence, its structure was “transcendental” and not true of the “transcendent” things in themselves.) This appearing world was not the world of things in themselves. If Kant had left it at that, his picture of things may have seemed very discouraging, even alienating. However, Kant turned the table by showing how his “transcendental idealism” could put to rest the emerging worries about human freedom and about the existence of God. For the latter, Kant argued that the only proper attitude to take in strictly cognitive terms was that of a kind of agnosticism: We could not in the proper sense know that God existed, but we could also not know that He did not exist. In fact, Kant himself even said of his results, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”6 Nor was he pushing philosophy itself off into being a mere sideline commentator. Philosophy now had a new method to make itself into a science equally established alongside the others. The watchwords were the receptivity of the senses, the spontaneity of the intellect, and the self-conscious unity of the “I” that was putting this all together in terms of the pure categories, followed by the admission of the logical impossibility of knowledge of things in themselves.

Reason Turned Practically on Itself Within a few years, Kant established yet another revolution in philosophy. Just as his first Critique highlighted spontaneity, his second Critique (of practical reason) highlighted autonomy. In the world as it must appear to us, the world is a deterministic whole of individual substances interacting according to strict causal laws. In such a world, there was no place at all for human freedom, yet, in acting, we had to think of ourselves as free. Deliberation from the first-person perspective would be pointless unless we assumed that we had the freedom to carry out those deliberations. For the purposes of practice, we must assume, as odd as it sounds, that we are always capable of starting an entirely new causal series that is not itself caused by any prior events, such that our action is fully up to us in terms of starting the new series. This impasse between determinism and freedom cannot be overcome unless we assume the validity of Kantian transcendental idealism, according to which we cannot prove that this ability to start a new causal series on our own is impossible (since that would require knowledge of things in themselves). Since we must assume we are free, and we cannot in principle show

6 Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 29 (Bxxx).

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that we are not, the practical necessity of freedom wins out over the theoretical unintelligibility of freedom. Understanding that reason could make practical demands on us in terms of the freedom we must practically assume puts us in the position of recognizing that pure practical reason, unlike pure theoretical reason, can demonstrate that there are indeed ultimate, unconditional purposes that play a central role in our lives. From the standpoint of appearance, it looks as if we are simply desiring-machines of a sort who can at best use our practical reason to choose the most efficient means of satisfying our inclinations. Kant, however, argued that a free rational creature would necessarily also have a special purpose limiting all of his or her actions, namely, that of treating all rational nature, in his or her own person or in the person of others, never merely as a means but always as an end in itself. Kant’s idea was, roughly formulated, that a rational agent, as selfconsciousness in action, necessarily commits itself to the unbounded value of such agency such that the capacity itself to deliberate and act on those deliberations cannot itself be simply one value to be balanced among many others. To use Kant’s own language, morality speaks to us in terms of a set of commands. From the standpoint of appearance, morality’s imperatives seem to be limited to “hypothetical imperatives,” which have the form, put very, very roughly: If you want X, then you must do Y. Such “hypothetical imperatives” are binding only on people who happen to want X. However, practical reason also provides us with an unconditional command, a “categorical imperative.” This imperative at first seems to be only formal and empty – as if it were just saying, “Do what a rational being would do” – but it itself boils down to the demand to value rational agency itself as an end in itself. The command to treat all rational creatures as ends in themselves, although unconditional, cannot itself be derived as a generalization of experience, and in fact puts strict limits on ordinary means–ends reasoning. Each person must be thought of as authorizing such a final purpose for himself, since the authority of such a command follows from each individual’s commitment to the demands of practical reason, yet in authorizing such an individual purpose, each is also submitting himself to the authority of all other such rational beings. (This was Kant’s extension into the moral arena of Rousseau’s radical political aim of each citizen being both sovereign and subject.) Although pure practical reason does have unbounded authority, in human agents it nonetheless runs up against another source of motivation that in effect challenges its authority and often refuses to obey pure practical 22

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reason’s commands. Especially in matters that deal with ordinary but powerful human inclinations and plans – such as power, money, and sex – the urgency of the drives themselves seems to defy the commands of morality. Nonetheless, in the face of that defiance, reason’s authority over other sources of motivation lies in its being the only way in which freedom can be made actual in our lives. To be free is to be able to act according to “laws” (rules or principles) that you author and give to yourself and thus not to be subject to a law given to you from outside of your rational will. Reason in its conditional employment (choosing the most efficient means to an end) is therefore not completely and fully free since it cannot choose the end it is trying to achieve. It is only in giving itself the moral law that the will (as nothing more than reason making itself effective) achieves genuine, unconditional freedom. The basis for morality is therefore the autonomy of the will itself. Such a potentially autonomous will has therefore unconditional value. This also has, as Kant clearly saw, radical implications for political life. Under the demands of morality, political life itself would have to be organized around the idea of each individual having basic rights to autonomy. Invoking the older language of the society of orders which the French Revolution was in the process of abolishing, Kant argued that everybody was endowed with a certain dignity as an end in itself, and that all political life had to be organized around the idea of implementing this possible kingdom of ends in themselves. Kant never underestimated how difficult this might be. In the world of appearance (in which we live), people are subject to what can seem to be intractable desires, which can seemingly drive people to use others as means. Fear, anxiety, and even love of one’s own kith and kin can lead people to use others merely as means. Nonetheless, in the face of such seemingly obdurate desires, human self-conscious freedom always has the right to assert its authority and proclaim both its normative primacy – nothing has higher authority than the command to treat all individuals as ends in themselves – and it has the practical faith (justified by transcendental idealism) that such a demand is not just a dream or a chimera but something that can be made actual, even if in the world of appearance it often falls by the wayside.

Taste, Teleology, and History’s Plan After the first two legs of Kant’s philosophical revolution had been completed (for metaphysics and morals), the world itself changed in a way that oddly seemed to make Kant’s philosophy even more important. The original reaction to Kant’s thought had to do with its perhaps profound implications for religious thought. However, in 1789, the French Revolution upended what 23

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people thought was politically possible in Europe, and in various circles, people quickly began to make the connection between Kant’s philosophy of freedom and the emerging regime in France. In the meantime, Kant had come more clearly to see that what had been driving his whole enterprise, namely the concept of judgment (in both cognitive and practical terms), was broader than a concern of the purely cognitive and practical sort. In judgments of the purely cognitive or practical type, we start with rules and then look to see whether any particular things are to be brought under the rule – for example, when we start with the rule for what counts as “red” and then look to see whether there are indeed any red things in the garden; or when we start with “Treat everybody as an end in themselves” and look to see whether our actions have genuinely exemplified that. However, there seem to be judgments which are not so rule-bound as that, and they are “reflective” judgments in which we encounter a particular thing and then have to look for the rule under which to subsume it. This is the case, so Kant argued, with both aesthetic and teleological judgments. Such judgments raise a crucial question: If one lacks knowledge, then one is ignorant, which is bad; if one lacks moral understanding, then one is bad as a person, perhaps even evil; but if one lacks a taste for the beautiful or cannot find purposes in life itself, what exactly is deficient about oneself? When we judge that something is beautiful, we are apt to think that it is because we find it pleasing, just as we are apt to think (wrongly) that the morally good has something to do with what we want. However, just as morality is not about what we want but what we ought to do, aesthetic judgment is not about what immediately pleases us but about what we ought to think is beautiful. However, as Kant notes, we do not have an independent rule for judging something to be beautiful as we have for judging things to be, say, red. In judgments about what pleases us, we simply report on the way something affects us as, for example, being agreeable. For example, I report on my own reaction to, say, an individual glass of whiskey as “feeling pleasant.” Reports on such subjective states do not bring any “ought” with them in that others who find the same glass of whiskey unpleasant are under no obligation to share my appreciation of it. However, in making a genuine aesthetic judgment, I am saying “This is beautiful, and those (who have taste) ought to agree.” What makes this especially problematic is that, unlike in morality, I can state no rule for why they ought to do this since there simply is no rule stating what counts as beautiful. The pleasure occasioned by the beautiful is the unique pleasure we receive in actually making the aesthetic judgment itself, which is itself the pleasure 24

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we have in experiencing the free and spontaneous harmony between our imagination and intellect, between the world as we actually find it (what “is”) and the world as we might imagine it (as it “ought to be”). In creating the work of art, the artist is as a “genius” thereby not following a rule (a concept) at all but instead creating a work that can then later function as a rule for more craft-oriented artists (at least until another genius overthrows that model in favor of another). What is the importance of such aesthetic judgments? In a tantalizing aside, Kant said that such judgments perhaps give us an indeterminate sense of the common root of both nature and freedom.7 This seemed to suggest that the naturally beautiful (even more so than art) was an intimation of what things in themselves would be, even though it was not an intimation that could be conceptually articulated. The aesthetic judgment, as it were, tells us that the world after all does have a place for us in it even if we cannot conceptually articulate exactly what that place was. In that way, what is disclosed to us in natural beauty and art takes priority even over religion when the latter is conceptualized within the limits of reason alone. Such “rational” religion amounts only to a kind of faith about the actualization of the moral law in the appearing world despite the essential human propensity to what Kant called “radical evil.”8 The experience of natural and artistic beauty, however, gives us the indeterminate sense that this actualization of the moral law fits into a larger purpose of the world. The world of appearance is deterministic, but within it, we encounter living things which seem to require us to judge them purposively. In order even to classify things as organs of a plant or animal, we must employ teleological judgments, since, for example, in saying that something is an eye or that something is a liver, we are speaking of the function of the organs and how they contribute to the whole that is the living organism itself. However, laboring under the strictures of the first Critique, we cannot claim that nature itself has any place in it for such purposes at all. We must therefore “subjectively” use the concept of teleology even though we cannot make sense of it in the terms of the objective appearing world. Kant put all this to work in several essays dealing with history and with what we could reasonably hope for in the future. In history, Kant said, we see progress being made, and that progress is measured by the way in which the 7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §59, 229 (354). 8 See Chapter 3 by David Fergusson for a discussion of Kant’s religious views.

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moral demands of the “kingdom of ends” are becoming more obvious and clear. Such demands lead to a clear conclusion: We are called to establish a cosmopolitan world order of free republics so that humanity will finally achieve its inherent goal, that of living in a world without war in which each individual is fully respected and legally entitled to the rights belonging to a member of the “kingdom of ends.” Given our “radical evil” and the appearance of progress, we must therefore think that, as it were, nature has a secret plan for us, such that our “unsocial sociability” – the way in which our sociability in situations of isolation and lack of assurance leads to a Hobbesian war of all against all – requires us to take some arduous detours that behind our backs drive us progressively toward that republican ideal. If so, then we can discern God’s plan for the world, since, although we cannot know whether God exists, we can know what He would require of us if He did exist, namely, to follow the moral law. (Kant’s endorsement of Republican government was one of the things that both made him attractive to the French revolutionaries and made Napoleon suspicious of him.) At the end of his extraordinarily creative burst of energy, Kant had constructed quite an edifice. Traditional metaphysics was no longer possible, but a new science of the metaphysics of experience (transcendental idealism) was to take its place, with the structure of self-consciousness at its center. All knowledge of “the unconditioned,” that is, things in themselves, was necessarily ruled out, and even space and time were to be regarded as only the forms under which we could intuit the world, not the way in which, for example, God might see the world as a whole. Yet for all those limitations, practical reason, assuming our freedom, delivers an unconditional set of commands that call for treating all rational agents as ends in themselves. In turn, the experience of beauty gave us an indeterminate sense that despite the seeming indifference of the appearing world, the universe has a place for us in it; and the subjective necessity of invoking teleological judgments to make sense of life itself helped to underwrite the practical faith that nature had a secret plan for us that was harnessing our own aggressiveness to move us toward a world order of justice among republican states respecting human rights. To the charge by the Enlightenment’s critics that reason could tear down the existing order but not be able to replace it with something else, Kant’s edifice offered a resounding answer. Nonetheless, by the late 1790s people were beginning to worry about how the whole edifice held together and whether changing one part of it might topple the rest. In the period of the Revolution, it made the intellectual stakes seem very high indeed. 26

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Post-Kantians Phase One: Fichte’s Non-ironic Instigation of Romantic Irony Even before the Revolution, other cracks in conventional ways of thinking had been opening elsewhere in Germany, and in one place in particular: Jena. The town itself was small, unimportant, with only an undistinguished university to its name. (Actually, its one distinction was the famously lopsided drinking habits of its students.) However, in 1775 the young literary celebrity Johann Wolfgang Goethe became the chief and only minister in Weimar, and, for odd historical reasons, also the chief caretaker of the university in Jena. He in effect created the only real place in Germany where there was complete academic freedom, and free-thinking intellectuals (Friedrich Schiller among them) began to arrive. With Goethe’s blessing, the earliest discussion of Kantian philosophy began in earnest in Jena in 1785. The first post-Kantian celebrity was Karl Leonhard Reinhold, who was brought to Jena on the strength of his 1786 Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, in which he had been the first to argue that Kant had finally settled the debate between science and religion in favor of both. Reinhold began work on a restatement of Kant’s whole system, but as he ran into difficulties with that project, his star fell, and he moved to another position in Kiel. His successor, J. G. Fichte, had risen to prominence overnight when a publisher’s error omitted his name from his first book (Critique of All Revelation), and people took the book to be an anonymous work by Kant himself. Once in Jena, like Reinhold, Fichte claimed that he too would put the Kantian system on a new and more complete footing. He began by rejecting Kant’s insistence on a realm of unknowable things-in-themselves because, as unknowable, they were indeterminate, and, as indeterminate, they were nothing, just pipe dreams. Besides, there was one entity whose nature “in itself” was in fact knowable by us even on orthodox Kantian grounds, and this was the self-conscious subject herself. The subject just is the activity of bringing representations into a unity of consciousness. On that basis, Fichte now proposed creating an entirely new philosophical discipline, a “science of science,” a Wissenschaftslehre, an account of all possible accounts and the ultimate account of making sense of making sense itself. As Fichte constructed it and altered it over the years, a Wissenschaftslehre begins with the subject giving an account of the possibility of any thought at all. In doing so, it arrives at a comprehension of itself as an “I” who is thinking and experiencing things and taking them to be one way in distinction from others. Fichte claimed that this knowledge of the basic spontaneous activity

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of the subject came from an “intellectual intuition.” For Kant, an intellectual intuition would be a thought of something so that in the act of thinking it would create the object, and, as Kant argued, although we might imagine God possessing such a capacity, it is completely ruled out for finite humans. Fichte argued that on Kant’s own terms, that has to be exactly what we are doing when we become self-aware since it is only in thinking of ourselves that we spontaneously come to be the agents that are thinking of themselves at all. Agents (subjects) are not substances that exist prior to thinking of themselves. Rather, agents bootstrap themselves into existence by spontaneously thinking of themselves. In becoming self-conscious, human animals become human subjects. Fichte proceeded to argue that such a subject could only think of itself by distinguishing that thought of itself from other items. If the first thought was that of “I,” then that second thought would be of a “not-I,” but if the second thought was required for the first thought to have any content, then there was a contradiction: The “I” would be authorizing itself to authorize something not-itself to give it the authority to do so in the first place. The resolution of this contradiction (what Fichte called a thesis followed by an antithesis) was a more determinate conception of the I–world relationship, which in turn would always generate a new contradiction between the “I” and the “Not-I,” and so on until infinity. The task of such a Wissenschaftslehre can thus never be finished, and philosophy thereby sets out to reach a point it knows it cannot reach but which it can infinitely approach. One of the steps along the way is the encounter with another subject, who is also an “I” to herself and who takes you to be a “Not-I,” a contradiction muted only by acts of mutual recognition between the two as authorizing each other to have the status of a “self-positing” I. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre attracted the ire of the elderly Kant, who published an open letter denouncing Fichte’s attempts as hopelessly muddled and wrongheaded. From Kant’s point of view, Fichte had misjudged the entire system and tried to spin it all out of concepts alone, which, without the contribution of sensory intuitions, would reduce the system merely to formal logic from which no content at all could follow. We can protect ourselves from our enemies, but heaven protect us from our friends, so Kant said of Fichte. This did nothing to dampen Fichte’s charisma among the students. The very idea of putting the self-positing “I” at the center of things and calling on people to exercise their radical freedom was catnip to the students attending his lectures. Fichte, even more than Kant, had put self-conscious autonomy in 28

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the opening pole of a philosophical system: For Fichte, it was an act of selfdetermining freedom itself that established the existence of subjects in the first place, and every step after that was also an act of freedom reasserting itself against a “Not-I” that threatened to negate it. Even the ordinary and banal acceptance of the deliverances of the senses was an implicitly free act involving judgment. The political break with the old feudal world order seemed to crystallize itself in Fichte’s self-described transcendental system of radical freedom and self-positing. Among the younger people attending his lectures were Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis (the pen name of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg). Schlegel, himself a gifted essayist, took Fichte’s philosophy in a completely different direction. In Schlegel’s retelling, what Fichte had in fact discovered in the “I” was “irony,” the capacity of an agent to self-consciously stand back from her own utterances and look at them with a more nuanced eye. If the “I” was really self-positing and thereby also positing its other, then it was also, as it were, above the fray, deciding whether it was going this way down the path or another. Its infinite task was in fact the task of creating itself, and a truly free self would realize that it is thereby unencumbered. The paradigm for Schlegel was the figure of Shakespeare, who created radically different characters in his plays but who never tipped his own hand as to where he stood. To describe this new approach to Fichte’s philosophy, Schlegel coined the term “romanticism”: Life was more like a novel (a Roman in German) than it was like a rigorous system, and it must therefore be approached “romantically” in the way Schlegel supposed Shakespeare to have approached his plays. What drives such a Romantic? A self-conscious longing for the absolute, the unconditioned, which he knows he can never fully reach. Novalis, in one of his sayings about this post-Kantian state of affairs, lamented in a pun that although we seek the unconditioned (Unbedingte) all we in fact ever find are individual things (Dinge). The true Romantic thus writes and lives in fragments with only his ironic self holding the disparate parts together by virtue of his own non-conceptual grasp of the whole.9 Oddly, one of the deepest ironies in the development of Romanticism was that of Fichte himself, who may have been one of the most non-ironic figures to have ever walked the planet, giving rise to a movement known for its ironic worldview.

9 See Chapter 2 by Nicholas Halmi in this volume. See also the discussion in Manfred Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); and Fred Rush, Irony and idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Another figure not in Jena but intimately connected to the early Romantic circle was Friedrich Schleiermacher, later to become in Berlin the leading Protestant theologian of his day. In his 1799 On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher argued that our grasp of the infinite need not be as limited as Kant had argued. Kant had argued that there were indeed pure intuitions of infinite space and time, even though we could never have the whole of space and time in any given set of human intuitions. All we ever perceived were finite things, and the infinity of space and time was only that of “the infinite extension of a line” and “the infinite expanse of temporal moments.” Schleiermacher’s question was as follows: Why therefore could there not be an even more general pure intuition of the metaphysically infinite and not just of the spatio-temporal infinite? In fact, why not accept that we originally have an intuition of the metaphysically infinite which is the basis for our ways of speaking about the divine or the godhead? Reversing Kant’s picture, Schleiermacher argued that our receptivity to the infinite lay in a pure non-sensible intuition and not in a concept; the differentiation or “finitization” of the infinite came not through sense-experience but through our own spontaneous activities that, as it were, carved up the original unitary experience of the metaphysical infinite into all the details of the individual religions. Each religion involves a particular and different response in terms of rite, ritual, and doctrine to this unitary experience; each is a different and unique expression of the same experience. This kind of “intellectual intuition” disclosed to us our dependence on the divine, the infinite as the “one and all,” out of which the different religions of the world flowed, each with their differing doctrines and practices.10 For Schleiermacher, the superiority of Christianity over all the other religions was only that it was the “religion of religion” itself and thus not simply one among others. Only in Christianity was the doubt inherent in all religions made into a central element of the religious faith itself, which was expressed in Jesus’s cry of despair on the cross about why God had forsaken him. In Christianity, the object of religious faith is the infinite mystery involved in religious faith itself. The early Romantics gathered around Fichte, worshipped Goethe, and engaged themselves in a series of literary and sexual scandals that turned Jena from a backwater into a gleaming center of European literary and philosophical life. However, in the midst of this glittering world, Fichte, the great non-ironist of the whole movement, got himself into a heated controversy 10 In Chapter 3, David Fergusson speaks of Schleiermacher’s use of “feeling,” Gefühl. This is a later move on Schleiermacher’s part. In his early work, he speaks instead of “intuition,” Anschauung.

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over some publications about the relation between religion and reason, and he threw further oil on the fire by holding lectures on Sundays. In 1798, he was confronted with trumped-up charges of atheism and loud public demands for his dismissal. Fichte took a defiant and rather moralistic “take me or leave me” stance in response to the whole affair, which resulted in his finding himself suddenly unemployed in 1799. He departed for Berlin.

Phase Two: Schelling’s Idealist Romanticism Right around the same time that Fichte was getting himself embroiled in what has come to be known simply as “the atheism controversy,” another figure arrived on the scene, the boy-wonder of German philosophy, F. W. J. Schelling. Only twenty-three, he had already made a name for himself as the leading edge of the post-Kantian, Fichtean philosophical movement. Whereas Fichte was stiff but magisterial, Schelling was all exuberance and creativity, with an inherently experimental cast of mind such that he was forever reinventing his system and refocusing his efforts. At Jena, although he did not invent the term “Romanticism,” he gave it much of the edge it came to have. Fichte had taken philosophy as Wissenschaftslehre to be the infinite task of the “I” (self-consciousness) coming to grips with its own spontaneity and freedom. Schelling drew a decidedly Romantic inference from this. In grasping the infinity of reason itself, we are grasping the absolute itself. In Fichte’s treatment, this was merely the subjective activity of a single subject comprehending his own activity of unifying and authorizing. For Schelling, it is not just an individual “I” but the absolute itself which is actualizing itself in its finite moments within our own activity itself as we think of it. In taking ourselves this way, we are a subject-object, as Schelling put it. Thought, as the divine logos itself, was taking shape in the activities of individual thinkers.11 Metaphysical thinking was not simply the thoughts going on in a particular metaphysician’s head; it was a participation in the way in which the universe was striving to comprehend itself. Schelling proceeded to develop his philosophy in Jena as a two-track system, one track starting from the intuition of the absolute in subjectivity and leading through a series of steps to a comprehension of nature as a whole, the other starting with the infinity of nature and leading up to subjectivity’s absolute comprehension of itself in the thinking individual subject. For Schelling, we needed both, a conception of nature evolving into higher 11 For the way in which Schelling’s later career both built on that and departed from it, see John E. Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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forms and a conception of us as radically free, self-conscious beings returning to the contemplation of nature. The two were held together in what Schelling, following Fichte, also called an “intellectual intuition,” but which for him was a kind of stereoscopic vision. In what he called his Naturphilosophie in 1797 – a term expressing the rather eccentric idea of “nature-philosophy,” that is, of nature, as it were, thinking of itself – one begins with the intellectual intuition of nature as a whole and then uses that intuition to proceed to nature’s parts. The method was to see how the original infinite oneness of nature would divide itself at first into matter and energy by virtue of combustion taking place in the furnace of the original unity. That produced a new and infinite unity, which, however, as coming out of the original unity was itself unstable and became the basis for a newer, more complex unity of matter in motion, and then, by the same process, produced electricity and magnetism, chemical reactions, all the way to life itself as a yet higher unity. Out of life come animals, plants, and finally selfconscious subjects (leading up to the difference of the sexes, as mirroring the cosmic significance of such divisions and unities). The end of the series was God himself as comprehending his own coming into being with the world. The other track, the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), went in the opposite direction and was more Fichtean in its presentation, starting with the “I” comprehending itself in an intuition of its own infinity of reasoning and culminating not in an intuition of nature as a whole but in an aesthetic intuition of a work of art as disclosing the whole to us. Schelling radicalized Kant’s claims about aesthetic genius into the Romantic idea that it was indeed the artist, not the scientist, who could disclose the meaning of being to us, a result that itself was to take on resonance in the rest of the nineteenth century and for large parts of the twentieth. Out of Schelling’s system came a distilled Romantic picture of agency: Agency was creative, reflecting within itself the creative processes of the universe, it was self-directing, and, in the shape of the artist, it did not follow the rules but continually broke them (as Kant had argued), and was thus continually creating new rules. The artist was not a craftsman but an oracle, giving us the comprehension of the whole that the conceptually obliged philosopher had to acknowledge and to which he was freely to subordinate himself.

Phase Three: Hegel When they were students together at the Seminary in Tübingen, Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, and G. W. F. Hegel had been roommates and the best of 32

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friends. They had taken classes from Gottlob Storr together and together had revolted against both Storr’s use of Kant and his insistence on biblical literalism. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was in this time in the 1780s that they together put together the outlines of what was to become German idealism.12 By the 1790s, Hölderlin had already begun making a name for himself as a poet, and Schelling had staged his unprecedented and meteoric rise in the German philosophical world. Hegel, on the other hand, had little to his credit. At first more inclined to pursue a form of applied philosophy, Hegel changed his mind in the 1790s while living in Frankfurt in close proximity to Hölderlin, and he managed to wrangle an invitation from Schelling to come to Jena, where he finally started his philosophical career while living on a very small inheritance that followed on his father’s death. Hegel arrived in 1801, and he began his philosophical trajectory there as a Schellingian. Between that point and his departure from Jena to take over the editorship of a newspaper in Bamberg in 1807, he completed one of the most astonishing developments and transformations in the history of philosophy. His first real book in 1807, the Phenomenology of Spirit, made a name for him in the German intellectual world, even though it was not until 1817 that he was finally able to get a university appointment in philosophy, first in Heidelberg and then in 1818 in Berlin, where he stayed until his death in 1831. At his death, the unknown of 1801 had become a European phenomenon and an intellectual celebrity of the first order. Kant had shifted discussion of the nature of human agency by refraining from asking of what “stuff” agents are composed (for example, whether they had immaterial souls) and instead focusing on what agents did – which for Kant was unifying experience through acts of judgment. Following some leads from Schelling, Hegel thought that the concept of life was best looked at from that perspective. A living thing is intrinsically self-organizing. It consumes nutrients and seeks to reproduce itself, and there is no need to look for some extra animating force for this. Also following Schelling’s lead, he came to the conclusion that although an animal may act in light of purposes internal to its species, the animal could not regard its purposes as 12 See Terry P. Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Terry P. Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Eckart Förster, The TwentyFive Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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purposes. Between the two – acting on a reason and acting on a reason as a reason – there is nothing, but there is also an infinity which, imagistically conceived, is like that of a circle, in which one returns to the same point in a full revolution. Part of the revolutionary character of Kant’s 1781 Critique had been its insistence that all consciousness was also self-consciousness and that this selfconsciousness was a unity of experience, not an intuition of an underlying soul-substance of any type. Following up on that, in the 1807 Phenomenology, Hegel began with an account of what it would be for us to have any putative direct consciousness of things without any self-consciousness to itself, and he argued that such a consciousness eschewing all relations to self-consciousness necessarily becomes deeply self-contradictory in any account it gives of itself. Our being was that of self-conscious form of a living entity, and Hegel called this self-conscious life Geist (spirit, or mind in English). Like Kant, Hegel thought that all action is self-conscious action in that the agent knows what she is doing without having to have a separate reflective act accompanying each act. Unlike Kant, Hegel thought that this self-conscious unity requires recognition by another self-conscious agent, a kind of actual second-person address from another self-conscious being as a kind of bestowal of status by another originally entitled to bestow such status. The self-knowledge involved in self-consciousness is originally knowledge of the other agent’s knowledge of himself involved in his being aware of the other’s awareness of him (and vice versa), with this kind of reciprocity piling up into layers on itself. At first, there is nothing to mediate that reciprocity, since the whole series of such recognition seems to involve an infinite regress over who originally has the authority to rule in and rule out claims to recognition. The initially reciprocal awareness of each thus turns instead into a struggle over which one has the authority to bestow such recognition in the first place. Since there is no obvious answer to the regress, this encounter develops into a life and death struggle, with one of them finally risking death for the sake of dominance and the other choosing instead life and therefore subordination. One becomes the master, the other the slave. That very basic form of human domination itself, however, turns out to be contradictory on its own terms. The master demands recognition as master from somebody whom the master recognizes as fully lacking in the authority to bestow such recognition in the first place. Such ensembles of brute power, Hegel suggests, cannot forever survive critical reflection on themselves, however necessary they may have been at the outset of human history. 34

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Although Hegel had originally intended his Phenomenology to provide a short introduction to his (not yet written) main system, he changed his mind as he was writing it and gave an account of the deeper sociality and historicity of reason itself.13 Hegel concluded the Phenomenology with two very long chapters on the history of spirit and the history of religion as it developed itself out of the progressively unfolding experiential logics of the ways in which self-conscious agents are embedded in the self-consciousness of each other. The movement effectively began with the rise of the democratic Greek state and its undoing by its own hands when it came to understand that the freedom and equality enjoyed by the men of the polis rested on an unjustifiable (but, to the Greeks, necessary) subjugation of women and slaves. As the senselessness of that world rose into a more full self-awareness of its own senselessness, Greek life moved itself away from the tragic view of the world evidenced in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – of a world in which beauty functioned as the basic truth – into the philosophical view evidenced in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, in which concepts, not the religion of beauty, played the dominant role. The beautiful Greek world was swamped and replaced by the rise and then consequent self-destruction of the Roman Empire, after which European life developed into a world in which relations among agents were no longer “ethical” but more like moves in an elaborate game, and the new issues on the table had to do with the rules of the game, how to accommodate oneself to the game, and despairing over whether playing the game made any sense at all. The breakdowns of the European attempts at collectively living out that kind of alienated life had, Hegel argued, led in his own revolutionary times to an “absolute” knowledge of what it means to be a self-conscious human (i.e., to be “spirit”) in which philosophy was enabled to establish a more detailed conceptual articulation of the intricacies involved in such selfconsciousness. In fashioning its own self-conception, “spirit,” self-conscious life has thus shown itself historically to be a product of itself. It is what it is by virtue of being required to take itself in a certain way, and those requirements for how it thinks of itself followed from the various historical and social constraints of its past, and how those constraints had generated ineliminable tensions within themselves such that their own failures had led gradually to the modern world. The “absolute” itself was the general intelligibility or “thinkability” of the world as a whole, the logos of being itself, and it

13 On Hegel’s change of mind, see Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy.

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appeared to us in the various forms of life in which we collectively tried to take it up. In his next book, The Science of Logic, Hegel developed what he conceived to be the logic of this kind of idealism itself. The end of the book has thought thinking of how it thinks of being and of itself under the conditions of intelligibility that emerge only in this kind of radical self-examination of itself. Thought reaches this end by coming to terms with the various conundrums and contradictions that develop in its attempts to think what must be the case if the world is to be comprehended as an intelligible whole. After his arrival in Berlin, Hegel worked out what he took to be the implications of this new form of idealism, which he mostly carried out in a series of lectures that were collected, edited, and published by his friends and students after his death. His Phenomenology in 1807 had theorized what things had to be in the wake of the Revolution. The outcome of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which claimed to “restore” the old world but which actually more or less kept much of the European order established by Napoleon in place, confirmed for him that in fact now the clocks could not be turned back and that progress was the watchword of the new era. This prompted him to work out a political philosophy in full, which he published in 1820 as the Philosophy of Right. Between 1818 and 1831, in his series of lectures on the different fields of philosophy, he tried to offer in more detail what the philosophical shape of this new experience of post-Revolutionary Europe was to be and what it meant for world history. (As Chapter 4 by Warren Breckman details in its discussion of the Left Hegelians, one of the debates about Hegel’s philosophy was – in his own time and in our day too – whether his later thought was a support for the reformers in political life or the philosophical underpinning for the conservatives longing for restoration.) In the lecture series, he went through what he thought a genuine Naturphilosophie would be once it was more firmly linked to the progress of the sciences and delinked from any appeal to intellectual intuition or the intuitive intellect. He also lectured on the philosophy of history, in which he reworked his general views first articulated in the Phenomenology into a more nuanced and factual approach to world history. (Famously and infuriatingly, he also got almost all the facts wrong about Africa, China, India, Persia, and Egypt, thereby setting in motion the tempers and the debates behind what has come to be called the dangers of Eurocentrism.) In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel argued that history had a kind of necessary progression from the ancient position that only one person by nature had the authority to rule over all others to the Greco-Roman–European idea that 36

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some (male aristocrats) had that authority to rule over others, and finally to the modern period where the guiding idea was that nobody had any natural authority to rule others and thus that “all are free.” (In that way, he at least seemed to be arguing that history itself was on the reformer’s side.) From the idea of a cosmic order in which some naturally dominated others, we had moved to an order where nobody naturally had the authority to dominate others. Nonetheless, this progress in history only shows up in a retrospective examination of history. The future, Hegel argued, remains open (despite the often-made assertion that Hegel argued for the “end of history”). He also argued that art was a specifically sensory and only mediately conceptual manner of spirit’s coming to terms with itself – that it embodied “reflective judgments” in Kant’s sense – and in his path-breaking lectures on the concept of art and its historical development, he provided an account of how art fills in the gaps in concrete human self-understanding that philosophy necessarily leaves open. Nonetheless, and unlike in Schelling’s system, Hegel argued that art has to end up standing in third place (behind religion in second place) to the kind of rational, conceptual activity of philosophy and the sciences in European modernity. Modernity could not be comprehended purely aesthetically, and in his own time, he argued, art had itself become self-conscious about its necessary failure to fully comprehend the whole of life. He also argued the same thing for religion, concluding that modern Protestant Christianity had sufficiently secularized itself and made itself thereby the appropriate, even if a bit spiritually defanged, accompaniment to modern life, but it stood in second place to philosophy and had to defer to secularized rationality to be genuinely appropriate to modern life. Hegel’s Christianity was not a “religion of humanity” (as Ludwig Feuerbach later argued on his own part) but a religion of reason itself: In the beginning, as the Gospel of John states, was the Logos, and Hegel’s Christianity was Johannine, with a strong emphasis on “kenosis,” on the Logos “emptying” itself to become human.14 Likewise, the shape of political and social life itself, so he argued, had emerged in its appropriately modern form – although still a bit hazy – as a system built out of the familiar triumvirate of general rights to life, liberty, 14 See the discussion of kenoticism by David Fergusson in Chapter 3. Hegel also adopted Luther’s translation of “kenosis” as Entäußerung to describe how self-conscious life empties itself in history, a usage interestingly picked up by the young Marx in 1844 to describe how capitalism empties human life of its true content. See the discussion of Marx’s relation to the Hegelian school by Warren Breckman in Chapter 4.

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and property. That was tied together with the modern conception of the moral world, which (with all its appeals to rules and sanctions for breaking them) resembled something like a game (with maybe even a divine referee calling the fouls and issuing red cards) that nonetheless also incorporated an un-gamelike and ineradicable appeal to personal conscience. General rights and moral appeals were to be made intelligible by giving them a home in the modern world of citizens ethically linked with each other in a (vaguely British-style) constitutional monarchical state subordinated to the rule of law, secure in the bourgeois family, living in a market economy tempered by the associations of civil society. This was the concrete shape of agents confronting each other as free and equal, not as dominating and dominated. In all these areas, Hegel argued that we are in fact articulating the absolute, taken in its modified Aristotelian sense as the rational intelligibility of the world. Idealist philosophy is just its “own time grasped in thoughts” as Hegel described it, one of the stages in the historical development of self-conscious humanity’s thinking about what it is to be such a self-conscious creature which by its nature is forever a problem to itself. As a reviewer noted of Hegel in 1810, if Schelling had been the Plato of Germany, Hegel had become its Aristotle.15 In Hegel’s retelling of the Kantian story, Greek philosophy, Kantian critique, and modern life had all dovetailed into a coherent although dense and arduous modernity that could be confident of itself. Hegel’s edifice was even grander than Kant’s. The traditional metaphysics of Aristotelian “substances” which Kant had claimed made up the deterministic structure of appearance was joined with Kantian self-consciousness as an account of how things really were. Hegel combined a logic with a metaphysics – to be was to be intelligible – that also resulted in a philosophy of nature as igniting within itself the development of self-conscious life, and that self-conscious life, in an attempt to understand what it meant to be a selfconscious life, developed itself historically and generated a history that was progressive and followed an internal logic of sorts of its own that reached one of its summits in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” in the French Revolution and shaped itself into a political order involving families, markets, and civil associations, and constitutional monarchies founded on the rule of law. Likewise, the coordinated efforts of art, religion, and philosophy (absolute 15 This was a review published by Christian Friedrich Bachmann, reprinted in Oscar Fambach (ed.), Ein Jahrhundert deutscher Literaturkritik (1750–1850). Band V. Der romantische Rückfall in der Kritik der Zeit: Die wesentlichen und die umstrittenen Rezensionen aus der periodischen Literatur von 1806 bis 1815, begleitet von den Stimmen der Umwelt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1963), 428–452.

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spirit, self-conscious life thinking about what it is to be self-conscious life) exhibited their own internal logical development, all of which was comprehended in one system. However, just as had happened with Kant, Hegel’s successors immediately began to worry about how cohesive the system really was and debated whether it had to be partially shored up or completely rebuilt with other means. (The chapters by Breckman, Fergusson, and Halmi in this volume speak to this.)

Phase Four: Dissolution and Transformation Although the political revolution in France had made German idealism attractive, the industrial revolution that accompanied it quickly made it seem obsolete. Absolute longing had been the watchword for the Romantic generation, but by the mid 1850s, after the bitter failure of the 1848 revolutions and the so-called springtime of the European peoples, the watchword for the post-1850 generation was realism. As the century progressed, the rising intellectual and economic importance of the natural sciences in the rapidly developing industrial revolution turned philosophy away from “idealism” to “materialism.” By the twentieth century, German idealism had become for the most part simply one more chapter in the history of philosophy. In 1900, the last important figure to be somehow connected to the idealist movement, but who made his name in part by furiously disowning any and all forms of idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche, died. In the same year, Edmund Husserl published his Logical Investigations and laid the ground for a rebirth of the spirit of idealism in the new philosophy called “phenomenology.” In the United States, around the same time, John Dewey (born in 1859) began articulating his version of a naturalized Hegelian idealism, for which he adopted the label of “pragmatism.” Overshadowed by its phenomenological and pragmatic offspring in the twentieth century, German idealism mostly vanished from public view. It has recently resurfaced, but how long it will stay around this time is another question, not to be answered here. After all, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.16 16 Actually, the real owl of Minerva does not. It flies in the day, an oddity for owls in general. See Dudley Knowles and Michael Carpenter, “Hegel as Ornithologist: The Owl of Minerva,” The Owl of Minerva, 42(1/2) (2010/2011), 225–227.

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2

European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch nicholas halmi

A Problematic Concept Attempts to define Romanticism characteristically begin by conceding the difficulty, even impossibility, of the task. The entry on the subject in an encyclopedia of German literary history summarizes the challenge: “The Romantic movement must be understood as a unity, but it is in itself so polymorphous and contradictory that both a definition and an historical presentation are extraordinarily difficult.”1 Rather than proposing a normative definition, as if that were possible, this chapter will take the resistance to definition and its historical roots as keys to understanding Romanticism as distinctly European and modern. Accordingly, the focus here will be less on the art produced during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Romanticism began to be theorized as a contemporary concern, than on discursive self-understanding in that unsettled period in which, as the poet William Wordsworth acknowledged, “a shock had then been given / To old opinions; and the minds of all men / Had felt it.”2 Inaugurating modern scholarship on the subject in 1870, Rudolf Haym argued that “to investigate the essence of Romanticism from a purely historical position [in rein historischer Haltung]” had become possible because it lay over half a century in the past – by Haym’s account, in the circle of the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), Ludwig Tieck, and F. W. J. Schelling in the university town of Jena.3 Many others, however, have questioned whether there 1 H. J. Lüthi, “Romantik,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. Werner Kohlschmidt and Wolfgang Mohr, 2nd edn., 5 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1958–1988), vol. III, 578–594, p. 578. 2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude 10.860–862, in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2013), 342. 3 Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (1870) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), 4. See also Nicholas Halmi,

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European Romanticism

ever was such a thing as Romanticism. Indeed, from its earliest articulations the concept of Romanticism has been haunted by a sense of its lack of correspondence to empirical reality. Thus the Russian poet Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky complained in 1824, “Romanticism [Romantizm] is like a phantom. Many people believe in it; there is a conviction that it exists, but where are its distinctive features, how can it be defined, how can one put one’s fingers on it?”4 The perceived elusiveness of Romanticism itself is due largely to the diversity of the intellectual and artistic phenomena – in literature, music, the visual arts, philosophy, even science – to which the term has been applied, across most European nations. In some, like Germany and France, the identification of Romantic “schools” was contemporaneous, whereas in others, like Britain, it was retrospective. When contemporaneous, these identifications could be admiring, as in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s appreciation of Beethoven’s instrumental music, or pejorative, as in the classicist J. H. Voss’s polemics against the culturally nationalistic poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. To be sure, there are clichés about Romanticism which have acquired a quasi-normative status through repetition in reference works: It is subjectivist and individualist, rejects rationalism for sensationalism and emotionalism, celebrates artistic imagination and originality, privileges authentic feeling and spontaneous expression over technique and form, prefers nature to society, condemns tradition and convention while promoting revolution (in thought and art if not in politics), is visionary and idealist, and is nostalgic and melancholy. Apart from the obvious contradictions among them, such clichés derive mostly from manifestos of the early nineteenth century, written by those for whom Romanticism (or something subsequently to be called that) was a cause to be espoused or opposed; and thus they cannot be considered neutrally descriptive. One cautionary example: In musical Romanticism, conventionally associated with the generation of Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Berlioz, “emotional and picturesque expression” is supposed to have been “more important than formal or structural considerations” – yet this same generation saw the first systematic publication of Bach’s works and regarded his technique as “a model . . . for the whole of music.”5 “Romanticism, the Temporalization of History, and the Historicization of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly, 74 (2013), 363–389, p. 365. 4 Quoted and translated by Sigrid McLaughlin, “Russia: Romanicˇeskij – Romanticˇeskij – Romantizm,” in “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 418–474, p. 418. 5 Michael Kennedy (ed.), “Romantic(ism),” in The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd edn., rev. Joyce Bourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 737; and Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7.

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The endlessly lamented wide application of the term Romanticism and its cognates in many European languages is due in turn to the coexistence, or rather the frequent fusion, of two concepts of Romanticism, one historical and the other typological. Already in the earliest history of Romanticism, Eugène Ronteix (publishing under an anagrammatic pseudonym) maintained simultaneously that it was a rebellious tendency “in every century, in every epoch,” rejecting conventional ideas and established forms, and a contemporary artistic movement fathered in France by François-René de Chateaubriand in 1801, adopted by Germaine de Staël thereafter, and attaining maturity with Lord Byron and Victor Hugo in the 1820s.6 But while a purely historical classification must include heterogeneous phenomena by virtue of their contemporaneity, a purely typological classification must exclude contemporaneous phenomena by virtue of their heterogeneity. When, therefore, both classificatory criteria are applied at once, the result is a Romanticism whose constituents are not all Romantics – a club worthy of Groucho Marx’s membership. Prominent literary critics have been entangled in this paradox when they have tried to define Romanticism normatively. In articles first published in 1949 and 1963, René Wellek forcefully countered the intellectual historian A. O. Lovejoy’s argument that, in the absence of any common denominator among all the phenomena labeled Romanticism, it was best to speak of a plurality of Romanticisms.7 But although Wellek affirmed “the unity of European Romanticism” on the basis of three generic characteristics – “imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style” – his choice of examples presupposed the validity of the conventional chronological designations of Romanticism in various European literatures as well as of the consensus among literary historians that Romanticism in the aggregate extended roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth.8 Consequently, Wellek’s three criteria could exclude some writers within a given Romantic period (as he conceded with regard to Byron) and include others outside it. Similarly, having defined Romanticism as the early nineteenth-century “secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking,” the critic M. H. Abrams 6 Eugène Ronteix (“F. M. de Toreinx”), Histoire du romantisme en France (Paris: L. Dureuil, 1829), 6–7, 10–11, 17, and 390. 7 Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA, 39 (1924), 229–253, pp. 235–237. 8 René Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History” and “Romanticism Reexamined,” in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 122–198, pp. 160–161; and 199–221, pp. 200–201.

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European Romanticism

was compelled to omit the skeptical and ironic Byron from his account, despite the fact that the poet was widely regarded after his death in 1824 as having epitomized Romanticism.9 Given the obstacles to defining Romanticism holistically, historians and critics have largely, if tacitly, followed Lovejoy’s advice to distinguish Romanticisms and investigate each as a more or less self-contained complex. Focusing on the species – a Romanticism delimited nationally, geographically, linguistically, temporally, politically, or some other way – allows one to elide the genus while conforming to current disciplinary boundaries. In some disciplines it is acceptable even to distinguish contemporaneous Romanticisms centered on particular social networks: thus Anglisticists classify Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “first-generation” and Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats as “second-generation” Romantic poets (the latter having differentiated themselves poetically and politically from the former), while Germanists distinguish Romanticisms both chronologically (“early,” “high,” and “late”) and geographically (Jena, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Dresden).10 Yet, since the obvious expedient of abandoning the term Romanticism altogether, proposed as early as in 1906 by Wilhelm Dilthey,11 has never found favor, its apparent indispensability suggests a persistent sense that it designates something tangible to which all the differentiated Romanticisms are related, even if they are not necessarily compatible with one another.

Ambivalent Modernity Neither Lovejoy’s nominalism nor Wellek’s realism could reconcile the heterogeneity of historically attested uses of the word Romanticism in multiple languages with a unitary concept of European Romanticism. But there is no need to sacrifice one for the sake of the other if, as Christoph Bode proposes, we recognize in that very heterogeneity the solution to the problem of definition. For Bode, the commonality among “Romanticisms” is to be found not in their content but in their point de départ, a set of conditions that he generalizes as “the ever-accelerating modernization of European 9 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Revolution and Tradition in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 12–13. 10 Defending the geographical subgrouping, Ziolkowski insists, “The mythologizing works of the Heidelbergers are just as ‘romantic’ as the Jena theoretical works and the Berlin historical works, but in a completely different way” (Heidelberger Romantik: Mythos und Symbol (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), 3). 11 Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906), 202.

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society.”12 Conceptualizing European Romanticism thus as a network of responses to shared historical challenges allows us not only to accommodate the diversity of those responses, but also to recognize the source of the tension between historical and typological accounts of Romanticism – more specifically, the sense that neither alone is fully adequate to its object – in the eighteenth century. What were those challenges? Although this chapter is concerned with intellectual rather than semantic history, the early uses of the English word romantic (followed by its cognates in other European languages) are worth considering briefly because they illustrate an ambivalence that extended both to later applications of the word and more generally to nineteenth-century historical thought. Deriving from the noun romance, a popular narrative form of contested generic and moral status, the adjective is first attested in the middle of the seventeenth century, when its meaning was “as in romances,” with the connotations of fantasticality, extravagance, even absurdity.13 These connotations reflected a recognition of historical distance from the conventions of chivalric romance and at least an implicit conviction of the form’s obsolescence. But by the early eighteenth century the adjective, without losing its original sense, was also being applied with an increasingly positive valence to the kind of natural scenery – irregular and seemingly untamed – associated with the wildernesses and enchanted landscapes represented in classical and medieval literature, especially epics and romances. For although the “fantastic beings” of older poetry could no longer be used plausibly by 12 Christoph Bode, “Europe,” in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 126–136, p. 127; and “Romantik – Europäische Antwort auf die Herausforderung der Moderne? Versuch einer Rekonzeptualisierung,” in Die Romantik: Ein Gründungsmythos der europäischen Moderne, ed. Anja Ernst and Paul Geyer (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2010), 85–96, p. 90. See also Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), a collection which according to its editors seeks “to elucidate how the diverse [national] Romanticisms took shape under the influence of the epochal upheavals that were shaking the foundations of the whole of Europe, the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution” (pp. 2–3). While insisting that Romanticism must be examined exclusively “in a social and historical context,” Michaël Löwy and Robert Sayre define it quasitypologically as an anti-capitalist Weltanschauung (Révolte et mélancolie: Le romantisme à contre-courant de la modernité (Paris: Payot, 1992), 18 and 30). 13 Raymond Immerwahr, “‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates in England, Germany, and France before 1790,” in “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner, 17–97, pp. 17–22. See also Hans Eichner’s annotated chronology in “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, 501–513. The initial French and German equivalents, romanesque and romanisch, date from the same period; romantisch and romantique followed at the end of the seventeenth century but became well established only in the eighteenth.

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modern poets, as Thomas Warton lamented in the first large-scale literary history, the woods and grottoes and caverns those beings had inhabited could be recreated by landscape architects in what became known throughout Europe as “English gardens.”14 Thus by the middle of the century the adjective romantic was capable of performing opposing functions, designating on the one hand the outdated literature of a more credulous age, and on the other the aesthetically appealing manifestations of “savage” nature in the modern world. From the original, historical sense of romantic was derived a second, typological sense. This latter meaning, which at once appropriated and transcended temporal specificity, entailed a critique of the very modernity that the historical sense presupposed. Designating the reassuring reminders (however fake) of the untamed nature and unfettered imagination that modernity was supposed to have overcome definitively, the typologically romantic was the aesthetic counterpart to Rousseau’s moral argument that “our souls have been corrupted to the same extent that our Sciences and our Arts have advanced towards perfection.”15 Relegating the romantic to the past was to affirm a sense of modernity as the progress of reason; reviving the romantic, if only in simulacra of the past, was to concede that that progress was not achieved without losses, particularly of traditional beliefs and values. The ambivalent modernity revealed by the early uses of the word romantic became more pronounced in the late eighteenth century as questions of historical self-definition began to present themselves more urgently. The impetus for those questions cannot be reduced to specific socioeconomic or political processes such as the transition from a feudal to a commercial economy, industrialization, urbanization, the economic and political self-assertion of the bourgeoisie, the growth of literacy, the development of a “public sphere,” or the emergence of the nation-state as the principal political unit. For one thing these processes, although of major importance in certain nations, did not occur equally or simultaneously across Europe, and for another Romanticism was discussed and Romantic movements were proclaimed or retrospectively identified in lands with widely 14 Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry (1774–1781) (facs. rpt. London: Routledge, 1998), vol. I, 486; and Immerwahr, “‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates in England, Germany, and France before 1790,” 20–45. 15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), part 1, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995), vol. III, 7.

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different economies, social structures, and political arrangements, from Britain to Spain to Hungary to Russia. To be sure, the beginning of the period of European Romanticism is typically dated to the French Revolution, and there is no question that the twenty-three years of war (1792–1815) unleashed by the Revolution affected the whole of the continent. Yet in crucial respects post-Napoleonic political and economic conditions differed little from those before the Revolution, for “the land-owning elites were still firmly in charge of even the most advanced countries [and] the overwhelming majority of Europeans were still illiterate peasants.”16 In France itself many of the Revolutionary reforms were reversed between 1799, when the first Napoleonic constitution was adopted, and 1804, when a new civil code was promulgated: the Declaration of the Rights of Man was abandoned, amnesty was granted to émigré nobles, slavery was reintroduced in French colonies, and the legal subordination of women to their fathers or husbands was reaffirmed. What is striking, however, is that almost from its beginning, well before Napoleon’s coup d’état, the Revolution was interpreted as an epochal threshold, historically unprecedented and therefore inexplicable by reference to the past. Even the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which not only involved most of Europe but extended to European colonies on four continents, had not appeared so exceptional to its contemporary chroniclers; and to the end of his life Frederick the Great adhered to the traditional understanding of the past as exemplary for the present: “History is the school of princes; it is for them to study the errors of past centuries in order to avoid them.”17 In contrast, an antipathetic observer of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, declared it already in 1790 “the most astonishing [thing] that hitherto happened in the world,” while an enthusiastic protagonist, Maximilien Robespierre, informed the National Convention in 1793 that “the theory of revolutionary government is as new as the revolution that brought it about.”18 It did not require a gift of prophecy, therefore, for Goethe (who was hostile to the Revolution) to tell the dejected Prussian soldiers at the 16 Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 676; see also Reinhart Koselleck, “Das achzehnte Jahrhundert als Beginn der Neuzeit,” in Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewußtsein, ed. Reinhart Herzog and Reinhart Koselleck (Munich: Fink, 1987), 269–282, p. 272. 17 Friedrich II, “Preface” to Histoire de mon temps (1775), in Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand, ed. J. D. E. Preuß, 30 vols. (Berlin, 1846–1856), vol. II, xxii. 18 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10; and Maximilien Robespierre, “Rapport sur les principes du Gouvernement révolutionnaire, fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public,” in Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, ed. Marc Bouloiseau, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul, 10

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Battle of Valmy on September 19, 1792, “From here and today proceeds a new epoch of world history, and you will be able to say that you were there.”19 The accuracy of his recollection, when he wrote up the Campaign in France thirty years later, matters less than his assumption – which he expected his readers no less than his original auditors to share – that an epochal event could be recognized as such by its participants, even before it was over. That the Revolution attracted such interpretations owed less to the unfolding events themselves than to intellectual developments in the preceding decades, especially the temporalization of history and the historicization of culture. In the first, history began to be understood as an open-ended succession of unique events rather than a closed circle of recurrent ones; in the second, Montesquieu’s concept of the esprit général, meaning the combination of physical and moral causes of the particular character of a nation, was adapted to elicit the distinctiveness of the present age by comparison with past ages.20 Although Frederick the Great may have remained untouched by these developments, later generations did not: they were developments transnational in range and surprisingly independent of individual national conditions. By entertaining the possibility of the appearance of the radically new – a possibility excluded from exemplary history, which assumes the cyclicality of historical patterns – this historicizing perspective vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950–1967), vol. X, 274. Less than a month after the fall of the Bastille, the British Whig leader, Charles James Fox, exclaimed, “It is I think by much the greatest Event that has ever happened in the world, and will in all probability have the most extensive good consequences” (quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110). 19 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Campagne in Frankreich 1792, in Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 143 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), sect. 1, vol. XXXIII, 75. 20 On temporalization see Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte” and “‘Neuzeit’: Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe,” in his book Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 38–66 and 300–348; and Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), Chapter 3. On historicization in this sense see Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 23. More generally on the influence of Montesquieu’s relational historical analysis, see Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1972), Chapter 3; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966–1969), vol. II, 325–332; Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 70–71; and Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 234–265. Montesquieu defined esprit général in Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois (1748), Book 19, Chapter 6, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949–1951), vol. II, 558.

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encouraged both the division of historical time into self-contained periods and, more particularly, the identification of an inaugural event from which a period could be dated. Such an event would merit the designation revolution in its modern sense (which also developed during the eighteenth century): no longer a periodic or recurrent event, such as the motions of celestial bodies, but a turning point from which there is no turning back.

Enlightenment Inheritances The development of historicism and of a critique of modernity within Enlightenment thought is worth emphasizing in view of the persistent commonplace that Romanticism constitutes a fundamental rejection of Enlightenment thought. This opinion, which derives partly from Heinrich Heine’s devastating satire of the German “Romantic school” (the Schlegel brothers, Brentano, and Arnim were among his targets) as the morally hypocritical, politically reactionary, and nationally chauvinistic embrace of medieval Catholicism, is based on a facile association of Enlightenment with rationalism and Romanticism with irrationalism, not to mention a selective identification of figures as Romantics.21 This is not to say that Heine’s caricature was entirely groundless, for the conjunction of nationalism, religious fervor, and medievalism was a notable feature of writers who (like Brentano and Arnim) from about 1807 were grouped, mostly by their opponents, under the noun Romantik. The same conjunction characterized artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose paintings of the 1810s symbolized patriotic opposition to the Napoleonic occupation with figures in traditional German costume or scenes of medieval cathedrals and castles.22 21 Heinrich Heine, Die Romantische Schule (1836), in Werke, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 6 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1968–1976), vol. III, 357–504. Recent examples include Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution (London: Weidenfeld, 2010), 8–9; Terrence James Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2; and Peter Gay, Why the Romantics Matter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 14–16. 22 On Romantik as a designation of contemporary writers, see Hans Eichner, “Germany,” in “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, 142–147; on Friedrich’s patriotic paintings see Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, trans. Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 85–99, and on Schinkel’s see William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 130–133. In England a comparable mixture of nationalism and religion appears in the formerly radical Wordsworth’s anti-Napoleonic poetry, such as the notorious “Thanksgiving Ode” of 1816, which justifies British militarism as “the most dreaded instrument” of “Almighty God” (ll. 275–282); see Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 536–538.

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It is also true, though it was not Heine’s concern, that various Romantic-era writers, including Goethe and Schelling in Germany and William Blake and S. T. Coleridge in England, severely criticized Newtonian science, that exemplary Enlightenment achievement – and canonized as such by Voltaire – for replacing nature with a mental fiction by reducing phenomena to relations of number and magnitude. As Blake captioned one of his drawings, exhibited in 1809 but since lost, “The horse of Intellect is leaping from the cliffs of Memory and Reasoning; it is a barren Rock: it is also called the Barren Waste of Locke and Newton.” Lecturing on Wordsworth in 1818, the critic William Hazlitt, who had retained his youthful radicalism, included in his long enumeration of the poet’s faults, “He hates Voltaire; he hates Sir Isaac Newton.”23 Nonetheless, however much some Romantics may have adored medieval Catholicism or detested Newtonianism, the fact remains that the ostensibly counter-Enlightenment tendencies in Romanticism had already developed in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. Let us briefly consider five prominent examples: artistic expressivism, the rejection of aesthetic rationalism in favor of emotionalism, the defense of religious faith against rationalism, medievalism, and cultural nationalism.24 According to the well-known thesis of M. H. Abrams, Romanticism marked the fundamental transition from a mimetic conception of poetry, focused on the relationship of the work to reality and dominant from Plato into the eighteenth century, to an expressivist conception, focused on the relationship of the work to the artist.25 Thus Coleridge, in his intellectual apologia Biographia Literaria (1817), felt compelled to explicate the poetic imagination before proceeding to criticize Wordsworth’s poetry. Understanding the artistic process was a prerequisite to assessing the product because (and here Coleridge was in accord with A. W. Schlegel and Wordsworth) the principles by which a poem is judged should be those by which it was composed, which in turn are 23 William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, in Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman, 2nd edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 546; Hazlitt, Lectures on the Living English Poets, quoted in Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 546. On critiques of Newton by Goethe and Romantic Naturphilosophen, see Trevor Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early NineteenthCentury Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 48–52 and 149–153; and Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986). 24 This line of argument is developed much more fully by James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Rolf Lessenich, Aspects of English Preromanticism (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 1989). 25 See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

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intrinsic to the poem. Yet Coleridge’s definition of the imagination “as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation” had precedents in the redefinitions, first by the third Earl of Shaftesbury in his influential Moralists (1710) and later by Johann Gottfried Herder in On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1783) and Karl Philipp Moritz in “On the Pictorial Imitation of the Beautiful” (1788), of mimesis as reproduction of the creation of nature rather than of created nature itself.26 More generally, the Romantic identification of artistic genius with the imaginative faculty derived from eighteenth-century discussions of the topic, particularly Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Genius (1774). Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and Abrams has explained the centrality of this axiom to expressivist theory.27 But in Britain the displacement of neoclassical rationalism, which sought to define universal rules and abstract models for artistic practice, by an aesthetics that privileged subjective sentiment had begun with Shaftesbury’s Moralists and Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers “On the Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712) and was already well advanced by the time of Burke’s widely disseminated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). As far as the representation of affective states was concerned, the way had been prepared for Romantic writers and artists by the literary forms to which eighteenth-century analyses of emotional responses to aesthetic stimuli had given special impetus, namely epistolary fiction with its exploration of subjective self-presentation (in England and France from the 1740s, in Germany from the 1750s), the Gothic with its representation of extreme emotions and morally transgressive behaviors (in England from the 1760s), and sentimental fiction with its commendation of heightened sensibility (in England and France from the 1760s, in Germany during the so-called Sturm und Drang period of 1771–1780). Ironically, eighteenth-century subjectivist aesthetics assisted Chateaubriand, in the Génie du christianisme (1802), in defending Catholicism against Enlightenment attacks on religion, for instead of trying to refute arguments against religion in their own terms, he presented religious feeling in terms of an experience that had preoccupied aesthetic theorists from Burke to Kant: the sublime, in which the individual is supposed to be overwhelmed and 26 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in Collected Works, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 34 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2001), vol. VII, part 1, 304. 27 William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 79 and 92; and Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 21–22.

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exalted by the encounter with a natural scene. So the aestheticized religion in which Chateaubriand would have us take refuge from modern alienation is itself suspiciously modern. It was only logical that the critical spirit of Enlightenment should turn its attention to the dogmas lurking within philosophy itself. But such selfcritique was not limited to Hume’s rejection of causal necessity or Kant’s exclusion of metaphysics from the realm of knowledge. Blake’s belief in the truth of individual vision had affinities with George Berkeley’s empiricist idealism, which (as elaborated in A New Theory of Vision, 1720) rejected the possibility of objective standards of measurement.28 And Coleridge’s Logosophia, a long-contemplated but never-completed project of vindicating the grounding of reason in faith, drew inspiration from, among others, two influential eighteenth-century critics of rationalism: the Englishman William Law, whose Way to Divine Knowledge (1720) argued that reason’s respect for its own limits should make it appreciate the necessity of faith; and the German Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, whose On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785, rev. 1789) argued that a consistent rationalism, assuming the universal applicability of the principle of sufficient reason, was deterministic and fatalistic and therefore incompatible with the ideas of a self-caused God and human free will. Heine interpreted the German Romantic celebration of the Middle Ages as a collusion between those who, like the Rhenish polemicist Joseph Görres, wanted to resurrect the spirit of medieval Catholicism in Germany and the princes who wanted to strengthen hostility to the French occupiers by fostering a specious sense of German cultural unity. While not inaccurate, this interpretation does not sufficiently explain the renewal, from the middle of the eighteenth century and in France and Britain as well as in Germany, of an interest in things medieval. For the positive revaluation of medieval artistry began in earnest not with Görres and Friedrich Schlegel, as Heine implied, but with Jacques Germain Soufflot’s “Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique” (1741) and Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). In fact this was a manifestation of an emergent historicism, which, by maintaining the individual integrity of every age and culture, encouraged the recovery of the past – recognized as such – on the one hand as historical artifact (e.g., the ballads collected in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765) and on the other as stylistic replica or recreation (e.g., James Macpherson’s purported translations of ancient Scottish bardic poetry, 28 See Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, ed. Nicholas Halmi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), Chapter 1.

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the Ossian poems of 1762–1763, which were immensely popular in western and eastern Europe into the nineteenth century). In its historical premises the so-called Gothic Revival was no different from the contemporaneous Greek Revival, which also assumed a dual archaeological and imitative character with the study of ancient Greek buildings and the construction of new ones in Greek styles – and which also continued well into the nineteenth century, as the careers of Schinkel and Leo von Klenze, the leading architects respectively of Prussia and Bavaria, exemplify.29 If all cultures had an intrinsic worth and could be fully understood only on their own terms, then it followed that the vernacular had no less claim to consideration than the long-normative classical. Historicism thus served to bolster the conceptualization and promotion of distinct national literary and artistic canons, a process that had begun in Britain in the late seventeenth century and would follow in Germany in the eighteenth with encouragement especially from Herder. In that respect the Gothic Revival, in Germany as in Britain, was overdetermined. While Soufflot appreciated Strasbourg Cathedral on structural and aesthetic grounds, Goethe did so on nationalistic grounds, (mistakenly) proclaiming Gothic style autochthonously German in On German Architecture (1773). When Goethe published that jingoistic essay, Napoleon was still a child and the prospect of completing Cologne’s half-built medieval cathedral as a monument to Germanness, fantasized by Friedrich Schlegel (in Letters from a Trip, 1806) and actively promoted by Görres, lay decades in the future.

The Sense of a New Epoch That the representative tendencies just surveyed were not only not exclusive to Romanticism but present in the movement against which it is supposed to have rebelled will not seem paradoxical if we acknowledge that Enlightenment thought was multivalent and that epochs are not empirical facts but conceptual fictions created to assist in comprehending history. Indeed, it might be said that what was most distinctive of the Romantic period was its evident compulsion to designate itself a new world-historical epoch. If the French Revolution was not “the master theme of the epoch in which we live,” as Shelley declared to Byron in 1816,30 it was certainly the focal point of historical self-orientation, the intended permanence of which 29 See Nicholas Halmi, “The Anti-Historicist Historicism of German Romantic Architecture,” European Romantic Review, 26 (2005), 789–807. 30 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, ed. Frederick Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. I, 504 (September 8, 1816).

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from the revolutionaries’ perspective was signaled in their institution in October 1793 of a new calendar, whose beginning was retrospectively assigned to the proclamation of the French Republic on September 22, 1792. Even the Christian division of history into a before and after at the Incarnation had not been so stark, since the new chronology was adopted six centuries after the event and it incorporated the existing Roman (Julian) calendar. The playwright Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine, who devised the seasonal nomenclature for the French calendar (Brumaire, Germinal, Floréal, Thermidor, etc.), made explicit its purpose of defining the Republic as historically discontinuous with the ancien régime: “We can no longer count years during which the kings oppressed us as a time in which we lived.”31 The sense of futurity implied in the calendar was what Wordsworth, as he recalled bitterly in 1805, had experienced while traveling through France in 1790: “’twas a time when Europe was rejoiced, / France standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again.”32 Such a demarcation of the present and future from the past was all the more necessary precisely because the condition of modernity, predicated on an open-ended temporality and the concept of indefinite immanent progress, presented itself under two aspects, as existential condition and unrealized project. The paradox of an epoch that conceived itself as the first to be self-conscious of its historicity is that it could not recognize the unhistorical nature of that very conception. That roughly was Nietzsche’s point when he ridiculed Hegel, who declared philosophy “its own time grasped in thoughts,” for assuming that the world-spirit “became transparent and intelligible to itself in the Hegelian cranium [Hegelischen Hirnschalen] . . . so that for Hegel the apex and terminus of world history [des Weltprozesses] coincided in his own Berlin existence.”33 The founder of the nineteenth-century “Berlin school” of historiography, Wilhelm von Humboldt, opined that “the eighteenth century occupies in the history of all times the most favorable place for examining and appreciating [würdigen] its own character” because “we enjoy in our standpoint the great 31 Quoted in Mona Ozouf, “Revolutionary Calendar,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 560–570, p. 541. 32 Wordsworth, The Prelude 6.352–354, in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 249. 33 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 21 vols. (1968–1970; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. VII, 26; and Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben” (1874), in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (1967–1977; Munich: DTV, 1988), vol. I, 308.

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advantage . . . of completely and perfectly overseeing [ganz und vollständig zu übersehen] the first two eras [i.e., antiquity and the Middle Ages].”34 By thus privileging itself, the present demanded a caesura in historical time before which its state of enlightened clarity had not yet been achieved. So if the French Revolution had not occurred, it would have been necessary for the Romantic generation to invent it. In the event, the revolution met the expectation of a decisive disruption from which the present could be dated, but of course it could not guarantee that the specific hopes invested in it would be fulfilled – as for many they were not, especially with regard to the realization of the secular natural-law (i.e., Enlightenment) principles proclaimed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), a document that derived from the American Declaration of Independence (1776). However epistemologically superior its viewpoint to what obtained in the past, the new historical understanding was always in danger of being superseded by a yet newer understanding. This was a problem that the Swiss historian Johannes von Müller experienced as the incompatibility of historicity with systematicity. Writing to his brother from Vienna in 1797, he complained not only that he was unable to finish his manuscript on universal history, which had sought to discern a providential plan from the empirical data of human history, but that the entire project was losing “much of its value on account of recent history”: “Everything is becoming so completely different [so ganz anders] that the writer is simply unable to establish a fixed point of view [den Augpunkt zu fixieren].”35 The limits of Müller’s historicism meant that he could recognize perspectival relativism not as an inherent epistemic condition of historiography, but only as an historically emergent imposition upon it – one that his teleological interpretation of history could not accommodate. He left his manuscript unfinished, its narrative stopping at 1783, the year in which God had presumably abandoned humanity to its own devices. The new epoch, precisely because it was new, had made history harder rather than easier to comprehend. The provisionality of the understanding of the present found expression in the provisional content and open forms of Romantic-era writing. The self-conscious fragment – that is, a work presented as a fragment, like the pensées published by 34 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert” (c. 1796–1797), in Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, 5 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–1981), vol. I, 401. 35 Johannes von Müller, Briefe, in Auswahl, ed. Edgar Bonjour, 2nd edn. (Basel: Schwabe, 1954), 212 (quoted by Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 25).

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Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) under the title Pollen (1798), Coleridge’s interrupted dream-poem “Kubla Khan” (composed c. 1797, published 1816), or Ugo Foscolo’s both fragmentary and actually unfinished poem Le Grazie (composed 1803–1822, published in part by the poet in 1822) – is often referred to as a distinctively Romantic literary form, the principal purpose of which is to gesture toward a totality that can be sensed but not fully conceptualized or expressed.36 In the self-reflexive way that it advertises its inability to represent the infinite or absolute directly, but without renouncing the assumption of its ability to do so indirectly, the fragment performs what Friedrich Schlegel conceived as irony and is now called, in recognition of his elaboration of the concept, Romantic irony. He himself explained it as “the impossibility and necessity of a complete communication [einer vollständigen Mittheilung].”37 But only he made fragments a preferred public form of critical reflection, and then only in the years 1797–1800, when he published a collection of “Critical Fragments” in the journal Lyceum (1797) and included two further collections (with contributions from his brother and Friedrich Schleiermacher) in the first and last volumes of the Athenäum (1798 and 1800), the periodical he edited with August Wilhelm. Literary works did not need to be fragmentary in form, moreover, to express an intimation of or longing for the infinite by means of the finite: in Giacomo Leopardi’s famous lyric “L’Infinito” (composed 1819, published 1826), the reflection on “endless spaces [interminati spazi]” is stimulated by a hedge that blocks the speaker’s view of the horizon.38 Arguably, an even more characteristically Romantic form (one that can include the critical fragment) is the manifesto or programmatic statement, which announces the task to be undertaken in order to progress intellectually, morally, and artistically, in particular toward individual and collective self-determination and self-expression. Such documents, the large number of which written from the 1790s onwards illustrates the claim that Romanticism is neither purely literary nor purely theoretical but both simultaneously, constitute “theory itself as literature, or what amounts to the same thing, literature producing itself in producing its own theory.”39 The manifesto gestures towards totality in temporal terms by conjuring up a future of 36 See Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141–153; and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Absolue littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemande (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 57–80. 37 Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum-Fragment 108, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, gen. ed. Ernst Behler, 35 vols. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–), vol. II, 160. 38 Giacomo Leopardi, “L’Infinito,” ll. 1–7, in Opere, ed. Sergio Solmi, 2 vols. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1956), vol. I, 58. 39 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’Absolue littéraire, 22 (emphasis in original).

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which the present imagines itself to be part – the new epoch, the reborn human nature – and thus reflects the duality of modernity as reality and potentiality. Notable examples of such statements include Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), which recommended aesthetic experience (as opposed to political action) to counteract the alienating effects of modern social life; the so-called “Earliest Systematic Program of German Idealism” (c. 1796), which will be discussed below; Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800 and 1802), which defended “low and rustic” subjects and plain diction as the poetical means of cultivating imaginative sympathy and hence public morality; Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808), which exhorted Germans to realize their eternal destiny by subordinating themselves to the fatherland (then under French occupation); Madame de Staël’s On Germany (1813), which presented a progressive and vigorous Germany as an alternative to a despotically ruled and culturally enervated France; Orest Somov’s “On Romantic Poetry” (1823), which paraphrased passages from Madame de Staël and exhorted Russians to create their own Romanticism from indigenous sources; Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare (1823–1825), which defined Romanticism as literature that gave the public pleasure by representing contemporary life and customs; Victor Hugo’s preface to his play Cromwell (1827), which called for art to follow its internal laws of development rather than the external precepts of neoclassical criticism; Antonio Alcalá Galiano’s anonymous manifesto of 1834 (published as the prologue to his friend Ángel de Saavedra’s narrative poem El moro expósito), which sought to dissociate Romanticism from Spanish Golden Age drama (Spanish critics having assimilated A. W. Schlegel’s well-known classification of Calderón as “romantic” in his 1808 lectures on drama) and to redefine it as a contemporary literature synthesizing the real and the ideal; and Giuseppe Mazzini’s essay “The Duties of Man” (1844), which encouraged Italians to improve their lot by unifying their nation politically and culturally. The fragment and programmatic statement coincided with the theorization of the romantic in Friedrich Schlegel’s celebrated Athenaeum Fragment 116. Like other critics of the time, Schlegel used the category romantic at once historically and normatively, to define what “romantic poetry” both is and should be: not a particular kind of verse, he insisted, but a creative activity that reunites “all the divided genres of poetry” and furthermore fuses poetry and prose, literature and other disciplines in order to encourage social cohesion. If in one sense (used also by August Wilhelm) romantische Poesie is simply post-classical and already exists, in contradistinction to other kinds 56

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of poetry “that are finished and can now be fully anatomized,” then in another, because “its true essence is always to be developing [ewig zu werden]” and never to be completed, it does not yet exist. Schlegel’s insistence that romantische Poesie recognizes no law but the poet’s will might seem like an expressivist rejection of neoclassical prescriptive criticism. But when the species subsumes the genus in the fragment’s final sentence, which declares that “all poetry is or should be romantic,” we sense the larger stakes in Schlegel’s concept: the desire for a synthesis of disciplines and unification of knowledge in the face of a contemporary sense of intellectual and social fragmentation and uncertainty.40 By means of a fragment he sought to offer the prospect of wholeness.

Some Romantic Responses to “this time / Of dereliction and dismay” Already in 1762 Rousseau had forecast an approaching “state of crisis and century of revolutions” whose outcome was unknowable.41 And the early reception of the French Revolution confirms that the expectation of a new epoch – one founded on abstract ideas of rights and equality – preceded any experience, especially among observers outside France, which could have justified that expectation. As the 1790s proceeded without political stability in France and the hopes initially invested in the revolution increasingly seemed misplaced, European intellectuals were compelled to reassess the relationship between the idea of freedom and its historical actualization. This was an issue that Kant – regarding himself free to publish on religious and political subjects after the death of the reactionary Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1797 – addressed in The Conflict of the Faculties, published the same year as the first volume of the Athenaeum. Strikingly, he argued that not the French Revolution itself but rather the early public reaction to it was “epoch-making [Epoche machend].” While the revolution might fail, or succeed at such cost as to discourage a repetition of the experiment, enthusiasm for its goal of a republican constitution testified to an advancement of human morality, one owing to “nature and freedom alone, united according to the inner principles of right.” Distinguishing between “mode of thinking” (Denkungsart) 40 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäum-Fragment 116, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. II, 182–183. 41 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou De l’Éducation, Book 3, in Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, 468–469.

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and “experience” (Erfahrung) allowed Kant to affirm an epoch of republicanism without republican government and thereby preserve the idea he was unwilling to relinquish, that human history has a moral telos.42 The Conflict of the Faculties is worth dwelling on for a moment because its elisions reveal in miniature the philosophical aporiai with which the early Romantic generation, born several decades after Kant, had also to contend, as will be considered by way of conclusion. Kant interpreted the manifestation of an affect, “enthusiasm” (his word is Enthusiasm instead of the more usual Schwärmerei), as an “historical sign” (Geschichtszeichen) of progress towards the appropriate political realization of a principle of practical reason, freedom. By thus applying a transcendental conception of individual human psychology to an historical conception of collective human nature, he sought to reconcile contingent historical facts with a priori moral principles. But the strong qualifications in which he couched his optimism – humans are predisposed to a mixture of good and evil, enthusiasm as such is inimical to reason and worthy of censure (Tadel verdient), the actual outcome of the revolutionary process is unpredictable – betray the difficulty of relating the individual to the collective, the transcendental to the empirical, practical reason to political practice, from a unified perspective.43 (The first of these difficulties also found expression in Kant’s dissociation of republicanism from democracy on the grounds that the latter, by treating everyone as a ruler, conflates legislative with executive power and thus excludes the possibility of representative [representativ] government.)44 Kant’s outspoken sympathy for the French Revolution as late as 1798 was unusual. But his reservation, in seeking empirical confirmation of the autonomy which he considered defining of the modern subject – that is, the ability to recognize and act on moral principles determined by reason alone – is symptomatic of its time. Kant’s appeal here to history for an intimation of a moral law that by his own account could not be confirmed empirically is analogous to his earlier effort, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), to bridge the chasm between the sensible realm of the concept of nature and the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom by means of what he called the “aesthetic idea.” Explained as the sensible presentation of a rational idea, the aesthetic idea was supposed to make morality intuitable with “the appearance of an

42 Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, Part 2, §§ 6–7, in Werke: Akademie-Textausgabe, 11 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968–1977), vol. VII, 85–89. 43 Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, Part 2, §§ 4–6, in Werke, vol. VII, 84–86. 44 Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), in Werke, vol. VIII, 352–353.

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objective reality [dem Anschein einer objectiven Realität].”45 Though discussed only fleetingly in the third Critique, the concept of the aesthetic idea, as an attempt to mitigate Kant’s self-imposed dualism of knowledge and metaphysics, furnished an important model for a concept of non-discursive representation formulated by Goethe and further elaborated by Schelling (in lectures on the Philosophy of Art, delivered during the years 1802–1804, and his System of the Complete Philosophy, 1804) and Coleridge (chiefly in his notebooks and The Statesman’s Manual, 1816), namely that of the symbol – or as it is widely known now, the Romantic symbol. Not confined to the aesthetic sphere, in contrast to artistic symbols, but extending to nature, the symbol was supposed to perform the same function in relation to “intellectual intuition” (which presupposed the primordial unity of subject and object as the condition of reflection) that Kant’s aesthetic idea was in relation to a moral idea: to objectify it.46 Once it was recognized – and the purpose of its theorization was to ensure that it could be – the symbol, because it was supposed to participate ontologically in its referent (that is, not merely to represent but to be part of what it symbolized), would reassure its viewer of the meaningfulness of nature to humanity and of humanity’s participation with nature in an ordered and unified whole. Reflecting what might be called a broader symbolic sensibility and a resistance to materialist natural philosophy, nineteenth-century painters found ways to suggest that nature is pregnant with meaning to the knowing observer. Philipp Otto Runge’s planned series The Times of the Day, of which only preparatory drawings and one painting (Morning, 1808) were completed, was to express his conception of nature as a system of “hieroglyphs” through images of giant lilies surrounded by groups of winged genii. More subtly, by signaling “the presence of an occulted meaning . . . without, however, compromising the structural or temporal integrity of the natural world,” Caspar David Friedrich’s landscape paintings offered something like a nondiscursive counterpart to Schelling’s discursive exposition of the concept of the symbol (which the painter may have known through a mutual friend, G. H. Schubert).47 Friedrich’s famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818), in which a foregrounded man stands with his back toward us atop a rocky peak 45 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, § 49, in Werke: Akademie-Textausgabe, 11 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968–1977), vol. V, 314. 46 On “intellectual intuition” see Chapter 1. On the concept of the symbol, see Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 47 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd edn. (London: Reaktion, 2009), 151 and 253.

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and gazes across the mist toward mountains in the distance, represents not only nature itself but the act of perceiving it, for the man in the painting, incongruously wearing street clothes rather than something suitable for rock climbing, reproduces the stance of the painting’s viewer: we are looking at him looking at the natural scene (which is itself, of course, a representation). Like him, we can recognize from visible fragments, the summits extending above the mist, the invisible presence of the whole, the entire mountain range. The foregrounding of the Rückenfigur (a favorite device of Friedrich’s) makes him appear as large as the mountains – in contrast to the dwarfed figures in paintings of conventionally sublime landscapes – and implies an equality between perceiving subject and perceived object, united within the painting’s frame as within the cosmic order. That Coleridge for his part considered the perception of nature’s symbols to have moral and political implications, insofar as the correctly understood natural order might offer a model for reform of the social order, is evident from his discussing the concept of the symbol in The Statesman’s Manual, a pamphlet intended to prepare Britain’s “higher classes” intellectually for the task of governance. Eccentric as that project may seem to us (and seemed to Coleridge’s contemporaries), it was comparable in its basic aims to a more speculative and optimistic project that had suggested itself to the early German Romantics: a “new mythology.” The desirability of a modern “mythology of reason,” which would make aesthetic and thus publicly accessible the idea of the self as “an absolutely free being,” was affirmed in the fragmentary manuscript known since its publication in 1917 as the “Earliest Systematic Program of German Idealism” and attributed variously to the Tübingen seminary students Hegel, Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin (and possibly reflecting input from all three).48 Notably anti-clerical in tone, the document imagines the new mythology as a replacement for established religion, providing, through its fusion of the philosophical and the aesthetic, the intellectual and cultural basis of a future society in which “the equal development of all powers await[s] us, those of the particular person [des Einzelnen] as well as of all individuals.” The obvious question of what form this mythology might take was not addressed in the “Systemprogramm,” but 48 The text of “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” appears in Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (eds.), Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “ältestes Systemprogramm” des deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 8–14, and an English translation in Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, 170–172. Both volumes contain critical analysis of the document. On its relation to modern political theory, see Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die neue Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 153–187.

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was in Friedrich Schlegel’s version of the proposal, published in the Athenaeum (“Dialogue on Poetry,” 1800). Although the content of the new mythology was to come from modern physics and idealist philosophy (“the great phenomenon of the age”), Schlegel’s spokesman Ludoviko explained, these sources were not yet able to supply the “symbolic view of nature” required for the form, which accordingly had to be reappropriated from “the motley crew of old gods” in Greek mythology because they had (supposedly) embodied such a view.49 So the new mythology was to be at once completely different from and remarkably similar to the old one – an ambivalent expression of modernity. Small wonder, then, that when Schelling took up the idea in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), he deferred its realization to the indefinite future.50 Another indefinitely deferred project was the “philosophical poem” that Coleridge encouraged Wordsworth to undertake for the benefit of those “who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind.”51 Called The Recluse, the poem was to be “On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,” as Wordsworth grandly announced in a proleptically published “Prospectus” (1814). In the event, he wrote only parts of the projected whole, but one of these was the thirteen-book Prelude (composed mostly in 1804–1805), now recognized as his masterpiece and one of the major long poems in English literature.52 In effect steeling himself to write so ambitious a work as The Recluse in “this time / Of dereliction and dismay” (2.446–447), twelve years into the war with France, Wordsworth surveyed his intellectual and moral development from early childhood to confirm his vocation as a poet of “lasting inspiration, sanctified / By reason and by truth” (13.443–444). Extrapolating from the moral grounding he believed himself to have acquired in his youthful encounters with nature and from the subsequent discovery of the power of his imagination – experiences that he pointedly contrasts with the course of 49 Friedrich Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. II, 311–322. Foscolo’s unfinished poem on the Graces, Le Grazie, celebrating the civilizing power of the arts and intended to be dedicated to the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, similarly models a new mythology by apostrophizing figures from classical myth (Ugo Foscolo, Le Grazie, in Opere, ed. Franco Gavazzeni, 2 vols. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1974–1981), vol. I, 395–532). 50 F. W. J. Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, 14 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–1861), vol. III, 629. 51 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971), vol. I, 527 (September 1795). 52 Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 167–377. Parenthetical references are to book and line numbers.

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the philosophically based French Revolution (which he had witnessed personally in 1790 and 1791–1792) – Wordsworth articulates the general principle that love of nature leads through cultivation of the sympathetic imagination to love of mankind. Aligning reason with imagination as the foundations of “intellectual love” (13.166–188), the poem implicitly offers the poet’s own path out of spiritual crisis as exemplary for the modern age in finding compensations for the disappointments of history. Beginning with self-doubt and uncertainty, the poem ends with self-confidence and a commitment to teach others how the mind of Man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this Frame of things (Which ’mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of Men doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of substance and of fabric more divine.

(13.446–452)

Yet the larger project remained unfinished, and The Prelude itself, which Wordsworth wanted to shield from hostile critics, was not published until after his death in 1850. While poetry offered Wordsworth a consolation in the face of contemporary history’s “outrage and bloody power” (Prelude 10.181), it suggested to the painter Eugène Delacroix ways of conveying exactly such outrage and violence. His vast Massacre at Chios (exhibited in Paris in 1824, only two years after the event) was inspired not only by newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts, but also by Dante’s representation of despairing souls in the Inferno and Byron’s of the fatal conflict between a Venetian and a Turk in Ottomanoccupied Greece in The Giaour (a narrative poem of 1813). Focusing on the Greek victims rather than the Ottoman perpetrators, the painting foregrounds a group of thirteen captured men, women, and children, including an infant at its dead mother’s breast and a women stripped and lashed to a Turkish officer’s rearing horse.53 An even more direct and anti-heroic presentation of contemporary warfare – among the most unsparing and disturbing ever created – was Francisco Goya’s series of eighty-two etchings of scenes from the Peninsular War (1808–1814). Published posthumously in 1863 under the title Disasters of War, the etchings depict atrocities committed by both sides on soldiers and civilians, the effects of famine in Madrid during 53 See Werner Hofmann, Das entzweite Jahrhundert: Kunst zwischen 1750 und 1830 (Munich: Beck, 1995), 591–597.

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the French occupation of 1811–1812, and – allegorically – the oppressiveness of the restored Ferdinand VII’s regime. Conspicuously absent from the series is any indication of a providentially directed outcome or overall meaning to the conflict. Recent and contemporary history also provided constant points of reference for an unfinished epic-length poem deplored by Wordsworth but admired by innumerable readers throughout Europe, a poem whose literary impact in the Romantic period can be readily discerned, for example, in the comic opening scenes of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black (1831) and in the easy diction and digressive narrative of Alexander Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1825–1832). The poem was Byron’s Don Juan (1819–1823), the freedom of whose narrative structure, diction, and treatment of sensitive themes (religion, sex, war, politics, cannibalism, contemporary English poetry) is inversely related to the restrictedness of its eight-line, threerhyme stanzaic form (ottava rima).54 A self-consciously anti-philosophical poem, Don Juan repudiates philosophical systems (14.1: “One system eats another up”), satirizes Berkeleyan idealism (11.1: “When Bishop Berkeley said ‘there was no matter,’ / – And proved it – ’twas no matter what he said”), refuses speculation on metaphysical questions (14.3: “I know nought; nothing I deny”), and affirms a skeptical empiricism (14.2: “Nothing more true than not to trust your senses; / And yet what are your other evidences?”). Like Delacroix’s Scène des massacres de Scio and Goya’s Desastres de la guerra, Don Juan refuses to dignify war with conventional notions of military heroism: “I want a hero,” the poet begins, explaining that the present age has none to offer (1.1–5); referring to the commemoration of soldiers in the Russo-Turkish war of 1787–1792 (and implicitly of British soldiers at Waterloo in 1815), he asks sardonically, “I wonder (although Mars no doubt’s a god I / Praise) if a man’s name in a bulletin / May make up for a bullet in his body?” (7.21; Byron’s emphasis). By repeatedly professing its adherence to an epic tradition that it manifestly, indeed gleefully, flouts, above all in its abandonment of any claim to a narrative teleology, Don Juan positions itself as a distinctly modern work, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty of finding a form adequate to a contemporary history which itself seems to lack a teleology: “I meant to make this poem very short,” Byron informs the reader in Canto 15, “but now I can’t tell where it may not run” (15.22). 54 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann and Barry Waller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1993), vol. V. Parenthetical references are to canto and stanza numbers.

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Accommodating the complexity and contingency of modern history both thematically (having the protagonist participate in historical events, referring to Byron’s own experiences while writing the poem) and formally (in its frequent digressions from Don Juan’s story and abrupt shifts in tone and rhetorical register) within the framework of a rigid verse form (one that Wordsworth never mastered), the poem suggests simultaneously the necessity and impossibility of containing history within structures created by the human mind. In that respect Don Juan expresses perfectly the ambiguity and ambivalence of a time that could conceive of itself as a new epoch but could not be confident of fulfilling the promise implied by its newness.

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History, Tradition, and Skepticism: The Patterns of Nineteenth-Century Theology david fergusson The religious thought of the nineteenth century is often associated with heterodoxy, skepticism, and the radical criticism occasioned by the work of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and later Freud. While these movements and thinkers were significant, we should not view the period merely in terms of a steady march toward atheism and secularity. The long nineteenth century can be considered one of the most diverse and fruitful periods for theological work with the immense profusion of thought forms, intellectual challenges, and innovative developments that were generated in Europe. Often breaking out in new directions, the leading thinkers of the period also wrestled with the challenges of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; these include questions surrounding the rational basis for religious belief, the historical reliability of sacred texts, and the foundation of ethics. In this chapter, much of the focus is on a succession of seminal thinkers, many of whom flourished in the universities of Germany under conditions that fostered academic rigor and facilitated an emerging if hard-won intellectual freedom.1 Particular attention is given to the impact of historical work, strategies that mediated between Christian doctrine and modernity, the reinvigoration of confessional theologies, and the influence of politics, natural science, and the empirical study of religion. The following selection is thematic rather than chronological.

Reason and Religion Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century exercised a decisive influence on much of the theological work of his successors. Against the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolf, he cast doubt on the capacity of human reason to arrive at knowledge of the nature and existence of God. 1 For exploration of this institutional context, see Zachary Purvis, Theology and University in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Our cognitive capacities do not extend to this region, these being largely limited to generating a knowledge of the world through the forms of intuition and categories imposed by the mind upon the flux of sense experience. This transcendental idealism seemed to leave no scope for knowledge of God as a supersensible object. Following David Hume’s skepticism, Kant subjected the standard philosophical arguments for the existence of God to some formidable objections. One outcome of this attack was to subvert the claims of the deists for whom knowledge of God was more reliably derived from natural reason than from the confused and contradictory deliverances of ancient texts or venerable institutions. Unlike Hume, however, Kant assigned a positive role to religion in matters of practice. Although religion was not necessary to know or to do one’s duty, it could yet prove useful in providing some practical assistance in its performance. Hence the three postulates of practical reason – freedom, God, and immortality – were beliefs that could sustain and fortify us in the moral life. Providing a framework and set of incentives for our ethical pursuits, the latter two religious tenets are justified in the domain of practical reason. In this way, the world of nature could be reconciled with the world of the categorical imperative. God acted as the guarantor not of the source of morality, but of its success in realizing the Highest Good. This approach was developed in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), in which Christ emerges as a moral paradigm and the true church as a community united by common ethical pursuits. While few commentators could rest easy with the details of this approach – Heine accused him of reanimating the corpse of deism – Kant’s critical philosophy set much of the agenda for subsequent scholarly work in Protestant thinkers such as F. D. E. Schleiermacher and G. W. F. Hegel. Schleiermacher attempted to transcend Kant’s disjunction of pure and practical reason by introducing a further source of knowledge, namely feeling (Gefühl). This was reducible neither to the empirical nor to the ethical, but instead constituted a distinctive source that was at the root of all religion. This impulse is more primordial than the reason which constructs the world or acts in accordance with the claims of duty. It belongs to a realm in which the unity of life is experienced and from which all our receptive and free activity derives. During the 1790s, Schleiermacher was at the centre of the socalled Romantic Circle in Berlin, where he enjoyed a close friendship with Friedrich Schlegel. His early work On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) has sometimes been interpreted as depicting a romantic approach to religious knowledge grounded in a quasi-mystical experience of the natural world. On account of its perceived drift toward a tenuous Christian 66

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pantheism, critics have read this text as a heterodox treatise that capitulates to the spirit of the age. According to this interpretation, the Speeches move from a foundational phenomenology of religious consciousness to a description of its particular Christian expression, as if this were one of several instances of a general category. But in several respects this is misleading. By the time of the publication of the Speeches, Schleiermacher had already been ordained as a young Reformed pastor. In fact, the book is written as a response to the increasing skepticism within Romantic circles regarding organized religion. Since the despisers of religion are his target, the Speeches are hardly a manifesto for their circle – indeed, they became a source of consternation. Furthermore, the move from general to particular is subverted by his criticism of a religion of nature. This is an abstraction for Schleiermacher; religion is to be found in its forms of historical expression. The God who is described in Schleiermacher’s theology is the God of Jesus. This produced some predictable reactions. Though Novalis was sympathetic, Schlegel and Goethe had their worst fears confirmed in finding the work much too Christian in its apologetic intent. The Christian Faith (1821–1822) also suffered from misunderstanding, largely on account of its opening sections in which Schleiermacher describes what all forms of piety have in common – the feeling of absolute dependence – and the characterization of Christianity within a general system of religion as monotheistic, teleological, and redemptive. Again Schleiermacher was charged with constructing a pantheism on the basis of a generic religious experience. Yet the great bulk of this work suggests that Schleiermacher’s interests lay elsewhere. His approach remains historical. Christianity derives from the appearance of Christ. The power of his God-consciousness has a redemptive effect upon his community of disciples. This is the source of all Christian affections. In approaching doctrinal formulations from this orientation, Schleiermacher seeks to move beyond both the overly objective constructions of the past, with their desiccated dogmas, and also subjective accounts of religious experience that reduced to forms of human selfdescription. In his intersubjective account of Christianity, we are offered a theology that is at once modern in expression and traditional in content. Its Christocentrism remains quite striking, especially when considered by contemporary audiences more attuned to the comparative study of religion. Schleiermacher and Hegel were colleagues in the recently founded University of Berlin. Though ironically both were charged by their critics with pantheism, their thinking moved in quite different directions. Hegel had scornfully remarked that if religion were to be based upon a feeling of 67

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dependence, then the dog must be the best Christian of all. For his part, Schleiermacher tended to regard Hegelian philosophy as a modern form of Gnosticism that assumed an esoteric knowledge available only to an initiated few. Yet their work shared a dual commitment to the study of history and to overcoming the arid rationalism of an earlier era without collapsing into a subjectivism of the human spirit. For Hegel, this was accomplished by a philosophy of absolute idealism in which Spirit achieves its gradual selfrealization in a process of temporal emergence, particularly in our human self-consciousness, by which God comes to a knowledge of God’s own identity. All nature and history are interpreted in terms of this spiritual process of self-realization. Religion represents an important stage, though its images and myths are destined to be surpassed (sublated) by the ideas of pure reason. Hegel devotes a good deal of time to discussing the history of the world’s religions, though he concludes that Christianity is the absolute religion by virtue of its understanding of the incarnation of the Son of God. Yet even here philosophy must proceed beyond religion by interpreting in rational concepts (Begriffe) the images (Vorstellungen) of faith. Hegel’s most sustained account of Christian doctrine is found in the posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832). His attention to the ideas of the incarnation and the Trinity is unprecedented in any of the great philosophers of the west. The incarnation represents the reconciliation of God and the world. In the consciousness of this one human being, our identity with God and as God becomes realized. Yet, for this consciousness to become universalized, Christ must die so that his Spirit can be imparted to the whole community of faith. Within the church, the communion of the Holy Spirit adumbrates this notion that Spirit (Geist) is realized in and through us. This speculative reading of Good Friday raises the images of religion to the pure concepts of reason. Closely related to this is a temporal rendition of the Trinity. The Son goes forth from and returns to the Father. This follows the dialectical pattern of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, resulting in the procession and descent of the Holy Spirit. The followers of Hegel can be classified in three groupings – right-wing or Old Hegelians, left-wing or New Hegelians, and a center group adopting a more mediating position.2 The first group, which included Carové and Hinrichs, stressed the personhood of God, our distinct individual immortality, and the claims of historical revelation. In this way, Hegel was assimilated to a more 2 See David Friedrich Strauss, In Defense of My “Life of Jesus” against the Hegelians, trans. Marilyn Chapin Massey (Hamden: Archon Books, 1983), 38–66. See Chapter 4 for a discussion on the Left Hegelians.

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conservative Lutheran theology. By contrast, the left-wing Hegelians tended to follow his empirical rather than his speculative interests, often in more secular and politically radical directions. This generated a critical and reductionist attitude to religion in the work of younger Hegelians such as Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx. Within the Hegelian middle, we find a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which traditional claims are revised without being subverted. Any assessment of Hegel’s influence would be incomplete without reference to Søren Kierkegaard, whose work provides its most striking theological rejection. In criticism of the entrenchment of a right-wing Hegelianism in the Danish Lutheran Church, Kierkegaard sought to retrieve a notion of faith as counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. This is encapsulated in his slogan that “truth is subjectivity.” Religious faith is realized not through speculative thought or social mores, but in the concrete decisions of individual existence. The need for radical decision amidst the complexities of each human life is repeatedly emphasized in a succession of writings, many of which appeared pseudonymously, about the real nature of Christianity. In some respects, with its turn to the particulars of history this can be seen as a development on the Hegelian left, though in other ways it constitutes a clear break with idealist philosophy. Distinguishing three modes of existence, Kierkegaard offers a sustained critique of the aesthetic or pleasure-seeking life-style. This leads inexorably to boredom, guilt, and despair, though a better possibility can be realized in an ethical existence with its more enduring commitments and useful pursuits. Yet this too reaps a harvest of regret and guilt, and lacks the capacity fully to register the complexities of human existence. The tensions within the ethical life are addressed only by entering into a religious commitment. This requires a deeply personal choice in which one embraces for oneself the convictions and obligations that accompany faith – hence Kierkegaard’s abiding suspicion of the institutionalized practice of theology in both church and academy. The starkest example of this leap of faith is explored in Fear and Trembling (1843), where Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is the consequence of his obedience to God’s command; this is an action that no ethical system could sanction. For Christian faith, the incarnation is a paradox that cannot be grasped by speculation but only revealed in the midst of one’s life choices. Kierkegaard explores the nature of belief in this paradox in his Philosophical Fragments (1844). Since the condition of believing is not an innate or latent disposition, this must be given to the believer, whether she is an eye-witness contemporary of Christ or one belonging to a later generation. Only within 69

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the life circumstances and commitments of the individual subject can such faith be realized – it can never be fully possessed or mastered. This generated a more disruptive account of divine grace than anything Kierkegaard found in Hegelian philosophy. Partly on account of the delay in translating his main works from Danish into German and English, the influence of Kierkegaard is probably more apparent in the twentieth century. He has been proclaimed variously as a forerunner of existentialist thought and a resource for dialectical theology.

History and Religion If there is one distinguishing mark of nineteenth-century theology, this may be its pronounced historicism.3 For both Schleiermacher and Hegel, Christianity was approached as a historical movement rather than as a system of ideas or inflection of a natural religion or morality. The methodologically self-conscious historical study of Bible, church, and dogma became the most characteristic and enduring feature of subsequent work. The development of Biblical criticism, particularly in Germany, is attributable both to the influence of Pietism, with its emphasis on experience rather than dogma, and to the emergence of a university culture in which this could flourish in relative independence from ecclesiastical control.4 Historical criticism of Bible and dogma had already been attempted by Spinoza in the early modern period onwards. But concerted work on the Old and New Testaments was undertaken by German academics in the nineteenth century. A pioneer figure was Wilhelm de Wette. In his Jena dissertation of 1805, he argued that instead of merely recounting the history of Israel, the canonical books of the Hebrew Scriptures were to be interpreted as composite and multi-layered works that were the products of this history. This generated a striking shift of perception. Much of the putative history narrated in Scripture was to be seen as the literary expression of the religious ideas held by authors at the time of their composition and editing. Implicit in this approach was the governing idea of a canon that had developed over several centuries, its influences reflecting historical circumstances much later than, for example, the time of Moses.

3 See Chapter 13 in this volume. 4 For a detailed examination of these trends see Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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De Wette’s approach did not become well established until the middle of the nineteenth century with the work of Julius Wellhausen, who sought to identify different strands in the Pentateuch as belonging to successive periods in the development of Israelite religion. While control of university appointments and the fear of ecclesiastical censure continued to ensure that more conservative approaches to the historical criticism of Scripture were also practised, these contributed in their own way by assuring church scholars that not all critical roads led to skepticism or heterodoxy. An early outlier was David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835). Like de Wette, he employed the concept of myth to argue that many of the stories told about Jesus were the faith-based creations of the early church. His walking on water, for example, was not an eye-witness report but a myth that expressed the community’s later belief in his divine status. Strauss’s work was groundbreaking. His reputation in the history of New Testament criticism was secured, though his book ensured his notoriety in more orthodox circles. In 1865, Strauss’s work was translated into English by the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) and appeared around the same time as the publication of Bishop J. W. Colenso’s work on the Pentateuch (1862) and J. R. Seeley’s revisionist account of Jesus in Ecce Homo (1866), a work denounced by the Earl of Shaftesbury, the evangelical social reformer, as “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.”5 Yet Strauss assumed a pivotal place in New Testament criticism by virtue of his thesis that the actual Jesus of history was strikingly different from the Christ of faith. In his 1906 survey of the quest of the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer later claimed that there were two epochs – the period before and the period after Strauss. The higher criticism that was gathering pace in Germany aroused some consternation in conservative circles elsewhere. In Oxford, E. B. Pusey viewed these developments as constituting an attack on orthodox claims. Jesus had affirmed Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. To doubt this was to cast aspersions on his divinity. Similarly, claims that Isaiah 7:14 did not amount to a prediction of the virginal conception of Jesus were regarded as subversive of Christian doctrine and devotion. In Scotland during the 1830s, Thomas Chalmers cautioned his students against reading anything from Germany – the impact of its speculative scholarship was considered deleterious and destructive. 5 Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Cassell, 1892), 591. Shaftesbury’s bon mot is often cited in relation to Strauss, but I can find no evidence of this. His colorful condemnation of Ecce Homo seems to have worked wonders for its sales.

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Yet both in England and in Scotland higher criticism gained a foothold, albeit amidst some turmoil. Unlike Strauss, most of the exponents of the newer criticism believed that when properly pursued it would prove consistent with orthodox theological convictions. A landmark publication was Essays and Reviews (1860), most of which were written by Anglican clergy. R. Williams suggested the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch and some of the prophetic books.6 C. W. Goodwin proposed that the cosmological worldview of Genesis 1 should not be confused with modern scientific work. Benjamin Jowett, a longstanding adversary of Pusey, insisted that the Bible was to be interpreted “like any other book.”7 The ensuing controversies only ensured that the new higher criticism became more widely known and accepted. A similar effect followed the trials of William Robertson Smith in Scotland. Robertson Smith was dismissed from his teaching post at the Free Church College in Aberdeen by decision of the General Assembly in 1881 for views that he had propagated about Mosaic and gospel authorship in the article on the Bible in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His case aroused extensive and heated public debate.8 Catholic scholarship engaged with higher criticism but only in the later period of the nineteenth century. The encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893) reaffirmed the inerrancy of the sacred texts. Apart from any errors introduced by the copyists, Scripture must be regarded as inspired in all its parts by God. Scholarship was therefore to be subordinated to church teaching and constrained in its judgments by acknowledgment of the text’s immunity from any form of error. Against this, there is the reaction of modernism, a term employed to describe, sometimes pejoratively, a disparate group of Catholic thinkers who displayed an affinity with the historical and philosophical developments of the nineteenth century. The central figure in Catholic historical scholarship was Alfred Loisy, one of the foremost modernists, with a succession of writings in the late nineteenth century, followed by the publication of his L’Évangile et L’Église (1902). Here he argued against Adolf von Harnack’s reduction of Christian faith to the religious and ethical teaching of Jesus. Church tradition carried faith forwards, leading to its development beyond the initial data provided by the gospels. The church, developing organically from the society that Jesus founded, is necessary to 6 On Essays and Reviews, see also Chapter 17 in this volume. 7 Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. H. B. Wilson (London: Parker, 1860), 377. 8 A similar controversy afflicted Presbyterian circles in the United States when Charles Briggs of Union Theological Seminary in New York was excommunicated in 1893.

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maintain his gospel, though it must take different forms to adapt to changing circumstances. His famous remark that “Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came”9 pointed to the necessity of the ecclesial community to advance his work. The emergence of the Catholic tradition pace Harnack was neither a mistake nor a declension from the pure gospel of its founder. Yet, by distinguishing the New Testament from later doctrinal formulations, Loisy appeared to be arguing against their continuity or any sense that the dogmatic tradition is already embedded in the New Testament. In 1903, several of his works were placed on the list of prohibited books; five years later, he was excommunicated. The most theologically sensitive area of Biblical criticism surrounded the historical Jesus. If critical study revealed Jesus to be strikingly different from the traditional figure of Christian devotion, what outcomes would follow? Schweitzer’s fin-de-siècle review ended on a skeptical if somewhat mystical note.10 Attempts to reconstruct the life of Jesus had tended to reflect the presuppositions and ideals of each interpreter, none more so than the French scholar Ernest Renan in his popular Life of Jesus (1863). To paraphrase George Tyrrell, another Catholic modernist, the questers of the historical Jesus had stared into the deep well of history and seen there only the reflection of their own faces. In most cases, these were liberal and Protestant. Schleiermacher’s own reliance on the Fourth Gospel as affording the best description of the historical Jesus had already proved untenable. Not surprisingly, such projects were discounted by more rigorous historical study which situated Jesus in first-century Galilee as an end-time prophet rooted in the soil of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology. For Schweitzer, this Christ was strange and unknown to us, though he continued to exercise the power of fascination.

Mediating Theologies Theologies of mediation are not easily defined. These did not belong to a single school or tendency, nor were they dominated by the influence of a leading thinker. The term itself (Vermittlungstheologie in German) could be used negatively to describe an uneasy compromise between the secular and the ecclesiastical. Yet some important trends can be detected, particularly in Germany and England, amongst scholars who sought to position faith claims positively in relation to other disciplinary perspectives. Schleiermacher may 9 Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the Church (London: Pitman, 1908), 166. 10 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: A & C Black, 1910).

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be seen as an early exponent of mediating theology by virtue of his attempt to reassert the distinctive claims of Christian faith while recognizing the ways in which modern science, philosophical scepticism, and historical criticism make previous approaches untenable. Later theologians such as Isaak Dorner, the best example of mediating theology in Germany, regarded Schleiermacher as having over-stressed states of human consciousness at the expense of the being of God. The Christian faith offers a resolution of the moral and spiritual antagonisms that beset each human life – here one can detect an apologetic element in Dorner. What the gospel offers us is forgiveness, justification, and reconciliation, centered upon a knowledge of Christ as the divine Logos. Dorner’s Glaubenslehre, completed in 1881, is heavily concentrated on the doctrines of the incarnation and Trinity as offering a distinctive knowledge of the being and action of God. Here he attempted to think of the immanent divine being in terms that corresponded to its historical expression in creation and redemption. This constituted a break with classical theism on attributes of immutability and impassibility, thus anticipating the later emphasis in British and Germany theology on divine suffering. Similar mediating strategies can be detected in Anglicanism, these generally being dominated by an awareness of historical criticism allied to a conviction regarding the centrality of the incarnation. In distinguishing understanding and reason, Samuel Taylor Coleridge combined romantic sensibilities with his revision of Kant. Reason is a faculty by which we are able to know things-in-themselves and derives from the divine Logos which mediates between God and creation. Here the doctrine of the Trinity became of epistemological significance. In an act of self-realization, God lives as Father, Son, and Spirit, a unity in differentiation. This model of oneness in diversity also had significant political implications for Coleridge, especially in his defense of a national church in Aids to Reflection (1825). Envisioning a society that was imbued in its diverse parts by a shared culture, he viewed the monarch as symbolizing a unity of state, church, and people. The Anglican focus on the doctrine of the incarnation is evident in many of its key exponents and movements in the nineteenth century. Having migrated from Unitarianism to the Church of England in 1831, F. D. Maurice developed a theology in which the incarnation, as the union of humanity and divinity, reflected the oneness and purpose of creation. This unity in difference is to be reflected in church and society – Maurice himself was a founder member of the Christian Socialist Movement. The effect of the incarnation was to reveal the structure of the created order and to promote 74

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its underlying principles through education and social action. There was less stress here on the traditional language of atonement, as in theories of satisfaction or penal substitution. Instead the self-giving of the Son of God discloses the eternal nature of divine love and raises us to conform our lives to its likeness. The contributors to the aforementioned Essays and Reviews tended to reflect the same meditating tendencies. Their commitment to historical criticism and modern science was held in tandem with quite traditional theological convictions about creation, revelation, and reconciliation. Appearing shortly after The Origin of Species (1859), this body of work signaled an early acceptance of the theory of evolution and a recognition that its effects would be significant. Baden Powell predicted that Darwin’s great work “must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.”11 A similar approach can be discerned in Lux Mundi (1889), a collection of twelve essays advocating a religion of the incarnation alongside an allegiance to historical criticism and evolutionary theory. The political concerns of Maurice were also reflected in a commitment to Christian socialism amongst several of the essayists. Stressing the immanence of God in creaturely processes, Lux Mundi tended to view the incarnation as the high point in the story of creation. In this way, an evolutionary account of nature could sit well with a theology that described the work of God in and through creaturely processes, as opposed to occasional miraculous interpositions. So Aubrey Moore famously remarked that Darwinism appearing in the disguise of a foe performed the work of a friend.12 Similar accommodations of Darwinism were found in the writings of leading Scottish divines, including Robert Rainy and Robert Flint in Edinburgh, and in Asa Gray at Harvard. In many ways, the reaction to Darwin aroused much less controversy in the late nineteenth century than did the espousal of higher criticism.13 Only in isolated quarters such as Belfast and Princeton were there signs of concerted resistance – the culture wars surrounding Darwinian evolution should be considered a twentieth-century phenomenon.

11 Baden Powell, “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. H. B. Wilson (London: Parker, 1860), 138. 12 Aubrey Moore, “The Christian Doctrine of God,” in Lux Mundi, ed. Charles Gore (London: John Murray, 1889), 99. 13 See David Livingstone, Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

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The editor of Lux Mundi was Charles Gore, who exerted a widespread influence into the early twentieth century as theologian, teacher, and bishop. Although open to Biblical criticism and the findings of modern science, Gore was also concerned to restrict symbolic interpretations of Scriptural and credal tenets against modernizing tendencies. The virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ were defended, while the redemptive and counter-active effects of the incarnation for a world mired in sin were stressed. To this extent, he was alert to the dangers of Whiggish notions of human progress, even before the culture shock of the Great War. Elements of socialism proved attractive to Gore, particularly the idea of an organic society in which the relationships of individuals to one another were recognized as vital to the selfrealization of each within the whole. The church could be considered “an extension of the incarnation” in its sacramental life, fellowship, and social action. Gore was active in the Christian Social Union, founded in 1889 by Henry Scott Holland, a fellow contributor to Lux Mundi. Despite being a loner in many respects, Gore’s blending of liberal and Catholic theological themes exercised extensive influence upon twentieth-century Anglicanism. Gore was one of several exponents of kenotic Christology in Britain. This was another German import, which was developed by Thomasius and Gess from the 1850s onwards. A term deriving from the Greek ‘keno¯sis’ (Christ ‘emptied’ himself, according to Philippians 2:7), kenoticism holds together a keen sense of the humanity of Jesus, as discerned by historical criticism, with the traditional commitment to his divinity. The kenoticists argued that the pre-incarnate Logos adapted his divinity to a form consistent with living a fully human life under the natural and historical conditions of development. In distinguishing the immanent and the relative attributes of divinity, Gottfried Thomasius, a Lutheran theologian in Erlangen, was able to argue that in becoming Incarnate the Logos retained the essential immanent attributes, including holiness, love, and justice, while divesting himself of those relative attributes described in terms of God’s relation to the created world, for example omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. This process was a kenotic one in which the divine underwent a self-emptying to satisfy the constraints of a truly human existence while maintaining the essential divinity of Christ by virtue of these immanent attributes. Yet the immanent divine attributes remained intact so that Christ’s essential divinity was retained, though shorn of relative attributes. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the attractions of kenotic Christology outweighed its deficiencies in the judgment of many leading British theologians, even at a time when it declined in its 76

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German heartlands.14 In his Dissertation on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation (1895), Gore further elaborated his initial commitment to kenotic theory. In Scotland, A. B. Bruce in The Humiliation of Christ (1876) offered a defense of kenoticism as the necessary outworking of the logic of the Christ hymn in Philippians 2:5–11. Other Scottish theologians, most notably P. T. Forsyth and H. R. Mackintosh, followed him, though both were careful to limit the speculative tendencies toward which this inclined. By about 1920 this approach to the doctrine of the person of Christ had largely run its course. Problems included the speculative entanglements into which it entered, particularly the bizarre notion of a temporary administrative reorganization within the persons of the Trinity, as well as the theological problem of whether it reduced the incarnation to a brief theophany rather than the self-revelation of the eternal God. Was the purpose of the incarnation not primarily to reveal rather than to conceal God? Turning to other pursuits, particularly to history and ethics, Christology in Germany tended to eschew these metaphysical speculations. The study of religions other than Christianity developed rapidly after the middle of the nineteenth century through philological, philosophical, and social-scientific study, though again this work was adumbrated by Enlightenment interest in other religious traditions and cultures. Figures such as Max Müller, scholar of comparative religion and in 1888 the first Gifford Lecturer in Glasgow, were influential in raising awareness of the sacred texts, practices, and beliefs of the world religions. In a spirit of mediation, theologians responded to some of the obvious challenges that this presented. In their contributions to Essays and Reviews, Maurice and Jowett broke with earlier assumptions of Christian triumphalism by offering a positive estimation of the beliefs and practical effects of other religions. In similar vein, Rowland Williams proposed a broadening of the understanding of divine revelation by “not removing the footsteps of the eternal from Palestine, but tracing them on other shores.”15 If God had worked amongst the Jews, we should not assume that the reach of divine providence was limited to one region or people. Several key principles informed Victorian thinking about the relationship of Christianity to other faiths. First, it was widely assumed that the history of religion followed an evolutionary path. Within this evolution of religion, one 14 See David W. Brown, Divine Humanity: Kenosis Explored and Defended (London: SCM Press, 2011). 15 Rowland Williams, “Bunsen’s Biblical Researches,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. H. B. Wilson (London: Parker, 1860), 51.

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could detect development and progress. This enabled theologians to perceive Christianity as both surpassing and also fulfilling elements that could be discerned in other faiths. The alternative and minority view was that other faiths represented a decline or degeneration from an original pure revelation of monotheism – this fitted a narrative of fall and redemption – but, as with the claims of the deists, any account of an original, revelatory, and global event was difficult to substantiate. Instead, evolutionary views of the history of religion tended to dominate – a leading example was Edward Caird’s St Andrews Gifford Lectures of 1890–1892, which concluded in Hegelian manner with the absolute religion of the incarnation.16 Second, comparisons with other faiths could be welcomed as these were capable of exhibiting points of similarity and contact. Where these existed, one might reasonably postulate either a common human perception of the divine or a general revelation that extended far beyond the provincial reach of Judaism and Christianity. Third, in dealing with sacred texts, scholars could adopt a more capacious account of providence in extending the category of inspiration beyond the canonical books of the Bible. Within an evolutionary framework, it was thus possible to incorporate the good practice, veridical beliefs, and sacred scriptures of different faith traditions. Much liberal theology inclined in this direction. Illingworth, another contributor to Lux Mundi, argued that the pre-Christian religions were analogous to pagan philosophy in preparing people for a fuller disclosure of God’s identity. For this reason, we should expect some similarities of belief, practice, and ritual. “The pre-Christian religions were the agelong prayer. The Incarnation was the answer.”17 Much of this literature offered a more informed and charitable account of other religions within a modified theological framework. For Christians in the west, such an approach had wide appeal both at home and in overseas mission fields. Yet it was vulnerable to further empirical study that disrupted progressive evolutionary accounts of the complex history of religion or overdetermined the signs of similarity between faiths. In hindsight, the Procrustean imposition of a theological worldview upon the study of religion was not hard to discern; social scientists were understandably keen to cast off the yoke of theology. Yet at least the challenge of religious plurality was acknowledged and addressed in the nineteenth century.18 16 Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (Glasgow: Macelhose, 1893). 17 John Richardson Illingworth, “The Incarnation in Relation to Development,” in Lux Mundi, ed. Charles Gore (London: John Murray, 1889), 206. 18 See the discussion in James. C. Livingston, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 230–278.

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The mediation of Christianity and contemporary philosophical culture is further evident in several seminal Russian thinkers of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Solovyov, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov. Vladimir Solovyov (also transliterated as Soloviev) absorbed philosophical influences from his travels across Europe and Egypt while uniting these with a commitment to Orthodox theology and spirituality. His work proved highly influential and has important links with Dostoevsky – Alyosha, a central character in the The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), may have been inspired by Solovyov. Arguing for a union of church and culture, Solovyov dealt at some length with the kingdom of God as an organic community united by ethical and religious bonds. Here he presented a vision of Russian society as having the potential to overcome the division between the impersonalism of Islam and the individualism of the Christian west through instantiating a ‘third force’ – the humanity of God. The incarnation was key to this ultimate unity through the fullness of the spirit-filled body of Christ, who represents the fulfillment of religion. An incarnational theology must then be united with philosophy and science to form a single integrated ‘theosophy.’ Although it is elusive in some respects – Solovyov was described as a philosopher by day and a mystic by night – his work signals the influence of Enlightenment thought on Russian theology, literature, and spirituality.19

The School of Ritschl The work of Albrecht Ritschl, who held a chair in Göttingen from 1864, determined much of the Protestant theology of the second half of the nineteenth century. In Ritschl’s work, which represents a return to Kant, there is a less speculative and more empirical focus, particularly with its concentration on historical study. The value judgments of ethics take us to the brink of religion, though not quite in the way that Kant intended. For Ritschl, religion, though practical in intention, springs from a deeper wellspring of human consciousness and thus provides a resolution of ethical guilt and uncertainty. Here there are echoes of Schleiermacher. As a value judgment, faith in Christ is an act of practical trust. Its content resides in a conviction that the kingdom which Christ brings is a divinely bestowed reality which regulates the world. The self is redeemed and repositioned in nature and society. People of faith, 19 For further discussion see Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); and Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Continuum: London, 2008).

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no longer at the mercy of impersonal forces, are assured that the world is ordered according to higher values that derive from God. Here Ritschl draws inspiration from Luther’s concept of faith as an existential commitment that trusts the promise of God to care for us. The functional dictum of Melanchthon was frequently quoted in this context: “To know Christ is to know his benefits.” The concentration on history within Ritschl’s school, in particular the study of the New Testament, determined much of late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The reaction against natural theology and speculative metaphysics together with the focus on the person of Jesus, historical critical study of the New Testament, the importance of ethics in religion, and the irreducible personhood of God and each individual are all recurrent features of theological liberalism. These are apparent, for example, in Harnack’s bestselling work What Is Christianity? (1900). Yet already by 1880, Ritschl’s program was in trouble. One particular challenge involved the capacity of historical scholarship to deliver an account of Jesus that supported the theological claims of his distinctiveness.20 Some, including Ritschl’s son-in-law, Johannes Weiss, pointed to a Jewish end-time prophet who looked less like the teacher and exemplar of the ethical kingdom described by liberal theologians. Around the turn of the century, two trends emerged within the liberal school, which corresponded roughly to the difference between Schleiermacher and Hegel. For Wilhelm Herrmann, Christian faith rests upon an experience of the inner life of Jesus as this is communicated through the gospels. In this way, the act of faith does not depend upon the relative and probabilistic judgment of the historian or the deliverances of the metaphysician. The person of Christ impresses itself upon us without the mediation of historical reconstruction. By contrast, Ernst Troeltsch, a leading figure in the History of Religion School, insisted that the act of faith cannot transcend or bypass the processes of history. According to this critique, Herrmann’s approach represented a rearguard action in attempting to establish an exceptionalism by isolating theology from historical and philosophical study. Yet this assumes a vantage point that we cannot possess within historical and natural processes. For Troeltsch, the ‘absoluteness of Christianity’ resides not so much in transcending history but in representing the high-water mark within an evolutionary history of religion in its treatment of God, the world, and ourselves. Troeltsch’s views were to 20 Johannes Zachhuber charts these developments, particularly with reference to the work of Julius Kaftan. See Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth Century Germany, 265–272.

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prove vulnerable to subsequent empirical study of religion that stressed greater diversity and particularity, and also to the shattering of evolutionary optimism during the Great War. Herrmann, by contrast, was the teacher of Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth, whose work in different ways challenged yet continued his approach through the twentieth century.21

Confessional Approaches Though resisted by more confessional orthodox Lutherans, Ritschl’s work is clearly indebted to church tradition and did much to stimulate the study of Luther in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, other constructive expressions of confessional traditions also featured in nineteenth-century European theology. Institutional factors shaped the development of church traditions throughout this period. These included the appearance of Catholic faculties of theology in the German universities, the founding of seminaries and colleges in the United States, and breakaway groupings in Scotland and the Netherlands that sought to recover their Reformed heritage. While seeking to affirm their historic identities, scholars from within these traditions were able to absorb an array of influences from their surrounding culture. Despite the attacks of skeptics and cultured despisers, a selfconfidence energized the churches, which rode with the tide of imperial expansion, missionary outreach, and religious awakening from the late eighteenth century onwards. The so-called Tübingen School of Catholic theology may not have constituted a single tradition, but in their concerns and approach its exponents displayed some clear continuity amidst differences of emphasis during the first half of the nineteenth century. Its leading figures included J. S. Drey, J. A. Möhler, J. B. Hirscher, and F. A. Staudenmaier. In different ways, they stressed the developmental nature of Catholic tradition across history by steering a course between a static triumphalism and a cultural relativism. Drey’s apologetic work after 1800 reveals the influence of Schleiermacher. Religious affections are an ineradicable and irreducible feature of human existence, yet these do not distill into an essentialist natural religion as in deism. The historical expressions of religion provide its form and content, though for Drey this includes both Scripture and the living traditions of the church in a single organic 21 See, for example, Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

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whole. To this end, the kingdom of God as taught and enacted by Jesus became a useful controlling concept for understanding a historical movement that included the life of the church and culminated in the second coming of Christ. As an organic approach to Scripture and tradition, this proved useful in combating the (Protestant) disjunction of the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. Late in Drey’s career, it would also lead to an affirmation of Christian socialism. Möhler stressed the living reality of the church, whose vital organs were the sacraments. Nourished by the Holy Spirit, the church persists as a single divine institution in the world. The Catholic theologians of Tübingen were united by a commitment to the organic, sacramental, and institutional nature of the church, and the importance of theology for its common life. Affinities can be discerned in the work of John Henry Newman in England. As a patristic scholar, he had a deep appreciation of the importance of the sacraments in the early church and their centrality for the Christian life. His Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845) stressed the nature of the church as a living organism. Neither an immobile expression of the faith nor captive to the prejudices of a given age, Christian doctrine can develop in accordance with a set of principles that determine its proper development, without declension or deviation from tradition. Though largely drafted prior to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, this work was revised and adapted to his new ecclesiastical affiliation. In generating widespread debate, however, Newman appeared to his critics to concede too much to individual judgment and creative impulses within church tradition. The sceptical, restless, and interrogative tendency which governed his life’s work ensured some suspicion on all sides, the magnificence of his theological prose notwithstanding. The importance of apologetics in combating heterodoxy and skepticism can be seen in the manuals of the time. Giovanni Perrone, an Italian Jesuit who taught for more than thirty years at the Gregorian University, was one of the theological experts at the first Vatican Council (1869–1870) and exercised a key role in formulating the definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854). Perrone produced in nine volumes his Praelectiones theologiae dogmaticae (1835), which appeared in thirty-four editions to 1888. Even more influential was his Compendium (1845) of the work that went through forty-seven editions during a period of almost fifty years. Although it was not a strikingly original production, it influenced several generations of students, many of whom later held episcopal office. Its structure shaped the theological curriculum and set out a series 82

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of standardized responses to philosophical atheism and faulty theories of revelation.22 The Catholic revival of Thomism can partly be attributed to the need to combat Kantian and idealist tendencies in nineteenth-century philosophical theology. In taking theology in speculative and heterodox directions, these carried unwelcome doctrinal baggage. With its commitment to the mindindependent and determinate world of Aristotelian realism and natural law, Thomism was perceived to place theology upon a surer philosophical foundation. The leading figure was a German Jesuit, Joseph Kleutgen, another consultant at Vatican I. He is widely believed to have been involved in the drafting of Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which advocated a recovery of Thomist teaching for a right understanding of philosophy. Against the Hegelianism of Anton Günther and others, Kleutgen advocated a return to the traditions of scholastic theology. With its commitments to ancient philosophy and the work of the early Church Fathers, this revived Thomism proved attractive in this context. In providing a configuration of philosophy and theology, it had a capacity to coordinate nature and grace, and reason and faith in ways that assigned an appropriate significance to each. Consequently, the officially sanctioned theology of the church could combat those mistaken approaches condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), especially traditionalism (which accredited too little to natural reason) and ontologism (which accredited too much). Thomism, it seems, could negotiate a safe passage between these dangerous shoals. Although the interpretation of Aeterni Patris is contested – does it favor a strict adherence to Aquinas or is it merely a commendation of his general approach? – the influence of the encyclical in shaping Catholic theology throughout the twentieth century, particularly through the return ad fontes, cannot be doubted. European confessional traditions had been exported with emigration to North America. Throughout the nineteenth century, these developed in ways that reflected the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the New World. Charles Hodge taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1820 to 1878. Under his leadership, Presbyterian theology adopted a quasi-scientific approach to texts as establishing propositional truths. This was combined with a strong commitment to the Westminster Confession (1646) as the best summation of the system of doctrine found in Scripture. His theology was set in opposition to those romantic, pantheist, idealist, and revisionist trends that 22 See C. Michael Shea, “Giovanni Perrone’s Theological Curriculum and the First Vatican Council,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 110 (2015), 790–816.

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he discerned in the Zeitgeist – like many in North America, he found Scottish common-sense realism a more congenial philosophical partner. Hodge’s dominance of Presbyterian theology extended through much of the century. His successor, B. B. Warfield, also advanced the scholarly study of the Reformers, while defending in robust terms the plenary inspiration of Scripture. Other confessional approaches flourished in the United States, for example in the theology of Walther, a leading figure in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and in the more catholic Reformed theology of John Williams Nevin at Mercersburg. Back in Europe, the emergence of Neo-Calvinism in the Netherlands was evident in the work of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Kuyper was the founder and leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party in 1879, and served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. His political theology was shaped by opposition to several religious and political trends. Rejecting the pietist tendency to restrict faith to private devotional and ethical practice, he argued in his Stone Lectures on Calvinism (1898) for a worldview that embraced every sphere of life. This also set him against forms of political liberalism that sought to exclude the influence of religion from the public domain. For Kuyper, an essential Calvinist insight is that every sphere of creation is intended to glorify God in its distinctive way. Created life is shaped by a covenant relationship with its Maker. In their diverse forms, the different spheres of creation reflect the divine wisdom, whether in family, trade, science, or art. These interact with each other to form an organic whole in human societies. The state should not encroach unduly upon those other spheres of created life, which in their own ways serve God. What emerges is a distinctively Calvinist inflection of a Christian society. Bavinck, a pupil of Kuyper, taught in Kampen and at the Free University of Amsterdam. His four-volume Reformed Dogmatics (1895–1901) represented a return to the classical Reformed tradition, but one that recognized historical development and registered its late-nineteenth-century intellectual context.

Alternative Theologies and Radical Criticism of Religion The plurality of nineteenth-century religious thought is perhaps most evident in the array of alternatives to Christian orthodoxy. Ranging from different spiritualities to a wholesale rejection of religion, these approaches anticipate the religious diversity and secularism of contemporary western societies. Romantic, Spinozist, and pantheist influences provided an alternative both 84

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History, Tradition, and Skepticism

to orthodox Christianity and to materialist philosophy in literary figures including Goethe and Carlyle who sought to retain the ethical elements of Christianity without its accompanying dogmas. Their work was transported to the United States through Ralph Waldo Emerson. Much influenced by his travels and contacts in Europe, he advocated a form of religion that was characterized by personal inwardness, reverence of nature, self-esteem, and moral optimism. His essay on Nature (1836) marked the beginning of the transcendentalist movement which flourished in New England and commanded the support of literary figures including Thoreau, Alcott, and Whitman. Adopting the Kantian insight that in our sense of moral obligation we encounter an ultimate reality, Emerson identifies the essential self. Each human soul is able to intuit its own divinity through a sense of virtue arising within us. Neither an external gift nor an imposition, this is the realization of one’s own participation in the divine. Our sense of unity with the divine is also intimated in the natural world, which is everywhere imbued with a universal spirit – in this context, Emerson writes evocatively of the great outdoors in America.23 God is described in moving if elusive descriptions of the ‘Over-Soul.’ “[W]ithin man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.”24 Resonating with romantic and idealist impulses, Emerson’s religion also had affinities with Unitarian theology – he himself had originally been ordained a Unitarian minister, though his later work tended to set the true expression of religion against its institutionalized forms. The feel-good factor in much of this, particularly for a younger generation, contrasted with an old-time religion which stressed human depravity and the atoning death of Christ. Emerson famously complained about the “noxious exaggeration”25 of the person of Christ in ecclesiastical dogma. At best, Jesus is a teacher and moral exemplar who shows what is latent within each of us, a possibility that we can realize by our own efforts. Transcendentalism espouses a spirituality that contrasts with traditional and more institutional forms of Christianity. Its literary bent, inward and individualized spirituality, and capacity to absorb diverse religious influences were suited to more eclectic and less prescribed forms of ecclesiastical adherence. 23 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 39. 24 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 207. 25 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address,” in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 114.

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Meanwhile, in continental Europe, more radical rejections of religion were manifested, particularly on the Hegelian left. A key transitional figure was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose inversion of idealism resulted in a projectionist account of religion in The Essence of Christianity (1841). According to Feuerbach, we create God in our image, not vice versa. The idea of the divine is a projection of our deepest aspirations, especially love. To take one example, the idea of the Trinity as a divine community constituted by eternal relations of love is an expression of our fundamental human longing to love and to be loved. In this respect, the divine is a function of concerns that emerge from the conditions of material existence. This projectionist account appeared in different forms in the subsequent critiques of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Neo-Darwinians. Karl Marx argued that religion had not only to be understood in non-realist terms; more importantly, it needed to be exposed to radical criticism. The projecting of our aspirations onto God and heaven was the result of economic alienation, “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and the “opium of the people.”26 To abandon this illusion requires us to remedy the causes that give rise to it. Hence the economic conditions of a capitalist society, rather than the study of religion, became the primary focus of Marx’s work. In England, doubt and agnosticism (a term coined by T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) tended to become the default setting of a group of literary figures in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Their rejection of religion included notes of elegy and wistfulness, as in Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and Hardy’s “God’s Funeral.” Yet in the writings of Nietzsche, there is an angrier and more combative atheism that attacks the servile virtues of Christianity that promote social control and stifle our more natural, vital, and healthier instincts. Nietzsche shares a projectionist account of religion, yet this is deconstructed to show how religion functions as an ideological device with negative consequences. In The Genealogy of Morals (1887), he argues that religion disguises a will-to-power on the part of a priestly caste. Their imposition of servile virtues and practices, such as humility and penance, undermined the warrior values of pagan culture. Yet these are proud, celebratory, and life-affirming values. To recapture their vitalism, if not their content, and direct it toward a new and unprecedented revaluation of values “beyond good and evil,” we need to overturn the morality of Christianity. Nietzsche is scathing of those thinkers, such as 26 Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 64.

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George Eliot, who sought to retain the ethical teaching of Christianity while abandoning its metaphysics. He writes dramatically about the death of God at our hands.27 As an unmasking of the motives and content of religion, his atheism offers the most radical and far-reaching criticism. It extends beyond an indictment of institutional Christianity to any replacement for God that we choose to adopt. Secular substitutes are equally prone to his hermeneutics of suspicion. The recognition that these are not only constructed, but prone to delusion, co-option, and the search for power, is inescapable according to Nietzsche’s searching analysis. His philosophical dream may be the theologian’s worst nightmare. This survey has pointed to the immense diversity of the theologies that flourished in the nineteenth century. The richness of the period is illustrated almost as much by those figures who have to be omitted, owing to space constraints, as by those who have merited inclusion. The problems, methods, and proposals that were tackled and developed loom large in contemporary theology. Together these confirm the long nineteenth century as arguably the most fruitful and compelling period of theological enquiry.

27 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119–220.

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The Young Hegelians: Philosophy as Critical Praxis warren breckman In 1837, David Friedrich Strauss intervened in the enormous controversy that had raged around his book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined since its appearance in 1835. The book was indeed provocative. Not only did Strauss deny the divinity of Jesus Christ as the incarnate son of God. He even left in doubt that Jesus, the man, had actually existed in history. The book shook the Hegelian School to its core, and, surveying the fractures that had emerged, Strauss identified a ‘left’, ‘right,’ and ‘center.’ The crucial dividing line rested on a matter of great concern to Hegel and his followers, namely the relationship between philosophy and Christian doctrine. “There are three possible answers to the question of whether and to what extent the idea of the unity of divine and human nature proved the gospel to be history,” wrote Strauss: “the concept proves either the entirety of the history, merely a part of it, or none of it. If each of these answers and directions were indeed represented by a branch of the Hegelian school, then, using the traditional analogy, the first direction, as standing closest to the long-established system, could be named the right, the third direction named the left, and the second named the center.”1 On the left, he placed only himself. That situation did not long endure. The radicalization of the Hegelian left proceeded so rapidly that, by 1841, Strauss had broken his ties with the Deutsche Jahrbücher, the main journal of the Hegelian left, no longer able to tolerate the criticisms and gibes of other leading figures such as Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer.2 If G. W. F. Hegel’s thought was the greatest achievement of German philosophy in the wake of Immanuel Kant, then the breakdown of the 1 Strauss quoted in Jon Stewart, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and the Question of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ Hegelianism,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 67. 2 Strauss to Theodor Vischer, November 13, 1841, in Briefwechsel zwischen Strauss und Vischer, ed. Adolf Rapp, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1952), vol. I, 105.

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Hegelian school and the emergence of radical Left Hegelianism in the late 1830s and early 1840s were themselves momentous developments in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. The Young Hegelians contributed enormously to the politicization of intellectual life in Germany in the years before and after the failed Revolution of 1848. Their critique of religion took them beyond Enlightenment anti-religiosity and blazed trails that philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of religious belief have been treading ever since. They reimagined philosophy as critique, as critical theory aimed at liberating people from the mental and physical chains that bind them. Their political engagements brought them to the forefront of republican and democratic thinking; and Karl Marx, whose early intellectual formation was indelibly stamped by his involvement with the radical Hegelians, was not alone in drawing socialist and even communist conclusions from the trajectory of Left Hegelian thought. Still further, they were the first to experience a condition in which we still find ourselves. Precisely the allencompassing ambition of Hegel’s work made Hegel something of a horizon for the very possibility of thinking modernity as a unified and meaningful phenomenon. To experience the collapse of Hegel’s school meant liberation from a thought system that, despite its infinite scope, seemed always to fold phenomena back into a constraining schema, yet it also meant a confrontation with the question of how to think outside that schema. It is a problem still with us. Michel Foucault noted in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970 that “our age is attempting to flee Hegel.” Over a century earlier, the Hegelian Left might have said the same thing. They were perhaps more optimistic about their capacity to forge beyond the horizon of Hegel than Foucault, whose lecture cautioned that “our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.”3 In 1831, just ten years before David Friedrich Strauss withdrew from the Deutsche Jahrbücher, the twenty-three-year-old Strauss resigned his post as a teacher of theology in a southwest German seminary to study in Berlin with luminaries such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and, above all, G. W. F. Hegel. Strauss’s copious notes from Hegel’s course on political philosophy survive, as does a lapidary memento on Monday, November 14, 1831, that Hegel had died suddenly of cholera during the weekend. Strauss had barely arrived in Berlin. To the inner circle of Hegel’s followers – students and colleagues who 3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 235.

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had enjoyed a longer relationship with the great thinker – the prospect of a disintegration of the Hegelian school was far from their minds. Indeed, the political philosopher Eduard Gans wrote in his obituary that, with Hegel, philosophy had “completed its circle.” Its future progress could only consist “in terms of a thoughtful working over of the material according to the method and principle that the irreplaceable deceased established with such sharpness and clarity.” In his graveside eulogy, Friedrich Förster struck a similar note. There would be no successor to the emperor of philosophy. At most, “The Satraps will divide the orphaned provinces among themselves.”4 For many, though by no means all, German-speaking philosophers at the time, Hegel did, in fact, seem to occupy all the territories of human thought. His was a system that aspired to embrace all, the entirety of human, natural, and even divine phenomena. If Hegel’s aims were breathtakingly holistic, they nonetheless always centered on the rational human subject and its prospects for freedom. He was an heir of the Enlightenment and particularly of Kant. Yet, he was troubled by the dualism that left the autonomous rational subject separate from a world of things-in-themselves. An adequate theory of reason and human freedom would have to overcome the separation of thought and being, subject and world. His opposition to dualism linked Hegel to his Romantic contemporaries, but he rejected Romantic dreams that simply submerged the individual in some greater whole, whether that whole was construed as community, nature, the infinite cosmos, or the godhead. Unity had to be won through reason and in such a way that the autonomy of the human subject was realized, not thwarted, by its integration into a greater totality. In Hegel’s first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he embedded an historical account of the development of human selfconsciousness within a larger spiritual drama. The Phenomenology traces each successive mode of thought as it emerged from what preceded it, only to yield to another that transcended its contradictions but preserved its partial truths within a higher, more embracing comprehension of reality. This was a complicated spiritual advancement, wherein human consciousness moves through various forms of sense-certainty, empiricism, metaphysical dogmatism, mysticism, and analytical rationalism to arrive at a higher form of reason that penetrates the manifold of being, recognizes the deeper unity 4 Gans and Förster quoted in John Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 203–204.

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underlying division, and incorporates into itself the movement of contradiction and conflict that is the movement of the world itself. This is a historical development not only toward “absolute knowledge” but also, significantly, toward absolute freedom, because the progress of reason promises to overcome all alienating externality. As Hegel was to assert in The Philosophy of Right, “For it is only when I think that I am with myself, and it is only by comprehending it that I can penetrate an object; it then no longer stands opposed to me, and I have deprived it of that quality of its own which it had for itself in opposition to me . . . ‘I’ is at home in the world when it knows it, and even more so when it has comprehended it.”5 Unity was, in other words, not a given, but an unfolding process; nor was it won simply by overcoming individual subjectivity, but rather through the growing capacity of particular consciousness to grasp the universal. Ultimately, in a claim that exhilarated his followers and infuriated his opponents, Hegel identified the development of human subjectivity with nothing less than the emergence of finite spirit’s recognition of its participation in the self-realization of “Absolute Spirit,” or God, in and through the world. In language whose meaning and implications have been intensely debated ever since, Hegel asserted near the conclusion of The Phenomenology that “The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity that is beheld.”6 Hegel knew that he risked producing yet another dualism if he conceived this process only as one occurring in the interior mental world of the individual subject. Reason must recognize itself in the world, but that could not be limited to passive contemplation of nature or even of God; rather, in human history reason slowly builds a world in which, to use Hegel’s terms, the “subjective spirit” comes to see itself reflected in “objective spirit,” by which Hegel meant the institutions and mores (Sittlichkeit) of concrete, particular forms of collective human life, and recognizes its agency in creating that world. As with his thinking about nature and religion, so too in history and politics, Hegel’s core idea was that the unity of the human subject and the world was the product of a long process of self-realization, one that does not entail the disappearance of the individual human being, but rather brings particular subjects and the whole into a new and mutually enriching relation of identity and difference. True to his belief that an adequate philosophy of the totality must combine universality and particularity, Hegel tracked this process in a way that combined the 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–36. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 415.

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all-encompassing scale of human history with a remarkably granular attention to detail. In the name of this project, Hegel ventured into almost all the domains of human action, thought, and endeavor, embracing religion, aesthetics, historical study, and politics in a system that claimed to culminate in philosophical comprehension of the rational unity of all. Compared to the meteoric rise of Hegel’s companion in his student days at the Tübingen seminary, F. W. J. Schelling, who had won nationwide fame by the age of twenty-three, Hegel’s success had come slowly. Indeed, Hegel’s star rose only when he assumed a professorship at Heidelberg in 1816 and then moved to a position at the University of Berlin in 1818. In those years, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and in the context of efforts to restore the pre-revolutionary ancien régime, Hegel began to attract supporters and followers. As the historian John Toews has documented, the growth of a Hegelian school during Hegel’s lifetime emerged in two phases.7 In the later 1810s, the political fall-out from the end of the Napoleonic era meant that his first disciples frequently turned to Hegel for answers to pressing political issues, rather than the pursuit of truth in itself. The sense of political urgency subsided, aided no doubt by the Karlsbad Decrees, which in 1819 introduced a regime of strict censorship and repression of progressive political movements throughout central Europe. In the less overtly politicized context of the 1820s, Hegel’s political thought commanded less attention than did his work on art, religion, and philosophy. In due course, Hegel’s following gained visibility and legitimacy in ways that have become familiar in modern academic life: Hegel’s students graduated and some assumed teaching positions, while a Hegelian academic society, the Society for Scientific Critique, was founded, along with a major journal, the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik. Though some historians have spoken of a period in the 1820s and early 1830s when the Hegelian school enjoyed a dominant position in German intellectual life, Hegelianism was never in fact the predominant philosophical position. It vied with other intellectual trends, including Romanticism, historicism, and various blendings of theology and philosophy, which ranged from Schleiermacher’s liberal theology to more orthodox forms of Pietism. Nor did the Hegelian school ever assert a dominating presence in the German-speaking lands of Central Europe. It remained strongest in Berlin, with a scattering of Hegelians across the German states and some notable representatives in Prussian universities such as Königsberg or in the southwestern state of Württemburg. 7 Toews, Hegelianism, 84–86.

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In the eyes of its members and in those of outsiders, the Hegelian school presented a common front. Yet even while Hegel still lived, there were interpretive differences on a number of key issues. For present purposes, it suffices to identify two. One centered on the relationship between reason and the reality in which reason was supposedly active. The profoundly historical nature of Hegel’s philosophical style prohibited him from making abstract or a priori statements; instead, the course of reason as it moves toward selfrealization is to be read from the phenomena of the world. But if rationality is not a normative criterion, but rather a quality immanently emerging in the phenomena, then is there not a danger that philosophy loses its capacity to criticize and instead must sanction the world as it is as the adequate expression of reason attained at that stage? Hegel equivocated, but some of his bestknown statements suggest a conservative answer to this question. In his lectures on the philosophy of history, for example, he insisted that the meaning of history is the development of freedom, but then he asserted that “the real world is as it ought to be.”8 In the post-revolutionary context of reactionary retrenchment, that could be taken as an odd statement from a man committed to freedom. In even broader vein, Hegel asserted in the preface to The Philosophy of Right that “What is rational is actual, what is actual is rational.”9 This was a formulation that Hegel repeated in his lectures, and some of the most powerful Hegelians embraced this conservative accommodation to existing reality, and indeed praised the state apparatus of Prussia as the fulfillment of reason in the world. Others, such as Eduard Gans, drew reformist conclusions, arguing that even if reason could be discovered in the developments of world history, the philosopher should see in actuality not a stable condition, but rather the potentiality for even higher articulations of freedom.10 Hegel himself remained enigmatic. For example, the image of Hegel as an apologist for Prussia is challenged by the fact that the institutions he outlined in The Philosophy of Right do not in fact conform to any existing state, including Prussia, and seem more like lines of potential development to be discerned in the present situation. And, we have reports from encounters with Hegel that complicate a conservative interpretation of his famous claim that the actual is rational. For one, the poet 8 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 36. 9 Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 20. 10 See John Toews, “Transformations of Hegelianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 387–388; and Warren Breckman, “Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 62(3) (July 2001), 543–564.

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Heinrich Heine recounted that when he challenged Hegel’s formulation, Hegel “smiled strangely and said, ‘One could also read it as “everything which is rational must be.”’ He quickly looked about,” Heine reports, as if in fear that he would be properly understood, “but soon regained his composure.”11 For another, Strauss’s 1831 lecture notes record Hegel saying, “What is actual is rational. But not all that exists is actual.”12 Six years later, as Strauss defended his own left-wing Hegelianism, he would use exactly this argument against his critics, insisting that Hegel’s formula opened up a progressive pathway, because what was really meant was that the “actual” is the essential kernel of the merely existent.13 Ambiguities surrounding Hegel’s approach to religion were to prove more immediately incendiary. Hegel’s philosophy is one of dialectical supersession, in which the contradictions of a form of socio-political life or thought produce tensions that eventually yield new forms. Insofar as Hegel placed philosophy above religion, how should one properly understand their relationship? Did philosophy supersede religion or merely translate its content into a new conceptual form? Yet, even if it was only a matter of translation, could religion, as a system of belief, ritual practices, and communal integration, survive intact? Hegel believed that religious faith and philosophical knowledge share the same object, the Absolute, but he distinguished between the forms in which religion and philosophy express that content. Religion apprehends the Absolute “naïvely” because it does not recognize its absolute content “thinkingly” but rather represents this content “pictorially,” symbolically, as Vorstellungen (representations). Hence, religious consciousness knows the truth of religion in an unfree way, receiving that truth from authority instead of as a free determination of subjectivity. Philosophy, by contrast, appropriates the content of religion by demonstrating the rational necessity at the core of truth in religion. For Hegel, this did not mean the point-by-point rationalization of religious dogma, as some so-called theological rationalists attempted, but rather the transfiguration and supersession of religious representation in philosophical truth. Hegel’s view seemed to be that this did not jeopardize the essence of religion. Indeed, he spoke of belief taking “refuge” in the concept and of 11 Quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 95. 12 David Friedrich Strauss, “Fragment von Hegels Rechtsphilosophie,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 1818–1831, ed. K.-H. Ilting (Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1974), vol. IV, 923. 13 David Friedrich Strauss, Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwärtigen Theologie (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1837), 214.

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philosophy as a “sanctuary” for religion.14 While a number of his important early followers readily argued that philosophy and religion enjoy a harmonious and complementary coexistence, others were not so convinced. Monotheistic religions rest on a personification, namely of the divine as a personal God. Even more than Judaism and Islam, Christianity depends on personification, centered as it is on the Son of God, whose unique status as the incarnation of God had been Christian dogma since the Nicene Creed in the fourth century. In Hegel’s conceptual framework, both the personal God and Jesus Christ were Vorstellungen, naïve representations of a totality that philosophy had the power to grasp conceptually as a set of dialectially mediated relationships. Could Christianity really survive the exposure of its most venerated figures as mere symbols fashioned by human selfconsciousness at a lower stage of its development? Not surprisingly, controversies over Hegel’s philosophy of religion emerged even in his lifetime, and they tended to center on the status of personhood. Most obviously, these debates focused on the personhood of God and the divinity of Jesus Christ, but they also involved heated arguments about immortality. After all, the type of immortality that most Christians were interested in was not the survival of the dust of which we are made or the legacy of our deeds and thoughts, but the survival of the individual soul into eternity.15 Already in the 1820s, there were sufficient divergences of interpretation on these and other matters within the Hegelian school that Toews has detailed “accommodationist,” “reformist,” and “revolutionary” Hegelian positions, dubbing the latter, in an echo of the language of the 1960s, the Hegelian “old left.” A new left-wing Hegelianism emerged in the 1830s, within a broader historical context in which the post-conservative climate of the Restoration was shaken. It was a decade that opened with the July Revolution, which brought down the restored Bourbon dynasty in France and put on the throne a cousin of Charles X, Louis Philippe, who became known as the bourgeois king because of his concessions to constitutionalist and liberal democratic demands. Historical hindsight tells us that his regime was doomed to collapse in the Revolution of 1848, but, at the time, the July Revolution did send 14 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), vol. III, 246–247. 15 These debates are a recurring concern throughout my own Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. Chapter 4; and Jon Stewart, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and the Question of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ Hegelianism,” 66–95.

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a shock wave through Europe, sparking a revolution in Belgium and spurring the Polish to rise up against their Russian overlords. The western German lands experienced some political reverberations, and even in Prussia, which remained unshaken, intellectuals noted these events with varying emotion, ranging from the young Karl Gutzkow’s excited sense that the drama of history had reopened with the struggles in the Paris streets to the conservative historian Leopold von Ranke’s resigned remark that “The Revolution, which has often been pronounced at an end, seems never to be finished. It reappears in ever new and antagonistic forms.”16 The effects of the Revolution of 1830 on the course of Hegelianism are unclear and contested.17 To be sure, in the first instance, the left-wing Hegelianism that emerged in the late 1830s may be seen as a manifestation of divisions internal to the debates of the Hegelian school. Yet, the years from 1830 to 1848 witnessed intensifying conflict between reactionary governments and champions of liberalism, republicanism, and even socialism. The Left Hegelians’ bold challenges to religious orthodoxy were never far removed from the political context, nor were they ever devoid of political significance.18 Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined exposed the divergences in Hegelianism more openly and forcefully than any previous work, thereby triggering the disintegration of the school.19 Even before he had moved to 16 For Gutzkow, see Toews, Hegelianism, 217; for Ranke, see Horst Stuke, Philosophie der Tat: Studien zur “Verwirklichung der Philosophie” bei den Junghegelianern und wahren Sozialisten (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1963), 57. In a memoir written in 1845, Arnold Ruge spoke of the agitation in Germany caused by the Revolution of 1830, but asserted that the learned remained by and large complacent. See Arnold Ruge, Unser letzten zehn Jahre, in Sämmtliche Werke (Mannheim: J. P. Grohe, 1848), vol. VI, 11. 17 For the argument for a powerful effect, see Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1964), 25–26. For the counter-argument, see Toews, Hegelianism, 207f. 18 William Brazill sharply delineates between the Young Hegelians of the later 1830s and very early 1840s, whom he identifies with religious critique, and the Left Hegelians of the years after roughly 1842, whom he associates with revolutionary political and socialist ideas. See William Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University, 1970), 270. More recent scholarship, beginning with Toews’s Hegelianism and including my own Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, sees stronger political motives running throughout the history of Hegelian radicalism. See in addition, Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of “The Life of Jesus” in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Douglas Moggach (ed.), The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Douglas Moggach (ed.), Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011); and Michael Quante and Amir Mohseni (eds.), Die Linken Hegelianer: Studien zum Verhältnis von Religion und Politik im Vormärz (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015). 19 See Toews, Hegelianism, 165.

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Berlin, as a Protestant minister addressing his congregation, Strauss had been troubled by the Hegelian distinction between the representational content of the biblical narrative and the conceptual truth of philosophy. As he related in his 1837 Streitschriften, this distinction had served as the starting point for his reflections on the historical Jesus. Yet, in contrast to most of the Hegelians, Strauss combined this philosophical viewpoint with a deep commitment to historical biblical criticism, a tradition that reached back at least to Spinoza but had made big advances in the later eighteenth century.20 Indeed, the bulk of Strauss’s mammoth tome consists of close analyses of biblical text, in particular, painstaking comparisons between passages in the Old and New Testaments. From these, he concluded that the miraculous narrative of Jesus Christ was in fact a projection of messianic expectations generated by the mythic consciousness of the ancient Hebrew people. Putting paid to decades of debate, in which rationalist scholars had conceded mythic elements in scripture but tried nonetheless to identify moments of historical truth as well as genuine revelation, Strauss insisted radically that a mythic interpretation cannot be piecemeal.21 The mythical approach “takes the whole [of the New Testament] not for true history but for a sacred legend.”22 Myth, Strauss emphasized, was not to be understood as the creation of individual men, but rather as a product of a collective consciousness. Consistent with this, he quoted the scholar of Greek mythology Otfried Müller to support his refusal to view myth as a “deliberate and intentional fabrication,” insisting instead on “a certain necessity and unconsciousness in the formation of the ancient myth.”23 Such a claim reveals the philosophical framework underlying Strauss’s exacting philological work. Rather than dismissing myth as either an error or a deliberate deception, Strauss the Hegelian philosopher viewed it as the product of a lower stage of human consciousness. False as the manifest content of Christianity might be, the philosophical critic will recognize that Christianity is “identical with the deepest philosophical truth.”24 That truth is none other than the unity of the human and the divine. The naïve consciousness must clothe this insight in 20 For an excellent overview, see Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); see also George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 159 on Strauss. 21 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (London: Chapman, 1846), vol. I, 212–218. 22 Cited in Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany, 161. 23 Strauss, The Life of Jesus, vol. I, 76. 24 Strauss, The Life of Jesus, vol. III, 397.

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“sensual” form; “this truth must appear, in a guise intelligible to all, as a fact obvious to the senses; in other words there must appear a human individual who is recognized as the visible God.”25 Philosophical consciousness can dispense with this sensual form, this representation (Vorstellung), and instead seize the conceptual truth itself. Man is identical with divinity, and it is not in an individual man that perfection is attained, but in the species, in the whole of mankind, in humanity.26 Strauss established two crucial features of the Young Hegelian critique of religion. First, criticism reveals humanity as the real object of religious devotion. Second, it asserts the idea that religion is the source of human alienation because it separates humanity from its own divinity. Strauss did not believe that these critical operations would destroy Christianity; rather, he sought to rescue Christianity from a losing battle over historical veracity and preserve its spirit in a form appropriate to modern self-consciousness. Very few of his readers saw it this way. Strauss lost his position at the Tübingen seminary almost immediately and was never able to work as a pastor again. And a flood of publications fulminated against him.27 Attacks came not only from opponents of Hegel, but also from conservative Hegelians eager to defend the accommodation between Hegelianism and Christian orthodoxy. The ferocious onslaught of conservatives undoubtedly helped push some Hegelians to the left, as was the case with Arnold Ruge, who saw in Strauss’s argument a confirmation of his openly political optimism about the power of “Spirit, which criticizes all authority,” to “violently cleave dumb despotism.”28 Mobilized by the ferocious attacks on Strauss, Ruge and his friend Theodor Echtermeyer created the Hallische Jahrbücher in 1838. Ruge and Echtermeyer initially conceived the Jahrbücher as a “middle-point” where all sides of the controversy could meet.29 However, it 25 Strauss, The Life of Jesus, vol. III, 434. 26 See Strauss, The Life of Jesus, vol. III, 437–439 and 420–421. 27 The outrage may have had much to do with the style of Strauss’s presentation. That is, a standing assumption of German academics was challenged when Strauss published in a popular, ironic style that opened these debates to a new and broader readership beyond the academic community. See Erik Linstrum, “Strauss’s Life of Jesus: Publication and the Politics of the German Public Sphere,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 71(4) (October 2010), 593–616. On the broader impact of censorship upon the Left Hegelians, see most recently Matthew Bunn, “‘Censorship is Official Critique’: Contesting the Limits of Scholarship in the Censorship of the Hallische Jahrbücher,” Central European History, 47(2) (June 2014), 375–401. 28 See Arnold Ruge, “Gegen Heinrich Leo bei Gelegenheit seines Sendschreibens an Joseph Görres,” in Sämmtliche Werke (Mannheim: J. P. Grohe, 1848), vol. II, 132–137; Aus früherer Zeit (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1863), vol. III, 287; and “Strauss und seine Gegner,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (June 9–12, 1837), 645–657. 29 Arnold Ruge, “Gründung und erster Jahrgang der Hallischen Jahrbücher. Vorwort zum zweiten Jahrgang,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Mannheim: J. P. Grohe, 1846), vol. III, 3–12.

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was immediately perceived as a breakaway alternative to the Berlin-based organ of mainstream Hegelian thought, Die Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, and an opponent to all reactionary tendencies in Germany. Rapidly, the Hallische Jahrbücher moved further to the left, and as it did, the range of positions represented by contributors to the Hallische Jahrbücher narrowed, as more moderate writers dropped out.30 The most prominent of those defectors was, as we have already seen, Strauss, who broke with the journal in 1841. In 1845, Ruge recalled the galvanizing effects of The Life of Jesus when it first appeared, but he also recounted the mounting criticism of Strauss. Strauss had performed an inestimable service in striking away the ambiguities of Hegel’s philosophy by completing the collapse of God and man into one, but he remained attached to the question of divinity as such. To be sure, noted Ruge, Strauss criticized the naïve personification of the divine, but he replaced the personal God with a kind of pantheism based on the identity of human and divine consciousness. If Strauss called for a “religion of humanity,” it was based on an utterly abstract idea of humanity, not on the empirical mass of the people. In brief, wrote Ruge, though Strauss had made an advance by separating philosophical knowledge from religion, he remained essentially a theologian and metaphysician.31 Strauss’s critics on the Hegelian Left wished to complete the divorce of philosophy from theology once and for all. The mysticism of the Hegelian “Absolute Spirit,” which lingered even in Strauss, must give way to a thoroughly this-worldly, immanent idea of the human as such. The major attempts to attain this goal came from the pens of Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. Ruge called Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity the most important philosophical work in Germany in recent times.32 Friedrich Engels asserted decades later that “One must have oneself experienced the liberating effect of this book to have any idea of it. The enthusiasm was general; at once we all became Feuerbacheans.”33 Appearing in 1841, The Essence of Christianity offered a galvanizing thesis: The secret of religion is anthropology. Gone was the Hegelian assertion of a unity between the human and the divine, and in its place was an account of religion as “esoteric psychology.” The origin of 30 See Andre Spies, “Towards a Prosopography of Young Hegelians,” German Studies Review, 19(2) (May 1996), 332; and Wolfgang Bunzel and Lars Lambrecht, “Group Formation and Divisions in the Young Hegelian School,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 34. 31 Ruge, Unser letzten zehn Jahre, 43–46. 32 Ruge, Unser letzten zehn Jahre, 57. 33 Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 14.

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religious ideas was to be found in human needs and wishes, projected onto an imagined divine being. “The divine being,” Feuerbach wrote, “is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective – i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.”34 The process of objectification was crucial here, and Feuerbach traced this to a curious tendency of the religious mind to invert subjects and predicates. In the antiquated prose of George Eliot’s Victorian translation, we read, “Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject . . . because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject.”35 The religious person worships his own best attributes, or more precisely – because, like Strauss, Feuerbach did not believe that perfection is incarnate in any one individual – the religious believer worships the best attributes of the human species. Although religion thus expressed a fundamental truth, rooted in humanity’s this-worldly existence as a species, it did so in a deeply alienating form, which divided the individual person from human nature as such. Man makes himself poorer in making God richer. Feuerbach’s psychological insight is acute: Projecting his being into an imagined object, the religious man makes this object become a subject, even as man becomes an object subordinated to this non-existing subject. Overcoming this alienating projection belongs to the very essence of religious history, according to Feuerbach, which is a story of consciousness progressively awakening to its own powers: “what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human. What was at first religion becomes at a later period idolatry; man is seen to have adored his own nature. Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature: a later religion takes this forward step; every advance in religion is therefore a deeper self-knowledge.”36 Yet every particular religion exempts itself from this dialectic, taking itself to be the true relation to the superhuman. The thinker, by contrast, equipped with an understanding of the essence of all religion, is in a position to recognize that the antithesis of the 34 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957), 14. 35 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 18. 36 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 13.

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divine and the human is entirely illusory. For Feuerbach, this recognition produced a kind of promethean humanism, in which the recovery of alienated species-being liberates the infinite powers of human consciousness. The end of religious illusion meant a transition from abstract worship to practical action, as the love squandered on a non-existent divinity transforms into reverence for humanity and the energies of prayer are redirected toward work on behalf of mankind. The Hegelian background of The Essence of Christianity is evident in the dialectical account of the development of human self-consciousness. Yet, in some respects, Feuerbach’s philosophical rebellion was not just against the intermixing of philosophy and theology that he believed had tainted not only the Right Hegelians but even David Friedrich Strauss; rather, it was a rebellion against Hegel. Feuerbach’s turn against Hegel was a dramatic outcome for a man who had, in his youth, abandoned the study of theology in favor of philosophy, and experienced his move to Hegel’s Berlin in 1824 like the arrival in “the Bethlehem of a new world.”37 Indeed, as with many of the young men who embraced Hegelianism in the heyday of the movement, the young Feuerbach experienced this with all the intensity of a religious conversion. “What was obscure and incomprehensible while I studied [in Heidelberg],” he wrote breathlessly to his father, “I have now understood clearly and grasped in its necessity . . .; what only smoldered in me like tinder, I see now burst into bright flames.”38 From early on, however, Feuerbach established himself as a critical disciple. In a letter accompanying the dissertation he submitted to Hegel in 1828, he described his own philosophical sensibility as a “living, so to speak essential rather than formal assimilation and imagination of ideas or concepts forming the content of your works and oral lessons.”39 Feuerbach’s dissertation, “On Reason,” showed considerable impatience with Hegel’s painstaking effort to conceptualize dialectical mediations between universality and particularity, and instead measured the ascent of reason as the triumph of the universal over the particular. In his anonymously published 1830 book Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Feuerbach applied this same emphasis on universality to categorically reject the ideas of both the personal God and personal immortality, thus decisively 37 Feuerbach to Karl Daub, September 1824, in Briefwechsel I (1817–1839), ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984), 53. 38 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development,” in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi (New York: Anchor, 1972), 268. 39 Feuerbach to Hegel, November 22, 1828, in Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

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cutting through the ambiguities that had unsettled the Hegelian school.40 His book was a sufficiently radical assault on central Christian belief that eventual exposure as its author contributed conclusively to the permanent destruction of his hopes for a professorial career. Feuerbach’s moderately critical view of his teacher also produced a series of “doubts” focused on Hegel’s claim to have overcome the opposition of thought and being, recorded in his diaries in the late 1820s.41 In an essay published in the Hallische Jahrbücher in 1839, Feuerbach placed these doubts before the reading public and formally announced his break with Hegel. He attacked the hubris of Hegel’s devout followers for treating him like a kind of incarnation of philosophy at its end stage. Radicalizing the spirit of his 1828 claim for a “living” assimilation of the master’s lessons, Feuerbach now rejected as preposterous the notion that philosophy could ever have an end. Instead, he insisted that all things human, including philosophy, are products of their historical time. The dialectic of history is not a teleology moving toward an end state of perfection, but is rather an open-ended process of development and supersession. If the intrinsically historical nature of thought ensured its permanent openness, then so too did its inescapable relationship to an unmasterable other, namely nature. This point touched on the core of Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel. After all, Hegel’s philosophy rests on the claims that thought and being are ultimately one and that dialectical reason could comprehend this unity. Feuerbach judged this a failure. Far from revealing an identity of mind and being, Hegel revealed only the identity of thought with itself. Feuerbach argued that this one-sided insistence on the primacy of thought over being is, in fact, a residue of theological thinking, a transposition into philosophy of the idea that God is the being whose notion contains existence.42 Feuerbach’s break with Hegel’s absolute idealism launched him toward materialism and sensualism. In The Essence of Christianity, he insisted that his philosophy took its principle not from the various abstractions of recent German idealism, but rather from a “real being, the true Ens realissimum – man; its principle, therefore, is in the highest degree positive and real. It generates thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, from the sense.”43 40 Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, trans. James Massey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 41 See Feuerbach, “Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development,” 269–270. 42 Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 38. 43 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xxxv.

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In somewhat later works, such as “The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy” (1842) and “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” (1843), Feuerbach described his thought as a “new philosophy” based on the “concrete,” on the “real in its reality.”44 In place of the old philosophy’s fixation on the “abstract” and “merely thinking” being, even to the extent of denying the relevance of the body, the “new philosophy” begins by affirming, “I am a real, sensuous being and, indeed, the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself.”45 Where the old philosophy took reason as its point of departure, the new philosophy started with the senses, love, and feeling. In contrast to the main currents of eighteenth-century materialism, Feuerbach did not intend this new materialist philosophy to remain with a mechanistic view of the human organism or with the sense-certainty of the isolated individual; rather, he insisted that love and sense lead us into contact with, and dependence upon, other people. Feuerbach thus tried to anchor his new materialism in a theory of intersubjective community, giving further specificity to the famed “I–Thou” relationship described in the Essence of Christianity. In the end, the materialism of Feuerbach’s philosophy of the future remained underdeveloped. The fact that it was less a fleshed-out argument than a series of brilliant insights delivered aphoristically has invited criticism from numerous commentators. Yet, among his left-wing contemporaries, Feuerbach exercised a powerful and immediate influence, with so-called True Socialists such as Moses Hess, Karl Grün, and Hermann Kriege recognizing in his thought a principle of social solidarity and the young Karl Marx praising him for providing the philosophical basis of socialism.46 Marx’s enthusiasm proved short-lived. By 1845, Marx had grown critical of Feuerbach’s materialism, condemning it as an ahistorical and contemplative posture that does not recognize the active role that humans play in transforming the circumstances in which they find themselves and hence fails to grasp the significance of revolutionary, “practical-critical” activity.47 Bruno Bauer attacked Feuerbach, though for a different reason. Bauer found Feuerbach’s emphasis on species-being too naturalistic, founded not on the 44 Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 49. 45 Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 54. 46 Marx to Feuerbach, August 11, 1844, in Briefwechsel II (1840–1844), ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984), 354. For an interesting exploration of Feuerbach’s impact on radicals in the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848, see Peter C. Caldwell, Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Richard Wagner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 47 See Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edn., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 143.

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freedom of human self-consciousness but on a substance that precedes and defines self-consciousness.48 Bauer had already leveled a criticism of this sort against another erstwhile ally on the Hegelian Left, David Friedrich Strauss. In numerous publications, he insisted that Strauss’s argument for the power of collective mythic traditions to shape the gospels replicates the logic of religion because Strauss too elevated an alien objectivity over and above individual self-consciousness. Bauer believed that whereas conservatives could find no firm ground on which to challenge Strauss, only further radicalization could truly overcome Strauss.49 And in the disputes over the source and authority of scripture, Bauer resolutely radicalized the question by insisting on the role of finite (and decidedly non-divine) individuals, from Jesus himself to the authors of the gospels, who brought forth new content, neither expected nor already anticipated, through the creative power of selfconsciousness.50 Ironically, just a few years earlier, Strauss had placed Bruno Bauer in the right wing of the Hegelian school. Indeed, after the publication of The Life of Jesus, the editor of the mainstream Hegelian journal, Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, gave Bauer the task of refuting Strauss’s challenge to the peaceful coexistence of Hegelianism and Christian orthodoxy. Yet, even in the putatively conservative writings of the 1830s, Bauer had articulated a reading of Hegel that accentuated a subjective dialectic of selfconsciousness at the expense of a dialectic of subject and object, thought and being. There are some grounds for viewing Bauer’s subsequent radical subjectivism and atheism less as a surprising turn than as a development from his earlier position, but the extremism of his views in the early 1840s is nonetheless striking.51 Where Feuerbach’s thought tended toward a naturalist account of the “whole man” embedded in nature, Bauer claimed that “Self-consciousness is the only power of the world and history.”52 Significantly, that statement comes from an 1841 book in which Bauer 48 Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs,” Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1845), esp. 105–111. See also Bruno Bauer, “The Genus and the Crowd,” The Philosophical Forum, III(2–4) (1978), 129. 49 Bruno Bauer, Hegel’s Lehre von der Religion und Kunst (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1842), 36–37. 50 See Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1841), vol. I, 388–408. 51 See Zvi Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx: The Influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx’s Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 40. See also Chris Thornhill, “Hegelianism and the Politics of Contingency,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 130. 52 Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, trans. L. Stepelevich (Lewiston: E. Mellen, 1988), 115.

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adopted the persona of an anti-Hegelian Pietist to present Hegel himself as a revolutionary atheist and philosopher of self-consciousness. Feuerbach believed that the new philosophy demanded a sharp break with Hegel, whereas Bauer regarded himself as fulfilling the radical potentiality of Hegel himself. Or, more precisely, the potentiality of one side of Hegel, whose thought, Bauer believed, had been hampered by his desire to reconcile Spinoza with Fichte, that is, two incompatible principles, namely “Spinozist determinism and heteronomy, or the immediate causal impact of substance on consciousness, as opposed to the autonomy of rational thinking.”53 Decisively elevating the latter over the former, Bauer claimed that “history has no other meaning than the becoming and development of selfconsciousness.”54 Such assertions have opened Bauer to charges of an empty formalism, in which thought exists only in a self-relation. Yet, he clearly acknowledged a dialectical relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Selfconsciousness, he argued, has the right to demand that it find its inner determinations reflected in the laws and institutions of the existing world.55 To attain that state, self-consciousness must assess objective historical circumstances and judge among evolving historical possibilities, and it must encompass reflection on the entire historical process.56 If self-consciousness must thus encounter a world of positivity, of substance, nonetheless it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ultimately Bauer describes the self-relation of self-consciousness. After all, in his view, philosophy is properly conceived only as a critical operation that reveals the origin of the positive in selfconsciousness and thereby overcomes the alienating otherness of that content.57 Critique of religion masters religion by exposing its source in human subjectivity.58 Critique of politics reveals the freely creating selfconsciousness at work even in the most oppressive of regimes. And, in sharp contrast to Feuerbach’s insistence on the ultimate gap between thought and being, even nature would attain its full actuality only when it was 53 Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, 73 and 109. 54 Bauer quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 324. 55 Bruno Bauer, “Bekenntnisse einer schwachen Seele,” in Feldzüge der reinen Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1968), 81. 56 Douglas Moggach, “Republican Rigorism and Emancipation in Bruno Bauer,” in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122. 57 Bruno Bauer, “Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit,” in Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik im deutschen Vormärz, ed. Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle (Leipzig: Reclam, 1985), 519. 58 Bauer, “Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit,” 498.

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absorbed into the cultural world as a determination of free selfconsciousness.59 Bauer insisted of subjectivity that, “just as a fire it draws up and annihilates everything . . . established and positive.”60 More common than the image of fire to describe this voracious process wherein the human subject constantly overcomes limits was the invocation of terror, which he drew by analogy from the most radical phase of the French Revolution: “the terrorism of true theory must clear the field,” he wrote to Karl Marx in 1841, and hence, theory is “the strongest praxis.”61 The zenith of Bauer’s influence was in 1841, with publication of his critique of the synoptic gospels. In that year, Arnold Ruge, editor of the Deutsche Jahrbücher, endorsed Bauer’s criticisms of Strauss, precipitating Strauss’s resignation from this most important of Left Hegelian journals. Likewise, the young Karl Marx, who submitted a dissertation on ancient atomist philosophy to the faculty at the University of Jena, decided in 1841 to move to Bonn, where he planned to work as Bauer’s assistant. That proved a bad move for the twenty-three-year-old Marx, because Bauer came under such intense pressure from his conservative colleagues at the University of Bonn that the Prussian minister of education finally dismissed him in spring 1842. Neither Bauer nor Marx would ever hold another academic position. Bauer did not go down without a fight, publishing, among other things, a spirited self-defense in which he equated his own plight with the very struggle of philosophy itself. Yet Bauer’s star was sinking, driven down in part by the effects of censorship and political repression, but also, no doubt, by the vacuity of his position. Indeed, his two most prominent allies gradually turned against him. Arnold Ruge came to complain about the unrelenting negativity of Bauer’s position, which undercut not only the existing oppressive conditions but also any imaginable world that radical politics might aspire to create.62 As for Marx, he grew more and more skeptical of Bauer’s approach. For one thing, the more Marx came to view religion as an ideological expression of a distorted social and political reality, the more he doubted the utility of criticizing religion as such when the real object of criticism should be that socio-political reality 59 See Toews, Hegelianism, 326. 60 Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, 111. 61 Quoted in Massimiliano Tomba, “Exclusivism and Political Universalism in Bruno Bauer,” in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 93. 62 See Ruge to Moritz Fleischer, December 12, 1842, in Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik im deutschen Vormärz, ed. Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle (Leipzig: Reclam, 1985), 859–861.

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itself. For another, Marx cast an increasingly suspicious eye on the very effectiveness of critique itself. More precisely, he doubted Bauer’s belief that philosophy itself was a force sufficiently powerful to transform the world. Far from breaking with existing conditions, Marx judged this to be a product of the topsy-turvy world of the Germans, in which progressive thought was a kind of inverted reflection of regressive politics. As Marx famously put it in an essay completed at the end of 1843, “In politics, the Germans have thought what other nations have done.”63 Marx’s point was not to discount critical thought, but rather to insist that critique must attend to the real conditions of social and political existence and develop its own categories in dialectical relationship with the potentialities of history. In the course of arriving at this conclusion not only on Bauer but on Feuerbach and other German philosophical radicals as well, Marx and Engels produced in 1845–1846 some of their most scathing polemical works, including The German Ideology and The Holy Family, the latter a sprawling work whose verbose attack on the fetish of critique is countered by the succinct lampoon of its subtitle: Critique of Critical Criticism against Bruno Bauer and Company. Years before, in 1842, while Marx was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he had complained of the Berlin radical Hegelians who had rallied around Bauer, the so-called Freien, for what he judged to be their “licentious” and “sansculotte-like” behavior, including their dilettantish dabbling in French communist ideology, a line of thinking that Marx had not yet embraced.64 By 1845–1846, when Marx articulated his critique of what he later called his “erstwhile philosophical conscience,” he had not only embraced communism but had already begun to rethink all its premises. Marx was not alone among radical Hegelians in turning from theologico-philosophical critique to sociopolitical engagement with the so-called ‘social question.’ Indeed, this was a discernible phenomenon around 1843, remarked on with very mixed feelings by Bruno Bauer, among others.65 Left Hegelian concern with the social question was not really new, however. Indeed, from at least Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality in 1830, the critique of religion had carried 63 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. III, 181. 64 Marx’s relations with the Berlin Hegelians have been discussed by numerous scholars. For a recent treatment, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 118–120. On the Berlin Freien and Bauer’s relation to them, see Bunzel and Lambrecht, “Group Formation and Divisions in the Young Hegelian School,” 35. 65 See Bauer, “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?,” Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, 8 (June 1844), 18–26.

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along with it critical implications for theories of society and state.66 Undoubtedly, however, around 1843, radical Hegelians did come to focus more sharply on the problems posed by industrial society, spurred by an increasingly visible problem of pauperism in Germany, journalistic reportage from Britain, which was much further ahead in the industrial transformation of its society, and growing interest in French radical social movements, stimulated by a flurry of publications, foremost among them Lorenz von Stein’s book Socialism and Communism in Present-Day France. Feuerbach’s atheist materialism, as we have seen, inspired many German leftists right up to the Revolution of 1848. Left Hegelianism as a whole had a tremendous impact on the intellectual life of Germany in the 1840s. Nonetheless, the rise of the social question among German radicals helped to push the agenda of radical philosophical and theological critique off the front burner. Marx was not the only erstwhile ally of Left Hegelianism who challenged the Left Hegelian project. From a sharply different angle than Marx’s historical materialism and collectivist politics, Max Stirner, the pen name of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, launched a derisive attack in his book The Ego and Its Own, published in 1844. Arnold Ruge wrote in his memoirs of the combative years of the radical Hegelian movement that Stirner marked the terminus of an important line of development within German philosophy.67 A modern critic formulates this trajectory in terms of a critical tradition aimed at freeing the human subject from various hypostatizations; that is, a struggle against ideas, generated by human minds, which come to appear as distinct and higher entities to which human beings are subordinated.68 One sees this “progressive de-hypostatization” at work in Hegel’s account of the human subject overcoming the otherness of objects; it lies at the heart of Strauss’s challenge to the biblical account of Jesus Christ; it is the basis for Feuerbach’s exposure of the anthropological “secret” of religion; it fuels Bruno Bauer’s revolt against all positivity in the name of the unfettered freedom of self-consciousness; and it underpins radical Hegelian political arguments against monarchy, which in the name of the collective sovereignty of the people attack the hypostatization of sovereignty in the person of the king. 66 The entanglement of religious, social, and political criticism in Left Hegelian thought is a major concern of my own Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. 67 Ruge, Unser letzten zehn Jahre, 122. 68 Frederick Beiser, “Max Stirner and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 288–289.

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A bohemian outsider and erstwhile member of the Berlin Hegelian circle known as the Freien, Stirner pushed this logic to its extreme conclusion. Hegel’s world spirit, Feuerbach’s species-being, Bauer’s self-consciousness, the socialists’ proletariat, democracy’s Volk, liberalism’s rights, and so forth Stirner judged as just so many holdovers of the old theological consciousness and essentialism.69 Against all abstractions, Stirner set the concrete individual, whose will is the only legitimate source of law and value. Denouncing all forms of political state as “despotism,” he declared that “I give or take to myself the right out of my own plenitude of power, and against every superior power I am the most impenitent criminal. Owner and creator of my right, I recognize no other source of right than – me, neither God nor the state nor nature nor even man himself with his ‘eternal rights of man,’ neither divine nor human right.”70 Such declarations have endeared Stirner to generations of anarchists of an individualistic, libertarian stripe, yet he has drawn sharp rebuttals from many critics, including Karl Marx, who recognized in Stirner’s declarations for the boundless right of the “unconditional ego” an abstraction even more mired in the residues of theology than many of the philosophical or political currents Stirner so vehemently denounced. Feuerbach rejected Stirner’s critique, but Stirner may have played a role in moving Feuerbach toward a materialism oriented less toward the formation of a human community based in sensuous coexistence than toward the physiological supports of humanity’s place in nature. Arnold Ruge denounced Stirner for fashioning a doctrine from “the most shameless capriciousness,” but nonetheless, he accepted Stirner’s criticism of an “obliterating generality” at work in the radical collectivist ideologies of the time.71 Although Ruge never expressed sympathy for Stirner’s libertarian anarchism, his reading of Stirner likely exacerbated the tensions between Ruge and Marx that had doomed their collaborative effort to launch the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Intended to unify German philosophical acumen with French political activism, the journal managed to publish only one double issue in February 1844. The fact that Marx and Ruge initiated this project in exile in Paris, after the Prussian government had shut down Marx’s Rheinische Zeitung and pressured the Saxons into closing Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher, points to one of the reasons why Left Hegelianism began to wane. Strauss, Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx had already seen their hopes for academic careers shattered by state 69 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 30. For an example of this criticism, directed at Feuerbach, see 33f. and 55. 70 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 183. 71 Ruge, Unser letzten zehn Jahre, 113.

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repression, and the intensifying censorship and ultimate closure of the main publications of the Left Hegelians not only stripped the movement of its main channels of communication, but also dispersed the groups and individuals who were at its center. Radical Hegelianism contributed immensely to the politicization of German intellectual life in the 1840s, and it remained a force among German progressives right up to the Revolution of 1848; but its truly creative moment was past by 1844. In accounting for this, the effect of repressive state action should not be underestimated, but neither should the solvent power of the process of criticism and differentiation internal to Left Hegelianism. The breakdown of Hegel’s great attempt to comprehend all the diverse epochs of human history as unified phenomena and to discern identity behind the seeming difference that divided the human subject from nature and God precipitated a quick succession of increasingly radical positions among his left-leaning students. The brief span of time between Strauss’s Life of Jesus in 1836 and Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own in 1844 and Marx and Engels’s German Ideology in 1845 witnessed the emergence of a new conception of philosophy as a critical praxis aimed at cultural and political transformation, novel philosophical approaches to the critique of religion, a new form of social thought destined to have an inestimable impact on world history, and unprecedented claims for the power of the human mind to demolish every form of alterity in the name of a boundless process of emancipation. A moment of crisis, it was also a moment of unusual philosophical productivity and innovation. If Left Hegelianism stood at the end of what Friedrich Engels would later call “classical German philosophy,” it also stood at or near the headwaters of numerous currents that would course through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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5

Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation from Locke to Sidgwick philip schofield The standard account of the origin of utilitarianism is derived from Leslie Stephen, who argued that the doctrine developed from the rejection by John Locke (1632–1704) of innate ideas and his identification of good and evil with pleasure and pain, respectively.1 Stephen identified two strands of utilitarianism. One strand was ‘theological utilitarianism,’2 propounded by a ‘school’ of moral philosophers, most famously represented by William Paley (1743–1805), which held that what was useful or expedient, and hence virtuous, was what accorded with God’s will, and thereby attached a religious sanction to utilitarian moral behavior. If men were virtuous, that is, promoted the happiness of the community and hence did God’s will, they would be rewarded in an afterlife with the pleasures of heaven, but if they were vicious, they would suffer the pains of hell. The other strand was developed by David Hume (1711–1776) and borrowed in essentials by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), and aimed to formulate a ‘scientific’ system of morality. The foundation of ethics was laid in an objective human psychology, which was common to all men and would motivate them in the same way, all other circumstances being equal. Taking Bentham and Paley as the representative thinkers of the two strands, Stephen remarked that “The relation . . . of Bentham’s ethical doctrines to Paley’s may be expressed by saying that Bentham is Paley minus a belief in hell-fire.”3 1 The term ‘utilitarian’ was coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1781 (see The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. Volume 3: January 1781 to October 1788, ed. I. R. Christie (London: Athlone, 1971), 57), while ‘utilitarianism’, although used by Bentham in the mid 1810s, became more common from the late 1820s. The doctrine was otherwise referred to as that of ‘utility’ or ‘expediency.’ 2 The term itself seems to have first appeared in W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1869), vol. I, xi–xii. 3 Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1876), vol. II, 125.

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While stripping away the unnecessary theological trappings that characterized Paley’s system, Bentham, argued Stephen, did not make any significant contribution to the development of ethics.4 Stephen’s view was substantially endorsed by Ernest Albee, who noted that “Bentham contributed almost nothing of importance to Ethics, considered strictly as such.”5 Both Stephen and Albee regarded Hume as the most prominent exponent of utilitarian moral theory in the eighteenth century. The subtlety of Hume’s arguments was lost on Paley and Bentham, and it was left to John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) to further the development of the doctrine along the lines suggested by Hume.6 Stephen’s and Albee’s interpretations retain considerable value in identifying Locke as the inspiration for utilitarianism, and in dividing it into a theological and a scientific – or, perhaps more expressively, a naturalistic – strand. Less convincing, however, is the assimilation of Hume to the utilitarian tradition and the belittling of Bentham’s originality, both in terms of his positive contribution to the philosophy of utilitarianism and regarding his rejection of a religious basis for morals and legislation. In the nineteenth century, the most important theoretical developments in the doctrine were associated with proponents of the secular, Benthamite school, though the question of whether there could be a moral universe without the existence of God returned to prominence in the work of Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), who, following Bentham and John Stuart Mill, was the third of the great classical utilitarians.

Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) contained the main elements that would coalesce into utilitarianism, though he did not present them in a systematic form. There are three key passages. In the first (Book II, Chapter VII), Locke described the way in which pleasure and pain accompanied “almost all our Ideas, both of Sensation and Reflection.” Satisfaction, delight, or happiness on the one side, or uneasiness, trouble, torment, anguish, or misery on the other, were terms that merely represented “different degrees of the same thing, and belong to the Ideas of Pleasure and Pain, Delight or Uneasiness.” Pleasure and pain, moreover, were the motives that 4 Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1900), vol. I, 236. 5 Ernest Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902), 165 and 190. 6 Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, 92–93; and Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism, 78 n. and 110–112.

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Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation

God had provided not only to encourage us to pursue some actions and avoid others, but also to make us think about some subjects rather than others. Without this connection between “our outward Sensations, and inward Thoughts” on the one hand, and pain and pleasure on the other, we would “neither stir our Bodies, nor employ our Minds.”7 In the second passage (Book II, Chapter XX), having noted that pleasure and pain were “simple Ideas,” which could not be described or defined, but only known by experience, he went on to make the crucial point that good and evil were respectively the equivalent of pleasure and pain: “That we call Good, which is apt to cause or increase Pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure, or preserve us the possession of any other Good, or absence of any Evil,” while evil was that which “is apt to produce or increase any Pain, or diminish any Pleasure in us; or else to procure us any Evil, or deprive us of any Good.”8 In the third passage (Book II, Chapter XXVIII), Locke explained that there were three laws by which the ‘Rectitude’ or ‘Obliquity’ of actions could be judged, namely the divine law, the civil law, and the law of opinion or reputation. The divine law, given by God, was known through either “the light of Nature, or the voice of Revelation.” The divine law was “the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude,” and it was according to this standard that actions were judged morally good or evil. God not only had “Goodness and Wisdom to direct our Actions to that which is best,” but also “Power to enforce it by Rewards and Punishments, of infinite weight and duration, in another Life.”9 The civil law, laid down by the state, with the purpose of protecting life, liberty, and property, was the standard by which to judge whether actions were criminal or not, and was enforced by rewards and punishments administered by the state. The law of opinion or reputation was the standard by which to judge whether actions were virtuous or vicious, terms used to designate actions that were respectively praised (or liked) and blamed (or disliked) in any particular society, and were right or wrong only insofar as they coincided with the dictates of the divine law.10 With both human motivation and notions of good and evil made essentially dependent on pleasure and pain, the psychological and ethical foundations had been laid for scientific or secular utilitarianism. Add to this the view that God was the source of

7 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 128–129. 8 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 229–231. 9 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 352. 10 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 352–354.

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moral rules and moral obligation, and the foundations had been laid for theological utilitarianism.

Theological Utilitarianism The earliest systematic presentation of the utilitarian doctrine appeared in 1731 in an anonymous essay written by John Gay (1699–1745), which appeared as a preface to Edmund Law’s English translation of William King’s An Essay on the Origin of Evil (first published in Latin in 1702). Gay was concerned with two questions that dominated eighteenth-century moral philosophy: first, what was the criterion of virtue; and second, given that men had free will, what was the source of the obligation to practise virtue?11 Drawing heavily on Locke, his main purpose was to refute the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), on the grounds that there was no evidence that such a moral sense existed and that the notion was difficult to distinguish from the doctrine of innate ideas. Without any conscious aim of doing so, Gay inaugurated a new departure in moral philosophy. He began with the monist claim characteristic of utilitarianism, namely that there was a single criterion of virtue, even though moralists had given it different names, such as acting agreeably to nature or reason, the fitness of things, conformity to truth, promoting the common good, and the will of God. Hence, “the true Principle of all our Actions” was not a moral sense, but “our own Happiness.”12 Gay explained that virtue consisted in “Conformity to a Rule of Life, directing the Actions of all rational Creatures with respect to each other’s Happiness,” that we were obliged to conform our actions to this rule, and that a person who did conform would or ought to receive esteem or approval. The three central elements of virtue, therefore, were that the action should concern others, it should be obligatory, and, if performed, would or should lead to praise.13 Obligation arose when an agent was in such a position that, in order to be happy, he needed to perform some particular action. This meant that obligation was “founded upon the prospect of Happiness, and arises from that necessary Influence which any Action has upon present or future Happiness or Misery.” There were four sources from which obligation might arise: first, from “the fix’d Laws of Nature,” which was natural 11 See [John Gay], “Preliminary Dissertation. Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Morality,” preface to William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law (London: W. Thurlbourn, 1731), xi–xxxiii. 12 [Gay], “Preliminary Dissertation,” xi–xiv. 13 [Gay], “Preliminary Dissertation,” xvii–xviii.

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Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation

obligation; second, from the esteem and favor or disesteem and disfavor of our fellows, which was virtuous obligation; third, from the authority of the civil magistrate, which was civil obligation; and fourth, from the authority of God, which was religious obligation. The only “full and complete Obligation” was that which arose from the authority of God, and “since we are always obliged to that conformity call’d Virtue, it is evident that the immediate Rule or Criterion of it is the Will of God,” at least insofar as that will concerned one’s behavior towards one’s fellow-creatures. What, then, was the will of God? Now it is evident from the Nature of God, viz. his being infinitely happy in himself from all Eternity, and from his Goodness manifested in his Works, that he could have no other Design in creating Mankind than their Happiness; and therefore he wills their Happiness . . .

Since the will of God was the immediate criterion of virtue, and the criterion of the will of God was the happiness of mankind, then the happiness of mankind was the criterion of virtue at one remove.14 Gay argued that the only thing that man pursued for its own sake was pleasure, and things that produced pleasure were termed good and met with approval, while things that produced misery were termed evil and met with disapproval. From reflecting on pleasure and pain, there arose respectively a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain, which led in turn to love and hatred, and thence to all the passions or affections.15 In a parenthesis, Gay noted that, by happiness, was “meant the sum total of Pleasure.”16 By equating the happiness and good of mankind with pleasure, and misery and evil with pain, by claiming that there was no other basis for morality, and by introducing the element of calculation, Gay’s position was recognizably utilitarian. A number of writers, many of whom were theologians associated with the University of Cambridge, developed Gay’s position in the middle of the eighteenth century,17 but it was the publication in 1785 of William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which remained the Cambridge textbook on the subject for fifty years, that saw utilitarianism enter the 14 15 16 17

[Gay], “Preliminary Dissertation,” xviii–xix. [Gay], “Preliminary Dissertation,” xxii–xxiii. [Gay], “Preliminary Dissertation,” xxiii. For the emergence of utilitarianism as an ethical doctrine congenial to the latitudinarianism that became prominent among theologians in the University of Cambridge in the mid-eighteenth century see John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 126–130, and more generally James E. Crimmins (ed.), Utilitarians and Religion (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998).

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mainstream of English thought. The logical starting-point for Paley’s ethics, however, was his argument from design, which he later famously put forward in Natural Theology (1802). He pointed out that the difference between a stone and a watch was that, while the former was just a stone, the latter had been assembled for a purpose, namely in order to indicate the time of day. The ‘inevitable’ inference was “that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”18 The same evidence of contrivance that existed in a watch also existed in nature, except that the contrivances in nature were to an overwhelming extent more numerous, complex, subtle, and various.19 The choice, for Paley, was between design and chance, and it was absurd, he claimed, to think that the contrivance of an eye, for instance, could be the result of chance.20 Design meant an intelligent Creator, who was God.21 One of the attributes of God was goodness, which could be inferred from the facts, first, “that, in a vast plurality of instances in which contrivance is perceived, the design of the contrivance is beneficial,” and second, that God had “superadded pleasure to animal sensations” when there was no need to do so, for instance by adding the pleasures of the palate to the necessary function of eating.22 In Moral and Political Philosophy, building on this theological basis, Paley noted that happiness consisted in any condition in which the amount of pleasure exceeded that of pain, estimating both pleasure and pain by their intensity and duration. Happiness did not consist in the pleasures of sense, in an exemption from pain, or in high rank, but rather in the exercise of the social affections, in the exercise of the faculties, whether of mind or body, in the pursuit of some object, in the prudent constitution of the habits, and in health. The point was that happiness was pretty equally distributed throughout the different orders in society, and that vice had no advantage over virtue with respect to happiness in this world.23 These preliminary points cleared the way for the central thesis of theological utilitarianism. Echoing Gay, and borrowing directly from Edmund Law,24 Paley announced that virtue was 18 William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of The Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (London: R. Faulder, 1802), 1–4. 19 Paley, Natural Theology, 19. 20 Paley, Natural Theology, iv and 35–44. 21 Paley, Natural Theology, 473. 22 Paley, Natural Theology, 488 and 518–519. 23 William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: R. Faulder, 1785), 18–34. 24 See Edmund Law, “On Morality and Religion,” in William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law, 4th edn. (Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn, J. Woodyer and

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“the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” A virtuous act was one that promoted the happiness of mankind; to act in this way was to fulfill the will of God; and the motivation to do so came from the prospect of enjoying everlasting happiness.25 Just as we would not be obliged to obey the law if the magistrate had not imposed any sanctions in the event of our disobedience, so we would not be under any obligation “to practise virtue, obey the commands of God, do what is right,” had God not imposed sanctions. Everything depended on the assumption that there would be a distribution of rewards and punishments in an afterlife.26 Since the will of God was the rule by which we were to direct our conduct, in order to know what we were obliged to do, we needed to know what was the will of God: “The method of coming at the will of God, concerning any action, by the light of nature, is to enquire into the tendency of the action to promote or diminish the general happiness.”27 Actions were to be judged according to their tendency to produce happiness: “Whatever is expedient, is right. – It is the utility of any moral rule alone which constitutes the obligation of it.”28

Secular Utilitarianism Bentham developed his utilitarianism independently of the Cambridge theologians, drawing instead on the Continental Enlightenment, and in particular Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) and Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), as well as such British writers as Locke, Hume, and Joseph Priestley (1733–1804).29 He assembled the elements of his utilitarianism in his “most interesting year” of 1769,30 while his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (hereafter IPML), which contains his best known statement of the principle of utility, was written in 1780, and hence predated the appearance of Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Paley did, indeed, often feature in Bentham’s later writings, but in the guise of “a false brother.”31

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

J. Beecroft, 1758), xliii–lii, p. lii; and James E. Crimmins (ed.), Utilitarians and Religion (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998), 21 and 153. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 35–45. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 47–54. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 54–60. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 61. Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–5. Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1843), vol X, 54. University College London Library, Bentham Papers, box cvii, fo. 214 (January 1809).

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Bentham began his IPML by stating that “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”32 Given the prevalence of natural theology in eighteenth-century England, the reader might assume that Bentham was stating that, since God had created nature, He had placed mankind under the two ‘sovereign masters.’ Bentham meant no such thing: the all-powerful God assumed by the proponents of natural theology would be a capricious tyrant, more likely to instill fear and hence misery, rather than hope and happiness, in His followers. Moreover, it made no sense to attribute both benevolence and omnipotence to a supreme being in a world where evil existed: the supreme being was either not benevolent or not all-powerful.33 ‘Nature,’ for Bentham, represented animal psychology, founded on animal physiology. Human beings, like all sentient creatures, were motivated by a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain. In deciding whether or not to perform an action, we made a calculation, based on the extent of our relevant knowledge and judgment, as to the benefits or advantages – resolvable into feelings of pleasure – on the one side, and the costs or disadvantages – resolvable into feelings of pain – on the other. We had a motive to act insofar as the action in question produced a balance on the side of pleasure. The measurement of the value of a pleasure or pain taken in itself depended on four elements: intensity, duration, certainty, and propinquity. A more intense, longer-lasting, certain, and sooner-to-be-experienced pleasure was more valuable than a less intense, shorter, less certain, and remoter pleasure. However, while the prospect of a pleasure might be beneficial to the actor, performance of the action might result overall, when the pains and pleasures of all persons affected by the action were considered, in more misery than happiness. Hence, in order to judge whether an action was good or evil, in other words right or wrong, one had to take into account a further element, namely extent, that is the number of persons affected by the action. An action was morally good to the extent that, in respect of all its consequences for all the individuals affected by it, it produced a balance on the side of pleasure, and morally evil to the extent that it produced a balance on the side of pain.34 In order to act, we required a motive, and motives consisted solely in the prospect of either enjoying a pleasure or avoiding a pain. Since we could only feel our own pleasures or pains, and since human beings were in general 32 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [hereafter IPML], ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London: Athlone, 1970), 11. 33 Philip Beauchamp, pseud., Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (London: R. Carlile, 1822), 9–32. 34 Bentham, IPML, 38–41.

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motivated primarily by self-interest, what incentive was there for us to promote the greatest happiness of the community as a whole, rather than our own selfish interests? In his IPML Bentham pointed to three sanctions or sources of pleasures and pains (familiar from Locke and adopted by Gay), which might be used in order to direct conduct into the right channels. These were, first, the political, including the legal sanction, namely the rewards and punishments distributed by the state, for instance through the courts; second, the moral or popular sanction, distributed by the public generally, and particularly through praise and blame; and third, the religious sanction, distributed by a supreme being either in the present life or in an afterlife.35 Bentham later added the sympathetic and antipathetic sanctions, which had their source in the mind of each individual. When we saw persons to whom we were kindly disposed experiencing pleasure we also experienced pleasure, as we did when we saw persons to whom we were unkindly disposed experiencing pain.36 The only objective basis for morality was the principle of utility, because it was founded on pains and pleasures, feelings that existed in the real, physical world. All alternative theories consisted in “so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author’s sentiment or opinion as a reason and that a sufficient one for itself.” By appeal to highsounding but empty phrases, such as ‘moral sense’ or ‘natural law,’ the likes and dislikes of the moralist were elevated into moral rules for the guidance and determination of the conduct of others.37 Later in his career, related perhaps to his commitment to political radicalism after 1809,38 Bentham came to prefer the phrase ‘greatest happiness principle’ or ‘greatest felicity principle’ to the phrase ‘principle of utility.’ The word ‘utility’ did not so readily suggest the ideas of pleasure and pain as did the words ‘happiness’ and ‘felicity,’ or the idea of the number of persons affected, which was “the circumstance, which contributes, in the largest proportion, to the formation of . . . the standard of right and wrong, by which alone the propriety of human conduct, in every situation, can with 35 Bentham, IPML, 34–7. The effect of the religious sanction depended upon people’s beliefs concerning the distribution of such rewards and punishments. Whether in truth there was any such distribution was another matter. 36 Jeremy Bentham, Deontology Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 201, 202–204, and 277–278; and Bentham to Étienne Dumont, November 29, 1821, in The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. Volume 10: July 1820 to December 1821, ed. Stephen Conway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 444. 37 Bentham, IPML, 21–29. 38 Schofield, Utility and Democracy, 247–271.

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propriety be tried.”39 Bentham explained, moreover, that by ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ he did not mean that it was simply a matter of counting the number of individuals who were advantaged, in whatever degree, from an action or policy, and then counting those who were disadvantaged, in whatever degree, and thereupon favoring the majority. Instead of speaking of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ it was more accurate to speak of ‘the greatest happiness of the whole community.’ It was possible to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number while not promoting the greatest happiness of the whole community.40 Bentham had recognized the problem that later came to be known as ‘the tyranny of the majority,’ and hence was concerned to mitigate the criticism by pointing out that the promotion of the greatest happiness involved counting not only the number of individuals who benefited or suffered from a certain law, measure, policy, or action, but the degree to which each such individual benefited or suffered.

Nineteenth-Century Debates Despite Bentham’s animosity toward Paley and the theological utilitarians, there was in practice a great deal of overlap and practical cooperation between the two schools. The most prominent example was perhaps John Austin (1790–1859), appointed as the first Professor of Jurisprudence at the newly established University of London in 1826, who was a member of Bentham’s circle, describing himself – albeit in relation to his jurisprudence – as a ‘disciple’ of Bentham.41 Yet Austin offered what was arguably the most sophisticated account of theological utilitarianism, by combining a belief in a hedonistic God with the clarity of method associated with Bentham.42 Bentham’s literary executor John Bowring (1792–1872), merchant, radical MP, and diplomat, was a Unitarian and a hymn-writer, composing the well-known hymn “In the cross of Christ I glory,” which contains the lines “Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, By the cross are sanctified” – a succinct statement of theological utilitarianism.43 39 Bentham, IPML, 11 n. 40 Bentham Papers, box xxxi, fo. 215 (November 18, 1828). 41 Austin to Bentham, July 20, 1819, in The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. Volume 9: January 1817 to June 1820, ed. Stephen Conway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 336–337; and A. D. E. Lewis, “John Austin (1790–1859): Pupil of Bentham,” Bentham Newsletter, 2 (1979), 18–29. 42 See John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. W. E. Rumble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38–105. 43 Bowring excluded Bentham’s published works on religion from his edition of Bentham’s Works, on the grounds that he had “not deemed it safe to give [them] to the world . . . so bold and adventurous were some of his speculations”: see John Bowring,

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The most important theoretical developments in the nineteenth century, however, were made by thinkers who belonged to Bentham’s secular school, of whom the most important advocate in the 1810s and 1820s was James Mill (1773–1836), who met Bentham in the winter of 1808–1809, and with whom he quickly formed a close friendship. Mill’s major contribution to the philosophy of utilitarianism was Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), in which he gave a detailed account of the psychological basis, including the key notion of the association of ideas, on which Benthamite utilitarianism rested.44 While James Mill’s work constituted the most coherent and systematic account of the hedonistic psychology that lay at the foundation of classical utilitarianism, its most attractive account is generally attributed to his son, John Stuart Mill. In his essay Utilitarianism (1861), the younger Mill expounded the doctrine with a view both to answering objections to it and to persuading his readers to subscribe to it: The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

Pleasure and freedom from pain were the only things desirable as ends, and it was only because a thing was pleasurable, or was a means to pleasure or the avoidance of pain, that it was desirable.45 This was standard Benthamite doctrine. Mill, however, with a view to answering critics who regarded utilitarianism “as a doctrine worthy of swine,” departed from Bentham by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. The desirability of a pleasure was not merely a function of its quantity, but also of its quality – “some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.” A higher pleasure was such that anyone “competently acquainted” with both higher and lower pleasures would choose to experience it in preference to any quantity of lower pleasure, no matter the amount of ‘discontent’ with

Autobiographical Recollections of Sir John Bowring, ed. L. B. Bowring (London: Henry S. King, 1877), 339. 44 James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1829). 45 John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Volume X), ed. J. M. Robson, F. E. L. Priestley, and D. P. Dryer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 203–259, p. 210.

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which it might be ‘attended.’ No human being would exchange their place for that of a ‘lower’ animal, “for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures,” just as “no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool,” even if they thought that the fool was “better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.” Hence, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”46 For Bentham, while he accepted that intellectual pleasures were potentially of the greatest value, because potentially the greatest in quantity, the fact remained that the most intense pleasures, if not those of the longest continuance, were those of “the bed” and “the table,” distinctly lower pleasures in Mill’s view.47 According to the utilitarian doctrine, noted Mill, happiness was “the only thing desirable, as an end,” and anything else that was desirable was so only as a means to that end. How was it possible, asked Mill, to convince people that the doctrine was true? Since “first principles” were “incapable of proof by reasoning,” the appeal had to be to matters of fact. Just as the only proof that an object was visible was that people actually saw it, so the only proof that anything was desirable was the fact that people actually desired it.48 The only reason that could be given for “why the general happiness is desirable” was the fact “that each person . . . desires his own happiness.” This fact was sufficient to prove “that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.”49 Mill has been accused here of fallaciously grounding universalistic hedonism on egoistic hedonism; in other words, he mistakenly inferred, from the notion that an individual’s own happiness was a good to that individual, that the general happiness was a good to all. Mill responded that he was not claiming that each and every individual would be motivated to pursue the general happiness, but making the factual point, based on simple calculation, that the more pleasure which existed in a community, the better for everyone considered as a whole.50 Having claimed that the general happiness was in fact desirable, and thus one end of conduct, Mill went on to claim that it was the sole end of conduct. He admitted that people desired things other than happiness, for instance 46 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 210–212. 47 Philip Schofield, “Jeremy Bentham on Taste, Sex, and Religion,” in Bentham’s Theory of Law and Public Opinion, ed. X. Zhai and M. Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 90–118, pp. 108–109. 48 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 234. 49 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 234. 50 Mill to Henry Jones, June 13, 1868, in The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Volume XVI), ed. F. E. Mineka and D. N. Lindley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 1414.

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virtue, power, fame, and money. Many things were desired in and for themselves, but they had become so through the operation of the association of ideas. Virtue, for instance, might come to be pursued for its own sake, even though, “according to the utilitarian doctrine,” it was “not naturally and originally part of the end.” However, “in those who love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.” Observation of one’s self and of others would show that mankind desired nothing but what was pleasurable or painavoiding, and “that to desire anything, except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”51 Mill’s commitment to the principle of utility can be seen in the structure of the harm principle, as described in On Liberty, with each step involving some characteristic feature of the doctrine, if not an outright utility calculation. Mill argued that individuality was essential to human flourishing and happiness, that individuality was threatened by the pressures of social conformity that existed in democratic states, and that it was necessary, therefore, to protect individuality. Such protection should be founded on “one very simple principle,” which stated that the only justification for “interfering with the liberty of action” of any member of society was “to prevent harm to others.”52 The first step was to consider whether the action was self-regarding or otherregarding. Insofar as an action affected the agent alone, there was no justification for interference. Once it had been established that an action was other-regarding, the second step was to consider whether the party or parties affected had given their consent or not. Where consent had been given by a responsible agent, there was again no justification for interference. Taking other-regarding actions that had not been consented to, the third step was to consider whether the action was beneficial or harmful. If beneficial, then again there was no justification for interference. Taking other-regarding actions that had not been consented to and were harmful, it was, at the fourth and final step, open to discussion whether there should be interference from the law, or interference from public opinion, or no interference at all. There should be no interference where there existed some overriding benefit to society as a whole, even though harm had resulted to some individuals – for instance, an improved industrial technique might put a competitor out of business, but the overall benefits to society from a better and cheaper product 51 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 234–238. 52 John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in Essays on Politics and Society (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Volume XVIII), ed. J. M. Robson and A. Brady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 213–310, p. 223.

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justified the policy. The harm principle did not rule out each and every action that caused harm to others, but stipulated that an action became liable to interference when it did cause harm, whereupon the policy adopted was determined by a utility calculation.53 Insofar as the harm principle was a central element of Mill’s liberalism, and the harm principle itself was a product of his utilitarianism, the principle of utility was central to his liberalism. In Utilitarianism, in a footnote to his discussion of “Bentham’s dictum, ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,’”54 Mill stated that This implication, in the first principle of the utilitarian scheme, of perfect impartiality between persons, is regarded by Mr. Herbert Spencer (in his Social Statics) as a disproof of the pretensions of utility to be the foundation of right; since (he says) the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that everybody has an equal right to happiness.

Mill claimed that the principle of equality, which he reformulated as the notion “that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons,” was not a “presupposition” of the principle of utility, but “the very principle itself,” “for what is the principle of utility, if it be not that ‘happiness’ and ‘desirable’ are synonymous terms?”55 In the 1863 edition, Mill added a further paragraph to the footnote, explaining that he had received “a private communication” from Spencer (1820–1903), in which he objected “to being considered an opponent of Utilitarianism” and stating that he regarded “happiness as the ultimate end of morality.”56 In Social Statics (1851), Spencer pointed out that the content of what was considered to be the greatest happiness varied from culture to culture, and from individual to individual, and even if it were theoretically possible to identify the content of the greatest happiness, no one, legislators included, had the requisite knowledge and judgment to do so.57 In Spencer’s view, the principle of an equal right to happiness had its foundation in the moral sense. The disciples of Bentham, therefore, had no option but to fall back on an intuition of the moral sense on which to ground their system.58 John Stuart Mill had edged toward a reconciliation of utilitarianism and intuitionism by 53 Mill, “On Liberty,” 276–284. 54 See Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Specially Applied to English Practice, ed. John Stuart Mill, 5 vols. (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), vol. IV, 475: “Every individual in the country tells for one; no individual for more than one.” 55 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 257–258 n. 56 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 258 n. 57 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics. The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1995), 5–13. 58 Spencer, Social Statics, 21–23.

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claiming that, if there were an innate sense of duty, there was “no reason why the feeling which is innate should not be that of regard to the pleasures and pains of others,” in other words the greatest happiness principle.59 The moral sense, according to Spencer, was a perceptive faculty that attached pleasure and pain to feelings, and thereby generated a belief that the actions that produced those feelings were good and bad, respectively. The problem was that such feelings tended to conflict, leading to conflict between beliefs. The role of reason was to resolve such conflicts by developing “a systematic morality” based on “deductions scientifically drawn from some primary law of man which the moral sense recognizes.”60 Spencer went on to argue that both the physical world and the moral world had constant and universal laws that had been laid down by God;61 that the moral law was suitable only for the perfect man, and not for man as he was at present;62 and that, while evil arose from non-adaptation to circumstances, the inevitable tendency was toward complete adaptation and, therefore, perfection.63 He agreed with the theological utilitarians that the greatest happiness was God’s purpose, but argued that “the expediency philosophers” had mistakenly assumed that the greatest happiness was the immediate aim of man, whereas the correct course was to discover the conditions through conformity to which the greatest happiness might be obtained.64 Spencer concluded that the fundamental principle, in accord with the will of God and essential to the promotion of happiness, was the equal-liberty principle, otherwise termed justice, by which each person had as much liberty as was compatible with the equal liberty of others.65 This “fundamental truth” was recognized by the moral sense, and developed into a scientific morality by the intellect.66 From here, Spencer derived a set of personal rights, including rights to life, liberty, property, free speech, and the franchise.67 Although Spencer claimed that he was not “an opponent” to utilitarianism, the doctrine that he outlined in Social Statics was quite distinct from what had hitherto been the mainstream of English utilitarianism. First, he rejected consequentialism, on the grounds that it was futile to try to ascertain all the effects of policies or actions, and instead argued that the morality of actions and policies should be assessed by their consonance with general 59 61 63 65 67

Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 230. 60 Spencer, Social Statics, 25 and 28–29. Spencer, Social Statics, 37–48. 62 Spencer, Social Statics, 51–54. Spencer, Social Statics, 54–60. 64 Spencer, Social Statics, 60–62. Spencer, Social Statics, 67–72. 66 Spencer, Social Statics, 84. According to David Weinstein, Equal Freedom and Utility: Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Spencer advocated the adoption of non-utilitarian moral principles as the best means of maximizing utility.

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principles. Second, he was committed to the existence of a moral sense, a notion that had been consistently rejected by the utilitarians.68 Third, his emphasis on equal liberty and absolute moral rights, which he saw as vital ingredients in the promotion of happiness, jarred with the less prescriptive hedonism of Mill and, even more strikingly, Bentham, who preferred to leave open the question of what, in each particular circumstance, might be most conducive to happiness. Furthermore, Spencer’s evolutionism, to which he was converted after the appearance of Social Statics, and which transmuted into an endorsement of laissez-faire capitalism, was a departure from the classical utilitarian tradition. The classical utilitarians, while often associated with free trade through their development of the principles of political economy, were never committed to any one absolute policy recommendation, since what was expedient was always dependent upon particular circumstances. The doctrine of evolution, moreover, was incompatible with theological utilitarianism, insofar as the latter relied on the argument from design. Henry Sidgwick, who took up the mantle of the utilitarian tradition, criticized Spencer by making the point that evolution or progress as such did not equate straightforwardly with increase in moral value.69 Sidgwick is, as noted above, recognized as the third of the great classical utilitarians following Bentham and John Stuart Mill, but unlike Bentham and Mill, who held no formal academic posts, he was a lifelong academic at the University of Cambridge, eventually being elected Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy in 1885. His major work The Methods of Ethics was first published in 1874, but was reissued with Sidgwick’s emendations through to the posthumously published sixth edition in 1901. While Sidgwick confessed that his “first adhesion to a definite Ethical system was to the Utilitarianism of [John Stuart Mill],” and referred to his “discipleship of Mill” (though he also acknowledged his debt to Immanuel Kant),70 his interpretation of the basic elements of that system represented a return to Bentham’s position. Sidgwick accepted Bentham’s view that the greatest happiness should be understood in terms of the greatest possible surplus of pleasure over pain, and that pleasures were capable of being compared quantitatively.71 In other words, Sidgwick 68 J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 175–177. 69 Henry Sidgwick, “The Theory of Evolution and its Application to Practice,” Mind, 1 (1876), 52–67; and M. Ruse, “Evolution and Ethics in Victorian Britain,” The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. W. J. Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 233–256, pp. 239–240. 70 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (London: Macmillan, 1907), xvi–xxiii. 71 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 92 and 413.

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rejected Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures and hence between the quantity and quality of pleasures. If pleasure were to be taken as “the sole ultimate end of rational conduct,” there was no escaping Bentham’s view, hence “all qualitative comparison of pleasure must really resolve itself into quantitative.” The point was that pleasures were all linked by the common property of pleasantness.72 In relation to the distribution of a given quantum of happiness, Sidgwick endorsed Bentham’s ‘formula’ that everybody was to count for one. The utilitarian principle itself, noted Sidgwick, gave no answer to the distributive question, and thus needed to be supplemented by a principle of just or right distribution. The principle adopted by most utilitarians, and one that needed no “special justification,” was that of pure equality.73 In contrast to the earlier utilitarian position on the opposition between utility and moral sense, and following Mill’s suggestion rather than Spencer’s attempt at reconciliation, Sidgwick accepted that utilitarianism itself was founded on an intuition that the universal happiness was the ultimate standard of morality, though problematically he found that the view that the greatest happiness of the individual self was the ultimate standard of morality, in other words egoism, also had intuitive appeal. Since utilitarianism and intuitionism both aimed at the general happiness, albeit the latter regarded adherence to the rules of morality as the best means of achieving it, utilitarianism was allied with intuitionism in its opposition to egoism.74 Another significant point of difference between Sidgwick and the earlier secular utilitarian position was his allocation of different spheres to ethics and to the natural sciences – Bentham and Mill had both grounded their ethics on psychology. In his discussion of ‘nature,’ Sidgwick argued that “what ought to be” could not be derived from “what is.” All that ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ could mean was what was more common or original as opposed to rarer or later, and carried with it no implications for morality.75 Psychology dealt with nature, and so could not form the basis for ethics. Sidgwick identified two related problems which he struggled to resolve. The first was what he termed the ‘Dualism of Practical Reason,’ that is, the problem noted above concerning the proper basis for ethics, given the 72 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 93–94. 73 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 416–417 and 432. For a statement of Bentham’s to the same effect, see Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Cyprian Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 72–73. 74 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 83–86. 75 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 81 and 83.

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intuitive appeal of both egoistic hedonism (Epicureanism) and universalistic hedonism (utilitarianism).76 The second was what he termed the ‘double aspect’ of utilitarianism, namely, once one had accepted that utilitarianism was the proper basis for ethics, how could one bring self-interested individuals to do their duty? In other words, how could individuals, whose primary motivation was to promote their own happiness, be brought to promote the greatest happiness of the community as a whole?77 The ‘dualism’ problem, therefore, concerned the reasons for accepting one moral standard as opposed to another, and was a problem within ethics. The ‘double aspect’ problem concerned the motives that an individual might have for acting in a morally appropriate way, and was a problem of the relationship between psychology and ethics. In relation to the ‘dualism’ problem, as Bart Schultz points out, for Sidgwick, “Egoism . . . could rival utilitarianism as an independent principle of practical reason.”78 Unless there was some sort of natural harmony between duty and happiness, there appeared to be “a fundamental contradiction” at the root of ethical thought, with skepticism the inevitable conclusion.79 In relation to the ‘double aspect’ problem, Sidgwick noted that Bentham had attempted to reconcile his view that the proper end of action of the individual was his own greatest happiness80 with his view that the proper standard of right and wrong was the greatest happiness of the greatest number by means of the political, moral, and religious sanctions, but there was no guarantee that these sanctions would be adequate. In short, Bentham and Mill could not have provided an adequate account of moral obligation unless they had abandoned the “purely empirical basis” of their utilitarianism.81 The solution had to be found within ethics itself, but that in turn led back to the ‘dualism’ problem.

76 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, xxi. 77 Henry Sidgwick, “Bentham and ‘Benthamism’ in Politics and Ethics,” in Henry Sidgwick, Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, ed. E. M. Sidgwick and A. Sidgwick (London: Macmillan, 1904), 135–169, pp. 150–151. For the problem of the ‘Dualism of the Practical Reason’ see Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, 352–379; and Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe. An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 205–253. 78 Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, 206. 79 Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, 209–213. 80 Bentham did not say that the ‘proper’ end of each individual’s action was his own greatest happiness, except in those cases in which no one else was affected by the action. In fact, his claim was that, for most persons, it was, on most occasions, the actual end. See, for instance, Jeremy Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 232–234. 81 Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1888), 233–239.

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Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation

Having admitted that an “inseparable connexion between Utilitarian Duty and the greatest happiness of the individual who conforms to it” could not be “satisfactorily demonstrated on empirical grounds,” Sidgwick thought that the only solution was to appeal, like the theological utilitarians, to the existence of an afterlife in which a utilitarian God would distribute rewards and punishments according to the merit or demerit of the individual’s actions in the present life. The rational egoist who accepted God’s command to promote the general happiness needed “no further inducement to frame his life on Utilitarian principles.” But how, asked Sidgwick, was an individual to be convinced of the existence of God? Against the background of his own orthodox Anglican upbringing and a lifelong interest in ghosts, and several years of attending séances, it was Sidgwick’s concern with the ethical implications of a Godless universe that motivated him in 1882 to take a leading role in the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in order to find empirical evidence for the existence of a spiritual domain. As Schultz explains, Sidgwick believed that, in Methods of Ethics, he had failed to provide a convincing basis for ethics, and this had heightened his own fears for the future of civilization: this endeavor to reenchant the universe was . . . bound up with [Sidgwick’s] worries about the chaos of the dualism of practical reason and the grounding of egoism; . . . such concerns were absolutely crucial to him, and he regarded the empirical investigation of the paranormal as a form of theological study that could help to vindicate belief in the moral order of the universe, the harmony of duty and interest.82

For Gay, Paley, and the theological utilitarians, observation of the natural world revealed a creator God who willed the happiness of his creatures. For Bentham and the Mills, there was neither utility in religious belief, nor truth in claims affirming the existence of God, though the younger Mill did advocate a secular religion of humanity.83 For Sidgwick, in the postDarwinian age, scientific investigation was the final resource for establishing the existence of a divine dispensation and hence an adequate basis for moral obligation. Sidgwick was a recognizably academic philosopher, and was pivotal in reforming philosophical studies in the University of Cambridge in line with 82 Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, 276–277 and 279. 83 John Stuart Mill, “Three Essays on Religion,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Volume X), ed. J. M. Robson, F. E. L. Priestley, and D. P. Dryer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 369–489.

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the general trend toward more specialist, independent disciplines in the second half of the nineteenth century. His view that the domain of ethics was independent from the natural sciences became something of an orthodoxy when another Cambridge-educated philosopher, G. E. Moore (1873–1958), criticized the utilitarians, amongst others, for committing the ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ that is for defining goodness in terms of a natural quality, namely pleasure.84 In the twentieth century utilitarians generally abandoned psychology and theology, not to mention the practical reform of the world that had characterized the Benthamites, and focused on developing the most plausible account of the doctrine judged by the standards of the new discipline.85

84 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, rev. edn., ed. T. Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 69–72. 85 See T. Hurka, British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Capital, Class, and Empire: Nineteenth-Century Political Economy and Its Imaginary francesco boldizzoni Even before venturing into the realm of ideas, the historian of the nineteenth century is confronted with the inevitable question of why political economy acquired so much importance during this period. Not only did economic thought gain full autonomy from philosophical and legal thought, but it also established itself as a central domain in the study of society. This was, to a large extent, due to the advent of industrial capitalism in northwestern Europe and to its subsequent spread southward. Through a good part of the century – at least until the development of Emile Durkheim’s sociology – political economy (and its critique) represented the only theory of capitalist society. Be it a “bourgeois science,” an anti-bourgeois science, or one of social mediation, it could not evade the great problem of industrial society, that of wealth distribution. “To determine the laws which regulate this distribution, is the principal problem in Political Economy,” wrote David Ricardo.1 He was echoed by N. W. Senior, for whom political economy was “the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth.”2 This connection with the industrial revolution makes it easy to understand why Britain, the German lands, and, to a lesser degree, France occupy center stage in the history of modern economic ideas; while, on the other hand, the Italian and Spanish intellectual traditions, whose influence had extended well into the eighteenth century, became increasingly peripheral and marginal. (Nineteenth-century Russia, for its part, was still a largely underdeveloped country troubled by concerns of perceived backwardness.) Around 1840, it was clear that British political economy, also called “classical,” was internationally dominant. This approach originated from the work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith. His Wealth of Nations (1776) represented 1 David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation [1817–1821], in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), vol. I, 5. 2 N. W. Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (New York: Kelley, 1965 [1836]), 1.

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a synthesis of late-eighteenth-century views about the virtues of competition and free trade and a bridge with an earlier French tradition – physiocracy.3 From the latter, classical political economy inherited the circular-flow model based on the notion of “surplus.” By surplus (or produit net) the physiocrats meant what was left of the agricultural product once the conditions of its reproduction had been fulfilled; that is to say, once the workers’ wages plus the cost of raw materials and that of simple tools had been deducted. Surplus was then broken down into rents and profits. The concept of surplus, therefore, embodied a political assumption: By definition, surplus could only be portioned out among the ruling classes – the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. At the end of the eighteenth century this fact was far from being questioned, so much so that for Smith distribution as such was not even an object of study. He took it as a given and rather concentrated on the causes determining the growth of surplus over time, which he identified with the division of labor and the accumulation of circulating capital. His successors lived in an age of mounting social conflict and could no longer take the existing order for granted.

The Age of Ricardo The first three decades of the nineteenth century were dominated by the figures of T. R. Malthus and David Ricardo. The pair made an odd couple. Malthus was a minister of the Church of England and a professor at the East India College. Ricardo, the son of a Sephardic Jewish stockbroker, made a fortune with insider trading; he then retired, lived as a country gentleman in Gloucestershire, and bought a seat in Parliament. They had a close intellectual relationship resulting in extensive correspondence and frequent debates at the Political Economy Club.4 Although both achieved public prominence in life, much of Malthus’s later influence came via Ricardo. Ricardo set up 3 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). The literature on Smith is immense. See A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds.), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and C. J. Berry, M. P. Paganelli, and C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. part IV. On physiocracy, see Gianni Vaggi, The Economics of François Quesnay (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); and Bertrand Delmas, Thierry Demals, and Philippe Steiner (eds.), La diffusion internationale de la physiocratie, XVIIIe–XIXe siècle (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1995). 4 On Ricardo’s life see D. Weatherhall, David Ricardo: A Biography (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). On his economic theory, see S. Hollander, The Economics of David Ricardo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); and T. Peach, Interpreting David Ricardo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Both aspects are dealt with in Sraffa’s

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a consistent theoretical system, which was deductive in character and dependent on a set of strict assumptions. He had a razor-sharp, analytical mind, and no time for the nuances of human behavior. As his foremost interpreter, the economist Piero Sraffa, argued, “Ricardo was, and always remained, a stockbroker with a mediocre culture.”5 This contrasts with the sound humanistic background of most classical thinkers, from Smith to John Stuart Mill, who were well-read in many areas of philosophy and were not indifferent to history either. The core of Ricardo’s theoretical edifice is the theory of income distribution he outlined in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, first published in 1817. About twenty years earlier Malthus had argued that population was growing faster than food production and this was due to the operation of an inescapable natural law. He predicted an impending catastrophe unless demographic growth was checked by “moral restraint.” Over the years, he attenuated, yet never retreated from, his views.6 Ricardo’s pessimistic outlook, on the other hand, concerned the way this process was to impinge on capitalist dynamics. Assuming diminishing productivity, he expected that population growth would push production to marginal land, with less and less fertile lands being brought under cultivation. This would lead to higher rents and lower profits, up to the point where the latter would come close to zero. Capital accumulation, which was driven by profits, would ultimately stop. Therefore, Ricardo’s picture was one in which the capitalist class – the only source of dynamism in the economy and the only hope of achieving economic growth – would sooner or later be overcome by rentiers. Ricardian science found its practical application in the context of the great distributional conflicts of the early Victorian era, namely the conflict between classic “Introduction” to Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), vol. I, xiii–lxii. On Malthus, see P. James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); and D. Winch, Malthus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See R. J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacy of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) for an example of the endless attempts that have been made to reread Malthus’s ideas in present-day developmentalist or environmentalist terms. The recent vogue for global intellectual history has left its mark too. A. Bashford and J. E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) makes the very controversial claim that the genesis of Malthus’s thought should be decontextualized from its English milieu and relocated instead to the “Atlantic and Pacific new worlds.” 5 Piero Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991), 74. 6 T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. P. James, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). This is based on the 1803 edition, with the variora of 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826. An earlier edition was published in 1798.

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the bourgeoisie and land-owning aristocracy on the one hand, and that between employers and wage workers on the other. As such, it served as a defense of the capitalist standpoint. In the Corn Law controversy of 1815, Ricardo took a stance against the interests of rentiers.7 He opposed the Importation Act, and called for the opening of the domestic market to the import of corn, on the ground that protectionism was accelerating the trend toward the growth of rents to the detriment of profits.8 Against wage claims, Ricardo drew once again on Malthus’s population theory to formulate the socalled iron law of wages, according to which wages, in the long run, tend toward subsistence level.9 When they exceed this equilibrium level, irresponsible reproductive behavior is triggered, resulting in population growth. However, as food production cannot match population growth, the price of foodstuffs will increase. There follows the progressive erosion of real wages, until they fall back to the subsistence level. The moral of the story is that it is pointless to pay workers above the minimum necessary to keep them alive and fit to work. Indeed, this theory, as with the whole Ricardian theory of distribution, rested upon a strong assumption – that there was no technological progress to counterbalance the effect of the “law of diminishing returns,” whereby the more labor was applied per unit of land, the smaller the increase in output. This is surprising when one considers that Malthus and Ricardo were writing at the peak of a century of uninterrupted agricultural progress and at the outset of industrialization. However, it should be noted that agricultural productivity was difficult to measure in an epoch that was certainly informed by political arithmetic but still largely pre-statistical. And the fact that population was growing to unprecedented levels must have sounded alarming to men used to understanding demography in eighteenth-century terms. This substantial skepticism about technological change persisted in the early, non-capital-intensive stages of the industrial revolution. Like Smith before him, Ricardo was aware of the existence of a manufacturing sector, alongside the agricultural sector. But he treated it as an appendix to his 7 The 1815 Corn Laws were a set of restrictions on corn imports that remained in force until 1846. Despite their being consistent with the traditional protectionist attitudes of the British state, they were met with hostility by the new industrialist class. 8 David Ricardo, An Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock (1815), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), vol. IV, 1–41. 9 Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 94. Ricardo’s was neither the only nor the earliest formulation of this principle, but he gave it the seal of orthodoxy. The expression “iron law of wages” was coined by Ferdinand Lassalle.

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model, under the assumption that there was a uniform profit rate throughout a perfectly competitive market economy, as if to say that the agricultural sector set the tone of the economy, not vice versa. When, in the third edition of Principles (1821), Ricardo set out to discuss the effects of the introduction of machinery into industry, he saw nothing but gloomy prospects – mechanization was the prelude to an age of technological unemployment.10 Moreover, Malthus and Ricardo held onto Smith’s view that there was an upper limit to economic growth, a view that was consistent with the constraints of an “advanced organic economy.”11 This conclusion is implicit in Ricardo’s model, yet follows straightforwardly from his prediction that capital accumulation would come to a halt. It is explicit in the mature work of Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (1820), where he outlined one of the first theories of underconsumption. In modern terminology, we might say that while for Ricardo the supply side was the soft underbelly of the capitalist system, Malthus was afraid that demand might be insufficient to sustain industrial production. Consumption, he famously wrote, “is a plant of slow growth.”12 In the age of Ricardo not only was political economy an instrument for governing class relations but it also acquired the function of a science for the empire.13 As the industrial revolution progressed, British industrialists felt the need to abandon the very same mercantilist policies that had led them to succeed, in order to fully exploit Britain’s comparative advantage vis-à-vis less developed countries.14 The dismantling of the Continental System following the fall of Napoleon paved the way for the conquest of European markets. This is the context for Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which was little more than a clean statement of ideas that were already in the air and propounded by the likes of James Mill and Robert Torrens. The theory holds that free trade between two or more countries, if there is specialization, is 10 Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter 31. 11 See E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34ff. 12 T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, ed. J. Pullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol. I, 359. This is the 1820 edition, with alterations from the 1836 edition. 13 Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 14 Patrick O’Brien has aptly described the British industrial revolution “as possibly the sole example of successful mercantilism that created geopolitical and economic conditions required for the liberal international order that came all too gradually on-stream under the benign hegemony of the Royal Navy after 1815.” See Patrick O’Brien, “A Conjuncture in Global History or an Anglo-American Construct: The British Industrial Revolution, 1700–1850,” Journal of Global History, 5(3) (2010), 509.

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mutually advantageous. The condition is that each country should specialize in producing certain goods, namely those that it can produce at a lower opportunity cost than other countries. “It is this principle,” Ricardo wrote, “which determines that wine shall be made in France and Portugal, that corn shall be grown in America and Poland, and that hardware and other goods shall be manufactured in England.”15 It goes without saying that the English land-owning aristocracy was entirely hostile to these ideas. The principles of free trade began to be implemented only in the 1840s, when the Corn Laws were repealed. A last important theme in Ricardo’s economics is value, although it can hardly be seen as a subject on its own, separate from core concerns about distribution. Ricardo was interested in developing a specific theory insofar as it could be used to compare the value of output with that of the factors of production. The labor theory of value he developed had the advantage of allowing one to express all variables in the same unit of measurement, but also posed a number of difficulties for explaining relative prices, that is to say the price of a commodity in terms of other commodities. Ricardo was aware of this problem, and to the end of his life he strove to solve the conundrum, without ever reaching a satisfactory solution.16 Like Smith, but unlike Malthus, he remained convinced that variations in supply and demand could only account for short-term fluctuations in prices. Smith was uncertain as to what determines exchange value in the long run. Ricardo took up one of his theories and carried it to its logical conclusion. He argued that the equilibrium price of a commodity (the “natural price”) could not but reflect the quantity of labor embodied in it. Thus the great defender of capitalism came to a conclusion that, by a twist of fate, would be turned against capitalism by Karl Marx. Of course, Marx regarded labor embodied not just as a measure but as the foundation, the very essence of value. As Joseph Schumpeter observes, this represented a metaphysical transposition of the Ricardian concept.17

Consolidation, Revision, and Crisis By the 1830s the influence of classical political economy had extended to social policy. The 1834 Poor Law reform provided a testing ground for some of its 15 Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 134. 16 See David Ricardo, “Absolute Value and Exchangeable Value” (1823), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), vol. IV, 357–412. 17 Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (London: Routledge, 1954), 596.

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tenets. This new high point is attested by the appointment of N. W. Senior, the first professor of political economy at Oxford, to the chair of the Royal Commission charged with making recommendations for overcoming the Old Poor Law, which had been in place since the late Elizabethan period.18 Central to the proposals for reform was the idea that all able-bodied poor should be sent to the workhouses, thus putting an end to outdoor relief and to the wage supplements that operated under the Speenhamland system.19 The iron law of wages offered a powerful argument to discontinue the latter. But another influence began to be felt at this time and to affect the public use of political economy – that of Jeremy Bentham. One of the principles underpinning the New Poor Law was that individuals react to incentives of pleasure and pain. Therefore, the best way to discourage the poor from resorting to public assistance was to make life in workhouses hard, and to keep the wages of inmates at a level below the lowest market wages. As far as theory is concerned, the two decades that run from Ricardo’s death, in 1823, to the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles, in 1848, may be regarded as an age of consolidation, but also as one of transition and crisis. The deductive character of classical economics was reinforced. This enabled Ricardo’s more faithful followers, such as J. R. McCulloch and James Mill, to strenuously defend orthodoxy even when it openly clashed with empirical reality.20 At the same time, the enemies of political economy grew in numbers. Romantics such as Thomas Carlyle contested the reductionist and mechanistic nature of the “dismal science.” They blamed it for being unable to grasp the complexity of the human spirit and also for promoting a certain type of society, the “machine” of industrial society made of interchangeable human cogs.21 Forerunners of the English Historical School such as Richard Jones, Malthus’s successor to the Haileybury chair, criticized Ricardian economics for the lack of realism and the tendency to make undue generalizations.22 18 See N. W. Senior (and Edwin Chadwick), Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1905). 19 Under the Old Poor Law, the majority of the poor received “outdoor relief,” that is, assistance in money or in kind without the obligation to enter a workhouse. The Speenhamland system, adopted in 1795, was a system of wage subsidies aimed at supplementing the low incomes of rural workers in a time of rising costs of living. 20 Compare Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958) with Neil B. de Marchi, “The Empirical Content and Longevity of Ricardian Economics,” Economica, 37 (August 1970), 257–276. 21 Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12 and 46. 22 R. Jones, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, and on the Sources of Taxation (London: John Murray, 1831); and G. M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London: Routledge, 2001), 65.

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The Malthusian doctrine was contradicted by facts, and the same could be said for the principle of diminishing returns (leaving aside that the focus on agriculture had become anachronistic). But, to Ricardo’s followers, admitting this would have meant giving up the Ricardian theory of distribution and its policy implications. Senior himself, who stands out as an original theorist, departed from orthodox assumptions only after many hesitations. In his analysis, however, the industrial economy became prominent and the notion of capital changed to acknowledge the centrality of machinery in the production process.23 Until then, writers of political economy had mainly considered circulating capital.24 Senior described capital accumulation as the product of the abstinence (that is, of the saving) of capitalists and interpreted profit as a reward for abstinence. Mountifort Longfield, who was professor at Trinity College, Dublin, attributed the origin of profit to productivity gains from the application of machinery to labor.25 This, too, represented an important novelty, since Ricardo had obtained profits by simply subtracting wages and rents from output. Profits were, therefore, a residual quantity, which he did not bother justifying. In the mid 1830s, on the other hand, the justification of profit in response to early socialist criticisms became a widespread concern. As the Malthusian doctrine waned, another rationale had to be found to argue for keeping wages down. What was at stake was no longer poor relief but the regulation of industrial relations. Working-class movements and organizations such as Chartism and the unions were actively fighting for higher wages and better working conditions. The apologists for capital put all their eggs in the basket of wages fund doctrine. The latter did not come out of the blue. It was rather a generalization of an old idea Smith had imported from France, which Ricardo had already borrowed to explain short-run wage levels. The idea was that, at any given moment, the fund of capital available for the payment of wages was fixed in size, being the result of previously accumulated money. Its source was the saving of the capitalists. This implied that the wage rate depended solely on the number of people on the labor market, that is to say on labor supply, and could not be increased at will. John Stuart Mill, unquestionably the towering figure of the period, received through his father a job at the East India Company and a utilitarian frame of mind. But his defense of imperialism did not have the 23 Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy, 58–59. 24 Francesco Boldizzoni, Means and Ends: The Idea of Capital in the West, 1500–1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61–64 and 67–68. 25 Mountifort Longfield, Lectures on Political Economy (Dublin: Milliken, 1834), 187ff.

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racist overtones of James Mill, and his faith in utilitarianism was tempered by a genuine interest in the condition of the working class.26 Many Benthamites, on the basis of the principle that the happiness of society was the sum of individual happiness, felt they could disregard how it was actually distributed among individuals and social groups. John Stuart Mill was uncomfortable with this view, but his good intentions were not followed by any radical innovation. As John Kenneth Galbraith caustically observes, “Mill . . . was no revolutionary; libraries were not and are not at risk from having his Principles on their shelves.”27 For sure, this man was cautious by temperament to the point of being almost obsessed with doubt. The ideas put forward in Mill’s Principles were often a case of two steps forward toward progressivism and one step back. He advocated intergenerational justice and the taxation of inherited wealth but opposed progressive taxation, which he labeled “a mild form of robbery.”28 In the third edition, he went so far as to argue that, faced with the choice between communism and the injustices of Victorian society, he was ready to choose communism.29 But he was quick to add that he was optimistic about the imminent advent of a “stationary state of capital and wealth,” which would put an end to social conflict and ensure everyone a moderate state of prosperity. Moreover, in On Liberty he seemed to backtrack on his earlier, open-minded attitudes about state intervention in the capitalist system, warning instead against the “mischief” government commits when it meddles in the economic activity of individuals.30 For these reasons it is perhaps more accurate to interpret Mill’s thought as the most mature expression of classical liberalism rather than as an early embodiment of social liberalism. On the other hand, it would be unfair to see his work as the last defense of Ricardo’s system. As a matter of fact, Mill broke with the Ricardian distribution scheme, denying it any character of 26 It is difficult to think of a work so tainted with blatant Anglocentrism as James Mill’s The History of British India, 6 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817–1826). On John Stuart Mill’s attitudes toward colonialism, see Chapter 19 by Jennifer Pitts in this volume. On his utilitarianism and liberalism, see respectively Chapter 5 by Philip Schofield and Chapter 8 by Jerrold Seigel. 27 John Kenneth Galbraith, A History of Economics: The Past as the Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 120. 28 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, ed. W. J. Ashley (London: Longmans, 1909), 808, note 2. This sentence from the first edition (1848) was replaced in the third edition (1852) with a more nuanced statement to the same effect. 29 Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 208. 30 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. S. Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1859]), 114–115.

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inevitability. His decision to reject the wages fund doctrine, which he had formerly endorsed, and his support for the unions, caused something of a sensation among his contemporaries. While he conceded that the production of wealth was subjected to natural laws, he clearly stated that its distribution fell within the moral sphere, thus claiming the existence of a margin for political maneuver.

Karl Marx Already in the 1820s, while the Ricardians were revising and progressively departing from Ricardo’s labor theory of value, some authors of the anticapitalist tradition such as the anarchist Thomas Hodgskin reworked it for a different purpose.31 In so doing, they opened up a path that would be trodden by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the middle of the century.32 In Volume I of Capital (1867), Marx defined value as the sum of constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value. While constant capital incorporates the cost of raw materials and depreciation of machinery, variable capital corresponds to wage expenditures. It is “variable” because it yields returns more than proportional to labor costs. This means that only labor “creates” value ex nihilo. The difference between the value created by labor and its cost is called surplus value. What makes possible the extraction of surplus value from labor is the existence of a mode of production – capitalism – in which a social class is excluded from ownership of the means of production. The development of capitalism, Marx asserted, was the result of primitive accumulation. During this process, which began with the sixteenth-century enclosures and culminated in the factory system, workers had been dispossessed of the means of production and gradually transformed into a class of proletarians. They were now entirely dependent on capital and, at the same time, alienated from themselves and from society.33 In Marx there is no such thing as an economic analysis disjointed from sociology and the philosophy of history. The methodological individualism of British thought was also alien to him. Marx was German, and from 31 Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1922 [1825]). 32 Engels’s engagement with political economy predates that of Marx, with whom he was closely associated since around 1844. The most recent intellectual biography of Marx is G. S. Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016). 33 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I (1867), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling, ed. F. Engels, in Marx & Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol. XXXV (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996).

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G. W. F. Hegel and the Young Hegelians he derived a dynamic and dialectical conception of history. Society was his great unit of analysis, encompassing productive forces and relations of production.34 The economy, meant as an aggregate of physical quantities, was meaningless per se: capitalism, the overarching form of social organization, had to be investigated. “Capital,” Marx wrote, “is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.”35 Unsurprisingly, then, the most innovative aspect of his political economy concerns capitalist dynamics. Marx came to the conclusion that capitalism was doomed to collapse because of its inherent social and economic contradictions. Capitalism produces business crises and a tendency toward concentration of capital in a few hands. This is something classical economics was unable to explain, taking for granted the so-called “Say’s law.” It was a theory formulated by the French liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say at the beginning of the nineteenth century according to which supply creates its own demand. Only Malthus and the Swiss writer J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi had rejected this view. The latter did so in his Nouveaux principes (1819). He prefigured a world in which laissez faire would lead to unemployment, growing inequality, and underconsumption. Hence he strongly advocated state intervention.36 For Marx, the rejection of Say’s law followed from the idea that capitalism was a system oriented toward exchange value rather than use value. Disequilibrium was a consequence of the fact that capitalism was not focused on material needs but on the capitalists’ drive for profit. The loss of any direct relationship between production and consumption triggered periodic crises. Yet the chief economic contradiction of capitalism lies in the simultaneous pursuit of profits and capital accumulation, which turn out to be incompatible tendencies. To understand this point, one has to refer to Marx’s theory of value. According to it, the rate of profit is directly proportional to the rate of exploitation/surplus value and inversely proportional to the capital intensity of an industry, that is, to the amount of constant capital employed in the 34 Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See, in particular, Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan and D. J. Struik, in MECW, vol. III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975) and his “Preface” (1859) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. Ryazanskaya, in MECW, vol. XXIX (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), 261–265. 35 Marx, Capital, vol. I, 753. 36 J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi, New Principles of Political Economy: Of Wealth in Its Relation to Population, trans. Richard Hyse (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991 [1819 and 1827]).

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production process. Firms have to grow to stay viable, and this requires capital accumulation. Capital accumulation, in turn, entails recruiting more labor on competitive labor markets. As the reserve army of the unemployed shrinks, wages rise. The ensuing fall in the rate of exploitation, ceteris paribus, will result in a fall of the rate of profit. Competition on commodity markets will put capitalists under further strain. Thus they will seek to hold down costs by substituting machinery for labor. But this will only worsen the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx predicted that industrial concentration and inequality would spread to the whole economy, causing the “increasing misery” of an ever-expanding proletariat. Eventually, a point is reached where this situation becomes unbearable. The “social” productive forces prevail over privatized distribution of income and wealth and “the knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”37 This would not be a mechanical process, though. As a child of the Enlightenment, Marx believed in the progress of reason. The formation of class consciousness would be critical in paving the way for revolution. Marx also acknowledged the existence of “counteracting influences” that would check the fall of profit. There was still a margin to increase the rate of exploitation. Employers, for example, could lobby to enforce a longer working day or could achieve higher labor productivity by more efficient organization. But more importantly, technological progress was a great unknown. Could it proceed at the same pace as or faster than capital accumulation itself? Marx did not think so. He could not imagine that in the next 100 years or so science and technology would drive industrial innovation.

Toward a New Orthodoxy In the 1870s, in Britain as in Continental Europe, the seeds were planted for a paradigm shift known as the “marginal revolution.” The early steps in this direction were taken independently by three authors: the British William Stanley Jevons, the Austrian Carl Menger, and the French Léon Walras.38 “Internalist” explanations for the shift usually stress the fact that keeping together the disparate building blocks of classical theory had become

37 Marx, Capital, vol. I, 750. 38 On the marginal revolution as a whole, see R. D. Collison Black, A. W. Coats, and C. D. W. Goodwin (eds.), Papers on the Marginal Revolution in Economics, special issue of History of Political Economy, 4(2) (1972).

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impossible and that this inconsistent body of doctrines was often contradicted by the available evidence. In fact, the issue is much more complex. The marginal revolution has remained associated with the triumph of the concept of utility or, to put it another way, with the “subjective” theory of value. In his manifesto, Jevons emphatically referred to his “somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility.”39 However, classical economists were also convinced that use value and scarcity played some role in determining exchange value, at least in the short run. This idea, after all, was a commonplace for eighteenth-century authors such as Ferdinando Galiani, and its origins can be traced further back in time to the Renaissance and late Scholastic writers of Italy and Spain.40 In sum, subjective theories of value and the alternative “objective” theories (whereby the ultimate source of value was labor, toil, or the cost of production) already coexisted in the early modern period, sometimes even in the same thinker. Neither was mathematization – the most obvious if superficial change brought about by the marginal revolution – a complete novelty. In this respect, too, precedents may be found as early as the 1710s.41 In 1838 and 1842, respectively, the French economist Augustin Cournot and the German J. H. von Thünen had offered mathematical depictions of the operation of an economy. In the middle of the nineteenth century mathematical theories of utility had been put forward by Jules Dupuit and H. H. Gossen. Moreover, not all varieties of marginalism were mathematical. Stripped to its essentials, the late-nineteenth-century dissolution of classical political economy went hand in hand with a change of emphasis from production to consumption. Consumption was to occupy pride of place in an advanced industrial economy such as Britain, where imperial expansion was a response to the need for markets. And the industrialization process was accelerating almost everywhere north of the Alps. The economies and societies of France, the German Rhineland, and the neighboring regions were being transformed, at different speeds and in different ways, exacerbating ideological divides. But another factor may have contributed to this change. After Marx, the classical theory of value had become a weapon in the hands of revolutionaries. The association between value and labor, aside 39 William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (New York: Kelley, 1965 [1871]), 1. Italics in the original. 40 See, for instance, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 62ff. 41 Marco Bianchini, Bonheur public et méthode géométrique: Enquête sur les économistes italiens (1711–1803), trans. Pierre Crépel, rev. Gisèle Sandri (Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2002).

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from any technical issues, was dangerous. One could no longer argue that labor was the foundation of value without arousing the suspicion that capitalism was based on dispossession and exploitation. The theory of value based on utility was perfectly suited to counter these radical ideas.42 It was fit to survive (and prevail) in the new intellectual environment. This said, a diversified picture emerges as one considers individual biographies and approaches. Jevons was a chemist by training, Walras an engineer. Both were imbued with positivist spirit and cherished the dream of making economics resemble analytical mechanics. Menger’s background was different. He held a doctorate in law, as was typical of elites in the Habsburg Empire, who were also far from embracing the religion of progress.43 Jevons’s and Menger’s political ideas were rooted in Unitarianism and traditional Catholicism, respectively, inclining Jevons to liberalism and Menger to conservatism. Walras, on the other hand, was in many ways a product of the Second French Empire: He had a secular view of life and a social philosophy inspired by Saint-Simonianism. He thought that laissez faire should coexist with a radical land reform.44 Jevons’s science of decision-making may be defined as “operational utilitarianism,” whereby pleasure (positive utility) was attached to the consumption of goods and pain (disutility or negative utility) to labor. Its key principle was that the utility gained from consumption of a good decreased with quantity. Assuming consistent and stable preferences, self-interested individuals were supposed to maximize their “utility function” subject to a budget constraint.45 Menger, who remained faithful to the teachings of Aristotelian Thomism, shared neither Jevons’s sensualism nor his view of man as a maximizing machine. He never spoke of “utility,” but did rather stress subjective needs 42 This is not to imply that the marginalists intended to achieve this objective. In the early 1870s the first volume of Marx’s Capital had just appeared in German and there is no evidence that Jevons was even aware of its existence. In the 1880s, though, the book began to be fiercely attacked by Menger’s disciples. For a discussion see M. Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 166–167; and H. W. Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought, 3rd edn. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 514. 43 See W. M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 44 On Jevons, see H. Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). On Menger, see M. Alter, Carl Menger and the Origins of Austrian Economics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); and G. Campagnolo (ed.), Existe-t-il une doctrine Menger? Aux origines de la pensée économique autrichienne (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2011). On Walras, see J. Cunningham Wood (ed.), Léon Walras: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1993), particularly vol. I. 45 Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy.

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and the different capacity of goods to satisfy them.46 Jevons’s assumption of the stability of preferences was also at odds with Menger’s view of the fundamental uncertainty surrounding decision-making. What they had in common was methodological individualism and a strong faith in the market as an efficient coordinating mechanism. Finally, the problem of how individual decisions translate into market outcomes, and of how all markets interact leading to adjustment of quantities exchanged and prices, was tackled by Walras by means of an ingenious if daring system of simultaneous equations.47 Yet, this “general economic equilibrium” approach, further developed by the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, was for a long time sidelined. While Jevons and Menger mainly dealt with the demand side of the economy, assuming fixed supply, their successors extended the tools and the axioms of marginal analysis to the production side.48 The new theory of production was built as a perfect counterpart to marginal utility theory so that a theory of distribution could be derived from it. This explains why the hallmark of the new orthodoxy was not the subjective theory of value as such but the role that this theory assumed within the theory of distribution. Unlike the classical interpretation of the economic process as a circular flow, the marginalists saw production as a linear process turning disaggregated inputs into output. Hence, under the assumption of perfect competition and other ideal-world conditions, they were able to claim that each factor of production was rewarded according to its actual contribution (called “marginal productivity”). Eventually, at the end of the century, the British P. H. Wicksteed and the American J. B. Clark set out to provide a mathematical proof of “product exhaustion”: In the capitalist system, they argued, there was no room for superprofits and nothing was taken away from labor.49 In marginalist theory, functional income distribution no longer depended on natural laws, as in Ricardo, or on social and institutional circumstances, as in Marx, but on the workings of factor markets. If for classical economics distribution logically preceded the determination of value, for marginalism the reverse 46 Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, trans. J. Dingwall and B. F. Hoselitz (New York: New York University Press, 1981 [1871]). 47 Léon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics: Or the Theory of Social Wealth, trans. W. Jaffé (Homewood: Irwin, 1954 [1874–1877]). 48 For all its shortcomings, G. J. Stigler’s Production and Distribution Theories: The Formative Period (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994 [1941]) is still the most cited survey of these developments. 49 Philip H. Wicksteed, An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1932 [1894]); and J. B. Clark, The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

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was true. In the classical model, relative prices could not be derived unless the wage rate and the rate of profit were first determined. This is because the market had no role in regulating the remuneration of the factors of production; it only determined the quantities of goods to be produced. Prices of consumer goods could temporarily deviate from their “natural price,” which reflected the conditions of production, but in the long run they had to converge to it. For the marginalists, on the contrary, the theory of value, turned into a theory of market prices, underlay the analysis of distribution.50 By appealing to the market mechanism as a substitute for the faltering laws of classical political economy, they reasserted the justice of the capitalist order and bypassed the problem of power posed by Marx. But, to achieve this, they had to invest the market with the implausible qualities of an all-powerful invisible hand.51 The demise of classical political economy was gradual. Its replacement by marginalist approaches was completed only at the turn of the century. Oxford University, where Mill’s Principles was the standard textbook until 1919, represents a somewhat extreme case. More generally, the year 1890, when Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics was published, can be seen as a turning point. This work, which significantly endorsed the relabeling of the field as “economics,” would exert unrivaled academic influence in the English-speaking world until the rise of John Maynard Keynes.52 In truth, Marshall regarded himself as the author of a synthesis between classical and marginalist theory. Yet the synthesis was often a case of twisting the former to fit the latter. Nor did Marshall manage to settle the contradiction between deduction and induction, static analysis and evolutionary dynamics, all of which he believed should contribute to scientific explanation. This is why the term “neoclassical economics” was used from the beginning as a synonym for the marginalist paradigm, for example by Thorstein Veblen, one of its fiercest critics.53 50 On these important differences, originally highlighted by Sraffa, see H. Bortis, “Structure and Change within the Circular Theory of Production,” in The Economic Theory of Structure and Change, ed. M. Baranzini and R. Scazzieri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 64–92. 51 Cf. B. Ingrao and G. Israel, The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 52 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890). On Marshall’s life and thought, see P. Groenewegen, A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924 (Aldershot: Elgar, 1995); on his philosophical background, see S. Cook, The Intellectual Foundations of Alfred Marshall’s Economic Science: A Rounded Globe of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); on his influence, see J. Maloney, The Professionalization of Economics: Alfred Marshall and the Dominance of Orthodoxy (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991). 53 Thorstein Veblen, “The Preconceptions of Economic Science. Part III,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 14(2) (1900), 240–269.

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The Great Struggle Already in the first half of the nineteenth century the British canon was analyzed, debated, received, and often contested on the European mainland. While most national traditions were, at least to some extent, keen to incorporate and adapt some of its concepts, British political economy was met in Germany with hostility and rejection. Criticism had an immediate target: the policy implications of the theory of international trade, which suggested that continental countries should give up industrialization and specialize in the production of low-value-added commodities. Unequal exchange between industrial Britain and the developing economies of the Continent, critics argued, would set off a vicious cycle of growing dependence and international disparities in wealth. This argument was at the core of Friedrich List’s work The National System of Political Economy (1841), where he exposed the opportunistic motives that were leading the British to embrace free trade. “Now [after 1815],” he wrote, “for the first time the English were heard to condemn protection and to eulogise Adam Smith’s doctrine of free trade, a doctrine which heretofore those practical islanders considered as suited only to an ideal state of Utopian perfection.”54 The “cosmopolitical economics” theorized by the classics was portrayed as a pseudo-science whose function was to legitimize British imperialism. Against it, List argued for the primacy of the “nation” over individual appetites and impersonal market forces. Consequently he reasserted the nature of economics as statecraft, paying homage to the early modern tradition of public policy (Polizeiwissenschaft). He died unhappy and plagued with financial woes, but his book enjoyed an extraordinary posthumous success. At various critical junctures in the histories of Japan, India, and other developing countries, List was invoked as the patron saint of the victims of westernization, colonialism, and globalization.55 Indeed, behind the critique of cosmopolitical economics there lay an important theoretical point, which would be fully developed by the subsequent German writers. This was the idea that British political economy was flawed because it posited the existence of universal regularities in economic behavior. Such regularities were seen as resulting from unwarranted generalization. 54 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, trans. S. S. Lloyd (London: Longmans, 1909 [1841]), 60. 55 Francesco Boldizzoni, “The Long Shadow of Cameralism: The Atlantic Order and Its Discontents,” in Economic Growth and the Origins of Modern Political Economy: Economic Reasons of State, 1500–2000, ed. Philipp R. Rössner (London: Routledge, 2016), 302–303 and 305–307.

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In other terms, British economists were blamed for thinking that the principles governing economic and social life around the entire world were basically the same, even without ever setting foot across the Channel. To this ahistorical and deductive style of theorizing the Germans opposed a methodology based on historical analysis, induction, and comparison – hence the label “German Historical School.” This definition, however, applies to a variety of approaches, conventionally grouped under two main headings: the Older Historical School and the Younger Historical School, the 1870s being a watershed between the two. Chronology aside, there are some basic differences between the mid-century generation of Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies and the later school of Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Lujo Brentano. The former tended to use historical evidence to build stage theories of development, broad-brush pictures of the comparative evolution of nations and civilizations from which to draw explanatory principles. The latter, on the other hand, favored a more cautious use of inference, emphasizing historical specificities. While the older historicists were not afraid of resorting to organicist analogies and meta-analytic categories such as the Volksgeist (“spirit of the people”), which could be grasped only intuitively, the younger members were careful to specify the relevant variables, and were more reliant on statistical reasoning. This said, they too rejected positivism, adopting instead the methodology of Verstehen or the empathetic interpretation of human behavior. The marginal revolution opened a new front in the struggle between “analytics” and “continentals.” In 1883 Carl Menger published a book on the method of social sciences animated by a polemical zeal against the historicists, whom he accused of being inconclusive. He stressed the autonomy of economic behavior from other spheres of social action, which made it possible to consider it in isolation. Economic laws, he argued, could be derived from first truths by applying a deductive method. The reply of the Younger Historical School was not long in coming. Schmoller, its leader, wrote a double review in which he contrasted Menger’s work with another newly minted book, Introduction to the Human Sciences by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, a major proponent of the interpretive approach.56 This comparison was intended to show the lack of sophistication in Menger’s thinking vis-à-vis what Schmoller regarded as cutting56 Carl Menger, Untersuchungen über die Methode der Sozialwissenschaften und der politischen Ökonomie insbesondere (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883); Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. R. A. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989 [1883]); and Gustav Schmoller, “Zur Methodologie der Staats- und Sozialwissenschaften,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, 7(3) (1883), 975–994.

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edge research. While expressing respect for his interlocutor, he essentially saw Menger as a narrow-minded scholar, stuck with outdated ideas, who was teasing him from the periphery of the German-speaking world.57 Schmoller’s position may be summarized as follows: Since the object of the human sciences is thinking beings, a theory of human behavior can be constructed only after understanding the meanings of actions for the people performing them. Thus economics should not rest on axioms but on genuine psychological and anthropological foundations. Moreover, as those meanings vary in time, knowledge about society is necessarily historical in character. Menger and the marginalists were found guilty of methodological individualism, insufficient empirical work, misleading transposition of natural science concepts to the social context, arbitrary definition of economic behavior, and an oversimplified view of the actors’ psychology, reduced to self-interest.58 The Methodenstreit, the conflict over proper method, dragged on over the next few years, but without altering the balance of power in German academia, which remained firmly in the hands of the historicists until the interwar period. In Europe the Schmollerian approach proved particularly influential in Italy, Central Europe, and Scandinavia. It also spread to Japan and the United States, where it inspired the institutionalist movement.59 The younger historicists were politically engaged intellectuals, which also explains the importance attached to institutions, and the state in particular, in their depictions of economic life. Whereas List’s chief concern was freeing Germany from economic subordination, thirty years later the big issue had become handling the country’s rapid industrial development and its social consequences. In 1872 Schmoller and his colleagues founded the Verein für Socialpolitik, which aimed to inform the policies of Otto von Bismarck’s government. The idea behind “social policy” was that the state should take up the burden of mediating between capital and labor and settle what was called the “social question” (soziale Frage). In this way the twin evils of modernity – liberalism and revolutionary socialism – would be defeated. Adolph Wagner, who represented the left wing of the Verein, introduced into the debate concepts that were quite ahead of his time, such as the

57 See C. D. Salley, “Gustav Schmoller, Wilhelm Dilthey, and the German Rejection of Positivism in Economics,” History of Economic Ideas, 1(3)–2(1) (1993–1994), 81–91. 58 Schmoller, “Zur Methodologie der Staats- und Sozialwissenschaften.” 59 For a more detailed picture see H. Hagemann, “Concluding Remarks,” in The German Historical School and European Economic Thought, ed. J. L. Cardoso and M. Psalidopoulos (London: Routledge, 2016), 229ff.

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redistributive use of taxation.60 In the twentieth century such concepts would form the backbone of the social democratic tradition of Continental Europe. This conception of the state as an ethical whole that was able to achieve a synthesis among particular interests was clearly indebted to Hegel, Lorenz von Stein, and two generations of Prussian social reformers.61 But the reformist spirit of the Verein also reflected the wider theoretical orientation of the Historical School and its skepticism about prospects for spontaneous social progress. It was the logical outcome of the rejection of economic naturalism, on the one hand, and of Marxist historical teleology, on the other.

Conclusion If three keywords were to be identified encapsulating the essence of nineteenth-century political economy, these would be “capital,” “class,” and “empire.” Economic thinkers placed capitalism at the center of theoretical speculation. Intellectual representations from those turbulent times mirror the articulation of the new, controversial mode of production within the structures of class society and imperial relations. In this sense, the conceptual frameworks of liberalism, Marxism, and state socialism may be understood as intellectual constructs aimed at legitimizing or challenging the capitalist system, or at reconciling its conflicting parts. Political economy, alongside political and legal philosophy, made a substantial contribution to these ideas. For much of the century, it represented the core of the intellectual enterprise, sharing its vocabulary and categories of analysis with the neighboring fields of inquiry. In the twentieth century the archetypes of liberalism, Marxism, and state socialism were combined in various ways. At times they escalated into ideological aberrations and unfortunate experiments; other times they evolved into a wide spectrum of theoretical and institutional hybrids. Yet in the nineteenth century all these developments only existed in potency. This is perhaps the blurred line that, in the history of ideas, separates the “age of capital” from the “age of extremes.”

60 Adolph Wagner, Finanzwissenschaft, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Winter, 1877–1901). 61 Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, “German Origins of a Theory of Social Reform: Hegel, Stein and the Idea of ‘Social Policy,’” in Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, European Foundations of the Welfare State, trans. John Veit-Wilson (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 58–74.

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Positivism in European Intellectual, Political, and Religious Life mary pickering Positivism inherited the anti-metaphysical stance of the French Enlightenment and with its empirical bias sought to put a stop to traditional philosophical movements. Understanding the history of positivism is difficult for several reasons. It was enormously influential in its day, exercising a strong attraction over a wide range of thinkers. At the same time, it was the object of harsh and even dismissive criticism. Many of its difficulties stem from the character of its founder, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a brilliant polymath but also a highly unstable person who spent time in a mental asylum and conceived his project in highly different ways at various moments in his life. To him, positivism was a philosophy of science, a framework for understanding history, a source of morality, and a solution to the social and political problems of his day. But many people, even some attracted to parts of the system, rejected positivism as authoritarian, excessively materialist, deaf to human spiritual needs, or misguided in attempting to restore a kind of religious authority in a world no longer able to be subject to it. That it belonged somehow both to the realm of science and to that of religion was one reason why it appealed to some people and repelled others. Comte’s successors, many of whom occupied important places in their time, added to the confusion by focusing exclusively on one or another of the aspects he had sought to bring together. Eventually, many people who never heard of Comte or read him developed ideas connected with him.

The Positivist Impulse before Comte The word “positive” at the root of Comte’s philosophy comes from the Latin word positus, the past participle of ponere, which means to put or place. By the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “positive” meant explicitly laid down by human or divine authority and was often used in the phrase “positive law” as opposed to “natural law.” Eventually the divine aspect of positive law was de-emphasized, and “positive” connoted deliberately imposed by human authority, especially in 151

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legislation and courts.1 Because the application of “positive law” resulted in something certain, by the seventeenth century, when the positivist “revolution” took off, the adjective had become equivalent to factual, certain, real, and capable of verification.2 The scientific method developed by Bacon and Descartes established certain knowledge that came from sense experiences and related especially to the laws of nature.3 In effect, humans created the scientific method and provided the sense experiences and observations that constituted reliable knowledge about the natural world. The extension of the word “positive” from juridical laws to natural laws occurred because, both in courts and in experiments, humans ultimately determined what was certain, that is, factual.4 The word “positive” became more widespread in the late eighteenth century. J.-A. Naigeon used it to refer to knowledge that was “incontestable” because it was based on induction and was verifiable, as opposed to Christian theology, which could never be considered a “positive science.”5 Condorcet praised d’Alembert for using “facts” and “rigorous proofs” to verify the “reality of a phenomenon” and for restricting himself to “the discovery of positive truths,” which promoted “the common good.”6 Condorcet sought a firm basis for the “moral and political sciences,” the predecessor of the modern social sciences, which he suggested would do a better job directing human conduct than Christianity did. Germaine de Staël reinforced Condorcet’s point of view. In 1800, she suggested that the “positive sciences” were the “physical” or “exact sciences,” and she praised their firm basis in “experience and observation,” as well as their usefulness in combating “illusions” and partisan passions, which were encouraged by the weak arguments of religious and political leaders. To ensure progress, she recommended making morality and politics positive sciences and using the “philosophy of the positive sciences” to judge all institutions and opinions.7 1 J. B. Murphy, The Philosophy of Positive Law: Foundations of Jurisprudence (New Haven: Yale University Pres, 2008), 2 and 214. 2 Auguste Comte, Philosophie première, Cours de philosophie positive, leçons 1 à 45 (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 27. Hereafter, this work will be cited as Cours, vol. I. 3 Michael Singer, The Legacy of Positivism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005), 21; and T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 18. 4 R. W. Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” Early Modern Science, vol. III of The Cambridge History of Science, ed. K. Park and L. Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 134, 158, and 161–162. 5 Jacques-André Naigeon, Encyclopédie méthodique: Philosophie ancienne et moderne (Paris,1791), vol. I, xxiii and 420. 6 J. A. N. Condorcet, Éloge de M. d’Alembert (Paris, 1784), 48, 54. 7 Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris, 1842), 220, 232–234, 425, 481–482, and 483.

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Condorcet and Madame de Staël influenced the social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). In his various writings from 1802 to 1816, he suggested that the traditional society that had ill-weathered the French Revolution needed to be replaced because its archaic feudal and theological characteristics supported reactionary sentiments. To him, society reflected the dominant intellectual system, and the Encyclopédie had not replaced what it had destroyed. What was needed was a new system of knowledge based on the inherently progressive positive sciences. A “positive science” signified “a science based on a large number of observed facts rather than imagined facts.”8 Like Madame de Staël, he urged the creation of a new positive science of man and society, which would cover morality and politics and guide social reorganization. He emphasized, “We are at the point that the first good summary [that is, synthesis] of the particular [positive] sciences will constitute positive philosophy.”9 Unifying all knowledge, it would lead to a stable, harmonious scientific and industrial order devoted to activity benefiting humanity.

Auguste Comte In 1817, Saint-Simon hired Comte, who had recently studied at the École Polytechnique, and brought his scientific expertise and organizing skills to the autodidact’s journalistic enterprises. Comte, who was born into a royalist, Catholic family in Montpellier in 1798, had witnessed the disharmony caused by the French Revolution in his native city and home. Having rejected monarchical government and traditional religion as a lycée student, he sought to rebuild consensus. By 1817, he had experienced a republic, empire, and monarchy, and had no faith in a purely political path to the regeneration of society.10 During their seven-year collaboration, Saint-Simon gave Comte a new approach, guiding his interest in both politics and science by showing him that a scientific synthesis could provide an intellectual worldview that would 8 Henri de Saint-Simon, “Cinquième Lettre: M. de Saint-Simon à ses amis Les Docteurs Burdin et Bougon, ainsi qu’à tous les physiologists du Globe,” in Henri Saint-Simon: Œuvres complètes, ed. Juliette Grange, Pierre Musso, Philippe Régnier, and Frank Yonnet, 4 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), vol. I, 859. 9 Henri de Saint-Simon, “Second mémoire de M. de Saint-Simon sur sa contestation avec M. de Redern,” in Henri Saint-Simon: Œuvres complètes, ed. Juliette Grange, Pierre Musso, Philippe Régnier, and Frank Yonnet, 4 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), vol. I, 871. 10 Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009).

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create like-minded people and regenerate society. While Saint-Simon increasingly devoted himself to practical reforms, Comte, a mathematician and engineer by training, believed that theory should precede practice. He achieved a breakthrough in 1822, when he completed the Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société (Plan of the Scientific Works Necessary for Reorganizing Society). It introduced the historical law of three stages that was later developed in the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and Système de politique positive (1851–1854). Comte wrote, “By the very nature of the human mind, each branch of our knowledge is necessarily obliged in its advancement to pass successively through three different theoretical stages”: the theological, metaphysical, and scientific stages.11 Given that all our ideas were interrelated, changes in one branch of knowledge affected the entire system of knowledge. Because “ideas govern and overturn the world” and intellectual evolution was the key to all other transformations, the political and social system also changed.12 Comte anchored his law in humans’ universal struggle to explain and control nature. In the first, theological stage, the mind accounted for what it observed by referring to fictitious entities, that is, one or more gods. (This stage had three substages: fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism.) Whereas priests ruled the spiritual realm, military men, especially monarchs, dominated politics. Comte believed that in every period, there were separate spiritual and “temporal” powers. The second stage was the metaphysical or transitional stage, where the mind substituted abstractions like Nature for God. Metaphysical philosophers governed the “spiritual realm,” while lawyers (especially in parliaments) ruled the temporal realm, where doctrines of popular sovereignty and natural rights flourished. Production began to overtake conquest as the primary activity. The third stage was the positive stage. Dismissing the search for first or final causes and all references to supernatural beings and metaphysical abstractions, whose existence could not be proven, people used descriptive laws to explain how, not why, things worked. Once the positive philosophy triumphed, a new republic would be directed by positive philosophers, who had a general knowledge of the sciences, and regenerated industrialists, who would dedicate society to peaceful, productive, cooperative activities. 11 Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, 4 vols., 5th edn. (Paris: Société Positiviste, 1929), vol. IV, Appendix, 77. 12 Comte, Cours, vol. I, 38.

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Workers, who were uncorrupted, and women, who were experts in the emotions, would help positive philosophers ensure common interests. In the Système, Comte insisted that everyone in the future should unite in the worship of Humanity, which would be the focus of their intellectual, active, and artistic endeavors. The positive philosophy was in his mind closely linked to this Religion of Humanity, which gave it its moral compass and reflected the impact of the Counter-Revolutionaries, his own spiritual yearnings in an age of romanticism, and his despair after the death in 1846 of Clotilde de Vaux, a much younger woman with whom he had fallen in love the previous year. Various followers and scholars thought his religion reflected the mental instability that had landed him in an asylum in 1826. Yet larger issues were also at work. Even before meeting Clotilde de Vaux, Comte had attacked excessive “positivity,” that is, scientism. He became convinced that, to ensure social solidarity, people needed to develop not only their intelligence but also their sociability, that is, their sentiment of “altruism,” a term he coined around 1850. Comte’s view of history was Eurocentric and normative, although he condemned nationalism and the domination of one state by another. He assumed all societies around the globe would follow this standard pattern of development because the mind desired to understand what occurred around it, sought to link its observations, and demanded that all its ideas be homogeneous. As it developed, so did the sympathies. As a result, all individuals experienced these three stages, as did the societies that they constituted. Comte’s law was closely connected to his classification of the sciences, which likewise showed the inevitable domination of positive philosophy. In his view, each science progressed through these three stages depending on the simplicity of the phenomena it studied and the distance of these phenomena from humans. Each relied on the knowledge provided by the sciences that preceded it in the hierarchy. Much of the Cours traced the methods and research approaches developed by each science, frequently pointing out that there was no one single scientific method applicable to all sciences because their phenomena were complex in different ways.13 Besides founding the history of science as a discipline, Comte was original, according to Johan Heilbron, for devising a “differential epistemology,” which upheld the “relative autonomy of the sciences” and opposed the reduction of one science to another.14 13 Robert C. Scharff, Comte after Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–10. 14 Johan Heilbron, “Social Thought and Natural Science,” in The Modern Social Sciences, vol. VII of The Cambridge History of Science, ed. T. M. Porter and D. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 53–55.

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In classifying the sciences, Comte set aside mathematics, the first science, as a special case because it served as an instrument of discovery. The other sciences developed in this order: astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. (Comte rejected psychology as a science chiefly because he associated it with Victor Cousin’s metaphysical philosophy of the unified self.) The phenomena of biology were more complex and closer to humans than those of astronomy. Now that biology was being established, Comte believed that it was time to launch the science of society by applying the “positive,” that is, scientific, method to the most complex phenomena, social phenomena (such as families, communities, and other collective groups), the study of which was still dominated by theological and metaphysical ways of thinking. Comte called this new science “sociology” in 1839.15 He recommended three methods of scientific investigation: observation, which originally developed in astronomy; experimentation, which was first used in physics and would be indirect in sociology; and comparison, which was the specialty of biology and would include historical research in sociology. Once sociology became positive and had the certainty of the other sciences, positive philosophy, which encompassed all the positive sciences, would be complete. Because all ideas would be homogeneous, that is, scientific and certain, everyone would agree on basic principles, and there would arise a stable, harmonious state with a new secular morality stressing altruism. Although Madame de Staël and Saint-Simon had briefly referred to positive philosophy, Comte was the first to develop it and make it a significant, respectable doctrine. He called his positive philosophy “positivism” in the second volume of the Cours, published in 1835.16 The word had been used derisively since 1829 by the followers of Saint-Simon who were trying to create a new Christianity. However, Comte embraced the term of his rivals, especially after the Revolution of 1848, when he became more militant about his republican agenda and organized the Positivist Society.17 In Comte’s version, positivism regarded as valid only knowledge based on the scientific method, that is, on direct or indirect observations of real, concrete phenomena. Such observations were used to create general laws expressing in precise, certain terms the “relations of resemblance and succession that facts have among themselves.”18 These laws, which described how 15 Auguste Comte, Physique sociale: Cours de philosophie positive, leçons 46 à 60 (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 88. Hereafter, this work will be cited as Cours, vol. II. 16 Comte, Cours, vol. I, 454. 17 Annie Petit, “Des Sciences positives à la politique positive,” in Auguste Comte: Trajectoires positivistes, ed. Annie Petit (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 108–109. 18 Comte, Système de politique positive, vol. IV, Appendix, 144.

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phenomena functioned and how they were related in space and time, had to predict future events. In his mind, all sciences had to make predictions, which were crucial to actions useful to society. Positivism reflects Comte’s combination of the approaches of Bacon and Descartes. Bacon contributed the empirical idea that meticulous observation of nature must constitute the facts that are at the base of all scientific generalizations. While he pushed the inductive, experiential side of the scientific method, Descartes developed the deductive, rationalist side of the scientific method. Elaborating upon Cartesianism, Comte believed knowledge about phenomena that we encounter through experience should be advanced by using reason, that is, logical mental operations.19 “One can even say generally that science is essentially destined to dispense with all direct observation – as much as the diverse phenomena allow – by making it possible to deduce from the smallest possible number of immediate data the greatest possible number of results.”20 Reason helped us to see patterns in relationships between phenomena, make predictions, and find ways to intervene in the natural and social order. Comte had a number of caveats. He insisted that “everything is relative,” that is, that we not refer to absolute truths or make universal claims; “exact reality can never, in any way, be perfectly unveiled.”21 Moreover, complete objectivity was not always possible, especially in the science of society, which touched on phenomena close to us. At the same time, Comte waved away the destructive tendencies of skepticism, proclaiming that dogmatism was the “normal state of human intelligence.”22 To be positive meant to favor something. In addition, he warned against efforts to equate positivist thinking with statistics, especially in sociology, whose phenomena were too complex to be quantified. Reducing positivism to empiricism was also forbidden because collecting data for data’s sake was pointless. Scientists needed first to use their imagination and reason to devise an a priori provisional hypothesis before they could even determine what phenomena were important to observe. Afterwards they verified the hypothesis by means of induction and deduction. Reflecting his recognition of the parameters of the mind, Comte wrote, “[Man] cannot have connected 19 Robert C. Scharff, “Comte’s Positivist Dream, Our Post-Positivist Burden,” in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy, ed. D. Moyar (London: Routledge, 2010), 453. 20 Comte, Cours, vol. I, 71. 21 Auguste Comte, Ecrits de jeunesse 1816–1828, ed. P. de Berrêdo Carneiro and P. Arnaud (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1970); and Comte, Cours, vol. II, 103. 22 Comte, Système de politique positive, vol. IV, Appendix, 202.

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observations without some theory any more than [he can have] a positive theory without regular observations.”23 Warning against excessive rationalism, Comte pointed out that imagination helped not only to pose questions and build a priori hypotheses but also to create hypothetical cases, which could be used to approach scientific problems in a tentative fashion until better evidence could be found. As he was not a rigid, scientistic thinker, Comte chose not to offer universal, ahistorical rules of scientific procedure or any organon of proof. Indeed, he believed that purely abstract rules seemed metaphysical and absolutist and uselessly encumbered the free pursuit of science.24 Scientists should be encouraged to use a wide variety of methods and go beyond direct evidence without forgetting that ultimately some type of evidence involving the sensory observation of phenomena had to be used for verification. Contrary to stereotypical views of positivism, Comte did not advocate the rule of scientists, who he thought were too specialized, selfish, and narrowminded. Having given free courses to workers for years, he aimed to demystify the sciences and make the scientific mindset the “normal” mindset of every person. The positive spirit should be an extension of common sense, for both originated in concrete sense-related experience, tried to connect and foresee, remained preoccupied with “reality,” and had the same goal of practical utility. Knowledge was to be employed not to satisfy humans’ idle curiosity or love of conquest but to increase their power over nature, to better social conditions, and to help individuals improve themselves. Positivism entailed not simply an anti-metaphysical philosophy but a religious and political system. Comte believed that creating a new system of ideas would lead to a moral and then a political revolution that would complete the work of the Revolution of 1789. Sociology, whose aim was to guide scientists in assuring people’s happiness, provided the understanding, tools, and laws to recreate the social and political world. People would study, love, and act to improve Humanity, the object of sociology. The positive republic, grounded in the Religion of Humanity and based on order and progress, would help people combat their individual egoism and develop their sociability, which, along with intelligence, distinguished humans from animals. In the 1850s, Comte created not only a new secular religion but a new, seventh science, morality. Providing a definition of science, he defended his decision: “One could never objectively fix the number of sciences . . . 23 Comte, Système de politique positive, vol. IV, Appendix, 141. 24 Scharff, Comte after Positivism, 7 and 65.

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Basically, the name given to each science designates only the group of speculations whose unity is sufficiently recognized; this must vary according to time and the minds of the individuals.”25 The science of morality was necessary at the moment because the scientific spirit of the age was making people too egotistical. Therefore the positive spirit designated not only the “certain” (as opposed to “indecision”), the “precise” (as opposed to the “vague”), the “real” (as opposed to the “chimerical,” that is, pertaining to “impenetrable mysteries”), the “useful” (as opposed to the “pointless”), the “relative” (as opposed to the “absolute”), and the “organic” (unifying and organizing as opposed to the destructive), but also the “sympathetic” (as opposed to hateful).26 Again revealing his distance from pure scientism, Comte stressed the importance of emotional growth as critical to his political project. Thought was not sufficient; one must feel and act.

Positivism after Comte Comte’s influence was remarkable. Thanks to the richness of his thought, many people selected aspects that appealed to them, overlooking those that did not. Two of his most famous disciples, Émile Littré and John Stuart Mill, balked at the religious turn in his thought and rejected the increasingly conservative nature of his politics, which had no regard for parliamentary democracy. Embracing primarily his philosophy, they helped make positivism the scientific manifesto of the industrial, secular age. In doing so, they robbed it of many of its nuances and contributed to reducing it to the cult of science and objectivity. At this time, science had a great deal of cachet as the backbone of industrialization and the apparent solution to many of the problems of the day. Indeed, the word scientist was coined in 1833, replacing the older term “man of science.” Scientists, along with engineers and doctors, became increasingly professionalized and welcomed a legitimizing doctrine, one that seemed to privilege them. Moreover, positivism’s dogmatism about science appealed to those who were not bound to a traditional religious faith but, like Comte, wanted a cogent worldview that promised certainty. Skeptics now could behold a universe and a history full of meaning. For many intellectuals and reformers, to embrace positivism was to reject tradition, romanticism, and the domination of old elites and to uphold progress, reason, and modernity. 25 Comte, Système de politique positive, vol. IV, 187. 26 Comte, Système de politique positive, vol. IV, 547.

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Émile Littré, a leftist republican and author of the famous Dictionnaire de la Langue française (1863–1873), was close to Comte until the latter supported the takeover of Napoleon III in 1851. Yet, until his death in 1881, Littré remained an avid propagator of Comte’s thought, for he believed it was the only philosophy “that makes known how these three things are connected: the order of immanent properties, the order of the successive constitution of the sciences, and the order of their hierarchical teaching.”27 Positivism gave the sciences a philosophical turn and philosophy a scientific turn, making all our ideas homogeneous. It also informed people about the feasibility of their plans to improve themselves and the material world. Littré cleverly defended positivism from those who accused it of atheism and materialism by arguing that it merely said God was unobservable and thus unknowable, not that his existence was impossible. In removing the paraphernalia of the Religion of Humanity and its authoritarian political regulations, Littré finetuned positivism to make it a scientific weapon against the Catholic Church and the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin (1792–1867), which had dominated the university world for decades and was in its death throes during the Second Empire. Thanks to Littré’s many books and articles simplifying and summarizing positivism and uncoupling it from conservatism, the philosophy became a key doctrine buttressing the Third Republic. The prominent politicians Jules Ferry (1832–1893), Léon Gambetta (1838–1882), and Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) used it to promote the sciences as a way of rejuvenating the country after the defeat of 1871, to fight the Catholic Church for obstructing the use of reason, and to provide a secular, that is, “laic,” basis for the public school system. With an anchor in the sciences as a means of legitimation and its promise to ensure order in addition to progress, positivism helped make republicanism acceptable to broad swaths of French people, who were wary of its revolutionary associations.28 Attesting to Comte’s increased influence, the Collège de France created a chair in the history of science in 1892 and gave it to Pierre Laffitte (1823–1903), the leader of the positivist movement since 1857. Because positivism permeated the intellectual discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century, different aspects of it were embraced by many 27 Émile Littré, De la philosophie positive (Paris, 1845), 102. 28 R. Fox, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 140–148 and 228–239; Singer, The Legacy of Positivism, 77–83; and Cheryl Welch, “Social Science from the French Revolution to Positivism,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 194–199.

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leading figures, even if they denied its direct influence and combined it with other philosophies, such as Hegel’s idealism. Two such scholars were Ernest Renan (1823–1892) and Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893).29 Renan attempted to reconcile religion and science to fulfill people’s emotional need for faith and their modern insistence on rejecting knowledge not based on observation. He famously questioned Jesus’s divinity and proposed a religion of science. Yet his view of religion was less institutional than Comte’s.30 Taine argued that history and the study of politics and morality should be made to become scientific by relying solely on facts. He also attempted to make literary criticism a science by focusing on how writers were influenced by their milieu, a term often used by Comte. Yet he differed from Comte in advocating the extension of the scientific method to metaphysics and psychology.31 Despite their differences from Comte, both Taine and Renan contributed to the reduction of positivism to scientism, which became an easy target for critics, who denounced the “bankruptcy” of scientific thinking.32 Another person who remade positivism was Mill. From 1841 to 1847, he carried on a correspondence with Comte that was marked by quarrels over the Frenchman’s anti-liberal politics, rejection of psychology in favor of phrenology, and misogyny. Mill’s frustration culminated in a critical book, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865). Yet there is much evidence that Mill admired Comte. The first edition of A System of Logic (1843) referred to Comte almost 100 times, praising his scientific method, especially its expression as a historical method in sociology, a new science that much excited him. Dubbing the historical method the “Inverse Deductive Method,” Mill explained that this historical method began in a deductive fashion by making “generalizations” about the past, which derived from “a collation of specific” inductive experiences. It then verified the generalizations by deductions from “the laws of human nature.” In pointing out that the premises that begin a deductive process derive from induction, Mill confirmed Comte’s positivist principle that all scientific theories must rest ultimately on experience, a view that he popularized in his textbook on logic.33 In addition, Mill liked 29 G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire, 1852–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 88–93, 106–107, and 127–57; and W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Kennikat Press, 1963), 94–130. 30 Annie Petit, “Le prétendu positivisme d’Ernest Renan,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 8(1) (2000), 73–101. 31 Jean-Thomas Nordmann, “Taine et le positivisme,” Romantisme, nos. 21–22 (1978), 21–33, pp. 22–24. 32 Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire, 224. 33 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, vols. VII and VIII of

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positivism’s social vision because it equated progress with growing human solidarity based on a common doctrine and promoted a directing intellectual elite. He supported the Religion of Humanity only insofar as its worship of Humanity as a replacement for God had wide-ranging ethical benefits; he disliked its rituals.34 Although Mill commended Comte’s philosophy of science and some of its social implications, he denounced Comtean politics as despotic. Comte would call Mill (and Littré) an “incomplete positivist,” but, by distancing positivism from its more objectionable political and utopian aspects, which seemed to rest on non-empirical grounds anyway, Mill made it seemingly more rigorous and more respectable. In the process, Mill tweaked positivism by insisting, contrary to Comte’s wishes, that it take a succession of phenomena to be causal in nature and provide formal, ahistorical, permanent rules for scientific discovery and verification. Henceforth providing such rules became the main preoccupation of most positivists, who likewise followed Mill in insisting on empiricism, neutral objectivity, induction, and the inevitable triumph of scientific thinking. As Robert Scharff noted in 1995, “Mill’s outlook already resembles our century’s Logical Positivism in being both rationally reconstructive and ahistorically oriented.”35 Many of Mill’s contemporaries embraced positivism, which reinforced the British empirical tradition with its roots in Bacon and Hume. In addition, the ideas of worshipping Humanity, altruistically living for others, and giving moral power to an intellectual elite intrigued many Britons, especially evangelicals whose missionary fervor and volunteerism made them eager to direct their religious fervor to social goals. Positivism suited the moral earnestness and high-mindedness of the Victorian age.36 At Oxford, philosopher Richard Congreve preached the Religion of Humanity. His young adherents included John Henry Bridges, Frederic Harrison, and Edward Spencer Beesly, who continued the positivist interest

The Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1963–1991), vol. VIII, 897; and John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. J. Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 126. 34 C. Heydt, “Narrative, Imagination, and the Religion of Humanity in Mill’s Ethics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 44 (2006), 99–115. 35 Scharff, Comte after Positivism, ix. See also Scharff, Comte after Positivism, 36–72 and 120–22. 36 Wright, The Religion of Humanity, 273–275; and Norman Mackenzie and Jeanne Mackenzie (eds.), “Introduction” to The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1982), vol. I, 10.

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in social activism. Beesly, a friend of Karl Marx, helped form the International Working Men’s Association in 1864. Many people in Mill’s circle embraced positivism for scientific and semireligious reasons. Alexander Bain helped Mill revise A System of Logic, abandoned his evangelicalism, and adopted the positivist emphasis on induction and sensory knowledge as crucial to establishing scientific laws. He advanced psychology as a rigorous science founded on physiology, echoing Comte’s dislike for introspection as its usual basis.37 The journalist George Henry Lewes admired positivism for representing a secular, scientific, and universalist philosophy, one that offered a new moral system grounded in humanity. In the 1840s, he wrote a popular Biographical History of Philosophy, which concluded with a chapter on positivism as the culmination of Western thought. After reading Lewes and Littré, the writer Harriet Martineau became entranced by the Cours with its large range of knowledge and clear principles. Thanks to the law of three stages, positivism gave her an exclusively scientific framework for understanding individual and social development, and gave her the reassurance that her own difficult journey from Unitarianism to atheism was normal. The sciences seemed far more effective than Christianity in achieving social justice. With a sense of moral duty, she freely translated and condensed the Cours in 1853 and insisted on its affordability so that workers could read it and escape the skepticism of the age. Her work, which streamlined Comte’s convoluted prose, did a great deal to popularize positivism. Yet, like Littré and Mill, Martineau did not expound on the Religion of Humanity or Comte’s political philosophy with its endorsement of a hierarchical, inegalitarian society and a disciplinary state. She gave the impression that Comte was chiefly a scientific philosopher who recommended a secular, humane, altruistic life-style.38 George Eliot, the partner of Lewes, much admired Martineau, who was the model for Dorothea in Middlemarch. Eliot’s positivist ideas can be seen most clearly in Romola, whose well-educated female protagonist goes through the three stages of thought and ends up embracing an altruistic philosophy devoted to Humanity.39 Other nineteenth-century European 37 Mark Francis, “The Evolutionary Turn in Positivism: G. H. Lewes and Leslie Stephen,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. W. J. Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 287 and 291. 38 S. Hoecker-Drysdale, Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 168. 39 D. M. Hesse, George Eliot and Auguste Comte: The Influence of Comtean Philosophy on the Novels of George Eliot (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 282.

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novelists also claimed to be positivists in faithfully observing everyday life and/or adhering to its altruistic principle: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), George Gissing (1857–1903), Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910), Bolesław Prus (1847–1912), and Émile Zola (1840–1902). The latter embraced materialist determinism and regarded literature as a form of experiment. Besides Martineau and Eliot, other prominent women intellectuals went through a crisis of religious faith and welcomed positivism not only for its scientific approach to social investigation but also on account of its moral commitment to social justice. Annie Besant (1847–1933) wrote a defense of Comte for the National Secular Society: Auguste Comte: His Philosophy, His Religion and His Sociology. Like Martineau and Eliot, she was eager to show that secularism and virtue could go hand in hand. Revealing her devotion to the common good, she helped unionize workers, joined the Fabian Society, and reiterated Comte’s opposition to imperialism.40 Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), like Besant, became interested in positivism while struggling with her Christian beliefs. Along with her positivist husband, Sidney Webb, she devoted herself in the Fabian Society to changing society gradually and gave a large role to altruistic civil servants, a notion not dissimilar to Comte’s enlightened elite.41 The example of these women as well as that of Mill, who was also drawn to the Religion of Humanity, shows that positivism, with its emphasis on altruism, hit more of an ethical chord in Protestant England than in France, which preferred its republican, unifying ramifications.42 As the scientific doctrine of the moment, positivism spread throughout the continent. In Sweden, positivism was connected with workers’ movements. A Positivist Society was founded in Stockholm in 1879 by Dr. Anton Nyström (1842–1931), who supported trade unions, workers’ education, secularization of the school system, and freedom of religion. The astronomer and leftist Karl Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925) initially called himself a positivist and later became the first socialist prime minister of Sweden.43 In Italy, positivism was embraced by the republican revolutionary Carlo Catteano (1801–1869) and the philosopher Roberto Ardigò (1828–1920), who sought to make Italy a strong independent modern nation. Like Third Republic politicians in 40 Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9, 47–57, and 191–192. 41 R. J. Harrison, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 16–23, 40, 48, 59, 68, 76, 102, 134–135, and 249. 42 Welch, “Social Science from the French Revolution to Positivism,” 192 and 198–199. 43 M. Hurd, Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 103–104, 109–110, 114, 117, 125, and 192–197.

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France, both men believed the spread of scientific enlightenment would eliminate the influence of the Catholic Church. Moreover, as in Sweden and England, positivism appealed to Italians on the left, who used it to lambaste state policies that hurt workers.44 In Germany, scholars had been condemning “positive science” since the 1820s for being too mired in the particular and not sufficiently philosophical.45 Positivism was of no interest to Germans who were devoted to a traditional humanistic approach to Bildung. German Protestants disliked Comte’s condemnation of their religion as destructive and his Catholic-sounding Religion of Humanity.46 Positivism also had to contend with strong rivals: neoKantianism, the scientific philosophy of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), the hermeneutic philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and Marxism.47 A leading opponent of Marx, Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) has been called the “founder of German positivism.” Dühring argued that Comte helped usher in the modern age because of his forceful case against metaphysics. The positivist stress on the facts of experience made people seek the meaning of life on this earth and thus encouraged them to reform institutions that were part of their immediate world.48 Franz Brentano (1838–1917) also applauded the positivist take on the scientific method in philosophy, which, he insisted, must focus solely on “phenomena” to avoid metaphysics.49 Eventually physical scientists in Germany became interested in positivism in order to combat philosophical idealism and to promote the sciences in German schools.50

44 M. Donzelli, Origini e declino del positivismo: Saggio su Auguste Comte in Italia (Naples: Liguori, 1999), 76 and 81. 45 Denise Phillips, “Trading Epistemological Insults: ‘Positive Knowledge’ and Natural Science in Germany, 1800–1850,” in The Worlds of Positivism: A Global Intellectual History; 1770–1930, ed. Johanes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer, and Jan Surman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 137–154. 46 Laurent Fedi, “Avant-propos – De Paris à Vienne. Quelques jalons,” in La réception germanique d’Auguste Comte, special issue of Les Cahiers Philosophiques de Strasbourg, no. 35 (2014), 20–21. 47 Michel Bourdeau, “La réception du positivisme (1843–1928),” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 1(8) (2003), 7; and Eckhardt Fuchs, “Positivism and History in the XIXth Century,” in Positivismes: Philosophie, Sociologie, Histoire, Sciences, ed. Andrée DespyMeyer and Didier Devriese (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 154–155, and 158. 48 Frederick C. Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 174–178. 49 B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 43. 50 R. Harré, “Positivist Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, ed. T. Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12.

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Positivism spread to Eastern Europe. Brentano’s student, the philosopher Tomáš Masaryk (1850–1937), was inspired by positivism to modernize his country with the help of an elite of social scientists; he became the first president of Czechoslovakia after World War I.51 Polish scholars and journalists, such as Aleksander S´więtochowski (1849–1938), were frustrated by their inability to throw off the yoke of Russian rule and took up positivism because it seemed to offer a more rational, pragmatic approach to social and economic progress than idealism and romanticism and avoided direct confrontation with the enemy. As in France, spreading an education based on the sciences seemed a promising way to effect change.52 Similarly, the Young Turks became attracted to positivism, especially its republican, anti-imperialist message, in their drive to modernize the Ottoman Empire. Like the French and Italians, they used positivism to secularize their state. One of their leaders was Ahmed Riza (1859–1930), who became a positivist while living in Paris. Following Comte’s precepts, he fought for an authoritarian, centralized government founded on scientific laws, the separation of church and state, and a laic school system. Positivism also influenced Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who in 1907 joined the Young Turks’ political party and in 1923 became the first president of Turkey.53 Beginning in the 1840s, positivism infiltrated Russia, where the disaffected intelligentsia saw the sciences as the way to eliminate obsolete mental habits, ensure modernization, and regenerate society, concerns that became even more urgent after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War in 1856. Positivism replaced German idealism as the latest intellectual fashion, as indicated by the enthusiasm with which it was embraced by Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Those who upheld positivism as a progressive, liberating force included the Nihilist Dmitrii Pisarev (1840–1868), the leftist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), the Populist theorist Nikolai Petr Lavrov (1823–1900), and the Bolshevik A. A. Bogdanov (1873–1928).54 The Russian academic Grégoire 51 Jan Sebestik, “Thomas Garrigue Masaryk ou le positivisme détourné,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 1(8) (2003), 102–123. 52 Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), 281–321. 53 M. S¸ ükrü Hanio˘glu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39–40, 293, and 303. 54 Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 273 and 349–387; and Frederick C. Copleston, Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 101, 127–131, 139, 227–229, and 400.

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Wyrouboff (or Grigory Vyrubov, 1843–1913) took over Laffitte’s chair in the history of science at the Collège de France in 1903. Besides the history of science, positivism had a strong impact on other academic disciplines. Comte’s system energized scholars to partake of the prestige that science enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Who would not want their field to sound as certain and legitimate as physics, for example? As part of the professionalization of academia, disciplines followed positivist precepts to develop their own criteria for investigation and methods of proof. People involved in the new social sciences abandoned the title of men of letters and became specialists with years of training, “laboratories,” and journals devoted to their subjects. Avoiding speculation, maintaining objectivity, and seeking generalizations based on facts became marks of true scholarship and important ways of gaining respect from other academics.55 Disciplines that emphasized their scientific, positivist approach were legal positivism, whose main figures include John Austin and Hans Kelsen; criminology, founded by Cesare Lombroso; psychology (especially behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner); economics (e.g., Jan Tinbergen); political science (e.g., David Easton); anthropology (e.g., A. R. Radcliffe-Brown); and literary criticism (e.g., Gustave Lanson). Sociology is where Comte’s impact is most evident. He is generally considered to be “the father” of the discipline. Although he denied being influenced by positivism and was far more a proponent of individualism and laissez-faire than Comte was, Herbert Spencer did employ one of Comte’s divisions of sociology in his book Social Statics (1851), used his words “sociology” and “altruism,” and embraced his ideas that a system of philosophy based on the sciences should replace religion and that society was an organism with its own laws of development.56 Comte also influenced Emile Durkheim, who occupied the first chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in 1913. He echoed the positivist’s arguments that society could be studied in a scientific manner, that “social facts” were distinctive and capable of being approached objectively, and that it was important to explain the mechanisms of social solidarity.57 Many sociologists today still bear the marks of their discipline’s positivist roots in seeking the laws of social change and social 55 Steve Fuller, The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies (New York: Routledge, 2006), 88. 56 Daniel Becquemont, “Positivisme et utilitarisme: Regards croisés, Comte, Spencer, Huxley,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 1(8) (2003), 61–68. 57 Warren Schmaus, “Hypotheses and Historical Analysis in Durkheim’s Sociological Methodology: A Comtean Tradition,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 16(1) (1985), 1–30; and Annie Petit “De Comte à Durkheim: Un héritage ambivalent,” in La

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structures and in trying to solve social ills that derive from the breakdown of community and consensus. History was another discipline that sought respectability by claiming to be based on the model of the sciences. “Positivist history” refers to fact-based, “objective” history. In opposition to the emotionalism of Romantic historians, various positivist historians, such as Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), followed Comte and demanded that historians seek first the facts and then construct laws of history, which were generalizations based on induction from the facts.58 Other historians, such as Charles Seignobos (1854–1942), abandoned the second stage of finding general laws and instead focused on setting down in great detail and without judgment the facts themselves, which they mined from documents.59 In the middle of the twentieth century, “positivist” historians attempted to capture the past by means of statistics. Many scientists were inspired by positivism as a doctrine that seemed to legitimize and give direction to their careers, and brought up intriguing methodological questions. Charles Robin (1813–1878) gave biology a positivist orientation and did much to promote this new science. The chemist Marcellin Berthelot (1827–1907) was so enthusiastic about positivism’s strictures against non-observable phenomena that he famously denied the existence of atoms.60 The physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878) maintained that our knowledge of reality must be based solely on the scientific method, which should seek only phenomenological relationships, and he insisted, like Comte, that this knowledge was provisional and relative.61 He pushed the anti-realist implications of positivism, which would resonate in philosophy. Indeed, philosophy, especially the philosophy of science, was deeply affected by positivism. Thanks to the controversies that it generated, philosophers debated the nature of scientific knowledge, the relationships between science and philosophy and between science and society, and the importance of empiricism in establishing meaning.62 Many thinkers modified Comte’s

58 59 60 61 62

Sociologie et sa méthode. Les “Règles” de Durkheim un siècle après, ed. M. Borlandi and L. Mucchielli (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 42–70. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 126–127. Fuchs, “Positivism and History in the XIXth Century,” 148–153 and 159. R. Laudan, “Positivism and Scientism,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. J. L. Heilbron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 670. Annie Petit, “Claude Bernard and the History of Science,” Isis, 78 (1987), 208 and 215. Anastasios Brenner, “Reflections on Chimisso: French Philosophy of Science and the Historical Method,” in The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, ed. F. Stadler, D. Dieks, W. Gonzales, S. Hartmann, T. Uebel, and M. Weber (Heidelberg: Springer, 2010), 58.

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classification of the sciences: Herbert Spencer, Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932), and Karl Pearson (1857–1936). This classification is still the one most often referred to today.63 Comte’s equally influential notion that scientists should begin research with a provisional hypothesis challenged the strictly empirical approach of first collecting data as well as the idea that knowledge is absolute, which was upheld by the eclectic school of Victor Cousin. Charles Renouvier (1815–1903), Comte’s former student at the École Polytechnique, critiqued eclecticism by referring to positivism’s stress on the importance of hypotheses and the principle of limiting knowledge to the laws of phenomena.64 Three eminent philosophers at the Sorbonne were influenced by similar ideas relating to the relative, contingent, hypothetical nature of the scientific enterprise, which lay at the heart of this version of positivism: Paul Janet (1823–1899), Émile Boutroux (1845–1921), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939). Boutroux’s brotherin-law, the physicist Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), and the physicist Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) were in the positivist tradition and developed the notion of conventionalism, which maintained that scientific theories were more helpful tools organizing data than exact representations of reality.65 Many of Comte’s points about provisional hypotheses as convenient scientific devices and about the role of the imagination in scientific and social analysis were taken up by Hans Vaihinger, Thomas Kuhn, and Jean Baudrillard.66 Whereas French philosophy was more interested in questions relating to science than logic,67 German and Austrian philosophy combined the two subjects in logical positivism, which originated with the physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Positivism confirmed Mach’s skepticism regarding metaphysical and other speculative approaches to knowledge. He echoed Comte’s empirical statement that “every proposition that is not reducible to a simple enunciation of a fact, whether particular or general, could have no real and intelligible sense.”68 Thanks in part to Mach, the Vienna Circle turned Comte’s doctrine into “logical positivism,” which tried to avoid metaphysical, speculative 63 R. Laudan, “Classification of the Sciences,” “Philosophy and Science,” and “Positivism and Scientism,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. John L. Heilbron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 155, 632–634, and 670. 64 Warren Schmaus, “Renouvier and the Method of Hypothesis,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 38(1) (2007), 132–139. 65 Anastasios Brenner, Les origines françaises de la philosophie des sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 12 and 31; and B. Bensaude-Vincent and J. Simon, Chemistry: The Impure Science, 2nd edn. (London: Imperial College Press, 2012), 194. 66 M. Gane, Auguste Comte (London: Routledge, 2006), 13 and 20. 67 Brenner, “Reflections on Chimisso,” 58. 68 Comte, Discours sur l’esprit positif (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1963 [1844]), 74.

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thought that masked prejudices and attempted to protect the sciences from the anti-science backlash that occurred after World War I, when the right-wing celebrated instinct rather than reason. Embracing positivism constituted a political stance, though many Vienna Circle members resisted politicizing philosophical methods.69 Indeed, logical positivism became quite different from Comte’s positivism because of its periodic insistence on maintaining a distance from ethical pronouncements, which to some adherents seemed emotional and untestable, and because of its preoccupation with logic, language (especially that of mathematics), and verifiability. Comte would not have embraced the radical empiricism of Mach and his successors, who sought to limit meaningful scientific propositions to economical descriptions of the sensations (sense data) at the root of all phenomena. Comte believed the sciences could be unified most effectively around a universal goal, the improvement of society or humanity, whereas later positivists thought they could be unified by means of a common essential basis or a single language.70 Comte was more interested in saving society than in developing universal or formal rules of scientific investigation – rules that delineated what was scientific and what was not. Attacks on positivism have been a mainstay of the academic world, especially since the 1890s. It has been criticized for being mechanistic and narrowly empirical and for not explaining how one goes from particular sensory data experienced by individuals to impersonal general laws about an assumed common reality.71 It does not offer any notion of truth or a clear definition of “fact,” pretends to be “value-free,” imposes a simplistic model of the sciences on all forms of knowledge, promotes an impossible-to-attain neutral observational stance, dismisses too easily the importance of intuition in the scientific process and the irrational in human behavior, and supports a naïve realism in philosophy and a capitalist, technocratic status quo in politics. Despites such attacks, positivism as a philosophy and a political movement had a significant impact. It contributed a great degree to modern 69 Thomas Uebel, “Political Philosophy of Science in Logical Empiricism: The Left Vienna Circle,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 36(4) (2005), 755 and 759; and Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12–13 and 26–27. 70 J. H. Turner, “Positivism: Sociological,” in International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. N. J. Smelser and P. B. Bates (Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2001), vol. XVII, 11,828; Scharff, Comte after Positivism, 61–63; and S. Fuller, “Positivism, History of,” in International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. N. J. Smelser and P.B. Bates (Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2001), vol. XVII, 11,823–11,824. 71 Harré, “Positivist Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” 17 and 19.

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consciousness, which values scientific thinking as the most legitimate form of knowledge; to tackle problems, including social problems, means to frame them in a scientific fashion, not to have recourse to religion or metaphysical speculation.72 Moreover, with its optimistic stress on progress and its emphasis on industry, educational reform, and moral betterment, positivism offered a program for modernization and proved liberating to people feeling oppressed by reactionary politicians, traditional religion, and foreign powers. Reformers in India and many Latin American countries found its program useful.73 Although Marxism had a bigger impact thanks chiefly to its appeal to a single target group, the working class, one could argue that positivism’s influence has been subtler and more enduring. 72 Scharff, “Comte’s Positivist Dream,” 438. 73 Mary Pickering, “The Legacy of Comte,” in Love, Order & Progress: The Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Auguste Comte, ed. Michel Bourdeau, Mary Pickering, and Warren Schmaus (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2018), 250–304.

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European Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century jerrold seigel Of the modern political labels that emerged and spread in the earlynineteenth-century “Age of Revolutions,” none is more difficult to pin down than “liberal.” Conservatism, socialism, and nationalism all take manifold forms, but liberalism is the most protean of all. Liberals have been royalists and republicans, anti-clericals and Catholics, individualists and communitarians, opponents and supporters of government action in society and the economy. There have been liberal advocates of universal suffrage and of restricted voting rights, liberal defenders of capitalism and liberal critics of it, liberal imperialists and liberal foes of empire. Do the terms liberal and liberalism point to one thing or many? Is there a solid core to being liberal that gives substance to all its variations, or does it owe its diffusion to some fickle fluidity that allows it to take on the shapes people and circumstances impose on it? These questions point to yet another, especially critical for historians: Just who should count as a liberal? Self-declared anti-liberals have sought to tar each other with the label, while some among those who claim it for themselves contest the right of others to bear it. One more or less standard genealogy of liberalism gives an especially prominent place to the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, a supporter of representative government who limited its powers to the protection of “life, liberty, and property,” and argued for religious toleration. Similar views were espoused by many later liberals, but recent writers have emphasized that neither in his own time nor in the century that followed was Locke called a liberal, much less viewed as a founder of the family. The term was used to describe governments and constitutions favorable to liberty by supporters of American independence, but it was the upheaval in France after 1789 that established its centrality in the modern political vocabulary, as people sought to stake out positions in regard to the new potentials and dangers the French Revolution unleashed. The “Glorious Revolution” that established Parliamentary supremacy a century earlier had 172

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inspired Locke’s defense of liberty, but the transformation that began in 1789 constituted a movement considerably more democratic in its mobilization of ordinary people, more radical in its anti-clerical and anti-aristocratic thrust, and more international in its implications. To place the origins of liberalism in the age of Locke runs the danger of locating it in a much narrower political and ideological universe than the one in which the term began its modern career. The story that made him a kind of liberal father-figure only began to acquire the dominance it largely retains today in the years before and after World War II, given impetus by the search for long-term roots of “Western liberal democracy” as an alternative to communist and fascist movements in both Europe and America.1 None of this means it is wrong to refer to Locke (or some of his predecessors) as liberals: They gave voice to ideas we now recognize as fundamental to the kind of politics the category calls up. But we can only prepare ourselves to confront its protean nature if we approach it in the context when its meanings deepened and its range of reference spread. The first people to call themselves liberals in this moment were ones who responded to the Revolution by at once affirming the liberation it seemed to promise and rejecting some of its more radical consequences. Such a formula, however, amounts more to a question than an answer: Just where should the balance be struck between openness to change and resistance to disruption, between hope and fear? Liberalism’s protean nature emerged in this uncertain space, one made still more difficult to chart because it had different contours in the diverse places and times where attempts to define it took shape. To approach this history we need first to attend to the word liberal itself. Its modern political sense evolved out of an earlier idiom in which its meanings were cultural, social, and moral. In classical Latin liberalis denoted things that were appropriate or becoming to a free person, usually assumed to be male. Among these references were those school subjects intended to develop intellectual (as opposed to merely manual or mechanical) capacities, and that were therefore called “liberal arts.” The term also applied to 1 For the history of the term and Locke’s association with it, see Duncan Bell, “What is Liberalism?,” Political Theory, 42(6) (2014), 682–715, esp. 700 for the topos of Locke as a liberal. The association between Whig politics and liberalism went back to the 1830s, but at its center was Parliamentary supremacy, not Lockean theory. See Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus: Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 495. Leonhard’s book has put the study of the term liberalism on a whole new basis, and I rely on it at many points below. For the political uses of the term liberal in the American context, see Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 31–36.

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personal qualities associated with free individuals, such as generosity, benevolence, courtesy, and open-mindedness, attributes that by the eighteenth century were often (but not exclusively) associated with noble or gentlemanly, in contrast to lowly or “mean,” ways of life. In the famous Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert “liberality” was a virtue rulers could exercise toward their subjects, thereby serving the public good, provided that their intention was not simply to create a party of supporters bound to them by selfish interests.2 In the highly politicized atmosphere of France after 1789, these senses of the term took on a political inflection, but in different ways. Generosity was a quality the Revolution’s supporters had no difficulty finding in such defining moments as the night of August 4, when aristocrats in the National Assembly tumbled over each other to renounce their feudal rights, and such moments must have encouraged the members of the London Revolutionary Society, in 1792, to praise the “liberal and enlightened” sentiments of their French correspondents. But an opposite potential had already found expression two years earlier in Edmund Burke’s critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. Defending the principle of hereditary nobility for its embodiment of the respect for tradition and authority without which the great Whig orator thought no stable society could survive, he declared that “It is indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it [i.e., nobility] with some sort of partial propensity,” in contrast to the “sour, malignant, envious disposition” that set itself against social hierarchy on principle. In other words, if liberality meant generosity, then only a person who extended it to those the Revolution sought to dispossess could legitimately claim the title. Later conservatives would repeat the same contention.3 This double-sidedness of the term constituted part of its appeal to the person who may have been the first to use it to stake out a position in regard to the mix of hopes and forebodings the Revolution unleashed, the Swiss-French writer and publicist Benjamin Constant. A supporter of the early phase of the Revolution that proclaimed “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and sought to embody the great trinity in a regime based on popular sovereignty, constitutional government, and citizen rights, Constant recoiled from the more radical and violent 2 For the Encyclopédie see Leonhard, Liberalismus, 97–98. 3 Letter of January 26, 1792, in The Correspondence of the Revolution Society in London with the National Assembly [of France] and with Various Societies of the Friends of Liberty in France and England (London, 1792), 157. See also Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: ElecBook online edition, ProQuest ebrary, 2000), 178–179; or Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Hammersmith: Penguin, 1968), 245.

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actions of the turbulent years 1793–1794. Establishing himself in Paris in 1795, he attached the adjective libérales to the principes or idées or opinions he shared with other moderate revolutionaries. He appears not to have applied the label to persons, only to ways of thinking, and its pre-political overtones still resonated in his speech. But the future showed through it too, and Constant would be (in ways we will come to below) one of France’s most prominent early theorists of what it meant to be liberal.4 But the Janus-faced quality of the word that made it serviceable to him also made it available to a person whose use of it would later be fiercely contested, none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. On the eve of the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799), by which the Corsican general did away with the moderate but wavering regime of the Consulate and opened the way to his later establishment of the authoritarian Empire, Bonaparte’s supporters toasted “the generous and liberal ideas on which the Revolution had been founded”; and on the day following the coup, the future emperor declared that by ending the factional infighting that put the country’s future in jeopardy he had re-established the “conservative, tutelary and liberal ideas” that put the good of all above individual and partisan interests.5 Whether Bonaparte had any right to pin the term liberal to his banner then or later remains a matter of contention (he was aided by the fact that a number of people with evident liberal credentials, including Constant, supported him at this moment), but that he did so both then and in the years that followed contributed greatly to its spread to other countries. This role unfolded in two connected but contrasting stages. During the 1790s, when Bonaparte was the leader of French republican armies in Italy, he was welcomed by what one Italian writer called uomini liberali as the representative of principles that promised to free Italy from the ancient yoke of authoritarian and clerical domination. Later, however, as the local rulers he supported there became more oppressive and demanding, liberal principles were increasingly invoked against them. At this juncture both pro- and antiBonapartist groups referred to themselves as “true liberals,” deriding their opponents as “false” ones, a sign at once of the term’s susceptibility to competing definitions and of the importance attached to it.6 One effect of these Italian debates was to make it easier to apply the label liberal to people, 4 On Constant’s use of these terms see K. Steven Vincent, Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 235. For a similar evaluation of Constant’s role see Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5 Leonhard, Liberalismus, 131–133. 6 On the Italian usage see Leonhard, Liberalismus, 208–224.

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rather than ideas or beliefs, a development that was given additional impetus in 1812, by Spanish opponents of the Napoleonic domination of their country. Advocating a new constitution for Spain that would be based on universal male suffrage, a single-house legislature, and a free press, they declared themselves to be liberales, in contrast to the traditionalist serviles. Such a use still resounded with the old sense of liberal as befitting people who were not slaves, but politics had become the realm where the distinction operated.7 In the years that followed, the example of the Spanish liberales would be invoked by activists and publicists in other countries, especially after Napoleon’s fall and the establishment of the declaredly anti-liberal system of the Holy Alliance, dominated by the Austrian minister Klemens von Metternich. The term liberal now gained increasing prominence as a description of opposition to the oppressive regimes the system supported, confirming the international bearing of liberal politics, and encouraging an opening of liberalism to the left. What powered the second of these effects was that liberals forced to live under authoritarian regimes, where free expression and association were banned, could organize only in secret societies, notably the Italian Carbonari and its branches elsewhere, turning what might have been peaceful public agitation toward tactics of illegality and violence. Having served as leaders and foot soldiers in the abortive uprisings of 1820–1821, numbers of these activists were sent into exile, forming an international network of anti-Metternichean liberals and radicals. They sought and found support (or at least sympathy) from reformers who themselves operated only in open and legal ways, among them British Whigs whose elitist style of politics reflected their aristocratic origins or connections, and French moderates attached to the constitutional monarchy set up in their country after Napoleon’s fall.8 It was at this juncture that the term liberal was introduced into England, first of all in reference to these continental doings. The cabinet minister and diplomat Lord Castlereagh may have been the first to invoke it, in 1816, turning up his nose at the Spanish liberales who, despite their opposition to 7 See the Wikipedia article on the Spanish Constitution of 1812: “Constitución española de 1812,” https://es.wikipedia.org/ (accessed July 27, 2016). 8 For the exile movement see Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Chapter 1 for the politics of the emigration and 29–30 for the support it found among moderate liberals. For the second topic see also Jörn Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms: The Semantics of Liberalism in European Comparison,” Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History, and Feminist Theory, VIII (2004), 25–26.

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French power in their country, were “politically a French party of the very worst” – that is Revolutionary – sort. The Spanish spelling Castlereagh employed was applied to “British liberales” by others in the next years; the French term libéraux appeared too. Thus the first English uses of liberal as a political term in England made it seem both foreign and suspect. An early attempt to domesticate and embrace it was mounted in 1820, when a group of self-consciously radical writers, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, founded a journal called The Liberal. Its subtitle acknowledged the still foreign aura of the word: “Verse and Prose from the South” (that is from Italy, Greece, and Spain). The magazine’s first issue declared that the title was to be taken both in the term’s “old” sense and in its “new” one, joined together by the ties forged between politics and “all other subjects” by events of the time. The editors invoked the “large bodies of men who are called LIBERALS” and who sought to promote the cause of humanity in general by furthering enlightenment and freedom. Its content was less political than literary, however, and the debates it provoked turned chiefly on cultural and moral matters, with critics expressing suspicion that writers such as Byron and Shelley were sexual libertines, closet atheists, and fomenters of immorality. These polemics contributed to making the term “liberal” part of public discussion, but in a way that reinforced the radical overtones it had acquired after 1815.9 What would reverse this evolution would be the spread of the movement for Parliamentary reform. The reform campaign, harking back to the storied defeat of tyranny in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689, and capable of raising great excitement in the country in such moments as the agitation in favor of the anti-royalist critic John Wilkes in the 1760s, was largely put on hold during the conflict with Napoleonic France. Its revival after 1815 would create the context in which the term liberal came to describe those who favored a more open and democratic politics, but within the framework of existing institutions. Because it was the Whigs who chiefly supported the Reform Bill that expanded and regularized voting rights in 1832, adding to the identification with liberty gained by their leading role in 1688, it was chiefly to them that the label came to be attached. Both before and after, however, there were Tories who were seen to be liberal too, on the basis of their

9 For the first part of this paragraph see the article of Leonard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms,” esp. 23–25. For The Liberal see D. M. Craig, “The Origins of ‘Liberalism’ in Britain: The Case of The Liberal,” Historical Research, 85 (2012), 469–487.

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support for such measures as giving political rights to Catholics and reducing import duties. Behind this possibility for liberals to appear in both parties lay two conditions that gave British politics a character not found in any other country: first the deeply rooted presence of Parliament itself, an institution through which myriad groups and interests pursued their aims, in the process learning to make compromises with others; and second the many social and political ties between aristocratic landowners on the one hand and commercial and business interests on the other, nowhere better exemplified than in the Whig party, but extending to their opponents too. In 1827 Henry Brougham, a Whig contributor to the Edinburgh Review, wrote that the traditional contrast between Whigs and Tories was dissolving as people in both groups arrived at a shared recognition of the need for reform; thus there were “Liberal Parties on both sides of the House,” or even a single “Liberal party” consisting of all who sought not partisan advantage but the good of the country.10 One person Brougham had in mind was the future minister Robert Peel, the son of a textile manufacturer but a protégé of the conservative Duke of Wellington. Peel would oppose the Reform Bill in Parliament in 1831–1832, but he worked to give victory to the liberal cause of civic equality for Catholics in 1829, and later his support for free trade would be crucial in the repeal of the Corn Law (the tariff on grain established in 1815) in 1846, an event to whose importance we will return in a moment. In 1820 Peel asked a correspondent whether he agreed that “the tone of England,” the messy mix of ideas and feelings that constituted “public opinion” (and toward which Peel’s sentiments were mixed at best) was “more liberal – to use an odious but intelligible phrase – than the policy of the Government.” He glossed “more liberal” as “in favor of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country,” giving the phrase a broad and loose ring that would often echo in it later, and that did not exclude the radical overtones it carried at this moment.11 Those overtones would be damped down after 1832, as the dominant sense of liberal became the mix of progress and moderation embodied by the Reform Bill itself. The Whig-sponsored Bill replaced the chaotic warren of inherited arrangements for Parliamentary representation with a more uniform and rational system, giving seats to the newly populous but hitherto unrepresented towns of the industrial North, and extending voting rights to 10 Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms,” 28–29. 11 Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms,” 24 and 26.

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most middle-class men (on the basis of the rental value of their households). But it disappointed many who had led the campaign, leaving practically all workers outside the political nation. Supporters of Whig liberalism saw its strength in just this mix of progress and restraint, a view encouraged by Francis Baring in 1830, when he made the terms Whig and liberal synonymous, both designating politicians who combined “rank and property” with “higher motives,” and “who in bad times keep alive the sacred flames of freedom, and when the people are roused, stand between the constitution and revolution, and go with the people, but not to extremities.” In a way this simply restated Constant’s notion of what it meant to be liberal, and versions of it have been legion ever since; the question remained at what point the desire for change fell into “extremities.”12 The Whig answer was already being contested by other liberals, notably those close to Jeremy Bentham. They were more commonly called “philosophical radicals,” but included people who would come to epitomize English liberalism, most eminently John Stuart Mill. In 1822 Bentham himself recommended the Constitutional Code he devised for Greece (then seeking to free itself from Ottoman rule), and that called for universal male suffrage (an “extremity” for most Whigs), to “all Nations and all governments professing Liberal Opinions.” And in an article of 1836 Mill distinguished Liberals from both Whigs and Radicals, describing them as reformers who had not decided in advance “how far parliamentary reform should go,” but were “disposed to carry it as far, as, on trial, should be found necessary for obtaining good government.” Although not committed (as were the largely working-class Chartists) to such specific measures as the secret ballot or annual parliaments, they were willing to favor them if more gradual changes “should fail to give them a government of which the pervading spirit should be a regard to the public good.” We will return to Mill below; here we only note that he understood being liberal as a kind of indefinable openness to effective and beneficial change, a notion that both recalls the formula Robert Peel used in 1820 and had much in common with what French liberals at this moment (we will return to them below too) were calling a “party of movement.”13 These differences show that, even when considered in a specifically British context, the term liberal had to be defined in connection with the new possibilities and dangers unleashed by the outbreak of revolution in France: 12 Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms,” 30. 13 Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms,” 25 and 31–32.

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Liberalism was one response to the challenge of modern democracy. The point is worth underlining because one of the most common ways to tell its history, above all in England, focuses instead on economic questions, making free trade its cornerstone and attributing its adoption to the “rising middle class” whose interests it served. Such accounts have been sponsored at once on the left, by Marxists seeking to reduce liberalism to bourgeois ideology, and on the right by neoliberals of the stripe of Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins, in their efforts to discredit centralized planning, beginning in the 1930s. But recent historians have cast much doubt on this narrative. Despite the vigorous attempt by the Manchester-based anti-Corn Law League to rally middle-class opinion around the cause of free trade, many business and commercial people opposed it, some manufacturers fearing it would allow foreigners to undercut them by importing English-style machinery. The Manchester Guardian (already a recognized liberal voice) criticized the League for its “dogmatic” adherence to a single principle, denying that it represented “the community at large,” and many London bourgeois resisted free trade too, in part because financial and commercial circles there had many connections with aristocrats and large landowners (who preferred to keep grain prices high). The League’s propaganda had far less impact than its supporters claimed, and was decidedly less important in effecting the actual repeal of the Corn Law than was the conversion of Robert Peel to the cause in 1846.14 Peel himself had earlier been one among a sizable group of liberal Tories who favored a gradual lowering of tariffs through reciprocal treaties with other countries; his move toward a more sweeping abolition, like that of most other members of the political elite, appears to have been influenced less by secular political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo (although their ideas were much in the air) than by Christian and evangelical writers, who argued that removing man-made restrictions on trade would make people properly subject to the divine rewards and punishments built into the natural order of things. The economic concomitant of this thinking aimed at preserving an orderly balance of existing groups and interests, as opposed to the mercantile expansion and increasing wealth envisioned by Richard Cobden, the chief intellectual figure in the anti-Corn Law League. Cobden’s program was infused with a utopian moralism, making free trade 14 I gave a succinct account of the League in Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 164–167. For a more detailed one see Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapter 2.

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a weapon for knocking down “the barriers that separate nations; those barriers, behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy, which every now and then burst their bounds, and deluge whole countries with blood.” Despite its secular grounding, however, Cobden’s vision could easily be restated in religious terms, and Peel’s conversion seems to have been effected in just this way; in one speech he linked abolishing tariffs to not interfering with “the beneficent designs of an all-wise Creator” (a course made more necessary by the need to have cheap food flow to starving Irish peasants).15 Well into the twentieth century the regime of free trade established in 1846 would appeal across the British political spectrum, serving as a cornerstone of domestic and foreign policy under Conservative as well as Liberal governments, and gaining broad support among the population as a whole by virtue of its perceived contribution to the economic expansion that put an end to the travails of the “hungry 40s.” Like liberalism itself, free trade was not only or chiefly a class cause, nor should we define what it meant to be liberal primarily in terms of it.16 Diverse conditions led the term to develop different senses and a different history in Germany, but in ways that reinforce this conclusion. There too the modern sense of liberal emerged out of the pre-political use of the term, tied up with generosity and open-mindedness but less specifically connected to nobility in the social sense (since there was no national aristocracy to set society’s tone as was the case, somewhat differently, in both France and England). Instead Liberalität was seen more as a cast of mind, one encouraged (for instance in the view of the philosopher Immanuel Kant) by reason and Enlightenment, and in principle available to anyone devoted to them. The political meaning of the term came into Germany from France in the years of Napoleon’s supremacy there, when he exported the Empire’s association with “liberal ideas” to justify such reforms as legal equality, the abolition of guilds, and more uniform systems of administration and taxation. All these measures aimed to release social energies and nurture civic loyalties that could not develop under the Old Regime, but they were also recognized as ways to strengthen the power of states. For this reason much of Bonaparte’s program was taken over by German rulers themselves after his fall, notably in Prussia, where the elimination of serfdom was added to the 15 For the politics of the 1846 repeal see Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, esp. 8–12 and the literature cited there. 16 The Cobden quote is from a speech of September 28, 1843, online at “Richard Cobden,” https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Cobden (accessed April 27, 2016). For Peel see Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 11.

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mix. For some years the Prussian king seemed ready to establish a representative assembly as well, and in this atmosphere some German writers began to propagate a second version of French “idées libérales,” based not on Napoleonic-style reforms but on “liberal government,” resting on representative institutions and free political discussion. By 1822, however, such notions had lost any chance for realization as the Prussian king, bucked up by the anti-liberal policies of Metternich and the Holy Alliance, turned his back on such changes. The Reform Era was over.17 As this tide turned, the meaning of liberal took on a more oppositional and radical tone, associated (as in Italy) with attempts to keep alive a program that had to be pursued against existing states rather than within them (one locus for it was in the student organizations or Burschenschaften, some of whose members were drawn to violent measures). Proceeding in the opposite direction from England, this evolution reflected the much greater distance between the state and society in Germany, that is the smaller chance there for groups of all kinds outside the institutions of government to exercise influence over policy. As liberals felt themselves more estranged from their states, they began to see themselves as representing a future fended off by retrograde opponents; to be liberal was to be in tune with the direction of historical evolution, in a situation where forces still mired in the past retained the power to resist it. Germans began to speak about a Bewegungspartei, a party of movement; one writer described liberalism as advancing “in the same degree as the age itself, or it is impeded in the same degree to which the past persists within the present,” and another declared that “liberalism wants nothing else than the historical future.”18 Such images corresponded to the French notion of a “party of movement,” and to Robert Peel’s and Mill’s equation of being liberal with readiness to undertake measures that history put on the agenda. But it was much more difficult to act on that agenda in Germany. This does not mean that reform was impossible there, only that its animating force lay much more in states (mostly devoid of elective institutions) than in society. Even as it turned in a direction liberals decried, the Prussian regime continued to be the spring of change in one area favored by 17 Jörg Leonhard, “Von den idées libérales zu den liberalen Ideen: Historisch-semantischer Kulturtransfer zwischen Übersetzung, Adaption und Integration,” in Kulturtransfer im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Marc Schalenberg (Berlin: Centre Marc Bloch, 1998), 26–30. On Napoleon in Germany see Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chapter 1. See also my account in Modernity and Bourgeois Life, 131–137. 18 See the passages quoted in Leonhard, “From European Liberalism to the Languages of Liberalisms,” 44 n. 66.

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them, namely the reduction of tariffs. The famous Prussian customs union, the Zollverein, now appears to historians to have been less important in bringing about German economic development than earlier writers thought, but until after the unification in 1870–1871 it represented the chief example of a move to market freedom in the German lands, and it was the monarchy, not people external to it, that set it in motion. Beginning in 1818 with the elimination of customs barriers between the various territories that had come under its rule, Prussia opened membership in the union to other North German states from 1834.19 If there are good reasons to doubt the story that attributes the coming of free trade to “liberal bourgeois” forces in Britain, the case is still weaker on the continent, where governments, anxious to develop the wealth and thus taxability of their subjects, were the chief agents of market freedom. This was true of France no less than Germany: The Old Regime monarchy had sought repeatedly both to reduce internal tariffs and to abolish guild privileges, only to be opposed by powerful interests that belonged as much to the middle classes as to the aristocracy; and it would be Bonaparte’s nephew Louis-Napoleon, ruler of the Second Empire, who would impose free trade on reluctant manufacturers in 1860.20 This story of the ways in which the term liberal acquired its modern sense in different contexts suggests some reasons why it took on the protean quality we noted at the start. Other reasons will emerge as we turn now to some of the defining figures and moments in nineteenth-century liberal thinking and action. What made France the first place where the term liberal took on a clear political stance was that it was the first country to experience the Janus-faced power of democratic politics, at once opening up new spaces of freedom and generating new threats to it. The “liberal principles” Benjamin Constant spoke about in the aftermath of the Terror were ones that sought to preserve the first while countering the second, and this project would give a particular coloration to much of French liberalism. Two persons who display this complexion are Constant himself and Alexis de Tocqueville, the first seeking a solution in a historical understanding of the nature of modern life, the second by way of particular institutions and policies. But neither thought the solution he proposed would fully resolve the problems it addressed. 19 See James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 203–204. Sheehan here relies largely on Frank Tipton, “The National Consensus in German Economic History,” Central European History, 7 (1974), 195–224. 20 On France and on guilds see my discussions in Modernity and Bourgeois Life, 76–83 and 51, respectively.

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Constant came to believe that the key to preserving the original democratic impulse of the Revolution while heading off the dangers so dramatically displayed in the Terror was to understand and accept the difference between two kinds of liberty, one ancient and one modern. The Jacobins, seeking to purge the country of the heritage of despotism and corruption left behind by the Old Regime, and misled by Rousseau, had understood liberty in the ancient sense, as the direct and constant involvement in politics that made Athens a model of democracy (one that excluded, to be sure, the large population of slaves – and of women). Aiming to infuse citizens with the virtues of public devotion and self-denial, the radicals set up a highly controlling and intrusive regime, establishing despotism in the name of liberty. To forestall this scenario being played out again, people had to put aside the ancient notion of participatory liberty in favor of a modern one based on “the peaceable enjoyment of private independence.” The idea was not so passive as this formula might imply, since it involved freedom for every kind of activity that did not harm others or interfere with their legitimate pursuits: thought, expression, work, and industry. Moreover, Constant was never so indifferent to politics as some of his critics have claimed, warning people against becoming so enamored of the fruits of their private existence that they failed to stand up against potential despots, all too ready to offer material and psychic benefits in exchange for a free hand in running the state. But his emphasis on private existence over public activity as a source of human satisfaction put him at the opposite pole from the Jacobins, no doubt missing something of modern life’s potential that they recognized. Constant’s persistent emphasis on individuality and personal freedom in no way blinded him to people’s dependence on the societies that nurtured and formed them. Individuals took their ways of thinking and being from the world they inhabited, and modern ones owed the very possibility of finding fulfillment in private activities to conditions that had developed over time, providing social and cultural resources unavailable to the ancients. Central to this evolution was the progressive elimination of evils that had long distributed liberty unequally: theocracy, slavery, feudality (in the sense of personal dependence), and aristocratic prerogatives. Only with their eradication (the last thanks to the Revolution) could liberty become an organizing principle of social life and a goal for its future development; hence the promise of liberty could be fulfilled only in connection with the advance of equality. Economic freedom was a central element in modern liberty, expanding material resources and opening new avenues to individual development by letting people choose work that gave scope to their particular talents and interests. 184

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Constant often celebrated economic freedom, but he understood that the scope it gave to individual development was narrower for the poor than for the well-off, and he worried that the advance in political equality effected by the elimination of the four great historical evils was countered by a deepening of economic inequality, effected by the advance of industry. Like Adam Smith he looked to education as a way to counter the effects on the spirit of boring repetitive work, and he defended workers’ right to form associations when less sympathetic liberals such as François Guizot contested it. Such groups provided arenas where laboring people could improve themselves through mutual discussion and exchange, adding a perspective to the political dialogue of the nation as a whole. This way of thinking was in concert with Constant’s often-repeated insistence that what counted most in creating the conditions for individual development and the advance of liberty was not economic freedom but cultural and intellectual advance, promoted by widening networks of communication and rational discussion within them. “Thought,” he wrote, “is the starting point (principe) for everything.” Constant’s emphasis on intellectual advance as the source of political progress tied him to the Enlightenment, but here, as in regard to democracy, his optimism could not be separated from its opposite. He celebrated the rise of “public opinion” in the eighteenth century, seeing the expansion of books, newspapers, and the discussion of common issues they fostered as a restraint on the state power it often subjected to critical scrutiny. But, seen from his own time, public opinion revealed a second and much less benign face. Having begun as a force external to government, it was drawn into the web of the state by the Revolution’s attempts to form thought and belief in accord with its principles, becoming an instrument of power rather than a check on it. Knowing the force of opinion, modern conquerors (viz. Napoleon) sought not just to subject people to physical domination, but to control their mental life (le moral) too. Thus the same developments that promised liberation also generated threats to it, so that liberals could never be wholly confident that the promise of modern life would prevail over its dangers.21

21 This discussion takes many elements from the one I offered in The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 268–291. Helpful longer treatments include Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Tzvetan Todorov, A Passion for Democracy: Benjamin Constant, trans Alice Seberry (New York: Algora, 1999); Vincent, Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism; and Rosenblatt, Liberal Values.

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Alexis de Tocqueville saw liberalism’s dilemmas in similar ways, but from a different perspective. As an Old Regime aristocrat who felt uncomfortable in modern social settings and had no personal taste for rule by the people (like Constant seeing the Terror as a likely realization of its negative potential), he saw the task of modern politics as to render democratic rule compatible with liberty. It was this project that inspired his famous account of Democracy in America. The first volume, published in 1835, gave a largely optimistic portrayal of American life, highlighting the features that allowed democracy to coexist with and nurture liberty there, as it had not in its author’s own country. These included the high level of education of the first settlers and their shared determination to evade the constraints they left England to escape; the strength of local government and the habit of joining together in associations for particular purposes, both of which gave people experience in cooperation and collective self-determination; and, no less importantly, the near-universal but disparate and fragmented adherence to religious faith, free of the connection to state authority that had long made the Church appear as a tool of despotism in France. American-style religion infused people with values that transcended mere material well-being, encouraging involvement in projects of collective betterment. Tocqueville’s emphasis on these features of American life gave his liberalism a communitarian quality largely absent from Constant’s more exclusive emphasis on private life.22 The second volume, however, appearing five years later, was more pessimistic and admonitory, putting the persisting dangers of democracy in higher relief. Yes, people under democracy desired liberty, but their passion for equality was much stronger, and in societies where aristocracy had been abolished and economic advance made more widely available, equality of condition was relatively easy to obtain; by contrast, keeping liberty alive in the face of strong governments with large resources and ambitions required much greater effort, which few were willing to expend. This was especially the case because democratic societies gave birth to a new passion: individualism. In contrast to the age-old vice of egoism, the exaggerated love of self that made a person value his own existence above that of others, modern individualism “disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends.” Egoism might be the more morally dangerous of the two, but individualism was politically 22 On this point see George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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more perilous, leading people “to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands” and thus not to care about the public involvement with others that protecting liberty required. Americans remained better able to counter these threats than Europeans, especially the French, and for many of the same reasons as were given in the first volume, but Tocqueville’s references to the latter in Volume II gave the whole book a more disquieting tone.23 At least part of the difference between the two parts reflected Tocqueville’s experience under the self-consciously liberal Orléanist monarchy established by the revolution of July 1830, with its later phases dominated by the rigid moralist François Guizot, whose resistance to suffrage extension had much to do with the revolution that broke out in February 1848. Guizot’s clunky advice for those excluded from the vote by the high tax-based qualification, to “enrich yourselves by work and saving,” was broadly taken as evidence of just the materialist individualism Tocqueville feared. His disillusionment deepened after the republic established by the February uprising gave way to the Second Empire of Bonaparte’s nephew in 1852. In the following years he wrote another great book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, arguing that the preference for equality over liberty was deeply rooted in French history, both planted and cultivated by the monarchy’s centuries-long efforts to undermine both rural and urban institutions of local self-government by spreading a net of bureaucratic officialdom over the country as a whole, and seducing both aristocrats and bourgeois to exchange their former liberties for personal benefits such as tax exemptions and chances to profit from investment in state offices.24 Similar anxieties troubled the major French liberal intellectual of the later nineteenth century, Émile Durkheim, a founder of sociology and an active supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the controversy that roiled French life in the fin de siècle. Durkheim, like Constant, believed that individual liberty – indeed individuality itself – was a specifically modern phenomenon, and that protecting it required understanding how it had emerged. Central to the story was the contrast between two forms of society and the solidarity appropriate to each, the contrasting ways in which each cohered as an entity. Most people in pre-modern societies lived under similar conditions, tied to their localities and typically engaged in the same – chiefly agrarian – activities. So fully did they share experiences and ideas that they could be compared to the 23 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 482–483. 24 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1955).

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interchangeable parts of simple machines: Their solidarity was “mechanical.” Modern societies, by contrast, were characterized by a growing differentiation between activities and the people engaged in them, arising from the division of labor that developed as the population expanded and distant connections grew more important. Conservatives in Durkheim’s time feared that this modern kind of society could not cohere at all, because the diversity of interests and opinions it spawned destroyed the unity of belief that had once drawn people together and reined in their anti-social impulses. But Durkheim insisted that modern life generated its own species of solidarity, no longer mechanical but “organic,” analogous to the kind of interaction between bodily organs that keeps a person alive, each nurturing the others with its special activity. By becoming aware of what they owed to others, people could develop the kind of moral consciousness appropriate to modern life, eventually understanding that the well-being of their own form of individuality depended on the simultaneous preservation of all the others, and preparing them to accept the obligation to preserve and advance the collective life of which they were a part. This was the lesson of Durkheim’s first great book, The Division of Labor in Society (1893). It had many ties to his liberal predecessors, but went beyond them in arguing that one of the obligations modern life created for all individuals was to assure justice for society’s weaker members, specifically workers subjected to the superior power of their employers in the labor market. Durkheim never engaged in socialist politics, but he was close to prominent socialists such as Jean Jaurès and praised their ideas in public. All the same, Durkheim, like Tocqueville, feared the modern individuality he championed. From the start he did not think the consciousness of mutual dependence fostered by the division of labor sufficient on its own to cure people of egoistic impulses (which he sometimes described in near-lurid terms); achieving solidarity required that society, through its interpreters and theorists, instill its members with a new moral code. His sense for the necessity of such direction grew more intense and anxious as time went on, fed by worries about social disorder (France was set on edge by a wave of anarchist bombings in the 1890s) and political division, notably the rise of socialist parties whose expectations of a revolutionary transformation lessened their commitment to existing forms of legal and political order. In this atmosphere he turned away from his earlier belief that the division of labor could generate a new and modern form of moral obligation, looking instead to the public-spiritedness stimulated by participation in great civic causes such as the Dreyfus agitation, which drew people out of their private 188

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isolation and indifference. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) he described the welling up of shared patriotic feelings that occurred in such moments as a “collective effervescence,” a socially induced feeling for the presence of higher moral powers, much like the enthusiasm that joined together participants in primitive religious rituals: Modern forms of solidarity could not be so different from older ones after all. He never retreated from his championing of either individual rights or greater social justice, but his turn to locating the source of moral solidarity in collective identification with society and la patrie clashed with his earlier celebration of individual difference; and it was called into question by the unavoidable recognition that nations had selfish interests too, leaving his thinking with tensions he could never wholly overcome.25 Durkheim was far from the only liberal in his time who expressed sympathy with socialist aims while keeping his distance from socialist politics. His counterparts in other countries took similar stances, and the policies they supported have encouraged people then and since to speak about a “new” or “social” liberalism in the years around 1900. Liberals sponsored programs for social welfare and progressive taxation few of their predecessors would have contemplated earlier. But the break with earlier liberalism was not so sharp as it has sometimes been portrayed. Elements of such an opening to the left had been part of liberal thinking earlier, and what we often think of as liberal individualism gave far more importance to social life as a condition for individual development than has often been recognized, preparing the ground on which the later, more social liberalism could take shape. This continuity has been highlighted by a recent historian and philosopher: “In fact one might argue that it is only because liberals are so impressed by the ways in which society molds and shapes the lives of its members that liberals are so eager to ensure that society does not also cramp and distort their lives.”26 An exemplary illustration of this statement’s meaning is provided by the most eminent figure in English (and perhaps any) liberalism, John Stuart Mill. Nothing is more characteristic of Mill’s thinking than his advocacy of a rich kind of individuality. As set out in his most celebrated (and contested) writing, On Liberty (1859), freedom had to extend not just to thought and expression, but to behavior as well, giving every person the right to follow whatever “plan of life” was most 25 For a more detailed version of this account of Durkheim see my discussion in The Idea of the Self, 479–493. The most comprehensive treatment remains Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 26 Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 37.

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in accord with his or her particular character – and Mill was, among nineteenthcentury liberals, the most outspoken and consistent advocate of equality for women, his writings serving as points of reference for feminist movements in many countries. The only actions society had a right to restrict were ones that did harm to other people. To be sure, this formula could be taken to justify something of what we regard as Victorian moralism, for instance restricting drinking and sexual freedom, but the program was intended as an assault on the reigning spirit of conformity Mill saw around him, including the oppressive power of public opinion, whose dangers to liberty he recognized in much the same terms as Constant and Tocqueville. Although Mill’s own personal style was staid and decorous, his willingness to defy convention in ways shocking to others was manifest in his long and public (although surely chaste) relationship with the married woman who helped shape his feminist consciousness, Harriet Taylor. They wed in 1851, a seemly two years after the death of her first husband. Some of Mill’s reasons for restricting society’s right to limit personal behavior had to do with individual happiness: The society that did not let people live as their own impulses and temperaments directed kept its members on a leash of frustration and vexation, interfering with the development of their talents and faculties. But equally important were the ways society benefited from the range of possible models available where individuals were free to develop their own plans of life. Not only did they provide a treasury of examples on which others could draw, they also stimulated people to develop their powers of imagination and choice. A society of autonomous individuals was not diminished as a collective entity but enhanced, exhibiting a “fulness of life” that contributed to both individual and communal advancement. This vision had something in common with Durkheim’s image of modern individuals as able to provide material and moral resources for each other through the qualities the division of labor allowed them to develop, but Mill was not troubled as Durkheim would be by anxieties that egotism would expand alongside individual difference. One reason for this contrast may have been the confidence inspired by English industrial advance and the prosperity it brought in the 1850s and 1860s, ameliorating the conditions that had made social conflict endemic in the previous decades. In addition, English political and social relations had long provided greater scope for cooperation between separate classes and groups than French ones, making the achievement of solidarity less of a worry there. Mill’s understanding of individuality came to him in part from a German source, Wilhelm von Humboldt, to whom he owed the notion that the “true end of man” was “the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to 190

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a complete and consistent whole.” But the ability of Mill’s thinking to nurture the new “social liberalism” of the later nineteenth century owed at least as much to his rootedness in the Benthamite program that helped English liberalism maintain its ties to radicalism. Reared into Benthamism by his father James, one of Jeremy Bentham’s chief disciples and supporters, with the intention of forming him into a kind of instrument of Benthamite reform, the younger Mill was subjected to an intrusive and debilitating mix of attention and manipulation as a child, which he described in his Autobiography as partly responsible for the “mental crisis” he experienced in his twenties. His recovery involved a turn to ways of thinking that gave greater importance to historical experience and circumstances (as opposed to universal recipes for improvement), as well as to aesthetic experience and feeling, than Bentham and his father had. Still, he remained a Benthamite utilitarian in important ways. Bentham had been a radical and consistent individualist; the notion of utility as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” presumed a society of separate, atom-like individuals, on the basis of which general social happiness could be calculated as the sum of any action’s or policy’s effects on all those it affected. By the middle of the nineteenth century some of Bentham’s disciples (for instance the urban reformer Edwin Chadwick) were expanding the range of things involved in such a calculation, saying that only where society’s members were assured of protection against such conditions as noxious air and polluted water could they see far enough into the future to make rational choices in their lives.27 Mill expanded this thinking to include the ways in which society’s weaker and less privileged members were intellectually debilitated by ignorance and exclusion from public life; to counter them he emphasized both compulsory education and an expanded suffrage, drawing more people into the discussion of disputed questions, as ways of developing the capacity for autonomy. The same logic led Mill to support labor unions and their right to bargain with employers over wages and conditions. These positions have been taken as evidence that Mill became some kind of socialist by late in his life; if so it was a socialism that drew on and expanded the basic liberal commitment to individuality.28 For Mill this commitment was never absolute, however, since it was operable only, as he put it, in situations where “mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” This allowed him to exclude “barbarians,” a term that 27 See Richard Bellamy’s “Introduction” to Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. Richard Bellamy (London: Routledge, 1990), 6. 28 John Gibbins, “J. S. Mill, Liberalism, and Progress,” in Victorian Liberalism, ed. Bellamy, 102–105.

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included the Indian subjects of the British empire, as well as the mentally handicapped and morally unqualified, exceptions that most people today are likely to see as deriving from Victorian prejudices. All the same, the line that led from Mill to the social liberalism of the century’s end is clear. One figure through whom it passed was T. H. Green, who sought to deepen Mill’s commitment to individual self-development by reinserting it into some of its earlier and especially German sources, notably Humboldt and Hegel. More than Mill, Green emphasized society’s obligation to provide all individuals with the necessary conditions of their self-realization, sometimes speaking in terms that seem close to L. T. Hobhouse and John A. Hobson, the “two Hobs” who provided justification for the social-democratic measures introduced by the Liberal leaders Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George in their party’s “People’s Budget” of 1909: a graduated income tax, government-sponsored pensions, and unemployment insurance. But Green’s position was not yet theirs because the self-development he championed was essentially and exclusively moral, pursued solely through the exercise of intellectual and spiritual capacities. In his view direct attempts at economic betterment were not just morally irrelevant; they were harmful, since they led people to engage in hostile competition for scarce material goods, nurturing egotism. Other liberals were critical of this stance, however, in particular the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who assailed Green for not understanding that individuals required a certain level of material well-being before they could devote themselves to intellectual and moral improvement. Hobson and Hobhouse made this still more explicit, arguing that the liberal vision of a society able to nurture the independence and selfrealization of individuals could be realized only by way of social reforms that reduced inequality, provided widened opportunities for economic advancement, and countered the oppressive power of the rich. The reforms they encouraged, and that the Liberal government enacted in 1909, were only necessary and possible in light of the social transformation brought by industrialization, and the rise of independent working-class political organization it encouraged. But all these thinkers recognized the ties between their positions and earlier liberalism: Green explicitly declared his closeness to John Bright, who had been Richard Cobden’s partner in the anti-Corn Law league, and the “two Hobs” similarly acknowledged a large debt to Mill.29

29 On these continuities see Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1978), esp. 49–50. On Green and his critics see Richard Bellamy, “T. H. Green and the morality of Victorian Liberalism,” in Victorian Liberalism, ed. Bellamy, 131–151. A pioneering study of Green is Melvin Richter,

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German liberals arrived at their own form of “new liberalism” in these years, giving this dimension of German history a trajectory not unlike that of England and France. A “National Society for a Liberal Germany,” formed in 1907, declared that “being liberal means recognizing the right to economic organization, the full freedom of association for members of both sexes, and the equality of employees and employers,” insisted that the liberal vision of a country devoted to the personal and moral development of its citizens could not be realized as long as the vast majority of them were mired in poverty, and called for new social legislation to correct these defects.30 But German liberals before World War I never acquired the power to bring these policies into effect, since representative institutions there operated under the debilitating thumb of the Prussian domination imposed by Bismarck, one of whose chief aims in imposing unity on the country by force of arms in 1870–1871 had been to block whatever potential for independent political power liberals possessed. Social legislation was by no means absent in Germany, indeed government-sponsored health insurance and pensions had been established there in the 1880s. But the impetus for them came from Bismarck, for whom they served as instruments to weaken potential enemies. What this means is that the domination of the state over society already evident earlier endured at least until the end of World War I. The persistence of these conditions had much to do with the singular configuration by which German liberalism at once affirmed its dependence on the state and made progress in every realm dependent on inner spiritual development that remained independent of any outside power. This attitude, which was already marked in the thinking of such philosophical liberals as Kant and Hegel, would recur in the suspicion of material satisfactions developed by T. H. Green. Spirit and power, Geist and Macht, were the dialectical poles of intellectual existence in a country where a large proportion of the graduates of its many universities (their number multiplied by the competition between independent states which established and supported them) found jobs as civil servants and bureaucrats. This dependence was one source of the often hard-headed, even desperate attempt to infuse idealism with realism in which German liberals engaged. The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and his Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964). 30 On German new liberalism see Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 224–227; English edn. Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Bannerji (London: Macmillan, 2000), 241–245.

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The term Realpolitik, meaning a politics of practical means, to be undertaken even in pursuit of high-mindedly moral goals, and whose defining exemplar is often seen in Bismarck’s pursuit of unification through “blood and iron” rather than public discussion and engagement, was invented by a young liberal, Ludwig August von Rochau in 1853. Although convinced that no measures could succeed that did not accord with the Zeitgeist, whose reigning principles were “civic consciousness, the idea of freedom, national sentiment [and] the idea of equal human entitlements,” Rochau still insisted that “it is power alone which can rule,” and that “the spoken and written word can accomplish nothing in the face of physical facts.” It was just such a spirit that led many liberal nationalists to support Prussia as the source of unification before Bismarck appeared on the scene, and the same hard-headed recognition led many who had fought against Bismarck during the 1860s to end their opposition once the fact of his success stared them in the face, withdrawing from the Progressive Party that opposed him to form a new National Liberal Party specifically organized to accept his new Reich.31 In no other Western country were liberals so conscious of their own weakness as in Germany. Liberals everywhere lost influence at the end of the century due to the rise of independent working-class parties, their strength fed by economic crises, by the anxiety of cultural dislocation many workers felt in the burgeoning cities to which they were drawn, and by the exhilarating sense of independence and self-affirmation fostered by membership in their own still fresh and unstained organizations. What was different in Germany was the degree of pessimism this fostered among liberals, unable to enjoy such successes as the electoral victories that led to the People’s Budget of 1909 in England or the Dreyfusard victory in France. No one plumbed the darkness more determinedly than the great liberal sociologist Max Weber, who found the seeds of disillusionment in the original grounds of modern optimism, the liberation promised by Enlightenment, industrial advance, and democracy. Reason freed people from mystery and superstition, but over time the substantive rationality that had supported new understandings and values was overtaken by the merely formal or instrumental reasoning devoted to achieving practical results. The industrial economy, spurred on by the “Protestant ethic” that encouraged steady work, calculation, and ascetic self-denial, overcame limitations long taken to be insuperable, but in the process it subjected people to the laws of a mechanized existence, chaining them willy-nilly to the tasks that had once been freely chosen 31 See my discussion of Rochau in Modernity and Bourgeois Life, 230.

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vocations. And democracy, with its promise of freedom through widespread political participation, turned into the rule of faceless functionaries with the inevitable rise of bureaucratized mass parties. Taken together these outcomes condemned humankind to inhabit an “iron cage” of its own construction, the precipitate of energies grown too powerful for those who had unleashed them to master.32 That Weber saw an at least partially positive response to this outcome in the turn to a kind of leadership grounded in “charisma,” the aura some individuals radiate that draws followers to them by a sometimes fallacious belief that they can infuse life and politics with new meaning, may appear as a sign of failure for European liberalism, especially given the species of charismatic politics that welled up in his own country and elsewhere in the years following Weber’s death in 1920. But liberalism is only a way of understanding and responding to the evolving form of life alongside which it emerged, not its creator, and Weber’s pessimism should serve as a reminder that inseparable from its affirmations of modern democracy, industrial society, individualism, and the rationality on which this whole complex relies, has been liberalism’s persistent and keen criticism of each and all of these elements. On the spectrum between this yea and nay liberals in their diverse ways have sought to realize the promise of modern existence while shielding its denizens from the looming dangers that it still calls forth. 32 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (London: Keegan Paul, 1947); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1958 [1905]); and Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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9

European Socialism from the 1790s to the 1890s gareth stedman jones

“All Shall Work” What came to be called ‘socialism’ was a product of the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The word entered political language in the 1830s and was universally associated with the work of three founding ‘prophets’: Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier in France, and Robert Owen in Britain. Adolphe Blanqui, originally in 1837, described Fourier and Owen as “utopian economists,” while Lorenz von Stein in 1842 defined socialism as that “theory which made work the sole basis of society and the state.”1 This emphasis on work connected ‘socialism’ with the French Revolution of 1789, in which a society of three Estates was transformed into a single nation, by merging the first two (the clergy and the nobility) with the Third, “those who worked.” This transformation was originally articulated in the famous 1789 pamphlet by Abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? The nation, according to Sieyès, was first, the unity between individuals that was the constituent power, the body politic, and second, the combination of labour that made up a rationally organized society. Sieyès, who had been opposed since the 1770s to the Physiocratic identification of wealth and land, derived all wealth from labour. This provided the basis of his argument for representative government rather than ancient democracy. Clearly drawing upon political economy, Sieyès declared in his 1789 speech on “the Rights of Man

1 Adolphe Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique en Europe, depuis les anciens jusqu’à nos jours, 2nd edn. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1842), 193; and Lorenz von Stein, Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1842), vol. II, 221. The word itself had first been employed by Pierre Leroux in the early 1830s.

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and the Citizen” that “political systems” were “today founded exclusively on work.”2 In 1829, ‘socialism’ first became famous across Europe as the result of the Doctrine de Saint-Simon: Exposition, première année, originally delivered as a course of lectures in Paris and collectively produced by the followers of Saint-Simon. The Doctrine combined a vision of social reorganization based on social science with Saint-Simon’s proposal of a New Christianity, put forward in 1825. In place of outmoded Christian commandments, dating from antiquity, New Christianity contained two precepts: “all men are brothers”; and the “main object” must be “the speediest improvement of the poorest class.” In 1825, barely a month after Saint-Simon’s death, his disciples, led by Olinde Rodrigues, formed an association to propagate his ideas. Many of those attending were engineers, graduates of the École Polytechnique, an institution specializing in the applied sciences, and founded in 1795. They included future leaders of the socialist or positivist generation – Prosper Enfantin, Philippe Buchez, Pierre Leroux, and, initially, Auguste Comte. The Doctrine, its new Bible, was propounded by the ‘Fathers’ of the new Church, Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard. The Doctrine’s impact was immediate and far-reaching, especially four of its tenets: first, the replacement of Enlightenment and Jacobin-based notions of human equality and uniformity by the formula “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his works”; second, the representation of progress in history not only as the replacement of war and plunder by industry and peace, but, within that world itself, as the decline of “the exploitation of man by man”; third, the pre-eminent status now accorded to the artist rather than the priest in “the art of moving the masses”; and finally, a new conception of history, no longer as the ever greater scope of ‘association,’ but as the oscillation between periods of association and periods of antagonism. The impact of these teachings upon a Romantic generation could be seen across Europe, in the writings of Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, and George Sand in France, Mill and Carlyle in England, Mazzini and Garibaldi in Italy, Heine and the Young German movement, and Herzen in Russia. While emphasis upon work went back to 1789 and the impact of commercial society, the proposal of a new religion was a result of the failure of the Revolution’s attempt to reform the Church. In 1789, the problem of ecclesiastical 2 See Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (New York: Leicester University Press and Holmes and Meier, 1987), 135 and 141.

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reform had looked to be soluble. But appearances proved deceptive. The battle over the Church became the Revolution’s central polarizing issue and, by 1793–1794, what had begun as an optimistic and consensually intended reform had ended in the violent ambition to overthrow first Catholicism and then Christianity itself.3 The first writings of Saint-Simon and Fourier at the end of the 1790s are inexplicable except as an off-shoot of this battle. It was the Revolution’s combination of extraordinary ambition and terrible failure which shaped French ‘socialism.’ However it was subsequently to be judged, what struck contemporaries was the Revolution’s inability to realize its ideals. Instead of a new order based upon the “Rights of Man and the Citizen,” the Revolution had created the Terror and Jacobin dictatorship. During the years following Robespierre’s fall, all who had supported the Revolution, whether as moderates or radicals, had to face the shocking fact that the majority of the population remained attached to the Catholic Church and probably the monarchy as well. What had gone wrong? From these questions it is possible to trace the origins of socialism in France. The formative period was that of the Thermidorian republic between 1794 and 1799. It was a time of continuous war, economic hardship, and weak government. It was also the first point at which contemporaries could reflect upon the trajectory of the Revolution. The once unbounded faith in political institutions had faded. The Revolution had been unable to establish reason without bloodshed, and had failed to capture the hearts and minds of a large part of the French people. Without a change in beliefs and manners, it was unclear how the Republic could survive. There were various solutions. Some, notably the Idéologues – those who followed Condorcet in thinking that progress, whether social or political, depended upon the advance of science – believed all religion and its attendant superstitions could be eliminated by a reform of the process of reasoning itself, and that this could be secured through a reform of public education. Others considered this just one component of the reorganization of society. For SaintSimon and Fourier – if in very different ways – only a new creed based upon the discoveries of a new social science could supply what revolutionary Jacobinism had failed to create – a new form of ‘spiritual power’ (pouvoir spirituel) equivalent to that of the Catholic Church. ‘Theophilanthropy,’ Saint-Simon’s “Religion of Newton,” and his later “New Christianity,” Fourier’s “Science of Passionate 3 The centrality of the religious issue in the Revolution was highlighted by Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1985 [1845]); see also François Furet, La gauche et la révolution au milieu du XIXe siècle: Edgar Quinet et la question du Jacobinisme 1865–1870 (Paris: Hachette, 1986).

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Attraction,” and Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” were competing attempts to devise a new ‘scientific’ starting point. Later assumptions about socialism have obscured what was most distinctive about the ‘socialist’ answer to questions raised by the Revolution. Socialism did not arise from a concern about equality. Saint-Simonian proposals for social reconstruction were explicitly hierarchical, while those of Fourier were intended to reverse the ‘hateful’ Jacobin cult of equality. Unlike republicanism, socialism was preoccupied not with the pursuit of virtue, (although the issue was to be raised again by Proudhon), but with the attainment of harmony. Its concern was not with popular sovereignty, but with the reign of truth, not with the enlargement of politics, but its subordination. It was also a pacific creed, which aimed not to extend the revolution, but to establish a stable social order based upon a new creed, whose “spiritual power” would no longer depend upon unfounded Catholic belief, but would instead rely upon newly discovered scientific truths about man, nature, and the cosmos. Saint-Simon set forth his initial agenda in his Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva in 1802. They began with an apparently bizarre proposition. Open a subscription at Newton’s tomb; each subscriber to nominate three scientists or artists to sit on the Council of Newton and oversee the progress of the world. Arguments for the subscription were addressed to scientists, to property owners, and to “the third, which rallies under the word equality, and encompasses the rest of humanity.”4 If these rival classes agreed to raise above themselves that interest which they all possessed in common – the progress of science – and if, therefore, all obeyed the spiritual rule of scientists, social conflict would cease. Previous religions had not followed the scientific path. They had not seen that instead of chastity, continence, and all other meaningless religious injunctions, mankind need only obey a single Commandment: “all men shall work.” The Letters reiterated the faith in scientific progress found in Condorcet and the Idéologues, but now combined with an insistence upon the primordial importance of religion as the binding force of the social and political order, an idea associated with the counter-revolutionary theocratic thinkers de Maistre and Bonald. This startling combination between science and theocracy was made possible by the work of Charles Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle, published in 1795. Dupuis argued that man created God, 4 Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, “Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains,” in Œuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, 6 vols. (Paris: Anthropos, 1966), vol. I, 26.

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and that God was simply a name for the universal cause unifying natural phenomena. Therefore, the history of man’s conception of God was none other than the history of man’s conception of nature, and this meant that religious ideas changed in parallel with scientific progress. By these means, Saint-Simon was able to separate Bonald’s antiindividualist theory of religion and power from his defense of Christianity. Like Bonald, he considered religion an intrinsic part of any social order; the Latin word religare meant to bind. Religion was the mental order that binds minds together – the primordial source of unity and order itself. But Christianity had ceased to play this role; it no longer reflected the progress of science. Hence, the Revolution and the Terror. Like Saint-Simon’s “Religion of Newton,” Fourier’s “Science of Passionate Attraction” dated from the late 1790s, and it was another attempt to appropriate Newtonian science. For Fourier, the Revolution had proved “the incompetence of Jacobins, republicans, political economists and all other theorists.”5 His ‘Columbus’-like discovery was the result of applying the principle of ‘Absolute Doubt’ to such alleged knowledge. His basic argument was that the passions, so despised by the ‘philosophers,’ were God-given. Passions or ‘attraction’ had the same properties as magnetism. It was the repression of passions that explained the ‘incoherence’ of civilization. Like Saint-Simon, Fourier considered the Catholic Church ‘decrepit.’ But he did not place the same emphasis upon religion. Attraction moved both human passions and the planets. “The attractions and properties of animals, vegetables and minerals,” he argued, “were perhaps coordinated according to the same plan as those of men and the stars.” Hence the title of his first book: The Theory of the Four Movements. Saint-Simon’s new social science was entitled ‘physico-politics’ or ‘physiology.’ Human nature and social organization were not effects of the external environment. Instead, they were guided by the same principles as those governing the human body.6 This shift was a result of the gathering reaction against the egalitarian Enlightenment psychology of Helvétius or Condillac, and found support in the new medical research of the 1790s. The physiologist Pierre Cabanis had demonstrated that human beings reacted differently to 5 Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6; see also Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 6 See Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri de Saint-Simon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).

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identical impressions from nature. Around the same time, the physician Marie François Bichat, in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, replaced eighteenth-century associationist approaches to the understanding of human nature by a theory of mutually exclusive human types – the ‘motor,’ the ‘rational,’ and the ‘sensory’. Humanity was defined as ‘composite.’ The three human types were later to form the basis of three natural social classes, the ‘industriel’, the scientist, and the artist-priest. The ‘social physiologist’ could demonstrate that men did not strive for what Saint-Simon later called “the Turkish equality” of the Jacobin, but rather for the fulfillment of their particular natures. The task of the ‘social physiologist’ was to conceive a social order in which these groups would interact in a harmonious whole, while fulfilling their particular natures. Society was an ‘organized body,’ and its growth, like that of an individual body, proceeded from childish aggression (military) to adult peaceful industry. In 1789, society had progressed from adolescent disorder to its age of majority. Fourier’s new science contained a yet more dramatic reversal of Enlightenment assumptions. If the passions were God-given, they could not be repressed, but they could be harmonized in progressive ‘series’ through association in the ‘societarian order.’ Outside the ‘series,’ the passions were but ‘unchained tigers.’ But within, even apparently destructive passions could be harmonized like chords on a piano and rendered beneficial. The problem was to devise a form of association in which passions could be combined and satisfied to the benefit of all.7 It was the lack of fit between the passions and the social order which explained the ‘incoherence’ of civilization. Philosophical preoccupation with “the political and the moral” should be replaced by attention to the “industrial and domestic.” In the domestic sphere, the chief cause of ‘incoherence’ was the division into individual households and the miseries of ‘civilized marriage.’ In Fourier’s vision of history, the mode of love was the ‘pivot’ responsible for ensuring the progress from one epoch to the next – from the slavery of women through exclusive marriage to the ‘amorous corporation.’ Women’s passions were geared not to the existing chaos of civilization, but to the coming rule of harmony. Hence the widespread reports of female boredom, adultery, and prostitution. In the ‘industrial’ sphere, ‘incoherence’ prevented the alignment of different passions with different kinds of work 7 Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, vii–xxvi and passim; see also Beecher, Charles Fourier.

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or the possibility that the divinely implanted passion for riches take an honest form. The true human passion was ‘unitéisme,’ but, set in the context of false social institutions, necessitating oppression and deceit, it could only manifest itself as the contra-passion of ‘egoism.’ Egoism ruled civilization. Hence “poverty in the midst of plenty” and the ubiquity of fraud in commerce. The Doctrine drew upon a variety of discordant sources, not only SaintSimonian and Idéologue ideas of Industrie, but also the beginning of a radical revision of the status of political economy (associated with Sismondi, see below) together with Fourier’s critique of civilization. The decline of faith in political institutions after the Terror had led to renewed interest in political economy and underlay the ideal of what came to be called ‘industrialism’ (Industrie). Just as Saint-Simon had originally proposed scientific progress as the goal which would harmonize the interests of all, so among those promoting Industrie, it was believed that the Republic’s future could best be secured if, as argued by Pierre Roederer, the goal of society be considered the progress of economic production. For as the leading Idéologue, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, stated, “there is nothing in the world but labour.” Accordingly, society was now divided into functional components derived from the division of labor, and a far sharper distinction was drawn between those who worked and those who did not. For, as Jean-Baptiste Say argued in his Traité d’économie politique, ‘Industrie’ was the sole legitimate activity in modern society.8 It was counterposed to the worthlessness of the oisifs, the non-working landowners and rentiers, whose property was the residue of conquest or occupation. The debate on Industrie, like the debate on religion, had been halted by Napoleonic censorship, but resumed in 1814, this time led by a liberal journal, Le Censeur Européen, supported by Say, Saint-Simon, and others. Dismayed by evidence of the attractions of despotism and the fragility of representative institutions, revealed by Napoleon’s 100 days, the Censeur elaborated a theory of history in which trade would replace war and the military role of government would fade away. It argued that, with the decline of slavery and exploitation, “force and fraud” would diminish and government itself would become unnecessary. Here was the origin of the idea that “the government of men” would give way to “the administration of things.” Until 1820, Saint-Simon supported Industrie, and the idea that religion as the basis of morals might be replaced by “positive facts” was derived from 8 See Jean-Baptiste Say, “Discours préliminaire,” in Traité d’économie politique (Paris, 1803) and even more emphatically in the second edition of 1814. ‘Industrie’ literally meant industriousness and included agriculture, manufacture, and commerce.

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observation. But after the assassination of the heir to the throne, the Duc de Berry, in February 1820 and Saint-Simon’s own arrest following the publication of his notorious ‘parable,’ he returned to his original belief in the necessity of religion. He now criticized the advocates of Industrie for not understanding that its progress presupposed the establishment of a new moral doctrine. For its advent would require not merely a liberal legal and political order, but also the replacement of a traditional ruling class by three ‘natural’ classes – scientists, artists, and industriels. To accomplish this transition, a new religion was required. This was his Nouveau Christianisme, published in 1825. Science and ‘Industrie’ would be its means of realization. Saint-Simon bequeathed to his followers the idea of a new creed carried across the globe by an appeal no longer to the rationality of man, but rather to the ‘devotion’ of the artist-priest. The economic assumptions of the Doctrine, however, were not those of Saint-Simon. What was offered in the Doctrine was not a reiteration of the gospel of Industrie, but a critique of the new system of manufacture and, by extension, a questioning of the optimistic assumptions upon which the notion of Industrie had first been based. The main source of this criticism was the New Principles of Political Economy by Simonde de Sismondi published in 1819, and reiterated even more strongly in the second edition of 1827.9 In the New Principles, Sismondi expressed his fears about the political and social dangers of the new system of manufacture. His book highlighted the growth of a volatile world market, sucking rural workers into centers of manufacture where their livelihood was uncertain and they were liable to displacement by machinery. Employers took no responsibility for this new and rootless industrial population: an assemblage of beings without property, education, religion, or country, whom Sismondi now called ‘the Proletariat.’ Laisser faire, once the liberating watchword of Turgot and Smith, was now held responsible for the growth of a new class, whose miserable condition threatened society and the state. Sismondi’s account undermined any idea of a simple equation between the unhindered pursuit of interest and the maximization of happiness. The progress of Industrie meant the growth of inequality. Furthermore, there was no single ‘industrial’ class. Rather, there were two classes – capitalists and proletarians – and the gulf between them was widening. In this 9 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, ou De la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population, 2 vols. (Paris, 1819–1827); see also Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Chapter 4.

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process of polarization, intermediate strata were pauperized or forced into the proletariat. The increasingly volatile behavior of markets and the swelling mass of poverty and unemployment could not be dismissed as the temporary effects of the transition to peace. Nor could they be explained away as the remnants of “force and fraud.” They were the effects of a new system of economic production, and could be removed only by the transformation of that economic system itself. Much of what Sismondi wrote became part of the standard repertoire of socialist economic criticism. But, in themselves, his writings did not possess any specifically socialist component. They did not situate modern manufacture within a large-scale philosophy of history. They did not point to the possibility of any other economic order. Nor did they suggest that the economic system might soon experience mounting crises or collapse. Sismondi’s writings did not foretell the imminence of great systemic change. Nor did they point to any beneficiaries of transformation. Nothing was said about women, while the account of workers was largely confined to the enumeration of the circumstances in which they became prone to distress. It is equally clear that systemic criticism did not derive from Saint-Simon himself. Saint-Simon largely approved of free competition and egoism. He never gave up his belief in Industrie or in Say’s economics. He therefore did not believe that misery could be attributed to the industrial system itself. He never showed any interest in the condition of women, and although he wrote about the imperative need to aid the poorest and most numerous class, he never took any sustained interest in the conditions of workers or in the volatility of the economic cycle to which they were subject. The presence of all these elements in the Doctrine in 1829 suggests only one other plausible source. It was above all Fourier who considered industry to be organized “around some reversal of the natural order.”10 Lacking any principle of association, it needlessly multiplied tasks, and its mode of work was scarcely better than slavery. For “it is the same of every order which rests on violence; every class coerced directly, like slaves, or indirectly like wageearners, is deprived of the support of providence which uses no other agency on this globe than attraction.”11 The people lacked both the right to work and 10 Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, 7. On the relationship between Fourier and the Saint-Simonians, see Henri Louvancour, De Henri de Saint-Simon à Charles Fourier; étude sur le socialisme romantique française de 1830 (Chartres: Durand, 1913), Chapters 4 and 13–15. The main intermediary between Fourier and the Saint-Simonians was Enfantin. 11 Charles Fourier, Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier, 12 vols. (Paris: Anthropos, 1966–1968), vol. VI, 354.

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any guaranteed minimum; they saw “their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.”12 The disorganization of industry was associated with poverty, just as the disorganization of the household was associated with the oppressed condition of women. From these jarring elements, the Doctrine assembled a vision of man which, in one form or another, defined the vocabulary of nineteenthcentury socialism. A “new philosophy of human nature” was to be “based upon the recognition that the destiny of our race” was “to exploit and modify external nature to its greatest advantage” by “incessantly extending association, one of the most powerful means at its command.” ‘Association’ had expanded from family, through tribe and nation, toward global federation. War and Conquest were giving way to trade and ‘Industrie’; competition to association. The condition of the woman and the proletarian represented the last chapter in the decline of “the exploitation of man by man,” a process which had proceeded from cannibalism, slavery, and serfdom through wage labor and the isolated household to the association of labor and the emancipation of the woman.13 The domination of the oisifs would be removed by the abolition of inheritance. Private property would be replaced by the association of producers organized by a bank which would superintend national property and plan economic activity. Unearned interest would disappear. All individuals would henceforth be classed according to their capacities and remunerated according to their works. The purpose of the Doctrine was to announce the end of the ‘critical’ epoch and the advent of a new religion appropriate to the coming ‘organic’ age. Christianity had separated body from soul, just as it had separated church from state. It was also primarily responsible for the individualism expressed in liberalism and political economy. In place of Christian individualism, there would emerge a new pantheist religion based on ‘love.’ Like the Theocrats, the Doctrine envisaged religion as a necessary social bond, in which there would be no place for toleration or freedom of conscience. In the coming ‘organic’ epoch, the three social components of the social organism – the rational, the sensory, and the motor, or the scientist, the ‘industriel,’ and the artist – would find their true functions as part of a larger social whole. After fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism, all of which tied life to a single cause, Saint-Simonianism would end the duality between spirit and matter. 12 Beecher, Charles Fourier, 197. 13 On changes in the condition of women, see The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition; First Year, 1828–1829, trans. Georg G. Iggers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 85.

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Science and the Millennium In Britain, by contrast, there had been no disorienting shift from revolution through civil war to restoration, and no comparable discontinuity in political thought. In Owenism, the dominant form of British ‘socialism’, eighteenthcentury rationalist assumptions about man and nature were radicalized, but not transformed. Between 1812 and 1822, Robert Owen, a textile manufacturer, applied these principles with increasing boldness to the solution of the country’s industrial problems. In the five years preceding 1817, the immediate object of Owen’s preoccupations changed from crime, through the misery of factory children to postwar unemployment and the increase of pauperism. His increasingly visionary solutions started from a new national system of education, proceeded through fiscal reforms and factory legislation, and culminated in 1817 in the establishment of a national, and indeed global, network of ‘villages of cooperation.’ All these proposals were supposedly applications of his new principle of “the formation of character,” published in 1816 in A New View of Society. Owen claimed that “all men are . . . erroneously trained at present, . . . hence the inconsistencies and miseries of the world.”14 In particular, individuals were subjected to the fundamental error “that they form their own individual characters.” Man’s ignorance of his own nature, the belief that he himself, rather than outside circumstances, was responsible for his character, led him to devise false laws and ‘social arrangements.’ This was the reason why man’s pursuit of happiness took only selfish and destructive forms. But history would now take a new direction. As the product of circumstances, man’s relationship to history was essentially passive. “Do we not learn from history,” Owen wrote in 1816, “that every generation has thought and acted like preceding generations, with such changes only as the events around it, from which experience is derived, may have forced upon it.” But Owen was not entirely consistent. For man himself was partly responsible for “these events.” “Man has been formed to be a progressive animal and to be gradually advancing from a state of perplexity, confusion and disorder of ideas towards a sane state of mind and more rational conduct.” The stepping stones of that advance were scientific inventions, which changed the circumstances under which men lived.

14 Robert Owen, A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice (1813–1816), in The Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys, 4 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), vol. I, 70.

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This was dramatically exemplified in Owen’s own time, a time of “crisis.” Until the beginning of the French Wars, Britain had been an agricultural nation and relatively harmonious. The lower orders “were generally trained by the example of some landed proprietor and in such habits as created a mutual interest between the parties.”15 However, this rough balance between restricted wants and limited knowledge had been upset by scientific inventions, which had led to an extraordinary rise in the importance of trade, manufacture, and commerce, especially “the mechanical invention which introduced the cotton trade into this country and to the cultivation of the cotton tree in America.”16 In consequence, there had been a huge increase in productive power, unaccompanied by any scientific knowledge of the new social arrangements needed to manage and distribute the new wealth. The result had been the spread of individualism and the decline of social affections, with the productive powers of the country throttled by an antiquated medium of exchange, technological unemployment, and underconsumption. Owen saw his science as the complement in the human sphere to the inventions of Watt and Arkwright in the mechanical and chemical sphere. His science would show how men could be trained “to act in union” not simply for war, but also “for the attainment of pacific and civil objects.” Owen’s claims for his ‘science’ were even loftier than those of the French. They were spelled out in a ‘Recapitulation’ at the end of his most systematic treatise, his Book of the New Moral World in 1842. This knowledge imparted to mankind by Owen was “The Second Coming of Truth.”17 In Britain, and to a lesser extent other Protestant countries, the global impact made by the succession of revolutions between the 1770s and the 1830s generated widely shared expectations of millennial change, not only among the poor, but also among the established clergy, the evangelically enthused middle class, and some government ministers.18 Owen’s “Second Coming of the Truth” was one distinctive example, despite his repeated denunciations of “all the religions of the world.” His diagnosis of the obstacles to human emancipation, his providential sense of the role of his ‘science,’ his idea of 15 Robert Owen, “Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System,” in A New View of Society and Other Writings, ed. G. D. H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), 123. 16 Owen, “Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System,” 120. 17 The ‘First Truth’ imparted to humanity was Christian love to promote ‘universal charity and universal kindness.’ Robert Owen, Book of the New Moral World (London, 1842), Book 7, 65. On Owen’s relationship with the Protestant millennialist tradition, see especially W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Use of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 18 See in particular Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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‘Truth,’ and his millennial conception of the future of mankind were all recognizable modifications of a discourse which contemporary historians writing about eighteenth-century political theories have defined as ‘rational dissent.’19 Unlike France and other Catholic states, where secular history had rarely been imbued with providential meaning, millennial thought in Protestant countries had been defined by the sixteenth-century Reformation, which had introduced a new understanding of secular time. For orthodox divines the millennium had begun with the establishment of the Church of England in 1558. But since, for many, the millennium could only begin with the destruction of Anti-Christ, and since Anti-Christ still ruled in Rome, the millennium belonged to the future. Despite his avowed Deism, Owen’s approach bore a strong similarity to the millennial optimism and scientific rationalism of Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian preacher, famous chemist, and champion of the associational psychology of David Hartley. Hartley’s theory of the association of ideas, which was directed against the Calvinist understanding of original sin, formed the basis of Owen’s famous ‘Law’ of the formation of character. Owen also followed Priestley in believing human progress was not solely a human project. Humanity’s duty was to cooperate with the divine plan for the arrival of the millennium by removing all obstacles to ‘the truth.’ According to Priestley, this meant that church and state should be separated. Religious establishments were objectionable because they used their association with civil power to enhance their authority. They thus inhibited ‘candor,’ the means by which honest citizens reached agreement and therefore the truth. The best way to hasten the millennium was by removing all obstacles to the Truth. Governments, republican or otherwise, were to be judged according to the extent to which they assisted progress toward this “end of all things.” In Owen’s writings, many of Priestley’s assumptions reappear, but now shorn of their explicitly Christian reference.20 Just as the Dissenters had broadened the Anglican definition of Anti-Christ from the Pope to all 19 See Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in EighteenthCentury Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 20 On Owen’s debt to Priestley, see John G. McEvoy, “Enlightenment and Dissent in Science: Joseph Priestley and the Limits of Theoretical Reasoning,” Enlightenment and Dissent, 2 (1983), 47–67; and Martin Fitzpatrick, “Heretical Religion and Radical Political Ideas in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 339–375.

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ecclesiastical establishments, so Owen extended it to all religions. Similarly, he enlarged the dissenting conception of the original purity of Christianity into that of the original purity of human nature. Its implicit reference was to God’s purposes, both in nature and in ethics. In this way, liberty of private judgment led to the triumph of one indivisible truth. As can be seen, there was a clear difference between ‘socialism’ in France and ‘socialism’ in Britain. In one case, it derived from a sharp reaction against Enlightenment beliefs, which were assumed to have been responsible for the failure of the Revolution. In the other, it derived from an endorsement and enlargement of enlightenment optimism, albeit in semi-secularized Protestant millennial form. In both cases, however, the solution to the present crisis was the recognition of a new social science capable of establishing harmony and cooperation among mankind.

Building a New Moral World The primary aim of socialists both in Europe and in America between the 1820s and the 1840s was to build communal settlements. The founding of such a community was the chief objective of Owen and his followers. It would provide experimental proof of its superiority over a society based upon competition and individualism. In 1825, Owen ploughed almost the whole of his fortune into the foundation of New Harmony, a community located in Indiana. But bad land, insufficient capital, and lack of requisite skills meant that the settlement did not flourish, and ended in 1827. In 1832–1833, there was a similarly unsuccessful attempt to create a trial Fourierist community (Phalange) at Condé-sur-Vesgre near Paris, to which Fourier himself gave active support.21 Such communities were not entirely speculative. In the early years of the American Republic, when European settlement on the frontier was still rudimentary, communal participation in clearing, settling, and farming the land could also be of practical benefit. It might also be conceived as the extension of existing practices, whether of the benevolent paternalism of philanthropic landowners or of the proprietors of model factories. Such communities might also be designed to replicate the ethos of mutuality governing the conduct of friendly societies, burial clubs, or Methodist congregations. Early socialists in the United States were encouraged by the apparent success of religious communities, 21 See Beecher, Charles Fourier, Chapter 23. In the United States, during the mid 1840s, there were several attempts to practice Fourierist forms of ‘association,’ the most famous of which was Brook Farm, Massachusetts.

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especially the Rappites or the Shakers, but found it impossible to create a collective ethos of comparable power. Following the failure of New Harmony, Owen returned to Britain to find that interest in his ideas had developed among artisans. In response, between 1829 and 1834, Owenism adapted itself to their interests, especially through its encouragement of consumers’ cooperatives and trade unions. This phase came to an end in 1834 with the collapse of the Grand National Consolidated Union. But, in the process, Owenism had developed into a nationwide movement. Between 1839 and 1845, ‘Halls of Science’ were built in all the major cities of Britain. They were intended as secular alternatives to Christian churches. Large followings were attracted especially to Sunday Lectures, where Branch lecturers propagated the Owenite critique of competition.22 Artisan participation did not fundamentally change the character or ambitions of the Owenite movement. Attempts to form communal settlements continued. Owen believed that the division between single families and the influence of the priesthood were more destructive than differences of class; families were the source of individualism. The aim therefore was to change from “the individual to the social system, from single families with separate interests to communities of many families with one interest,” reinforced by birth control and easier divorce. The problems facing Owenite settlements were practical rather than ideological. Few survived beyond two or three years. On account of their being purely agricultural, lacking financial expertise, and often spending disproportionate sums on building, such communities proved incapable of producing the surpluses necessary to offset their shortage of capital. Nevertheless, until the beginning of the 1840s, optimism among the Owenites remained high. When Owen laid the foundation stone of his community at Queenwood in 1839, the stone was inscribed “C.M.” – “Commencement of the Millennium.”

Between Laisser faire and Theocracy – The Invention of ‘Socialism’ in France Following the July insurrection in Paris in 1830, Charles X was overthrown. But pleasure at the fall of a reactionary regime was tempered by fear of the return of terror and civil war. To forestall any move toward a republic, the 22 In one year, over two million pamphlets were produced. See Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 250.

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‘juste milieu’ Orléanist regime of Louis Philippe was hastily installed. It was both hostile to manhood suffrage and unwilling to alleviate the economic distress of the Parisian workers. Anger, especially among those who had toppled the king on the barricades, brought together students and artisans in militant republican societies, like the newly founded Society for the Rights of Man. Revolutionary sentiments were rekindled by Buonarroti’s 1828 account of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals of 1796, or inspired by Carbonari-style secret societies. They provided the seed-bed for what Marx later called “the spectre of communism.” In November 1831, unity among the Saint-Simonians broke down, when a split developed between the two ‘Fathers’ of the Church, Enfantin and Bazard. Enfantin argued that if the sanctification of material needs entailed the reversal of the Christian contempt for matter, then it must be enlarged to include what he called “the rehabilitation of the flesh,” meaning a religion of sexual pleasure proclaiming the androgynous nature of God, communal life, and a form of feminism. This in turn led to disagreement over the laws of constancy and inconstancy, which were to govern the institution of marriage, and led to the disintegration of the Church. Enfantin and forty followers set up a short-lived community in Menilmontant, while Bazard, Buchez, Leroux, and others gravitated toward the newly established workers’ associations and republican clubs. By means of the notion of ‘association,’ they attempted to reconcile their Saint-Simonian beliefs with democracy and a positive reinterpretation of the French Revolution. Artisan associations, whether as charities or covert trade societies, had re-emerged in the 1820s. But ‘association’ also provided the main symbol of historical progress in the Doctrine. According to the Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux, following the abolition of aristocratic privilege, it was possible to implement Saint-Simonian ideals in political life through the enfranchisement of the “poorest and most numerous class.” But if ‘democracy’ were not to be associated with Jacobinism, a new language was needed. ‘Democracy’ in the 1793 “Declaration of the Rights of Man” was rejected as too individualistic. Democracy must now be imbued with a more collective and spiritual meaning. It must be linked to a “religion of democracy.” Such a creed, more inclusive and emotive than liberalism, could be built upon the romantic reading of Christianity. In another sphere, Félicité Lamennais popularized the Gospel story as a message about fraternity among the working classes.23 23 See Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

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This was the context in which Leroux coined the word ‘socialism’ (though paradoxically as a position opposite to his own). Leroux initially identified the term with the authoritarian theocratic vision of social reform associated with Enfantin – “this crushing new papacy, which would transform humanity into a machine.” He juxtaposed socialism to “the individualism of English political economy, which in the name of liberty makes men behave as rapacious wolves among one another and reduces society into atoms.” Individualism and socialism resembled “two loaded pistols aimed at each other.” ‘Religious democracy,’ his attempt to fuse Saint-Simonian ideals with a democratic polity, was equidistant from either of these extremes.24 Political economy and free market competition must be replaced by a society in which ‘the people’ became the legislator, a society built upon the ideals of ‘association’ and the insights of social science. The SaintSimonians had wrongly believed that a sudden and complete transformation of society was attainable. After 1830, a more gradual transition was now possible. The changes, both material and spiritual, must be able to reconcile equality with individuality. This was the first articulation of what was later to be called democratic socialism. But Leroux’s vision of ‘religious democracy’ as the inclusive creed of a republican community foundered in the face of government antagonism. Republican societies were outlawed in April 1834, provoking insurrections in several cities. In Paris, the conflict culminated in a massacre in the Rue Transnonain in Paris. Republicans were defeated in the subsequent general election, and in 1835 all advocacy of a republic was forbidden. From 1835, according to Lorenz von Stein, there was a fundamental shift in the preoccupations of French Socialists. Interest in immediate questions relating to the economy and the condition of the working classes replaced discussion of political and religious issues. This was already evident in 1838 in the debate about the state and rail investment, a debate in which Louis Blanc first came to prominence as the strong advocate of a state-based approach. Like Leroux, Blanc was an advocate of government-led reform, a widened franchise, and a republic based upon ‘fraternity.’ But the crucial turning point came in May 1839, when, in the midst of a government crisis and an economic slump, the Society of the Seasons – an ultra-radical secret society – attempted an uprising in Paris. In response, Blanc 24 Pierre Leroux, “De l’Individualisme et du Socialisme” (1833), in Le socialisme romantique: Pierre Leroux et ses contemporains, ed. David Owen Evans (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière et Cie, 1948), 223–238. As he recalled in 1850, what had come to be called ‘socialism’ by 1848 was what he had originally described as ‘religious democracy.’

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argued that the deeper cause of the uprising was not political, but social, the miserable condition of the working class. By writing as a journalist and connecting the uprising directly with the newly emerging concern about social conditions, Blanc turned socialism into a practical question. Blanc elaborated his solution to the workers’ pauperized condition in 1840 in The Organization of Labour. Savings banks – the liberal solution – could not resolve the problem. In 1789, he argued, France had adopted the English system of “unlimited competition.” It was “a system of extermination,” in which the poor died of hunger, while the rich died of fear. Competition resulted not only in “the dissolution of the family,” as was evident in the increase of infanticide and the growth of crime and prostitution, but also in the ruin of the bourgeoisie itself as the strong eliminated the weak. Wages were falling, and in factories unskilled labourers were replacing artisans, while railways were bringing in ever greater numbers of rural migrants. Blanc’s case was reinforced by the researches of Villermé’s two-volume statistical study of the condition of French textile workers.25 The state must become “the banker of the poor.” With state help, workers would be provided their own instruments of labor. Social workshops would be set up, in place of individual enterprises. The government should first raise a loan and then fund social factories. Workers, Blanc believed, would probably prefer communal living. But this would be a matter of choice. Once these social workshops were successfully established, they would become self-regulatory and state intervention would cease. In 1840, ‘socialism’ came to dominate French public debate. The government was distracted by a ministerial crisis; an unprecedented strike wave followed economic slump; and among the middle classes there emerged a suffrage reform movement. In July, “the first communist banquet” took place in Belleville, while in October a ‘communist’ worker, Darmès, attempted to assassinate the king. The year also witnessed an unprecedented array of socialist or communist publications. Especially prominent was the Voyage to Icaria by Étienne Cabet, a labored imitation of Thomas More’s Utopia, combined with an emphasis upon equality derived from Buonarroti. Building upon his English exile, Cabet argued for the establishment of communities along the lines of Owen’s ‘villages of cooperation.’ After a transitional period of dictatorship, Icaria would become a centrally planned, but democratically governed, nation-state, free from the existence of private property, money, law courts, or police. 25 Louis-René Villermé, Tableau de l’état physique et morale des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie, 2 vols. (Paris: J. Renouard, 1840).

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The same year saw the publication of Proudhon’s What Is Property? – with its famous answer: “property is theft.” This caused a sensation, but was less radical than it first appeared. Property was that which provided an income without requiring any work, namely rent and interest which sustained an unproductive class of ‘oisifs.’ It was sharply distinguished from ‘possession’ – the dwelling, land, and tools necessary to work. More radical was Proudhon’s challenge to the identification of socialism with the state. In 1848, he attacked Blanc and Leroux as ‘politicians,’ who relied upon centralized government rather than the activity of workers themselves. The state was inherently repressive and hierarchical. To imagine that the state might change its nature was utopian. Proudhon described himself as a ‘proletarian.’ His original project had been to re-establish the church as the embodiment of social justice. But, by 1843, he had abandoned religion. Instead, justice would become the practice of a people, educated in virtue and aided by science. In place of the state, ‘progressive workers’ associations’ would cooperate in a federation on the basis of justice and equitable forms of exchange.26 In 1848, this was set out as a practical proposal for the establishment of a bank, which would advance loans at minimal rates of interest and issue ‘exchange notes’ in place of money based on gold. Between 1830 and 1848, in contrast to those like Blanqui who considered the July monarchy illicit and insurrection justified, a diverse spectrum of socialists ranging from Leroux and Blanc to Cabet and Proudhon rejected the violence of the Jacobin tradition and attempted to sketch diverse paths toward a republican community. But hopes of a peaceful transition were severely battered in the crisis-torn development of the European revolutions in 1848.

The Crisis of the 1840s and Its Aftermath In 1839, Owenite attempts at community-building had resulted in the construction of a settlement at Queenwood – a 532-acre estate in Hampshire. This culmination of Owenite ambition collapsed in 1845 when extravagance and mounting debts forced its closure. Following its failure and the economic 26 Proudhon’s economic analysis of ‘the social problem’ was developed in his System of Economical Contradictions: Or, The Philosophy of Poverty, vol. I, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1888 [1846]). His solution to ‘the social problem’ was entitled ‘mutualism,’ but later became better known by another term he also used to describe it, ‘anarchism.’

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crisis of 1846–1847, the organized Owenite movement disintegrated. By the middle of the century, communitarian enthusiasm not only among Owenites, but also among Fourierists and Icarians, had declined both in Europe and in the United States. Owenites themselves attributed their failure to the over-optimism of “the pure doctrine of circumstance.” Human nature was not uniform, and could not be made to change overnight. Some blamed heredity, while others maintained that phrenology should have been employed to select those best suited to a life of association. In the 1850s, the different elements combined within Owenism developed in different directions. ‘Rational religion,’ renamed ‘secularism’ and propagated by George Holyoake, became a successful movement in its own right. Under Holyoake’s successor, Charles Bradlaugh, the movement dropped its communitarian and socialist aspirations. The cooperative retail movement, originating in 1844 in the Toad Lane store of the Rochdale Pioneers, also grew strongly, especially after 1870. It also abandoned the ambition to build cooperative communities, as did other offshoots from Owenism, including the Spiritualists and the adult education movement.27 In France, the 1848 Revolution began with the apparent triumph of socialism. The Parisian crowd established not just the ‘Democratic Republic,’ but the ‘Democratic and Social Republic,’ and on February 25 the new provisional government “guaranteed work to all citizens” while reducing the working day to ten hours. Furthermore, in apparent recognition of the ‘right to work,’ ‘National Workshops’ were created, while, at the same time, the Luxembourg Commission under Louis Blanc was appointed to investigate the condition of workers. For a few weeks, European governments were pushed toward democratic reforms. But the triumph of ‘the People’ was brief, and, by the end of May, conservative forces had regained the initiative. Although far from Louis Blanc’s original proposal, the Workshops seen by the press as connected with ‘socialism’ became the object of bourgeois suspicion. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Constituent Assembly, which replaced the Provisional Government, decided on June 21 to close them. The prospect of renewed hunger and unemployment provoked a spontaneous workers’ uprising, savagely put down by the National Guard and Garde Mobile. In this conflict, the Archbishop of Paris was shot, and 15,000 insurgents were rounded up for transportation to Algeria. Prominent socialists were arrested, or, like Blanc, departed for England. In the Constituent 27 See J. F .C .Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1969), 235–264.

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Assembly, Proudhon’s proposal for free credit and an exchange bank, financed by a compulsory levy on rent and interest, was rejected by 600 to 2. Unsurprisingly, socialism was thereafter associated with class war, which helped to reinforce the victory of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in the presidential election of December 1848 and make possible his eventual appointment as Emperor in 1852. In short, the character of socialism changed substantially around the middle of the century. In Britain, the communal vision of the Owenites was abandoned, while at the same time the democratic movement suffered a humiliating defeat. In April 1848, the Chartists, a mass movement predominantly composed of workers and aiming at universal male suffrage, declined sharply after the failure of their attempt to present a national petition on Kennington Common.28 In France, apparent socialist gains in February 1848 were followed by conservative hostility and populist support for an authoritarian Empire, which was to last for almost two decades. In the 1850s, the counter-revolutionary climate all but stifled progressive activity. Change occurred in the following decade. In 1864, the first mass social democratic party was founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany. Transnational republican and democratic movements re-emerged, inspiring popular enthusiasm for the Risorgimento in Italy, the abolition of slavery in America, and an uprising against Czarism in Poland. In England, there was an upsurge of new forms of trade unionism. Stronger and more stable trade unions, based in London and largely the result of the worldwide boom in economic activity (especially in house building and the production of consumer goods), made possible ongoing collaboration with French workers and the founding of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1864. Stronger trade unions also underpinned the growth of the Reform League, a form of “pressure from without,” which in 1867 helped to achieve the extension of the suffrage to include the majority of male wage earners, followed a few years after by the consolidation of the legal rights of trade unions. In France in the 1860s, Bonaparte attempted to gain working-class support by introducing an amnesty, a relaxation of censorship, and the legalization of strikes.29 But, by 1863, popular sentiment in Paris (still denied political 28 Radical Chartists moved toward a more social-democratic campaign for “the Charter and something more.” But they could no longer mobilize mass support. Originally, the framers of the Charter, especially William Lovett, had wanted to include women in the demands of the Charter. 29 The general amnesty of August 16, 1859 not only included those convicted of political crimes, but also restored the civil rights of those previously released.

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representation) had turned overwhelmingly republican and anti-clerical. The works of Proudhon became particularly popular. Despite his having been imprisoned in 1849 for insulting Bonaparte, throughout the 1850s and early 1860s Proudhon continued to elaborate his vision of a socialist society built upon progressive association. Understandably, after the authoritarian resolution, both of 1830 and of 1848, there was little support for a state-based socialism. Bonaparte’s empire ended in military defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and a prolonged siege of Paris. Paris resisted the armistice signed by the Versailles government in January 1871, resulting in the establishment of an independent government, the Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18 until May 22. Although most of its supporters saw themselves as defenders of La République démocratique et sociale, the Commune was not socialist. At the beginning of a war, wholly the result of Bonaparte’s adventures – or so it seemed – Karl Marx welcomed the prospect of “German predominance” shifting “the centre of gravity of the West European workers’ movement from France to Germany.”30 This did indeed happen. But with it came lurid stories spread by the French, Austrian, and German governments. The Commune, it was alleged, had been a conspiracy to start an insurrection, hatched by the International and directed by a ‘Red Doctor’ either on his own, or as the agent of Bismarck. In the newly constituted German empire, the fact that the Social Democratic Labour Party was affiliated to the International, and that its leaders, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel in the Reichstag, had abstained from supporting the war, led to their trial for treason. In these circumstances, the prosecution was happy to republish the otherwise forgotten Communist Manifesto, where it had been proclaimed that “the working men have no country.” For the rest of the century, the future of socialism was strongly identified with developments in Germany, and with the theories associated with Karl Marx.

German Socialism in Theory and Practice In the last third of the nineteenth century, the form in which socialism became best known was German. The German Social Democratic Party, whose voting strength amounted to 1,427,300 in 1890, was by far the largest socialist party in the world, having survived Bismarck’s anti-socialist 30 Marx to Engels, July 20, 1870, MECW, vol. XLIV, 3–4.

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legislation, which ran from 1878 to 1890. The primacy of a German approach was also clear at the annual gatherings of the Second International, which was founded as a successor to the IWMA in 1889. Furthermore, the bestknown international socialist journal during this period was Die Neue Zeit, founded in 1883, and edited by Karl Kautsky. As a source of socialist theory, Germany’s primacy was above all associated with the reputation of Karl Marx’s Capital, the first volume of which was published in 1867. Its importance was tirelessly explained and propagated through to his death in 1894 by his lifelong companion, Friedrich Engels. At Marx’s graveside in 1883, Engels associated his friend’s work with Darwin. He claimed that “just as Darwin discovered the law of the development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.”31 The first part of the Party’s Erfurt Program of 1891, drafted by Kautsky, was a summary of Marx’s picture of capitalist development in Capital. As a result of Engels’s widely read publications, Marx’s work was presented as the replacement of ‘utopian socialism’ by ‘scientific socialism.’32 In Capital, Marx investigated the connection between the exploitation of labor and the accumulation of capital, the history of the development of ‘the capitalist mode of production.’ Workers were exploited, but not as the result of unequal exchange between worker and employer, as had been assumed in the 1830s and 1840s by English critics of political economy and French socialists like Proudhon. They were exploited through production, the actual process of work. The capitalist purchased not the labor of workers, but their capacity to work (‘labor power’). To profit, or extract ‘surplus value’ from workers (the additional amount of ‘value’ produced beyond that necessary to ensure the subsistence and reproduction of the worker), the capitalist had to lengthen the working day or increase productivity during each hour.33 To ‘realize’ this ‘surplus value,’ the commodities produced had to be circulated and sold at a profit in the world market. But without any certainty of sale, ‘capitalist crisis’ could ensue: Goods might be overproduced and profits decline. 31 Friedrich Engels, “Karl Marx’s Funeral,” in MECW, vol. XXIV, 467. 32 See in particular his “Socialism Utopian and Scientific,” originally written for La Revue socialiste in 1880 as an abbreviated version of the Introduction, Chapter 1 of Part I, and Chapters 1 and 2 of Part III of his Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (London: Wellred, 2011 [1878]). The pamphlet was published in German in 1882 and in English in 1892. 33 Hence the importance Marx attached to the success of the Ten Hours Campaign, the movement to restrict factory hours. He contrasted “this modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working day” with “the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man.’” See Karl Marx, Capital, in MECW, vol. XXXV, 306–307.

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“The starting point of capital formation and the capitalist mode of production” was the circular trajectory followed in the global circulation of commodities and money. Originally this had involved the exchange of equivalents, independent production, and the exchange between owners of commodities. But this no longer pertained. A transition had occurred from ‘simple circulation’ (commodities into money; money into commodities) to a situation in which the process of exchange came to incorporate the process of production and the relationship between capitalist and laborer. In this situation, commodities became “the repositories of capital,” or “capital itself, valorized, pregnant with surplus value.” The constant transformation of surplus value back into capital created new capital and new wage earners. Therefore the growth of capital and the growth of the proletariat were interconnected. As economic relations took on an increasingly capitalist character, the worker–capitalist relation was reproduced on an ever more extensive scale, incorporating more and more branches of production, and in this way the scale of the capitalist mode of production had reached global proportions. Despite an intimidating beginning, in which Marx attempted to distinguish between the substance and form of value, two-thirds of Capital was devoted to a fact-based depiction of the development and current relations between capital and labor, mainly in England. The precondition for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production was “the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant from the soil.” This was depicted in the final part of the volume, on so-called ‘primitive accumulation,’ which recounted the development of a capitalist economy in Britain from the dissolution of feudal relations in the fourteenth century to its triumph in the middle of the Victorian period. In another part on “the Accumulation of Capital,” a detailed account of the condition of British wage workers in different sectors of the economy in the 1860s was provided. Marx published only the first volume of Capital analyzing production, even though just months before the second volume on circulation had been scheduled to appear at the same time. The non-appearance of the second volume left large questions unanswered. Was capital a global phenomenon? What was the connection between the process of capitalist production and the proclaimed imminence of capitalist crisis? What was the relation between production and circulation? For it was in the functioning of circulation that signs of crisis would appear. Above all, how would the capitalist mode of production come to an end? Unlike in his writings in the 1840s, there was little on the role of the working 219

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class, and nothing conclusive on structural crisis which might end capitalism. Yet in earlier analyses, especially those of the 1850s, Marx had attached great importance to what he considered a fundamental flaw in capitalist development. Profit, he had asserted, could be derived only from living labor. But, with the advance of machinery, there was a proportionate fall in the number of laborers from whom surplus value could be extracted, and this would mean a decline in the rate of profit. In every respect, Marx had written at the time, “this is the most important law of political economy.” If this were the case, “the highest development of productive power . . . would coincide with the depreciation of capital and the degradation of labour” and “these regularly recurring catastrophes . . . would lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow.”34 The published edition of Volume One of Capital answered none of these questions. But it did provide an unrivaled account of the condition of the modern wage worker. The worker was ‘free’ in a double sense: free from serfdom and subordination to a feudal lord, but also free from the possession of any means of production. Without any other resources, the only possession the laborer was able to sell was labor power, and this had to be sold continuously to secure survival. Capital was notable for its employment of an extraordinary wealth of statistics and official reports together with an abundance of literary sources. Extensive use was made of the reports of factory inspectors, medical officers of health, and government commissions of enquiry to support claims about the extensive use of child labor, and pressure to lengthen the working day or increase the speed of work. Even if he did not establish a definitive association between capitalist advance and proletarian immiseration, Marx was able to connect a critical analysis of the current capitalist economy with its longer-term historical roots. The socialism developed by Marx, Engels, and their circle had started as an offshoot of the critique of religion developed among the Young Hegelians.35 Marx seized upon Feuerbach’s idea of ‘Species-being’ to conceptualize the communal nature of human being, and, in 1844, Marx made use of the idea of inversion in Feuerbach’s religious criticism to develop a critique of private property. His innovation was to apply Feuerbach’s idea of inversion (the substitution of God for man) to other ‘abstractions’ – to the state, to the commodity form of economic exchange, and to human labour. Private property was responsible for the destruction of Man’s ‘social’ nature. 34 Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58, commonly known as the Grundrisse, in MECW, vol. XXIX, 133 and 134. 35 See Chapter 4 by Warren Breckman for more on the Left Hegelians.

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The guiding question was how the development of exchange relations had transformed this originally sociable state into social interactions based upon individualism, class antagonism, and domination by the world market. What was now required, Marx argued, was no longer a political revolution like that of 1789, but rather a ‘human’ revolution carried out by a class “outside and beneath” existing society – the proletariat. This change in the direction of his thinking in 1844 was fundamentally aided by his first encounter with political economy, as the theoretical representation of a world ‘estranged’ by the advent of private property.36 This occurred when, as editor of the exile Paris-based journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, he received an essay by Friedrich Engels titled “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” Engels was the son of a textile manufacturer and a radical follower of the Berlin-based Young Hegelians. In Cologne in 1842, while on his way to England to become a manager in his father’s Manchester factory, Engels had been converted to ‘communism’ by Moses Hess.37 Once in Manchester, he was attracted to the socialism of Robert Owen, and he drew much of the material for his essay from the ideas of the Manchester Owenites, whose lectures he regularly attended. The Owenites particularly attacked competition and “the practice of buying cheap and selling dear.” Engels combined this critique with a direct attack on private property, inspired by Proudhon. It was this equation between political economy and private property that first inspired Marx to embark upon his own Critique. Marx began work on this project in Paris and continued it from 1845 to 1848 in Brussels. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, he worked in London – particularly at the British Museum – from 1849 through to the publication of Das Kapital in 1867. The difference between Marx’s account of socialism and that found in France or England was most marked in relation to his conception of the ‘proletariat.’ In both countries, defense of workers was based upon an appeal to democracy. In France, the basic socialist demand was that the proletariat be recognized as ‘citizens’ and reunited with an undivided nation, a demand achieved in February 1848. In England, the position of the Chartists, with roots going back to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and the 1689 Settlement, was that the working classes be fully recognized as part of the people, whose consent was necessary as the legitimate basis for any 36 See Chapter 6 by Francesco Boldizzoni. 37 Hess’s argument can be found in Moses Heß, “Die europäische Triarchie,” in Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837–1850, ed. Wolfgang Mönke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1980), 159–160.

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government. In Germany, on the other hand, in Marx’s account, there was no attempt at democratic justification or historic appeal to a pre-existing constitution. Marx’s ‘proletariat’ was outside and beneath society, a debased group defined by a ‘vocation.’ This identification of the proletariat with an image of human degradation was powerfully reinforced by Engels’s picture of The Condition of the Working Class in England.38 Engels’s exploration of the working-class quarters of Manchester was in part motivated by a desire to validate, both metaphorically and literally, the Feuerbachian conception of the ontological loss of humanity associated with alienation. What distinguished man from animal, according to Feuerbach, was not consciousness, but ‘species-consciousness.’ Thus the loss of species-consciousness consequent upon religion, private property, and the state was identified with a return to animality. In this condition, that which was essentially ‘human’ became a mere means to satisfy animal ends. In Engels’s account, the worker was degraded and wholly deprived of humanity before re-finding his manhood through crude struggle leading to mental awakening.39 Workers were dragged into world history by the “industrial revolution,” which took away their land, dispossessed them of their tools, and forced them into the city and the factory. But through the “industrial revolution” “which turned them into machines pure and simple” they were ultimately forced “to think and demand a position worthy of men.” From primitive beginnings, forms of resistance became increasingly self-conscious, leading to the formation of trade unions and political parties, defined by the class struggle against competition and private property. Engels’s Feuerbachian Manchester story about the degradation of the worker and Marx’s conception of the ‘vocation’ of the proletariat for a number of reasons were punctured.40 What still remained and now took its place was a French-derived picture of the unfolding of ‘class struggle.’ This was a post-1815 superimposition by Guizot and others upon the account of the supposedly centuries-old struggle between Frankish invaders and the conquered Gauls. It was a relatively belated and superficial addition. But what imbued it with an altogether unprecedented strength in Marx’s account 38 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England from Personal Observation and Authentic Sources (1845), in MECW, vol. IV, 307–342. 39 For an account of the Christian origins of this trope depicting degradation as the prelude to emancipation, see Georges M.-M. Cottier, L’athéisme du jeune Marx: Ses origines hégéliennes (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1959). 40 See Chapter 4 by Warren Breckman.

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was its identification with a new conception of the historical significance of labor. This was inspired not by a putative materialism claimed by Engels and later ‘Marxists,’ but rather by a particular appropriation of the basic assumptions of German Idealism. The extent to which Marx’s fundamental inspiration was drawn from idealism becomes clear when his approach is compared with that of other radicals and socialists at the time. Their outlook was shaped by a naturalistic version of materialism, standardly accepted by English thinkers from the time of Locke through to Bentham, prevalent among Philosophes and Idéologues in France, and employed in Germany by Feuerbach himself. Man was a natural being; his actions were motivated by the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain; as a creature of nature, a ‘sensuous being,’ man was primarily defined by his needs and impulses. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this position offered a welcome alternative to the Christian emphasis upon original sin. Not surprisingly, this was also the position emphatically espoused by the largest socialist groupings in the 1840s: the Owenites in England and the Cabetists in France.41 For them, Man was a product of his environment. By improving this environment through better education and a more enlightened attitude toward reward and punishment, it would be possible to transform human nature and increase the extent of human happiness. By contrast, Marx’s innovation, spelled out in his writings in the course of 1844 and after, was to apply the insights of German idealism to the understanding of labor, to recuperate the emphasis found in idealism upon human activity and man’s position as a producer. Most striking here was the connection Marx made between two areas of discourse hitherto unrelated to each other: first, ‘the social question’ or the plight of the proletariat; and second, the world-transforming significance accorded to labor in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit. By making this connection, Marx identified socialism with human self-activity as it had been invoked in the idealist tradition following the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant.42 Kant and Fichte had challenged the passivity of the image of man as a natural being, but it was in The Phenomenology of the Spirit that Hegel, 41 See Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 115–119; and Christopher Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–1851 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 45–46. 42 On Marx’s relationship with the idealist tradition, see Douglas Moggach, “Post-Kantian Perfectionism,” in Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 179–203.

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building upon this idealist inheritance, translated it into a vision of history. According to Marx, Hegel had grasped “the self-creation of Man as a process” and in so doing had grasped the essence of labor, the creation of Man as “the outcome of Man’s own labour.”43 Man, according to Marx, was not merely a ‘natural being,’ but “a human natural being,” whose point of origin was not nature, but history. Unlike animals, man made his activity “the object of his will.” Thus history could be seen as the humanization of nature through man’s “conscious life activity.” From this conception, it was a short step toward one of Marx’s most memorable insights, the identification of history with the advance of “the forces of production.” By taking this step, Marx, more powerfully than anyone else in the 1840s, was able to invoke the unparalleled productive powers of modern industry and helped to make the Communist Manifesto such a memorable document. As he wrote there, The bourgeoisie . . . accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals . . . in one hundred years, it has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.44

Marx’s identification of the proletariat as the ‘class’ that would inaugurate the ‘human’ or ‘communist’ revolution led him and his small circle of followers to link up in 1847 with The League of the Just (soon to be renamed The Communist League), a revolutionary organization mainly composed of artisans and located in Paris, London, and other European cities. The Manifesto has rightly been celebrated as Marx’s most influential text. Intellectually, the compelling power of its argument was the result of bringing together the economic criticism developed by French and English authors of the emergence of industrial capitalism and the world market with the activist starting point of German idealism, that man was not just a creature of nature, but equally a being who transformed nature by his productive activity. But whatever its later iconic status, the Manifesto played no role in the mid-century revolutions.45 After a hurried printing in February 1848, the 43 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in MECW, vol. III, 332–333. 44 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London, 2002 [1848]), 222. 45 Although written and published in 1848, the Manifesto made no impact in the ensuing revolution. It first became famous when employed as evidence against Bebel and Liebknecht in a prosecution brought against them in 1872 for refusing to support the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871.

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Manifesto was shelved. The immediate aim of the Communist League was not to fuel a class war between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but to effect a Jacobin-style national revolution against the equivalent of the ancien régime in Germany. The unreality of Marx’s attempt to equate the events of 1848 with ‘class struggle,’ as depicted in the Manifesto, was apparent in some of his writings for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. There, the closing down of the Paris National Workshops by the National Assembly in June 1848 was described by Marx as “the first great battle between the two classes that split modern society.” The interpretation was not supported by the narrative. The rebellion was not caused by the action of the employing class, but by the Assembly’s antagonism toward what they feared as ‘communism.’ There was no mention of what prompted the resistance of the insurgents – the threat of destitution – or of their main grievance – that the Republic had reneged on its promise to fulfill “the right to work.” Marx could produce no solid evidence of the existence of a class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and was reduced to defending his argument by invention of a fiction, that the true nature of the conflict was revealed by some allegedly discovered graffiti: “Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the Working class.”46 There were three distinct phases in Marx’s picture of what capital was, and how it might end: the first in the 1840s through to the revolutions of 1848, the second in the 1850s through to 1857–1858, and the third during the years 1864–1869. The first belonged to the 1840s. It was governed by a picture of original human downfall brought about by the institution of private property, followed by class struggle culminating in an epic confrontation between bourgeois and proletarian. This struggle, to be fought out in the coming revolution, would end in the supersession of private property and the final restoration of human sociability. This vision was shattered by the disenchanting failure of the 1848 revolutions. His second attempt to depict what he now called ‘capital’ or ‘the value form’ occurred in the 1850s and was recorded in the so-called Grundrisse of 1857–1858. In the early 1850s, Marx had persisted in the use of class struggle as an explanatory device, but found it unilluminating, and instead increasingly adopted the terms ‘labor’ and ‘capital.’ His researches on the emergence of what he called the ‘value form’ highlighted the fact that ‘capital’ was not like other ‘modes of production.’ If there was a ‘class struggle,’ it was not like that between master and slave, or between lord and bondsman. Nor would its 46 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, in MECW, vol. X, 69.

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destruction be like the victory of a republican or democratic movement over a particular form of political rule. The emergence of ‘the value form’ was neither the result of conquest by an external force (slavery, feudalism), nor the result of domination by an extra-human power (God or Nature). Rather, it was the spontaneous creation of human beings themselves and had emerged within civil society. ‘Capital’ was the product of free human activity in the form of the exchange of goods. It could not therefore be understood like slavery or feudalism in terms of the crude polarities of class struggle. Its development into a system of production was a process that had taken place behind the backs of human beings, but was no less a result of human activity on that account. Having settled in London from 1850, Marx now began to enquire how ‘capital’ or ‘the value form’ drove forward the forces of production. In the face of a worldwide boom, which Marx supposed had killed off the revolution in Europe, he now placed his hopes in the cyclical character of the growth of productive forces. The centerpiece of his new theory was the development of a ‘social form,’ which at a certain point in human development had been superimposed progressively upon relations between and within societies. Assisted by the growth of monetary relations, simple exchange of useful products gave way to the exchange of commodities as embodiments of exchange value. Henceforth, history concerned the dual development of material production and of ‘the value form’ or process of ‘valorization.’ Thus, commercial society was not, as Adam Smith thought, a simple expression of human nature, but the product of a social form which would be superseded at a higher stage. Inspired by the use in Hegel’s Science of Logic of circular processes or a spiral of concepts of increasing universality, Marx similarly presented the growth of the value form as a series of cycles, or as one great spiral embracing more and more universal forms of human interaction.47 In this way, the circular trajectory of the commodity proceeded from the simplest beginnings through to its apogee in the world market. But, like other organisms, it was characterized by a life cycle, which meant that its ultimate global conquest would at the same time mark the beginning of its dissolution. This did not happen. The hoped-for world economic crisis came and went in 1857–1858, without producing any revival of revolutionary politics, and Marx found himself increasingly isolated. He was slow to recognize the new forms of radicalism appearing in England, Italy, Germany, Poland, and 47 Marx to Engels, January 16, 1858, in MECW, vol. XL, 249.

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America from the early 1860s and was also encountering increasing theoretical difficulties. The idea of a spiral encircling the world with increasing speed and intensity and resulting in organic self-destruction had come to nothing. Furthermore, even in more parochial terms, he was unable to connect production and circulation in an overall theory and therefore unable to demonstrate the existence of a process which might lead to the crisis and dissolution of the capitalist mode of production. At his lowest point, he exhibited increasing symptoms of mental disorder, expressed in alternating bouts of paranoia and megalomania.48 It was also in these years that Marx felt most threatened, both politically and theoretically, by what he saw as the rivalry of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle had been a member of the Communist League in 1848 and was an admirer of Marx. At the beginning of the 1860s, when a Prussian amnesty was expected with the accession of a new monarch, Lassalle invited him to come to Berlin, where they might jointly edit a revived Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx was tempted, but his family were firmly against the move. Furthermore, on a return visit from Lassalle to London in 1862, it became clear that their positions were far apart. Both were formed by Hegel, but in very different ways. While Marx had concluded that the state was a creature of civil society, Lassalle remained much closer to the Hegelian view of the state. He did not believe that the state was the creature of civil society. On the contrary, Lassalle believed that civil society was subsumed within the state as the larger social, political, and spiritual whole. The crucial objective was therefore to transform the character of the state through the achievement of universal suffrage. The power of trade unions to improve the position of workers was limited by what, after reading Ricardo, Lassalle called “the iron law of wages.” But once the state had been transformed by the enfranchisement of the ‘worker estate’ (the Arbeiterstand), workers would be defended against the depredations of the market and their prosperity secured through the establishment of state-aided cooperative production. In other words, Lassalle was much closer to the radical thinking of 1848, deriving his estimation of the importance of the franchise from the Chartist leader Fergus O’Connor, and his belief in state-assisted cooperatives from Louis Blanc. One of the principal sources of the opposition between Marx and Lassalle concerned attitudes toward bourgeois liberalism. Marx and Engels reiterated 48 See Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 401–410.

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the position they had adopted in 1848. The constitutional conflict between liberals and the government over the position of the military was no more than a continuation of the struggle between aristocratic feudalism and bourgeois liberalism. Socialists should continue to push liberals forward against the government, and only turn to the battle against the bourgeoisie once feudalism had finally been defeated. By contrast, Lassalle noted the timidity of bourgeois liberals in the Prussian Assembly in opposing the Prussian state, and their refusal to support the enfranchisement of manual workers. In May 1863, as the result of an inspired campaign of Lassalle, the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), the first European social democratic party, was formed. Their principal demand, like the Chartists, for manhood suffrage undercut the aims of the liberal constitutional movement, but also raised the disturbing possibility of an implicit alliance between the crown and the workers against the middle class. Marx and Engels were deeply suspicious as a result of rumors of a deal made between Lassalle and Bismarck. But Bismarck’s interest in such an alliance, even if serious, had only been momentary, and, in September 1864, Lassalle died as the result of a duel. Marx’s third attempt to construct a viable theory, in the 1860s, was far more successful. The years 1864–1867 were among the most fulfilling in Marx’s life. Not only were these the years in which he wrote up Das Kapital, but he also became engaged in the new politics of the 1860s. He became an active and influential participant in the IWMA, which had been founded in London in 1864. Almost by chance, it had fallen to Marx, rather than to the followers of Mazzini or Robert Owen, to compose the Inaugural Address of the Association and to formulate its rules. What he wrote gained unanimous acceptance by the General Council of the Association, his greatest and most permanent contribution to the International. More clearly than anyone else, he had formulated the new social democratic language of the 1860s, both in the definition of the political and social aims of the Association and in his global diagnosis of the condition of workers. In England, this period, which culminated in the Second Reform Act of 1867, was an era of constitutional transformation and mounting political excitement. In the “Preface” to Das Kapital, written in July 1867, Marx wrote about “the actuality of the process of revolution in England.”49 His picture in Das Kapital of 49 Karl Marx‚ “Vorwort” to Das Kapital (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867), xi. Marx used the term Umwälzungsprozeß, the standard German term for revolution. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling in their English translation of 1887 wrote of “the

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the process of transition from feudalism to the capitalist mode of production closely paralleled his pronouncements on the transition toward the world of the ‘associated producers’ in the Inaugural Address. Transition was a multi-faceted process, which combined social and economic development with political upheaval, generated by campaigns of popular agitation, and described by contemporaries as “pressure from without.” It is difficult to relate twentieth-century visions of revolution to Marx’s writings in the 1860s, because ‘revolution’ in those writings was conceived not as an event, but as a process. Successful revolution meant the political ratification of changes which had already occurred or were already occurring in civil society. The greater the extent of such changes, the greater the possibility of imagining a revolution which need not be violent. This was how he envisaged the conquest by English workers “by peaceful means” of “political supremacy in order to establish the new organisation of labour.”50 Part of the reason why this vision of revolution as process was largely forgotten was that Marx’s most striking examples of transition in civil society belonged to the section on ‘circulation,’ which was meant to appear in the second volume of Das Kapital.51 Included in the projected second volume were meaningful examples of transitional forms. The new form of stock company and the growth of cooperative factories were examples of how “a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.”52 But the unpublished part of Das Kapital, still in unfinished manuscript drafts and largely dating from the years 1861–1864, appeared only some two to three decades after Marx’s death (in 1884 and 1894.) Marx did not publish progress of social disintegration,” a less immediate and less political image of upheaval than that conveyed in the original edition. 50 Karl Marx, “Speech at the Hague Congress of the International,” in The First International: Minutes of the Hague Congress of 1872, ed. H. Gerth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 236. At the beginning of 1867, in a speech to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Polish insurrection of 1863–1864, referring to ‘social revolution,’ Marx said, “It is possible that the struggle between the workman and the capitalist will be less fierce and bloody than the struggles between the feudal lord and the capitalist proved in England and France. We will hope so.” See Karl Marx, “Speech at the Polish Meeting in London,” January 22, 1867, in MECW, vol. XX, 200–201. 51 Right up until the last moment it was intended that the section on circulation should go together with the section on production in a single volume. 52 Karl Marx, “The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production,” in Capital, vol. III, in MECW, vol. XXVII, 438.

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the subsequent volume because the theoretical problems he encountered, when he attempted to bring production and circulation together, proved impossible to solve. But developments in the period after 1867 were frustrating. With the passing of the Second Reform Bill, the interest of English trade unionists in the IWMA declined. In the 1868 election, Gladstone’s promise of land legislation in Ireland and the prospect of the liberalization of trade union law drew trade union leaders toward the Liberal Party. Conversely, the decline of their active participation left the International increasingly vulnerable to the hostile activities of Bakunin and the Jura Federation. The original vision was increasingly lost in a sectarian battle, fought with underhand tactics by both sides. Marx supported the Paris Commune, particularly the political principles embodied in its democratic structure. But, privately, he considered its survival very unlikely. Internationally, the possibility of progressive development looked increasingly remote after the Franco-Prussian war, and his own politics became increasingly unreal. Around the end of the 1860s, he speculated upon the possibility of an Irish rebellion, which might lead to a collapse of English landed rule, ‘Landlordism,’ both in Ireland and England, and an international political crisis as a result. Later in the 1870s, the one hopeful area looked to be the increasingly unstable situation of Czarist Russia. In 1877, at the onset of the Russo-Turkish war, he became excited at the prospect of Russian defeat, and wrote to Friedrich Sorge, “this crisis is a new turning point for the history of Europe. This time the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the impregnable bastion and reserve army of counter-revolution.”53 But in this war the Russians were victorious. In terms of immediate impact, Das Kapital failed. The 1867 edition sold only 1,000 copies in five years. But a Russian translation appeared in 1872, a second German edition in 1873, a French translation in 1875, and an English edition in 1886. It was in the decade after Marx’s death in 1883 that the real impact of the book was felt. In the course of a dozen years, groups and embryonic parties modeling themselves on the German Social Democratic Party, and basing themselves on what they took to be the ideas of Marx, sprang up in every major European country – the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1879, the English Social Democratic Federation in 1882, the Russian “Group of the Liberation of Labor” in 1883, the Parti 53 Marx to Sorge, September 27, 1877, in MECW, vol. XLV, 278.

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Ouvrier Belge in 1885, the Swiss and Austrian Social Democratic Parties in 1888, and the Italian Socialist Party in 1892. As Friedrich Engels claimed with understandable justification in 1888, “the Marxist world outlook has found adherents far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world.”54 54 Friedrich Engels, “Preface” to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, February 21, 1888, in MECW, vol. XLII, 513.

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10

Conservatism: The Utility of History and the Case against Rationalist Radicalism jerry z. muller Conservatism can be distinguished – definitionally, if not always in practice – from reaction. The conservative seeks to conserve existing institutions (political, cultural, social, and economic), usually recognizing that the process of conservation may include the need for evolutionary reform. The reactionary, by contrast, is at odds with existing institutions, and seeks to return to some institutional status quo ante, often in a form transfigured by memory and ideology. Radical conservatism is a recurrent strand of thought which is related to conservatism yet politically and analytically distinct both from conservatism and from reaction. The radical conservative shares some of the concerns of more conventional conservatism, such as the need for institutional authority and continuity with the past. But he believes that the processes characteristic of modernity have destroyed the valuable legacy of the past for the present, so that a restoration of the purported virtues of the past demands radical or revolutionary action. Of the intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, conservatism is among the most ubiquitous, yet difficult to define. Like liberalism and socialism, it denotes both an intellectual current and, in some states, a political party. But while liberalism and socialism tended to put forth universal claims, conservatism differed substantially, and sometimes radically, from one context to another. Moreover, the content and emphases of conservatism changed over the course of the century. Because of the variety of institutions that conservatives defended, it has been suggested that conservatism has no substantive institutional commitments. That, as we will see, is an overstatement; but it does point to the challenges of characterizing conservatism.1 1 Some of the themes of this chapter are explored in Jerry Z. Muller (ed.), Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), which includes an extensive bibliography, as well as many of the texts mentioned.

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Conservatism

Because conservative thought typically arose as a reaction to attacks on existing institutions and practices, the conservative response was determined in good part by the specific nature of those attacks, which varied across time and space. Moreover, since conservatism emphasizes the need for institutional and symbolic continuity with the particular past, its symbols and institutional ideals tended to be more tied to specific, usually national, contexts.2 One of the earliest social-scientific approaches to the issue was formulated by the Hungarian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim, in his essay “Conservative Thought” of 1927.3 He introduced the important distinction between traditionalism and conservatism, the former, a near-universal psychological propensity to do things as they have traditionally been done; the latter, an articulated set of inter-related political ideas, an ideology which arose, Mannheim thought, as a reaction to the new and dynamic historical processes associated with the Enlightenment, capitalist modernization, and the bourgeois class. Though primarily focused on some leading thinkers of German conservatism of the late eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, Mannheim’s essay is replete with insights into the broader phenomenon of conservatism. Subsequent social-scientific analysts of conservatism have built upon Mannheim’s emphasis on the reactive nature of conservatism, the fact that it arises in response to a challenge (intellectual, political, or cultural) to existing institutions, on behalf of which conservative arguments are then developed. In one of the most perceptive scholarly analyses of the subject, Samuel Huntington argued in 1957 that conservatism is best understood not as an inherent theory in defense of particular classes and institutions, but as a positional ideology. “When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and desirability of the existing ones,” Huntington suggested. He claimed that because “the articulation of conservatism is a response to a specific social situation . . . The manifestation of conservatism at any one time and place has 2 F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Conservatism in England: An Analytical, Historical, and Political Survey (London: Macmillan, 1933; reprinted New York: H. Fertig, 1967), 35. 3 Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr (London: Routledge, 1986); a slightly abbreviated version, “Das konservative Denken” (1927), reprinted in Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie: Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1964), appears as “Conservative Thought” in Karl Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), reprinted in Karl Mannheim, From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

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little connection with its manifestation at any other time and place.”4 This, as we will see, is an overstatement. Amidst the multiplicity of conservative contentions, there is a recognizable core of recurrent conservative assumptions, arguments, and themes.

Recurrent Conservative Assumptions and Predispositions What follows is an outline of the recurrent constellation of assumptions, predispositions, arguments, and themes that characterized nineteenthcentury conservative social and political thought. None of these were exclusive to conservatism, nor did every conservative analyst share them all. But it is in conservative thought that these features occurred with greatest frequency and in combination with one another. Conservative thought typically emphasized human imperfection, an imperfection at once biological, emotional, and cognitive. More than any other animal, man is dependent upon other members of his species, and hence upon social institutions for guidance and direction. Though this assumption may be grounded in a religious doctrine of original sin, it has often been argued upon entirely secular grounds, including the biological facts of limited human instinctual preparedness for survival, an argument advanced by Vicomte de Bonald.5 Conservatives typically contended that human moral imperfection leads men to act badly when they act upon their uncontrolled impulses, and that they require the restraints and constraints imposed by institutions as a limit upon subjective impulse. Conservatives were skeptical of attempts at “liberation”: they maintained that liberals over-valued freedom and autonomy, and that liberals failed to consider the social conditions that make autonomous individuals possible and freedom desirable.6 Conservatives also stressed the cognitive element of human imperfection, insisting upon the limits of human knowledge, especially of the social and political world. They warned that society was too complex to lend itself to 4 Samuel Huntington, “Conservatism as an Ideology,” American Political Science Review, 51 (1957), 454–473. 5 See Louis de Bonald, Du divorce, considéré au XIXe siècle (Paris: Le Clère, 1801), English translation On Divorce, ed. and trans. Nicholas Davidson (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 43. 6 Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 13; and Roger Scruton, “Introduction” to Conservative Texts: An Anthology, ed. Roger Scruton (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 9.

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theoretical simplification, and that this fact must temper all plans for institutional innovation.7 Such epistemological modesty could be based upon philosophical skepticism, as in the case of David Hume, on a religiously derived belief in the limits of human knowledge, as in the case of Joseph de Maistre, or on some general sense of the fallibility of human knowledge. These assumptions explain the emphasis of conservative social and political thought upon institutions, that is, patterned social formations with their own rules, norms, rewards, and sanctions. While liberals typically viewed with suspicion the restraints and penalties imposed upon the individual by institutions, conservatives were disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions because they believed that human society cannot flourish without them. The restraints imposed by institutions, they argued, are necessary to constrain and guide human passions. Conservatives stressed the role of custom, habit, and prejudice. Burke used the term “prejudice” to refer to rules of action which are the product of historical experience, are inculcated by habit, and provide a stimulus to unreflective action. Like David Hume and Justus Möser before him, he argued in favor of relying upon customary moral rules even when they had not been subject to rational justification. Subsequent conservatives, too, assumed that most men and women lacked the time, energy, ability, and inclination to re-evaluate or reinvent social rules. Therefore “duty,” the subjective acceptance of existing social rules conveyed through socialization and habit, was regarded as the best guide for most people, most of the time. Many valuable institutions, according to conservatives, arise not from natural rights, or from universal human propensities, or from explicit contract, but rather are products of historical development. To the extent that human groups differ, conservatives argued, the institutions which they develop will differ as well.8 Thus conservatives tended to embrace historicism and particularlism. Unlike liberals, who favored voluntary, contractual social and political relations, conservatives emphasized the importance of non-voluntary duties, obligations, and allegiances – a position one could term “anticontractualism.” Here, as for many other elements of conservative thought, 7 There is a good discussion of this element of conservative thought, as well as much else, in Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection, 17. 8 Burke’s analysis of American peculiarities in his speech on “Conciliation with America” provides a model of this element of conservative analysis. See Edmund Burke, “Conciliation with America” (1775), in Edmund Burke, Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 206–269, esp. 220ff.

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Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France provides an exemplary formulation in his redefinition of the social contract as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”9 Because the dissolution of the political order would mean the end of social institutions by which men’s passions are guided, restrained, and perfected, Burke argued, the individual has no right to opt out of the “social contract” with the state. “Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual.”10 This non-contractual basis of commercial society, Burke wrote, was evident in other social relations as well. Marriage was a matter of choice, but the duties attendant upon marriage were not: Parents and children were bound by duties which were involuntary.11 This emphasis on the non-voluntary bases of obedience and allegiance remained a distinctively conservative theme. Despite disagreements as to the veracity of religion, conservatives tended to affirm the social utility of religion. Conservatives made several arguments for the utility of religion: that it legitimates the state; that the hope of future reward offers men solace for the trials of their earthly existence and thus helps to diffuse current discontent which might otherwise disrupt the social order; and that belief in ultimate reward and punishment leads men to act morally by giving them an incentive to do so. Flowing from conservative arguments regarding abstract theory, latent functions, and unanticipated consequences (explored below) is a recurrent polemic of anti-humanitarianism. Time and again, conservative analysts argued that humanitarian sentimentalism, combined with abstraction from reality, led reformers to policies that promote behavior which is destructive of the institutions upon which human flourishing depends.12

9 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Volume VIII: The French Revolution 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 147. 10 Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in Edmund Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 160. 11 Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” 160–161. 12 Scruton, “Introduction,” 9.

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Recurrent Themes and Commitments Recurring themes and substantive commitments of conservative social and political thought include the following. 1. A skepticism regarding the efficacy of written constitutions, as opposed to the informal, sub-political, and inherited norms and mores of society. For conservatives, the real “constitution” of society lies in its historical institutions and practices, which are inculcated primarily through custom and habit. 2. The central role of cultural manners and mores in shaping character and restraining the passions, and hence the political importance of the social institutions in which such manners and mores are conveyed. 3. The need of the individual for socially imposed restraint and identity, and thus skepticism regarding projects intended to liberate the individual from existing sources of social and cultural authority; hence the advantages of “knowing one’s place.” 4. An emphasis on the family as the most important institution of socialization, and the assertion that some degree of sexual division of labor is both inevitable and desirable. 5. The legitimacy of inequality, and the need for cultural, political, and economic elites. 6. Security of possession of property as a prime function of the political order. 7. The importance of the state as the ultimate guarantor of property and the rule of law, and hence the need to maintain political authority, and to affirm the state’s right to punish. 8. The ineluctability of the possibility of the use of force in international relations. 9. The Catholic traditionalist conservatism of Bonald in France, and the romantic conservatism of Adam Müller in German-speaking Europe, were hostile to commerce. Even when they favored commerce, as did Burke, conservatives emphasized that the successful functioning of a capitalist society depends on pre-market and non-market institutions and cultural practices. Anxiety over whether the cultural effects of the market would erode those institutions and practices was a recurrent concern of conservative social and political thought.13 In the latter half 13 Albert O. Hirschman has dubbed this “the self-destruction thesis” in the eponymous essay of his Rival Views of Market Society and Other Essays (New York: Viking, 1986), 109ff.

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of the nineteenth century, conservatives were often more favorable than liberals to policies that sought to guarantee some degree of economic security from the vicissitudes of the market, as in the case of governmental health insurance adopted in Germany under Bismarck.

Historical Overview The contention that conservatism arose in opposition to the Enlightenment and to the French Revolution reflects Edmund Burke’s polemical characterization of the Enlightenment in his critique of the French Revolution. Though frequently reiterated, the contention is historically untenable. So too is the conception that conservatives such as Justus Möser and Burke were part of a distinct “counterEnlightenment.”14 In Britain and in German-speaking Europe, conservatism arose not against the Enlightenment but within it. In the case of France, one can speak of a Catholic counter-Enlightenment;15 but the major figures of nineteenth-century French conservatism borrowed the Enlightenment’s criterion of worldly happiness and defended institutions more on the grounds of their social utility than of their correspondence to Catholic theological orthodoxy. The thought of David Hume marks a watershed in the development of conservative social and political thought into a coherent, secular doctrine. The precursors of conservatism may be found in the Anglican critique of the Puritan contention that the elect or the inspired congregation, guided by their individual interpretations of the Bible, were entitled to exercise political authority.16 Hume began by borrowing and expanding upon this critique of the politics of religious “enthusiasm.” He went on to criticize what he saw as its secular counterparts in the philosophically implausible and politically subversive doctrines of natural rights and of voluntary contract as the sole legitimate basis of political obligation.17 In 1757, Burke used similar terms to attack what he called the “abuse of reason” among deistic enlightened

14 15 16 17

On conservative anxieties regarding the effects of capitalism see Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). The term was coined by Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in his Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking, 1980). On which see Darrin McMahon (ed.), Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection, 21. On Hume’s conservatism, see, in addition to Quinton, The Politics of Perfection; Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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thinkers. On the Continent, conservative social and political thought arose as a critique of the policies of enlightened absolutism that sought to weaken the power of corporate institutions such as guilds in an effort to create a more individualistic and economically dynamic society. Among the foremost practitioners of this criticism was Justus Möser, himself a part of the German Enlightenment, but a reformer who defended many of the corporate institutions of his day, from guilds to serfdom. In Holland, another Enlightenment figure, Jean de Luzac, articulated politically conservative arguments opposing the claims of “patriots” for a more democratic constitution.18 Much of post1789 intellectual conservatism is continuous with the analytic strategies, if not with the tone, of pre-revolutionary conservative analysis. It was the democratic radicalism of the French Revolution that provoked Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which remains the most influential work in the history of conservative thought. Reflections and a few closely related works – especially his “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” (August 1791) and “Thoughts on French Affairs” (December 1791) – provided many of the keystones of subsequent conservative thought. Burke’s defense of monarchy, aristocracy, and the established church stamped conservative thought at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early decades of the nineteenth.19 In his early Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Burke had ridiculed the propensity of enlightened deistic intellectuals to judge institutions by abstract principles, and had insisted that the attempt to do so would delegitimate all existing institutions without being able to create better ones in their place. This presumption conditioned his initial response to news of the revolution in France, and served as the leitmotiv of his analysis thereafter. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a critique of the revolutionary mentality which attempts to create entirely new structures on the basis of rational, abstract principles, a mentality which Burke contrasted unfavorably to his own conception of legitimate reform as building upon existing, historical institutions. 18 See Wyger R. E. Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic: The Political Thought of Elie Luzac (1721–1796) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993). 19 Among the best discussions of Burke’s conservatism are Iain Hampsher-Monk, “Introduction” to The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk (London: Longman, 1987), 1–43; and the same author’s chapter on Burke in his A History of Modern Political Thought: Major Political Figures from Hobbes to Marx (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). The most thorough treatment of Burke’s writings in the context of British politics is Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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Burke attributed the revolution in France to the combined influence of men of letters and financiers of government debt. In conjunction, he charged, they were subverting the intellectual, moral, and institutional basis of a civilized society. By stripping away the veil of culture and by undermining the traditional institutions of the aristocracy and the church which had supported that veil, the intellectuals and financial speculators were leading France into disaster, Burke argued. The result, he feared, would be a return of man to his “natural” state, a state not elevated and benign, but brutish and barbaric. In Reflections, Burke maintained that, in France, power had fallen into the hands of social outsiders who owned the public debt (which had soared as a result of French financial aid to the American revolutionaries), and that these men were incapable of governing. Burke’s contention was based upon his own sociology of knowledge. There was a mentality inherent in the way of life of each class, Burke thought, and the mentality which led to success in finance (what Burke called “the monied interest”) was, in isolation, disastrous for government. “The monied interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure; and its possessors more disposed to new enterprizes of any kind. Being of a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change.”20 Men of finance, according to Burke, share this propensity to innovation with “a new description of men . . . the political Men of Letters” with whom they had become allied. Politicized French intellectuals, Burke maintained, were motivated by the desire to destroy the Christian religion, and he predicted, quite accurately, that they would soon attempt to eliminate the established church entirely. For Burke, the Revolution’s attack on the institutional bases of the Church and the aristocracy threatened to destroy the cultural “manners” on which a decent commercial society depended. The destruction of the power of the aristocracy and of the influence of the Church, he claimed, would unleash avarice and the will to exploit others for one’s own pleasure – it would lead, as he put it, to “rapine” and to “rape.” To Burke, it seemed that the French intelligentsia in 1788 and 1789 had done everything he had warned against three decades earlier. They had engaged in a wholesale critique of all the premises of their major institutions, and they had done so publicly. Now, Burke asserted, the French would live with the results of the fairy land of philosophy, results which they had not 20 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 159–160.

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anticipated but which he could. The French men of letters had delegitimated the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the taxing powers of the state in the eyes of the larger public. They were left with a government drained of authority and no longer capable of collecting taxes or conducting commerce. The result, he predicted, would be ongoing instability and the threat of anarchy, which would be controlled only by the massive use of force, and, eventually, military rule. It is important to remember that Burke made these predictions long before the Terror, the execution of Louis XVI, the massacre of more than 100,000 civilians in the Vendée, or the rise of Napoleon – events which made his diagnosis and prognosis seem all the more convincing, even to readers who were originally inclined to dismiss them. Reflections on the Revolution in France formed the cornerstone of subsequent British conservatism, and, soon translated into French and German (as well as other European languages), exerted an international influence. Attention to passages that convey its major contentions therefore serves as a useful entrée to nineteenth-century European conservative thought. The first of these was a critique of abstraction: of an approach to politics that sought to enact abstract, universal, natural rights. By contrast, Burke emphasized the importance of particular circumstances, and the inevitable difficulty of trying to realize multiple goods, which might be in tension with one another. I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind . . .21

Liberty, for Burke, was a good, but it was only one good among others, and focusing on it alone was myopic. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty 21 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 58.

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to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.22

Another Burkean theme was that human flourishing demanded political stability, and that in turn depended on preserving the emotional attachment of the populace to political institutions: The goal was to “procure reverence to our civic institutions.” Part of the art of cultivating such attachment was to engage in reform in a manner that minimized the appearance of institutional discontinuity. Burke acknowledged that how to reform is not clear from tradition, indeed that traditions are not univocal, and hence there is a need for a “choice of inheritance.” He insisted that British institutions, even when they were renovated, had a greater emotional hold over their subjects because their continuity with the past was emphasized. The French revolutionaries, Burke suggested, were dooming their innovations by making their appeal on the basis of abstract, natural, and universal rights while discrediting all of their past and present political institutions. In contradistinction to the Revolution’s abolishment of titles of nobilty, Burke defended aristocracy. His argument was based not on the superior merit or virtue of the aristocracy, but on its political function. That was to balance off the energy and openness to change characteristic of entrepreneurs, creative intellectuals, and men of ability. While these groups were inclined to change, the aristocracy was inclined to sluggishness, thus providing a countervailing force, what Burke called “the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth.” The aristocracy, precisely because it had so large an interest in its own property (landed property, rather than financial), functioned to defend property in general. And private property, for Burke and subsequent conservatives, was central to the social order. In connecting family and property, Burke tied together two key themes in conservative thought: the centrality of the family as a socializing institution for the formation of moral character; and the protection of private property, which serves as a means of expressing familial commitments. The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice.23

22 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 58–59. 23 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 102.

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In contradistinction to the Revolution’s emphasis on equality, Burke defended inequality both of property and of political representation. He offered a theory of the social contract, but understood in an inegalitarian sense. If civil society [government] be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right . . . Men . . . have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to it, as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.24

In opposition to the characteristic liberal emphasis on liberating the individual from the constraints of institutions, Burke emphasized the human need for restraint through institutions, including government. Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.25 24 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 110. 25 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 110–111.

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Here Burke engaged in reversing the connotations of the key terms of his opponents. “Rights” were usually identified with restrictions on government; Burke contends that there is a right to be restricted by government. In keeping with his emphasis on the importance of historically evolved institutions and on multiple goods that may be in tension with one another, Burke champions judgments of historically grounded utility and attention to historical particularity over appeals to abstract theory. In the following passage, perhaps the keystone paragraph of his Reflections, Burke ties together the critique of overly ambitious rationalism, the significance of the unintended negative consequences of deliberate action, and the importance of latent functions within institutions – functions not easily recognized, and easily damaged by overly ambitious reforms. The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science; because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.26

For Burke, therefore – and for most subsequent conservatives – recognition of social complexity demands epistemological modesty and caution in reform. Since we do not fully understand the inner workings and intertwined connections of the institutions that make life reasonably tolerable, we ought to be cautious in deliberately transforming them. Hume’s combination of political conservatism with the championing of commerce was to remain characteristic of subsequent British conservatism. By contrast, the French, Catholic strains of conservatism of Bonald and 26 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 111–112.

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Maistre, as well as the romantic German strain of conservatism of Adam Müller, shared Burke’s substantive commitments to monarchy, aristocracy, and one or another form of church establishment, while remaining less accepting of capitalist economic development than the British strains.

French and German Conservatism after Burke Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Louis Gabriel de Bonald (1754–1840) are the two towering figures in the tradition of French reactionary thought which, while it had eighteenth-century antecedents, was transformed by their reaction against the French Revolution. Like Burke, they condemned the Revolution root and branch, but unlike him they regarded Catholicism as integral to political conservatism.27 Though Maistre and Bonald are often grouped together, their styles of thought and of writing could not have been more different. Bonald was traditionalist in the style and content of his conservatism. His cast of mind is orthodox even while he seeks to prove that divine law meets the test of social utility. His style is systematic, plodding, and pedantic at times, as he seeks to demonstrate the necessary inter-relationships and parallels between every level of obligation, from God, to kings, to fathers. Maistre, by contrast, delighted in extremist assertions and paradoxes, intended to shock his readers, as the first step toward making them re-examine their liberal assumptions. The task with which Maistre and Bonald saw themselves confronted was rather different than the one that had motivated Burke’s Reflections, and the nature of their conservatism varied accordingly. Burke’s primary task was to conserve a British order which was substantially intact, though subject to intellectual attack. He could thus stress the historical utilitarian arguments that the existence of an institution creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need, and that historical continuity is intrinsically valuable because it increases the emotional hold of an institution upon its members. Similarly, Burke could underscore the importance of habit, custom, and what (in another reversal of liberal terminology) he deemed wise prejudice. By the time Bonald and Maistre came to write their major works, the forces of the French Revolution had already overturned or transformed many of the key institutions of the old regime. The Counter-Revolutionary conservatives, 27 For a comparison of Burke’s position with that of Maistre and Bonald see Massimo Boffa, “La Contre-Révolution, Joseph de Maistre,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Volume 3: The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), 291–308.

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therefore, were forced to create, at least in theory, a regime worth conserving. They were forced by circumstances to offer a rationale other than that of historical continuity because the institutions of the old regime had been disrupted by the Revolution. Moreover, the very fact of the Revolution seemed to offer proof that the institutions of the old regime had decayed. Bonald sought to present a systematic institutional blueprint, modeled on the French old regime, yet avoiding the flaws that had led to its demise. The pillars of that old/new regime were to be the Catholic Church and the restored monarchy. Yet the role of the monarchy, as Bonald conceived it, was to support, rather than control, the functioning of “natural” social groups, such as the family, the guild, and local government. This strain of thought was to influence French Catholic conservative social analysts later in the century, including the pioneering empirical sociologist Frédéric le Play, author of Social Reform in France (1864), and, at the end of the century, the radical right-wing Charles Maurras, who sought an authoritarian political regime which would support “natural” social groups.28 Bonald sought to create a new orthodoxy to plan and legitimate a restored institutional order. For Bonald, it is man’s fallen nature that necessitates institutions capable of punishment, including religious sanctions, thus justifying “the wisdom of the Christian religion and the severity of her maxims about the terrible corruption of the human heart and the necessity of smothering its desires in order to stymie its passion, to command man to abstain in order to force him to control himself.”29 Unlike Maistre, there is little room in Bonald’s thought for the particularist argument that different cultures require different institutions – for Bonald, one size fits all. While Maistre emphasized the appropriateness of British institutions for Britain, Bonald condemned the British for their Protestantism, and for what he thought of as their licentious, commercial order. Indeed, characteristic of Bonald’s thought and of the traditionalist Catholicism he championed was an insistence on the close affinity of 28 For the influence of Bonald on French sociological thought, see Robert Nisbet, “De Bonald and the Concept of the Social Group,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 315–331; and his “Conservatism,” in A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. Thomas Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978). For similar arguments on the French radical right at the end of the century, linking a strong monarchy to the protection of local and familial sources of authority, see Charles Maurras, “Dictator and King” (1899), in The French Right from Maistre to Maurras, ed. John S. McClelland (London: Cape, 1970), 215–238. 29 Louis de Bonald, “Considérations politiques sur l’argent et le prêt à intérêt,” in Œuvres de M. de Bonald, vol. X (Paris: Le Clère, 1819), translated as “On Money and Lending,” in Louis de Bonald, The True and Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy and Society, trans. Christopher Olaf Blum (Naples: Sapientia Press, 2006), 28.

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Christianity for agricultural societies, and hence antipathy to commerce – charactistics that distinguished it from Burke and from Burke’s English successors.30 “To counsel a nation to seek the wealth that manufacturing and commerce can procure is to exhort it to renounce all public spirit, all lofty sentiment, all generosity, all disinterestedness, and to wish to discard that noble disdain for wealth that has always characterized great men and great nations in order to throw it into a restless activity whose single motive and sole end is money,”31 Bonald wrote. Among Bonald’s most effective works was On Divorce, which was published in 1801.32 The revolutionary French Constitution of 1791 had legalized divorce, asserting that “the law considers marriage to be only a civil contract.” The law was liberalized in 1792, permitting divorce for any reason whatsoever. The new divorce laws were part of the larger ideological project of the Revolution: Ease in dissolving marriage was seen as an essential element of freedom, and the premises of the new law were individualistic and egalitarian.33 Bonald demanded the repeal of legislation permitting divorce. Marriage, he thought, should not be judged on the basis of the momentary happiness of the partners: Its prime function was the creation and socialization of children. Allowing marriages to be dissolved not only harmed children, but also left women in a disadvantaged position compared with men, since, having lost their youthful attractiveness and virginity, they were less likely to find new partners. Since the role of the law was to protect the weak, Bonald argued, it ought to forbid divorce. Bonald’s perspective was antisubjective and anti-individualistic: His focus was upon the social functions of institutions, for it was only within institutions, he believed, that the unruly passions could be controlled and channeled in ways that made happiness possible, if frequently unrealized. Maistre responded to the Revolution by carrying to new lengths previous conservative arguments of epistemological modesty, historical particularism, 30 Bonald, “On Money and Lending,” 46 and 57. 31 Bonald, “De la richesse des nations,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. XI (Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 1982); translated as “On the Wealth of Nations,” in Louis de Bonald, The True and Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy and Society, trans. Christopher Olaf Blum (Naples: Sapientia Press, 2006), 69. 32 On the dating of the book’s composition and publication, see the “Translator’s Note” in Louis de Bonald, On Divorce, ed. and trans. Nicholas Davidson (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992), which also includes a useful introduction by the translator. Bonald’s work and career is succinctly explored in Jacques Godechot, The CounterRevolution: Doctrine and Action 1789–1804 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 33 Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 175–189.

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and the unanticipated consequences of deliberate action. Despite being steeped in Enlightenment thought and influenced by the speculative and highly unorthodox theology of the Illuminati, Maistre nevertheless remained a committed Catholic. When the French Revolutionary armies marched into the Kingdom of Savoy, where he was a civil servant, Maistre went into exile and continued to serve his monarch. His first major work, Considerations on France, was published anonymously in Switzerland in 1797. There and in subsequent works Maistre offered an interpretation of the Revolution that synthesized his conservatism and his millenarianism by arguing that the Revolution was a product of man’s sinful pride, but that its very destructiveness paved the way for a new, more Christian Europe. At the turn of the century, Maistre was dispatched by his king to the Russian court at St. Petersburg, and it was there that he wrote his most provocative work, the Soirées of Saint Petersburg (the dialogic form of which allowed him to offer startling assertions without necessarily subscribing to them), as well as his more systematic Essay on the Generative Principles of Political Constitutions and of Other Human Institutions of 1809. In contradistinction to the typical liberal emphasis on the importance of written constitutions and legislation, Maistre insisted upon what Montesquieu had called “the spirit of the laws,” that is the historically developed mores and manners characteristic of a particular culture: One of the gravest errors of an age which embraced them all was to believe that a political constitution could be written and created a priori, whereas reason and experience agree that a constitution is a divine work and that it is precisely the most fundamental and essentially constitutional elements in a nation’s laws that cannot be written . . . The real English constitution is the public spirit, admirable, unique, infallible, and above praise, which guides all, conserves all, preserves all. What is written is nothing . . . [T]he weakness and fragility of a constitution is in direct relationship to the number of written constitutional articles.34

More radically than Burke, Maistre insisted on the perils of deliberate reform, for the faults of existing institutions were connected with their benefits, but in ways that were not easily discerned, so that reforms aimed at eliminating the faults might easily destroy the benefits. While Burke had

34 Joseph de Maistre, “Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and of Other Human Institutions,” in Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present, ed. Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 136–145.

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invoked God and religion in support of existing institutions, Maistre made the religious legitimization of institutions into an explicit strategy: . . . [T]he more divine the basis of an institution, the more durable it is. It is as well to point out, for the sake of clarity, that the religious principle is in essence creative and conservative, in two ways. In the first place, as it is the most powerful influence on the human mind, it can stimulate prodigious efforts . . . In the second place, the religious principle, already so strong because of what it effects, is still stronger because of what it prevents, through the respect with which it surrounds everything that comes under its protection . . . If therefore you wish to conserve all, consecrate all.

For Maistre, the longevity of institutions is seen as proof of their sacred origins, while the attribution of sacred origins to institutions enhances their emotional hold and hence their stability. Thus, for Maistre, the Enlightenment’s tools of reason and empirical evidence led to the conclusion that religion should buttress politics.35 Maistre’s thought is thus more bold and more original than Bonald’s, and far less orthodox.36 An orthodox theorist might assert that divine origin accounts for the continuity of an institution: Maistre reverses the formulation, suggesting that the continued existence of an institution is itself evidence of its divine origin. Burke had noted the significance of involuntary obligations; Maistre carries Burke’s claim to an extreme by asserting that no permanent obligations can be dependent on the voluntary consent of those obliged. Burke asserts that the legitimacy of the political regime is strengthened by its connection with an established church: Maistre insists that the only effective way of legitimating institutions is to make them sacrosanct. Burke suggests the limits of written constitutions: Maistre insists not only that written laws are futile, but also that the most important laws are not written, indeed cannot be written. In other ways as well Maistre takes up themes from eighteenth-century enlightened conservatism and carries them to 35 As noted in Carolina Armenteros, “Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821): Heir of the Enlightenment, Enemy of Revolutions, and Spiritual Progressivist,” in Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History, ed. Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 125–144, p. 140; and her “Conclusion” to Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers: From Friedrich von Gentz to Isaiah Berlin, ed. Carolina Armenteros and Richard A. Lebrun (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 36 See for example Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in his The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Richard A. Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); and Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, ed. and trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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greater extremes. Hume had criticized contractual theories of political obligation for being overly rationalistic and insisted upon the role in human affairs of less calculating modes of behavior, such as custom and habit. Maistre digs deeper into the irrational sources of political obedience, including the desire for submission and sacrifice.37 German-speaking Europe failed to produce a conservative thinker of the stature of Maistre or Bonald, not to speak of Burke. Their closest contemporary was Adam Müller (1779–1829), a writer who developed a romantic brand of conservatism, that, to an even greater degree than Bonald, was characterized by its antipathy to the spread of market relations. Müller’s conservatism was based upon a rejection not only of the French Revolution, but also of German bureaucratic absolutism, which sought to liberalize legal and social relations in order to create a more economically productive society. In Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the land-owning nobility maintained a high degree of legal domination (Herrschaft) over the peasants who worked their land. In the years from 1807 to 1815, responding to Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806, the reform administration of Stein and Hardenberg had sought to weaken the legal hold of the nobility, and to put agriculture on a more commercial basis, based upon free labor. They also sought to weaken the power of guilds, in order to put manufacturing on a more commerical basis. Müller responded in a series of lectures in 1808, published as Elemente der Staatskunst. He presented a holistic conception of social institutions as “organically” interlinked, and defended inherited noble estates and the guilds, contrasting the personalistic relationship of mutual caring and concern between guildmaster and journeyman, and between the paternalist landlord and his subordinates, with the bloodless, self-interested behavior of actors in the free market, which is based upon wage labor and private property. In his defense of what he termed “feudal agriculture,” in which nobility, land ownership, and political authority were combined, Müller disputed the advantages of distinguishing private property from public authority and obligations.38 Like Bonald, Müller stressed the importance of knowing one’s place as a member of a family, community, and state. Like Bonald and Maistre, he believed in a close association between throne and 37 See especially his “Enlightenment on Sacrifices,” in The Works of Joseph de Maistre, ed. and trans. Jack Lively (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 38 On Müller, see Robert Berdahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 174–180; James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 368–371; and Mannheim, “Conservative Thought.” An excerpt of Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst is available in English translation in European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents, ed.Warren Breckman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2015),

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altar, a position he laid out most extensively in Von der Notwendigkeit einer theologischen Grundlage der gesamten Staatswissenschaften (On the Necessity of a Comprehensive Theological Foundation for Political Science) of 1819. As with so many other historical movements, the phenomenon of conservatism long preceded the use of the term in political life. Terms related to “conservative” first found their way into political discourse in the title of a French weekly journal, Le Conservateur, founded in 1818 by François-René de Chateaubriand with the aid of Louis de Bonald.39 In England, the label “Conservative Party” was first applied to the Tories by the publicist John Wilson Crocker in 1830.40 In Germany, the term “conservative” came into use later in the same decade: It was wielded primarily by the opponents of those designated as conservative, who were charged with seeking to preserve existing institutions at any price.41 Only after the abortive revolutions of 1848 did a party that proclaimed itself “Conservative” arise in Prussia. Among its founders was the Prussian political and legal theorist Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861), who put forth a case for constitutional monarchy that sought to anchor the state’s legitimacy in Christianity and the landed nobility. Stahl, and the Prussian conservative party he helped found, were opposed to the idea of a single, national German state, an idea then identified with liberalism.42

Key Developments after the Middle of the Century The development of conservative social and political thought after the middle of the nineteenth century shows a movement from substance to function: from the defense of particular institutions to the defense of institutions in general; from the defense of the landed aristocracy to a defense of elites in general; from an emphasis on the role of the established Church to 39 Le Conservateur, October 5, 1818, p. 7, quoted in Rudolf Vierhaus, “Konservativ, Konservatismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), vol. III, 531–565, p. 538. 40 John Wilson Crocker, “International Policy,” Quarterly Review, 42 (1830), 276, quoted in Vierhaus, “Konservativ, Konservatismus,” 539. 41 Vierhaus, “Konservativ, Konservatismus,” 540. 42 See Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 436–439; and his Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992), 331ff; Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” and John E. Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 306–317.

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the function of culture in linking the individual to communal purposes; from monarchical authority to the authority of the state in general. The rhetoric by means of which institutions were defended also changed. It placed less emphasis on the veneration of tradition as such, while seeking to increase the legitimacy of existing institutions by showing that they were in accord with the needs of historical development. The language of common law and of inherited tradition was increasingly abandoned in favor of the language of science. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, conservatism underwent an important shift, reflecting a change in opponents and in institutional substance. The increasing dominance of industrial capitalism, the expansion of the suffrage, and the rise of socialist movements and of a new brand of liberalism, which was more economically redistributionist and more culturally permissive, all led to transformations of conservatism. In 1859, the greatest liberal theorist of the age, John Stuart Mill, made the case for a more expansive conception of liberty, one that sought to liberate the individual not only from government control but also from the sanction of social disapprobation, in order to foster what Mill called “experiments in living.” In On the Subjection of Women (1869), he put forth the case for equal rights for women, and for egalitarian relations between men and women in marriage. Both books garnered a wave of conservative responses,43 the most sustained of which came from the English jurist and writer James Fitzjames Stephen (1828–1894). Stephen held no brief for aristocracy, but argued that hierarchy and subordination were both inevitable and honorable. In his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), Stephen reiterated the conservative claim that individuals required restraint upon their conduct, and asserted that much of that restraint came from fear: fear of legal punishment, fear of the social disapproval of their fellows, and religious fear of divine punishment, all of which Stephen thought salutary. To Mill’s claim that relations in the modern world were increasingly based upon equality, which ought also to regulate the relationship between man and wife, Stephen responded that submission and obedience were by no means disappearing with the advance of civilization, and that there was nothing morally objectionable about subordinate status. On the contrary, 43 A score of contemporary responses, mostly from a conservative direction, can be found in Andrew Pyle (ed.), The Subjection of Women: Contemporary Reponses to John Stuart Mill (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995).

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submission and obedience were a necessary part of human cooperation, and ought to prevail in marriage as well.44 The spread of industrialization, and with it of an urban working class increasingly organized by labor movements committed to the ideology of socialism, led to a rapprochement between conservatism and liberalism, in a defense of private property and of the capitalist market. Many of the economic institutions and policies once associated with European liberalism now became that which conservatives sought to conserve.45 The new challenge of socialism, with its egalitarian assumptions about human abilities and about the desirability of economic equality, called forth conservative responses. Among the most cogent of these came from the pen of the English journalist W. H. Mallock (1849–1923). In Aristocracy and Evolution: A Study of the Rights, the Origin, and the Social Functions of the Wealthier Classes (1898), he argued that the material progress of the majority of men and women depended on a small elite of the talented. Material advance was therefore based on unequal contributions, and these contributions had economic inequality as their legitimate reward. Inequality was therefore both inexorable and desirable, for it provided the incentive for the talented to apply their potential talents to actual economic improvement. At the same time, Mallock returned to a Humean theme in stressing that the economy cannot and does not reward virtue. In A Critical Examination of Socialism (1908), Mallock chastised Marx for ignoring the role of intellectual ability in his labor theory of value. Every business, he argued, depended for its success on the talents and energies by which labor was directed by management, rather than on the quantity of average labor put into it. The modern development of knowledge, of industrial methods, and of machinery, Mallock wrote, was the product of individuals of exceptional ability, and he stressed the role of character and management skills in accounting for the success and failure of business enterprises. In German-speaking Europe, nationalism had been closely identified with liberalism. After the founding of the German Reich by Bismarck, in the process of which he co-opted some of the key demands of liberals, German nationalism came to be a conservative cause as well. In Britain and France, 44 James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. Richard A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1873]), 190–197. 45 Rudolf Vierhaus, “Conservatism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip O. Wiener, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968–1974), vol. I, 477–485, p. 484; and Noël O’Sullivan, Conservatism (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976), 111–118.

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where ethno-cultural and political unity had long overlapped, conservatism and nationalism had never been at odds. The final decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of varieties of radical conservatism. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) – whose actual political commitments were anti-liberal but otherwise indeterminate – was a precursor of this strand of conservatism.46 But radical conservatism was more of a French and German phenomenon. Radical conservatism unites several predilections which, in combination, make it a recognizably distinct phenomenon. It shares with conservatism an emphasis on the role of institutions in providing restraint and direction to the individual, but seeks to create new institutions which will exert a far stronger hold on the individual than do existing ones, which, because of their relative tolerance, are perceived by radical conservatives as “decayed.” Hence the self-description of one German radical conservative, Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891), as “too conservative not to be radical.”47 Radical conservatives typically looked to state power to reach their goals. These aims typically included the reassertion of collective particularity (of the nation, the Volk, the race, or the community of the faithful) against a twofold threat. The internal threat arose from ideas and institutions identified by radical conservatives as corrosive of collective particularity and incapable of providing worthy goals for the collectivity and the individuals who comprise it. These threats usually included the market, parliamentary democracy, and the pluralism of value systems which capitalism and liberal democracy were thought to promote. But the ideas and institutions perceived as threatening also included those of internationalist socialism, which was similarly perceived as corrosive of collective particularity. “Radical conservatism” in this sense emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Germany and in France, with figures such as de Lagarde, Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), and Charles Maurras (1868–1952), the founder of the Action Française. Though their substantive programs were varied and vague, their vehemence against liberal institutions set the stage for fascist ideologies that developed in the twentieth century.

46 On Carlyle’s ambiguous political stance, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 47 On de Lagarde and the development of radical German völkisch conservatism see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).

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11

The Woman Question: Liberal and Socialist Critiques of the Status of Women naomi j. andrews Although the philosophical and political conviction that women and men are equal came to be called feminism only in the 1890s, it had begun to be publicly articulated and debated more than a century earlier. The “woman question” came to prominence in Europe during the revolutionary decades at the end of the eighteenth century, but it drew on two older strands of argument: the “querelle des femmes” dating to the Renaissance, and debates over the relationship between the individual and society that marked the Enlightenment. Reflecting the explosive intellectual climate of the era, feminism took shape as a wide-ranging, international critique of traditional gender roles and patriarchal social structures. The place and role of women in society was a central problematic for thinkers grappling with the profound changes resulting from the industrial and political revolutions that inaugurated the “long” nineteenth century and remained contested to its end. As intellectuals and political actors engaged in debates about the proper shape of equitable and just societies, they developed a vocabulary that largely eschewed religious justifications, and defined female and male social roles in new ways that depended increasingly on biological notions of sexual difference. As the consequences of these tectonic shifts in power relations took hold, the “woman question” resonated profoundly in European intellectual life, and advocates of women’s equality developed ideas and positions that in turn reflected the changing social, cultural, and political landscape.1 In the revolutionary eighteenth century, all forms of social prerogative came under scrutiny, including patriarchal authority, the longest held and most deeply entrenched of these privileges. Whereas arguments for women’s 1 This chapter examines ideas about the place of women in society in the “long” nineteenth century. Feminist activism per se is not detailed. See Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (eds.), Women, the Family and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983).

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humanity, equality, and moral superiority had long been articulated by individual women and men, by the late eighteenth century the question of women’s status was no longer a discrete topic, but integral to all societal issues. These debates centered on the relationship between nature and culture: Are human beings born to their social roles or acculturated into them? Feminist responses ranged from assertions of individual equality that discounted sexual difference to affirmations of women’s roles as mothers and wives that used sex-specific characteristics to justify their emancipation.2 Late-eighteenth-century feminism was an international endeavor, both in terms of its participants and in its intellectual underpinnings.3 It was carried out across borders and drew on a diverse set of influences, which lent it a universal cast from early on, despite regional differences inflected by religion and culture. Nineteenth-century feminism was also deeply influenced by the imperial entanglements of the major western powers where it was most engaged. This influence is discernible in the pervasive use of the vocabulary of slavery and emancipation to lend moral weight to arguments for women’s rights, and arguments about the civilizational superiority of western women over their colonized counterparts in order to advance their movements for enfranchisement.

Revolutionary Citizens During the French Revolution, female and male commentators viewed the attainment of women’s rights as the logical realization of the promise of the “rights of man.” As debates in the revolutionary assemblies in Paris engaged with major issues such as the nature and definition of citizenship, public education, property and inheritance rights, and the legal state of marriage, observers and participants elaborated a philosophical critique of male privilege in response to women’s marginalization. These critics looked to 2 Scholars differ over whether a clear demarcation can be made between feminists who subscribed to this “difference” model of feminism and those who advocated the “equality” argument that denied the salience of sexual difference. See Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(1) (1988), 119–157; Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14(1) (1988), 33–50. 3 Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).

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environmental factors rather than innate characteristics, asserting that women’s apparent intellectual inferiority was the result of their formation, not of fixed capabilities, and linked the negative attributes associated with femaleness to “the tyranny of man.”4 In arguing their case, revolutionary-era feminists had to counter both traditional legal regimes that embedded women in the family as wife, daughter, or mother, rather than as civic entities in their own right, and the well-developed Enlightenment discourse that naturalized women’s subordination. Influential philosophers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, invoking “nature” and the complementarity of the sexes, defined women through their sexual and reproductive roles. Kant captured the cultural consensus when he observed, “in the interests of the progress of culture, one partner must be superior to the other.”5 The impact of these rigid notions of sexual difference cannot be underestimated. In an era in which ideas about natural rights and selfdetermination for citizens were beginning to be realized politically, the hierarchical ordering of the sexes in fact became more entrenched, determining the radically different opportunities men and women had for securing those rights. This growing distance between women’s and men’s access to the public sphere became very clear during the French Revolution. Although early on certain aspects of women’s status improved, their definition as passive citizens denied them a political role. Under the Republic, women’s political clubs were shut down and their relegation to the domestic realm was reinforced. Not surprisingly, arguing for women’s legal equality as citizens and as women proved problematic. Challenges to women’s traditional exclusion from the body politic had to invoke their sex, yet the available vocabulary for such assertions rested on universalist notions of the abstract individual that disavowed the particularity of sexual difference.6 Feminists nevertheless used these intertwined lines of argument to claim inclusion in the newborn republic, and to challenge the masculine foundations of citizenship. During the liberal phase of the Revolution, prior to 1792, Olympe de Gouges and the Marquis de Condorcet reframed the universalistic language of the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” which famously 4 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1792), Chapter XIII. 5 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 204–212. 6 Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

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pronounced that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” They echoed the Declaration in making their arguments for improved education, economic power, equality within marriage, and enlarged social authority for women, basing their claims on women’s essential and equal humanity. Moreover, they linked women’s status to the legitimacy of the political experiment under way, framing their exclusion as an indictment of the new democracy, thus while “Man . . . wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.”7 In a revised marriage contract appended to her “Declaration,” de Gouges linked women’s lack of economic autonomy and their inequality in marriage to their political exclusion and social inferiority. Anticipating later utilitarian arguments, de Gouges linked the public good to women’s inclusion in the body politic, asserting that “ignorance . . . and scorn for the rights of woman are the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments.”8 In order for women to have the power and autonomy necessary to influence the public sphere, she insisted, they required economic independence. Her version of the marriage contract included equal ownership of property, transmission of inheritance to both legitimate and illegitimate children, and women’s control of their own inheritance. Condorcet also protested the denial of women’s natural rights by the newly constituted French nation as tyranny, and likened women to religious and racial minorities whose rights had recently been recognized by the National Assembly. “Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones.”9 Condorcet rejected the convention of generalizing to all women the qualities exemplified by a few, and juxtaposed the education and intellectual capabilities of women to those of the majority of men, rather than just the exceptional few. He rejected biologically based arguments for women’s exclusion from citizenship that rested on their reproductive functions by pointing to the irrelevance of physical limitations where men’s public engagements were concerned. “Why may they not exercise rights of which it has never been proposed to deprive those persons who periodically suffer from gout, bronchitis, etc.?” He also denied that inferiority of education, in man or woman, was grounds for 7 Olympe de Gouges, “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” (1791). 8 De Gouges, “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne.” 9 Marquis de Condorcet, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship” (1790).

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political exclusion. Asserting the importance of education in ensuring justice and equality for all citizens, he proposed free and equal public education for men and women, with no discrimination as to subjects such as science or mathematics.10 The conversation about the place and rights of women, although sparked by the French revolutionary debates about the rights of man, took on a more universal cast as others joined in. Women’s legal subordination in marriage, unequal property rights, and limited educational opportunities were common across Europe. Demands for equal education, in particular, were a hallmark of Enlightenment feminism, and the views Condorcet espoused can be found reiterated elsewhere. Two writers who had a lasting influence on future feminist ideas, Mary Wollstonecraft in England and Theodor von Hippel in Prussia, both responded to the events in France, but drew more general conclusions about the place of women in society. Wollstonecraft, an early enthusiast for the Revolution, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 in response to debates on women’s education in the National Assembly in 1791. Wollstonecraft was a fierce advocate for women’s education, continuing a critique that Catherine Macaulay had recently given voice to in her 1787 Letters on Education. In critiquing naturalized explanations for women’s subordination, Wollstonecraft claimed the mantle of the reasoning philosopher and deployed the political language of natural law and the rights of man. In adopting this stance she set herself as peer and opponent to male opinion makers, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas about gender roles and motherhood were widely influential among educated Europeans of both sexes. Responding to Rousseau’s 1762 Émile, Wollstonecraft challenged his assertion that education should fit a woman for dependence on a man, insisting instead that the function of education is to inculcate “such habits of virtue as will render [one] independent.” Engaging with the key issue of virtue, Wollstonecraft dismissed the notion that its meaning differed for men and women, insisting that virtue depends upon the autonomous reason of the individual.11 Like de Gouges, Wollstonecraft linked intellectual and economic independence for women, asserting that a marital arrangement resting on equality of respect and education, if not of social function, would create the proper environment for the rearing of educated citizens. Furthermore, she emphasized the utility to men of emancipating women: “Would men but generously 10 Marquis de Condorcet, “Memoir on Public Instruction” (1791). 11 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter IX.

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snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience,” they would find women to be better citizens in whatever role they played.12 Wollstonecraft’s insistence on the irrelevance and injustice of gendered notions of sexual difference defined one thread of feminist critique that would continue through the century. Perhaps her most important contribution to that tradition was her insistence on the importance of independence of mind and body to women’s happiness, and the link she drew between the perils of sexual desire and women’s dependence on men. “The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams . . . Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort?”13 She thus rejected prescriptions to women to please men at the expense of self-cultivation and their own happiness. Theodor von Hippel was also spurred by the French Revolution, writing On Improving the Status of Women in 1792 in response to the exclusion of women from citizenship in the 1790 constitution. When he first engaged with the woman question in On Marriage in 1775 his views were conventional, but over time they shifted radically, going well beyond these other writers. Agreeing that women must have equal citizenship status and educational access, he further argued that women often have superior competences to men, and proposed active roles for them in the management of the economy and the state.14 Despite the groundbreaking nature of these critiques, these writers acknowledged and even endorsed contemporary views on sexual difference. They honored women’s vital roles as mothers and wives, and insisted on the necessity of their education to successfully fulfill these roles, reflecting the construct of republican motherhood that was so important to the era. De Gouges, for example, called women “the sex that is as superior in beauty as it is in courage during the sufferings of maternity.”15 However, while not dismissing the importance of reproduction and sexual difference in women’s lives, these writers did not rest their arguments for women’s entry into the public realm on them, as a variety of nineteenth-century feminists would. They deployed, at least in theory, a gender-blind notion of humanity, one that could encompass both female and male bodies and their varied qualities and experiences. As Condorcet put it, “Women having, then, the same 12 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter IX. 13 Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter II. 14 Theodor von Hippel, On Improving the Status of Women, trans. T. Sellner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 111. 15 De Gouges, “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne.”

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qualities [as men], have necessarily the same rights.”16 Such assertions notwithstanding, early feminists were obliged to engage with discourses that could not easily be reconciled with such universal, inclusive notions of humanity. Motherhood proved a constant challenge to radically egalitarian notions of gender equality, and reconciling the social function of motherhood with female independence proved an enduring problem for feminists. Besides the French Revolution, another important influence on early feminism was the contemporaneous anti-slavery movement. Without exception, the thinkers discussed here were vocal critics of slavery: De Gouges and Condorcet both penned passionate critiques of the institution, and Wollstonecraft called the slave trade “an atrocious insult to humanity.”17 Of equal salience, however, was the power of the vocabulary of slavery and emancipation to express feminists’ outrage at the status of women. De Gouges and Condorcet both employed the analogy, and Wollstonecraft framed her argument for the rights of woman in abolitionist language. The commonalities in the condition of women across Europe encouraged the framing of the debate in universal terms such as these, terms informed both by domestic events within Europe and by the institutions of European empires. As the varied approaches taken by revolutionary-era feminists suggest, the “woman question” was actually several questions. This diversity is reflected in the two major strands of feminist thought and activism that developed over the course of the nineteenth century, which can be loosely characterized as liberal feminism and socialist feminism. Liberal feminism, which, like its eighteenth-century predecessor, was an elite, and over time increasingly bourgeois, movement, continued in the rights-based vein of revolutionary feminism, focusing on issues such as education, full citizenship, employment, and, after the middle of the century, the vote. Socialist feminism, however, drew on different aspects of revolutionary feminism, in particular its focus on economic rights, but went beyond those concerns to a more thoroughgoing deconstruction of the bourgeois social order and its patriarchal underpinnings. If liberal feminism can be seen as a bid for women’s inclusion in the governing mechanisms of the nation state on a par with men, socialist feminism was aimed at redefining the terms through which the power structure of such societies was determined.

16 Condorcet, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship.” 17 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London, 1790), 24.

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Liberal Feminism and the Nation State In the early nineteenth century, conservative regimes reinforced patriarchal authority through economic and legal mechanisms. The 1804 Napoleonic Code rolled back many of the freedoms women had gained during the French Revolution.18 Contributing to the tenacity of legal structures of male privilege was the social dominance of the ascendant middle class. Bourgeois notions of separate spheres of influence for men and women – he deeded the public, political, and economic realms and she the moralized domestic realm – permeated European society and structured gender roles in lasting ways.19 Of equal importance was the increasing power of nationalist ideologies, which framed the national community in gendered terms, posited sexual reproduction as integral to the health of the nation, and designated the family as the primary site of patriotic work for women. This conservative climate inhibited the kind of engaged critiques that produced revolutionary feminism. The woman question could not be directly engaged, but rather surfaced in literary venues. Elite women of letters were important bridges between revolutionary and mid-nineteenthcentury feminisms. Germaine de Staël, most famously, critiqued the conservative gender order through the lives of her heroines. Their intellectual and emotional lives are tyrannized over by public opinion, to which they must “bow” but from which men can “liberate themselves.”20 Amalia Holst, similarly, challenged convention in her work on women’s education, although she stopped short of calling for full political rights as her compatriot von Hippel had done. While Holst insisted on women’s essential humanity as earlier writers had, she also suggested their potential superiority due to their disinterested relationship to social power, anticipating later arguments for women’s moral superiority. The education of women was necessary for the welfare of humanity itself, because, unlike men, they have a more “noble” calling.21 18 Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 249–310. 19 On the historiography of separate spheres, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2003), xiii–l. 20 Madame de Staël-Holstein, Delphine (Geneva, 1802), 617. Quoted in Geneviève Fraisse, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 108. 21 Amalie [sic, Amalia] Holst, “On Women’s Obligation toward the Higher Cultivation of the Mind” (1802), in German Feminist Writings, ed. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum Books, 2001), 10–13.

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In the nineteenth century, as anti-slavery campaigning made significant headway on both sides of the Atlantic, it also became a catalyst to women’s rights organizing. An important voice in both contexts was Harriet Martineau, a British journalist who helped to publicize the principles of political economy and positivism to English speakers. Martineau likened the status of women to that of slaves in her 1837 Society in America, using their similar “political non-existence” to challenge the legitimacy of the law, asking “how obedience to the laws can be required of women, when no woman has, either actually or virtually, given any assent to any law.”22 Martineau denounced the exclusion of women from the terms of the social contract, which, as in the case of enslaved people, nonetheless presumed to govern them mentally and physically. For mid-century feminists, the challenge thrown down by writers such as de Staël, Holst, and Martineau – how to ensure that all members of society are both qualified and permitted to consent to their governance – set the agenda for reform, with education remaining a critical touchstone. Feminists argued and organized for systematic education for women and paved the way for higher education and their eventual entry into the professions. The most successful of these campaigns, in England, established the first women’s colleges in the 1860s. Emily Davies, a leader in the campaign for education reform, argued against sexspecific exams and for one that would “sift” out “half-educated women,” which she saw as a necessity so their qualifications would be respected.23 Women’s education was intimately linked to full citizenship and thus to the vote, especially during the revolutionary year 1848, when challenges to monarchical authority reinvigorated longstanding critiques of patriarchy.24 The democratic character of these revolutions created important openings for women to demand full citizenship, often in the pages of newspapers and journals they founded and ran. Journalist and activist Louise Otto-Peters, considered the founder of organized German feminism, argued that women must be educated for independence, which would in turn serve the nation: “German sisters . . . the fatherland also makes solemn demands on you . . . educate your daughters to be worthy companions of a free people.”25 Spring 22 Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 199–207. 23 Emily Davies, “Special Systems of Education for Women,” in Free and Ennobled: Source Readings in the Development of Victorian Feminism, ed. Carol Bauer and Lawrence Ritt (New York: Pergamon Press, 2013), 125. 24 Bonnie S. Anderson, “The Lid Comes off: International Radical Feminism and the Revolutions of 1848,” NWSA Journal, 10(2) (1998), 1–12. 25 Louise Otto-Peters, “The Participation of the Feminine Sphere in the Affairs of the State,” in German Feminist Writings, ed. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum Books, 2001), 17–20.

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1848 was a moment of tremendous possibility in France as well, where feminists like Jeanne Deroin, who ran for the Assemblée Nationale in 1849, sought inclusion in the republic inaugurated by the February Revolution. Deroin, a republican and a socialist, linked the overthrow of patriarchy to the goals of the revolution itself: “It is not only in the name of women, but in the interest of the entire society . . . that we have demanded the abolition of the privilege of sex.”26 Like Otto-Peters and other 1848 feminists, Deroin based her claim to political inclusion on women’s duty to the nation. Feminist demands were not met, however, and the widespread ensuing political repression after 1848 silenced critics across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, the era saw the emergence of women’s rights organizing around legal and political reforms that proved durable. Great Britain, spared the upheavals of the late 1840s, was a particular site of feminist organizing, where successful campaigns led to the erosion of the doctrine of coverture and its curtailment of women’s rights to divorce, child custody, and ownership of their wages. In this context, the influence of John Stuart Mill and his close collaborator and wife Harriet Taylor (Mill) was critical. Taylor had been an early campaigner for the vote, publishing “Enfranchisement of Women” in 1851, and her influence upon Mill was deep and well-acknowledged.27 Mill was already a widely known utilitarian philosopher and politician when he introduced a bill in the British Parliament in 1867 to give women equivalent political rights to men. His 1869 essay The Subjection of Women indicted the conventions of gender discrimination and their cultural, legal, and political consequences. Like their predecessors, the Mills deployed the rhetoric of slavery and emancipation to characterize the condition of women, and rejected essentialized ideas about woman’s character or domain, pointing out that women’s equality had never been given a fair trial. Mill also noted the damage done to the “masters” by women’s exclusion, and questioned the honor and integrity of any man who would benefit from such an unequal system.28 Perhaps most striking was his defense of the right of any individual, female or male, to the essential satisfaction of productive, intellectually engaging work: “An active and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to control others.”29 Within Europe The Subjection of Women was 26 Jeanne Deroin, “Campagne électorale de la citoyenne Jeanne Deroin et pétition des femmes au peuple” (1849). 27 Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 194–195. 28 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (New York: Hackett Publishing, 1988), 47. 29 Mill, The Subjection of Women, 105.

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quickly translated into German, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Russian, and went into multiple printings in English. Mill argued for the emancipation of women both on individualist grounds and because of the utilitarian advantages it offered to society, but not all liberal feminists subscribed to these arguments. One of the most effective and, over time, contentious, forms of feminist advocacy deployed notions of radical sexual difference and the moralization of women’s roles in the family and the home. Variants of this way of understanding sexual difference can be found in both liberal and socialist feminism. For liberal feminists, the moral superiority of woman derived from the construct of separate spheres, wherein women’s roles were defined by their reproductive and nurturing functions. Writers and intellectuals conceptualized the female realm in ways that ranged from romanticized, if still restrictive, to blatantly misogynist. For example, Italian romantic nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini described woman as an otherworldly “angel of the family,” while Jules Michelet and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon saw little use for women other than their sexual and reproductive capacities and denounced their potentially destructive influence beyond the domestic realm. More intriguing for the history of feminist ideas is the perspective famously articulated by Victorian poet John Ruskin, in which he enumerated the disparate qualities of men and women, “He is eminently the doer, the creator . . . his intellect is for speculation and invention . . . her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision . . .” Although embracing deeply essentialized notions of sexual difference, Ruskin nonetheless valorized women’s domestic functions and argued for their exercise “not in their households merely, but over all within their sphere,” suggesting a wider, indeed public, purview for women’s distinctive influence.30 Many middle-class feminists embraced this notion of female moral superiority and used it to redefine the boundary between the domestic and public spheres. On the one hand, the social mission they described for women necessitated improved education, and on the other, it legitimated a public role that ultimately implied exercise of the franchise. They were activists on disparate issues, including social welfare work with the urban poor, temperance campaigning, and, most explosively, challenges to the sexual double standard sanctioned by state regulation of prostitution. Regardless of the specific issue, however, invocations of service to the nation and the public 30 John Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865).

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good rested on women’s unique moralizing influence in the public sphere and their greater devotion to the common good. Exemplary of this approach was Josephine Butler’s campaign to end state regulation of prostitution in the British Empire. Butler and the Ladies National Association called into question the sexual double standard, which was encoded into law by the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 that mandated medical inspection and quarantine of infected female prostitutes in garrison towns. Middle-class activists advocated on behalf of their working-class “sisters,” who were subjected to the “instrumental rape” of medical examination. In so doing they leveraged contemporary views of respectable women as sexless, denounced craven male sexuality, and effectively inserted their moral credibility into the public debate.31 Service to the nation was also a key feminist priority in France. The French suffragist cause was particularly problematic because of the perceived threat of the Catholic Church to the survival of the Republic. Throughout the century republicans feared the influence of priests on ostensibly gullible female voters. In response, moderate feminists like Maria Deraismes underscored the importance of women to social stability, and the centrality of the family to societal cohesion. Deraismes’s close colleague Léon Richer similarly advanced a conservative republican position, asserting the indispensability of women’s support to the well-being of the French nation. Although Deraismes and Richer framed their advocacy for women’s rights in terms of the needs of the nation, they did not go so far as to link women’s well-being to the vote, prioritizing instead the stability of the Republic.32 In contrast, Hubertine Auclert prized the vote for women above all, denouncing the “fiction” of republican elections and the “illusion of sovereignty.”33 Although Auclert focused her activism on attaining political power and framed her feminism in individualistic terms, she still advocated her views in terms of support for the nation. “Women’s suffrage is the utilization of the whole, of the nation’s intelligence and energy, in order to bring about a greater welfare.”34

31 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). 32 Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984). 33 Hubertine Auclert, “The Vote for Women,” in Feminisms of the Belle Époque: A Historical and Literary Anthology, ed. Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 267. 34 Auclert, “The Vote for Women,” 269.

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Similar differences of approach divided the British suffrage movement after the turn of the century, and called into question the premise of women’s moral superiority. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the dominant suffrage organization at the end of the century, pursued the vote using lawful means such as petition campaigns and worked to deconstruct the sexual double standard within the framework of women’s perceived moral superiority. By contrast, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed in 1903, resorted to more radical strategies, defying conventional gender norms and, in the view of many contemporaries, undermining the moral-superiority argument for women’s participation in the public arena. After 1906 they took their demands for suffrage to the streets, using a variety of combative strategies to make their campaign for the vote visible to a broader audience. Emmeline Pankhurst explained this in 1908: “We have tried to be womanly, we have tried to use feminine influence,” to no avail.35 However, as much as the WSPU challenged the ideology of separate spheres, both in word and in deed, they also strategically deployed its assumptions to elicit popular sympathy for their cause, invoking their own “violated bodies” in likening force feeding to the medical examinations denounced in Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts.36 The nationalist cast of liberal feminism presented an important challenge to the universalism of the arguments and organizations feminists built in transnational collaboration. The desire of liberal feminists to support their national governments created conflicts as the tensions of nationalism intensified in the 1880s. At the same time, these dynamics presented feminists with surprising opportunities to leverage the value of their patriotic service in exchange for recognition as full citizens. Feminists like Butler and Auclert deployed orientalist tropes of civilizational hierarchy to their advantage, illustrating their bona fides as citizens through their paternalist advocacy for colonized women.37 Demonstrating their loyalty to the nation on the eve of the Great War, prominent British feminists Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst spurned the feminist movement’s longstanding pacifism in favor of vitriolic nationalism, arguing that women served the nation as men did and

35 Emmeline Pankhurst, “Speech from the Dock,” Votes for Women, October 29, 1908. 36 Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 210–211. 37 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Carolyn J. Eichner, “La citoyenne in the World: Hubertine Auclert and Feminist Imperialism,” French Historical Studies, 32(1) (2009), 63–84.

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denouncing men who did not serve. Their campaign was instrumental in earning adult women the vote after the war.38 Contemporaneously, broad-based international alliances, including international feminist conferences and organizations, advanced the cause of women’s rights.39 The most important of these was the grassroots movement for maternal rights and child welfare that began in western Europe in the 1880s. “Maternal feminism” developed the middle-class feminist emphasis on motherhood and inserted it into public policies of the nation state. Although most of the maternalists were liberal feminists, the thrust of their arguments often reached far beyond tactical reforms to problematize the purpose and function of the state itself. At the same time, however, the middle-class cast of the movement tended toward paternalism and protectionism where poor women, both as workers and as mothers, were concerned. This movement thus encapsulated both the power and the limitations of the moralsuperiority stance, as it reified women’s maternal function while validating an important public role for women as guardians of the social arena.40 In these various ways, liberal feminists worked within the constraints laid down by the nation state, bidding for inclusion in existing power structures. During the same decades, however, a series of critiques of the bourgeois social order and of the nation state itself nurtured, and were in turn shaped by, feminist critiques that more radically challenged the status quo.

Socialist Feminism, from Inclusion to Reinvention During the Romantic era, pioneering socialist thinkers called into question the legitimacy of the wage labor system and the domination of liberal politics by the propertied classes. In the process, the parallels between class and gender hierarchies became increasingly apparent to participants and observers. Generally eschewing the rhetoric of rights so integral to liberal feminism, romantic socialists prioritized bonds of obligation and interdependence over the autonomy of the discrete individual. As a result of this more cooperative view of society, women’s relational importance came to 38 Nicoletta F. Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave, 2004). 39 Offen, European Feminisms; Anderson, Joyous Greetings; and McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy. 40 Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review, 95(4) (1990), 1076–1108; and Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

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particular prominence. Although romantic socialists’ privileging of feminine qualities inspired some to advocate feminist perspectives, feminism was not a central priority of the Marxist socialism that dominated after the middle of the century. Nevertheless, socialist critiques of the bourgeois family had longlasting results. Charles Fourier is frequently, if inaccurately, given credit for coining the term “feminism.”41 While the term actually emerged later, Fourier’s critique of women’s treatment in what he sardonically called “Civilization” did set the tone for radical and transformative approaches to the woman question. Fourier identified women’s status as key to the overall health of society: “Social progress and historic changes occur by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and decadence of the social order occurs as the result of a decrease in the liberty of women.” He linked the marriage conventions of his society to the capitalism he deplored, asking “is not a young woman a piece of merchandise put up for sale to the highest bidder?” He also identified the intellectual capability of women and the ways that society obscured it: “people try to persuade her that she is only bound by chains of flowers. But can she really doubt her degradation . . . ?”42 Most provocatively, Fourier asserted that sexuality and passionate love are pivotal to human happiness, arguing that “too many restraints had been imposed on the passion of love.”43 Rejecting the penalties conventionally applied to transgressions such as adultery, Fourier counseled, “the philosophers . . . should watch how people actually behave and try to make some use of conduct which they are unable to prevent.” In his view, marriage was the vehicle for all manner of individual unhappiness for men and women.44 In linking his indictment of marriage to the condition of contemporary society, Fourier envisioned a radical reconstruction of the social world and women’s place in it. For the rest of the century the implications of this critique were worked out by a variety of thinkers who engaged with questions of family structure, sexuality, and individual identity as feminist projects. Fourier was a forerunner to the romantic socialist movement of the 1820s through the 1840s. Although the movement as a whole was focused on issues raised by rapid industrial and urban development, socialists engaged with 41 Offen, “Defining Feminism,” 126. 42 Charles Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction, ed. and trans. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 177. 43 Fourier’s ideas about sexuality were long suppressed, Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 7. 44 Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, 172.

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questions of gender equity and women’s emancipation, although not necessarily their political equality. As was the case with their liberal contemporaries, the two predominant modes of argumentation for women’s equality – one based on their common humanity and the other on embodied femininity – were employed. Scottish factory owner Robert Owen experimented with cooperative forms of property ownership and cross-class collaboration, and, because of the radical reinvention of work and family life he proposed, women’s roles took on central importance. While he recognized the evident deficits in women’s capabilities under contemporary conditions, he and his followers saw women as having a unique moral vision, one that was especially well suited to cooperative life.45 Owen’s ideas were spread through public lectures and newspapers, both of which featured women participants. Frances Morrison, who published in The Pioneer as “The Bondswoman,” was his system’s outspoken advocate, calling upon women to be the harbingers of Owen’s utopian social vision, “and to point the attention of [their] fellowsufferers to the only system which promises them protection, independence, and happiness.”46 Similar ideas about women’s nature and social function emerged in France in the 1830s. A circle of young men and women, influenced by the doctrine of Henri de Saint-Simon, developed a worldview informed by essentialized notions of femininity and the complementarity of the sexes, as captured by his dictum “the couple is the social individual.”47 The “Church” of SaintSimon linked his critique of capitalism to the contemporary gender order. As Claire Démar put it, “the emancipation of the proletariat . . . is possible . . . only through the emancipation of our sex, through the association of strength and beauty, harshness and gentleness, man and woman.”48 The first female-run newspaper, La Femme libre, was published by a predominantly working-class group of Saint-Simonians in 1832, making 45 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 46 Frances Morrison, “The Influence of the Present Marriage System upon the Character and Interests of Females,” in Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence, ed. Gregory Claeys, 10 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2005), vol. V, 43–53. 47 Susan K. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803–44 (London: MacMillan Press, 1992); and Naomi J. Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006). On the emergence of the Saint-Simonian movement and its religious dimensions, see Robert Carlisle, The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 48 Claire Démar, “My Law of the Future,” in Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism, ed. Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 181.

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the case for women’s legal emancipation and for educational and work opportunities to promote their independence. In a gesture that foreshadowed twentieth-century feminism, contributors forsook familial names as a symbolic protest against patriarchal authority. They demanded “marriage with equality . . . Better celibacy than slavery!” and denounced competitive nationalism, asserting that “The age of universal association is beginning . . . The reign of peace and harmony is being forged all over the earth, and the moment has come for woman to have her place within it.”49 The issue of sexuality particularly divided early socialists. Women feminists’ responses were complicated, as many rejected the constraints that marriage imposed upon women. Nevertheless, they understood, as the men who advocated “free love” often did not, the costs to women of rejecting conventional marital arrangements, as they uniquely suffered the stigmas of promiscuity and illegitimacy that the rejection of marriage entailed. Thus, while a figure such as Prosper Enfantin, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, argued for the “rehabilitation of the flesh,” and the rejection of religiously based hostility to women and to sexuality, women like Pauline Roland and Claire Démar, who agreed in principle and practiced free love personally, paid the price through social opprobrium and poverty, to the point of suicidal despair, as in the case of Démar. The exalted notion of womanhood that both male and female Saint-Simonians embraced also had other repercussions. Drawing on Saint-Simon’s ideal of sexual complementarity, Enfantin defined god as androgynous; as the “pope” of the movement, he sought his complement in a female messiah. Until she could be identified, however, women were stripped of leadership roles, which occasioned the departure of one of the movement’s founders, Claire Bazard. Once considered the “mother” of the movement, Bazard was an educated woman who significantly influenced its feminist cast, and who left when Enfantin’s ideas about sexuality and the androgynous god divided the group.50 Contemporary Flora Tristan took this quasi-religious exaltation of a morally superior womanhood beyond the “angel at the hearth” to posit a female savior. Tristan had been a fellow traveler of French socialists and also spent time in Owenite circles in England; she was a vocal critic of Napoleonic marriage laws. In The Worker’s Union (1843), Tristan offered a feminist socialism, which, unlike 49 Jeanne-Victoire [Jeanne Deroin], “Call to Women,” in Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism, ed. Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 283. 50 Claire Goldberg Moses, “Saint-Simonian Men/Saint-Simonian Women: The Transformation of Feminist Thought in 1830s France,” The Journal of Modern History, 54(2) (1982), 240–267; and Pamela M. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth Century France: From Free Love to Algeria (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 44–69.

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many other socialist doctrines of the era, included women in the category of worker. Tristan asserted that workers as a whole would find their lives improved by women’s equality, noting “the legal equality of men and women [is] the only means of constituting the UNITY OF HUMANITY.” She exhorted her readers to work for women’s education, “so that they may become moralizing agents of the men of the people.”51 Issues of sexuality were central to English socialism and feminism as well. In 1825, William Thompson and his collaborator Anna Doyle Wheeler championed the legal and political equality of women as necessary for ameliorating the poverty of the working classes and women’s bondage within the family. Responding to James Mill’s assertion that women, as dependents upon men, could clearly be “struck off from political rights without inconvenience,” they argued that the elimination of “individual wealth” was a necessary prerequisite for the full equality of women. Radically linking unrestrained reproduction to women’s poverty, they observed that the “occasional loss of time in gestation and rearing infants must eternally render the average exertions of women in the competition for wealth less successful than those of men.”52 Most strikingly, they advocated the use of birth control and the elimination of private property as means of weakening male control over women. As organized socialist movements developed across Europe in the second half of the century, the initial correlation between women’s status and the plight of the working classes was largely severed. Classbased socialism increasingly emphasized male prerogative in labor organizing, wage ladders, and leadership. Feminism, meanwhile, became a distinct strand of political activism, one that was dominated, as noted above, by bourgeois women and men. Socialist feminism was far from an oxymoron, but important divisions within Marxist circles over tactics and strategies weakened consensus on gender questions. Nevertheless, continuities with the romantic socialists are discernible after the mid-century Marxian turn in socialist feminism’s critique of the family. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels asked, sounding a bit like Fourier, “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the 51 Flora Tristan, The Workers’ Union, trans. B. Livingston (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 128. 52 William Thompson, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race (London, 1825), x.

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family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.”53 Contesting bourgeois accusations that communism would create a “community of women,” they argued instead that such a system already existed, in the form of bourgeois marriage and prostitution. Engels’s 1884 Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State developed this idea historically, linking the shift away from matrilineal social structures to the establishment of private property, and attributing prostitution and women’s slave-like status within marriage to it. According to Marxist analyses, the nuclear family was a pernicious manifestation of the bourgeois monopoly of the means of production. Proletarian women, as both reproducers of the population and wage laborers, were “doubly oppressed,” enslaved in public and private spheres. Bourgeois women, although liberated from wage labor by their class standing, were bound, nonetheless, to sexual reproduction. The point of communism, they argued, is the end of all forms of exploitation and alienation for all workers, male and female.54 Engaged debate on the woman question became widespread in the last quarter of the century as socialist parties in Europe became important political forces and women’s roles as laborers and political actors took on practical significance. A key text in this regard was August Bebel’s 1879 Woman and Socialism. Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, was influenced on gender questions by his early reading of Fourier. His account chronicles the relationship between women’s oppression and capitalist economic relations, blaming capitalism for social evils such as prostitution, the loveless bourgeois marriage, and the joylessness of rote labor. “Marriage constitutes one phase of the sex relations of bourgeois society; prostitution constitutes the other.”55 Bebel’s work was highly influential, reviewed and translated widely within Europe, and banned in Germany. Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, who reviewed the English translation in 1886, thought the book made clearer than anything before it had that “those who attack the present treatment of women without seeking for the cause of this in the economics of our latter-day society are like doctors who treat a local affection without inquiring into 53 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Chicago: Kerr & Company, 1906), 39. 54 Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 58. 55 August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, trans. M. Stern (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910), 174.

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the general bodily health.”56 Bebel offered a nuanced assessment of gender roles, describing how critical workplace reform and women’s work could be to improving the proletarian family’s standard of living. At the same time, however, he presented such reforms as stop-gap measures; only the wholesale destruction of capitalism would resolve women’s dual subordination in the workforce and the family. Bebel’s twofold analysis captured the poles of the debate over feminism within socialist circles through the end of the century.57 In many ways, these positions reflected the debate over whether socialism would best be achieved through gradual reform or through the wholesale destruction of capitalism. Where feminism was concerned, the problem was whether gender-specific reforms should be sought under capitalism, or whether capitalism’s demise would bring those changes in the course of events. Socialist theorists and organizers who adhered to the orthodox Marxist perspective dismissed feminism as a “bourgeois indulgence,” and deferred substantive challenges to the gender regime to a post-revolutionary future, on the assumption that the conventional family would disappear with capitalism. Clara Zetkin, an important leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), resolved this conundrum by prioritizing women’s emancipation as workers over the gender-specific aims of organized feminism. Her antagonist in this contest was Lily Braun, a partisan of the “revisionist” school of Marxism and of feminism.58 Both of Braun’s positions were defeated in the intraparty struggle, and she was marginalized from the SPD. Thereafter, feminism’s promised emancipation of women was shelved as a priority until after the promised revolution, both within the German SPD and within other European socialist parties. Despite this strategic trade-off, however, socialist parties were at the forefront in demands for women’s political rights and economic empowerment. The SPD, the largest socialist party in Europe, helped to establish an enduring agenda that included advocacy for female suffrage, equal pay for equal work, and educational and professional access for women.

56 Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, “The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View,” Westminster Review, 69 (January–April 1886), 207–222. 57 Marilyn J. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’” American Historical Review, 112(1) (2007), 131–158. 58 On the controversy over revisionist Marxism see Chapter 20 on late-nineteenth-century radicalism by Claudia Verhoeven.

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Programmatic priorities, however, were not always fulfilled and the goal of gender equity remained secondary to the workers’ revolution.59

Independence of Mind and Body As the century drew to a close, women’s economic and bodily independence from men and from the family became hotly debated questions, especially as they pertained to sexuality and reproduction. Women had made incremental gains in their legal independence through the concerted efforts of women’s rights organizations and individual advocates. In part as a result of these gains, the “New Woman” emerged as a highly controversial archetype. Although not all newly independent women saw themselves as feminists, their disregard for the confining domesticity of traditional marriage aligned with feminist positions.60 The New Woman’s seemingly radical independence from men and the family conjured anxieties about population stability, the morality of future generations, and the security of male privilege.61 Such concerns notwithstanding, most women were not freed from the demands of domesticity or the rigors of reproduction. Olive Schreiner recognized this fact when she denounced women’s “parasitic” economic dependence on men and demanded for women their “share of honored and socially useful human toil.”62 Independent women became important subjects of cultural controversy in Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House, which ends with housewife Nora Helmer leaving her home, her husband Torvald, and their children. Ibsen’s play, with its infamous concluding “sound of a door shutting,” provoked tremendous outcry across Europe when it was premiered. George Bernard Shaw, who, since the 1870s, had called for women to recognize their duty to themselves before service to others, used Ibsen’s play as a platform for his feminism. He incisively criticized what he called the “Womanly Woman” as a false ideal and used his biting wit to take down men whom he saw as propagating such fantasies. Shaw called on women to abandon self-sacrifice and work toward self-realization: “The sum of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, [and] her duty to . . . everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.” Although echoing 59 Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 60 Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 61 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 62 Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), 63–64.

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Ibsen’s language and argument, Shaw went a step farther in his critique, advocating radical self-possession for women divorced from any social function, asserting that “Woman has to repudiate duty altogether.”63 Shaw proved a vociferous and prolific feminist critic, denouncing the contemporary conditions that left women with little choice other than the degrading terms of marriage or prostitution.64 During the 1880s and 1890s, ardent nationalists viewed liberal and socialist feminists with special suspicion. Because of widespread concerns about population degeneration and decline, and the perception that feminism sought to undermine women’s primarily reproductive role, national loyalties and feminist sentiments were seen as antithetical. In particular, championing the rights of women was closely tied to controversies over birth control and family planning.65 In the resulting debates, feminists were deeply divided around issues pertaining to reproduction, such as marital reform and birth control. The Malthusian League, which originated in Great Britain and found adherents across western Europe, promoted family limitation as a means of combating widespread working-class poverty. Feminists in many European nations saw value in this agenda, arguing for the individual and societal benefits of family planning. Nelly Roussel, for example, linked birth control to the national well-being when she demanded contraception in tandem with state support for motherhood, and rejected the conceptualization of mothers as baby-making machines. Addressing herself to “gentlemen repopulators,” Roussel lamented the physical toll unrestrained fertility took on women, and asserted that “woman alone is mistress of her body.” In her view, societal prosperity and peace among nations were naturally aligned with women’s bodily autonomy. Acknowledging that reproduction was in the national interest, Roussel made the case that state support for motherhood was indispensable for the social good.66 On the eve of the Great War, medical doctor Madeleine Pelletier made an even stronger case for women’s sexual freedom coupled with fertility control, including abortion, then widely outlawed in Europe. Pelletier denounced the sexual double standard, sexual violence, unequal 63 George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Brentano’s, 1913), 33–40. 64 Philip Graham, “Bernard Shaw’s Neglected Role in English Feminism 1880–1914,” Journal of Gender Studies, 23(2) (2014), 167–183. 65 Karen Offen,“Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review, 89(3) (1984), 648–676. 66 Nelly Roussel, “The Freedom of Motherhood,” in Feminisms of the Belle Époque: A Historical and Literary Anthology, ed. Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 242; and Elinor Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

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education, and women’s exclusion from the franchise. For Pelletier, legal equality and access to the political sphere would enable these ills to be eradicated: “When women have conquered the right to a political life, their emancipation” would follow rapidly.67 During this same time period, some feminists also embraced eugenics, seeing in it the possibility of greater female autonomy and a counterweight to natalist condemnations of feminism.68 Pelletier and Roussel were not alone in their willingness to speak frankly about birth control, abortion, and the taboo subject of female sexual pleasure. Members of the British WSPU published the short-lived paper The Freewoman, which included graphic discussions of contraception, lesbianism, and menstruation, scandalizing conventional readers.69 Anarchist Emma Goldman was a relentless proponent of birth control and sexual education, publishing widely on these subjects in the years before World War I. Goldman linked women’s lack of education and economic dependence to the proliferation of prostitution: “It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex.” Referring to the “moral spasms” provoked by discussions of women’s sexuality, Goldman called for frankness and clarity in sex education, and the full acknowledgment of women’s sexual desire.70 Perhaps the most important voice for women’s sexuality, however, was Ellen Key, the widely read Swedish writer on female sexuality. Although not a radical in all respects – Key generally conformed to maternalist feminism – her acknowledgment of women’s ability to experience sexual pleasure and its place in a loving relationship was shocking to conventional readers, feminist and otherwise. Calling attention to the “erotic greatness” of women, Key promoted sexual companionship in love between men and women: “Modern woman’s love differs from that of older times by . . . the insatiability of its demand for completeness and perfection in itself, and for corresponding completeness and perfection in the feeling of the man.”71 These iconoclastic authors notwithstanding, most feminists avoided direct confrontation with issues of sexuality, and some were explicitly against population control. Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, both opposed abortion and 67 Madeleine Pelletier, “On Morality for Both Sexes,” in Feminisms of the Belle Époque: A Historical and Literary Anthology, ed. Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 184. 68 Ann Taylor Allen, “German Radical Feminism and Eugenics, 1900–1908,” German Studies Review, 11(1) (1988), 31–56. 69 Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 225. 70 Emma Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” in Anarchism and Other Essays, 2nd edn. (New York: Mother Earth, 1911), 183–200. 71 Ellen Key, Love and Marriage, trans. Arthur G. Chater (New York: Putnam, 1911), 84.

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birth control on the grounds that the growth of the working classes would ultimately serve their revolutionary agenda.

*** Throughout the nineteenth century, feminists, both liberal and socialist, problematized a wide array of societal power structures. By interrogating bedrock social institutions including the traditional family, the economic structures of capitalism, and the nation state, feminists were central to the broader deconstruction of social power that gained momentum as the century drew to a close. Despite challenging the status quo on many fronts, feminism was also deeply imbricated in the political structures of the century, being drawn into both strategic and tactical compromises with the forces of social, political, and economic power in ways that did not always advance the long-term goal of equality of the sexes. Nevertheless, on the eve of World War I, significant changes to conventional ideas about women and gender were discernible. While the case for women’s education had to be made repeatedly by early feminists, arguments against women’s rationality had largely retreated in the face of educational reforms that opened doors for their professional lives and economic independence. Similarly, by the end of the century, respectable women were publicly acknowledging women’s sexual nature, and the independent woman was no longer seen as a pariah. Finally, although, in most of the world’s democracies, women attained the vote only after the end of the Great War, the precedent of women’s participation in public life had been well established by the end of the century, paving the way for future developments in the theory and practice of feminism.

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12

Darwinism and Social Darwinism gregory radick

A Darwinian Beginning Whoever says “social Darwinism” says “survival of the fittest, in society as in nature.” There are good reasons to regret that the term ever acquired this meaning, and good historical studies to learn from in understanding how and why it nevertheless became the entrenched meaning. But there is also an oftmentioned bad reason for regret, linked to bad history. Social Darwinism, it is sometimes said, has nothing whatever to do with Charles Darwin (1809–1882) or with the body of time-tested facts, theories, and practices deriving from Darwin’s work. On this view, Darwinism is science, and social Darwinism a pseudo-science masquerading as an application of Darwinism.1 To see why such a separation is untenable, we need only consider an exchange of letters from Darwinism’s beginning. In October 1859, while Darwin was awaiting publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, he corresponded about it with the geologist Charles Lyell, who had read the book in proof. Lyell’s verdict meant a great deal to Darwin. There was no one whose judgment Darwin esteemed more highly. But there was also no one more fully committed to an idea that the Origin of Species aimed to discredit. For Lyell, species were independent creations, each brought into being by the “Author of Nature” (Lyell’s phrase) according to a divine plan, and designed to thrive for a particular period in a designated region of the Earth. By contrast, Darwin in the Origin of Species explained the 1 Donald C. Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” Perspectives in American History, new series, 1 (1984), 1–129; Jim Moore, “Socializing Darwinism: Historiography and the Fortunes of a Phrase,” in Science as Politics, ed. Les Levidow (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 38–80; and Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, “Darwin and Social Darwinism: Purity and History,” in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (London: Sage, 1979), 125–142.

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gregory radick

origin of species by appeal only to ordinary, continuously operating, lawgoverned natural processes, which anyone could see in action now – chiefly, processes of variation (when individuals of a species are born a little different from the others), inheritance (when those individual differences are passed on from parents to offspring), and competitive struggle (because typically life is hard, between the scarcity of food and an abundance of predators, diseases, and so on). The Origin of Species showed how, by those means alone, existing species slowly and gradually become modified, in directions adapting them to the changing environments that they chance to encounter. As the modifications accumulate, generation after generation, species change – to the point where, eventually, new species can be recognized. There is no intervening from on high, and no overall plan. Lyell found the Origin of Species hugely impressive. But he was not going to be easily converted or, as he joked to Darwin, “perverted” to the new theory. In Lyell’s first letters he pressed Darwin on several points, among them the question of how to account for the rise in intelligence over the history of life on Earth. Was it really possible, Lyell asked, that intelligence could have risen from, say, the primitive level of a fish, or even the higher level of an elephant, all the way to the human level, by nothing other than the cumulative action of natural causes? Surely, he suggested, one has to assume the action of a “creative power,” working alongside the ordinary causes, in order to account for so momentous a series of changes. Darwin disagreed. On his theory – which he called “natural selection” – the increase in intelligence followed from three facts which no one could deny: first, that individuals vary in how intelligent they are; second, that, at least sometimes, some of that variation is inheritable; and third, that it is an advantage to be more intelligent in the struggle to survive. Anyone who puts those together will see how, on average, even slightly more intelligent individuals – fish or elephant or whatever – can be expected not just to out-survive their less intelligent competitors but to out-reproduce them, and to pass the advantageous extra intelligence on to the next generation. As this selective process repeats itself generation after generation, average intelligence will slowly increase. Darwin stressed how repugnant to him the calling in of a supernatural agency to do any of the work of explanation would be. “If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection,” Darwin wrote to Lyell, “I would reject it as rubbish.” Darwin went on, “But I have firm faith in it, as I cannot believe that if false it would explain so many whole classes of facts, which if I am in my senses it seems to explain.” As for the facts about intelligence, and the theory’s power to explain them, Darwin added 280

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“I look at this process as now going on with the races of man; the less intellectual races being exterminated.”2 Note the ease with which Darwin here slipped across what tends now to be thought of as a borderline between the biological and the social. That was not a distinction that he observed. Note too how straightforwardly he represented social inequality in his day – here, between the races, colonizing and colonized – as not merely natural but freshly intelligible under his theory, as the raw material of a naturally occurring progressive process. Acknowledging such passages in Darwin’s writings, and others that we will examine shortly, we should feel obliged neither to accept social Darwinism as somehow intellectually and morally legitimate because it is “really Darwinian,” nor, at the opposite extreme, to condemn Darwin as a sort of sinner, to be chastised for poor reasoning and held personally responsible for the human misery created by those he may, somehow or other, have influenced. Darwin’s writings, public and private, came to inspire an enormous range of readings of their social implications. As we shall see, there was social Darwinism, but also socialist Darwinism. A list of opposing Darwinisms is easily generated: warmongering Darwinism and peace-mongering Darwinism; feminist Darwinism and anti-feminist Darwinism . . . You name it, and someone, somewhere will have backed it, in the name of Darwinism; and someone else, no less ardently Darwinian, will have backed its contradiction. The challenge is to give that diversity its due without denying that there is a history of social Darwinism to tell – and, ideally, explain – as part of the history of Darwinism.3

“Darwinism” Curiously, “social Darwinism” has a more traditionally stable meaning than “Darwinism” itself. Sometimes “Darwinism” is treated as a synonym for “evolution.” A history-of-science commonplace has it that in the Origin of Species Darwin furnished a new argument for an old idea, evolution, which went back at least to the days of Darwin’s grandfather, the physician Erasmus

2 Lyell to Darwin, October 3 and 4, 1859, and Darwin to Lyell, October 11, 1859, Darwin Correspondence Project, letters 2501, 3132, and 2503; for discussion see Mike Dixon and Gregory Radick, Darwin in Ilkley (Stroud: History Press, 2009), Chapter 2. 3 Recent overviews rising to this challenge include Diane B. Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 219–245; and Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Darwin, and his French contemporary, the Paris naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. Unquestionably, there was nothing new in the idea of the mutability of species, which can be found in ancient Greek and Roman writings. Yet the word “evolution” does not appear in the 1859 first edition of the Origin of Species. The term carried associations of planned directionality that, as we saw in the run-up exchange with Lyell, Darwin was keen to avoid. And though Darwin studied the work of his grandfather and others who wrote on species mutability or, to use a term favored at the time, “transmutation,” the Origin of Species’ two main proposals were at least as novel as the argument mounted in support of them.4 The first proposal was, as mentioned, the theory of natural selection, which Darwin named in analogy with stockbreeding by humans, or “artificial selection.” Breeders had long taken advantage of the great diversity of inheritable variations that domesticated animals and plants exhibit, breeding only from those individuals that most closely approximated to whatever ideal the breeder had in mind. By assiduous, repeated selection, artful breeders had gradually brought into being the most amazingly diverse new varieties. Likewise, Darwin argued, in nature too individuals occasionally show inheritable variations, and those become the basis of new varieties. But what does the selecting in nature is what he called “the struggle for existence,” as described by the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. Under the knife-edge conditions of Malthusian struggle, those individuals who happen, by chance, to be that bit better adapted to their environments – by being even slightly faster, stronger, smarter, better camouflaged, or whatever – will have the advantage. They will tend to live long enough to become parents, and their offspring will tend to inherit their winning variations. But where, on the farm, artificial selection can build up those variations into new varieties of existing species, natural selection, working with infinitely greater precision over far larger timescales, can go further and create new species. Darwin presented his second main proposal as following from the first. If natural selection operates on whatever variations happen to turn up, favoring them or not depending on the conditions of life that happen to prevail in a place at a particular time, then the overall timing and character of new species will be highly irregular, like the timing and character of the branches on a tree. Indeed, the image of a family “tree of life” for the genealogical, common-descent pattern 4 Jean Gayon, “From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 277–301, pp. 279–281; and Jonathan Hodge, “Against ‘Revolution’ and ‘Evolution,’” Journal of the History of Biology, 38(1) (2005), 101–121.

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of relationships between species struck Darwin as a remarkably good fit. For just as all of the outermost tips of a tree can be traced back, with unbroken continuity, to ever larger, more comprehensive, and older groupings of branches, all the way back to a shared, single trunk, so living species can be grouped, with each other and with extinct species, until the whole of the history of life on Earth can be seen as forming one or, at most, a few family trees. When, in his letter to Lyell, Darwin wrote that his faith in natural selection was so strong in large part because he could not “believe that if false it would explain so many whole classes of facts, which if I am in my senses it appears to explain,” he had in mind especially the way that, as he showed in the latter part of the Origin of Species, common ancestry threw light on mystery after mystery, and in a coordinated way. It explained, for example, why the birds on the Galápagos Islands belong to the same genera as the birds on the South American mainland, where environmental conditions were so very different; why the fossil species dug up from the rocks in a place so often resemble the species to be found living at the surface; why taxonomists found it so useful to group species into ever larger hierarchical groupings; and why early embryos of very different species look so much alike, only gradually differentiating during development.5 Whether one thinks the Origin of Species brought about a “Darwinian revolution” turns in part on what one thinks about two more or less separate issues: the question of what, in a general way, counts as a revolutionary change in science; and the question of how differently the history of science, and the world, would have gone had Darwin not published. At present there is no consensus on either issue.6 Certainly the book was a publishing success, selling out on publication day, immediately going into a second edition (there were six in Darwin’s lifetime), rapidly getting translated into the major European languages, and enjoying a huge and varied penumbral life via reviews and references in the amazingly diverse print culture of the middle of the nineteenth century.7 Among those who read the book, some of them 5 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), available – along with everything else by Darwin, and a great deal of relevance by others – at Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk. On Darwin’s life and times, see Adrian Desmond, James Moore, and Janet Browne, Charles Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and, more extensively, Janet Browne’s twovolume biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). 6 See, for example, Hodge, “Against ‘Revolution’ and ‘Evolution’”; and Peter J. Bowler, Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 7 Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 [1958]);

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gregory radick

found it life-changing. “Depend upon it,” the London anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley wrote to Darwin after devouring a presentation copy Darwin sent, “you have earned the lasting gratitude of all thoughtful men – And as to the curs which will bark & yelp – you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which . . . may stand you in good stead.” Good as his word, Huxley went on to achieve lasting fame as “Darwin’s bulldog,” coining the term “Darwinism” in a laudatory April 1860 review of the Origin of Species, defending the Darwinian theory in a legendary confrontation with the Bishop of Oxford at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science a few months later, and publishing a major demolition of the notion of an insurmountable gap between humans and apes in 1863.8 For Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s with a modest reputation as a geographer and meteorologist, the Origin of Species not only broke the spell of the old “argument from design” – from, that is, the excellent design of well-adapted species to the existence of a divine Designer (on the view that only the latter could explain the former) – but directed him toward what became a decades-long interest in the scientific study of hereditary improvement in humans. “I always think of you,” Galton later wrote to Darwin, “in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of their superstition.” (Galton eventually published a study of the statistical efficacy of prayer, concluding that ships with priests on them sank at the same rate as ships without priests.)9 In Germany, the naturalist Ernst Haeckel rounded out a magisterial two-volume 1862 monograph on the microscopic radiolaria with a genealogical table, along with a note hailing Darwin’s “epoch-making work” for “the immortal service of having brought the entire doctrine of relationships of organisms to sense and understanding.” Like a German Huxley, Haeckel would become the public spokesperson for a cleric-baiting, apes-and-humans Darwinismus.10

and Thomas F. Glick (ed.), The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1974]). 8 Huxley to Darwin, November 23, 1859, Darwin Correspondence Project, letter 2544; James Moore, “Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s,” Journal of the History of Biology, 24(3) (1991), 353–408; and Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (London: Penguin, 1998). 9 Galton to Darwin, December 24, 1869, Darwin Correspondence Project, letter 7034; and Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1985]), 3–19. 10 Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 71–72.

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For every generalization one is tempted to make about Darwinism, it is easy to identify complications and counterexamples.11 Yes, on the whole, Darwinism became associated with the attempt, led by the likes of Huxley, Galton, Haeckel, and other professionalizing modernizers, to extrude “Author of Nature” talk from science, and to exclude those who talked it from the scientific community. A perception of such us-versus-them animosity provoked the American clergyman Charles Hodge to publish What Is Darwinism? (1874), where he depicted Darwinism as an atheist, materialist worldview. Yet the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s greatest advocate within the American scientific elite, always sought to defend a theistic Darwinism, wherein natural selection operated on variations that God designed so as to fill out the divine plan.12 Reconciliations of Darwinism, broadly construed, and the spiritual life, broadly construed, were rife in the nineteenth century, and have remained so ever since. Likewise, on the whole, Darwinism continued to be identified mainly with natural selection and the genealogical tree of life. When, in 1889, seven years after Darwin’s death, Alfred Russel Wallace, the “co-discoverer” of natural selection, published Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications, he deliberately promoted natural selection and its entailments as “pure Darwinism,” ignoring what he judged to be Darwin’s misguided enthusiasms for other evolutionary processes, such as sexual selection – where the females of a species choose the showier males – and the inheritance of modifications acquired during the lifetime of a parent through the habitual use or disuse of organs and faculties (so-called “Lamarckism”). But other Darwinians found that unpersuasively dogmatic.13 It also gave a quite misleading picture of the scientific mainstream, which, from the mid 1860s onward, had embraced the challenge of reconstructing evolutionary genealogies with far greater unanimity and energy than it had ever devoted to natural-selection theory. Even Huxley and Galton had well-known doubts about the latter.14 11 On Darwinism over the long run, the best recent survey is Michael Ruse (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 [1944]), 13–30, esp. 26. 13 Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications (London: Macmillan, 1889), viii. The Origin of Species was Darwin’s hastily composed response to his discovery in 1858 that Wallace, working independently, had come up with a theory so similar to natural selection that public credit for the theory might go to Wallace if he published first. 14 Gayon, “From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology,” 281–283.

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Darwin, Spencer, and Marx In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin’s most important book after the Origin of Species, he acknowledged the different receptions that its main proposals had met with. His critics, he wrote, had helped him see “that in the earlier editions of my ‘Origin of Species’ I probably attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.” He went on to state I had not formerly sufficiently considered the existence of many structures which appear to be, as far as we can judge, neither beneficial nor injurious; and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work. I may be permitted to say as some excuse, that I had two distinct objects in view, firstly, to shew that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change . . . Some of those who admit the principle of evolution, but reject natural selection, seem to forget, when criticising my book, that I had the above two objects in view; hence if I have erred in giving to natural selection great power, which I am far from admitting, or in having exaggerated its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.15

Strikingly, Darwin here used two terms absent from the 1859 Origin of Species. One is “survival of the fittest.” The other is “evolution.” The invention of the former, and the popularizing of the latter, were the work of Darwin’s younger contemporary Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Some who incline to exonerate Darwin for social Darwinism seek to blame it on Spencer, even urging that “social Spencerism” would be a historically more accurate name.16 We shall come to Spencer and his thought more directly in a moment. For now, it is worth underscoring the Spencerian origins of what became two of the most enduringly Darwinian terms, which were adopted by Darwin himself.17 Three further points about the Descent of Man – where Darwin sought to apply the Origin of Species proposals in a detailed way to humankind – bear emphasis. First, he now made public what he had written privately to Lyell in 15 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. I, 152–153. See also the 1862 correspondence with Charles Kingsley discussed in Chapter 17 by Adam Kuper. 16 Eric Foner, “Introduction” to Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought [1860‒1915] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 [1944]), xix. 17 Diane B. Paul, “The Selection of the ‘Survival of the Fittest,’” Journal of the History of Biology, 21(3) (1988), 411–424; and Peter J. Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36(1) (1975), 95–114, esp. 106–109 and 111–112.

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1859 about the “less intellectual” human races being exterminated, adding now that the most humanlike apes would likely also disappear. “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries,” wrote Darwin, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break [between humans and the nearest animal species] will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.18

Second, and following the lead of the English journalist Walter Bagehot (editor of the Economist, then as now house publication for free-market liberalism), Darwin argued that it was not just higher intelligence but higher morality – in the sense of a greater willingness by individuals to make sacrifices for the good of the collective – which made for success in the struggle between the human races. Hence the ascent of humans up the “scale of civilisation,” as Darwin put it, was as much cooperative as competitive.19 Third, and relatedly, he saw future progress for our species as a matter of getting the balance right between, on the one side, strengthening hard-won moral instincts for giving aid to the less fortunate, and on the other side, keeping competitive pressures in civilized society intense. Balance was needed because too much of the one could undermine the other, to the detriment of the species. Yes, Darwin acknowledged (again following others, notably Galton), medicine and charity protect the weak in body, mind, and character from the full force of natural selection, and to that extent may actually erode overall biological quality, by creating conditions under which the weak not only out-survive but outbreed the strong. Yet the withdrawal of those institutions would so damage what is noblest in humans as to do more harm than good. It would be better to counteract whatever damage they bring by ensuring that struggle nevertheless remains severe around them. “There should be open competition for all men,” Darwin wrote near the end of the Descent of Man, “and those most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring.”20

18 Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. I, 201. 19 Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. I, 161–167, p. 166; and Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society (London: H. S. King, 1872), collecting articles he began publishing in 1867. 20 Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. I, 167–184; and vol. II, 402–404, p. 403.

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Spencer was a different kind of thinker from Darwin, from a different background; it is all the more fascinating to see how their ideas at certain points parallel and converge. Where Darwin was a globe-traveling geologist and naturalist whose inherited wealth meant he never had to earn a living, Spencer was a provincial railway engineer turned social commentator and speculative philosopher who lived by his pen. In a series of essays culminating in an 1851 book, Social Statics, he set out a version of what we would now call a radically libertarian social theory. (Among the journals Spencer worked for was the Economist.) On Spencer’s diagnosis, the ultimate source of human unhappiness is the state. By its constant, freedom-limiting meddling in human affairs, it shields people from learning to deal in full with the complexities of life, leaving them poorly adapted to each other and to their wider circumstances. Take away government, make people fend for themselves, and, Spencer predicted, two things will happen. Under the new conditions of struggle, some people will work harder, gradually becoming not just better adapted but better in themselves, with stronger bodies, sharper minds, and enlarged capacities for moral action – refinements, Spencer believed, which they would pass on to their children in Lamarckian fashion. As for the rest, they will die, culled just as the weaker animals in a herd get culled. Such was Nature’s way of maintaining quality control: the survival of the fittest, as he came to call it. What will emerge in the end is a far better society, indeed a utopia, where truly free people live peaceably and happily thanks to optimally adjusted bodies, minds, and morals.21 Over the course of the 1850s, Spencer went on to embed this social vision within a truly cosmic developmental-evolutionary scheme, drawing on the whole of the sciences of his day – from matter-and-motion physics to Malthus on populations – and presenting the universe, and everything within it, as progressing naturally from an initial state of undifferentiated homogeneity to ever higher states of differentiated, integrated heterogeneity. The heavenly nebula becomes the solar system; the first organisms on Earth become the whole of its plant and animal diversity; the fertilized egg becomes the complexly organized adult; the tribal “social organism,” full of savagely warring egoists, becomes the well-ordered, industrially productive, and altruistically inclined civilization. At every scale, a seemingly stable 21 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: Chapman, 1851); and Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 243–268. On Spencer’s life and thought see Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

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equilibrium eventually gives way to a period of differentiation and then a new equilibrium, featuring a higher level of integration, which in turn gives way . . . In the early 1860s, with public interest in Darwinism and its controversies on the rise, he launched himself on a multi-volume expansion of what he eventually called “the Synthetic Philosophy,” beginning in 1862 with First Principles and then proceeding, over the next three decades, with books on the principles of biology, psychology (a reworking of an earlier book), sociology, and ethics. Not just “evolution” and “survival of the fittest” but “heredity,” “sociology,” and “altruism” are among the legacies to the English language of this now unread and unloved philosophical system. Darwin was ambivalent about Spencer, but Wallace was a fan, even naming his son after Spencer. It was Wallace who urged “survival of the fittest” on Darwin, arguing that it invited less confusion than “natural selection,” which suggested to some that Nature was a kind of choosy deity.22 The penultimate volume of the Synthetic Philosophy came out in 1893. The next year, Enrico Ferri, an Italian Marxist and disciple of the Darwinian criminologist-anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (who regarded criminals as evolutionary throwbacks), published Socialism and Positive Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx). It includes one of the earliest instances of the term “social Darwinism.” For Ferri, it meant not “survival of the fittest, in society as in nature” but, roughly, “the progressive class struggle picks up where the progressive natural struggle leaves off.” He aimed, he explained, to show the congruence of the best of modern science and the best of modern socialism, acknowledging that in so doing he was putting Darwin’s and Spencer’s writings to a purpose that neither approved.23 Indeed, the liberal Darwin was dismissive of socialist enthusiasm for his work, no less than he was about worries that it had vindicated a philosophy of “might is right.” Spencer’s early writings promoted common ownership of land, equal rights for women and children, anti-imperialism, and other socialist goals – it was 22 F. Howard Collins, An Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy, with a preface by Herbert Spencer (London: Williams & Norgate, 1889); Greta Jones and Robert A. Peel (eds.), Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy (London: Galton Institute, 2003); and Paul, “The Selection of the ‘Survival of the Fittest,’” 414–418. In Wallace’s copy of the Origin of Species, now in Cambridge University Library, he repeatedly crossed out “natural selection” and penciled in “survival of the fittest.” 23 Enrico Ferri, Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx), trans. R. R. La Monte (New York: International Library, 1900), with “social Darwinism” on pp. 51 and 56; Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” 42‒51; and Naomi Beck, “The Diffusion of Spencerism and Its Political Interpretations in France and Italy,” in Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy, ed. Greta Jones and Robert A. Peel (London: Galton Institute, 2003), 37‒60, esp. pp. 52‒57. The final volume of the Synthetic Philosophy came out in 1896.

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part of the attraction for Wallace – but he had become more conservative over the years, and complained to an Italian newspaper about Ferri’s book.24 Marx, however, would have taken Ferri’s side. Although mindful of the ways in which, as we shall see, Darwin’s theory mirrored (and thereby potentially legitimated) English capitalism, Marx nevertheless admired the Origin of Species hugely, telling his close collaborator Friedrich Engels in December 1860 “this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view,” and another correspondent around the same time that “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.” Marx did not, as formerly believed, offer to dedicate the second volume of Das Kapital to Darwin. But Marx did, in 1873, send Darwin a signed copy of the second German edition. When, after Marx’s death ten years later, Engels in a graveside speech in London’s Highgate Cemetery declared that “[j]ust as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history,” he was thus upholding one of Marx’s firmly held views.25

“Social Darwinism” By the time Ferri wrote, a comprehensive Darwinism-and-society bibliography would already have been long, multilingual, and nigh on impossible to sort into sensible categories. In 1894 alone, in Britain alone, the well-remembered contributions include the Scottish preacher Henry Drummond’s best-selling, altruism-celebrating Ascent of Man; the Christian-Darwinian anti-socialist Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution; a rejoinder to Kidd from the secular Darwinian socialist mathematician Karl Pearson; articles by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin on “mutual aid” as a neglected theme in human as in evolutionary history; and the reprinting of the aged Huxley’s brilliant 1893 lecture “Evolution and Ethics,” now published with a lengthy prolegomenal essay, and arguing, contra Spencer, that evolution is irrelevant to understanding the human ethical condition. (Although 24 Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics,” 229 and 237; Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, 263‒266; and Beck, “The Diffusion of Spencerism and Its Political Interpretations in France and Italy,” 56. Spencer’s anti-imperialism remained intact and potent to the end; see Chapter 19 by Jennifer Pitts. 25 Garland Allen, “Evolution and History: History as Science and Science as History,” in History and Evolution, ed. Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 211‒239, p. 211; and Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Social Thought from Marx to Bernstein (London: International Scholars, 1999), 15‒51. See Chapter 17 by Adam Kuper for another, anthropological context in which Engels put Marx and Darwin together on the scientific summit.

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Huxley believed no less firmly that civilization needed to be kept under the stern discipline of the struggle for existence, he lampooned Spencer’s version of laissezfaire as “administrative nihilism,” and Spencer himself as the sort of thinker for whom the definition of tragedy was a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact.)26 It was over the next twenty years that the term “social Darwinism” settled into its familiar meaning, coming to name just one option, or cluster of options, from within the available possibilities. That misleading narrowing is one good reason to regret the fixing of the term’s meaning in this way. Here are some others. • It has almost always been a term of abuse, not self-description. “Social Darwinism” has mainly functioned as a label for a position held by other people, of whom the labeler disapproves. That does not mean, of course, that there is no such thing as social Darwinism, any more than the preference for racists not to describe themselves thus would mean that there is no such thing as racism. But caution is nevertheless in order. • It suggests that there was nothing importantly social about Darwinism until there were social applications of it. The first in a long line of commentaries and historical studies complicating any simple science/society divide when it comes to Darwinism is a famous 1862 letter to Engels from Marx, pointing out how Darwin had seemingly rediscovered, among the animals and plants, his English industrial society with its Malthusian struggle, its division of labor, and so on. The Marxian historian of science Robert M. Young eventually used a slogan: “Darwinism is social.”27 • It encourages a characterization of Darwinism that treats the theory of natural selection as its essence, and the socially harshest interpretations of that theory as ineluctable. Consider, however, that when Darwin’s other main proposal, the genealogical, common-descent tree of life, is put in the spotlight, it is not the Malthusianism of his political class but its anti-slavery campaigning that becomes conspicuous.28 Attention to Darwinian Lamarckism, sexual selection 26 Overviews of the British discussion include Piers J. Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 27 Gregory Radick, “Is the Theory of Natural Selection Independent of Its History?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 147‒172; and Robert M. Young, “Darwinism Is Social,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 609‒638. 28 See, respectively, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (London: Michael Joseph, 1991); and Adrian Desmond and James Moore,

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gregory radick

theory, and emphasis on the instinctual, unconscious mind provide comparable reorientations of perspective.29 • It invites all manner of arbitrary splittings and/or lumpings, e.g., the declaring of someone as not a social Darwinist because his or her ideas owe far more to Haeckel and Spencer than to Darwin, or at any rate to Darwin properly understood (whatever that means); or, in the other direction, the declaring of anyone who somehow naturalizes unequal or unpeaceable social relations as a social Darwinist, no matter the actual source inspirations, or affiliated politics, or whether the relations in question hold between individuals, sexes, classes, races, nations, species . . . • It makes necessary a set of unsatisfactory distinctions marking it off from “eugenics,” which was Galton’s term for the scientifically managed breeding of better people. Eugenics was a worldwide phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century, with appeal across the political spectrum.30 Galton invented the term in 1883, but had been promoting the idea since 1865. He reckoned eugenics was needed because of the “morbific” tendencies accumulating in the human stock under the conditions of civilization.31 There is thus a sense in which eugenics was a form of social Darwinism (as a response to the concern about the biological effects of diminished struggle), and a sense in which it is an alternative to social Darwinism (since laissez-faire is diminished rather than enhanced). Darwin, among others, moved seamlessly between what we, looking back, might be tempted to distinguish as eugenical talk and social-Darwinian talk. Another candidate for this list is that social Darwinism is premised on a philosophical fallacy, known as “the naturalistic fallacy.” For present purposes, we would do better to treat this point historically, as part of the same interlinked developments that led “social Darwinism” to become the disapprovingly used label for “survival of the fittest, in society as in nature.” The Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore introduced the term “naturalistic fallacy” in his 1903 book Principia Ethica. The fallacy, he argued, is to infer that because something is natural it must therefore be good. His main example, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (London: Penguin, 2009). 29 See, for example, Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” 96‒97. 30 Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (New York: Humanity Books, 1998). 31 Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Magazine, 12(68 and 70) (June and August 1865), 157‒166 and 318‒327, p. 326; and Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), 24‒25.

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Darwinism and Social Darwinism

subjected to remorselessly forensic criticism, was Spencer’s evolutionistic ethics, which equated whatever makes for survival in the struggle with what is best. Thus did the new analytic philosophy of the twentieth century – Moore’s book was one of its key documents – begin by demolishing the claims of the synthetic philosophy of the previous century.32 Moore did not, however, use the term “social Darwinism” for the competition-is-natural-therefore-good view. That was the work, that same year, of a French sociologist, Célestin Bouglé. He used it again more prominently in 1904, lamenting the emergence recently of a new, naturalistic sociology emphasizing, as he put it, “the necessity of taking a completely hands-off attitude toward universal competition among the members of human societies; this can go by the name of social Darwinism.” Whose sociology was that? In the first instance, Bouglé had in mind Comte Georges Vacher de Lapouge, a Montpellier-based proponent of a craniological “anthroposociology,” and a one-man counterforce to general Gallic indifference to natural selection. From studies of French skulls down the centuries, Lapouge had concluded that the selection pressure which formerly had made French aristocrats not just distinctive but superior had relaxed after the French Revolution, bringing about degeneration. What was needed, he judged, was not Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity but Determinism, Inequality, and Selection. It was an illiberal and racist message, which, for the likes of Bouglé, fitted all too well with the worst tendencies in French public culture, as recently made visible during the Dreyfus affair. It was also picking up fellow travelers, notably the German craniologist Otto Amman, who likewise celebrated selection as Nature’s great improver, and at all levels, from students taking exams, to workers getting promoted, to nations conquering others in war. In naming this new hyperselectionism “social Darwinism,” Bouglé meant to sound the alarm about a position that, in his view, pretended to greater scientific authority than it had for its pessimistic take on human society.33 To sound an alarm is one thing; for others to take notice is something else. Those who did take notice were, like Bouglé, members of the international community of that newly professionalizing discipline, sociology, with 32 Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 103‒112 (for Spencer) and 141‒152 (for Moore); and Suzanne Cunningham, Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 1996). I owe the observation about “synthetic”/“analytic” to Jon Hodge. 33 Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” 100‒116; and Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 143‒158.

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gregory radick

a shared concern for working out the relationship between biology and sociology. They wondered, for example, about whether the German biologist August Weismann’s seemingly conclusive case against Lamarckian inheritance licensed pessimism about social change, or on the contrary, whether it enforced a helpful disciplinary division of labor between the biological and the social sciences. They disagreed with one another about whether eugenics was the solution to society’s ills or just another symptom of its problems. And they discussed social Darwinism, under that name, as one of the options then being explored, especially in Continental Europe.34 What transformed the fortunes of this minor sociological term was its extension, in the United States during the years of the Great Depression and its aftermath, backward to an earlier generation of American social commentators, and laterally to American biological scientists whose work was judged reactionary. William Graham Sumner, Spencer’s long-deceased advocate at Yale (and Yale’s first professor of sociology), became a social Darwinist. So did Earnest Hooton, a Harvard physical anthropologist who, in his book Why Men Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa (1940), had decried the “biological havoc” being wrought in Europe by equality-preaching humanitarian groups. A reviewer was unsparing: “Such characteristic antidemocratic, ruthless, socialDarwinian utterances indicate why Hooton has become the scientific playboy of fascist and neo-fascist groups in this country.”35 Extension at an enduringly large scale took place shortly thereafter. Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), a Ph.D.-dissertation-turned-first-book by the young American historian Richard Hofstadter, was an instant classic. In Hofstadter’s version, Spencer served as the house philosopher for the capitalist free-for-all that was Gilded Age America. Spencer’s devotees included not merely university professors such as Sumner but the great robber-baron industrialists of the age. In 1889 the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote of the law of competition

34 Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” esp. 2‒5, 38, 54‒55, 63‒100, and 116‒126; and Maurizio Meloni, Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 28‒29 and 131‒135. 35 Both Sumner’s and Hooton’s taggings as social Darwinists were the work of Bernhard J. Stern, a Marxian sociologist of medicine based (like Richard Hofstadter) at Columbia University, then the American headquarters of progressive social science. See Bernhard J. Stern, “William Graham Sumner,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (New York: 1930‒1935), vol. XIX, 463; and Bernhard J. Stern, “Recent Literature of Race and Culture Contacts,” Science and Society, 5(2) (1941), 173–188, p. 181. The latter provoked a fascinating exchange of letters on social Darwinism, with contributions from J. B. S. Haldane and Ashley Montagu.

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Darwinism and Social Darwinism

[W]hile the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.36

Of course, this same period in American history is often called “the Progressive Era,” as Hofstadter well knew. But though he gave more space in the book to the critics of social Darwinism than to social Darwinism per se, and allowed that there were progressive as well as conservative readings of the Synthetic Philosophy, he was clear about the main drift. “Conservatism and Spencer’s philosophy,” insisted Hofstadter, “walked hand in hand . . . Acceptance of the Spencerian philosophy brought with it a paralysis of the will to reform.” And he called some impressive witnesses for the prosecution, notably the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In dissenting from a court ruling that, in the name of the fourteenth amendment of the US constitution, struck down an attempt to regulate working hours, Holmes observed drily that “the fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”37 It was the postwar success of Hofstadter’s book that put the now-familiar meaning of “social Darwinism” into wider circulation. His message that Spencer, not Darwin, was ultimately responsible for social Darwinism suited an era coping with revelations about the Nazi abuse of biology and eager to see in the new, genetical Darwinism – which had no truck with the old race hierarchies – a reclaiming of the scientific and moral high ground. From the sociobiology debates of the 1970s to the present, “social Darwinist” has remained an epithet flung in an accusatory way at opponents whose views are judged too close for comfort to an ideology that many believe lay behind Auschwitz.38 36 Andrew Carnegie, “[The Gospel of] Wealth,” North American Review, 148 (1889), 653‒665, p. 655. Cf. Robert J. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979; with a new preface 1988), 82‒86, where Carnegie emerges as at best a piecemeal Spencerian. More or less everything in Hoftstadter’s book is subjected to annihilating revisionism in Bannister’s. 37 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 46‒47; and Thomas C. Leonard, “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 71(1) (2009), 37‒51. 38 Bellomy, “‘Social Darwinism’ Revisited,” 8‒9 and 14‒16; and Meloni, Political Biology, 136‒187. At the time of writing, the Googling of “Trump Social Darwinism” is an efficient way of gauging the term’s currency.

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gregory radick

The Case of Germany and Austria The linking of Nazi fascism and social Darwinism, so named, dates back to World War II. It is explicit in the criticism of Hooton just quoted, from 1941. That same year saw the publication of From Luther to Hitler, by the political historian and military man William McGovern. An early and widely read entry in the explaining-Hitler genre, the book included a chapter on German social Darwinism, depicted as the latest, scientifically updated expression of old blood-and-soil, master-race fascist impulses that ran deep in German culture. When Hofstadter was at work on his dissertation on social Darwinism, there was thus no historical topic that was more topical.39 In the decades since then, the question of Nazism’s debt to Darwinism has, if anything, become still more emotionally charged and polemically complex. Even so, the best of the accumulated scholarship has clarified many of the facts to be contended with as well as the difficulties in interpreting them.40 For the German-speaking lands in the nineteenth century, the general European pattern – with diverse liberal-to-left readings of Darwinism’s social implications bulking large, and right-of-center readings a conspicuous presence mainly toward century’s end – holds good. Nineteenth-century Germany was where Darwinism and socialism had the greatest uptake in Europe; indeed, to a large extent, they marched together. Marx and Engels were representative of the eagerness with which German socialists, for all their differences, embraced Darwinism, from the early 1860s onward.41 In the wake of the supposedly Darwinism-inspired Paris Commune, the notion that Darwinism entailed socialism became so widespread that in the late 1870s Haeckel sought to reassure his colleagues in the German scientific establishment that it was not true. Against fantasies of social equality, Haeckel insisted, Darwinism taught that, in society as in nature, the struggle for existence pitilessly elevates the born aristocrats, consigning the rest to death. There was nothing democratic, let alone socialist, about the Darwinian process.42

39 William McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist–Nazi Political Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); and Bannister, Social Darwinism, 249‒251. 40 For an insightful and even-handed overview up to the mid 1990s, see Richard J. Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism,” in his Rereading German Social History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800‒1996 (London: Routledge, 1997), 119‒144. 41 Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism,” esp. 120‒132; and Weikart, Socialist Darwinism. 42 Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science and Teaching, preface by T. H. Huxley (London: Kegan & Paul, 1879), 90‒94, excerpted (from a differently titled French edition) in Ferri, Socialism and Modern Science, 14‒17.

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Darwinism and Social Darwinism

Haeckel’s pronouncements along these lines can make him sound like a proto-Nazi – an impression compounded when one considers, for example, his energetic promotion of a scheme of racial hierarchy placing the German race at the pinnacle, and his belief (which Hitler later shared) that the nation’s criminals should be killed in order to balance out the deaths in war of the finest biological specimens. Yet Haeckel influenced many people with nothing like those politics: consider only, on the other side of the German–Austrian border, Sigmund Freud, from an emancipated Jewish background, whose Darwinism was not just fundamental to psychoanalysis (especially the signature Haeckelian evolutionary doctrine, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” i.e., the growing individual climbs up the evolutionary ladder of the lineage), but was part and parcel of Freud’s identity as a modern liberal. Furthermore, Haeckel was, on Darwinian grounds, a pacifist. Throughout World War I, the Monist League he founded backed the case for pacifism. Far from celebrating Haeckel, the Nazis purged his books from public libraries.43 Beyond Haeckel himself, there was nevertheless, around the turn of the century, a rightward shift in the German-speaking public discussion of Darwinism, along with heightened self-consciousness about the biological condition of the Volk and the need to safeguard it. Out of sixty submissions to an essay contest sponsored in 1900 by the arms-maker Krupp on the question “What can we learn from the theory of evolution about domestic political development and state legislation?,” a mere handful took a socialist line, and just one a liberal line. The rest argued in various ways for greater state control of human affairs. The idea that, for Darwinian reasons, the state ought to keep criminals from reproducing, by segregation if not sterilization or extermination, became a commonplace. An attempt to legalize abortion failed, with opponents underscoring the need to keep the German birth-rate high enough to supply good soldiers in the next war. By the time of World War I, an aggressive, militaristic, racialized Darwinism, nurtured in the meetings and publications of the Pan-German League and combining – after the fashion of Lapouge, Ammon, and others – the race fatalism of the mid-century French thinker Joseph Arthur de Gobineau with Darwinian (and, for German biologists especially, Weismannian) selectionism 43 Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism,” esp. 119‒120 and 125‒126; and Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (London: Basic Books, 1979), esp. 258‒264. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 244‒247 and 269‒276, points out that Haeckel, no anti-Semite, ranked Jews near to Germans in his hierarchy.

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gregory radick

and progressivism, had become rife in the German high command.44 A witness to their biological-necessity-of-war table talk, stressing the creative potential of prolonged war to test the fitness of nations and so advance the species, was an American evolutionary biologist, Vernon Kellogg, who was there with a US-led humanitarian relief effort in Belgium and northern France. Kellogg arrived in Europe in 1915 a pacifist, but left convinced that, for the sake of the species, Germany needed to be destroyed, the ideology of its leaders utterly discredited.45 In the event, of course, the defeat of the Central Powers, and the extreme economic and political crises thus unleashed across the German-speaking lands, fed a sense of national humiliation in the 1920s that, for some, only increased the attraction of biologistic diagnoses and prognoses. (State-of-thenation discussions of the day moved easily across medical, evolutionary, botanical, and zoological imagery and terminology.) For too long, the German people had permitted degenerate elements, from within and without, to dilute the Aryan purity that was their evolutionary birthright and destiny, and had suffered the consequences. The way forward was clear. Here was how Hitler put the point, in Mein Kampf (1925), in a (representatively repellent) passage on the duty of the Aryan not to mate with the Jew: The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind in the ruck everything that is weak or diseased or wavering . . . And this struggle is a means of furthering the health and powers of resistance in the species. Thus it is one of the causes underlying the process of development towards a higher quality of being. If the case were different the progressive process would cease, and even retrogression might set in . . . If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionarily higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.46 44 Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics,” 238‒239; and Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism,” 132‒137. 45 Vernon Kellogg, Headquarters Nights (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1917), esp. 22‒23, 28‒33, and 53. Pre-war, pro-war German Darwinism can be sampled in Friedrich von Bernhardi, “The Right to Make War,” from his Germany and the Next War (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), in Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Michael Ruse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 134‒137. On the wider debate, see Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the “Origin of Species” to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the role of Kellogg’s book in the making of American creationism, see Stephen Jay Gould, “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign,” in his Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 416‒431. 46 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939). On Hitler, Nazism, and Darwinism, see Richard Weikart, “The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought,” German Studies Review, 36(3) (2013), 537‒556, drawing on his From

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Darwinism and Social Darwinism

When, after the further crises of the Depression, Hitler came to power in early 1933, he received a letter of congratulations from Alfred Ploetz, who hailed him as “the man who had the will to implement racial hygiene.” The “racial” in “racial hygiene” – the term mainly used in Germany for “eugenics” – was indeterminate between the German race and the human race when Ploetz set up the Racial Hygiene Society in 1905, and the German movement made room for the usual range of political motivations. (Ploetz was a socialist, who had lived for a time in a utopian community in Iowa.) Only after World War I did the Aryan supremacists gradually gain the upper hand. Even so, up to 1933, German racial hygienists looked on with envy at what was happening in the United States, where compulsory sterilization of the insane and “feeble minded” (in the language of the day) was increasingly the norm, and where many states had laws preventing interracial marriage on the books. Under the new Nazi regime, however, they made up for lost time rapidly, instituting compulsory sterilization on a scale that soon dwarfed American efforts but going much further. The innovations of the 1930s included not just laws forbidding interracial marriage but a breeding program pairing racially “pure” German women with SS officers, the introduction of the death penalty for a huge range of even minor crimes, and then euthanasia on a mass scale for the mentally and physically disabled.47 What, if anything, has Darwinism got to do with explaining the next, unprecedented step, into systematic genocide? It is easy enough to characterize two opposite, and equally unappealing, options. At the one pole, the claim that Darwinism was somehow responsible for the death camps – as though, once the theory of natural selection began circulating, death camps would eventually follow, somewhere or other, sometime or other – is typically insinuated rather than stated, as part of a wider attack on the scientific status of evolution. At the other pole is the claim that Darwinism had nothing to do with the death camps – perhaps because, as a recent recasting has it, Hitler was no Darwinian, since everything in Mein Kampf can plausibly be traced to

Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 47 Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 20 and 84‒91; Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics,” 236 and 239; Richard Evans, “From Racial Hygiene to Auschwitz,” in his Rereading German Social History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800‒1996 (London: Routledge, 1997), 145‒148, quotation from Ploetz on p. 147; and James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

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gregory radick

some other source, and nothing in it suggests that Hitler knew, let alone understood, the Origin of Species’ distinctive proposals.48 A better answer, unsurprisingly, lies somewhere between these extremes. Not just any history would have led a nation from Darwinism to the death camps; nor is the challenge of understanding the German–Austrian case well addressed by asking whether Hitler would have passed an exam on the Origin of Species. Among the documents we should consider beyond Mein Kampf is the Wannsee Protocol, a set of minutes drawn up by the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann from a meeting that took place on January 20, 1942. It is the closest thing ever found to a document spelling out the logic of Nazi genocide. And that logic is, distressingly but distinctly, Darwinian. About midway through, it is explained that, with the Jews having been shipped to the East and forced into slave labor, many of them will undoubtedly die through attrition – at which point the remainder will have to be “treated accordingly.” Why? Because this remainder will be “a product of natural selection,” and so potentially the nucleus of a revived Jewish race, now hardier than ever.49 The final word should be given not to Eichmann but to a brilliant historian of Nazi Germany, Richard Evans. It would, Evans counsels, be a mistake to see Nazi invocations of the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, and so on as a kind of window dressing – “merely a cover for state terrorism,” as he puts it – for “it also provided a discursive practice which allowed that terrorism to be exercised, and helped remove all restraint from those who directed it, carried it out and drove it on, by persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science and nature.”50 48 Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?,” in his Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 192‒242. 49 “The Wannsee Protocol,” tr. Dan Rogers (revising the text made for the Nuremberg Trials), available online at the Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ the-wannsee-protocol; and Stephen Jay Gould, “The Most Unkindest Cut,” in his Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 309‒319. 50 Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism,” 138.

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13

Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche john toews

Historicism as a general framework for thinking about human existence was connected to the development of the European national state after 1815 not only in Germany, but across Western Europe. It was a critical component in the formation of a public culture in which the emergence of new collective identities was tied to the production of narrative scripts creating the memory of a common past. Increasing recognition of the value of historical research and historiography was entangled in this process, as historians teaching in public universities or writing for an expanding literate public became the recognized spokespersons for the collective memory that created and sustained the common identity of the otherwise fragmented populations of the emerging nation-states. Both the articulation of national borders as cultural boundaries and the definition of nation-states as primary sites for integrating ethnic and ethical identities were central to nineteenth-century historicism; and the emergence of a professional academic discipline for the production of publicly validated historical knowledge delineating a common past was important in both of these processes. Historicism was defined most of all by the belief that reconstruction of the meaning of the past could sustain the meaning of existence in the present, and that historical understanding was a necessary condition for determining the creative possibilities of human individuals both in the present and in the future. In this chapter I will explore the ways in which the historical transformations of the revolutionary watershed period of 1789–1815 merged cultural difference and temporal difference in ways that framed the development of historicism in the nineteenth century. I will follow the personal itinerary of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who represented the professional institutionalization of history as an autonomous discipline, but who also participated in the broader cultural discussions concerning the implications of defining human existence as essentially historical during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Reading Ranke historically also 301

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john toews

serves as an important entry into the process of living and thinking human existence as historical in the decades between the integrative and totalizing metaphysics of Romantic and Idealist philosophies of history and the reflective critique of the assumptions of historicism during the last quarter of the century. This will also help us to understand the tensions in Rankean historicism in the work of the “post-Rankean” historians Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) as well as the critical reconsideration of historicism in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).

Ranke: Historical Anthropology and Self-Determination Much of the scholarly debate about the defining characteristics of nineteenthcentury historicism has focused on the issue of continuity and discontinuity with eighteenth-century traditions of historical thinking and historiographical practice. It has also addressed the question of whether the era of political turmoil between the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and the end of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815 marked a radical break with inherited understandings of temporal and cultural difference, and transformed multiple stories of human development into a singular history of “man” as historically fashioned and self-fashioning. At this juncture Ranke was engaged in the transition from his initial immersion in the religious and secular (Lutheran Protestant and neoclassical humanist) value systems of his culture in the elite boarding school of Schulpforta to the more advanced philological, philosophical, and theological study of those traditions at the University of Leipzig. Central to Ranke’s inheritance was the commitment to a critical linguistic and also historical analysis of the biblical and classical textual sources that sustained cultural meaning in the present. During his pre-university years Ranke was often absorbed in the philosophical and literary texts of classical Greek culture as expressions of an immanent or naturalistic humanism that could be imagined as universally valid. But by 1815, as he entered the mature phase of his training, honing his linguistic and philological skills, and became a spokesperson for historical traditions of cultural meaning, he began to rethink the content of his intellectual inheritance in light of the current political turmoil: the defeat of Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions, the emergence of pan-German ethnic nationalism in resistance to those ambitions, and the battle over the nature and appropriate institutional forms of political authority. A number of fragmentary, unpublished writings as well as extensive diary 302

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Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche

entries from Ranke’s early years reveal his intense engagement with the question of how to give meaning to the historian’s vocation. Ranke’s process of thinking through the theoretical assumptions of inherited traditions of historical self-consciousness is most evident in an essay fragment entitled “Man and Nature” that he wrote during his last two years as a university student at Leipzig.1 This essay empathetically worked its way through what seem to be contrasting, even contradictory, conceptions of historical existence. Following the inspiration of the neo-humanist naturalism of Herder and Goethe, who were dominant figures in the emergence of a distinctively German public culture in the late eighteenth century, Ranke examined the implications of perceiving man “as product and part of nature” when nature itself was experienced as a creative power, rather than as a “created” order of atomized objects. Human existence, including both human individuality and the collective existence of “peoples” or cultural ethnicities, was conceived as a particular combination of drives and feelings that shaped the forms of embodied human identity in relation to other forms of natural life and the world that they shared. Even the most advanced forms of consciousness, self-consciousness, and interpersonal social interaction that characterized human existence were conceived as expressive individuations of nature. Ranke connected the investigation of this immanent naturalism to an aesthetic form of knowing. Aesthetic representations articulated the implicit presence of the universal substance of nature in any particular form, of divine creative purpose within created existence. As a part of the proliferating and changing organic forms of nature, human existence was temporally specific, being marked by particular forms of association among individuals and relationships to the environment that differed from one period to another, and thus “historical.” Human self-determination, or “freedom,” implied the spontaneous expression of the potential determinations of nature, undistorted by arbitrary “external” impositions of abstract order. Moreover, knowledge of the essence or “idea” of humanity as an historically situated form of existence was not separated from knowledge of nature. Rather, the human was imagined as a development within nature. In Ranke’s youthful ruminations, the conception of historical reality as an organic totality of self-expressive manifestations of natural energies was confronted with a rather different conception of historical reality as the product of autonomous action, a conception grounded in the ethical 1 Leopold von Ranke, “Mensch und Natur”(1816–1818), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1973), vol. III, 223–232.

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philosophies of Kant and especially Fichte. The moral perspective of naturalistic historical anthropology was that of free self-expression of latent “ideas” in appropriately individuated cultural forms. Accepting one’s identity as the expressive fashioning of unconscious natural powers was the mark of moral freedom. But as soon as human beings recognized their possibility of choosing – and not just reaffirming – their own fate and shaping themselves according to acts of self-legislation, they were no longer “products” of nature but independent producers distinguished from, and potentially opposed to, their natural determinations. Natural powers were no longer the inevitable driving force of all human activity; they could also be experienced as the material means for creative self-production. Ranke insisted that the selfdetermining moral subject could not make the world in its own image or simply dissolve the reality of nature into a self-projection. Consciousness of the ethical determination of the human will revealed that human subjectivity was not just the finite manifestation of natural energy, but a self-determining activity with potential access to an infinite power that transcended the natural world. Subjectivity thus functioned as the ground for actions that might transform that world, including the human subject’s own physical being. To be historical in this second sense entailed more than simply reaffirming one’s particularity as an individuation of natural energies at a particular time and within a particular environment. It meant acting in time and space so as to change one’s relation to one’s unconscious energies, to others, and to the world, and thus continually to refashion one’s identity, both individual and collective. Ranke avoided any one-sided, reductive resolution of this tension between the culturally expressive and the actively self-determining forms of historical subjectivity. Instead he affirmed the tension between the natural and transcendental dimensions of human agency as an indication of the peculiar nature of what it meant to live human existence as historical. In this sense he reaffirmed the tensions between historical anthropology and the philosophy of the transcendental ego of the late eighteenth century and resisted attempts by thinkers like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel to overcome these differences in a radically transformative actualization of “natural supernaturalism”2 that merged spirit and nature in a teleological process of self-integration. In his first forays into thinking about being historical, Ranke distanced himself from the utopian Romanticism of the revolutionary decade, in which the ethical 2 As analyzed in the brilliant study by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).

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freedom of subjective self-determination was seen as a product of the immanent logic of human development, and historical identity was construed as submission to a metahistorical process. We can better grasp the implications of Ranke’s historical method when we recall his private reflections on this period of political and cultural turmoil. Although he did not take an active public role in the political opposition to Napoleonic domination or in the war of national liberation in 1813–1815, his private writings express sympathy for the resistance to French imperialism by the nationalist student movement and its cultural spokespersons. He clearly believed that the process of liberation from foreign domination entailed a liberating recovery and self-recognition of an essential German ethnic identity, a “natural” historical power that was finally to achieve an appropriate cultural manifestation in the practices and institutions of public life. He saw the external liberation from French rule as an inner liberation: It would affirm Herder’s conception of historical identity as the manifestation of the evolving heterogeneous ethnic organism of the German “people.”3 Ranke’s student diaries and fragmentary papers also explored the meanings of religious identity within the two dimensions of his emerging historicist framework. On a number of occasions he expressed a profound awareness of being overtaken by an almost mystical experience of identification with the infinite power that was articulated in the individuated forms of both natural and cultural phenomena, a consciousness of dissolving into a universe in which “All is One and One is All” and in which selfaffirmation became indistinguishable from immersion in the totality of Being.4 In such moments Ranke imagined his philological study of historical texts as a path toward unveiling the totality of divine life in all of its individuated difference. But Ranke’s persistent attempts to unpack the meaning of Martin Luther’s writings and the religious (and political) transformation they initiated revealed the other dimension of historical existence – the potential for commitment to a power that transcended the immanent determinations of individuated life and made possible the control and transformation of those determinations through ethical actions grounded in religious belief in transcendentally grounded universal truths. For Ranke, investigation of the textual articulations of the Lutheran Reformation within the historical 3 Leopold von Ranke, “Aus den Papieren eines Landpfarrers” (1818), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1973), vol. III, 467–483. 4 Leopold von Ranke, “Tagebücher” (1816–1817), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1964), vol. I, 141–142.

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development of Christianity became a means for examining the possibility that a universal ethical order of self-determining “free” subjects could emerge from and ultimately transform those historically individuated determinations of archaic natural powers manifest in the cultural communities of ethnic “peoples.” But such transformations were dependent on historical actions by individuals who grounded their intentions in a religious commitment to a universal, objective truth that transcended their immanent or “natural” existence and their ethno-cultural contextual determinations. By the time Ranke had completed his university studies, it had become clear to him that although philology, defined broadly as the linguistic and historical examination of the traces that constituted the text of the past, was an important dimension of his search for the connection between ethnic identity and ethical action, it was the historical investigation of subjective agency working within, but not necessarily fully determined by, specific temporal and cultural frameworks that would open the possibility of grasping the meaning of historical existence for his own age. Ranke chose the vocation of historian as a way of addressing the questions of personal self-formation, collective identity, and religious or ontological grounding of human existence that had emerged in the political and cultural transformations of the postRevolutionary and post-Napoleonic era, and which he was convinced could not be adequately addressed or answered by the inherited forms of historical anthropology and philosophies of subjective freedom, or by Romantic attempts to fuse them into a metahistorical, teleological narrative of absolute identity. It was in the historical sequence of events produced by the actions and interactions of human beings that Ranke saw the tension being played out between the immanent determinations of ethno-cultural individuation and public activity motivated by transcendent principles directed toward disciplining, shaping, and transforming such individuations. As Ranke made clear in the opening paragraph of his first work as an historian, The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 (published in 1824), he came to the study of history with both a clear viewpoint (Ansicht) and a clear intention (Absicht).5 His viewpoint was that the three Latin (French, Spanish, and Italian) and the three Germanic (German, English, and Scandinavian) peoples or cultural nations of Europe constituted a differentiated but recognizable ethno-cultural unity, the articulation or formal expression of an “idea,” which was not identical with the geographic 5 Leopold von Ranke, “Vorrede der ersten Ausgabe” (1824), in Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1874), v.

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boundaries of the European continent or the religious boundaries of Christendom. The present intention that drove Ranke’s examination of the fate of this individuated cultural identity in the modern era of state formation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the desire to gain some clarity about how the naturally grounded energies of ethno-cultural identity could find an appropriate political form that would transform ethnic determinism into a public community of ethical self-determination, a problem made acutely relevant by the apparent failures of the universalizing revolutionary and imperial projects of the period between 1789 and 1815. By tracing the interlocking sequences of political actions at the dawn of the modern era in which the public representatives of the major cultural nations tried to create a pluralistic order of mutual recognition that affirmed their differences, Ranke hoped to think through the question of historical existence as both ethno-cultural determination and self-determining ethical action. He admitted that the historical intentions fueling his search for historical knowledge and meaning had ultimately remained unfulfilled. Despite evidence of an underlying pattern of common development and occasional signs of the potential for creation of political forms of interactive recognition, the hopedfor singular “history” of the Germanic and Latin peoples as a history of emergent modern Europe remained a plural ensemble of “histories,” in which the universalizing power of ethical principle was relegated to the external judgments of the historian/narrator. The main result of Ranke’s initial attempt to find an historical answer to the pressing issues of integrating ethnic determination and ethical self-determination in the public life and institutions of the evolving modern nation-state was recognition of the robust resistance of ethno-cultural differences to any attempts to impose a uniform political order or homogeneous religious identity. Thinking historically did not immediately answer the questions that drove Ranke’s investigations. But in some sense that was not the point. More significant was his reformulation of historical thinking not as the recreation of a teleological process, but rather as an inquiry into the conditions defining the meaning of human existence in the present. Ranke’s choice of the historical vocation as the royal road for examining fundamental questions of human identity and ethical purpose in the modern world shaped his perspective on questions of historical methods of research and representation. History’s role, he claimed in 1824, was not to judge the past or derive exemplary lessons for the guidance of later generations, but to reconstruct the human activity of the past in its own terms, “as it essentially was (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).” In this famous phrase Ranke articulated his 307

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commitment to uncovering and presenting human actions of the past in the immediacy of their actual occurrence and the framework of their original intentions, allowing the historian and his reader to think along with those actions without necessarily prejudging their consequences or results, or inserting them within the script of a closed framework. The historian’s central focus should be “to grasp the event in itself, in its human comprehensibility, its unity and its fullness,”6 to understand the workings of the essential Ideas articulated in the immediacy of particularized appearances. But this research agenda was clearly framed by the question of defining the meaning of human existence in the historical present. Although Ranke has often been seen as a historical ‘positivist,’ he did not see his task as simply an ‘objective’ accounting of empirically verifiable ‘facts.’ He understood objectivity as an intersubjective relation between the questioner and the witness. To uncover the undistorted testimony of historical actors was to touch upon the essential meaning of actions before these actions had been interpreted by others for their own purposes. The immediacy of historical testimony was evidence of the ongoing human attempt to transform the given “natural” identity of an ethnic people into the self-conscious collective identity of a political state, whose laws and institutions gave form to the processes of self-determination and mutual recognition while also forging heterogeneous ethnic communities into a common transnational culture.

Culture, Politics, and Religion: Ranke’s Historicism after 1830 Following the liberal-populist overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty in France in 1830 and the ensuing political turmoil, Ranke’s attempts to think historically about the relations between ethno-cultural, “natural” peoples and communities of self-determining subjects ruled by ethical principles gained a new focus. In his historical investigations, politics now became the primary concern, both as the active mediator between ethnic life and ethical community and as the privileged site of their ultimate integration. Between 1832 and 1836 Ranke even took on the role of a public intellectual with a clearly partisan conservative political message as a founding editor of the Historical Political Journal (Historisch-politische Zeitschrift). He was disturbed especially by the political divisions between conservative patriarchal authorities and populist democratic forces within Europe’s and Germany’s ethnic 6 Ranke, “Vorrede der ersten Ausgabe,” vii–viii.

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communities. This inner political division made more problematic the historical scenario in which the recognition and expression of ethnic identity in language and literature created the foundations for the political “forms” of the modern sovereign state as an ethical community. Conscious political action was required to play a more determining role in the creation of an ethical community, and this role demanded a principled universal foundation (a religious ground) more powerful than the natural “life” of the people, which seemed to have devolved into the atomized aggregate of the masses. Ranke continued to insist that cultural nationality was the living substance of any viable modern state that purported to function as an ethical community and to reject the notion that the modern sovereign state represented a universal form of community that simply dissolved ethnic difference into ethical identity. “Every people must have its own peculiar politics,” he insisted.7 Politics should not override or displace ethnic difference but help it to flourish, by protecting it from external threats of foreign intrusion or internal threats of ego-driven fragmentation, by organizing material resources to protect cultural autonomy, and most of all by creating appropriate institutions of socialization or cultural identity formation that would bind people together as self-determining citizens of an ethical community through voluntary obedience to the “spiritual” unity that defined them, a unity articulated in the historical narrative of the growth and development of the cultural nation into a sovereign nation-state. By the mid 1830s Ranke had clearly chosen post-1815 Prussia as the appropriate form of a German nation-state defined by what he saw as benevolent patriarchal relations between prince and people, powerful disciplinary protection of external borders and internal order, and a focus on administrative rather than parliamentary institutions to organize the implicit will of the people through specialized cadres of functionaries who understood their roles as the historical representatives and educators of national identity formation. But Ranke clearly did not think that the political rulers of the national state could simply read the implicit natural will of the ethnic nation, its divinely instituted “genius” or “living substance,” and transform it into the individualized spiritual substance of a community of law informed by a common ethical consciousness. Controlling and disciplining the ethnic community, and especially educating it into voluntary obedience to the principles of a unified ethical public life, required the foundation of a moral authority that transcended the natural 7 Leopold von Ranke, “Frankreich und Deutschland” (1832), in Zur Geschichte Frankreichs und Deutschlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Alfred Dove, in Sämmtliche Werke, 54 vols. (Leipzig, 1867–1890), vol. 49–50, 72.

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authority of the ethnic life of the people. In fact, the construction of the historical narrative of national identity was not merely an anthropological account based on indigenous myth, language, and literature, but a story of the ways in which universal ethical principles had become integrated into this ethnic life through individual actions in time and had been sustained by the moral traditions that those actions had created. The problem of defining the ontological ground or transcendent foundation of the ethical principles that informed the political actions which produced the narrative of the emergence of an ethical community from the natural state of ethnic life dominated much of Ranke’s thinking in the 1830s. Classical nineteenth-century historicism was characterized at its very core by the relationship between immanent historical existence and the transcendent other that made this existence not only possible but also meaningful. The historicist narrative of a sequence of ethically motivated actions in time and space that transformed the implicit identity of ethnic life into the explicit consciousness of a unified ethical will required an account of the ways in which the transcendent reality of the universal spiritual being that sustained the freedom of subjective agency intervened in the immanent process of individuated cultural development. Ranke’s great multi-volume works of the 1830s and 1840s, The Roman Popes during the Last Four Centuries and German History during the Age of the Reformation, explored the historical relationship between ethical universality grounded in a transcendent spiritual power and the ethnic individuality of immanent cultural life through an historical account of church–state relations within European Christianity. His work on the papacy described the ultimately unsuccessful historical attempts to impose the universal principles of a transcendent spiritual order on the individualized humanity of ethnic tribes and peoples in the form of centralized, homogeneous temporal order. Ranke’s account makes clear that by the mid 1830s he had come to the conclusion that a historical knowledge of human existence was premised on a commitment to the transcendent truth of Christian religious principles. The freedom of the will that informed the ethics of a community of self-legislators was grounded on a purified apostolic faith, in which voluntary submission to “the true and eternal principles of religion” would produce a “unity of conviction” based on a “pure and simple consciousness of the ever-enduring, all-pervasive presence of God.”8 It was the recovery of this apostolic faith that defined 8 Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes: Their Church and State, trans. E. Fowler, 3 vols. (New York: Colonial Press, 1901), vol. III, 173. This passage was excised after the first edition and does not appear in the Sämmtliche Werke.

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the message of Martin Luther and the German Reformation and it was precisely this purification of the subjective experience of religious truth from all earthly mediations that released the power of ethical actions that could enter into and possibly transform the relations of the immanent, individuated life of historical peoples. Paradoxically, it was the separation of the grounds of ethical principle from the immanent processes of ethnic existence that opened up the possibility of liberating those processes from the immanent necessities of natural life. Through actions based on religious belief, the universalism of ethical principle entered into the heterogeneous organism of individuated historical life. Historical knowledge was not restricted to the immanent processes of ethnic life, but encompassed historical traces of the interaction between universal principles and the particular conditions of ethnic existence. It thus allowed for the emergence of a common “human” or at least European cultural tradition that amalgamated the individuated ethnic “ideas” of national cultures with the transcendent “ideas” of a shared ethical life. Historical writing for Ranke reconstructed the contextual totality of liferelations that gave individual phenomena immanent meaning. Purified of the distorting lens of individual subjectivity, the documentary traces of the past emerged as representations of a life whose interconnectedness displayed the foundations of all human life in “the ground of universal life.” However, Ranke’s growing confidence in the 1830s that history could replace philosophy as the universal knowledge of human existence was based on his incorporation of the transcendent dimension – the ground of human freedom in the universal moral order ruled by the personality of an absolute subject or God – into the project of historical understanding and the expansion of his theory of ideas to include not only the implicit divine essences actualizing themselves in the patterned totality of historical cultures, but also ideas of a transcendent, infinite reality that entered the historical process as the empirically recoverable convictions, ethical ideals, and cultural ideologies of specific individuals and groups. By tracing the emergence, diffusion, conflict, and transformation of religious ideas the historian could discover how human words and deeds not only exemplified or “expressed” the hidden organizing power of the national Idea, but actually created, in the specific actions of historical events, a constructed order of their own, which could then become the customary frame of moral assumptions for future generations. The source of this constructed historical meaning was the relation of human actions to the supra-historical transcendent; its practical actualization emerged through an appropriation of the transcendent “idea” as a goal of self-conscious individual and collective action. 311

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The transcendent ground of being to which religious ideas referred was not itself an actor within history. History was not the revelation of a “becoming God” or a progressive self-expression of the redemptive reconciliation of the finite and the infinite. In this sense Ranke continued to reject the identity philosophy of Romantic and Hegelian forms of historicism. The transcendent entered history through individual conviction, choice, and action, as the mark of human freedom. The religious relation to the transcendent, articulated in the doctrines, liturgies, and sacraments of churches but also, Ranke increasingly suggested, in the post-ecclesiastical tradition of a universal, deistically grounded humanism, broke through the apparent necessity of the evolution of immanent relations. In the 1840s Ranke rejected Hegelianism not only because it dissolved concrete existence in abstract thought, but also because it denied “individual human consciousness” as the real subject of history.9 In most eras and among most national cultures, freedom took the form of customary obedience and conformity to inherited religious ideas. But on those rare occasions when the reproduction of religious meaning veered into historical discontinuity and qualitative change, the words and deeds of individual human subjects would break into the ongoing necessities of life and the customary forms of religious meaning, providing an experience of new possibilities for the construction of the relation to the transcendent and opening new possibilities for the way human lives were lived. The appropriate representational form for Ranke’s view of the relationship among national cultural totalities, inherited discourses concerning the connection between finite existence and its infinite ground, and the free acts through which a recreation of the discourse of transcendence opens up new possibilities for the direction of national cultures was a narrative of contingent human action that only in retrospect displayed the larger coherence of divine purpose. In such narratives the immanent meanings of cultural development were set in relation to the construction of meanings based on direct experience of the transcendent sphere in order to produce a genealogy of the contingent events that had shaped the tradition that confronted the present as a fund of inherited meaning. The narrative of Ranke’s German History was organized around such historical conjunctures in which creative intervention and discontinuity had been possible. In the last volume of his history Ranke reflected on this post-Romantic, “existential” or “positive” historicism that informed his narrative: 9 Leopold von Ranke, “Neuere Geschichte, seit dem Westfälischen Frieden” (1847), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1964), vol. IV, 187–188.

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From the distance of centuries we can perceive the great combinations that are inherent in the nature of things; the individual action in every individual present, however, cannot depend on them. Here it is a matter of the correct handling of what is immediately given, on the good cause which one represents, on the moral force one can exert. The moments which condition the progress of world history are, I would like to say, a divine secret. The value of man is grounded in his self-determination and activity.10

The emergence of an ethical community of free subjects was not just the perfected expression of the immanent potentialities of the national genius, an objectification of the implicit goal of the collective cultural subject, but a constructive shaping of that culture on the foundation of an experience of the transcendent grounds of all cultures and historical possibilities, a construction that expressed the freedom of human beings to make the world conform to (or to fail to make the world conform to) divine truth through moral action. The site of ethical community for Ranke was the “national” state, the political world produced by the interaction of the immanent forces of ethnic and linguistic tradition and the moral convictions grounded in religious ideas about absolute, transcendent truth. In the relations between church and state, the church became the exemplar of the transcendent grounds of free action that could break the internal causal nexus of ethno-linguistic national life and produce a new moral order within the constructed forms of the state. Within the political constitution of the state the inherent necessities of the national idea were modified according to a will infused with a conviction of universal transcendent truth. The national culture provided the specific contextual limitations within which such ethical construction could occur. Ranke affirmed the freedom of the moral subject as the creator of its own history. But religious convictions manifested themselves in effective action only if they conformed to the objective foundations of human existence both in the “maternal” ground of “natural” being and in the transcendent spiritual ground of divine “paternal” authority. The human subject could exert its will as a free agent only by conforming to the restrictions imposed by its status as a finite creation. To exist historically was to exist simultaneously or stereoscopically as cultural product and self-determining subject. In Ranke’s historical constructions the description of human existence in terms of a narrative of relations between religion and nationality, church and 10 Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, ed. Paul Joachimsen, 6 vols. (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1925–1926), vol. IV, 64.

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state, became a way of expressing the contingency of historical events. Church and state framed the discussion of associative life as long as the question of that life as an expression or construction of fundamental values remained a vital and contested question, as long as politics was perceived in terms of the historical creation of an ethical community according to values derived from an experience that related the immanent relations of historical cultures to the transcendent ground that defined their possibility.

Integrating Individuality into Universalism: From Ranke to Droysen Ranke’s first historical works already made fairly clear that he viewed historical knowledge-production as an intentional activity whose purpose was to understand human existence and guide human action in the present, in the “modern” cultural epoch. In the half-century after his first works, often stimulated by historical events that seemed to threaten the stability of the inherited ethical and political forms that defined the experienced present, like the European Revolutions of 1848 and the military conflicts leading to German unification in 1870–1871, Ranke periodically rethought certain aspects of his historical project’s general framework, especially regarding the specific historical forms that framed the struggle to achieve an integration of individual freedom and essential human identity in the ethical sphere of the state. After the revolutions of 1848 Ranke viewed the nineteenth century as a historically distinct “revolutionary” epoch, a temporally defined synchronic cultural form whose determining problematic was the tension between representative constitutional government that articulated the participatory role of individual citizens comprising the nation or “people” and the patriarchal rule of a hereditary monarchy that defined ethical life as voluntary submission to a single personal will. In the movement toward German national unification under Prussian leadership in the 1860s Ranke discerned a possibility that these frameworks for the construction of ethical identity were not necessarily divided among different national traditions but could converge in a single nation-state. This opened up the possibility that German political will was not limited to becoming one distinctive power within the balance of modern European powers but an exemplary articulation of a general process of human development extending back to the beginnings of Western Civilization and culminating, at least in the consciousness of the contemporary world, in the integration of individual freedom and collective identity in a nationally unified constitutional monarchy. 314

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For the elder Ranke the period of political transformations from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century had produced a different present for contemporary Germany and thus also a different or at least expanded past, one defined more by the epochal age of revolutionary transformation than by the construction of a balanced cosmopolitanism of the five European powers.11 Germany’s past was also Europe’s, and, more expansively, “humanity’s,” past. To understand the process of self-formation and ethical identification in late nineteenth-century Germany demanded knowledge of World History as the history of the emergence and development toward ethical actualization of the idea of humanity, not just an understanding of the modern European model of a heterogeneous plurality of individuated forms of political power. As Ranke commented in an introduction to his lectures on world history in 1848, the most important object of historical research in the current historical moment was to see how mankind’s consciousness of its unity, the concept of humanity, was forged through the conflictual interaction between peoples since the Classical Era. Whatever the given natural differences among nationalities, the emergence of national identity in ethical form could be understood only if one grasped the connections between historical individuality and universal ideas of human identity. It was an error to conceive of world history as a mere collection or fusion of national histories. The “human race” may have preceded the historical development of human ethnic individualities as a natural “prehistorical” reality, but consciousness of humanity as a coherent identity was a product of the historical development of human actions in time and space.12 Ranke’s gradual shift of emphasis after 1850 toward universal world history and the formation of “humanity” as the primary object of historical research also brought a shift in his conceptions of the practices of producing historical knowledge. In a lecture from 1854 he articulated what became one of his most famous statements about the need for the historian to focus his research on the reality of particular existence, free of teleological assumptions about a necessary progressive development: “Each age is immediate to God and its value depends not on what comes out of it but in its own existence, in its very self.”13 Ranke defined the 11 On Ranke’s changing views of the relations between national and universal history after 1848 see Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 12 Leopold von Ranke, “Erster Teil der Weltgeschichte, oder Geschichte der alten Welt” (1848), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1975), vol. IV, 198–203. 13 Leopold von Ranke, “Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte,” in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1971), vol. II, 59–60.

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universal history of humanity in terms of temporal epochs within a common historical medium, rather than seeing this medium as broken into ethno-cultural individualities. He envisioned the ethical identification of the political sphere as an implicit “human” integration through the central “idea” of ethical life, the actualization of human freedom. Although the historian still began his research with the critical examination of original sources that connected him to the existential reality of the individuated forms of life, much of his work was focused on drawing out the contextual, synchronic relations that made such particular existences possible. But the various framing “worlds” in which individual existence and agency were situated retained for Ranke the character of tendencies or trends rather than closed systems. The cultures of different epochs constituted “scenes” of human freedom, while the products of that freedom could never be fully predicted.14 The historian’s constructions of the past needed to remain loyal not only to this contingency in the individual and collective actions that shaped the general identifying characteristics of individual cultural epochs but also to the constant transformative process of individual actions that eventually led to the cultural frameworks of succeeding epochs. To the end of his life Ranke continued to insist that an overarching view of this development of humanity as a unified narrative was not available to the historian within the context of his own finite, temporally defined existence, but only to the deity who observed the events of world history from a perspective transcending temporal sequence.15 As creations of historically embedded individualized subjectivity, the historian’s constructions of the past from the perspective of continually changing presents remained limited, and it was this limitation that helped to sustain the reality of human freedom. The theoretical reflections, written between the late 1850s and the early 1880s, contained in the lectures on the production of historical knowledge and the nature of the historian’s task by Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) provided an expanded and detailed conceptualization of the positions that Ranke had articulated in somewhat inconsistent and scattered fashion over the last five decades of his life.16 Droysen, however, did not see himself as Ranke’s follower or disciple. He continually dismissed Ranke’s historiography 14 Leopold von Ranke, “Neuere Geschichte seit dem Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts” (1867–1868) and “Die Notwendigkeit universalgeschichtlicher Betrachtung” (1859–1861), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1975), vol. IV, 414 and 296–298, respectively. 15 Ranke, “Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte,” 62–63. 16 Droysen’s Historik comprises both a condensed outline (Grundriß), which was printed during Droysen’s lifetime (the last edition in 1882), and a series of lectures delivered

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as a naïvely unreflective combination of positivist fact-grinding, antiquarian nostalgia, and literary story-telling. In his theoretical revisions of basic historicist principles Droysen sought to legitimize the production of historical knowledge as an academic discipline that possessed both its own content and its own methods of production. But his work also unwittingly helped to expose both the limits and the unexamined assumptions of historicism. Droysen, like Ranke and many other mid-nineteenth-century German historians and philosophers, defined the substance of historical knowledge in terms of the historical development of humanity toward the full actualization of the idea of freedom. Through history, subjective agency or selfhood (Ichheit) achieved the transparency of self-reflection (sich-auf-sich beziehen) and the freedom of self-determination (sich-in-sich-bestimmen).17 To create historical knowledge was to create a means by which individuals might grasp their own existence as self-conscious agents acting within the “ethical cosmos.” Historical consciousness was self-consciousness of the individual’s “human” being. By examining the formation of mankind as an integrated, self-aware, and self-determining collective agency, historical study distinguished itself from the natural sciences, in which empirical reality was examined as a world of objects connected by recurrent laws and systemic relations. The world of objective natural relations and determinations was not, of course, completely separated from the world of subjective freedom and ethical life. In the process of self-formation human subjectivity was fashioned in its ongoing and changing relations to its own embodiment and the external natural world in which it found materials for actualizing its own possibilities as a subjective agent. The individual substance of the human subject (its “spiritual” content) was a complex nodal point of socio-cultural relations.18 The object of historical investigation was primarily the contextual forms of these associative processes, from family life and kinship to socio-economic relations to the rituals and institutions of religious and political interactions. In Droysen’s work, history was defined as a study in morphology,19 as an analysis of the constantly changing forms of cultural meaning, in order to distinguish it from the search for recurring laws pursued by natural scientists.

occasionally after 1857 and reconstructed from handwritten notes. Here I cite the edition Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Rekonstruktion der ersten vollständigen Fassung der Vorlesungen (1857); Grundriß der Historik in der ersten handschriftlichen (1857/1858) und in der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882), ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog, 1977). 17 Droysen, Historik, 369. 18 Droysen, Historik, 7. 19 Droysen, Historik, 17 and 398.

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Droysen’s claims about the universal content of historical knowledge as knowledge of the actualization of the idea of humanity in the historical form of an ethical community were more confident, systematic, and theoretical than Ranke’s statements about the meaning of universal history. But their fundamental views of the nature of this universality were similar, and grounded in the model of the historical self-formation of human subjectivity associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception of Bildung or cultural self-formation, as well as Hegel’s vision of history as the self-creation of humanity as self-conscious spirit, but without Hegel’s claims to logical necessity and teleological closure. Droysen’s discussion of the proper methods to be applied in the production of historical knowledge also made explicit some of the implications of Ranke’s less systematic formulations. As a clearly defined academic discipline and legitimate, communicable knowledge of contingent, open-ended activities and associations, history was grounded in carefully elaborated empirical methods of investigation. Like Ranke, Droysen saw historical production as an ongoing activity of “research understanding (forschend zu verstehen),”20 in which the materials of the present were examined and associated in contextual layers or “forms” of historical determination produced in prior epochs or cultural moments. The materials that historians used to produce their knowledge of the past were materials existing in the present. Droysen was much more specific (and expansive) than Ranke in articulating the variety of such present sources – from unconscious habits and assumed traditions and customs to written testimony and material remainders. The forms of the present in which the historian’s own self was fashioned were a “historical result (historisches Ergebnis)”21 or product of the past and the only material available for reconstructing, or, as Droysen unabashedly asserted, “constructing” the past which had produced the current world and shaped its possibilities for the further development of subjective agency and ethical life. But Droysen’s elaboration was also in many ways a narrowing of the individual historian’s freedom of interpretive construction. Although he claimed that the historian’s truth was a relative, perspectival truth, he also insisted that the historian could construct the past from a universalizing viewpoint as the only and absolute truth for his epoch and community if he attained full selfconsciousness as a participant in the present. “When I look at the fate of the world from the standpoint of my state, my people, my religion, I stand high above my own ego,” he claimed. “I think as it were from a higher ego, in 20 Droysen, Historik, 22. 21 Droysen, Historik, 7.

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which the restricting fragmented debris of my petty personhood have faded away.”22 Although there might be many possible constructed pasts available in the source materials of the present, only a single, universal past was the legitimate or true past that could be plausibly constructed for the present by a historian who had attained full self-knowledge of his place in the general framework of his own ethical cosmos. In this case self-knowledge and knowledge of the past coincided in a quite literal sense. “In my present,” he insisted, “things appear in one way and not another, their truth is for now this interpretation (Auffassung), and only in this interpretation is it possible for both myself and my age to understand them, and thus articulate its truth.”23 The historian’s self-knowledge embodied in his historical constructions of the past was the knowledge of the universal “I” of humanity at that specific moment in time. A similar issue arose in Droysen’s discussion of the appropriate method for organizing and interpreting historical sources in the process of constructing the complex morphology of past worlds. With greater consistency than Ranke, he insisted on the distinctive nature of the historian’s materials as objectifications of human subject agency or intention. The historian read the evidence of possible pasts in his present world not as facts referencing objective past events, but as signs of human meaning within larger networks of cultural meaning. Empirical description of the “transactions (Geschäfte) of the past” was not yet History (Geschichte), which needed to be created from such pools of factual associations.24 Like Ranke, Droysen saw the historical method as a contextualizing, hermeneutic circle in which the historian moved from the individual statement or signification of meaning to the broader context and then circled back again to expand the original sense or depth of the individual statement, and thus systematically approached knowledge of the essential “idea” of an epoch or cultural formation. By unpacking the meaning of the individual primary source, the historian made contact with the subjective agency, “the determining power (bestimmende Kraft), the will (Wille), the spirit (Geist), the idea (Idee)” that created the forms or meaning-structures of the past, thus affirming the making and remaking of meaning in the process of selfformation as the defining form or the final, essential “truth” of all human existence.25 Droysen also helped to make explicit at least two of the underlying assumptions of Rankean historicism. First, he insisted that the political 22 Droysen, Historik, 238. 23 Droysen, Historik, 230–231. 24 Droysen, Historik, 69–70. 25 Droysen, Historik, 60.

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form of the German nation-state that came into existence in 1870–1871 was the absolute fulfillment of contemporary ethical life. Although Droysen pointed to the variety of social forms in which individual subjective agency participated in meaningful ethical worlds, from families to religious communities, and described the substantial content of individuality as a heterogeneous organism of ethical forms,26 he insisted that for his own age the Prussian nation-state served as the governing framework for all other forms of social/ethical life. To recognize one’s own subjectivity as merged into the “I” of the ethical cosmos of the state was to assume the universal human perspective for the current age. The human past for Droysen was a multi-volume history that saw the emergence of Prussia as the political fulfillment of a coherent ethical cosmos – a view which struck even some contemporaries as a thinly disguised piece of propaganda.27 In Droysen’s work, Ranke’s commitment to a unified political will as the organizing power and frame of ethnical life became more of a straitjacket, ignoring the multiplicity of organizing viewpoints in the present and thus eliminating the legitimate construction of variable and alternative pasts. Connected to this confidence in a unified construction of a single past for the present was Droysen’s often-stated religious belief that the meanings he found in the materials of the present as he created the appropriate (and only possible) past for his age were in harmony with the divine will. Although his historical method did not reveal the totality of God’s plan or the ultimate secret (letztes Geheimnis) of the divine will, it did “unlock an entry into the temple” that presented God in one of his manifestations, the one most directly relevant for mankind in the present. “From history we learn to understand God,” he concluded, “and in God we understand history.”28 What would happen to the historicist framework when the two fundamental assumptions of Ranke’s and Droysen’s historicism, the primacy of the nation-state as the exemplary form of ethical life and the grounding of the 26 Droysen, Historik, 288. 27 Ever since the 1970s Jörn Rüsen has argued that Droysen’s Historik provides an exemplary metahistorical theory of historicity. See for example his analysis in Konfigurationen des Historismus: Studien zur deutschen Wissenschaftskultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 226–275. The interpretation of his work as politically situated and motivated has recently been reiterated in Andreas Greiert, “‘Viele sind berufen, aber wenige auserwählt’: Geschichtstheorie, Politik und sittlicher Kosmos bei Johann Gustav Droysen,” Historische Zeitschrift, 292(2) (2011), 397–423. The monograph by Arthur Alfaix Assis, What Is History For? Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of Historiography (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014) provides a nuanced defense of Rüsen’s position. 28 Droysen, Historik, 30.

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individualized forms of a common humanity in the will of a transcendent God, became historically problematic ? The contemporary writings of Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche provide a starting point for this posthistory of Rankean historicism.

The Insider as Outsider: From Burckhardt to Nietzsche For Droysen, the years from 1864 to 1871 – the years of aggressive power politics and war that marked the creation of the German national state under Prussian leadership – were also years of fulfillment, presenting a series of historical actions that integrated the oppositions of the Revolutionary Age and created an ethical world in which individual freedom was synonymous with collective identity. For the Swiss cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt, this same period was marked by an increasing cultural unraveling and imminent threat of catastrophic collapse. The outlines of these opposing perspectives had been present since the 1830s. But the creation of the unified German nation state in 1870–1871 marked a culmination of opposing judgments of the historical significance of the present moment. Burckhardt felt that the basic trends shaping the European world in the Revolutionary Age of the nineteenth century – from the emergence of unified, sovereign nation states, to the political liberation of the “masses” from traditional structures of association and authority, to the reduction of the subjective agency of individual lives into a leveling and commodified objectivity through the economic and communicative practices of market capitalism and the centralized administrative state – were all conspiring to undermine a cultural world of dynamic, heterogeneous difference and creative destruction in which the values of self-fashioning individuality had survived and occasionally flourished both at the individual level and at the collective level.29 Burckhardt, a student of Ranke who had received his academic training in Prussia in the post-reform era that placed great public emphasis on historically fashioned 29 Burckhardt’s pessimistic descriptions of the crisis of his time are scattered throughout his writings, but see for example his “Introduction to Lectures on the Age of Revolution” (1867), in On History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 217–224; “Historische Fragmente aus dem Nachlass,” in Jacob Burckhardt-Gesamtausgabe, 14 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1929), vol. VII, 420–426; and especially “Supplementary Notes on the Origins and Nature of the Present Crisis,” in “Lectures on the Study of History” (1868 and 1870–1871), in Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History, ed. James Hastings Nichols (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 260–266; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” in Jacob BurckhardtGesamtausgabe, 14 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1929), vol. VII, 148–159.

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collective identity, had returned in the 1840s to the traditional and increasingly marginalized cultural milieu of Basel, Switzerland. From his perspective, the evolution of historicism in the work both of his academic mentor Ranke and of members of his original university cohort like Droysen appeared increasingly problematic, prompting Burckhardt to develop a revisionist and critical form of cultural historicism that not only clarified some of the political and religious assumptions sustaining the perspectives of Droysen and Ranke, but also exposed historicism to the more radical critique articulated by his younger Basel colleague Friedrich Nietzsche during the 1870s. Burckhardt’s critique of the historicism of Ranke and the Prussian school of historians was in many ways an insider critique, grounded in the basic assumptions of historicism itself. It affirmed that the purpose of historical knowledge was self-understanding of the present as a manifestation of the cultural process of human self-fashioning in which the determinations and conflicting energies of natural life were given meaningful form as expressions of the freedom of subjective agency. “Culture is, for us, the sum of all that has spontaneously arisen for the advancement of material life and an expression of spiritual and ethical life (geistig-sittlichen Lebens),” Burckhardt asserted in his course on “The Study of History” (given in 1868 and 1870–1871), “including all forms of social intercourse, all technology, the arts, literature and science.” It constituted “the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal – all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority.”30 The last phrase was revealing, as it led Burckhardt into a critical analysis of the relation between the power of culture as “society in its broadest sense,” the sphere of an expansive, “millionfold” process of the free creation and recreation of meaningful forms, and two other “potencies” – State and Religion – which were intimately entangled in the cultural process of meaning production, but did lay claim to “compulsive authority.”31 From Burckhardt’s perspective, both political power structures and organized religion were directed toward forcing the endless diversity of culture into stable, permanent forms. In some instances this might temporarily protect and even further the process of individuated meaning-creation, but more often it stifled and petrified such creativity in ways that threatened the survival of human existence as individuated self-determination. Conceived 30 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 95; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 20. 31 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 124; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 43.

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as an end in itself, political power signified domination over subjective agency. Insofar as it rejected the “absolute value” of individual human existence it stood as the epitome of “evil.”32 Similarly, Burckhardt recognized the universal human need to find ontological grounding for the created forms that gave meaning to human suffering; but once representations of a divine foundation of human subjective agency were institutionalized in churches and states and presented as absolute, universally valid truths, they became fetters rather than frameworks for the cultural production of individuated meaning. Whereas historians such as Ranke and Droysen displayed great confidence in the ethical universality of their historical knowledge, Burckhardt challenged the political and religious “powers” that informed this confidence. His criticism clearly reflected his own contemporary situation. From Burckhardt’s viewpoint, the sources, traces, or remnants of the past available in the present for the construction of meaningful pasts were heterogeneous, conflicting, and constantly expanding. And the ethical worlds in which historians in the present found the appropriate forms for interpreting the signs of various pasts were equally differentiated. Like Droysen, Burckhardt claimed that historical pasts were constructs, based on the material traces available to the historian in his present, traces that should obviously be examined with critical care and scholarly responsibility. But the interpretive task of creating meaningful pasts from such traces, he admitted, was “unscientific,” “because it hardly possesses or can possess, an assured, approved method of selection.” Every historian selected the sources for his constructed meanings differently “according to nationality, subjectivity, training and period.”33 Instead of advocating the kind of objectivity based on identification with the singular yet universal perspective of an imagined coherent and unified ethical world in the present, Burckhardt counseled both the makers and the consumers of historical knowledge to step back from their constructions, place them in comparative relation to other possible pasts, and view them as individuated images or scenes of the constantly repeated 32 Burckhardt, “On Fortune and Misfortune in History”, in Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History, ed. James Hastings Nichols (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 321–322 and 325–326; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 202–203 and 205–207. See also Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 102–103; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 25–26. 33 Burckhardt, “Introduction to Lectures on History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (1871), in On History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 163; and “Historische Fragmente aus dem Nachlass,” 373. See also Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 70–71; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 62.

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activity of the production of cultural meaning by human subjects at different moments in history. Burckhardt’s historical cultural studies, The Age of Constantine the Great (1853) and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), were complex constructions that portrayed cultural patterns at particular epochal moments of the breakdown and potential recreation of universalizing paradigms. In both works he described the dynamics of free self-expression and meaningcreation in relation to the “compulsive” forces of the state and religion. Eschewing any assumptions of teleological development, he acknowledged all attempts to freely create meaning from the ground of finite, individual human existence. Beginning “from the one point accessible to us, the one eternal center of all things – man, suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was and ever shall be,” the historian and his audience could think their way historically into other ways of imagining their own present situation, and study “the recurrent, constant and typical as echoing in us and intelligible through us.”34 For Burckhardt narrative construction held little interest. Like Droysen, he defined historical self-knowledge in terms of a morphology of contextually defined meanings, but, in his case, examination of the constant transformation of forms for individual and collective life was fueled by the need to recognize the freedom of creative individuation in a world in which objective values and meanings were unavailable. In his own alternative form of historical knowledge-production and understanding, Burckhardt did hope to secure a kind of wisdom, a reflective selfknowledge and self-determination, a “religious” grounding and collective human “ethical” identity that he had apparently subverted in his critique of State and Church as providers of objective values and meanings. His descriptions and analysis of the heterogeneous and entangled layers of cultural production in different times and places singled out one particular level of meaning-creation for particular emphasis – the production of visual, literary, and musical works of art, the monuments of “high” culture, in which the general patterns of meaning-creation which individuals and groups in particular cultural epochs had appropriated as their own were raised to the level of self-conscious individuality and infused by great artists with a self-knowledge of the universally human production process itself. Such artistic activity transmuted the activity of making meaningful cultural forms, with all its pain and conflict, sorrow and joy, into an ideal aesthetic object in which later 34 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 73; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 3. In this passage Burckhardt described the human condition as “pathological.”

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generations could both recognize their own individuated finite existence as the universal human condition and rise above it into a universal community of the spirit, joining a “spiritual continuum” transcending temporal and cultural divisions, a continuum of formal objectifications of human freedom that embodied the spiritual memory of a universal human community, constantly faced with the task of transforming despair into beauty.35 The function of historical knowledge was not so much to provide the kind of orientation in the present that made it possible to transform man’s selfknowledge of his own existence as a historical “product” into his self-activity as a historical “producer” (in Burckhardt’s phrase, to thus “make us shrewd (klug) for next time”) but to recreate moments of creative transcendence or “greatness” in which the finite individual could achieve consciousness of participation in the general activity of creating meaningful form out of existential suffering, thus making him/her “wise (weise) forever.”36 Friedrich Nietzsche was Burckhardt’s colleague (and admirer) in Basel. But Nietzsche, who was strongly marked by the events culminating in Germany’s emergence as a unified state, went much further than his mentor in his criticism both of the academic, historical, and philological and of the neoRomantic, philosophical, and aestheticist versions of the historicist tradition. During the wars of German unification between 1866 and 1870, and especially the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871, Nietzsche’s expressed loyalties were clearly with Bismarck and Prussia. In July 1870, filled with fear that a vengeful France might destroy the possibilities of German national consolidation, Nietzsche, who had taken on Swiss citizenship as a young Classics professor at the University of Basel, requested a leave of absence to join the Prussian army as a volunteer in the Medical Corps in the campaign against France, and in his few weeks of service in August 1870 he experienced some of the most devastating elements of modern warfare. Fresh from this battlefield experience, Nietzsche entered the arena of public life with a rhapsodic evocation of the ancient Greek experience of tragic drama, which he took as a model for his German contemporaries’ own project of a self-transcending consciousness of cultural identity and will to life in the face of the meaningless suffering 35 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 77 and 78; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 6 and 7. See also Burckhardt’s lecture “The Great Men of History” (1870), in Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History, ed. James Hastings Nichols (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 277–281. The title is an awkward translation of “Das Individuum und das Allgemeine (Die historische Größe).” See also “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 167–171. 36 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 78; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 7.

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of finite individual existence. Nietzsche thus began his public career as the self-styled prophet of a national German community that would actualize its implicit tendencies. Evidence of these tendencies he found in a distinctive ethnically grounded German philosophy of the formation of self-conscious individuality out of the unconscious energies of natural life (culminating in Schopenhauer) and of communal identification through aesthetic experience of the mythic representation of emergent individuated ethno-cultural forms (culminating in Wagner). The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872, was a “political” intervention – a “call” to release the unconscious dynamics of nature underlying all specific forms of historical human existence, and to sublimate this primordial instinctual energy into the forms of Wagner’s music dramas, in which Germans could recognize themselves as members of an authentic cultural community that had faced the terrors of individuated existence and transcended the agony of division and separation in the ecstasy of a unifying aesthetic experience. This was definitely not an attempt to provide Germans with a positive historical self-consciousness through recognition of the present German public order as an identityaffirming ethical cosmos, but rather a critical unveiling of a potential for what Burckhardt had called cultural or spiritual “greatness” in which traces of past self-representations could be creatively transfigured as forms of the present, thus unveiling the foundations of historical meaning in the endless creative movement from the pre-historical, unconscious flow of energy to the making of individuated cultural form. In the years following the publication of this Wagnerian call for national cultural renewal, Nietzsche grew disillusioned with his youthful dreams of the imminent emergence of a revived ethno-Germanic culture. By the late 1870s he had liberated himself from the thrall of both Schopenhauer and Wagner, and he reimagined them as individual self-creators unaware of the personal subjective nature of their intellectual or aesthetic productions. He now judged the search for collective identity, both in the reimagining of ethnically grounded myths and in “scientific” knowledge of the present as a product of the past, as ideological bids to escape the anxiety of meaninglessness that characterized individual existence in the modern era and as an abnegation of personal responsibility for creative self-fashioning. Historicist claims to see past meanings as embodied in the present only produced what Nietzsche deemed a passive acceptance of the given cultural order, just as the aesthetic recreation of a pre-historical mythology ignored the reality of the contextual conditions of present existence. Nietzsche’s disillusionment with what he called the “monumental” and ” antiquarian” 326

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forms of historical knowledge37 led to a major shift in his view of the cultural functions not only of philosophy and art, but also of history. Any claims to know objective truths and values beyond the perspectives of individual interpretation did not yield self-knowledge, but simply encouraged one’s subordination to collective meanings and inherited conventions. History, like philosophy and art, served to produce the illusions and mystifications of determined identities, affirming the deadening sense that human beings were simply products of the past. What Nietzsche called his “joyful” science was understood as a science of historical and cultural critique that sought to dismantle this deadening sense of submission to the past: It dedicated itself to the task of uncovering the constructed, interpretive nature of all truth claims. “Genealogy” aimed to undermine all assertions of historical necessity for integrative collective identity, by exposing the contingent actions and power struggles that had produced and sustained dominant cultural meanings and moral norms. All of this critical unmasking of the production of value and truth, of the various ethical worlds that defined not only individualized human identities in history, but also the nature of human identity itself, eventually centered on one core issue – the belief in a transcendent power that held the world together as one world and gave purpose and meaning and therefore a “soul” or subjective identity to “man,” a power that had gone through a number of metamorphoses and secularizations. Most notably and recently for Nietzsche’s contemporaries and historicizing teachers, this transcendent power was no longer portrayed as a supernatural deity, but as the universal human essence, grounded in a natural species-being, which evolved in a single integrative progressive history whose ultimate purpose was to actualize the full potentialities of this essence as the activity of collective selfdetermination. But belief in any form of objective, universal truth was for Nietzsche simply the last version of religious illusion. Thus Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God as the death of all objective truth and meaning, and, more specifically, as the collapse of any concept of universal humanity or “man” that claimed to transcend the realm of perspective and interpretation. There were two connected consequences of this implicit cultural nihilism as Nietzsche understood it. The first was the terrifying vertigo of experiencing nothingness, an absence where one sought a center or foundation of universal meaning and truth. The second, however, was a liberation of the 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sections 1 and 2 of “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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vital energies that belief in objective, stable meaning had denied. The death of objective meaning was also the beginning of life. For Nietzsche, this “release” also implied a “forgetting” of the inherited burden of the forms of the past that had shaped humans into homogeneous products. God died so that Burckhardt’s ideal of the self-creating, life-affirming individual could be born. Nietzsche’s joyful science of historical critique thus applied the principle of the historicity of meaning and the meaning-knower, the core of midnineteenth-century historicism, to the contemporary forms of that historicism, paradoxically transforming the absence of historical meaning and value into an affirmation of the creative power of individuals to produce their own forms of individuation as the only legitimate source of meaning. The process of critical unveiling, he suggested, would release the individual energies that had been inhibited through conformity to collective meaning systems. Such cultural nihilism could be a cleansing, purifying experience, an elevation into lightness after the burdens of dependence and conformity. Liberation meant you were no longer a slave defining yourself in relation to some other power, but a master who created your own forms of life. Art was not merely the representation of meaning but rather the creation of meaning, and thus an ethical and political act of self-formation that constantly celebrated the formmaking activity itself. The task of thinking through the form of a meaningful life after the death of the assumed values of inherited historical cultures runs through Nietzsche’s work of the 1880s, but it was most prominently articulated for public consumption in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche tried to move from critical demolition to the creation of new forms of existence through the persona of an ancient Persian prophet speaking in parables, sermons, sayings, and songs. Nietzsche’s positive message, as represented in Zarathustra’s teaching, had three general aspects: First, the god who died was displaced by an affirmation of life before meaning, of pure Being before any particular beings, as that formless regenerative energy that Nietzsche called “the will-to-power,” a transhistorical and pre-personal force that opened up a critical perspective on the process of historical becoming and the constructed nature of all cultural forms. Nietzsche rejected any notion of general purpose in this life-energy – there was no specific historical goal that was somehow innate to being, no inherent historical meaning to life. Yet Nietzsche did imagine a hierarchy of types of power in which purely physical power defined by mastery over others (Burckhardt’s definition of “evil”) was sublimated into a reflective spiritual mastery in which life would consciously determine its own processes of regeneration and creative expression 328

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(Burckhardt’s “greatness”). It was this spiritualization of power that grounded Nietzsche’s second major “positive” teaching – the displacement of belief in a universal human essence to which individuals must conform by what he called the Overman or Übermensch – a concept of human existence as a constant process of redefinition operating in the sphere between the prehistorical and the supra-historical, continually moving beyond any fixed or stable identities, not in order to produce a final end state of humanity but as an affirmation of the process of recreation itself, thus giving a subjective, visceral, dynamic intensity to Burckhardt’s contemplative wisdom of entering the spiritual continuum of self-creators. Finally, instead of defining his identity within the movement from past to future in some larger story scripted by the purposes of God or Man, the Overman affirmed his process of becoming as always fully in the present, as an affirmation of the NOW. To love one’s fate (amor fati) was to affirm the constant movement of selfovercoming and self-creation without guilt, or regret, without nostalgia or hope, turning panic at the absence of any stable identity into self-affirming joy.38 Mid-nineteenth-century German historicism thus found one possible culmination in a Nietzschean hyper-historicism as historical critique that transfigured the historically produced human subject into the producer of a world or a series of worlds transcending the historical determinations of the past, a supra-human subjective agency for which temporally individuated appearances became mere materials for the infinite activity of creative destruction.

38 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Book IV, Sections 270 and 341; and Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part III, Section 2 (“On the Vision and the Riddle”).

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Philology, Language, and the Constitution of Meaning and Human Communities tuska benes Philology, the historical study of language, has recently regained an authoritative position in the history of European thought, rectifying a half-century of relative neglect, and even derision, that followed the self-proclaimed “collapse”1 of the field in the early twentieth century. “Philology leads to calamity,” Eugène Ionesco cautions in the play The Lesson (1951) as a delusional professor descends into a feverish tirade on linguistics and stabs a bewildered student to death. Philology has at times stood for the worst in intellectual life: obscurity, self-absorption, empty erudition, and an unrelenting disregard for relevance. However, as historians excavate what Anthony Grafton in 1983 termed the “large and haunting empty space”2 occupied by philology in the history of ideas, it has re-emerged as the nineteenth century’s queen of sciences and as a bedrock of the modern humanities. Philology has accordingly featured prominently in current struggles to defend literary and cultural studies against perceived threats to their institutional survival.3 Historical appreciation of philology’s intellectual reach arguably dates to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). The study of language mysteriously remained “hidden from Western consciousness,”4 Foucault observed, as if philology were an esoteric pursuit, not “the modern form of criticism” with “profoundly political reverberations.”5 1 Sheldon Pollock, “Introduction,” in World Philology, ed. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elam, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3. 2 Anthony Grafton, “Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780–1850,” History of Universities, 3 (1983), 159–192. 3 Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 21–26; Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 57–84; and Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry, 35(4) (2009), 931–961. 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. R. D. Lang (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 282. 5 Foucault, The Order of Things, 298 and 291.

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The historicization of language in the early nineteenth century shook the “subterranean strata” that supported the human sciences, in his view, privileging historical interpretation and binding philosophy to language study. Indeed, Foucault traced his own preoccupation with language – and hence the origins of the late-twentieth-century linguistic turn – to the “strict unfolding” of the “radical reflection upon language” begun by nineteenth-century philologists.6 Recognition of philology’s significance for European intellectual life emerged with more sobriety in the pioneering work of Hans Aarsleff and Anthony Grafton. In the late 1960s, Aarsleff integrated the study of language into European intellectual history, exposing the deep embeddedness of linguistics in questions of philosophy, religion, and natural science.7 Having dissected the work of early modern classicists, Grafton asserted in the 1980s that the technical solutions European humanists found to basic philological problems produced the “first characteristically modern form of intellectual life.”8 James Turner has since seen in philology “the forgotten origins of the modern humanities,”9 its methods feeding into fields as diverse as anthropology, religious studies, and political science. As Suzanne Marchand has established, philologists dominated nineteenth-century scholarly engagement with nonEuropean cultural traditions, acting as gatekeepers to the wider world.10 The practices and scope of philology are notoriously hard to pin down, so our first task will be to survey its diverse forms. A concern for language, textual criticism, and the negotiation of cultural and historical difference extends through all variety of philological inquiry in the nineteenth century. The increasingly specialized sub-disciplines subsumed under its rubric were relentlessly historicist and often comparative. Indeed, the textual practices of philology fueled the historicist outlook; and language itself, as John E. Toews has shown, served as a prominent site of historical memory.11 The main areas of philological inquiry examined in this essay – classical philology, biblical 6 Foucault, The Order of Things, 384 and 365. 7 Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). 8 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7–8. 9 James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 10 Suzanne L. Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and her Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) are landmark studies in the history of nineteenth-century philology and substantially inform the discussions below. 11 John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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philology, linguistics, the national philologies, and oriental studies – shared a fascination for historical origins and genealogy, as well as a commitment to language as the primary embodiment of the human spirit. All found their institutional home in the nineteenth-century university and depended on state patronage. Our second task is to examine the cultural and political reverberations of philology beyond the academy. A number of explosive studies dating from the 1970s and 1980s implicated philology in highly politicized developments central to the history of nineteenth-century Europe: the rise of nationalism, imperialism, and anti-Semitism, the decline of religion, and the invention of race. Their most provocative claims have not gone unchallenged. But the perceived importance of language in the formation of human communities and culture emboldened philologists to render judgments on questions of race and ethnicity, as well as on the putative cultural level, religious sensibilities, and intellectual capacity of speakers. Their pronouncements fed off specific religious agendas, movements for national sovereignty and political reform, ideologies of conquest, and myriad forms of prejudice. The geographical focus of this chapter reflects that philology’s center of gravity in the nineteenth century was undisputedly the German-speaking states of Central Europe. The techniques of German philological inquiry radiated outward to France, Britain, the United States, and Russia, and to European territories overseas, though not without contestation. German philology itself is, nevertheless, the product of cultural transfer and exchange with neighboring states and the wider world. European incursions into India, East Asia, and the Ottoman lands procured the manuscripts, clay tablets, and papyri required for philological scholarship. The imperial hubs of London, Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg offered scholars access to these sources. Missionary scholars and professional philologists likewise relied on colonized peoples when compiling lexica and grammars. Njo Dibone, nephew to the Duala king Akwa in Cameroon, taught the German Africanist Carl Meinhof his first Bantu language. Arab and African teaching assistants, such as Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari, staffed the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Languages and the Hamburg Colonial Institute.12 Yet a reluctance to acknowledge or adopt non-western traditions of language study typifies nineteenth-century European philology and both hindered comprehension and reinforced intellectual hierarchies. Sir 12 See Sara Pugach, Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 141–159.

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William Jones, a judge for the East India Company in Bengal, likely knew, but failed to mention, that his contemporary Siraj al-Din Ali Khan Arzu was the first to relate Persian and Sanskrit, the ancient language of Hinduism.13 Hegemonic grammatical models derived from Greek and Latin dictated how Europeans viewed other languages, urging Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, to deem Chinese a language incapable of precisely connecting ideas.14 Although general outlines are emerging in present-day scholarship, the global networks in which European philology rose to dominance and the field’s engagement with world philology deserve further attention.

Classical Philology and the Research University The ‘new philology’ born in the German states between 1770 and 1810 fundamentally transformed scholarly practices and educational institutions. The tale of its meteoric rise and extended reign as a beacon of modern scholarship is deeply embroiled in the cultural politics of the Prussian state and its universities. Altphilologie largely restricted itself to grammatical explication and the emendation of texts. As an auxiliary science subordinate to theology and law, it honed the tools of textual interpretation, while bestowing the refinements of Latin erudition and eloquence on members of the learned elite. Philology’s transition to an autonomous and more rigorously historical discipline has its roots in Christian Gottlob Heyne’s philological seminar at the University of Göttingen, where Friedrich August Wolf reportedly registered as the first “studiosus philologiae” in 1777.15 Wolf secured the disciplinary autonomy of philology with a magisterial display of historical textual criticism and a revolutionary seminar. His Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) applied to classical texts techniques of Higher Criticism pioneered by Old Testament scholars. Having painstakingly reconstructed the ancient textual history of the Iliad, Wolf rejected Homeric authorship in favor of an early period of oral transmission. After his appointment to the Prussian university of Halle, he restructured the local pedagogical-theological seminar into a forum for disciplined linguistic and historical

13 Pollock, “Future Philology?,” 938. 14 See, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen, und ihren Einfluß auf die Ideenentwicklung” (1822), in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s gesammelte Werke, 7 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1841–1852), vol. III, 269–306. 15 Robert S. Leventhal, “The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German States, 1770–1810,” Isis, 77 (1986), 243–260.

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training. Wolf insisted that his students produce original scholarship, providing an institutional model for the modern research university. Classical philologists consolidated and elevated to the status of Wissenschaft (or science) powerful, and readily transferable, methods of textual criticism. Although these methods were pioneered by early modern humanists, they acquired a quasi-mythological aura in the nineteenth century as the mark of professionalization. The type of recension referred to as “Lachmann’s method,” for example, aimed to restore a text to its original form by disregarding as untrustworthy the vulgate and any interpolated manuscripts. Tracing errors in transmission enabled philologists to reconstruct a genealogy of the manuscript tradition, leading backwards to an archetype. Using these principles, Karl Lachmann produced influential editions of the Nibelungenlied (1826) and of Lucretius (1850).16 Despite the persistence of a grammatical school, classical philology rapidly expanded into the comprehensive discipline of Altertumswissenschaft – the ‘science of antiquity’ – which situated texts in a broader historical totality. Wolf’s student August Boeckh, founder of the massive Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, defined the field ambitiously: the “historical construction of the collective life of a people in its practical and spiritual tendencies, of an entire culture and its products, which no one individual can explain in adequate depth.”17 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the realities of disciplinary specialization fractured classical philology into increasingly isolated subfields. The educational reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt instituted the philological seminar as the centerpiece of the new research university founded in 1810 under Napoleonic occupation in Berlin. In a gesture inconceivable today, Humboldt subordinated the professional faculties of medicine, law, and theology to the philosophical faculty, and therein the natural sciences to the humanities, on the grounds that language was the privileged window for studying the human experience. In the process, neo-humanist Bildung (or selfcultivation) became the cultural philosophy of the Prussian state, guaranteeing classical philologists prestige and custodianship over an important path of social mobility. 16 Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 17 August Boeckh, “Rede zur Eröffnung der eilften Versammlung Deutscher Philologen, Schulmänner und Orientalisten” (1850), in August Boeckh’s gesammelte kleine Schriften, ed. Ferdinand Ascherson, Ernst Bratuschek, and Paul Eichholz, 7 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1858–1874), vol. II, 183–199, p. 189.

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Bildung espoused lofty ideals. Knowledge of the ancient Greeks was to instill in young Germans self-discipline, nobility of character, and idealism. These qualities would encourage the individual to freely mold himself into an engaged citizen. This vision of cultural renewal was secular and broadly liberal, an alternative both to Christian models of community and to enlightened rationalism. Yet the actual social function of philological training was decidedly prosaic – to prepare young men of merit and birth for entry into the professions, civil service, and ruling elite.18 The esoteric preoccupations of philology as a Wissenschaft eventually subverted the grand intentions of neo-humanist Bildung. A cautionary tale of disciplinary self-destruction can be drawn from the way dry erudition slowly eroded the original ambitions of classical philology. Scholars eventually lost the ability to inspire broad audiences; their research became sterile, and their authority institutionally entrenched. After 1850, a debilitating form of positivist historicism plagued the field, as philologists mined the past for minutiae that seemingly lacked relevance for either character formation or German nationhood. For these reasons, classical philology’s star pupil, Friedrich Nietzsche, turned against the field in the 1870s. His Birth of Tragedy (1872) drew on philosophy to make philology relevant again as a means of self-creation. Nietzsche took as a cultural model for the newly founded German Empire how the ancient Greeks had integrated irrational, Dionysiac principles into the Apollonian forms of tragic theater. The distinguished young classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff brutally rebuffed Nietzsche’s revaluation of the Greek ideal in the vitriolic “Zukunftsphilologie!” (1872). A public debate over the future of philology ensued, in which Nietzsche’s friend Richard Wagner denounced the discipline as pedantic, obsessed with trivial facts, and blind to deeper truths and noble goals. By the 1890s, a school reform movement began encroaching on the hegemony of Germany’s “philological mandarins.”19 Non-classical secondary education had by then increased in popularity among the commercial and entrepreneurial classes; so-called Realschulen offered an alternative modern curriculum based in the sciences and living languages. Despite WilamowitzMoellendorff’s alarmist rhetoric and powerful advocacy, by 1900 a degree from a classical gymnasium was no longer required for university admission. The non-utilitarian character of classical philology became a liability in 18 Pioneering in the history of German philhellenism is Eliza Marian Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). 19 Marchand, Down from Olympus, 133ff; citation from p. 142.

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Wilhelmine Germany, and its proponents found themselves on the defensive following the outbreak of World War I when a curriculum based on German values and past deeds was in greater demand.

Biblical Philology and the Assault on Orthodoxy Biblical philologists led a more precarious existence. In the 1770s liberal Protestant exegetes set in motion a momentous shift from a literal-realistic interpretation of biblical narrative to a critical-historical approach.20 The shock waves from this transition unsettled orthodoxy and religious certainty in arguably more fundamental ways than did developments in the natural sciences. Philology did preserve the authority of the Bible by transforming it from a source of revealed truth into the central cultural artifact of the Western heritage.21 But in the course of the nineteenth century, what J. G. Eichhorn termed “Higher Criticism” unraveled transmitted notions of revelation and divine authorship, as well as the historical reliability of scripture and the unitary nature of the Old and New Testaments.22 Higher Criticism aspired to date, detect the authorship, and explore the sources, composition, and original meaning of the scriptures within the Near Eastern and Greek cultures that produced them.23 Wielding the tools of Lachmann’s method – positivism, historicism, and mythological interpretation – philologists read the Bible as if it were a product of human history, often at great expense to their careers. Biblical philologists tended to be heterodox, yet committed Protestants willing to submit scripture to the standards of philology to secure the historical foundations and ‘scientific’ standing of their faith. The Wissenschaft of Judaism, established by Leopold Zunz in the 1820s, applied historicist, philological scholarship to Jewish cultural history and religious traditions, despite restrictions on Jews assuming academic positions in the German states. But Higher Criticism generally held little appeal for Jews, Catholics, or orthodox Protestants. The Catholic Church did not tolerate its methods, and without the exhortation to rely on scripture alone, Catholics and Jews could contest doctrine through commentaries and with reference to tradition.24

20 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1–16. 21 See Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 22 See Chapter 3 by David Fergusson on nineteenth-century theology. 23 Turner, Philology, 117. 24 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 105 and 76.

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The Old Testament was historicized first, as biblical philologists challenged Mosaic authorship and revised the depictions of ancient Israel found in the historical books. Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, for example, approached the Pentateuch as Jewish folk poetry that expressed the worldview of ancient Israel. His Contributions to the Introduction of the Old Testament (1806–1807) rejected the ‘documentary hypothesis’ that credited Moses with compiling a series of original sources. De Wette’s own ‘fragmentary hypothesis’ argued that unknown scholars had assembled pieces written long after the time of Moses. The prophet had not given the Israelites a developed legal system, sacrificial cult, or priesthood; these were a retroactive expression of a later religious identity.25 According to de Wette, the Pentateuch was a postexilic composition designed to legitimize Hebrew religious principles during the late monarchy.26 Under suspicion for theological radicalism, he lost his post in Berlin in 1819 following the murder of conservative playwright August von Kotzebue and the crackdown on progressives that followed the Carlsbad Decrees. The heir to this line of inquiry, Julius Wellhausen, gained greater acceptance for his findings due to a gradual decline in the influence orthodox theologians held over university life. His History of Israel (1878) proposed a new chronology for the four main scriptural fragments from which he believed redactors had composed the Torah. The progression of these sources reflected, for Wellhausen, the decline of a once vital and free Israelite religion into late, law-fetishizing Judaism. While in the early Yahwistic history the religion of Israel appeared to be a natural faith, free from law and compulsion, the late Priestly source testified to a religion with a centralized cult, fixed festivals, and a restricted priesthood. This raised the dangerous prospect that Christianity had not sprung from Jewish roots, a mainstay of anti-Semitic German Christianity. Accused of atheism, Wellhausen resigned his Greifswald chair in theology in 1882, only to be later rehabilitated with a professorship in oriental languages. Subjecting the New Testament to historical criticism ran greater risks, as evident in David Friedrich Strauss’s radical reduction of gospel history to myth in The Life of Jesus (1835). The tidal wave of resistance that sank the notorious Strauss indicates the limits of toleration then placed on the 25 John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1984), 29–36. 26 Thomas A. Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39–42.

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historicization of scripture. Strauss, who had been trained as a Hegelian, compromised the central dogma of Christianity by claiming that Jesus was not God incarnate but a mythical projection. In his view, the gospels did not depict real events surrounding the person of Christ. Instead, they reflected the messianic hopes of the Jews, as well as an abstract religious idea that had inspired the early Christian community. The religious meaning of the incarnation lay, for Strauss, in the assurance that God was manifest in the whole of humanity.27 Politically this position favored left-liberal advocates of popular sovereignty and democratic reform by denying the monarch’s centrality to the state and questioning bourgeois ideas of private property.28 Strauss abruptly lost his professorship in Tübingen and drew a torrent of brutal abuse from theologians seeking to preserve the historical veracity of the gospel. One of Strauss’s critics, the Leipzig religious philosopher Christian Hermann Weisse, admitted the gospels contained mythical elements, but defended the real historical existence of Christ and his divinity. In the process he developed a viable solution to the synoptic problem, that is, the question of how to reconcile disparities and overlap in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Weisse proposed in The Gospel History Critically and Philosophically Interpreted (1838) that Mark’s was the oldest, and therefore most accurate, synoptic gospel from which, along with a lost collection of Jesus’s sayings, Matthew and Luke had drawn. Weisse held that the historical myths surrounding Jesus emerged after Mark’s account of his life but before their incorporation into Matthew and Luke. Philosophically committed to the idea of personality, Weisse concluded that the language of the gospels attested to the personhood of Christ.29 Philological critique of biblical chronology undermined the historical reliability of the Old Testament as much as did Higher Criticism by extending the short time-span allotted to humankind in the scope of creation. Inventive acts of contortion had been necessary to reconcile the much deeper historical narratives of the Egyptians or Chinese, for example, with a biblical framework, especially following a geological deepening of natural time. More reliable dating of ancient 27 See George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 155–165. 28 See Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 29 See Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 50.

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non-European languages precipitated a “revolution in ethnological time” that burst asunder the presumed 6,000-year history of humanity long before the discovery of fossilized human remains.30 Precise philological dating of ancient religious texts, such as the Zend Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism, threatened the unique status of the Hebrews as the chosen people of God. Orthodox theologians generally explained similarities across mythological traditions as the legacy of primordial revelation. By this view, God’s original wisdom was present in paganism as a distorted inheritance, which only the Hebrews accurately preserved. Following Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Zend Avesta in 1771, Orientalists debated its authenticity, authorship, and relationship to the Old Testament. By the fin de siècle some scholars had credited the Persians with bestowing ideas of immortality, salvation, and monotheism on the Jews. The Babylonian captivity, which Persian king Cyrus II ended in 539 BCE, made cultural transmission conceivable. The decipherment of cuneiform intensified the implications comparative religion held for the early history of the Hebrews. Assyriologists in the late nineteenth century argued that ancient Babylon decisively shaped the cultural and religious life of the pre-biblical Near East. Friedrich Delitzsch’s notorious “Babel-and-the-Bible” lectures held in Berlin and Frankfurt between 1902 and 1904 attributed Assyrian origins to several Old Testament concepts, including monotheism. Wilhelm II attended the second lecture, and the massive public outcry Delitzsch elicited forced the Kaiser, as head of the Protestant churches, to publicly refute his views. For Delitzsch, nonbiblical sources, such as the Code of Hammurabi, took historical precedence over the scriptures. This placed Higher Criticism in the service of antiSemitism by encouraging philologists to expose the supposed deception by which the ancient Hebrews had suppressed pagan mythology.31

Comparative Linguistics and Human Communities Comparative-historical linguistics proved surprisingly fertile ground for building speculative cultural edifices in the nineteenth century. Arcane studies of verb conjugation patterns, etymology, and sound change fueled expansive debates over ethnic descent, race, nationhood, the origins of religion, and the reliability of scripture. The high stakes of language study 30 See Thomas R. Trautmann, “The Revolution in Ethnological Time,” Man, 27(2) (1992), 379–397. 31 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 244–249.

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are visible in the moment marking the field’s inception. The presidential address William Jones delivered to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in 1786 correctly identified most major branches of the Indo-European language family and recognized their shared descent from a lost ancestor. Yet Jones’s findings arose out of the tradition of Mosaic ethnology, a biblically inspired attempt to prove the common origin of Asian nations. Desiring to uphold the story of Noah and his sons, Jones mistakenly included Egyptian, Amharic, and tentatively Chinese, Japanese, and the languages of the Incas and Aztecs in the Indo-European family.32 A propensity to conflate language and ethnicity distinguishes comparativehistorical philology from the broadly French tradition of general grammar, which approached national languages as iterations of transcendent grammatical principles. The presence of universal rational structures in the mind justified, from the perspective of general grammar, scrutinizing languages for the clarity, utility, and precision with which they represented ideas. Comparative-historical philologists preferred to regard languages as a window into the diversity of national cultures and their specific worldviews. The genealogical model Jones sketched of branching descent from a shared origin offered an attractive framework for conceiving of ethnic descent. It also proved conceptually powerful within nineteenth-century scholarship more generally, contributing to a widespread idealization of origins as moments of purity, authenticity, and unlimited explanatory potential.33 The authority invested in linguistics as a platform for interpreting the history of human communities rested on a new set of procedures for establishing relationships among languages. Jones and his followers, including Franz Bopp, demonstrated that grammatical principles were more effective than the sounds of words with similar meanings for documenting linguistic relationships. Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm identified regular laws governing historical shifts in the sound values of consonants. The precedent this set for historical linguistics tamed the “wild etymology” that once permitted fanciful derivations of unrelated terms. Comparative-historical methods made the linguistic definition of community appear immutable, even as

32 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997), 40. 33 See, for example, Stephen G. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

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some cosmopolitan philologists foregrounded connections uniting seemingly disparate languages.

Nationalism Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) attributed a formative role to nineteenth-century philology in the creation of national identities. According to Anderson, a “philological-lexicographical revolution”34 produced the vernacularizing grammars and dictionaries necessary to sustain the early ethnolinguistic nationalism of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Greeks, and Poles. Erich Hobsbawm credits “philological nationalism” with the invention of semiartificial national tongues and a mandate to defend their purity. The “philological model” of nationality also encouraged new modes of language study and, as Joep Leerssen has argued, led to the codification of national literary canons and folk traditions, as well as new disciplines for their study.35 The intellectual process by which philologists correlated language and nationalism dates to the late eighteenth century and a culturally particularist response to rationalist language philosophy. In his essay On the Origin of Language (1772), Johann Gottfried Herder proposed that language originated in an inner act of human creativity. In his famous example of the sheep as “the bleating-one,” Herder illustrated that man’s reflective consciousness determined the name by which an object was to be known. Words no longer stood for pre-existing ideas or a stable external reality; rather they symbolized the mode or manner in which a national people gave meaning to objects. Herder conceived of language as a living organism whose inner principle of development guided the thought and spirit of a people. “He who was raised in a language,” Herder wrote in 1795, “and learned to pour out his heart in it, express his soul in it, belongs to the people (Volk) of this language . . . a nation is built and reared by means of language.”36 Genealogical research enabled language to fill pre-historical gaps in narratives of national origin and ethnic descent by identifying when national tongues had purportedly branched off from a common stem.37 On the basis 34 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 83. 35 Joep Leerssen, “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures,” in Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Dirk Van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 13. 36 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität,” in Sämtliche Werke, 33 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), vol. XVII, 287. 37 See Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in NineteenthCentury Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008).

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of German’s affinity with Sanskrit, the Indologist Friedrich Schlegel, for example, revered India as the ancestral homeland of the first Germans.38 Subsequent comparativists, including Julius Klaproth, labeled this language family “Indo-Germanic,” but located its Urheimat in an enclave across the Hindu Kush mountains, making the prospect of an Asian origin more attractive by disassociating Proto-Germans from the colonial subjects of India.39 Other philologists, including Jacob Grimm, mined historical sound changes to specify when the first Germanen had broken off from the larger Indo-European family. As part of a broader Romantic fascination for runes, Nordic mythology, and Germanic law, Grimm’s four-volume German Grammar (1819–1837) documented a series of sound shifts that distinguished the narrower family of Germanic tongues. For Grimm, regular vowel modifications in the syllables of words as they assumed grammatical function in a sentence defined membership in the family.40 He also discerned a double sound shift in certain consonants, now known as Grimm’s Law, which marked the apparent emergence of a Proto-Germanic community. Philosophers of language, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, explored how the peculiarities of each national tongue shaped the thought of speakers. “The diversity of languages consists in more than just a diversity of signs,” Humboldt wrote in 1822, “words and syntax build and determine . . . the concepts, and seen in their interconnection and influence on knowledge and sensibility, several languages [are] indeed, several worldviews.”41 He devised a hierarchical typology of languages based on how grammatical structures connected ideas, privileging so-called inflecting tongues, such as ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Agglutinating languages represented ideas “defectively and with imperfection,” in his view, whereas isolating languages, such as Chinese and Coptic, “disturbed intellectual activity” because they lacked formal grammatical principles.42 Politically, the linguistic definition of nationhood found its first traction among liberal intellectuals resisting the Napoleonic occupation of central Europe and among members of the educated middle classes seeking to limit 38 Friedrich Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Alterthumskunde (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808), 105 and 175. 39 Julius von Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta (Paris: Schubart, 1823), 43. 40 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 4 vols. (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1819–1837), vol. I, 546. 41 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über den Nationalcharakter der Sprachen” (1822), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Albert Leitzmann, Bruno Gebhardt, and Wilhelm Richter, 17 vols. (Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1903–1936), vol. IV, 420. 42 Humboldt, “Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen,” 301 and 305.

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monarchical authority and assert their cultural leadership. After Prussian defeat to the French, the idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, delivered his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), rallying his countrymen around the distinctiveness and antiquity of their mother tongue. The idea that the nation consisted not in a territorial or political unit, but in a cultural realm defined by a common language justified nationalist activism, but remained the preserve of a narrow elite through the Revolutions of 1848–1849. Only after 1870 did linguistic nationalism become a viable battleaxe wielded by journalists, school teachers, and subaltern officials, especially within the polyglot Hapsburg Empire, as they struggled to have Slavic and other languages recognized in education, the civil service, and public life.43 Within the humanities, the correlation of language and nationality generated a new and powerful paradigm for literary studies. Philologists invented the notion of national literature between 1780 and 1840, supplanting the framework of a unified European culture rooted in the classical past.44 Already in the 1770s, Scottish poet James Macpherson’s cycle of Gaelic poems, Ossian, drew a loyal following despite eventual exposure as a forgery. The presumption that a nation’s cultural memory was preserved in its literary moments and folklore inspired the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages and drove a search for lost manuscripts. Many of the philologists, including Jacob Grimm, who founded disciplines dedicated to research on the languages, literature, and folklores of national communities began their careers as archivists and librarians. The dissolution of old monastic collections under Napoleon brought new sources into the public domain, enabling the editing and publication of vernacular texts.45 At the heart of the new national philologies lay the compilation of historical dictionaries, the preservation of folk traditions, and the codification of national epics such as the Eddas, the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied, and Beowulf. The Philological Society of London began work on the Oxford English Dictionary in 1857, hoping to create a historical monument to the English language and its people.46 Fears of language decay and of a vanishing past inspired the phonetic notation of dialects, the collection of fairy tales, and such massive projects as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Nineteenth-century political rivalries and territorial disputes meant that the philological appropriation of a national literary 43 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101–130. 44 See Joep Leerssen, “Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past,” Modern Language Quarterly, 65(2) (2004), 221–243. 45 Leerssen, “Introduction,” 20f. 46 Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 257–263.

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inheritance was frequently contested, as in the case of Beowulf. Danish, English, and German philologists vied to claim this text, written in Anglo-Saxon, first published in Copenhagen in 1815, and set along the North Sea coast in the disputed territory of Schleswig-Holstein.47

Race Philology’s role in the European invention of race initially hinged on the adoption in the early nineteenth century of the term ‘Aryan’ to designate languages related to Sanskrit and Persian, as well as their speakers. Seeking the roots of Nazi racial ideology, Léon Poliakov argued in The Aryan Myth (1971) that at this time German language scholars confused the categories of language and race while reflecting on national origins and, in so doing, gave birth to modern antiSemitism. Accordingly, philology factored into histories of Nazi ideology which, following the Sonderweg thesis, presumed continuity across the nineteenth century.48 An “Aryan model” of western civilization also featured prominently in another and much more recent high-profile, but untenable, account of race and racism in humanist scholarship: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987). To explain an abrupt repudiation of Egyptian influence on ancient Greece in the early nineteenth century, Bernal proposed that philologists led by the classicist K. O. Müller invented a northern path of Greek settlement. Comparative-historical linguists undeniably created an “exclusionary philology”49 that set Semitic against Indo-European languages with clear racial overtones. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel contrasted “organic” inflecting languages descended from Sanskrit and lesser “mechanical” tongues related to Hebrew and Arabic.50 The former exhibited superior poetic and philosophical qualities, in his view, and their speakers a propensity for creativity and territorial expansion. Schlegel asserted in 1819 that “Our German ancestors” had been known by the “name of the Aryans” while still in Asia and had been a “warlike, heroic people.” He interpreted the Sanskrit root Ari as meaning “splendid and excellent, famous” and related it to the German word for honor, Ehre.51 By the 1830s the term Aryan 47 See Tom Shippey, “The Case of Beowulf,” in Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Dirk Van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 223–239. 48 George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 49 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 62. 50 Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 35ff. 51 Friedrich Schlegel, “Über den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte Revolution der Erde. Von J. G. Rhode,” Jahrbücher der Literatur, 8, ed. Matthäus von Collin (Vienna: Carl Gerold, 1819), 459–460.

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had gained traction as a designation for certain languages and their speakers. Semitic studies, by contrast, suffered endemic institutional marginalization at German universities.52 Religion, however, has proven at least as compelling as race as a lens for understanding the fateful distinction between Semitic and Indo-European, especially since Maurice Olender’s The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (1989). Indeed, Schlegel’s fascination for India stemmed from a longing to locate the origins of religion and defend Christianity’s historical truth. India, in his view, had been the seat of primordial revelation and original monotheism; Indian theories of emanation and the transmigration of souls represented corrupted versions of the doctrine of immortality. Seeking refuge from the tumult of early Romanticism and the specter of Indian pantheism, Schlegel, however, converted to Catholicism in 1808, convinced the Hebrews had best preserved God’s wisdom. The desire to uphold monogenesis and biblical accounts of human origins encouraged some comparative linguists to defend a universalist position in which bridging mechanisms attested to the mutual descent of language families. Scholars such as Heinrich Ewald argued that the dissyllabic roots typical of Hebrew derived from simpler forms related to the monosyllabic roots of Sanskrit.53 For Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, ancient Egyptian was the primordial, common bond uniting the families.54 Christian von Bunsen concurred that the “Egyptian language proves, both grammatically and lexicographically, the original identity of the Semitic and Arian.”55 This position, however, remained in the minority, and comparative linguistics more frequently contributed to a racialization of religion itself. One of the first to apply the new philology to Semitic languages, the French Orientalist Ernest Renan, decried the hypothesis of “primitive monosyllabism,” concluding in 1845 that the linguistic families’ grammatical principles were “profoundly distinct.”56 Renan lost his chair in Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac at the Collège de France after publishing a notorious Life of Jesus (1863), 52 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 292–300. 53 See Arno Beyer’s summary in Deutsche Einflüße auf die englische Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1981), 184–186. 54 Richard Lepsius, “Über den Ursprung und die Verwandtschaft der Zahlwörter in der Indogermanischen, Semitischen und der Koptischen Sprache” (1836) in Zwei sprachvergleichende Abhandlungen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1836), 83. 55 Christian Bunsen, Egypt’s Place in Universal History: An Historical Investigation in Five Books, trans. Charles H. Cottrell, 5 vols. (London: Longman, 1860), vol. IV, 141. 56 Ernest Renan, “Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques,” in Œuvres Complètes de Ernest Renan, ed. Henriette Psichari, 10 vols. (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1947), vol. VIII, 544–545.

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which denied the divinity of Christ. His claim that Jesus effectively shed his Jewish heritage while reforming monotheism contributed, Susannah Heschel has shown, to the creation of an Aryan Jesus in the late nineteenth century.57 Comparative linguistics bolstered Renan’s arguments for Christianity’s Aryan origins, as well as the notion that religion had an instinctual foundation in the unconscious structures of language. Religion was linguistically determined, for Renan; hence, grammar explained why Hebrew monotheism diverged from “Aryan” polytheism. In his view, the source of all mythology lay in a linguistically mediated process by which primitive man imagined natural forces as divine. The flexible roots of Indo-European verbs encouraged creativity, imagination, and abstraction. The inactive interior life of Semitic roots, by contrast, rendered them “incapable of giving birth to mythology.”58 Hebrew knowledge of the one true God was an instinctual response, for Renan, that the Aryan race transformed into science, philosophy, and art.59 Through the 1850s, the terms Aryan and Semite coalesced into increasingly rigid cultural stereotypes with the potential for deployment in fully racialized human histories and hierarchies. The two-race theory of India, popularized by Indologist Christian Lassen, for example, located the Aryan homeland outside the subcontinent and proposed that conquering tribes from the north had mixed with darker-skinned peoples, causing cultural decline. But philologists did not always understand the term Aryan in racial terms and used it inconsistently.60 Physical anthropologists challenged the prerogatives with which philologists used words, rather than bodies, to classify human communities, and Aryan theory often cast doubt on the racial ideologies of empire by emphasizing the affinities between British colonists and the Indian elite. Nevertheless, biological conceptions of race informed, for example, the comparative study of African languages. Carl Meinhof’s linguistic mapping of the origins and dispersal of African peoples thus included biological attributes. His Hamitic hypothesis postulated three main sub-Saharan African language families: the Hamitic, Bantu, and Nigritic/Sudanic. Lighter-skinned North Africans, who spoke more sophisticated, inflecting languages had, 57 Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 33–38. 58 Ernest Renan, “Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme,” Journal Asiatique, 13 (1859), 214–282 and 417–450, p. 429. 59 Renan, “Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques,” 144–145. 60 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 128.

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Meinhof argued, conquered inferior darker peoples south of the Sahara. Editions of his works contained photographs correlating linguistic divisions with skin color and facial attributes.61 A new concern for phonetics recast linguistics as a natural science in the late nineteenth century and scrutinized bodies for the sounds they produced. In his experimental phonetics laboratory in Berlin, Meinhof observed the faces and mouths of African test subjects, sometimes with X-rays, and felt the vibrations of their speech organs to ascertain the conditions behind sound shifts in Bantu languages. Culture still factored into the anatomical analysis of speech, as Meinhof considered, for example, the custom of Yao women to wear lip-pegs and the ritualistic mutilation of teeth.62 But African languages were studied alongside the speech pathologies of Europeans, and anatomical preparations numbered among the tools for assessing phonetic processes. Biology likewise encroached on religion as neoromantic Indologists, such as Paul Deussen, racialized the early history of Christianity to purge it of Old Testament origins. Deussen wielded philology within racist Christian apologetics, composing a history of philosophy that glorified ancient Aryan religion as a pristine cultural product untouched by the Semitic civilization of West Asia. His history leaped from Indian, to Greek, to Christian philosophy, concluding that those aspects of Judaism that influenced Christianity actually derived from the Zoroastrians. Only the Aryans, in his view, had recognized the central features of Christianity. Such genealogies sanctified a potent racialized cult of Germanic Christianity and Aryan piety.63

Imperialism Edward Said’s epochal, but much criticized, Orientalism (1978) positioned philology at the core of the European knowledge production that sustained empire. Every Orientalist began his career as a philologist, Said asserted, and an “unmistakable aura of power” enveloped the field. In Said’s analysis, philology produced the “intellectual authority” that Western culture wielded over the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia as a precondition for conquest. His claims are now seen as overextended. Historians have dismantled the facile reduction of philological knowledge to imperial power, but still recognize what Tony Ballantyne terms the “cultural utility of philology on the colonial frontier.”64 61 Pugach, Africa in Translation, 87. 62 Pugach, Africa in Translation, 132–133 and 136–139. 63 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 300–311. 64 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 69.

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The operation of the colonial state required a linguistic apparatus, and philology provided a technology of control, while legitimating ideologies of racial supremacy and conquest. In Linguistics in a Colonial World (2008), Joseph Errington depicts European language scholars as colonial agents who made communication possible, rendered spoken languages into objects of knowledge, and transformed their speakers into colonial subjects. Linguists produced the grammars, dictionaries, and word lists that reduced speech to written artifacts, transposing a European culture of literacy to preliterate communities. They also devised strategies for mapping ethnic divisions that legitimated human inequalities.65 Colonial study of South Asian languages, for example, imposed order on a perplexing mix of idioms by mapping the territorial spread of native dialects. Positioning themselves as the custodians of the vernacular, colonial officials created standardized norms of use and presented English as a new normative classical language.66 British philologists also derived the diversity of spoken languages on the subcontinent from a number of original tongues, displacing what had been an otherwise unarticulated relation between Sanskrit and the vernaculars. This valorized claims of purity and noble descent on the part of people speaking the Sanskrit-derived languages of north India, such as Bengali and Punjabi.67 Philological paradigms of invasion and displacement further naturalized European imperial expansion. The idea of Aryan conquest justified the presence of white settlers in the Pacific by evoking a long tradition of migration to the region.68 Yet philological narratives also fueled anticolonial and nationalist resistance. Aryan theory most directly reinforced the ethnic and religious foundations of Hindu nationalism. Swami Vivekananda, for example, applied notions of Aryan racial and spiritual superiority to resist the British.69 The narrative of Aryan conquest also amplified the grievances of marginalized, lower-caste communities by relating their experiences to the displacement of other non-literate groups by ancient invaders who controlled language.70 In the late nineteenth century, the Tamil ethnonational separatist movement evoked a presumed history of 65 Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 3–16. 66 Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 49–50. 67 Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2001), 44–48. 68 Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 7. 69 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 310–311. 70 Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere, 50–52.

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language purity to oppose not the British, but other colonized ethnic groups in the north of India.71 German intellectual culture, however, generally discouraged philologists from engaging in practical or political matters. The ideals of Bildung and Wissenschaft were not utilitarian, as Suzanne Marchand shows in German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (2009). Only a small minority of German philologists, mostly specialists in the Islamic world or China, actively supported empire. As iconoclasts who often articulated counter-hegemonic positions, Orientalists just as readily unraveled European identities, posing a fundamental challenge to the continent’s Christian and classical heritage. As such, Orientalists also laid the foundations for a multiculturalist turn, sensitive to the unsuitability of western models for appreciating the cultures of the East.72

The Philosophical Legacy of Philology A major philosophical reckoning with nineteenth-century concepts of language closed the century. After rebelling against his own training as a philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche envisioned a new mission for language study that attacked the authority philologists invested in origins and questioned the essentialist narratives of teleological development that invariably followed. In the same years, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure also turned against the historicism that dominated comparative linguistics, emphasizing the synchronic dimensions of language as a system of signification. Saussure’s insistence on the relational value of the sign laid the groundwork for twentieth-century structuralism, just as Nietzsche’s critique of language spoke to post-structuralists. Both called into question the privileges of the transcendent, knowing subject, pursuing full force the consequences of the century’s attributing constructivist powers to language. In 1873, Nietzsche severed the connection language supposedly maintained to an authentic realm of existence, presenting an account of language origin that destabilized the foundations of conceptual thought. Early man had agreed to recognize language as an “adequate expression of all realities,”73 Nietzsche proposed, only because reliable communication was necessary 71 Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, 89–91. 72 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 333–348 and 495ff. 73 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873), in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 248.

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to transcend the state of nature. The “first laws of truth,” he argued, rested on the tenuous “legislation of language,” which deceptively sustained metaphysical confidence in the existence of substantial identities.74 The relationship between a word and its referent, Nietzsche concluded, was not logical or essential, but rhetorical: Truth was nothing but “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms.”75 On these grounds Nietzsche made language study central to a new form of cultural criticism that excavated the sordid history of accidents, errors, and desires that gave rise to allegedly stable and universal truths. His Genealogy of Morals: An Attack (1887) used the “science of linguistics” to expose the prosaic origins of Christian morality in a slave revolt. According to Nietzsche, the terms “good” and “bad” had once referred to social distinctions between the nobility and commoners. A slave revolt overturned the life-affirming values of the masters, replacing their primitive assertion of strength with the pathological values of humility, compassion, and self-denial. The “snare of language” guaranteed, for Nietzsche, the hegemony of Christian principles. The invention of the soul and conscience followed from chance grammatical particularities that presented all activity as “conditioned by an agent – the ‘subject.’” The “dupe of linguistic habits,” he wrote, naturalized the selfdenying principle that ethical subjects could control their will to power.76 Analysis of language likewise sustained Nietzsche’s critique of the transcendental subject as a stable center of knowledge. In his view, a “crude fetishism”77 of the grammatical subject had encouraged philosophers to invest autonomy and substance in dubious metaphysical categories such as Being, causation, and free will. The subject, he wrote, was merely “a fable, a fiction, a play on words . . . a surface phenomenon of consciousness.”78 It obfuscated a deeper reality in which all appearances and actions stemmed from the will and desire. Duped by grammar, the mind constructed a rational order, which it attributed to a divine creator. “‘Reason’ in language,” Nietzsche concluded, “oh what a deceitful old woman! I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”79 He himself valued the language of transgression, madness, and impropriety for fracturing conventional linguistic constraints. 74 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 247. 75 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 250. 76 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 178–179. 77 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18. 78 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 28. 79 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 18–19.

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Philology, Language, and the Constitution of Meaning

The founder of structuralist linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, trained in the historicist philological tradition in Leipzig seven years after Nietzsche had completed his degree there. A reaction against historical linguistics had by then begun abroad in the circles of American Sanskritist William Dwight Whitney and Michel Bréal in France. Not until 1906, at the University of Geneva, however, did Saussure hold the famed lectures that make up the posthumously published Course on General Linguistics (1916). They established Saussure as a pioneer in the field of semiotics or the study of how signs convey meaning within cultural systems. According to Saussure, linguistics provided the “master-pattern for all branches of semiology.”80 This encouraged twentieth-century structuralists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, to approach social practices as circuits of signification and exchange and to regard cultural meaning as linguistically constituted. Saussure halted the idealization of origins within nineteenth-century philology by detaching the synchronic study of language as a system from historical consideration of how its elements evolved. Manifestations of human speech (langage) could be divided, in his view, into parole (speaking or concrete instances of use) and langue (the abstract rules or conventions that constitute a signifying system). The execution of a speech act was always individual and willed, subject to the laws of psychology. The true object of linguistics was langue, a “self-contained whole”81 whose internal dynamics remained unaffected by use. As a system of signification, language was arbitrary and self-referential, for Saussure. He argued that linguistic signs were composed of a signifier, the form the sign takes, and the signified, the concept it represents. He denied that signs possessed essential or intrinsic qualities; nor did they reference material things or the features of abstract ideas. Rather, like pieces in a chess game, linguistic signs had a purely relational value determined by structures internal to the system itself. Saussure’s approach to language undermined traditional Western concepts of a sovereign knowing subject capable of investing the world with meaning. Structuralism dissolved human agency within an impersonal system of relations that operated beneath the awareness and control of speakers. Neither an individual nor a community could “create or modify”82 langue on its own. There was no privileged center or source from which the subject could apprehend an empirical or metaphysical reality. Knowledge, by 80 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 68. 81 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 9. 82 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 14.

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tuska benes

implication, was inevitably specific to the local systems of identity and difference that governed linguistic signification. Structuralism and its decentering of the subject ironically grew out of philology, the quintessential humanist discipline of the nineteenth century. Yet, by Saussure’s time, the powers philologists ascribed to language in the formation of culture, community, and thought had already begun to encroach, as Foucault noted, on the autonomy and agency once reserved for human subjects. Nineteenth-century philologists imposed a linguistic turn on modern cultural criticism, whose fecundity in the late twentieth century in part inspired a historical return to the field.

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15

Decadence and the “Second Modernity” mary gluck

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans became obsessed with the idea of their own degeneration. Images of cultural decline and social pathology pervaded the products of popular imagination, as well as of avant-garde art. Predictions about an imminent barbarian invasion, envisioned as coming from within Europe or from the outside, became commonplaces of public discourse. At the epicenter of these extravagant claims was the figure of the decadent artist, invariably presented as the neurasthenic product of an aging civilization.1 His affinity for exotic settings, stylistic refinement, and psychological nuance gave rise to a literature of inwardness, which supposedly reflected “a refined and mournful nervousness, a bitter taste of life, a nostalgic pessimism about existence.”2 The phenomenon of decadence proved to be a transient cultural moment that disappeared from public life by 1900. Yet, its assumptions left indelible traces on twentieth-century art, philosophy, and social theory. The long-term significance of decadence was already apparent to shrewd contemporary observers like Osbert Burdett, who in 1925 wondered whether the decadents “may have stood for something more enduring than we thought, and if their chosen frivolity may not have a more vital principle than the seriousness against which it was directed.”3 The “vital principle” at the core of decadence, however, remains elusive, difficult to pinpoint. In Richard Gilman’s words, it is “buried under successive drifts of culture,” no longer directly available for analysis.4 1 Among the writers characteristically associated with the decadent style in France were J.-K. Huysmans, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Remy de Gourmont, and Rachilde. 2 Paul Bourget, “Études et portraits du moderne,” Le Parlement (May 31, 1883), in Daniel Grojnowski, Le Sujet d’À rebours (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996), 109. 3 Osbert Burdett, The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited, 1925), 5. 4 Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 24.

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The problem is not so much the historical erasure of decadence as its protean manifestations throughout fin-de-siècle culture. The phenomenon resists categorization. Though art remained central to its concerns, the decadent project transcended the realm of aesthetics, pointing toward broader social, cultural, and philosophic issues. Decadents spoke in a bewildering variety of voices and register and were more likely to perform their meanings than to articulate them in discursive forms. What is unmistakable about their gestures, however, is their challenge to existing social norms, intellectual truths, and aesthetic boundaries. Decadents questioned the proprieties of bourgeois life by assuming eccentric personal styles and attitudes. They undermined the orthodoxies of progressive politics and philosophy by identifying modern Europe with ancient Rome in its decline. They redefined the character of modern culture by identifying it with the medical diagnosis of hysteria and neurasthenia.5 These characteristic motifs of decadence were clearly related to one another, but they lacked an overarching philosophy or common ideology that might have integrated them into a whole. Opposed to coherent narratives and foundational truths, decadence gestured toward a new, more dynamic concept of culture, without, however, spelling out its forms and preconditions. Only in one area did decadents assume what could be called a clearly articulated social and cultural position; and that is their selfidentification with the city. Decadence was decidedly considered an urban phenomenon, associated with the new forms of metropolitan life and experience that emerged throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century, but with particular intensity in fin-de-siècle Paris. For contemporaries like Max Nordau, the concepts “decadence,” “fin de siècle,” and “Paris” were virtually synonymous. As he wrote in his popular book of 1892, Decadence, “Fin-de-siècle is French, for it was in France that the mental state so entitled was first consciously realized. The word has flown from one hemisphere to the other and found its way into all civilized languages . . . [But] it is in the land of its 5 See Asti Hustvedt (ed.), The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (eds.), Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (eds.), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambrdge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ian Fletcher, Decadence and the 1890s (New York: Homes & Meier Publishers, 1979); David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870–1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1986); and Michael Saler (ed.), The Fin-de-Siècle World (London: Routledge, 2015).

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birth that it appears in its most genuine form, and Paris is the right place in which to observe its manifold expressions.”6 Paris may have been the pioneer of decadence, but its most profound analyst was undoubtedly German. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who first pointed out that philosophic pessimism, often associated with the name of Schopenhauer, was actually the sign of a more generalized social and cultural crisis rooted in the decline of traditional religion and the scientific worldview in the modern world. Nietzsche spoke only to a small circle of avant-garde intellectuals, but his vision had broad relevance for his time. It reflected the anxieties of the general educated public, including journalists, writers, artists, musicians, and physicians, whose perceptions of cultural disruption and dislocation reached a crescendo in the years between the 1880s and 1900. Viewed from this broader cultural perspective, decadence appears to be not so much a discrete cultural event as a seismic shift within the culture of latenineteenth-century Europe, which prepared the way for new, nonfoundational concepts of modernity. How can the story of decadence be told without doing violence to its inherent heterogeneity? How can the anti-systematic, subversive gestures of decadents be incorporated within the linear narrative of traditional history? There is no entirely satisfactory answer to this question, but in this chapter I have chosen to expose, rather than eradicate, the elements of eccentricity, fragmentation, and discontinuity characteristic of decadence. This has meant, for the most part, adopting the method of the genealogist over that of the historian, without, however, entirely abandoning the interpretive and analytic tasks of history. I tell the story of decadence as a series of textual enactments that lead from the world of avant-garde art, where the concept of decadence was invented; to the realm of popular journalism, where its tenets were popularized; to the spaces of popular urban culture, where its images were performed. Common to all these instances of decadence were the leitmotifs of degeneration and regeneration, which were intertwined with each other in the years between 1880 and 1900.

Decadence as Aesthetic Gesture The counter-intuitive link between decadence and modernity was first made explicit in the realm of aesthetics. One of the earliest advocates of this idea 6 Max Nordau, Degeneration, introduction by George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 1.

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was the poet Théophile Gautier, whose “Notice” of 1868 presented Charles Baudelaire as the prototype of the decadent artist. Gautier argued here that Baudelaire’s particular version of artistic decadence was not a sign of moral decline or enervation, but rather the affirmation of the unique qualities of modernity. The modern experience, he claimed, was incommensurable with that of the ancients, and therefore needed new forms that could give expression to its complex insights and emotions. “The understanding of modern beauty,” Gautier concluded, “rejects the antique beauty as not only not available to contemporary artists, but as something lacking subtlety and sophistication – he [Baudelaire] regards antique beauty as primitive, vulgar, barbaric.”7 Gautier’s somewhat unwieldy concept of “modern beauty” already suggested the notion of modernism as a unique aesthetic event that had cut its roots from traditional art movements. The idea found programmatic articulation in 1885 on the pages of Anatole Baju’s short-lived avant-garde publication Le Décadent. The journal presented decadence as nothing less than a literary revolution destined to lay the groundwork for a new culture. Like Gautier, Le Décadent rejected the association between aesthetic decadence and social decline, establishing a paradoxical identity between degeneration and regeneration. Decadence, it declared, was everywhere and represented “only a happy transformation, the direct opposite of what happened in antiquity, whose decadent empires ended up disappearing forever.”8 The aesthetic vision promulgated on the pages of Le Décadent was directly indebted to J.-K. Huysmans, whose controversial novel of 1884, À rebours (Against the Grain), became the acknowledged symbol of the decadent movement. Huysmans confessed in his autobiography that he wrote À rebours with relatively modest goals and with a limited audience in mind. To his surprise, he ended up producing a cult book that became the “flagship of the Parisian avant-garde”9 and the “breviary of an entire generation.”10 Huysmans’s narrative focused on the personal habits and psychic peculiarities of an aristocratic hero, des Esseintes, who carried to its logical conclusion the inherent possibilities of aestheticism. Breaking with his extravagant life in Paris, des Esseintes moved to the relative isolation of a house in Fontenay on the outskirts of the city, where he planned to create an environment cleansed 7 8 9 10

Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Le Castor Astral, n.d.), 44. Pierre Vareille, “Décadence,” Le Décadent (April 24, 1886). Quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (London: Clarendon Press, 1955), 78. André Billy, L’Époque 1900 (Paris: Tallandier, 1951), 72.

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of the impurities and unforeseen disturbances of everyday life. His goal was to explore the potentials of a life dedicated to absolute beauty created through the devices of artifice and artistic manipulation. Des Esseintes’s obsessive preoccupation with aesthetic interiors was a familiar theme of the artistic avant-garde of Paris. Baudelaire had spent a good part of his inheritance furnishing a luxurious apartment at the Hôtel de Lauzun in the 1840s. Perhaps even more famously, at Auteuil the Goncourt brothers created their own ostentatiously beautiful house, which they bought in 1869 and filled with their large collection of antiques, paintings, prints, and wallpapers. In 1881, they published a two-volume work devoted to their enterprise, which they appropriately titled La Maison d’un artiste (An Artist’s House). The most direct model for des Esseintes’s experiment was undoubtedly the house of the famous dandy Robert de Montesquieu, who built a fantastic dwelling for himself in the 1880s, which he called Ali Baba’s Cave. Montesquieu rarely admitted visitors to his house, but one of the exceptions was the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who visited him in 1883 and recounted the experience to Huysmans. Many of the physical details of Montesquieu’s house were recapitulated in Huysmans’s fictional account of Fontenay, including the bizarre example of a pet tortoise with a gold-covered and jewel-encrusted shell. The publication of À rebours generated lurid curiosity among audiences hungry for details about the deviant habits and escapades of decadent artists. The novel’s superficial sensationalism, however, hid a serious aesthetic message that even Huysmans himself was only partially aware of. À rebours was not only a novel about decadent eccentricity, but also a laboratory experiment that put under microscopic scrutiny contemporary art practices and assumptions. It was a dialogue with, and ultimately a critique of, Émile Zola’s Le Roman expérimental (The Experimental Novel), which had been published in 1880, four years before Huysmans’s own book. Huysmans, who was associated with Zola’s informal literary circle at Meudon, obliquely hinted at his more general aesthetic concerns at the core of this work. “The desire that filled me,” he wrote in a letter to Zola shortly after the publication of À rebours, “was to shake off preconceived ideas, to break the limitations of the novel, to introduce into it art, science, history; in a word not to use this form of literature except as a frame in which to put more serious kinds of works.”11 By the time of his 1903 Preface to À rebours, Huysmans was more 11 Cited by Havelock Ellis, “Introduction” to J.-K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (À Rebours) (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), xlv.

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specific about its anti-naturalistic impulses. The plot of the traditional novel, Huysmans illustrated, “could be summed up in half-a-dozen words – to wit, why did Monsieur So-and-So commit or not commit adultery with Madam This-or-That? If you wished to be distinguished and stand out as a writer of the most polite taste, you made the work of the flesh take place between a Marquise and a Count; if on the other hand, you wanted to pose as a popular author, a writer knowing what’s what, you chose a lover from the slums and the first street girl to hand. Only the frame was different.”12 As this retrospective account suggests, the real meaning of À rebours was a search for personal and artistic liberation from the dead-end of nineteenthcentury naturalism and realism. It was a parody of the naturalist novel, which anticipated symbolism and other modernist movements, without, however, displaying any of their characteristic features. According to the poet Paul Valéry, Huysmans was a great transitional figure who opened the way for future innovation by the younger generation. “One thing cannot be emphasized enough,” he wrote in tribute, “and that is the enormous effect of Huysmans on the young people of my generation . . . Huysmans prepared without any question the transmutation of naturalism into symbolism.”13 What Valéry did not mention, however, was the centrality of decadent themes in this act of aesthetic liberation associated with Huysmans’s iconic novel. At the heart of Huysmans’s account was the problem of hysteria, whose status as aesthetic metaphor and medical condition was inseparably intertwined in the culture. Des Esseintes’s fascination with aesthetic images of hysteria found expression in elaborate artistic displays throughout his house. Among his prize possessions was a painting by Gustave Moreau, depicting Salome’s erotic dance in front of Herod. The painting plunged des Esseintes into passionate reverie in which he saw Salome not simply as a dancing girl but as the simultaneous incarnation of hysteria, lust, and universal beauty. The painting was a perfect embodiment of the decadent ideal of art for art’s sake, which brought about an artificial reconciliation between art and life, inner experience and external symbol. It affirmed the redeeming qualities of the art object, which transcended the inchoate manifestations of the empirical world. 12 Cited by Ellis, “Introduction,” xxxv. 13 Quoted in Michael Issacharoff, J.-K. Huysmans devant la critique en France, 1874–1960 (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1970), 65.

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In the course of Huysmans’s narrative, however, the image of hysteria as the symbolic incarnation of an ideal unity between art and life became impossible to maintain. With time, hysteria was transformed from an aesthetic ideal into a medical condition, whose symptoms increasingly intruded into des Esseintes’s daily life. The decadent hero’s first encounter with the physical aspects of hysteria came in an episode of sexual impotence, which preceded his move to Fontenay. The full-blown experience of the disease, however, unfolded in the solitude of his house of artifice, where des Esseintes acquired a list of ailments such as insomnia and the inability to swallow nourishment. Des Essseintes was forced to the humiliating conclusion that hysteria carried no transcendental aesthetic significance and did not hold the clue to the mysterious unity of life and art. The final pronouncement on the subject came from the medical experts des Esseintes had consulted in the course of his illness. They ordered him to abandon his house of artifice and to return to the pursuits of ordinary society if he wished to avoid an untimely death. The unraveling of des Esseintes’s experimental life at Fontenay liberated him from the aesthetic delusions of decadence. But it also exposed him to the terrors of an unfathomable and disorderly universe that art could no longer contain or redeem. Huysmans suggested the philosophic implications of this conclusion in the famous final lines of the novel. “Ah; but my courage fails me!” des Esseintes muses before his forced return to Paris. “Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illuminated no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.”14 Given Huysmans’s conversion to Catholicism in 1892, it is not surprising that this passage has often been interpreted as the expression of a religious crisis foreshadowing his return to the fold of the Church. Huysmans himself rejected such a conclusion, however, suggesting that, at the time of writing the novel, religion played no significant role in his life. The spiritual distress articulated at the end of À rebours was the sign of a more general cultural–aesthetic condition that Huysmans explicitly associated with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. For Huysmans’s generation, Schopenhauer had acquired the status of a cult figure whose work crystallized the crisis of romantic metaphysics and of evolutionary philosophy. Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, conjured up 14 J.-K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (À Rebours) (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 206.

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a universe of flux and violence beyond the illusions of art and reason. His writings negated not only images of the rational self but also the mimetic assumptions of traditional aesthetics, which had assumed the existence of an ontological connection between art and nature.

Decadence as Psychology Probably the most important interpreter of the cultural crisis recounted in Huysmans’s famous text was the novelist and essayist Paul Bourget, who brought the concept of decadence before a large literate public in the course of the 1880s. By coincidence, Bourget was acquainted with Huysmans and apparently well-disposed to him. He identified Huysmans’s work as part of a “literature of decadence and subtlety, whose troubled idealism nevertheless has its contemporary poetry, or to use the term found in the title of this review, its modernity.”15 Bourget’s own vision of decadence was not incompatible with Huysmans’s but was cast in a more general social and historical frame. It found expression in a series of essays published in La Nouvelle Revue between 1882 and 1885 and eventually collected under the general titles Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Essays in Contemporary Psychology) and Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine (New Essays in Contemporary Psychology). In these essays, Bourget single-handedly transformed the concept of decadence from an esoteric literary concept into a general psychological condition reflecting the outlook of an entire generation of artists and intellectuals who came of age in the 1880s. In the process, he established a necessary inner connection between decadence, pessimism, and modernity. Bourget did not entirely divorce his narrative from the characteristic literary and aesthetic manifestations of decadence. He explicitly linked contemporary psychological conditions with the influence of the literary avantgarde of the 1850s, whose perspective, he argued, had infected the youthful readers of the age. Indeed, he used the canonical figures of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dumas, and the Goncourt brothers as points of departure for his discussions of the meaning of contemporary decadence. These figures were of interest to Bourget not because of their literary achievements, but because of their role as harbingers of new cultural attitudes and sensibilities that would find their fruition in the 1880s. Baudelaire, for instance, was presented 15 Paul Bourget, “Études et portraits du moderne,” in Daniel Grojnowski, Le Sujet d’À rebours (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996), 109.

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as the poet of artifice, associated with the rejection of nature and the celebration of the urban experience. The Goncourt brothers perfected the traits of dilettantism, which reflected a generalized curiosity about life, without the willingness to commit to any of its specific manifestations. Stendhal, by contrast, explored the implications of cosmopolitanism, which Bourget considered the spatial equivalent of dilettantism and associated with the search for new experiences through foreign travel. Flaubert presaged the deep skepticism and passivity of the young generation whose disappointed idealism precluded their satisfaction with the routines of everyday life. Perhaps most disturbing of all, concluded Bourget, was the vision of modern love implicit in the works of these authors. In place of Victorian culture’s sublimated erotic rituals, they gave voice to a new kind of sexual encounter based on ferocious struggle and a reversion to savage nature. Bourget’s collective portrait of fin-de-siècle youth implicitly condemned decadence for its excessive individualism and its destruction of traditional values. “Slowly and surely,” Bourget warned, “a belief in the bankruptcy of nature emerges, which is in danger of becoming the sinister faith of the twentieth century, unless a renewal, which can hardly be other than a religious renaissance, saves an overly rationalized humanity from the fatigue of its own intellect.”16 The passage, which foreshadows Bourget’s imminent turn to reactionary politics and organized religion, presents an extreme reaction to the phenomenon of decadence. Among the general public, however, attitudes were more complex and more ambivalent than Bourget’s conclusion would suggest. For the vast majority of contemporary observers, decadence was not necessarily a moral or political problem, but an experiential one. It was associated with the novelty and dynamism of the modern world and conjured up feelings of anxiety tinged with exhilaration that could not readily be translated into ideological terms. In the final analysis, Bourget’s contribution to the discourse of decadence was not as moral critic, but as social theorist. His name came to be associated with possibly the most often-cited theoretical formulation of the fin de siècle, which linked decadence with the disintegration of the social organism into its constituent parts. “By the word decadence,” Bourget famously declared in the 1899 Preface to the Essais de psychologie contemporaine, “is implied the state of society that produces too few individuals suited to the work of collective existence. A society needs to be compared to an organism . . . It is made up of 16 Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Baudelaire, M. Renan, Flaubert, M. Taine, Stendahl, 10th edn. (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1886), 13.

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a federation of lesser organisms, which are, in their turn, made up of a federation of cells . . . The social organism becomes decadent the moment that individual life becomes exaggerated through excessive material wellbeing and through heredity.”17 This vision of social decay recalls Bourget’s earlier definition of the decadent style in terms of the disintegration of the aesthetic whole into its constituent parts. But the transposition of the formula from the aesthetic into the social realm dramatically expanded its meanings and significance.

Decadence as Social Theory The concept of organic disintegration became the master metaphor of fin-desiècle narratives of decline, being automatically cited without specific attribution to Bourget. Nietzsche himself used the formula in the “Case against Wagner,” which recapitulated Bourget word for word without the use of quotation marks. The vision of society as a biological organism made intuitive sense to a generation saturated with the claims of Darwinian science and images of a natural world detached from religious explanations. The authority of the scientific worldview both explained and helped assuage the symptoms of doubt and relativism that characterized contemporary culture. It transformed an ephemeral social and literary phenomenon into an indisputable component of the natural world. Above all, it paved the way for a new kind of historical imagination that shifted attention from abstract narratives of progress and teleology to a more dynamic and concrete vision of contemporary experiences. This new historical sensibility found its most characteristic expression through evocations of images of late-classical antiquity. As early as 1865, the German philosopher Friedrich Lange gave voice to this conceit in his account of the History of Materialism. “The present state of things,” he wrote, “has frequently been compared to the ancient world before its dissolution and it cannot be denied that significant analogies present themselves. We have the immoderate growth of riches, we have the proletariat, we have the decay of morals and religion; the present forms of government have their existence threatened, and the belief in a coming general and mighty revolution is widely spread and deeply rooted.”18 17 Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 20. 18 Friedrich A. Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance (London: Trübner & Co., 1881), 269.

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The theme of ancient Rome in its decline fascinated Europeans long before the fin de siècle. Edward Gibbon’s eighteenth-century classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire already sounded some of the themes that became commonplaces of decadence. The decadent imagination, however, radically challenged ingrained assumptions about classical culture that still carried general assent in the nineteenth century. The historian Patrick Bratlinger has referred to this challenge as a “negative classicism,” because it repudiated the very concept of an idealized classical culture that had dominated European arts and learning since the Renaissance.19 Negative classicism affirmed the equality and interchangeability of modern conditions and classical antiquity, and thus severed the ties of deference between ancients and moderns. By suggesting that the ancients had succumbed to their own decadence, negative classicism pointed to the futility of recreating the idealized forms of the classics. The myth of negative classicism was surprisingly optimistic about the fate and trajectory of modern culture. It represented a gesture of emancipation not only from the oppressive weight of the classics, but also from the deterministic tenets of historicism, which had grown burdensome and stultifying in the course of the nineteenth century. By assuming that historical change took place cyclically, through recurring episodes of birth, maturity, death, and rebirth, negative classicism repudiated the notion of inevitable historical progress based on the accumulation of moral and intellectual truths over time. It affirmed a revolutionary vision of historical time defined as the story of cataclysmic change, rather than of gradual evolution. The concept of decadence as historical rupture found its most compelling account in Max Nordau’s bestseller of 1892, Degeneration, which was rapidly translated from German into Italian, French, and English, with the English edition running through seven editions within six months. Nordau was a trained psychiatrist with a talent for translating abstract concepts into easily graspable popular narratives. It was through his mediation that the concept of degeneration found its way into the general stream of European social thought. “No other writer,” a recent historian commented, “was as successful as Nordau in goading the leading critics of the day into addressing the idea of degeneration, even if for the most part they roundly condemned him for it.”20

19 Patrick Bratlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 20 William Greendale, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 120.

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Nordau dispensed with the images of classical antiquity and oriental exoticism that had traditionally accompanied literary discussions of decadence. He firmly identified the experience of decadence with the modern metropolis and the rise of commercial mass culture that accompanied it. For Nordau, decadence was a capacious category that included the subversions of avant-garde art, the sensationalism of the mass-circulation newspaper, the eccentricity of contemporary fashion and interior decoration, and the excessive individualism of modern character. His examples of decadence, which he unambiguously associated with a “fin-de-siècle style,” included such amusing cases as that of the modern Bishop who became a culture hero while battling the forces of secularism; the executed murderer whose skin was tanned and made into cigar-cases and card-cases by the head of the secret police; and the young married couple who decided to share their honeymoon with the world by choosing to spend it in a balloon.21 Nordau saw the peculiarities of the age as the common historical expression of a cataclysmic transformation in everyday life that had taken place during the previous thirty years. His depiction of the process is worth quoting at length: Humanity can point to no century in which the inventions which penetrate so deeply, so tyrannically, into the life of every individual are crowded so thick as in ours. The discovery of America, the Reformation, stirred men’s minds powerfully, no doubt, and certainly also destroyed the equilibrium of thousands of brains, which lacked staying power. But they did not change the material life of man. He got up and laid down, ate and drank, dressed, amused himself, passed his days and years as he had been always wont to do. In our times, on the contrary, steam and electricity have turned the customs of life of every member of the civilized nations upside down, even of the most obtuse and narrow-minded citizen, who is completely inaccessible to the impelling thoughts of the times.22

According to Nordau’s analysis, the cumulative impact of accelerating social change had disastrous implications for the psychic health and physiological equilibrium of mankind. Indeed, Nordau linked hysteria and degeneration directly to the pressures of metropolitan existence and the loss of traditional ways of life and patterns of culture. Decadence, he concluded, was nothing more than the symptom of the “vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of discoveries and innovations 21 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 4. 22 Nordau, Degeneration, 37.

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burst abruptly, imposing upon it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength.”23 Despite such dark assessments, Nordau had a surprisingly optimistic prognosis for the future of mankind. At the end of his account, he conjured up a vision of a distant modernity where individuals had learned to adapt themselves to the pressures and challenges of modern life and modernity had transcended its own hysteria. “The end of the twentieth century,” he forecast, “will probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone, to be thinking simultaneously of the five continents of the world, to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine, and to satisfy the demands of a circle of ten thousand acquaintances, associates, and friends. It will know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited by millions, and will be able, with nerves of gigantic vigor, to respond without haste or agitation to the almost innumerable claims of existence.”24 Nordau’s vision had transformed hysteria from the quintessential disease of modernity into the prelude to a revitalized social self, capable of absorbing the shocks of the new.

Decadence as Discourse about the City Nordau’s association of decadence with the enactment of hysteria in urban settings was hardly a novel idea by 1892. It echoed earlier perceptions by avant-garde artists like Charles Baudelaire, whose prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen) were masterful evocations of the experience of hysteria in the context of the modern city. Nordau, however, extended the diagnosis of hysteria from the refined sensibilities of the esoteric artist to the stereotyped perceptions of the general public. Hysteria, he suggested, was not just the subject of literary and aesthetic depictions, but a collective social experience affecting the everyday lives of masses of Europeans. In Nordau’s hands, hysteria became both a psychological explanation and a cultural metaphor for the unprecedented impact of urban life on individual character and behavior. Nordau was an accurate interpreter of the mood of his time. Historians of Paris have echoed Nordau’s at times fanciful depictions of the centrality of hysteria in the cultural life of the modern city. By all accounts, preoccupation with the phenomenon of hysteria reached epidemic proportions at the fin de 23 Nordau, Degeneration, 536.

24 Nordau, Degeneration, 541.

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siècle. “The sheer accumulation of meanings of hysteria is nothing short of extraordinary,” commented Mark Micale. “It became shorthand for the irrational, the willess, the incomprehensible, the erratic, the convulsive, the sexual, the female, ‘the Other.’ It was a synonym for everything that seemed extreme or frivolous or excessive or absurd about the age.”25 Hysteria, in Janet Beiser’s view, was transformed into a kind of “media event” associated with a wide range of urban phenomena.26 Particularly striking were performances of hysteria in places of popular entertainment such as cafés chantants, cabarets, circuses, and, later, silent films. In these venues, actors and singers literally enacted the medical symptoms of hysteria before enthusiastic audiences. “Epileptic performances,” as they were called, duplicated “the same movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, fantasies, hallucinations, and speech anomalies found in nineteenth-century hysteria.”27 The Goncourt brothers, who attended such an epileptic performance at one of the leading cafés chantants, the Eldorado, left the following description of the event: “Toward the back a theater stage with footlights; and on it a comic in evening dress. He sang disconnected things, interspersed with chortling and farmyard noises, the sounds of animals in heat, epileptic gesticulations – a Saint Vitus’s dance of idiocy. The audience went wild with enthusiasm.”28 What the Goncourt brothers failed to mention is that the performance of hysteria was not restricted to venues of popular culture. It was also an integral part of avant-garde artistic spectacles, which mimicked the symptoms of hysteria in order to give expression to a spirit of artistic creativity and experimentation. The so-called “incoherent performances” of avant-garde artists could take many different forms, including unconventional poetic recitations, art exhibitions, costume balls, monologues, and theatrical spectacles, which self-consciously used the language of hysteria and pathology to undermine the rules of logic and convention. Incoherence, quipped a contemporary chronicler of the phenomenon, can be recognized when “subterranean rumblings are suddenly heard in the skull, shaking the sturdiest walls erected by logic, 25 Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 218–219. 26 Janet Beiser, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 3. 27 Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), vii. 28 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Mémoirs de la vie littéraire, 4 vols., cited in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 207.

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agitating cells and overturning nucleoli, twisting nerves, and suddenly forcing the entire immobilized brain to begin to dance.”29 Perhaps even more consequential than the aesthetic performance of hysteria was the central role it assumed in the medical debates of professional psychiatrists. By the fin de siècle, hysteria, which had traditionally been considered a typically female disease connected with the malfunctioning of the ovaries, had been transformed into a general ailment affecting men as well as women. The psychiatrist most closely associated with popularizing such notions was Jean-Marie Charcot, whose lectures on the disease became public events in Paris. Under Charcot’s charismatic leadership, the Salpêtrière, the city’s chief mental hospital, became a cutting-edge psychiatric institution, known throughout Europe for its treatment of hysteria through the use of hypnotism. Sigmund Freud himself spent six months visiting the Salpêtrière in 1885 and was to apply Charcot’s techniques in his early practice treating neurotic and neurological ailments. One of the unique features of Charcot’s lectures was their appeal to popular audiences that regularly mingled with the physicians and medical students in attendance. In time, the Salpêtrière became a tourist attraction, listed in official travel guides to Paris, along with the Chat Noir, the FoliesBergères, the Jardin des Plantes, and the newly completed Eiffel Tower.30 A contemporary physician who regularly attended Charcot’s lectures left the following description of these events: “The huge amphitheater was filled to the last place with a multicolored audience drawn from tout Paris, authors, journalists, leading actors and actresses, fashionable demimondains, all full of morbid curiosity to witness the startling phenomenon of hypnotism almost forgotten since the days of Mesmer and Braid.”31 The enormous prestige of these lectures was celebrated in André Brouillet’s iconic painting of 1887, Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, which depicted Charcot demonstrating the techniques of hypnosis on a half-clad, female hysterical patient, who was supported in the arms of a close associate of Charcot’s. As Brouillet’s painting makes apparent, Charcot’s lectures did more than simply explicate the medical etiology of hysteria. They also provided physical proofs of its symptoms through live demonstrations. In these demonstrations, 29 Émile Goudeau, La Revue Illustrée (March 15, 1887), quoted by Daniel Grojnowski, “Hydropathes and Company,” in The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabaret, Humor, and the AvantGarde, 1875–1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (New Brunswick: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1996), 96. 30 Micale, Approaching Hysteria, 200. 31 Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele (London: John Murray, 1938), 239.

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the hysterical attack was publicly enacted by actual patients recruited from Charcot’s outpatient clinic or from the regular inhabitants of the Salpêtrière. These voyeuristic performances transformed hysteria into a theatrical spectacle that deliberately provoked, publicly displayed, and visually recorded the phases of the hysterical attack. Charcot’s role in these dramatic events was a complicated one. He was not simply the physician/scientist, but also the artist/mediator, whose task was to make comprehensible the symptoms of hysteria to an audience eager for entertainment as well as enlightenment. Sometimes referred to as the “Napoleon of neurosis,” Charcot’s status as a cultural guru was in potential conflict with his professional role even at the height of his reputation. Charcot shared with his public an implicit assumption that hysteria was more than a medical condition or a neurological illness. The disease was considered the privileged site of individual subjectivity and a source of potential insight into the mystery of the human organism. Charcot’s selfdefined task was to solve the phenomenology of hysteria by making visible and legible its seemingly random and unpredictable manifestations. His lectures functioned as medical tales and detective stories rolled into one, patiently guiding the audience through the invisible labyrinths of the neurological illness toward the ultimate goal of uncovering its hidden truths. Charcot’s unstated hypothesis was that the scientific method, using techniques such as case histories, clinical drawings, and photographic images, would eventually generate a comprehensive narrative of hysteria that would re-establish the severed bonds between subjective experience and objective symbols. Hysteria thus held the key not only to modern identity, but also to the resolution of the crisis of contemporary culture. It appeared in the cultural imagination of the fin de siècle as the quintessential symptom, as well as the potential cure for the fragmentation of modern life. Hysteria could not sustain the weight of its own cultural mystique. As Huysmans’s decadent novel had already made clear in 1884, the paradigm of hysteria was based on faulty premises. Ultimately the cultural image and physical experience of hysteria were irreconcilable. Charcot’s influential medical project succumbed to the same fate as Huysmans’s hysterical hero. By the early 1890s, it became apparent to observers that Charcot’s theory of hysteria was contradicted by the empirical manifestations of the disease. His famous lectures at the Salpêtrière came under increasing scrutiny and outright criticism. It was suggested that the hysterical patients on whom Charcot performed hypnosis merely imitated the prescribed phases and gestures of the hysterical attack. They were described as frauds acting out prescribed 368

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roles out of calculation or sheer exhibitionism. However, the realities of these destitute, primarily working-class women were probably more complicated, leading to their displaying signs of genuine illness while also manifesting the desire to please and trying to conform to Charcot’s expectations. Whatever the individual motivations of these women were, the experiment of hysteria as a universal spectacle of human subjectivity lost credibility in the culture. By all accounts, Charcot himself began to have misgivings about the cultural and medical status of hysteria. “Our conception of hysteria has become obsolete,” he confided to a companion shortly before his death in 1893. “A total revamping of this area of neurological disease is required.”32 The decline of Charcot’s lectures on hysteria at the Salpêtrière signaled a broader shift in the cultural landscape of Paris. It is not coincidental that the performance of hysteria in music halls and cabarets went out of fashion at exactly the same time that the Salpêtrière lectures lost credibility. The rage for hysteria gradually dissipated as new ideas about cultural regeneration and artistic rebirth came to the fore. Yet, the symbolic identification of hysteria with the dynamic currents of urban life did not disappear. Hysteria, as Nordau had predicted, continued to reflect perceptions of emotional excess, theatricality, and dynamism associated with metropolitan life. The modernity of hysteria lay precisely in its ability to transcend the constraints of individual identity through the evocation of cultural stereotypes and collective images. The hysterics, who performed the drama of their inner life in the lecture hall, the café concert, the cabaret, or the movie-theater, were modern in part because they replaced the interiorized realm of bourgeois domesticity with a dramatic redefinition of public culture. They were identified with the public spaces of the city and re-established, if only for a moment, the severed bonds between individual experience and collective life. More than forty years after Charcot’s lectures on hysteria, the Surrealists paid homage to the grandes hystériques of the Salpêtrière. In their view, these often-maligned women were representatives of the principle of pure expressivity in a world defined by repression and fragmentation. Hysteria, they claimed, was the “greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century,” which needed to be considered as “a supreme mode of expression.”33

32 Jean-Martin Charcot, Charcot the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons: – Excerpts from Nine Case Presentations on General Neurology Delivered at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1887–88, trans. and commentary Christopher G. Goetz (New York: Raven Press, 1987), 111. 33 La révolution surréaliste, No. 11, Quatrième Année (March 15, 1928), 20 and 22.

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Conclusion In the long run, the cultural project of decadence could no more sustain itself than could the myth of hysteria to which it was closely allied. By 1900 the discourse of decadence was more or less exhausted, rapidly becoming an anachronistic remnant of the nineteenth century. Its distinct aesthetic impulses, philosophic insights, and psychological intuitions were reformulated in the context of radical new cultural movements such as aesthetic modernism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis, which were just taking off in the early twentieth century. Decadence was not so much repudiated as reabsorbed into the more specialized cultural world of the twentieth century. There was, however, one area where decadence left a direct imprint on the cultural discourse of the new century. It helped fashion a vision of modernity that sprang directly from its sensitivity to the public spaces and destabilized experiences of metropolitan life. The city, as envisioned by decadent intellectuals, became the unique site of a particular definition of modernity that the critic John Jervis depicted in the following words: “The city is where modernity happens; it is also where modernism happens . . . the city is rational project, and the excess of theatricality; it is pleasure and danger, a site of moral conflict; fragmented, yet interconnected, monolithic, yet heterogeneous; masculine and feminine. It is a place of fluidity and diversity, rather than rootedness and community, yet simultaneously reproduces communities within itself.”34 Jervis’s cultural vision of the destabilized city is a decidedly minority phenomenon in contemporary discourses about the city. It has mostly been superseded by the more familiar story of urbanization that focuses on the problems of industrial poverty, inequality, and population migrations. The very notion of an unstable and contingent modernity associated with the urban experience has been forced to the margins of historical thought. The canonical narrative modernity both in official historiography and in popular perceptions continues to be the story of the nation state and its institutions. At the same time, the concept of an alternate modernity based on the destabilized experience of metropolitan life continues to have an underground existence. Its genealogy reaches back to texts like Baudelaire’s manifesto of 1860 “The Painter of Modern Life,” which first introduced the figure of the flâneur as the quintessential embodiment of modern art and identity. This new kind of artist, represented in Baudelaire’s essay by the lithographer Monsieur G., saw as his mission the search after “the fugitive, fleeting beauty 34 John Jervis, Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 65.

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of present-day life, the distinguishing character of that quality which, with the reader’s kind permission, we have called ‘modernity.’”35 Baudelaire’s urban vision found its most important reincarnation in the 1930s in Walter Benjamin’s monumental Arcades Project, which retraced the contours of Baudelaire’s Paris through the retrospective lenses of Surrealism and postWorld War I Europe. Versions of the metropolitan project reappeared again in the 1960s with the Situationist International, whose mission was to oppose the “society of the spectacle” by recuperating a non-colonized urban world through the medium of everyday experience. In the 1980s, sociological debates about a “reflexive modernity,” or simply the “second modernity,” have once again revived elements of the decadents’ urban vision, which lent itself particularly well to the challenges of globalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. The “metropolitan” and “cosmopolitan” experiences are, in fact, conceptually and experientially related to each other, and most of the theorists of decadence elided the two phenomena. As Baudelaire and Nordau both suggested, the urban self was by definition also a cosmopolitan self that had been freed from the constraints of national loyalties and local prejudices. Baudelaire’s archetypal flâneur Monsieur G. was emphatically a “man of the world” and a “cosmopolitan,” who was at home not only in Paris, but also throughout the world. Nordau’s fanciful projection of the twentieth century also suggests a future populated by a new species of humanity capable of extending their attentions, their loyalties, and their activities to all segments of the globe. The global world of the 2000s, like the metropolitan world of the 1880s, has created not only a sense of interconnectedness, but also a collective experience of risk and uncertainty. It is no wonder that Ulrich Beck’s concept of the second modernity and modern cosmopolitanism sounds so much like the vision of urban life first articulated by Max Nordau and others a century earlier. “What do we mean, then, by the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’?,” Beck asked in 2006. His answer would have sounded familiar to his decadent predecessors. The new outlook, he claimed, encompassed “a sense of boundarylessness. An everyday, historically alert, reflexive awareness of ambivalences in a milieu of blurring differentiations and cultural contradictions . . . It is simultaneously a skeptical, disillusioned, self-critical outlook.”36 35 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1964), 41. 36 Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 3.

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Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Conditions of Modernity christian j. emden Nihilism and pessimism are concerned with the conditions under which we make normative claims in a world that is inherently meaningless. Friedrich Nietzsche aptly summarized this problem in The Gay Science (1882, second edition 1887): “The total character of the world . . . is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called . . . Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: . . . Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word ‘accident’ have a meaning.”1 Nihilism offers a glimpse into the fundamental paradox of normativity that is central to modern European thought at least since the later eighteenth century: There are no external authorities that safeguard the binding force of the normative commitments we make, both epistemically and morally, and yet we cannot escape, or deny, normative claims. We can live in a world without meaning, but we cannot live in a world without normativity. If modern European thought is characterized by far-reaching challenges to traditional normative authorities, then it is philosophical nihilism which makes these challenges possible in the first place. A historical perspective on the problem of nihilism allows us to make a clearer distinction between nihilism and pessimism, but also between philosophical nihilism and the popular understanding of nihilism in the pejoriative sense of the term.2 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109–110 (§ 109). 2 A limited historical perspective can easily lead to a reduction of nihilism to a pejorative concept that is inherently connected to violence and terror. See, for instance, Jürgen Große, Philosophie der Langeweile (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 87, which draws on his earlier “Nihilismusdiagnosen: Ihr theoretischer und ethischer Status,” Dialektik, 20(1) (2005), 97–122.

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The Politics of Modern Nihilism Given the different cultural manifestations of nihilism and pessimism, and the contradictory philosophical positions described in these terms, it is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of nihilism and pessimism. From the perspective of a metaphysical pessimism, for instance, human existence is not desirable, since life is marked by suffering, whereas an ethical pessimism claims that human beings are morally corrupt and, for a scientific pessimism, the presumed meaning of existence cannot constitute a reasonable object of knowledge. A moral nihilism could entail that ethical principles are merely subjective choices based on self-interest, while a political kind of nihilism aims at destroying, often violently, existing cultural and social institutions without, however, providing any alternatives. In the background of moral and political forms of nihilism we can often find an epistemological nihilism that denies the possibility of universal normative standards for warranted belief, which makes it difficult to justify any claims about the world. This also leads to existential kinds of nihilism that emphasize the sheer absurdity of human life in a world that is entirely unintelligible. It seems that the nihilist, as Louis-Sébastien Mercier noted in 1801, does not believe in anything at all and is not interested in anything.3 This indifference renders the nihilist not only unconcerned with the consequences of human action but politically dangerous. The suspicion of indifference has turned nihilism into a pejorative label that can easily be attached to any position that is seen to threaten existing authorities: atheism, idealism, various theological heresies, revolutionaries left and right, pantheism, skepticism, materialism, anarchists, and terrorists, real and imagined. The negative and pejorative use of the term “nihilism” neither reflects, nor fully maps onto, the constellation of philosophical problems that make up the core of nihilism proper. Thus, we need to distinguish between the substantive issues raised by philosophical nihilism, on the one hand, and the use of nihilism as a pejorative term in public discourse, on the other. At the same time, the philosophical debate about nihilism since the later eighteenth century has itself often failed to make this distinction and thus contributed to the conceptual vagueness of nihilism. Since nihilism and pessimism can easily be misunderstood, it is important to draw some further distinctions. First of all, nihilism and pessimism are, historically as much as philosophically, two different, albeit closely related, 3 See Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Néologie, ou Vocabulaire de mots nouveaux à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (Paris: Moussard, 1801), vol. II, 143.

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responses to the problem of whether and how the values and norms we live by can have any binding force. Second, since values and norms cannot be restricted to the realms of being and knowledge but extend into the moral world and thus into the world of human agency, they invariably entail a political dimension. Nihilism and pessimism underscore how closely connected philosophy and politics really are under the conditions of modernity. Third, a well-defined discussion of nihilism and pessimism centered on a distinct set of philosophical problems really begins to take shape only in the context of Enlightenment skepticism and German idealism.4 Modern conceptions of nihilism, and the term itself, emerge as soon as the unity of reason and revelation begins to break down in the course of the eighteenth century, so that nihilism, much like pessimism, is central to modernity’s secularizing trajectory.5 While it might be questionable that taking God and any transcendental points of reference for human agency out of philosophy invariably leads to nihilism, as Karl Löwith once suggested, it certainly renders the problem of nihilism more visible.6 Fourth, although modern debates about nihilism and pessimism are not an exclusively continental-European phenomenon, there are historical and philosophical reasons why these debates have been particularly prominent in Germany, France, and Russia. As central themes in modern European thought, nihilism and pessimism are directly connected to specific historical junctures, such as the French Revolution, the failed revolutions of the nineteenth century, the decline of Imperial Russia, World War I, and the rise of the Nazi regime. The crisis and uncertainty that is part of such historical junctures shows how the philosophical discussion of nihilism and pessimism is inherently related to political life. Finally, it is necessary to rethink the assumption that nihilism’s political home in particular is located almost exclusively in conservative or authoritarian thought. This conclusion has much to do with the aporetic structure of nihilism: The loss, or denial, of belief is ultimately a negative form of belief, but if any normative standard can be negated, everything can also be 4 See Hans-Jürgen Gawoll, Nihilismus und Metaphysik: Entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung vom deutschen Idealismus bis zu Heidegger (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989); and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, “Nihilismus als Konsequenz des Idealismus,” in Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus, ed. Alexander Schwan (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 113–163. 5 See Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xxiv. 6 See Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).

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permitted, including annihilation through war and genocide. We cannot overlook the fact that the discussion of nihilism and pessimism has been particularly prominent among politically conservative European intellectuals who have either supported or collaborated with the Nazi regime – including Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and E. M. Cioran. However, the problem of how to think about the value of values, or about the sources of normativity, without any hope for a transcendent point of reference cannot be limited to any one particular set of political ideas and practices. The recognition of nihilism as a genuinely philosophical problem entails the recognition that traditional normative authorities can and should be challenged since they rest on questionable metaphysical foundations.

Secularization and Enlightenment Skepticism Even though the historical emergence of philosophical nihilism in the later eighteenth century is directly related to the problem of secularization, it is remarkable that one of the most influential philosophers of secularization, Hans Blumenberg, viewed nihilism merely as a manifestation of the modern world’s failure to come to terms with its presumed metaphysical underpinnings.7 As soon as the post-Copernican world catapults humanity from the center to the periphery, we encounter that “immense devaluation” of the world that places humanity “on the edge” of an abyss of meaninglessness which is, however, always avoided, albeit “by only a hair.”8 Avoiding nihilism is crucial for the legitimacy of the modern world, it seems. Michael Polanyi, writing around the same time as Blumenberg, also situated nihilism in the context of secularization, but regarded nihilism as an ideological stance seeking to compensate for the loss of religious authority through a “moral excess” grounded in a radical form of subjectivity that is ultimately politically dangerous, which mirrors Isaiah Berlin’s idiosyncratic argument that there is an almost straight line from German idealism to modern totalitarianism.9 7 See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 287 and 572. 8 See Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 21 and 86. 9 See Michael Polanyi, Beyond Nihilism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 2, 5, 9, and 15; and Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–172, as well as his “Counter-Enlightenment” and “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” both in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction Roger Hausheer, foreword Mark Lilla, 2nd edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–32, pp. 11 and 22; and 204–235.

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In contrast to Blumenberg, Löwith viewed secularization as the process of translating eschatological commitments into a worldly form without fully overcoming their theological implications.10 Seen from this perspective, nihilism is the dark side of secularization, preparing the ground for the destructive totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.11 While Blumenberg, Polanyi, and Löwith view nihilism as a threat to the project of modernity, I am going to argue that the secularizing effects of the Enlightenment lead to a form of skepticism that places the critical potential of nihilism at the very center of the project of modernity. Enlightenment pessimism was rooted in a radical skepticism that differed from the inward-looking religious pessimism that could be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition and that, from the Old Testament to Baroque poetry, included a specific psychological stance: contempt for the vanity of the world. In contrast, eighteenth-century pessimism does not express any metaphysical need for existential authenticity. The Enlightenment link between pessimism and skepticism had a further effect that prepared the intellectual ground for the recognition of nihilism as a genuinely philosophical problem: Since evil and suffering cannot be vindicated in human history, pessimism turns into a world-historical direction with increasingly political overtones.12 Historical fate always favored pessimism, as the poet Hölderlin knew all too well: Blinded by its own superficial happiness, humanity did not recognize its own frailty and suffering, since it lacked any understanding of its fate.13 The question of the human condition can only receive a negative answer: “What is man? I could begin; how is it possible that something like this is in the world, something that, like chaos, festers, or rots, like a foul tree, and never flourishes to maturity?”14 Against the background of the French Revolution, Hölderlin and his contemporaries knew that this question was related to the possibility of morality and politics. It is not surprising that “The Oldest Systematic Program of German 10 See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 19. 11 See, for instance, Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 208, on Nietzsche opening up the path for Heidegger’s conception of nihilism in support of the Nazi regime. 12 On this world-historical turn of pessimism in the eighteenth century, see Michael Pauen, Pessimismus: Geschichtsphilosophie, Metaphysik und Moderne von Nietzsche bis Spengler (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 49–83. 13 See Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, oder Der Eremit in Griechenland, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Textausgabe, ed. D. E. Sattler, 12 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1984), vol. XI, 193–194. 14 Hölderlin, Hyperion, 63.

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Idealism,” written in 1796 or 1797, starts out with the claim that philosophy begins with “ethics” and that “all metaphysics will henceforth fall into morals.”15 This claim is possible only if we assume the “self as an absolutely free being,” that is, a being that is not determined by anything else, such as God or the material world. This radical self is grounded in nothing, but the act of positing the self as a point of reference necessarily posited, at the very same time, the normative world: “Along with the free, self-conscious being an entire world emerges simultaneously – out of nothingness – the only true and conceivable creation out of nothingness.”16 God was banished from philosophy, and what was left was the dialectic of self and nothingness as the starting point for both philosophy and knowledge: The question of how a world “should . . . be constituted for a moral being” also already assumed that the radical self was a moral being; the dialectic of being and nothingness put human autonomy and freedom on the table.17

Nihilism and Reason Philosophical nihilism is not the consequence of German idealism, but it needs to be located at its very center. Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism prepared the ground for philosophical nihilism, albeit accidentally. If it should be the case “that the objects must conform to our cognition,” since an unmediated access to external reality is not possible, human reason has to be capable of some kind of knowledge a priori on the grounds of which we can make normatively valid claims about the world at large, including ourselves.18 It is precisely in this sense that space and time were “the necessary conditions of all (outer and inner) experience,” which implied that human experience was limited to a world of things appearing in space and time without any access to whatever might have caused these appearances.19 Space is the nothingness within which we are situated, and which is a condition for our knowledge about the world. The role of space as the condition for our normative claims about the world is mirrored in the formal emptiness of the moral law. It is “undeniable,” Kant noted, that pure reason has to be seen as the source of “a universal 15 Unknown authorship (Hegel, Hölderlin, or Schelling), “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” trans. Diana I. Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 161–163, p. 161. 16 “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism.” 17 “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism.” 18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 110 (B xvi). 19 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 171 (A 48).

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law which we call the moral law,” and the latter was “a priori” in the “practical” realm of human “actions.”20 What brings the moral law into the fold of transcendental idealism is its purely formal nature. Kant’s demand to “act” in such a way “that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law” raises the question of the conditions under which human agency can be said to be morally justified.21 Much like pure reason, the moral law cannot be derived from anything outside itself: “the moral law is . . . a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is apodictically certain,” so that “the objective reality of the moral law cannot be proved by any deduction.”22 Reason, in other words, cannot be derived from, or grounded in, something else. Reason does not require God or any supernatural authority, which moves Kant’s critical project into the direction of nihilism. Human autonomy comes at the price of accepting the meaninglessness of the world. Kant’s critical project is the great watershed that clearly establishes groundlessness and meaninglessness as the very conditions of modern European thought, even though this was not supposed to be the implication of transcendental idealism. Nihilism is a philosophical accident, a fateful sideeffect of the autonomy of reason, which cannot be reversed once it has happened. Thus, the link between the practical autonomy of human reason and nihilism became the central issue in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s famous attack on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre in 1799. Jacobi was particularly critical of Fichte’s argument that all knowledge and experience, including ethical judgment, are grounded in the concept of a “pure I.” Fichte’s claim, most fully discussed in the Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (1794–1795), effectively denied the relevance of God to anchor human existence and thus the epistemic and moral claims we make about the world.23 Since Fichte’s “pure I” could not be grounded in anything other than itself, philosophy, Jacobi thought, had just been reduced to “nothingness.”24 Fichte’s post-Kantian transcendental idealism amounted to “nihilism,” and this was a charge Jacobi eventually also leveled against Kant.25 20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–271, p. 165. 21 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 164. 22 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 177–178. 23 See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, An Fichte, in Werke, ed. Friedrich Köppen and Friedrich Roth, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1812–1825), vol. III, 9–57, pp. 36 and 46. 24 Jacobi, An Fichte, 23. 25 Jacobi, An Fichte, 44. See Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus: Ein Gespräch, in Werke, vol. II, 3–126, p. 19.

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Since it seemed nonsensical from a logical point of view to argue that something could come from nothing, transcendental idealism, by foregrounding nothingness, could not explain the existence of the world as we know it. This was already a central theme in the early reception of Kant’s philosophy.26 Johann August Eberhard described the critical project as a “salto mortale into the barren realm of infinite nothingness,” while Gottlob Ernst Schulze viewed Kantian philosophy as an “empty intellectual thing” that aimed at the “complete destruction” of common sense.27 Jacob Hermann Obereit likewise pointed out that taking transcendental idealism literally leaves “pure nothingness.”28 Kantian metaphysics was bound to lead to “nihilism,” and with this turn of phrase Obereit had just established nihilism as a technical term of philosophy in modern European thought.29 Nihilism’s real threat, however, was the inability to allow for distinctions in the realm of moral judgment. As the Lutheran theologian Daniel Jenisch noted: Since critical philosophy could not demonstrate God’s existence, Kant was unable to justify why individuals should have any moral duties at all.30 In short, transcendental idealism was “atheism” and “nihilism” rolled into one.31

Nihilism, Revolution, and the Possibility of Politics That nihilism is concerned with the sources of normativity becomes particularly obvious in the debate between Jacobi and Fichte. For Fichte, the first principle of philosophy and knowledge cannot be conditioned by, or derived from, something else, especially not from the empirical world, since this first principle has to establish the formal condition under which we can know 26 Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel und die Anfänge der Nihilismus-Diskussion,” Man and World, 3(3) (1970), 163–199, rightly argues that the philosophical debate about nihilism and idealism predates Jacobi’s critique of Fichte. 27 See Johann August Eberhard, “Ueber die Schranken der menschlichen Erkenntniß,” Philosophisches Magazin, 1(1) (1788), 9–29, pp. 26–29, and his Aenesidemus, oder Über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie, nebst einer Vertheidigung des Skepticismus gegen die Anmassungen der Verunftkritik (1792), 159–160 and 417. 28 Jacob Hermann Obereit, Die verzweifelte Metaphysik (1787), 11. 29 Jacob Hermann Obereit, Der wiederkommende Lebensgeist der verzweifelten Metaphysik: Ein kritisches Drama neuer Grund-Critik vom Geist des Cebes (Berlin: Decker, 1787), 54–56. See also Jacob Hermann Obereit, “Obereits Widerruf für Kant: Ein psychologischer Kreislauf,” ΓΝΩΘΙΣΑΥΤΟΝ oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde 9(2) (1792), 106–143, p. 142. 30 See Daniel Jenisch, Ueber Grund und Werth der Entdeckungen des Herrn Professor Kant in der Metaphysik, Moral und Aesthetik (Berlin: Vieweg, 1796), 228–245 and 334–345. 31 Jenisch, Ueber Grund und Werth der Entdeckungen des Herrn Professor Kant in der Metaphysik, Moral und Aesthetik, 201 and 203.

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anything about this empirical world.32 While this condition can be expressed in the form of self-identity, “A = A,” self-identity is first and foremost the act of a self that posits itself as a self: “I am I.”33 Before the self can postulate the empirical world, the self needs to posit itself as the condition of the empirical world: “The self begins by an absolute positing of its own existence . . . [E]verything that exists does so only insofar as it is posited in the self, and apart from the self there is nothing.”34 From Jacobi’s perspective, Fichte’s “I” transformed everything that was “not-I [Nicht-Ich]” into “nothing.”35 The strange paradox of transcendental idealism was that Fichte first destroyed the world, only to reconstruct it as a representation of the self. Fichte’s position clearly entailed a political program. Like reason, freedom rested in itself and could not be derived from something else. The selfpositing act of the “I” was an act of human autonomy: The “I” was not constrained by the normative conditions under which it existed, but rather the “I” could always conceive of acting in ways that imagined this world to be otherwise. As such, the self-positing “I” was engaged in an enactment of the power of freedom: “My thinking and originating of a purpose . . . is in its nature absolutely free and brings forth something from nothing. I would have to connect my acting to such a thinking if I am to regard it as free and as simply proceeding from myself.” Only the self-positing “I” could possess “the real power to act.”36 For Fichte, the normative autonomy of reason was paradoxically dependent on nihilism; it was nihilism that ultimately began to create the conditions under which empirical reality could be seen to exist: “In destroying reality, reflection contains its own remedy in itself; the proof of the reality of knowledge itself.”37 The French Revolution showed, however, that the groundlessness of such freedom was as much a danger as it was an opportunity. What Fichte regarded as the necessary philosophical destruction of reality highlighted the ambivalence that is inscribed into nihilism: The normative demands of human autonomy can either lead to the 32 See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge, with the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 93. 33 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 96. 34 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 99–100 (Fichte’s emphasis). 35 Jacobi, An Fichte, 19–20 and 22–23. 36 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. and introduction Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 68–69. 37 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre, vorgetragen im Jahre 1812, in Nachgelassene Werke, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, 3 vols. (Bonn: Marcus, 1834–1835), vol. II, 314–492, p. 326.

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conception of a constitutional state as a manifestation of reason and freedom that rested in itself, as in the case of Hegel’s later political thought, or they can go horribly wrong, as in the case of the terror of Robespierre’s Jacobin dictatorship at the height of the French Revolution. Indeed, the philosophical criticism of German idealism as a manifestation of nihilism has much to do with the experience of the French Revolution. Violence and killing were not merely inevitable side-effects of the French Revolution that could be justified by pointing to the brutality of the ancien régime and the need for rapid change; rather, large-scale executions showed that the terreur of the early 1790s could not be disconnected from the course of the French Revolution itself.38 Revolution placed itself outside the normative order. The term “nihilism” has an illustrious history in the French Revolution.39 On December 27, 1793, Anacharsis Cloots used the term in a speech at the National Convention in Paris in order to describe the rationalist backbone of the revolutionary ideals. Precisely because these ideals were derived from natural right, the new “republic of the rights of man” stood beyond any traditional authority: “The republic of the rights of man . . . is neither theist, nor atheist; it is nihilistic.”40 For Cloots, the nihilism of the revolutionary republic promised an entirely new beginning for the political world, not only for France, but for humanity in general. Three months after his speech he was executed on the guillotine. Referring to nihilism in a positive vein was a perilous rhetorical move, since the term had already acquired thoroughly negative connotations. On October 14, 1793, Publicola Chaussard had used the term nihilistes to describe those who lacked any conviction at all.41 Being a nihilist was dangerous business. In the German lands, it led to fierce philosophical debate, but in revolutionary France it could end in 38 This point is crucial for Patrice Gueniffey, La politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789–1794 (Paris: Fayard, 2000). 39 See Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, 11 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1937), vol. IX, part 2, 834; and Max Frey, Les transformations du vocabulaire français à l’époque de la révolution, 1789–1800 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925) 165. 40 Anacharsis Cloots, Écrits révolutionnaires, 1790–1794, ed. Michèle Duval (Paris: Champ Libre, 1979), 642. On Cloots’s role during the French Revolution, see François Labbé, Anacharsis Cloots, le Prussien francophile: Un philosophe au service de la Révolution française et universelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Cloots’s speech continues to be credited as the first use of the term “nihilism,” which is clearly wrong. 41 See Albert Mathiez, “Publicola Chaussard, inventeur du mot nihilisme,” Annales Révolutionnaires, 10 (1918), 409–410; and Publicola Chaussard, Mémoires historiques et politiques sur la révolution de la Belgique et du Pays de Liège en 1793 (Paris: Buisson, 1793), 35. See also Courrier français (October 1, 1795), quoted in Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire: Recueil de documents pour l’histoire de l’esprit public à Paris, ed. François-Alphonse Aulard, 5 vols. (Paris: Cerf, Noblet & Quantin, 1899), vol. II, 451.

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execution. When Hegel took up the debate between Jacobi and Fichte in The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801) and “Faith and Knowledge” (1802), the course of the French Revolution had thus already highlighted the political ambivalence of philosophical nihilism.42 From Hegel’s perspective, however, philosophical nihilism did not destroy political life, but provided for the possibility of politics, that is, for a normative order of political life that rested in itself and did not require any external sources of authority. In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), he firmly established the modern state as the manifestation of reason and the realization of freedom in the organization of civil society, while in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1827–1831) he underscored the ambivalence of the French Revolution as a world-historical event.43 This also implied a farreaching rethinking of the task of philosophy itself to correct the dangerous implications of Fichte’s position. In “Faith and Knowledge,” Hegel argued that Kantian reason “acknowledges its own nothingess by placing that which is better than it in a faith outside and above itself, as a beyond.”44 As such, “the Absolute” stood “beyond Reason,” while Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi were united in their inability to properly overcome what had emerged, in the course of German idealism, as “the absolute antithesis of . . . reality and ideality.”45 Although Hegel envisioned his conception of “the Absolute” as a possible solution to the debate between Jacobi and Fichte, “Faith and Knowledge” did not really offer a way out: Hegel’s conception of “the Absolute” failed to recognize the importance of Kant’s insight that “the domain outside of the sphere of appearances is empty (for us).”46 In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806), Hegel aimed to create a fuller description of the Absolute as the centerpoint of his increasingly systematic rethinking of philosophy: Mere Fichtean subjectivity – what Jacobi had described as nihilism – was not sufficient, but neither was revolution in the political realm, since their promises of radical freedom always tended toward unrestrained 42 On the development of Hegel’s thought in Jena before the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2000), 118–203. 43 See G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 189 (§§ 142–143), 220–226 (§§ 182–188), and 275–282 (§§ 257–259); and G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, in Political Writings, ed. Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 197–224, pp. 217–218. 44 G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, ed. and trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 56. 45 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56 and 62. 46 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 350 (A 255).

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terror and the delusional self-conceit of the modern individual as the rational master of everything.47 The destructive tendency of the Jacobin dictatorship had to be understood as the necessary outcome of the Enlightenment itself. Hegel’s rejection of the dangers of absolute freedom in the Phenomenology of Spirit directly sought to address the political ambivalence of nihilism. Responding to Fichte as much as to the historical situation, Hegel underscored that consciousness always implies the consciousness of others and is highly intersubjective: Freedom is marked by the inescapable need to recognize others.48 In such intersubjectivity, consciousness also generates selfconsciousness: “consciousness for an ‘other,’ of an object in general, is itself necessarily self-consciousness, a reflectedness-into-self, consciousness of itself in its otherness.”49 While self-activity, and therefore practical autonomy, are central to Hegel’s conception of freedom, they are always bounded by their necessary recognition of others.50 Moreover, self-consciousness also includes consciousness of our own limitations. The Absolute, which lies beyond consciousness, comes to the fore in such negativity, and “absolute knowing” is a consciousness of this “pure negativity” as the space in which conscious individuals relate to other conscious individuals: Relatedness itself makes it possible for the “I” to realize itself as an “I” that is universal, but this realization remains wholly negative.51 Negativity is the starting point of philosophy and knowledge. The only way to overcome the dilemma of being and nothingness was through the paradoxical argument that being and nothing, in a specific respect, are essentially the same.52 “Pure Being,” Hegel noted, “makes the beginning: because it is on one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate.”53 The indeterminate nature of pure being renders such being compatible with the negativity of the 47 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. and introduction J. N. Findlay, trans. A. V. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 221–228 (§§ 367–380) and 355–363 (§§ 582–595). 48 See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 104–138 (§§ 166–230). 49 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 102 (§ 164). On Hegel’s conception of self-consciousness, see especially Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 148–170. 50 See Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 42–45 and 77–93. 51 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 486 (§ 799) and 491 (§ 805). 52 See G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–1971), vol. V, 82–83 and 93–96. 53 G. W. F. Hegel, Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace, introduction J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 124 (§ 86).

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Absolute: “the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined.”54 This is the reason why pure being is “the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just Nothing.”55 The paradox that stands at the beginning of thinking, and that makes normative claims about the world possible, is the connection between being and nothing as the condition of thinking: The relationship between being and nothing is a unity that also entails their differentiation. It was in his account of the possibility of thinking that Hegel also presented the possibility of politics. Nihilism is the condition of the political world: If “Life is a Becoming” toward “Being Determinate,” this would inevitably have to include political life.56 It is precisely in this respect that philosophical nihilism allows, at once, for the possibility of a political life that does not require any external point of reference and for the possibility to challenge the normative order of any particular historically contingent form of political life.

The Political Failure of Modern Pessimism While philosophical nihilism homes in on the conditions of knowledge and politics, modern pessimism foregrounds meaninglessness as a psychological or attitudinal disposition. As such, pessimism’s claim to derive its justification from the meaninglessness of human existence tends to be empty: In the background of modern pessimism, as it emerges in the context of Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, stands a longing for meaning and authenticity that is explicitly denied by nihilism. The relatively short-lived intellectual success of modern pessimism is tied to the legacy of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will, which itself reached a broader educated audience mainly after the publication of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation in 1844 and his collection of essays Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). Schopenhauer used the term “pessimism” quite sparingly and often more in passing.57 But as soon 54 Hegel, Logic, 124 (§ 86). 55 Hegel, Logic, 127 (§ 87). Hegel’s emphasis. On the centrality of “negation” as the “key” to Hegel’s Science of Logic, see Dieter Henrich, “The Logic of Negation and Its Application,” in Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 316–331; and Dieter Henrich, “Formen der Negation in Hegels Logik,” Hegel-Jahrbuch 1974, ed. Wilhelm R. Beyer (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1975), 245–256. 56 Hegel, Logic, 133 (§§ 88–89). 57 See, for instance, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. II, 170 (§ 17), 356 (§ 28), and 620–621 (§ 48); “Fragments for the History of Philosophy” and “Transcendent Speculation on

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as his metaphysics and the idea of pessimism had gained wider cultural currency, his entire philosophical thought was quickly described along these lines.58 Schopenhauer’s pessimism is rooted in an existential account of suffering derived from a specific metaphysical problem: Although the world cannot simply be reduced to material factors, or to its physical and chemical components, the latter’s complex relationships are indicative of dynamic forces that render life, human and otherwise, as a striving without any goal.59 Nature, including ourselves as part of nature, is best understood as a world of appearances characterized by endless conflict among its constituent parts and forms.60 At the lowest level, the will is “blind impulse,” but with increasing organic complexity the will “rises to higher and higher levels,” which finally leads to the development of the human “brain,” and it is only then that the world can appear to us as a representation, that is, as “the object of the subject of cognition.”61 Cognition, the development of reason, begins to displace the immediate experience and manifestations of the will, ultimately allowing for “the will’s self-abolition (Selbstaufhebung)” and the possibility of “redemption from the world.”62 Our willing and desiring run counter to the meaninglessness of the world, but they are at the same time manifestations of the meaningless striving that makes up the world. As natural beings, we cannot sidestep life as a striving without goal, and it is in this respect that we are condemned to suffering: When we become existentially aware of our striving in a world without meaning, we invariably experience suffering, which itself, however, is pointless. What appears in “human suffering,” then, is “the conflict of the will with itself.” Once we have recognized this existential predicament, and once we

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61 62

the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual,” both in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), vol. I, 29–136, p. 35; and 199–224, p. 192, respectively; and “Additional Remarks on the Nature of Suffering in the World” and “On Religion,” both in Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 291–305, p. 302; and 324–394, pp. 387–388, respectively. See, most recently, Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13–51. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, ed. and trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. I, 174 (§ 27). See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 171–173 (§ 27). As Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 140–188, pointed out, Schopenhauer’s account of nature and the self combines idealist and materialist perspectives. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 174–175 (§ 27). Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 177 (§ 27).

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have also realized that there is no escape, we have torn “the veil of ma¯ya¯” and we are suddenly able to see right through the forms of appearances that surround our daily lives.63 Schopenhauer’s argument tends to make suffering meaningful and thus reintroduces the problem of theodicy: In the absence of God, and in the context of a meaningless universe, suffering itself becomes the existential manifestation of an authentic life. This is the lesson Eduard von Hartmann, a popular philosopher and public intellectual in the footsteps of Schopenhauer, drew from the philosophical history of pessimism.64 “That positive happiness cannot be attained in a transitory life,” Hartmann argues, “is an inevitable postulate of practical reason: Pessimism is an indispensible assumption which ethical consciousness has to make as a precondition for its own autonomy.”65 Given the inescapably normative dimension of suffering that marks human life, it might be best to simply resign oneself authentically to a fate of misery and dread. In Schopenhauer’s eyes, however, and under the right conditions, resignation could eventually lead to the full recognition of what the world really was, namely pure will. Or, as Schopenhauer put it, the inwardness of art and mysticism offered a “pure, true, and profound cognition of the essence of the world.”66 As such, modern pessimism was also marked by a political failure: Precisely because it held on to a metaphysical meaning not accessible to practical reason, pessimism lacked any critical potential. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Schopenhauer’s response to the 1848–1849 revolutions was an unwavering support for the Prussian state.67 It is not difficult to see that modern pessimism was bound to encounter resistance. By the mid 1870s, and even more so during the 1880s, theologians and Christian public intellectuals predictably regarded pessimism in all its forms as corrupting the traditional moral order of Europe, which had already been hollowed out by the secularizing effects of the Enlightenment.68 Such moral indignation was, however, as weak a response to pessimism as, for instance, James Sully’s insistance that “sober-minded persons” had to believe 63 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 280 (§ 51). 64 See Eduard von Hartmann, Zur Geschichte und Begründung des Pessimismus (Berlin: Duncker, 1880), 101–141. 65 Von Hartmann, Zur Geschichte und Begründung des Pessimismus, 18. 66 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, 295 (§ 52). 67 See David W. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 515–517. 68 The theological response to pessimism begins with Georg P. Weygoldt, Kritik des philosophischen Pessimismus der neuesten Zeit: Eine von der Haager Gesellschaft zur Vertheidigung der christlichen Religion gekrönte Preisschrift (Leiden: Brill, 1875), but culminates during the early 1880s.

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in the virtues of “progress” and Eugen Dühring’s conclusion that pessimism was, simply, unpleasant.69 While German and British authors pointed to the intrinsic Germanness of modern pessimism, French commentators viewed pessimism as a decidedly European phenomenon. For Paul Bourget it was a cross-border psychopathology that merely took on different forms, depending on the cultural context: In Eastern Europe it appeared in the guise of nihilism, in Germany under the heading of pessimism, and in France, in the form of “bizarre neuroses.”70 At best, pessimism represented a “philosophy of transition” that reflected the discontents of a wider process of modernization.71 At worst, it exhibited a cultural “style of décadence.”72 But the strongest argument against modern pessimism did not require any detailed and sustained engagement with pessimism, but merely had to point out that the latter was a popular fashion which had little to do with academic philosophy proper.73 Modern pessimism’s claim to derive meaning and authenticity from suffering entailed a strikingly conservative position as soon as it was translated from the realm of philosophy to the realm of politics. Much like Schopenhauer, Hartmann viewed unquestioned obedience to the state as an organizing principle that was the result of the wider evolution of humanity.74 Although he accepted the central principles of a welfare state, alleviating suffering required a form of political stability that could not be achieved through social democracy.75 Accepting that social inequalities existed, and that they were the result of rapid industrialization and urbanization, his solution to the central social problems of Imperial Germany was the strikingly anti-modern recommendation to return to a quasi-feudal economy centered on agriculture.76 As a critique of the modern condition, the political 69 James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism, 2nd edn. (New York: Appleton & Co., 1891), 398–399; and Eugen Dühring, Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (Leipzig: Koschny, 1875), 341–355. 70 See Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Baudelaire, M. Renan, Flaubert, M. Taine, Stendahl, 10th edn. (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1886), 15. 71 Elme-Marie Caro, Le Pessimisme au XIXe siècle: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann (Paris: Hachette, 1878), 293–294. 72 See Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 25. 73 See Wilhelm Windelband, “Pessimismus und Wissenschaft,” in Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Einführung in die Philosophie, 4th edn., enlarged, 2 vols. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1911), vol. II, 195–220. 74 See Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des moralischen Bewußtseins: Prolegomena zu jeder künftigen Ethik (Berlin: Duncker, 1879), 589–714. 75 See the collected articles in Eduard von Hartmann, Die politischen Aufgaben und Zustände des Deutschen Reichs (Berlin: Duncker, 1881). 76 Eduard von Hartmann, Die sozialen Kernfragen (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1894), 440–559.

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dimension of nineteenth-century pessimism reflected nostalgia for a preEnlightenment social order.

Western Liberals and Russian Terrorists It is a common misconception to assume that a sustained engagement with philosophical nihilism is a central theme of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Rather, Schopenhauer’s emphasis on existential suffering prepares the ground for modern pessimism. Such pessimism shies away from challenging normative authority. Instead, pessimism seeks to give meaning to suffering, thus reactivating a pre-Kantian figure of thought by vindicating evil, albeit without the need for God. The question, then, is what happens to “nihilism” between the 1840s and the 1880s? In Western Europe, nihilism is misunderstood as undermining the achievements of Enlightenment liberalism, so that the pejorative meaning of the term increasingly moved into the foreground. In France and Germany, references to nihilism became a commonplace in literary responses to the failed revolutions of 1830, 1832, and 1848–1849. As soon as literary writers left philosophy behind, nihilism was presented as a defeatist political stance that had given up on political change and reform. Nihilism, on this account, stood in stark opposition to the ideals of nineteenth-century liberalism and republicanism, from Karl Immermann’s novel The Epigones (1836) and Karl Gutzkow’s story “The Nihilists” (1853) to Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1855) and, of course, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862). In hindsight, these and other authors failed to grasp that it is precisely nihilism which allows for challenging existing normative authorities, while the figures of hope and salvation that appear in the prose of nineteenth-century liberal writers tend to reactivate Christian themes that limit the critical potential of literary writing. While the references to nihilism among politically active West European writers are largely negative, the debates about nihilism in Russia are more complex: The belated reception of German idealism in Eastern Europe inserted nihilism into aesthetic and philosophical discussions that were already linked to increasing demands for social reform in the Russian Empire.77 Nihilism was a Western European intellectual import into 77 On the importance of German philosophy and literature for the formation of Russian nihilism, see Peter Thiergen, Deutsche Anstöße der frühen russischen Nihilismus-Diskussion des 19. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008). On Russian nihilism, see Richard Peace, “Nihilism,” in A History of Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 116–140.

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Russia, where it fell on the fertile ground of generational change within Russia’s highly authoritarian and feudal society that was deeply rooted in Orthodox Christianity. While Russian intellectuals were heavily influenced by German idealism in the 1830s and 1840s, since many of them had studied at German universities, the broader reception of materialism, especially works by Ludwig Büchner and Ludwig Feuerbach, in the 1860s, led to an internal clash between an older generation calling for liberal reform and a younger generation seeking to decouple itself from the Tsarist regime. It is precisely this conflict that comes to the fore in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862), when the self-proclaimed nihilist Bazarov declares that a nihilist “doesn’t bow down before authorities, doesn’t accept even one principle on faith, no matter how much respect surrounds that principle.”78 While liberal reformers merely talk about social emancipation in journals and salons, the nihilist is ready to “curse everything,” including those liberal principles and institutions that could bring change to Tsarist Russia, such as “parliamentarism” and the “legal profession.”79 As a consequence, Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the profoundly negative attitude of nihilist writers to existing normative authorities as a clear threat to what he regarded as an authentic Russian culture: Revisiting the generational constellation of Turgenev’s novel, and commenting on the increasing radicalization of the younger intelligentsia, Dostoevsky’s Devils (1871–1872) presents a group of radical nihilists, who kill each other, are killed, or commit suicide.80 Unlike in Fathers and Sons, the supposedly self-destructive nature of nihilism is not contrasted with a reform-minded liberalism but instead with the clear demand for a return to a transcendent God and the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian nihilism aims at new forms of individualism and aesthetic expression that break with the feudal and patriarchal social structures of Tsarist Russia.81 Turgenev’s figure of Bazarov was immediately picked up by Dmitry Pisarev in an 1862 essay for the left-liberal journal Russkoe slovo, which presents an ideal-type nihilist for whom negation is the source of social change but who also clearly bears the traits of Romantic 78 Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Michael R. Katz, introduction Rosamund Bartlett, afterword Tatiana Tolstaya (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994), 18. 79 Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 40. 80 See, for instance, Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils, trans. David Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1971), 592–624. 81 See, for instance, Stepniak, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life, preface Peter Lavroff, 2nd edn. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1885), 3–4 and 23. On Stepniak, see Peter Scotto, “The Terrorist as Novelist: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky,” in Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia, ed. Anthony Anemone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 97–126.

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individualism.82 Pisarev engaged in a primarily aesthetic construction of nihilism that also took center stage in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), but in both cases the negation of existing normative authority is linked to a utopian program that foregrounds the practical dimension of human existence: Individual freedom and the supposed pleasures of work, as opposed to the intellectualism of liberal reformers, are seen as the source of a new collectivism that might anticipate revolution, but that is actually rooted in deeply Romantic notions of equality and humanity that also guide Mikhail Bakunin’s account of the poor, the unemployed, and the young intellectuals as the true revolutionary forces.83 Although Alexander Herzen, in the late 1860s, warned against the aestheticized conception of the political that was part of Pisarev’s nihilism, and instead advocated a critical conception of “nihilism” based on “science,” “doubt,” “research,” and “understanding,” Russian nihilism had effectively run its course by the 1870s and was pushed aside by more radical political activism that had no connections to the philosophical nihilism of German idealism which had partly shaped the early formation of Russian nihilism.84 In Russian, the term nigilizm first appeared in 1829, largely in an aesthetic context, but the reception of Russian nihilism by the political elite in Russia and by public intellectuals in Western Europe increasingly constructed a causal nexus between nihilism as an aesthetic discourse and the repeated assassination attempts on Tsar Alexander II in 1866, 1867, and 1881. Although Russian nihilism, properly speaking, did not exist anymore by the 1880s and had become a cliché, it is at that moment that Russian nihilism was widely seen as promoting terror.85 Seen from 1880s Imperial Germany, for instance, 82 See Dmitry Pisarev, “Bazarov,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 12 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 2000–2013), vol. IV, 164–201. For a detailed discussion of Pisarev’s essay, see Peter Pozefsky, The Nihilist Imagination: Dmitrii Pisarev and the Origins of Russian Social Radicalism (1860–1868) (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 57–71. 83 See Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. and trans. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 198–217; and Adam B. Ulam, Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia, new introduction, 2nd edn. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 53–68. 84 See Alexander Herzen, “Bazarov Once More,” in My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, introduction Isaiah Berlin, trans. Constance Garnett, abridged by Dwight Macdonald (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 628–643, p. 630; and “Order Triumphs!,” in A Herzen Reader, ed. and trans. Kathleen Parthé (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 306–321, p. 320. 85 See Claudia Verhoeven, “The Making of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” in Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terror, ed. Isaac Land (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 99–116.

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Russian nihilism was both a perplexing historical phenomenon and a threat to the social structure of the nation state.86

The Value of Nihilism Nietzsche’s patience with Russian nihilism was limited. Although he read Turgenev’s novel, his characterization of Russian nihilism reflects the latter’s turn toward the political Romanticism of revolution, and when he commented on Russian nihilism in his later works, such as The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and The Genealogy of Morality (1887), he mainly refers to the kind of revolutionary anarchism that, in the Western European imagination, short-circuited nihilism with terrorism. Russian nihilism, he remarked, “indicates primarily the need for faith” and, as such, it is the manifestation of an “instinct of weakness” that is not fundamentally different from other political trends with obvious religious overtones, such as French chauvinisme or German nationalism.87 Russian nihilism, in short, was a fashionable intellectual platitude that, because it ultimately sought to overcome nihilism proper, was bound to turn into some sort of “fanaticism,” or what he called “St. Petersburg metapolitics.”88 The central problem of Russian nihilism is that it is not really nihilism to begin with. Rather, it remains deeply committed to a Christian conception of the vanity and corruption of the world that always entails a longing for the authenticity of political life.89 Almost a decade before he began to use the term “nihilism,” Nietzsche recognized the same basic problem already with regard to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which, unlike ancient Greek pessimism, fails to appreciate the tragic outlook of human existence. Schopenhauer still allows for the salvation and redemption of human existence through asceticism and art; his pessimism is not only 86 See, for instance, Nicolai Karlowitsch [Karl Nikolaus von Gerbel-Embach], Die Entwickelung des Nihilismus, 3rd, enlarged, edn. (Berlin: B. Behr, 1880); Josef Dippel, Der russische Nihilismus: Auf Grund zuverlässiger Quellen dargestellt (Passau: Waldbauer, 1882); and Karl Oldenberg, Der russische Nihilismus von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1888). 87 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 205 (§ 347). 88 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Dieter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–12 (§ 10), 99–102 (§ 208), and 116–117 (§ 225); and On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 123 (III: 26). 89 See, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ: A Curse on Christianity, in The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–67.

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a “sign of decline,” but, like Richard Wagner’s music, it is “a narcotic which both intoxicates and befogs the mind.”90 Pessimism, in other words, is a Romantic attitude of “excessive sensibility” that fails to understand the reality of human suffering in a truly meaningless world.91 Precisely because it does not realize that the tragedy of human existence cannot be overcome through some sort of poetic justice, modern pessimism is ultimately lifedenying: Instead of accepting human beings as natural beings, and thus as a constitutive part of a meaningless world, modern pessimism responds to human life with a contempt for nature that is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.92 While Nietzsche clearly rejected modern pessimism, there can be little doubt that he endorsed the kind of pessimism he saw as central to Greek tragedy. The strength of such Greek pessimism, he surmised, was that it refrained from moralizing the world and, in contrast to Socratic optimism, fully submitted to a tragic conflict at the center of human existence which could never be resolved.93 What Nietzsche described as “man’s instinctive lust for life” was the central characteristic of the “tragic view of the world.”94 As soon as human beings asserted their freedom and interests in a meaningless world, conflict could not be avoided, and the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus effectively mirrored the basic constellations of a social and political life marked by contradictory normative claims without an external, or transcendent, authority able to mediate between these claims. Greek pessimism was life-affirming in the sense that it accepted the natural conditions of human life and celebrated tragic conflict: As a counter-example to modern pessimism, Greek pessimism was capable of “saying yes to life, even in its strongest and harshest problems.”95 Nietzsche’s discussion of Greek pessimism foreshadows his much later conception of nihilism as the 90 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–12, p. 4. 91 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 61 (§ 48). 92 See Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” 9; and On the Genealogy of Morality, 46–49 (II: 7). 93 See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 69–70. Nietzsche’s emphasis on ancient Greek pessimism is indebted to Jacob Burckhardt’s reflections on Greek cultural history. See Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, III, in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Leonhard Burckhardt, Fritz Graf, and Barbara von Reibnitz, 28 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), vol. XXI, 242. 94 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 74 and 76. 95 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 153–229, p. 228 (X: 5).

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normal condition of human existence, and it is closely connected to his naturalistic account of norms and values. Nihilism is an integral part of Nietzsche’s philosophical project: Although he begins to use the term “nihilism” for the first time in the summer of 1880, and although his discussion of nihilism culminates in 1886 and 1887, his account of pessimism is already connected to philosophical and cultural tropes of nothingness since 1866. The immediate question, of course, is whether or not Nietzsche views himself as a nihilist.96 The more interesting question is whether his project of a genealogy and revaluation of values can be understood along the lines of philosophical nihilism in the tradition of German idealism. Like Hegel, Nietzsche recognizes the ambivalence of nihilism: Understood as a will to nothingness, nihilism’s radical ontological skepticism about the nature of reality entails a self-destructive tendency.97 Since there is no indication that Nietzsche envisions self-destruction as the task of his philosophical project, it is easy to assume that his overarching interest is to overcome nihilism by revaluating and affirming life: By becoming who we are, that is, by understanding more fully that we are value-creating beings, even though these values lack any transcendent point of reference, we are also able to overcome the problem of nihilism. For Nietzsche, however, nihilism is built into any normative order, and, since we cannot live in a world without values, or escape normativity, nihilism can never fully be overcome. Indeed, he notes “Nihilism as a normal condition.”98 But while an “active nihilism,” as the willingness to engage in revaluation, is an expression of strength and autonomy, a “passive nihilism,” such as Schopenhauer’s pessimism or the foundations of Russian nihilist activism, is merely a manifestation of weakness.99 As such, his philosophical project highlights a basic paradox: We cannot escape the world of values and norms, but these values and norms are themselves groundless; that is, they cannot be grounded in anything other than human existence itself. An active form of nihilism, thus, comes to recognize that “the value of things” rests “precisely in the fact that no reality corresponds and has corresponded to that value.”100 96 For the opposing views, see Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 22 and 30–33; and Richard Schacht, “Nietzsche and Nihilism: Nietzsche and Danto’s Nietzsche,” in Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 35–61. 97 See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 67–68 (II: 21), 70–71 (II: 24), and 94 (III: 14). 98 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 146–147 (note 9 [35]). Nietzsche underlined the word “normal” twice. 99 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 146–147 (note 9 [35]). Underlined twice in the original notebook. 100 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 146–147 (note 9 [35]).

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Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism is connected to a continuous revaluation of values and norms. On the one hand, as he notes in fall 1887, nihilism is always built into moral values, since “moral value judgments are condemnations, negations.”101 On the other hand, such a process of negation is not only a form of critique, but also allows for the possibility of different values and norms that were previously seen in a negative light themselves. Revaluation here implies “that those aspects of existence previously negated are not only necessary, but also desirable.”102 This link between nihilism and revaluation distinguishes Nietzsche’s approach sharply from what he regards as fashionable political and philosophical forms of nihilism. Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Russian nihilism, for instance, remain under the spell of metaphysical presumptions, such as an “unconditional will to truth” that is nothing but a “metaphysical faith.”103 Any conception of nihilism that fails to appreciate that nihilism is the condition of the normative world we are forced to live in amounts to a religious position that has not fully understood the consequences of either the death of God or human autonomy. Christianity is Nietzsche’s prime example for the inevitability of nihilism. Since Christian doctrine denies life, the body, and nature, and since it is marked at the same time by an uncompromising standard of truth in the service of what is seen as superior moral authenticity, Christianity is bound to undermine itself, because this uncompromising standard of truth will inevitably turn against Christianity’s own precepts: “Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as a morality must also be destroyed, – we stand on the threshold of this occurrence.”104 It is important to keep in mind, however, that this development is not specific to Christianity, but it is characteristic of any kind of normative order, as he notes in The Gay Science: “We negate and have to negate because something in us wants to live and affirm life itself, something we might not yet know or see!”105 Nihilism is inextricably linked to the question of “value” as the central problem of Nietzsche’s philosophy. As soon as he is able to recognize the importance of

Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 205 (note 10 [191]). Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 173 (note 10 [3]). Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 119 (III: 24). Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 127 (III: 27). See also Nietzsche’s so-called “Lenzer Heide” fragment on European nihilism from June 10, 1887, in Writings from the Late Notebooks, 116–121 (note 5 [71]). 105 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 175 (§ 307). 101 102 103 104

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nihilism, he leaves behind the traditional perspective of moral and political philosophy centered on the question of which values we ought to endorse. Instead, in Beyond Good and Evil, he is able to ask how values could possibly exist in the first place and why there should be opposites of values.106 By tracing the history of the values that shape the Judeo-Christian tradition at large, he is able to realize that their historical development is marked by a repeated “reversal” and “displacement,” but if that should indeed be the case then these values cannot be grounded in any external authority, such as God, that serves as an unchanging universal standard.107 Not surprisingly, the origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition constitutes a dramatic revaluation, the “slave revolt” in morality, which attributes superior moral authority to something that used to be perceived as a lack of power.108 Even a presumed will to nothingness, as comes to the fore in the Christian tradition, remains the manifestation of a will to power. But Nietzsche is also not willing to accept the autonomy of reason in the strict sense of the term. Rather, since reason and cognition require some sort of biological being with a specific psychology, the values according to which we live need to be seen as emerging from our existence as natural beings: Value judgments are always “physiological value judgments.”109 While nature is meaningless, it allows for the emergence of something that we, as a constitutive part of this meaningless nature, view as meaningful, even though, upon further critical inspection, the meaning we attach to our values always turns out to be merely a function of our natural existence and our continued survival as a species. Seen against this background, a “revaluation of values is achieved only when there is a tension of new needs.”110 The continuing revaluation of our values is, Nietzsche claims, a manifestation of the “will to power,” and the latter is mainly a metaphor to describe how we, as natural beings, engage with a world of which we are a constitutive part. What he presents here as the “world seen from the inside” pushes German idealism’s conception of nihilism to its obvious conclusion.111 Under the conditions of nihilism properly 106 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 5–6 (§§ 1–2). 107 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 32–33 (§ 32) and 75–92 (§§ 186–203). 108 See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 18–27 (I: 7–11). See also, more generally, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 88–89 (§ 201), 153–160 (§§ 260–262), and 160 (§ 265). 109 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 21 (§ 20). On the broader context of Nietzsche’s claim, see Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 184–214. 110 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 152 (note 9 [77]). 111 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 36 (§ 36).

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speaking all metaphysically meaningful points of reference melt away, since we cannot even decide whether the world we see is a product of our biology, or whether what we regard as our biology is merely a product of specifically human experience.112 The task of philosophy, then, is not to decide which already-existing values are good, but rather, as a manifestation of the will to power, philosophy’s task is to create and revalue values. Much like Fichte and Hegel, then, Nietzsche understands human beings as “value-positers.”113 Nietzsche conceives of nihilism proper as a form of critique that, by foregrounding the meaninglessness and groundlessness of the world and of our values, allows us to realize three conditions of our existence as a species. First, the values we subscribe to can only rest in themselves and thus in our existence as natural beings. Second, as such these values are subject to change. Third, such change is valuable itself since it contributes to the continued robustness of our natural existence as a species. It is precisely in this respect that Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism has a decisive political implication: Even though only the new philosophers, or free spirits, might be able to realize the “value of such a crisis,” the experience of nihilism highlights that there is “no need of extreme articles of faith.”114 In this sense, Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism also homes in on the relationship between philosophy and politics. Much like Fichte and Hegel, he comes to recognize nihilism as the condition of political life, and behind his conception of nihilism also stands a conception of freedom and autonomy.115 Even though we cannot escape the normative world we live in, we can demand freedom from certain values and norms that are imposed on us by others, which allows for practical autonomy. When Nietzsche occasionally speaks of the overcoming, or self-overcoming, of nihilism, he clearly understands that any such attempt will invariably lead back to nihilism. In this respect, nihilism emerges as the positive condition of political life that makes normative claims possible in a world that is equally marked by the possibility of freedom and the tragedy of necessity. Any attempt to overcome nihilism, on the other hand, inevitably leads to catastrophe. For Martin Heidegger, writing after World War I and reflecting on the broader crisis of European culture after 1918, nihilism was the fate of Western history that had to 112 113 114 115

See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 16 (§ 15). Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 147 (note 9 [35]). Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 120–121 (note 5 [71]). See Robert C. Salomon, From Hegel to Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87, 92, and 102–103.

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be overcome in order to save the authenticity of being, but this authenticity included “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”116 In contrast, and like Fichte and Hegel, Nietzsche understood clearly that philosophical nihilism allows us to challenge normative authorities and that nihilism is part of the history of human autonomy and freedom.

116 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 199. See also Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. David Farrell Krell, Joan Stambaugh, and Frank A. Capuzzi, 4 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979–1987), vol. I, 26; and vol. II, 4–5; and Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead,’” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 157–199, pp. 160 and 163.

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Civilization, Culture, and Race: Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century adam kuper

Anthropology, Ethnography, Ethnology In the 1830s and 1840s, an Enlightenment project, the study of the origin and variety of human populations, was made over into a natural science. It was termed “ethnography” or, more ambitiously, “ethnology” or even “anthropology,” all labels that had become current in the final third of the eighteenth century. The new science concerned itself with questions of “race,” “culture,” “civilisation,” and “progress.” These were also freshly minted terms, which became rallying cries in the culture wars of the day. Race was especially contentious. In 1735 Linnaeus distinguished four human “varieties”: the white European, the red American, the brown (later yellow) Asian, and the black African. However, he downplayed the significance of these differences, and even remarked that he knew “no scientific reason . . . to distinguish between Man and Ape.”1 In 1775, Immanuel Kant’s Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen identified four human “races,” so giving new currency to a recherché French biological term. In 1805, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor of medicine in Göttingen, published his very influential Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie, which identified five races, largely on the basis of cranial measurements. But the nature, number, and identity of human “races” were not the only contentious issues. At the heart of the new discourse was another crucial, bitterly fought debate. “Monogenesists” posited a single origin of the human species. “Polygenesists” contended that each race had a separate origin and even that human races were well on the way to becoming distinct species. These might be scientific issues, but the answers mattered greatly to *

I am very grateful to Peter Bowler, Benôit de l’Estoile, Gregory Radick, James Urry, and Han Vermeulen for their comments on a draft of this chapter. 1 J. S. Slotkin (ed.), Readings in Early Anthropology (London: Methuen, 1965), 179–180.

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Christians who defended the biblical account of Creation, and they were much debated by advocates and opponents of slavery and colonialism. Discussions of “race” were interwoven with arguments about “civilization” and “progress.” Measurements of the skull and brain were widely thought to reflect intellectual differences. Europeans were assumed to be not only more intelligent than members of other races but more adaptable, and uniquely fitted for civilization. And the civilized world was evidently on the verge of a wonderful new era of accelerating technological progress. “World Fairs” displayed marvels of technology at home and touted the spread of imperial power over faraway backward peoples. In 1851 the first of these, “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations,” attracted six million visitors to the Crystal Palace in London (this at a time when the population of the UK was about eighteen million). However, the march of civilization was not universally welcomed. Romantics protested against the suppression of local traditions. Conservatives worried about the unintended consequence of disrupting established institutions. After the British Parliament had assumed responsibility for the government of India in 1858 an ”Anglicizing” coalition of Utilitarians and free traders pressed for radical change, while administrators of a Burkean persuasion were more inclined to shore up established authorities and to show respect for local sensibilities.2 But was social and political progress inevitable? The politically aware were beset by concerns about the franchise in Britain, revolutions in France and Germany, and unrest in Europe’s internal and foreign empires. A confrontation loomed over slavery in the Americas. Perhaps not all races were capable of civilization. Racial mixing might put Europeans themselves at risk of degeneration, even regression to barbarism.3 Europe’s industrial cities apparently harbored “dangerous classes.” Were they throwbacks to a savage past, or perhaps harbingers of racial degeneration?4 Learned societies began to consider these issues. The Royal Geographical Institute, founded in 1830, made room for “ethnological” or “ethnographic” reports.5 Within a few years, societies were being formed specifically to study 2 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 3 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 H.-A. Frégier, Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes, et des moyens de les rendre meilleures (Paris: Baillière, 1840); E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. I, 42–43; and Marie Marmo Mullaney, “Frégier and the ‘Dangerous Classes’: Poverty in Orleanist France,” International Social Science Review, 58(2) (1983), 88–92. 5 James Urry, “The Founding and Organization of the First Ethnological Society of London” (2015), unpublished paper.

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“ethnology” or “anthropology.” A Société ethnologique de Paris was founded in 1839. Its first president, William Frédéric Edwards, a physician, was associated with the anti-slavery movement, and its members were largely Saint-Simonians, utopian, and philanthropically inclined. The ethnological society, which was suppressed after the revolution of 1848, was reborn in 1859. Also in 1859, the Société d’ethnographie de Paris was launched by philologists who shared a special interest in the IndoEuropean language family, and who tended to be Christians of a spiritualist cast. In 1842 an Ethnological Society was formed in New York. In the same year the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) in Britain passed a resolution to the effect “that the best way to help aboriginals was to study them.”6 This was contentious. The missionary Christian element in the society resisted. A year later the secretary of the APS, Richard King, and two influential members, the Quaker physicians Thomas Buxton and Thomas Hodgkin, formed the London Ethnological Society to promote ethnographic studies. In 1846 James Cowles Prichard, a pioneering psychiatrist and a Welsh-speaking Quaker, was elected President. He was the author of an extensive textbook on human variation, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, published in 1813, and his interests straddled race, philology, and myth. Prichard saw it as his special mission to reconcile the findings of paleontology with the genealogy of humanity as laid down in the Book of Genesis. The third edition of his textbook, issued shortly before his death in 1848, ran to five volumes, a testimony to his industry, to the strength of his faith, and to the growth of the field.7 According to E. B. Tylor, Prichard “merits the title of the founder of modern anthropology.”8 In 1859, just a week after the establishment of the Paris ethnological society, a distinguished physician and craniologist, Paul Broca, founded the Société d’anthropologie de Paris. This was the first learned society to adopt the title “Anthropological.” In Broca’s view the ethnologicals were in thrall to religion, do-gooders, their motivation not truly scientific. In consequence they were reluctant to acknowledge the radical importance of biological differences. 6 George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 252. 7 See George Stocking’s introduction to the scholarly reprint: “From Chronology to Ethnology: James Cowles Prichard and British Anthropology, 1800–1850,” in James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973), ix–cx. 8 E. B. Tylor, “Anthropology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edn. (1889).

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In the wake of the 1848 Revolution, a French diplomat, the Count de Gobineau, had published his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, which asserted the superiority of an Aryan race, represented by Europe’s aristocracies but not by the hybridized masses. Broca was sympathetic to the view that human races had different origins, and agreed that France’s population was racially hybrid, but he rejected Gobineau’s thesis that the mixture of races led inevitably to degeneration, and he countered that interbreeding could be beneficial.9 Variants of this argument flared up regularly in France throughout the nineteenth century, and were inflamed during the Dreyfus Affair.10 Argument about race also divided leading members of the London Ethnological Society. In 1863, in the heat of the American Civil War, a dissident faction broke away and set up the Anthropological Society of London. A year later its leader, James Hunt, published On the Negro’s Place in Nature (1864), in which he asserted the separate origin of human races and defended slavery. The inner circle of the Anthropological Society formed The Cannibal Club, which was gaveled to order with a mace “in the form of a Negro head.”11 The Ethnologicals were appalled by the “cannibal clique.” Committed to the campaign against slavery, they insisted on the common genealogy of the human species, a doctrine that was endorsed, if for very different reasons, by the Book of Genesis and by the Darwinians. Passions cooled following the Confederate defeat, and Hunt’s death. In 1871, the year in which Darwin’s Descent of Man was published, the two London societies merged under the leadership of John Lubbock, T. H. Huxley, and General Augustus Lane-Fox (later Pitt Rivers). They were all Darwinians, and indeed one commentator complained that the new society promised to become “little more than a sort of Darwinian club.”12 The choice of a name for the society provoked tense diplomatic maneuvering. After much heart-searching, and despite a rearguard action by the fervently anti-racist Lady Lubbock, it was settled that the new association should be termed “Anthropological.”13 And, no longer a merely metropolitan society, it was to be The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 9 Claude Blanckaert, De la race à l’évolution. Pau et l’anthropologie française (1850–1900) (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009). 10 Martin S. Staum, Nature and Nurture in French Social Science, 1859–1914 and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 64–68. 11 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 252. 12 Anonymous, “Anthropological News,” Anthropological Review, 6 (1868), 324. 13 George W. Stocking, Jr., “What’s in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71),” Man (n.s.), 6(3) (1971), 369–390.

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Alongside these learned societies, the first ethnographic museums were established. One was placed within the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg in 1836 (and a year later Russia’s Imperial Academy of Sciences endowed the world’s first chair in etnografia).14 A Museum voor Volkenkunde opened in Leiden in the Netherlands in 1837. Plans for a museum in Paris were mooted in 1839, but the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro was founded only in 1878. (It was reborn as the Musée de l’Homme in 1937.)15 An Etnografisk Museum was established in Copenhagen in 1841. In 1845 the British Museum added a substantial Ethnographic Gallery. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. set up a Department of Ethnology in 1846. A loose intellectual community was emerging, but its members had very diverse concerns. They might share an interest in savages, but they were divided, sometimes bitterly, on questions of religion, politics, race, and slavery. Nor did they have a common scientific background, let alone an agreed research program. The new learned societies attracted physicians interested in anatomy and race; lawyers and colonial officials with broadly political concerns; missionaries and their allies, fascinated by religion, worried about morality; classicists and orientalists, learned in philology and curious about pagan relics; and a scattering of folklorists, naval officers, travelers, collectors, and amateur archaeologists with eclectic interests but little if any background in relevant sciences.16 Candidates for membership of Broca’s Parisian association were vetted for their seriousness. Those admitted were mainly physicians. In England, in contrast, there was a decidedly dilettantish feel about much that passed as ethnology or anthropology, parodied by Thackeray in Pendennis in 1850: “As another man has an ardour for art or music, or natural science, Mr. Pen said that anthropology was his favourite pursuit . . . And indeed a man whose heart is pretty clean, can indulge in this pursuit with an enjoyment that never ceases . . .”17 Thomas Hodgkin actively encouraged amateurs to join the Ethnological Society of London: “Ethnology may appear 14 Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 408–410. Vermeulen also traces early uses of the terms ethnology and ethnography. 15 Benôit de l’Estoile, “From the Colonial Exhibition to the Museum of Man. An Alternative Genealogy of French Anthropology,” Social Anthropology, 11(3) (2003), 341–361. 16 For Britain, see Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially Chapter 2 and Appendix 1. 17 W. M. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, 2 vols. (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850), vol. II, 79.

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to be more exclusively within the province of the medical man and the linguist than is altogether desirable for the interest of the study, which really comes within the scope of every well-informed man, and more especially of every traveller.”18 To be sure, some distinguished scholars were active in the London societies. In the 1870s they increasingly came to dominate the affairs of the reformed Anthropological Institute. Perhaps as a result, membership and attendance at meetings dropped off, some amateurs opting rather for the Folklore Society, which was founded in 1878. But the scientists and physicians were busy with their day jobs, and in any case there was no obvious incentive to develop a formal disciplinary identity. The Bureau of American Ethnology, supported by federal funding, was established in 1870, and it was soon publishing lavishly illustrated ethnographic reports on American Indian peoples. Yet while French and English anthropological societies made regular appeals for government support, ramping these up in the 1880s with the “Scramble for Africa,” they yielded nothing. “In the absence of any significant social demand for anthropological research,” George Stocking concluded, “the community of anthropologists [in England] continued throughout the century to be composed primarily of gentleman scholars, or professionals in some other area of scientific or scholarly activity . . . there was no institutional framework that could provide systematic specialized training for any aspect of the discipline until the 1880s.”19

Time and Progress Yet something was in the air, if not quite a distinctive discipline. Perhaps the most important catalyst for new thinking was the recognition of the true timescale of life on our planet.20 In all sorts of ways, very dramatically, the remote past was giving up its secrets. Geologists were establishing the great age of the earth. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, catapulted the new science into public attention, and inspired the young Charles Darwin as he embarked on his 18 Thomas Hodgkin, “The Progress of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 1 (1848), 27–45, p. 35. 19 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 267. 20 Thomas R. Trautmann, “The Revolution in Ethnological Time,” Man (n.s.), 27(2) (1992), 379–397; and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993).

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voyage with the Beagle. The identification of geological strata allowed the relative dating of fossils and archaeological finds. Excavations in continental Europe uncovered human remains and artifacts in ancient geological formations, and in association with fossils of extinct animal species. English scientists were initially skeptical, but these findings were confirmed by excavations at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858. Lyell visited the site, and in 1859 he announced to a major scientific gathering that it was “probable that man was old enough to have co-existed, at least, with the Siberian mammoth.”21 In 1863 he published a cautious synthesis of the emerging perspective, his Antiquity of Man. In the same year Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature drew attention to anatomical similarities between humans and apes, clear indications of a common ancestry. Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) proposed that the earliest human beings must have lived rather like African apes, although they were bipedal, had larger brains, and made tools. Profiting from advances in geology, archaeologists could order their findings in time series with reference to geological strata. It now seemed incontrovertible that civilization was a very recent development. The period before the rise of civilization was given a new name: It was the age of “pre-history.”22 The term had been coined to refer to pre-Roman Europe. It gained currency, and a wider application, with the publication in 1865 of John Lubbock’s PreHistoric Times, which introduced the Scandinavian tripartite model of stone, bronze, and iron ages. “The great antiquity of mankind upon the earth has been conclusively established,” wrote Lewis Henry Morgan, introducing his Ancient Society in 1877. “It seems singular that the proofs should have been discovered as recently as within the last thirty years, and that the present generation should be the first called upon to recognize so important a fact.”23 Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times was subtitled as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. If all societies progressed through a common series of stages, then contemporary “primitive societies” could be treated as stand-ins for past societies at an equivalent stage of development. As Lubbock put it, the “Van Diemener [Tasmanian] and the South American are to the antiquary, what the opossum and the sloth are to the geologist.”24 This was the “comparative method.” 21 Charles Lyell, “On the Occurrence of Works of Human Art in Post-Pliocene Deposits,” Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 29 (1859), 93–95, p. 93. 22 Donald R. Kelley, “The Rise of Prehistory,” Journal of World History, 14(1) (2003), 17–36. 23 Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Holt, 1877), xxix. 24 Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times (London: Williams and Norgate, 1865), 336.

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Materials for comparison were accumulating. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Russian state had employed German geographers to undertake what they termed ethnographic or ethnological studies in Siberia.25 Protestant missionaries became active in Africa and the Pacific from the early nineteenth century and made it a priority to translate the bible into local languages. This obliged them to identify indigenous notions that were roughly equivalent to god, spirit, sin, sacrifice, and holiness. These concepts, and their ritual representations, were taken to be the essential constituents of a religion. If all religions at similar levels of civilization were very much alike, findings from any ethnographic study could be generalized. Native Americans had totems. Polynesians had taboos. Therefore all primitive religions at a similar level of development must have featured totems and taboos. Fieldwork in the tropics was generally left to amateurs in the nineteenth century, but, increasingly, they operated under long-distance guidance. In 1800 the short-lived Société des Observateurs de l’Homme published a field manual, The Observations of Savage Peoples.26 The APS had begun to commission ethnographic studies for its journal in the 1830s, a decade before the formation of the London Ethnological Society, and laid down guidelines for men in the field. Metropolitan scholars began to direct detailed enquiries to amateur ethnographers – colonial officers, missionaries, and scientific travelers. In the hands of Morgan and James George Frazer these took the form of extended questionnaires. The Anthropological Institute issued the first version of Notes and Queries on Anthropology in 1870.27 Missionary journals and the new journals of geography and ethnology that began to appear in the 1840s published ethnographic papers written by “men in the field,” which were featured alongside archaeological field reports, descriptions of exotic technologies, records of cranial measurements, and snippets of European folklore. Two broad research programs competed to make sense of this mass of new material. One took off from the doctrine of common descent. The fundamental assumption was that all societies began at the same ground zero, and then advanced through a fixed series of stages. Drawing on 25 Vermeulen, Before Boas, Chapters 2–4. 26 Jean Jamin, “Naissance de l’observation anthropologique: La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme (1799–1805),” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 67 (1979), 313–335. 27 James Urry, “‘Notes and Queries on Anthropology’ and the Development of Field Methods in British Anthropology, 1870–1920,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1972), 45–57.

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ethnographic and archaeological evidence, anthropologists aimed to characterize the first forms of religion, family, and society. Variations between human populations reflected the different rates at which they ascended the path from savagery to civilization. A second program assumed that human varieties were fundamentally distinct, perhaps even virtually different species, and that each developed on its own lines. The paradigmatic case was the Indo-European language family, supposedly associated with a European or “Aryan” race. Anatomy and philology provided the main approaches in this field. (Darwin himself compared the way in which “descent with modification” played out in biological and linguistic change.) In Germany this research program also drew in geographers, who related cultural and biological groupings to distinctive ecological regions.

Civilization and Culture These two research programs addressed a pair of eighteenth-century neologisms that took their place alongside “race” in competitive accounts of human history: the French “Civilisation” and the German “Kultur.” The French coinage “civilisation” gained currency in the 1770s, at the same time as “race.”28 It connoted a social condition that was the very antithesis of barbarism and savagery. A genre of Enlightenment historiography, originating in France but pursued enthusiastically in Scotland, speculated about the stages that intervened between savagery and civilization. The notion of social and intellectual “progress” emerged at the same time. “The two words were destined to maintain a most intimate relationship,” Jean Starobinski noted. Together they were taken to “describe both the fundamental process of history and the end result of that process.”29 It became customary to link ideas about civilization with the emerging typologies of races and languages. In the early eighteenth century, G. W. Leibniz had mooted a classification of all the world’s languages, and in 1786 Sir William Jones declared that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit – perhaps also early German, Celtic, and Persian – were related. In 1813 Thomas Young termed this family of languages “Indo-European,” though some scholars

28 Philippe Bénéton, Histoire de mots: Culture et civilisation (Paris: Presse de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1975). 29 Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.

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preferred “Aryan.” Franz Bopp’s Comparative Grammar (1833–1852) established a firm theoretical basis for Indo-European philology. More speculatively, this Indo-European language family was associated with ideas about a European race, or races, and with the development of a unique civilization. In Germany, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Carl Savigny, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Carl Ritter began to sketch the history of an “Indo-European” or “Aryan” civilization. Max Müller, a German philologist, was appointed to a chair in modern European languages at Oxford in 1850 and promoted Aryan studies. “They trifled for a time with fancy,” Lord Acton remarked in his essay “German Schools of History” (1886), “but they doubled the horizons of Europe. They admitted India to an equality with Greece, mediaeval Rome with classical [Rome].”30 Henry Maine declared that India “includes a whole world of Aryan institutions, Aryan customs, Aryan laws, Aryan ideas, Aryan beliefs, in a far earlier stage of growth and development than any which survived beyond its borders.”31 One of the founders of the Ethnological Society of London, Thomas Hodgkin, was equally effusive: “Thus, thanks to the ethnologist, not only is an affinity discovered between the ancient Londoner and his Roman invader, which neither of them suspected, but between him and those very people on the banks of the Ganges, whom the modern Londoner has invaded and subdued.”32 Inspired by Greece, civilization had developed in the Indo-European world. (“Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin,” Maine proclaimed.33) But the unique status of European – or of “Aryan” – civilization was soon brought into question. Lucien Febvre remarked that the plural form, Civilisations, began to appear in 1819.34 Adapting the methods of classical and biblical studies, European scholars now engaged in the systematic study of the religions, literature, and art of China, Japan, India, Egypt, Persia, and Israel, which were admitted as “civilizations” alongside classical Greece and Rome.

30 J. F. E. Acton, Historical Essays and Studies (London: Macmillan, 1907), 346. 31 Henry Maine, The Effects of the Observation of India on Modern European Thought (London: John Murray, 1875), 2. 32 Thomas Hodgkin, “The Progress of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 1 (1848), 40. 33 Henry Maine, Village Communities in India, 3rd edn. (London: John Murray, 1876), 238. 34 Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation,” in Lucien Febvre, Marcel Mauss, Émile Tonnelat, Alfredo Niceforo, and Louis Weber, Civilisation: Le mot et l’idée (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1930), 16.

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The term Kultur, also coined in the 1770s, and given currency by Johann Gottfried von Herder, was deployed in German intellectual circles to challenge the French idea of “civilisation.”35 For Herder, as for Humboldt, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche, Kultur connoted a distinctive, local system of values and ideas that found its fullest expression in language, folk tales, music, and crafts. Each Volk drew its particular spiritual character, its Geist, from its culture. And, in contradiction to the French philosophes, Herder argued that, as there was no objective way to evaluate a culture, no common progression and no hierarchy of cultures could be established: What is that one great endpoint? Where is the straight way leading to it? What does “progress of the human race” mean? Is it Enlightenment? Improvement? Self-perfection? Greater happiness? Where is the yardstick? How are we to use data for measuring so many different periods and peoples, even with the best of outside information?36

Nor would one particular culture or civilization suit everyone, everywhere: Herder himself affirmed a preference for Gothic over classical Greek culture. Herder also dismissed the very idea of human races: “neither four or five races, nor exclusive varieties exist on earth. The colours fade into each other . . .”37 Although he peddled popular stereotypes about Jews and “Negroes,” Herder argued that human groups were distinguished by a spiritual “culture” rather than physical descent.38 The theorists of civilization emphasized rationality, science, and technology: the cerebral motors of progress. They had no time for tradition or superstition, the barriers thrown up by ignorance and fear against the march of history. German romantics, on the contrary, idealized local folkways and arts and crafts. Authentic folk culture was to be found in villages rather than in the metropolis. Its nemesis was an imperial, urban, commercial, secular – probably French-speaking – civilization. Dr. Johnson refused to admit the French term “civilisation” to his dictionary of the English language, despite the urging of James Boswell in 1772. Boswell would have known that Scottish writers including Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson had adopted the word from the French philosophers, using it to designate an advanced and admirable state of society, but the Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of an English book 35 Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 36 Cited by Vermeulen, Before Boas, 322–323. 37 Cited by Vermeulen, Before Boas, 376. 38 Cedric Dover, “The Racial Philosophy of Johann Herder,” The British Journal of Sociology, 3(2) (1952), 124–133.

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to invoke “civilization” in this sense was, perhaps ironically, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. The German neologism “culture” became common currency in England much later. It was thoroughly domesticated only with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in 1869 – but this was in the sense of the “high culture” of an intellectual elite, summed up magnificently by Arnold in his preface as “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Arnold’s success led E. B. Tylor to change the title of his forthcoming book from Early Civilisation to Primitive Culture, but he used the terms “culture” and “civilisation” interchangeably, and to mean a universal human endowment, albeit one that was unequally developed in different populations. (“Culture, or civilisation, taken in its wide, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”39)

Natural and Social Evolution Drawing on biology, a new conception of progress was introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century: evolution. The technical term “evolution” had been used for the development of the embryo, and by analogy for the unfolding of inner potential. In 1832 Darwin’s mentor Charles Lyell had referred to the transmutation of species as “evolution,” but, as Peter Bowler remarks, “the terms ‘evolution’ or ‘evolved’ do not occur very often in Darwin’s writings,” and he rarely used it in the sense of transmutation.40 It was Herbert Spencer who generated debate in England about “evolution” and “social evolution.” Perhaps the founding document of evolutionary social theory was Spencer’s 1857 essay “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” which proposed that societies were like living organisms, and that the very same laws explained the “progress,” or “evolution,” of organisms, natural species, and human societies. All societies could be traced back to a common point of origin in a simple unicellular structure. Primitive institutional forms were never lost, but were recombined in more complex new forms. These ideas were not particularly original. When it came to social and intellectual progress, Spencer drew heavily on the “positive philosophy” of Auguste Comte. He accepted Comte’s model of the unity of the sciences, 39 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I, 1. 40 Peter J. Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1(36) (1975), 103.

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and endorsed the high place that he gave to “sociology” (Comte’s coinage). In natural history, Spencer embraced the doctrine of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, who argued that an innate life force drove biological organisms to adapt to their environment, and made them increasingly complex and efficient. A version of Lamarckism was popularized in England in a hugely successful book, published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, but Lamarck’s theories had been subjected to a scathing critique by Georges Cuvier, and Lyell had published a refutation.41 Lyell was so even-handed, however, that he actually converted Spencer to Lamarck’s theory. (Darwin was scathing: “Heaven forfend me from Lamarck’s nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression,’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’ &c.”42) Was social evolutionism simply a reformulation, in a biological idiom, of the universal histories of the Scottish Enlightenment? There were obvious continuities. Darwin, for one, believed that “man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion.”43 Stated so generally, in such broad terms, that was a common enough idea at the time, but John Burrow pointed out that the social evolutionists very largely ignored the universal histories of the eighteenth century.44 Was social evolutionism Darwinian? The central doctrines of social evolutionism had been formulated a decade before the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. Pressed by Huxley, Darwin rather reluctantly borrowed Spencer’s slogan “the struggle for survival,” but his theory of natural selection was very different from the teleological theories of Lamarck, Comte, and Spencer. Nor did Darwinism dominate the anthropology of the next generation, even in England. Darwin’s close associates Huxley and Lubbock became active in the Ethnological Society, and they later took the lead in forming the Anthropological Institute, yet even after the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871 most anthropologists and ethnologists treated Darwinism as an à

41 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830–1833). See the opening pages of Volume II. 42 Darwin, letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, January 1844, Darwin Project, Cambridge University, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-729.xml;query= heaven%20forfend%20me;brand=default;hit.rank=1#hit.rank1. 43 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd edn. (London: John Murray, 1974), 224. 44 John W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

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la carte menu. Darwin was “certainly not the father of evolutionary anthropology,” Burrow concluded, but “possibly he was its wealthy uncle.”45 Insofar as the ethnologists and anthropologists were concerned, the most relevant feature of Darwinism was the theory of common descent. This posited the unity of the human species, and so gave support to the antislavery views that were shared by most Ethnologicals. Tylor’s friend and biographer, R. R. Marett, noted that he was an orthodox Darwinian “whenever he has to pronounce on the physical problems relating to human descent.” Yet he was no Darwinian when it came to “evolution.” “Though he occasionally used . . . the rather high-sounding phrase ‘evolution’ which Darwin had taken over from Herbert Spencer, perhaps without paying much heed to its philosophical implications . . . Tylor decidedly prefers to speak simply of the ‘development’ of culture.”46 The theory of natural selection was still more problematic. Even Huxley had his doubts, and the ethnologists ignored it. “Neither Maine, nor Tylor, nor McLennan made much use of the theory of natural selection,” Burrow pointed out, “and Spencer used it only as a garnish for a theory he had already developed.”47 This was hardly surprising, since the theory of natural selection could not easily be reconciled with the doctrine of progress. Environmental challenges are unpredictable. Adaptations are thrown up by chance. In consequence, the direction of change within a population must be uncertain. “I believe in no fixed law of development, causing all the inhabitants of a country to change abruptly, or simultaneously, or to an equal degree,” Darwin noted in the Origin of Species.48 The astronomer John Herschel dismissed this as “the law of higgledy-piggledy.” In any case, as Bowler remarks, “there is little evidence that [Darwin] was able to disturb his contemporaries’ faith in teleology.”49 Yet Darwin himself did not consistently apply his theory of natural selection to human evolution. Bipedalism and brain-power had evolved as a result of natural selection. At some point, however, human beings had become in effect a domesticated species, or rather, a self-domesticated species. In principle, the process of selection could now be brought under human control, but Darwin noted that, while a breeder would weed out the infirm Burrow, Evolution and Society, 114. R. R. Marett, Tylor (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936), 19. Burrow, Evolution and Society, 115. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 2nd edn. (London: John Murray, 1860), 314. 49 Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 150. 45 46 47 48

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and take great care in the selection of mating stock, humans shielded weaker members of the group and chose their mates on frivolous grounds.50 Darwin also allowed for an element of group selection in human evolution: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes: and this would be natural selection.”51 The clear implication was that when it came to human beings what really counted was not nature but nurture. “The most efficient causes of progress,” Darwin wrote, “seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.”52 The argument from group selection also opened the way to a view of competition that pitted whole groups against each other. For many contemporaries, this meant a conflict between races. Darwin wrote a long and balanced chapter on race in The Descent of Man, and concluded that racial differences were of minor importance, and that they were the product of sexual selection: local aesthetic preferences that guided men and women in choosing mates.53 In his correspondence, however, he sometimes gave more weight to racial difference, and he had long thought that there would be a global struggle between the races, and that the civilized would triumph. “It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races,” he wrote to Charles Kingsley in 1862, “In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.”54

French Anthropology and German Ethnology While evolutionary social theory became the dominant paradigm in English anthropology, French anthropology, at least until the 1870s, was primarily Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd edn., 195–196. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd edn., 203. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd edn., 220. Gregory Radick, “Darwin and Humans,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, ed. Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 54 Darwin to Kingsley, February 6, 1862, Darwin Correspondence Project, letter 3439.

50 51 52 53

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biological. Broca remained the dominant figure until his sudden death in 1880. Though admitting evidence from archaeology, philology, demography, and ethnography, Broca ensured that biological approaches took precedence and that Lamarck’s transformism was preferred to Darwin’s ideas about the mutation of species.55 He was a master builder of institutions, running his own anthropology laboratory at the Sorbonne, and playing a significant part in setting up a journal, a teaching centre, and, in 1872, a collection of anthropological specimens. In 1875 private donations allowed Broca to set up a base within the faculty of medicine at the Sorbonne for the direction of these various anthropological institutions.56 He also organized a grand, “international” (but in truth largely French) congress of anthropology alongside the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878, and orchestrated an extensive exhibition to accompany it. The German tradition of Völkerkunde was very different both from the French and from the Anglo-American schools. Relativist in conception, historical in method, it was concerned with specific cultures and distinctive culture areas. Moreover, in contrast to the English and American situation, German ethnology developed with broad institutional support from the universities, where it was closely associated with faculties of linguistics and psychology, and most particularly with geography. German geography was disputed between two schools. The dominant tendency, influenced by Lamarckian ideas, was environmental determinism. Climate and landscape shape technological developments, drive demographic trends, and inform personality and ways of thinking. Another important – and politically liberal – faction put more emphasis on the movement of populations, the diffusion of languages and techniques, and intermarriage. “The fundamental theory of world history,” Friedrich Ratzel insisted, “is the history of migration.”57 His textbook Völkerkunde, published between 1885 and 1890, nevertheless also emphasized environmental influences. In 1869 an ecumenical Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory was formed in Berlin. Its leaders were Rudolf Virchow, a very distinguished anatomist who was also a liberal politician and an opponent of Bismarck; and Adolf Bastian, an ethnologist. Virchow was a critic of Darwin, 55 Claude Blanckaert, De la race à l’évolution: Paul Broca et l’anthropologie française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). 56 Jean-Claude Wartelle, “La Société d’Anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 10(1) (2004), 125–171. 57 Klaus-Peter Koepping, Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind: The Foundations of Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Germany (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 62.

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whose synthesis he thought premature. He denounced the racial theory of human difference expounded by Germany’s best-known Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel. According to Haeckel, the human races had evolved into virtually distinct species. Virchow countered that human races were unstable, their boundaries permeable and shifting. Racial mixing was normal. He was also enough of a Lamarckian to believe that the environment quickly imposed biological changes. And he insisted that race, culture, and language varied independently. Bastian was professor of ethnology at the University of Berlin, and became the first director of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde (established in 1886).58 He advanced a theory of culture that had much in common with Virchow’s approach to race. Just as there were no pure races, so there were no pure cultures. Contacts between peoples led to intermarriage and to the diffusion of ideas, techniques, and institutions. Like races, cultures were historically contingent, the unstable products of a local history of exchanges and interactions. Migration and diffusion were the main causes of culture change, but ecological constraints were important in shaping “geographical provinces,” ecological regions within which different populations interacted. Bastian advocated a tempered cultural relativism, but he insisted on the “psychic unity of mankind.” All human populations shared fundamental ideas, the Elementargedanken. These tendencies in anthropology were not completely identified with particular national schools, nor were they confined to a narrow disciplinary discourse. German and French anatomists, ethnologists, sociologists, philologists, and geographers engaged in common debates. In France, Charles Letourneau, Frédéric Le Play, and Émile Durkheim proposed histories of the family in the English social evolutionist mould.59 In the 1890s the Durkheimians addressed the evolution of religion, influenced in particular by the ideas of William Robertson Smith. In England, Henry Maine adopted the perspective of the Indo-Europeanists. Tylor kept up with German philology, and he considered diffusion alongside independent invention.

58 H. Glenn Penny, “Bastian’s Museum: On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of German Ethnology,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. H. G. Penny and Matti Bunzl (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); and Koepping, Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind. 59 Frédéric Le Play, L’Organisation de la famille selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps (Paris: Téqui, 1871); Charles Letourneau, L’évolution du mariage et de la famille (Paris: Delahaye, 1888); and Adam Kuper, “Durkheim’s Theory of Primitive Kinship,” The British Journal of Sociology, 36(2) (1985), 224–237.

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The Evolution of Religion and Society By the 1860s an “evolutionist” paradigm, widely accepted in the Englishspeaking world, had generated three related research programs. One studied technological progress. A second research program addressed the Comtean model of the advance of reason through magical, religious, and scientific modes of thought. These two programs were connected. Tylor’s Researches into the History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation (1865) treated the development of technology alongside language and myth. Taken together, they demonstrated the intellectual progress of humanity. A crisis of faith became apparent in the middle of the century. German biblical criticism undermined the authority of the sacred texts. The findings of geology discredited biblical accounts of the Creation and the Flood. (“If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well,” John Ruskin wrote in 1851 to a friend who enquired about his faith, “but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”60) In 1859 Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. A year later, Essays and Reviews appeared, presenting seven devastating essays by leading intellectuals in the Church of England that downplayed miracles, questioned the story of the Creation, denied the doctrine of eternal punishment, and endorsed German critical scholarship that read the bible as a compilation of sometimes contradictory texts dating from different periods.61 In response to these challenges, a new science of comparative religion emerged.62 The first volume of Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) was essentially a revamp of his Researches, but a new second volume treated the development of religion, which gave further evidence of the progress of the human mind. The ethnologists generally agreed that there was something particular about the ways of thinking of primitive peoples. Ignorant of natural causes, such peoples fell back on beliefs in magic, taboo, totems, or ancestor spirits. There was, perhaps, a biological explanation. After all, Darwin and Huxley were proposing that human evolution was paced by the development of the brain. It was widely assumed that the brains of the various races developed at

60 Ruskin, letter to Henry Acland, May 24, 1851, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1905), vol. XXXVI, 115. 61 See the discussion on religion in Chapter 3 by David Fergusson. 62 Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

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different rates, and that the smaller-brained savages, and indeed the early Israelites, had not been capable of thinking very clearly. So how did these primitive people think? Tylor argued that they relied on “analogy or reasoning by resemblance.”63 For Frazer, such “reasoning by resemblance” accounted for the belief in magic. Robertson Smith agreed that for the savage mind there was “no sharp line between the metaphorical and the literal.” He blamed the “unbounded use of analogy characteristic of prescientific thought” for producing a “confusion between the several orders of natural and supernatural beings.”64 This was compounded by “insouciance, a power of casting off the past and living in the impression of the moment,” which “can exist only along with a childish unconsciousness of the inexorable laws that connect the present and the future with the past.”65 Tylor suggested that the very earliest religion arose from a misapprehension. People everywhere have dreams and visions, but primitive people confused dreams with real experiences. They dreamed of dead relatives and concluded that the spirits of the deceased continued to live in another world. They then generalized this conclusion. Trees, plants, even the planets, have immortal souls that must be fed and placated by sacrifices. Tylor termed this “animism” (and acknowledged that it was rather like Comte’s “fetishism”). Vestiges of the primitive cult – which Tylor called “survivals” – could be traced in the ceremonies of the most advanced religions. If studies of technology, language, myth, and religion were all broadly concerned with the progress of reason, another research program addressed the development of the family and the emergence of political and legal institutions. Tylor commented in 1865 that the study of marriage and the family in primitive society “belongs properly to that interesting, but difficult and almost unworked subject, the Comparative Jurisprudence of the lower races, and no one not versed in Civil Law could do it justice.”66 The pioneers were, indeed, all lawyers: an English professor of Roman law, Henry Maine; a Swiss jurist, Johannes Bachofen; an eccentric Scottish advocate, J. F. McLennan; and an American lawyer, politician, and businessman, Lewis Henry Morgan.

63 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. II, 338. 64 William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh: Black, 1889), 87. 65 Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 57. 66 E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation (London: John Murray, 1865), 277.

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It was widely assumed – Aristotle had laid it down – that ancient societies were based on kinship. (“The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions,” Henry Maine wrote.67) Following Aristotle, Maine proposed that the initial social institution was the family, which gave rise in time to the clan. Eventually, blood ties became less politically important than residence in a common locality. Collective ties based on kinship status, regulated by a patriarchal despotism, then gave way to individualist contractual relationships. Maine claimed only that he was reconstructing the history of the IndoEuropean peoples. He did not concern himself with what he termed “savage races.” But the men who came to regard themselves rather as anthropologists or ethnologists – Tylor, McLennan, Morgan, and Frazer – were very interested in “savages.” They employed what they termed the comparative method, drawing on reports of societies all over the world, past and present, which were apparently at an early stage of development. In 1865, J. M. McLennan, a Scotsman who fitted very well into the lineage of the eighteenth-century Glasgow philosophers, denied that the patriarchal family was the original social unit. At first families did not exist. Paternity was not recognized. Nomadic bands of marauders practised female infanticide and marriage by capture. Captive women belonged collectively to all the men in the band. Paternity could not be established, and so blood ties were recognized only between a woman and her children. Each band believed that it was descended matrilineally from a particular natural species, its totem. McLennan then made a daring move, linking the original social unit, the matrilineal horde, to the first religion. This first religion turned out to be something very like Tylor’s animism. The matrilineal horde worshipped its totem as an ancestor god and placated it with prayer and sacrifice. McLennan’s friend William Robertson Smith applied this theory to ancient Semitic society and religion. It was later developed, and copiously illustrated, by Robertson Smith’s famous protégé, James George Frazer. Lewis Henry Morgan, the first major theorist in American anthropology, systematized current speculations on the course of social evolution and linked them to Max Müller’s genealogy of the world’s languages. The earliest societies were little more than kinship groups. After an initial period of promiscuity, marriages came to unite a set of brothers with a set of sisters. At first only descent from a mother was recognized. Relationships 67 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London: John Murray, 1861), 129.

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traced through males became more significant as economies became more productive and men began to accumulate property. The family was therefore a late development. Eventually a second great revolution in human affairs occurred: Political groups came to be based on territory rather than on kinship and descent. Powerful leaders emerged, and in time barbarian kings. These bronze-age courts, with their armies, state religions, and national territories, eventually evolved into civilized states. In their most advanced and perfect form, Morgan believed, they would become republican democracies like the United States. Darwin took issue in The Descent of Man with the anthropologists’ speculations about primitive mating practices. Sexual jealousy was a powerful emotion among apes and humans. The promiscuous hordes imagined by McLennan and Morgan ran counter to human nature. His criticism inspired the first truly Darwinian study of kinship, Edvard Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage (1891), but the neo-Lamarckian social evolutionists remained influential. Morgan’s thesis shaped the early research program of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Less predictably, it became part of Marxist doctrine. Karl Marx’s associate Friedrich Engels pronounced that Morgan’s “discovery . . . has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.”68 Morgan accordingly became the fount of orthodoxy in Soviet and Chinese Communist anthropology.69

Diffusionism, Evolutionism, Functionalism By the late nineteenth century, the main rival to Anglo-American social evolutionism was German ethnology, which was informed by geography, cultural history, and philology. The two traditions confronted each other directly at last in the 1890s, not in Europe but in the United States. It was, fittingly, in Washington D.C. that the social evolutionism preached by Morgan and institutionalized in the Smithsonian Institution was challenged by a representative of the leading German school of ethnology.

68 Preface to Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1902), first published, in German, in 1884. 69 Sergei A. Kan and Dmitry V. Arzyutov, “The Saga of the L. H. Morgan Archive, or How an American Marxist Helped Make a Bourgeois Anthropologist the Cornerstone of Soviet Ethnography,” in Local Knowledge, Global Stage, ed. Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 149–220.

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In 1885 Franz Boas, a promising young student of Virchow and Bastian, was sent to Baffin Island, which lies between Greenland and the Canadian mainland. He went into the field an environmental determinist, but came to the conclusion that “the phenomena such as customs, traditions and migrations are far too complex in their origin, as to enable us to study their psychological causes without a thorough knowledge of their history.”70 In 1886 he made the first of a series of expeditions to the Kwakiutl and neighboring peoples in British Columbia, with the aim of reconstructing the cultural history of the region. A year later he provoked a row with two followers of Lewis Henry Morgan, namely Otis T. Mason, the first curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and John Wesley Powell, the director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Visiting the Smithsonian to study its collection of Northwest coast materials, Boas discovered that they were distributed in a dozen sections of the museum. He complained that Mason arranged ethnographic objects as though they were natural-history specimens, which could be sorted into genera and species. But rattles, for example, might have very different uses and meanings in various cultural settings. Boas urged that objects from a particular region should rather be “arranged according to tribes, in order to teach the peculiar style of each group.”71 Powell responded that Boas’s alternative was not viable. Tribal groups had undergone so many changes that it was impossible to classify them on ethnic grounds. In any case, “there is no science of ethnology, for the attempt to classify mankind in groups has failed on every hand . . . The unity of mankind is the greatest induction of anthropology.”72 That was not a bad argument, and indeed Boas himself never doubted Bastian’s doctrine of the “psychic unity of mankind.” He did, however, insist, in the spirit of Virchow, that for the time being the anthropologist should try to establish regional histories of human populations, and not indulge in premature speculations about stages of social and cultural evolution. 70 George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 60. 71 Franz Boas, “The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart,” Science, 9(224) (1887), 485–486. 72 Quoted in Curtis Hinsley, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 98. See also Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75–111.

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adam kuper

In 1899 Boas became a full professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he established the most important center of the discipline in the United States. His protégés spread the doctrines of the Berlin school to newly founded anthropology departments in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Berkeley. Morgan’s social evolutionism was discarded. Boas’s historical project became the template for American anthropology until the 1920s. Tylor was appointed to the first academic position in anthropology in England, at Oxford University, in 1884. In the 1890s the subject began to be taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London. The first crop of university-trained anthropologists was encouraged to undertake ethnographic fieldwork. When it came to theory, however, the social evolutionism of Tylor and Frazer was losing its hold. Leading figures in the new generation, W. H. R. Rivers and C. G. Seligman, were converted to diffusionism. Mainstream anthropology in Germany, Britain, and the United States was apparently converging on the program of the Berlin school of Virchow and Bastian. However, in the aftermath of World War I, the most influential social scientists abandoned historical reconstructions. Dorothy Ross suggests that because of “the growing power of professional specialisation, and the sharpening conception of scientific method” there was a “slow paradigm shift in the social sciences . . . away from historico-evolutionary models . . . to specialised sciences focused on short-term processes.”73 Economies, societies, and cultures were now treated as integrated systems that were normally in a state of equilibrium. The question to be asked was not how they might have arrived at a particular stage of development but rather, how did they work? And could they be better managed? In the 1920s a new generation of American-born Boasians – Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead – turned away from the historical anthropology of Boas and began to take up broadly psychological questions.74 At the same time, the leaders of the rising generation of anthropologists in Britain, Bronisław Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, became “functionalists.” Malinowski pioneered new methods of field research that were designed to find out how a society actually operated. Radcliffe-Brown pronounced an anathema on all forms of “conjectural 73 Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore Parker and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 388. 74 Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1972), 126.

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history”: “I believe that at this time the really important conflict in anthropological studies is not that between the ‘evolutionists’ and the ‘diffusionists,’ nor between the various schools of the ‘diffusionists,’ but between conjectural history on the one side and the functional study of society on the other.”75 A new paradigm was taking shape. 75 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “A Further Note on Ambrym,” Man, 29 (March 1929), 50–53, p. 53.

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The Varieties of Nationalist Thought erica benner

Nation-states and nationalism appear to many people today as almost natural phenomena, deep-rooted parts of a human landscape dominated by artifice and change. This apparent naturalness is one of the most remarkable political achievements of the past two centuries. In the early nineteenth century, if asked “Where are you from?,” most of the world’s inhabitants would have named a province, town, or village. Away from home, some Europeans might have answered “France,” “Poland,” “Italy,” or “Germany.” But none of these names carried the political or emotional meanings they acquired in the course of the nineteenth century. The populations of France and Poland were divided by language, local loyalties, and social station; divisions were deepened in France by the 1789 Revolution, in Poland by the country’s forced partitions between Prussia, Austria, and Russia from 1772 to 1795. Italia and Germania were ancient Roman names of provinces that had never been politically united. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of most other Europeans, and of people everywhere: they were not national animals until nationalism – a specific kind of politics driven by a novel ideal – made them so. The nationalist ideal maintains that political bodies are strongest and most virtuous if their subjects or citizens share a strong common identity, and defend it in extensive, territorially bounded, independent states. The primary task of nationalist politics is to foster such identities through education and cultural projects, and to create the institutional, economic, and military structures capable of supporting national independence. A few ancient and early-modern city-states – notably Sparta, Athens, and Renaissance Florence – embodied aspects of this ideal in practice. But no one had yet advanced it as a general political idea. Beyond this core set of ideals,1 nationalists have always disagreed with each other on fundamental questions. How strong should identities or 1 Erica Benner, “Is There a Core National Doctrine?,” Nations and Nationalism, 7(3) (April 2001), 155–174.

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independence be? What form should they take? What are the best means of achieving them? Yet they all maintain that strong collective identities – whether based on history or language, civic allegiance, religion, or something else – are valuable in themselves, or because they support other human goods. And most nationalists have argued that some form of political independence is needed to defend distinctive identities and the values they underpin. These ideas were first spelt out in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and spread far and fast throughout the nineteenth. Intellectuals – philosophers, historians, philologists, and literary men – played a key role in articulating national ideals and encouraging cultural and political movements aimed at realizing them. This chapter considers why these ideals acquired such a wide intellectual appeal when they did, and why, in a short space of time, they assumed such a variety of forms. For one of nationalism’s most striking features is its promiscuity: its willingness to hook up and crossbreed with diverse ideologies. The nineteenth century saw the birth of civic republican, cultural, conservative, liberal, ethnic, socialist, and racialist national ideas. Some national doctrines were ferociously anti-imperial, while others trumpeted the need for some nations to rule others for the sake of human progress. The history of national thinking helps account for this extraordinary diversity, and for the practical and moral complications that have plagued nationalism since its birth.

The First Civic and Cultural Nationalisms In much of the world today, the word ‘nationalism’ has a pejorative ring. Nationalists, we tend to think, are people who show exaggerated pride in their nation, or excessive resentment about its standing in the world, or who worry too much about national safety or cultural distinctness. But nationalism’s main intellectual ancestors were a more temperate pair of ideas derived from classical republican thought. The first idea concerned internal legitimacy: it held that political authority should be conferred by popular mandate, not a monarch or narrow elite. The second concerned external sovereignty: to govern themselves freely, citizens had to be free from external control as well as internal tyranny. Republican thought placed a high value on defensive patriotism when freedoms were under threat. Indeed, it insisted that internal and external freedoms were inseparable, since people are better fighters for their country’s independence if they have a fair share in its government and enjoy equality under its 423

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erica benner

laws.2 Niccolò Machiavelli breathed new life into these ancient ideas in the sixteenth century, and helped disseminate them throughout a Europe whose peoples mostly lived under monarchies or the authority of the Church. English republicans seized on them in the seventeenth century and began to speak of the ‘nation’ – meaning a country’s entire people – as the sole source of a government’s legitimacy. In the middle of the eighteenth century, neo-republican thinking joined forces with the newer idea that states should foster a strong, durable identity throughout their populations, transcending social status, geography, and religious affiliations. Two philosophers did most to articulate this ideal: the Geneva-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and his German admirer Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Rousseau dealt with national identity from two very different standpoints, ideal and non-ideal. Having asked what principles define the best polity for human beings as such, his Social Contract sets out a pure version of the civic national ideal, which says that states are fully legitimate only when individuals agree to form one people. The ‘nation’ is the citizen body that results from this voluntary contract. Rousseau suggests that states based on individual wills need some kind of supra-individual identity to avoid constant clashes between private desires. His idea of the General Will seeks to give citizens a strong sense of identification with – and moral commitment to – the political processes that they agree to, so that they accept their outcomes whether or not they like them. The main bond among a nation’s members – indeed the only strictly necessary bond – is their agreement to obey the political authority they create for themselves, not affinities of birth, class, religion, or language. Rousseau qualified this culture-blind view of national identity, however, when he turned to the depressingly non-ideal conditions of his times. When a group of Polish reformers asked the philosopher to advise them on a new constitution, Rousseau put forward a different account of national identity.3 The Poles’ most urgent problem, he observed, was not internal legitimacy but external self-defense. Their sprawling, polyglot state was on the verge of being carved up between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. This plight gave them no hope of instituting ideal contract principles overnight. Their only chance of salvation was to play culture politics against power politics: that is, to use 2 See Erica Benner, Machiavelli’s Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chapter 6. 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne,” in Œuvres Complètes, 17 vols. (Paris: Armand-Aubrée, 1829), vol. V, 169–388.

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mass education and public rituals to give the divided populace a distinctively Polish spirit, since at present they had no sense of shared identity. The main thing was to make sure that “though the Russians can swallow you, they will not be able to digest you.” Even if some distinguishing cultural practices are “in some respects bad,” they “will still have the advantage of making the Poles fond of their country and give them a natural revulsion to mingling with foreigners.” Rousseau admits here that if defensive culture-building can help resist oppression, it also carries risks: it gives political elites license to mold citizens’ tastes and minds, and it might deepen divisions in Europe. As his era’s strongest critic of political tyranny and advocate of perpetual peace, Rousseau feared that the cost of defensive nationalism might be tragically high. Rousseau saw how civic nations might be pressed to build up collectivist cultures, but he saw little value in those cultures other than as weapons against oppression. For Herder, by contrast, politics did not make national cultures; it followed their lead, or ought to. Rousseau’s culture-national differences are man-made, often in response to brute conflicts over power; Herder’s are part of a divinely ordained plan of Nature.4 This plan, he thought, aims at the moral unity of the species, but seeks to express our common humanity in a variety of ways, above all through different languages. For Herder, language and its products – songs, folk poetry and oral narratives, sacred and mythical texts – have a deep ethical significance lacking in what he saw as the merely formal institutions of modern states. And since each language community has its role to play in God’s-and-Nature’s plan, none should be seen as a model for all the others to emulate, as his contemporaries across Europe treated French courtly culture and its stilted language. If any language-cultures could be called superior in Herder’s equalizing scheme, the best were those that stayed close to nature and followed their own distinctive patterns of organic growth. Inverting the usual standards of his day, Herder praised the vibrant moral and cultural life of Völker such as the Baltic peoples and non-Russian Slavs – groups routinely judged as history’s losers on high-cultural and power-political criteria.5 4 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, in Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), vol. VII, 65–68. 5 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in ihren Menschlichen Ursprunge,” in Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), vol. IV, 329–393; and Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, in Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), vol. I, 696–767.

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No one before Herder had suggested that identities based on language were the primary source of legitimate political authority, let alone that the most valuable languages were those that had no cultural elite or state to promote them. Like Rousseau, Herder attacked the tendency of self-styled ‘Enlightenment’ thinkers to erect their standards of knowledge and sophistication as universal models. Both men were committed to other, less highbrow Enlightenment ideas, especially universal human dignity and equality. But since high culture was increasingly used as an instrument of political domination, weaker peoples sometimes had to defend their equal dignity by mobilizing counter-cultural weapons. Herder did this by giving vernacular languages and cultures a formidable moral force, compensating for their current political weakness. As long as human beings continued to oppress each other, he argued, national egoism – however unappealing it might look – might play a constructive role in the history of human development, as a means of resisting imperial conquests. In the long run, Nature would bring about a variegated yet harmonized humanity. But for now it was necessary to reinforce “the diversity of languages, ethics, inclinations, and ways of life” as “a bar against the presumptuous linking together of the peoples, a dam against foreign inundations.”6

Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Nationalisms: Civic-Crusading, Ethnic, and Statist The first nationalisms were thus defensive, anti-imperialist, and sympathetic to popular government. Their aggressive potential came out in full force during the French Revolution, the first European movement to put national ideals and rhetoric at its center.7 Its stated aim was to realize the republican ideal of a civic nation based on freedom, equality, and fraternity. But radical revolutionaries, who soon gained clear ascendancy, demanded a great deal of housecleaning before the constructive part of their work could proceed. The unjust ancien régime had to be purged of all traces of monarchy and aristocracy to make way for an egalitarian civil identity – the true nation. In 1789 Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès (1748–1836) declared that the Third Estate – the largest group in the Estates 6 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe, in Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), vol. VII, 687; and Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 385. 7 The American revolution had done this earlier. See Erica Benner, “The Nation-State,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Allen Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Chapter 23.

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General, made up of non-nobles – embodied France’s ‘complete’ national personality.8 Though Sieyès was far more moderate than many of his fellowrevolutionaries, his concept of la nation was framed to exclude France’s nobility from republican politics. This exclusionary logic quickly came to dominate the revolutionaries’ efforts to define a new national identity. Soon the promise of a fraternal new France was being torn to pieces in the name of twin necessities: the necessity of creating a unitary nation, and that of defending it from enemies both domestic and foreign. This was the first of many future examples of civic nationalism going awry and encouraging policies that chafed against its brotherly rhetoric. The French Revolution showed how easy it is to push moderate nationalism toward extremes, republican nationalism toward dogmatic intolerance, and open-textured civic identities toward ethnic narrowness. Nationalism is inherently vulnerable to extremism because it seeks to create strong identities across a territory’s population. Even if the desired identity is only civic – a common sense of citizenship and commitment to defend one’s country – some individuals and categories of people are liable to be trusted to uphold this identity more than others; and in times of war or civic strife, suspicions can turn to civic-national persecutions. As revolutionaries confronted reaction and attempts to crush it from outside France, many became obsessed with sniffing out enemies of the nation of all kinds – not just aristocratic class enemies, but also foreigners or linguistic and religious communities such as Bretons and Jews.9 The Revolution brought out another disquieting feature of civic and other kinds of nationalism: a tendency to rank nations in some kind of hierarchy, whether superiority was supposed to be a matter of enlightenment, moral purity, military brawn, or blood. This is not an essential part of nationalist thinking, though it almost always links up with it in practice. Rousseau and Herder saw national hierarchies as products of a corrupt international system dominated by a handful of Great Powers. They hoped that lesser nations could help undo that system, replacing it with a Europe where moral and legal equality between nations would compensate for disparities of power. But in competitive conditions, the temptation to set some nations above others as beacons of enlightenment or warriors against corruption was hard to resist. Nationalist thinkers inherited familiar patterns of crusading rhetoric, 8 Emmanuel Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (1789), trans. M. Blondel (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), 53–63 and 127–128. 9 See Chimène I. Keitner, The Paradoxes of Nationalism: The French Revolution and Its Meaning for Contemporary Nation-Building (New York: SUNY Press, 2007).

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including the language of Chosen Peoples, from recent religious wars. In declaring independence from Britain in 1776, American revolutionaries had insisted on their new nation’s moral superiority over decadent European powers. Now the infant French Republic claimed leading-nation status on the Continent. Its rationale fused older ideas about France’s grandeur with a modernizing mission to replace monarchies, aristocracies, and feudal orders with republican government and rational forms of administration. At first, republicans and reformers outside France hailed the Revolution as the spark they hoped would ignite similar movements elsewhere. But many recoiled when the revolution took an aggressively expansionist turn. They wanted to initiate reforms in their own way, not stand by while an invading French army imposed them at gunpoint and took all the credit. Two young German philosophers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), were ardent supporters of the Revolution in its early days. When Napoleon invaded Prussia in 1806, however, they responded by putting forward new defensive national ideals. In 1808 Fichte delivered a lecture series entitled Addresses to the German Nation to audiences in French-occupied Berlin.10 He urged his countrymen to reject foreign occupation, “cast off foreign artifices,” and rally around a common national identity. Echoing Rousseau’s advice to the Poles, Fichte admitted that this identity would have to be “instilled” through deliberate policies, since few Germans at the time had more than a vague consciousness of their common national character. He regretted that nationbuilding would entail the loss of local freedoms and of the cultural diversity that had flourished in a Germany of multiple states. But if they wanted to preserve any shred of distinctness, Germans now had no choice but to work toward greater political and cultural unity. Fichte’s Addresses combine older republican ideas, especially the call for plucky resistance to conquest, with Rousseau-like arguments about the need to construct a distinct cultural sense of nationality as a buffer against absorption. But he married these political ideas to Herder’s cultural claims about the deep value of language communities as vehicles of human development. Then, spelling out the political implications of Herder’s language nationalism, Fichte 10 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, in Fichtes Werke, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, 11 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), vol. VII, 259–516; and Addresses to the German Nation, ed. and trans. George Armstrong Kelly (New York: Harper, 1968). For longer discussions of Herder, Fichte, and Hegel see Erica Benner, “Nationalism: Intellectual Origins,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nationalism, ed. John Breuilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and “The Nation-State.”

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argued that shared language ought to be the main criterion for deciding state boundaries. “Whenever a separate language is found,” he told his Berlin audience, “there a separate nation exists, which has the right to take independent charge of its affairs and to govern itself.”11 Fichte’s brief suggestions about how Germans might apply this doctrine reveal its expansive – and explosive – political potential: the German nation, he asserted, embraced a broad language family that included speakers of Dutch as well as Scandinavian languages. Fichte’s Addresses are sometimes seen as prefiguring aggressive ethnic nationalism in Germany and beyond. This is no more than half fair. Fichte does come close to outlining a rationale for ethnic nationalism, which defines exclusionary political identities by grounding them in inherited characteristics such as common descent or native language. His arguments are a good illustration of Max Weber’s classic (1922) argument about how ethnic identities are formed: conflict, or a perception of threat, triggers what Weber calls the “monopolistic closure” of a group’s boundaries and membership, generating beliefs about fundamental differences in the identities of in- and outgroup members.12 Defensive motives for group differentiation lead people to believe that their differences are natural or deeply significant; where no triggering motives come into play, the same differences can seem slight or unimportant. Napoleon’s invasions did trigger movements across Europe that drew sharp boundaries between peoples – increasingly called ‘nations’ – and taught members to view their differences as part of the deep, immutable structure of the world. As one of the first writers who offered an elaborate argument for such movements, Fichte can be considered a progenitor of ethnic nationalist thinking. At the same time, his conception of German national leadership was not aggressive. True, Fichte conjoined the goal of national liberation with an unselfish mission to seek the “salvation” of “the whole human race.” But he insisted that, unlike the French revolutionary crusade, Germans should not pursue their liberating aims by military means, or seek to dominate other peoples. Instead they should use rational persuasion to spread the system of universal education Fichte outlines in the Addresses. He insisted that words, reason, and spiritual resources were better arms than armies. The Germans’ best weapons were their high principles and “earnest” character, which Fichte opposed to soulless, emasculating French frippery. Rousseau had 11 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 184. 12 Max Weber, “Ethnic Groups,” in Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 385–398.

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erica benner

told the Poles to preserve their distinct identity by making life in Poland “more fun than life in any other country, but not the same kind of fun.” Fichte enjoined Germans to get more serious: instead of feeling embarrassed by French jokes about German humorlessness, they should “strive to deserve the accusation more fully” as they preached the “uplifting” word to foreign peoples – but without lifting a gun.13 Fichte’s younger contemporary, Hegel, responded to Napoleon’s invasions in an interestingly different way. Instead of idealizing language identities, he idealized the state as both the protector of traditional ethical values and avatar of rational progress. “In the existence of a nation,” he wrote in 1806 – the year Napoleon defeated German troops at the battle of Jena – “the substantial aim” set by history “is to be a state and preserve itself as such.”14 In his German Constitution, written a few years earlier, Hegel expressed fears that Germans would soon be forced to live under “foreign laws and customs” and lose “their highest good, namely their existence as independent states.”15 The spirit (Geist) of recent European history, he opined, was abandoning smaller polities and backing large “national states” (Nationalstaaten). So Germans had only one way to resist French absorption: to form a unified German state that would gather “the whole military strength of Germany into a single army.” Unification might have to be achieved by force, Hegel wrote, because the “common mass” of German people found the idea of unification “utterly alien.” Since concerns about external defense are at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of the state, he echoes republican ideas about the need for citizens eager to defend national sovereignty. But whereas Fichte expressed republican sympathies even after the shock of French invasion, the revolution’s excesses led Hegel to abandon his youthful zeal for popular government. In his statecentred nationalism, the old bond between republican ideals of popular selfgovernment and nationhood comes undone. He leaves open whether united Germans should opt for a monarchy or a republic, so long as they order a constitution based on rational, centralized laws and administration. This was a model of nation-building from above, very unlike Herder’s or Fichte’s 13 Rousseau, “Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne,” 201; and Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 177. 14 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III, in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), vol. X, 350; and G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 279. 15 G. W. F. Hegel, Die Verfassung Deutschlands, in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), vol. I, 461–472; and Hegel: Political Writings, ed. Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7.

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people-centered nationalism from below. Nor does Hegel suggest that common demotic culture or language are needed to undergird a Nationalstaat; indeed, in his Philosophy of Right he was very critical of ethnic nationalists such as Jakob Friedrich Fries. To keep up with the rational spirit of the times, Germans and other Europeans needed to undertake modernizing reforms; but these should be pursued cautiously, in a manner sensitive to local particularities or Sitten (ethical life and customs), so that people regard their new national identity as an organic outgrowth from older identities.16 The high moral significance Hegel gave to independent statehood led him to develop a distinctive account of international relations. Rousseau, Herder, and Fichte either called on governments to end European wars, or expected divine Providence to establish peace in Europe in some indeterminate future. Rousseau exhorted European leaders to form a confederation; Fichte envisaged a condition of international right among formally equal states. Hegel, by contrast, saw war as the natural and perhaps perpetual condition of nationstates. National individuality, he declared, depended on “awareness of one’s existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others”; war was a necessary means of strengthening this sense of identity. This view created a tension between Hegel’s principles of internal political order – which respected the rights of individuals, corporations, regions, and minorities – and the more collectivist virtues he saw as necessary in relations among modern states. For the individual’s highest duty, he wrote, was to preserve the “independence and sovereignty of the state,” not just “at the risk and the sacrifice of property and life,” but “also of opinion and everything else naturally comprised in the compass of life.”17 A further implication of Hegel’s statist nationalism was that only peoples with a history of independent political organization were entitled to form national states in the modern era. “A nation with no state formation (a mere nation),” he declared, “has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.”18 The Hegelian doctrine of “historyless nations” 16 G. W. F. Hegel, Naturrechts, in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), vol. II, 495 and 524; and G. W. F. Hegel, The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. T. M. Knox, introduction H. B. Acton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 92 and 126–127. 17 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), vol. VII, 410; and G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 209. 18 Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, 217–219.

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would soon exert a powerful influence on mid-nineteenth-century debates about when aspiring nations deserved to have states of their own, both in Europe and in non-European colonies.

Republican and Socialist Nationalisms and Internationalisms Napoleon’s troops were defeated in 1815. The Congress of Vienna established peace under the new Concert of Europe, consisting of Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and later France. Despite these governments’ efforts to contain fresh upheavals, republican and nationalist genies had been well and truly unbottled. Popular movements for German and Italian national unification sprang up, some of them traditionalist and monarchist, others calling for broad-based government and social equality. Movements of national self-discovery flowered among smaller and stateless peoples throughout Europe. Their leading intellectuals frequently came from outside the community they sought to nationalize, being philologists or folklorists who idealized the unspoiled peasant roots of stateless peoples and, like Herder, vouched for their high moral character against the corrupt governments of the so-called Great Powers. Some of these nation-awakeners had only vague political goals. Others strove quite frankly to shatter old multinational empires and create a new Europe of liberated, self-realizing nationstates. In 1848–1849 an outburst of liberal and democratic revolts brought national issues to the forefront of debates across Europe. In the Habsburg Empire, with its large Italian, Magyar, Slav, and Romanian populations, the uprisings soon turned into revolts of stateless ‘nationalities’ against foreign and imperial rule. Habsburg Austria, one of Europe’s oldest Great Powers, found itself fighting for its life, while other leading states faced secessionist threats. The Concert of Europe – that small club of ‘Great’ states charged with keeping order – collapsed as its members began to play power politics in the emerging field of popular nationalisms. The French Foreign Minister Lamartine proclaimed a “principle of nationality” in 1848, authorizing France to give military aid to any movement of subject nationalities in Europe. This was an audacious rebuff to the gentlemen’s agreement among Concert states not to stir up trouble in each other’s territories. A young Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw straight through the moralistic pretensions that brought the nationality ‘principle’ into politics. All the leading states, he pointed out, were sure to start invoking it in a self-serving way – supporting any national 432

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movements that weakened their rivals and increased their own power, while finding excuses to deny the claims of others.19 Observers wondered whether it was possible to address all these clashing national claims without unleashing further chaos. Intellectuals of a revolutionary disposition proposed to embed nationalism within a wider internationalist program, aimed at eradicating social and political oppression all over Europe. This was the ideal of the Piedmontese Italian activist Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872).20 Mazzini wanted to end the dominance of a few European states that had tried to stifle smaller nations’ desires for independence. The mixing of populations and vastly unequal size meant that some aspirations for national independence would have to remain unsatisfied. But at least every adult male would have a share in government, and smaller nationalities might enjoy modest political rights. Mazzini’s priority was national liberation; international collaboration was, in the first instance, a means to that end. Through his popular writings and leading role in numerous failed uprisings, Mazzini summoned Italians to set their regional differences aside, put historic and linguistic affinities and liberating political aims ahead of old hatreds, and fight to create a united Italian republic. But he stressed that separate national movements would be much weaker, both materially and spiritually, if they became egoistic. Like Rousseau and France’s revolutionary republicans, Mazzini hoped that a Europe of independent nations might establish a loose federation with an Assembly for discussing common concerns. Karl Marx reversed Mazzini’s nationalist and internationalist priorities.21 He too worked hard to subvert the old international order from below, by supporting popular revolutions. But Marx gave revolutionaries a new, more radical set of goals: not just to overhaul state boundaries and constitutions, but also to destroy the bourgeois property relations – capitalism – that he saw as the real power behind thrones and republican assemblies alike. Capitalism’s chief evil – or, in Marx’s un-moralistic terminology, its means of obstructing human progress – was that it allowed a class of property owners to gain massive profits at the expense of workers’ well-being. For Marx the ultimate aim of socialist revolution was to destroy these inhumane 19 Karl Marx, “English–French Mediation in Italy,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2000), vol. VII, 481; and “The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850,” in Surveys From Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 98. 20 Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and other Essays, introduction Thomas Jones (London: J. M. Dent, 1907). 21 See Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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relationships, replacing them with forms of self-management that gave people equal control over the means of production. Since capitalism was an international power whose beneficiaries were individuals and companies as well as states, it could be opposed only on an international scale. Nationalism, in this scheme, frequently looked like a distraction from the main task of revolutionary socialism: to unite the workers of the world under a single banner. For Mazzini and his fellow republicans, nations were the primary agents of progress and had deep intrinsic moral worth; for Marx they were only supporting actors in a human drama centered on class struggles. But if internationalism takes priority over nationalism for Marx, he left plenty of room for national movements in his world-changing program. While rejecting Mazzini’s romantic view of nations as bearers of deep human values, Marx understood that desires for national liberation were bound up with frustrations over unequal material conditions as well as political repression. He therefore urged socialists to support republican and democratic national movements as a step toward further social reforms. But Marxist national policies were not based on a general “principle of nationalities” that encouraged any people with a distinct history, language, or culture to seek independence. During the 1848 revolutions his collaborator Friedrich Engels recycled Hegel’s notion of “historyless nations,” arguing that socialists should oppose the national movements of smaller Slav peoples who had no history of leading a great state. Though Engels justified this stance in terms of revolutionary progress – which, like Hegel’s world-historical Geist, liked to work through the medium of great states – it was evidently based on strategic self-interest. The most important hotbeds of proletarian revolution were in the larger European states; it would be harder to arouse socialist enthusiasms in tiny new nations with their large peasant populations and ‘reactionary’ attitudes. Nevertheless, Marx himself came to recognize that whatever the longterm goals of revolution, national aspirations deserved to be taken very seriously indeed – as potential allies of revolution, but also in their own right, as expressions of a human desire to control one’s own life and be treated as an equal to others. In current historical conditions, he wrote in 1882, some peoples had “not only the right but the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalists.”22 Here Marx was speaking of “the Irish and the Poles. They are internationalists of the best kind,” he remarked, “if 22 Karl Marx, “For Poland,” in The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 391.

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they are very nationalistic.” But he goes on to argue in more general terms that “an international movement of the proletariat is possible only among independent nations,” because “international cooperation is possible only among equals.” This recalls Rousseau’s and Herder’s point that one of the most reasonable motives for nationalism is resistance to oppression, whether foreign or imposed by native ruling classes. In trying to integrate this egalitarian insight into his internationalist strategy, Marx’s approach stands in stark contrast to that of liberal contemporaries who clung to a hierarchical, paternalistic picture of relations between nations.

Liberal Nationalism and Enlightened Leadership European liberalism developed in opposition to absolutism, feudalism, and religious and communal traditions that discouraged free individual thought and enterprise. Yet a penchant for hierarchy runs through many liberal political theories. Early liberals set out a range of criteria for allotting some groups and individuals a larger share of authority, property, and other social goods. In the seventeenth century John Locke denied equal property rights to less rational and ‘industrious’ persons, an argument that helped justify European colonization of North America. Eighteenth-century commercial liberalism underlined the benefits of free trade for human progress everywhere, assigning first rank among nations to peoples whose wide-ranging trade activities dominated the globe. In the nineteenth century, especially in France but in other countries too, politics shaped liberal views of nationalism as much as economics. The revolutions of 1789 and 1848–1849 had been traumatic. After 1849 socialist and other urban left-wing movements burgeoned along with unsatisfied nationalisms, increasing fears among the middle, upper, and rural classes that further turmoil was imminent. In this tense climate, French liberals like François Guizot (1787–1874) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) saw themselves as mediators between archconservative reactionaries and revolutionary radicals. Seeking to restore moderation in an age of dangerous extremes, Tocqueville embraced the revolutionary goals of democracy and equality within nation-states. But he argued that these goals should be pursued through rational reforms directed from above, not unruly mass mobilization. The unitary, quasi-religious kinds of civic identification demanded by some revolutionaries were too intense for French liberals, too hostile to individual freedoms and friendly to tyrannical majorities. They rejected the notion that the popular will should determine the shape of national policies or identities. 435

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Most liberals thought that nations derive their defining characteristics from history, understood as an ongoing, common project rather than an undisputed past that dictates terms to present and future. Putting a positive spin on France’s turbulent recent past in 1882, Ernest Renan (1823–1892) urged his compatriots to see their agreement to stay together through thick and thin – not language, religion, or political orientation – as the essence of nationhood. A nation, he wrote, is “a daily referendum” founded as much on forgetfulness – especially forgetting the wounds that co-nationals inflicted on each other – as on shared memories. French liberal nationalism, then, was anti-populist in origin. Liberals saw themselves as a new intellectual and moral elite with a mission to reconcile the warring parts of their nation, guiding them toward moderate democracy in the fullness of time. Though one of their goals was to make France a more equal society, they assumed that some people were more qualified than others to direct the process of gradual reform. This residue of aristocratic thinking, based on education rather than blood, was also prominent in nineteenth-century English liberalism. John Stuart Mill (1808–1873) argued that the most legitimate governments were “representative” ones, declaring in 1861 that “the question of government ought to be decided by the governed.”23 But since less educated classes were not yet ready to assume a responsible role in politics, the political rights of the governed had to be unequal for a time, with the more educated having weighted or plural votes. Mill also had hierarchical views about which nations were ready for independence and which were not.24 “Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force,” he declared, “there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members” under a single government “to themselves apart.” The prima facie case held up, however, only for national groups that met rather demanding criteria. Some criteria were geographical and geopolitical: messily mixed populations, “incapable of local separation,” should “make a virtue of necessity, and reconcile themselves to living together under equal rights and laws.” But Mill’s main criterion was “utility in the largest sense,” which was “grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” These interests, he argued, were well served by granting independence to peoples who demonstrated their capacities for self-government and

23 John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 24 Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 428–430. See also Chapter 19 by Jennifer Pitts.

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promoted individual liberty. Those who lacked them would have to try harder, taking guidance from the more advanced liberal nations. A further criterion for independence was what Mill called a “moral and social consideration”: namely, that it was necessary for human progress that less advanced peoples be assimilated to more advanced ones. If one of two neighboring nationalities “was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race,” Mill wrote, then absorption by the other “is greatly to its advantage.” It would be better for a Basque or Breton to weld himself to the progressive French nation “than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.”25 Republicans like Mazzini and socialists like Marx and Engels also tried to contain endless national claims by invoking geopolitical viability and the interests of revolutionary progress. But these criteria for national ranking fit more comfortably with liberalism’s enlightened-aristocratic lineage than with republican or socialist ideas, which claimed to champion more robust forms of equality. Turning to European colonies outside Europe, Mill distinguished between countries whose population was already “in a sufficiently advanced state to be fitted for representative government” and “others which have not attained that state.” The sufficiently advanced were all “colonies of European race,” while the backward included Indians and other non-European peoples. Mill asserts that, regardless of local sentiments, colonial rule is no less legitimate than self-government if it is the “mode of government . . . which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher state of improvement.” Indeed, for peoples deemed unready for self-government, “it is often better for them to be under the despotism of foreigners than of natives, when those foreigners are more advanced in civilization” than themselves.26 As a civil servant who worked for many years on colonial issues, Mill understood better than many of his contemporaries that colonial rule could not last. Far from seeking to expand or tighten European control over non-Europeans, he argued that it should gradually be lifted – but only, if possible, after European Powers and “colonies of European race” had “used their superiority” to help non-Europeans develop the methods and mentalities needed for self-government. Marx took a less paternalistic view of non-European politics. In his later years he 25 Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 430–433 and 217. 26 Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 449–453.

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strongly supported anti-colonial movements in India and China, preferring Indian “self-emancipation” to a British-led path of westernizing.27 As these positions show, liberal thinking about nationalism reflected a distinctive view of international relations as well as concerns about political moderation. Mill, among others, set out what might be called an enlightenedleadership perspective on liberal nations’ responsibilities and entitlements. This perspective suggests that nation-states based on liberal constitutions have a responsibility to promote freedom abroad, as well as to tame conflicts caused by backward or despotic nations. It further assumes that such states can usually be trusted to do this in an enlightened, disinterested way, with due respect for international laws and other nations’ sensibilities, putting diplomacy above force and justice above expediency. While Mill criticized many aspects of British colonial policy and argued against the “direct subjection” of foreign peoples, his writings show a touching faith – typical for enlightened-leadership nationalism – that Great Britain, as the leading liberal nation, “could not fail to perform its civilizing role in an honourable way.” Even though he believed that “Britain could do perfectly well without her colonies,” it was better for the progress of civilization that she should keep them for the time being. For her imperial greatness enhanced “the moral influence, and weight in the councils of the world, of the Power which, of all in existence, best understands liberty.” Britain, moreover, “has attained to more of conscience and moral principle in its dealings with foreigners, than any other great nation seems either to conceive as possible, or to recognize as desirable.”28 Marx and Engels disagreed. Engels called the Taiping rebellion of the 1850s– 1860s “a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality,” arguing that “the piratical policy of the British government has caused this universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners.” He and Marx refused to romanticize what they saw as reactionary aspects of nationalist uprisings in Asia or Europe; in characteristic romance-bashing vein, Engels notes the Chinese movement’s “prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism.” Yet it still, he said, deserved support. For their “very fanaticism” showed that the Chinese had a new “consciousness of the supreme danger in which the old China is placed.” And “since the British treat them like barbarians,” the Chinese “cannot deny to them the full benefit of their barbarism.”29 27 Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 451–467. On Marx see Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms, Chapter 5. 28 Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 454–467 and 451. 29 Friedrich Engels, “Persia–China,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2000), vol. XV, 282.

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Liberal Imperialist and Anti-imperial Nationalisms Mill’s enlightened-leadership ideal has much the same confident tone heard during the French Revolution, when many were convinced that progressive good intentions need not ask permission to conquer. As their trade networks and colonies expanded across the globe, Britons could fairly think of themselves as the world’s leading nation. The mass uprisings in India and China in the 1850s–1860s led to military intervention and more direct forms of imperial rule. But even with these inklings of future trouble, the extent of Britain’s empire, its dominance in world trade and ability to command natural resources and manpower, caused anxiety in other European states. For, by the 1840s, to be counted as a leading nation it was no longer enough to have a modern constitution, industrializing economy, and system of mass education. An aspiring Great Power was now expected to have overseas colonies. But there was only so much earth to be dominated, and, in territorial terms, Britain and the vast Russian Empire were already much the greatest of Great Powers. The Austrian and Ottoman Empires were crumbling under nationalist pressures. France was struggling to hold its smaller empire in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Germany, not unified until 1871, lagged far behind in what was fast becoming a brutally competitive race for empire. The imperial scramble was not propelled only by the quest for land and resources. It was also driven by a competitive logic that had as much to do with fear of falling to a lower rank of power than with hope of concrete gains. Tocqueville expressed this fear in an unusually honest way in 1841. France needed to adopt a more aggressive colonial policy, he argued, simply because France would lose its standing in the world if it did not. “In the current state of things,” he wrote, “Algeria should not be considered from the commercial, industrial, or colonial point of view: we must take an even higher perspective” – that of national greatness. At present, local unrest in France’s North African colonies made her position “intolerable . . . destructive for our influence in the world, and above all precarious. Our most pressing interest,” Tocqueville contended, “and I would say our most national interest, is to resolve it.” The only safe solution was to send in “a European population” backed by French military power to “protect and guarantee the territory we have conquered.”30 Tocqueville does not claim that the native populations of North Africa are in any way inferior to their European conquerors. Nor does he try to dress up 30 Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 65 and 92.

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his liberal imperialism as a high-minded civilizing mission. He admits that its main motive is fear of falling to a second rank of civilized, expansionist nations. Since individual nations could not change the rules of the Great Power game, they had no choice but to use aggressive means to stay in it. Tocqueville knew well that such measures would provoke violent resistance. He admitted that the expansion of armed European colonies in Algeria had aroused “blind hatred” in Arab and Berber inhabitants toward “foreign domination.” Still, in order to keep other European powers out of Algeria, “all means of desolating these tribes must be employed.” Acceptable means included strict controls on natives’ travel and trade. French colonists should also be permitted “to ravage the country” by seizing men and herds and burning harvests. Perilous though this policy was – and deplorable on Tocqueville’s own humane principles – he still defended it in the name of “national interest.” “To remain strong,” he declared, “should always be our first rule.”31 Tocqueville’s portrait of Europeans in an all-out competition for colonies displays a common feature of nineteenth-century liberal nationalism: a tendency to embrace what would later be called Realpolitik, the idea that moral standards might have to be compromised or set aside for the sake of self-preservation. Few liberals were as frank as Tocqueville about the moral trade-offs they were willing to make between principles and power politics. In a letter he wrote to Mill in 1841, Tocqueville told his English fellow liberal that a nation like France “must not be suffered to believe that its place in the world is diminished,” consoling herself merely “with peaceful prosperity at whatever cost, and with the well-being of each individual.” After a long silence, Mill sent a disapproving reply, saying that he was appalled by the French obsession with national status. Even “the most stupid and ignorant person” in England, he wrote – thereby exposing his own enlightenednational blindness – was unconcerned with such vanities as national glory.32 Despite Tocqueville’s rare, ideology-free frankness, the main liberal justification for imperialist nationalism was still based on distinctions between more and less advanced peoples, with liberal and commercial nations assigned a mission to help backward peoples join the forward march of history. Until the 1880s progress was usually identified with political and scientific standards of ‘civilization’ that any people could learn, rather than with fixed biological aptitudes that placed some peoples forever at upper or 31 Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, 70–71 and 145. 32 H. O. Pappé, “Mill and Tocqueville,” in John Stuart Mill’s Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments, ed. G. W. Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 123–125.

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lower rungs. On these standards, all non-Europeans currently failed to come anywhere near the upper ranks; they needed western tutelage before they could demand independence, let alone equality in international relations. But if they lacked the material and military power to reject colonialism, people outside Europe did have the raw materials needed to forge other weapons: the same weapons that Fichte and Hegel told German nationalists to forge in response to French invasions, and Rousseau told Poles to use against the Russians. European imperial nationalism sparked counter-movements like the Taiping Rebellion and Indian Mutiny, showing – as in Europe – how foreign conquest could trigger the formation of popular national selfconsciousness in countries with culturally diverse populations and no traditions of popular self-government. The non-European elites who began to expound nation-building programs for their countries were well aware that this called for complex balancing acts. On the one hand, they sought to imitate western models. Would-be conquerors had to be greeted with the same threats of mobilized, nationalized people-power that they had used to make themselves strong. For one thing, people conscious of their common nationality made fearsome armies, as the levée en masse of 1793 had shown the enemies of the French Revolution. For another, non-western elites hoped that westerners might recognize their countries, re-branded as nations, as structurally and morally akin to their own, and thus find it harder to insist on their backwardness. On the other hand, crash nation-making programs needed to implant a sense of common identity and distinctness in peoples who often had no education, no exposure to public media, and little or no notion that they belonged to supra-local communities. In ancient imperial countries like India and China, new national identities had somehow to unite a dazzling array of peoples, languages, religions, and histories. This needed far more time than most nonEuropeans had had before they were put under direct foreign control. In the middle of the nineteenth century only one non-western country – the island empire of Japan – had avoided western incursions. But already in the early 1820s, Japanese intellectuals saw that their time was running out. “The Great Powers are dividing up the earth,” warned the Japanese scholar Aizawa Seishisai in 1825, writing in classical Chinese. “Today we find ourselves alone in a hostile world; we defend a solitary castle under attack by enemies who erect fortresses along our borders.”33 Aizawa was 33 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 199.

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a conservative who professed discomfort with western notions of popular government. But in a world where nearly every other Asian country was now a western vassal, Japan’s traditional elites had no choice, he argued, but to give the populace a much larger stake in their country than ever before, turning them into a self-aware nation or kokutai. Aizawa proposed to do this through a two-pronged strategy. The first was modernizing: a system of public education should be adopted, along with policies aimed at social advancement. The second prong was conservative: nation-building elites should brush the dust off ancient Japanese myths and give them new national and religious significance, instilling belief in Japan’s family-like ethnic unity and greatness. This strategy was fast becoming a model of nation-building in Europe as well. Education and reforms were designed to unleash the might of the masses, while the ‘rediscovery’ of ancient myths of origin – often recent inventions – helped nation-building elites maintain some control. Aizawa realized that political power may be projected indirectly through foreign cultural offerings disseminated through trade – books, radical ideas, new technologies, and especially religion. “Should the barbarians win our people’s hearts and minds,” he warned, “they will have captured the realm without a skirmish.”34 To prevent this, national policy had to build up popular resistance to Western cultural seductions, to create a certain “distaste for mingling” with foreigners, as Rousseau had advised the Poles. This nationalizing strategy helped Japan pursue a highly effective modernization program based on an ideology of archaic, ethnic myths. Yet not even the keenest Japanese modernizers were confident that their efforts would win their country recognition as the equal of Western powers; and without such recognition there could be no guarantee of lasting independence. In 1853, a few years before the Indian Mutiny and Taiping Rebellion in China, a squadron of American warships forced Japanese markets to open to western trade. “Though lip-service is paid to equality of rights between nations,” the Japanese liberal scholar Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote in 1874, “in reality the idea of equality and equal rights is unrealized.”35 An admirer of European liberals like Guizot, Tocqueville, and Mill, Fukuzawa gladly embraced the western distinction between progressive and backward peoples. The Japanese, he agreed, belonged in the second category, and needed radical reforms to escape their backwardness. But he spurned the liberal paternalist view that 34 Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan, 171. 35 Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970), 183.

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backward nations had to endure a period of western tutelage before they could aspire to independence. Mill and Tocqueville were right, he said, to preach the advancement of civilization, but wrong in the paternalistic means they advocated, for they failed to realize “how evil, how hateful, how infuriating, and how painful imbalance of power is.”36 Resentment at unequal treatment had always been one of the most powerful motives for nationalism. It was about to take even more radical forms.

Radicalised Nationalism and Race Radical nationalism arises from perceptions of threats to a nation’s survival or standing. It draws on one or several of the forms of nationalism discussed earlier in this chapter – civic, cultural, crusading, ethnic, liberal, or imperial – and intensifies some of their claims. It is not necessarily right-wing or ethnocentric. Reactionary, ethnic, and cultural nationalisms can of course become rabidly exclusionist and intolerant, but so can civic-republican and liberal nationalisms turn dogmatic, suspicious, or arrogant. Like more ‘normal’ nationalism, radical forms seek to promote strong national identities through education, media, administrative centralization, and nationalist economic policies. But radical nationalism seeks more aggressively to pre-empt alleged threats and increase the nation’s power, and sharpens lines between Us and Them. This outlook encourages nationalists to put their nation’s safety and prestige above supranational moral and legal restraints, whether they openly defend nation-first policies or in the name of some greater good. Radicalized nationalism in Europe was an international phenomenon. It gained fuel from the success of socialist, social-democratic, and syndicalist movements in galvanizing popular support and posing a credible threat to political conservatism and economic liberalism. Radical nationalism thrived on fears of a new revolutionary apocalypse. Its diverse forms and degrees of virulence depended partly on how nationalists assessed internal threats of popular revolt, partly on how they saw their nation’s chances in a ruthlessly competitive international arena. Large new nation-states like Italy and Germany were being born, midwifed by war and mass mobilization; national movements were making old states fall apart; some smaller nations had better hopes of winning independence than others. The resulting uncertainty, and a sense that national rivalries had become a matter of life-ordeath, pushed defensive and self-assertive national thinking to extremes. 36 Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 186.

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Anxieties ran especially high in the upper ranks of the European pecking order. Before the nineteenth century, most Europeans took it for granted that a few Great Powers should dominate Europe. The dread alternative, as they saw it, was ‘universal monarchy,’ the tyranny of one super-state like the one Napoleon nearly imposed. Another alternative – that Europe might become a continent of nation-states that treated each other as equals – had occurred to Rousseau, Mazzini, and others; but it seemed a pipedream at a time when neighboring nation-states were busy mobilizing mass armies against each other. In Germany, forcibly unified under Bismarck’s Prussia in 1871 after a territorial war with France, many feared that their latecomer status to the ranks of great states made it impossible for Germans to win the respect commensurate with their now daunting power on the continent. In France the shock of defeat and loss of its eastern provinces in the Franco-Prussian War stirred up widespread panic: la grande nation seemed in grave danger of falling from its hitherto unquestioned Great Power status. Such fears help explain the growing appeal of three sets of ideas that came to the fore in fin-de-siècle nationalism. One was Realpolitik: the idea that politics – especially international politics – is a dog-eat-dog game where moral standards, laws, and agreements sometimes need to be set aside if you want to survive. Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), a liberal who became official historian of Bismarck’s unified Germany, channeled Realpolitik as high political prudence that now required Germans to engage in Weltpolitik, a policy of aggressive expansion outside Europe.37 The second set of ideas originated mainly in France, where memories of revolution spawned theories – notably those of Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) – about the uncontrollable behavior of crowds, mobs, or masses.38 Popularized versions of such theories tapped into apprehensions about unruly democratic politics. Le Bon’s argument that crowds need charismatic leaders to orchestrate their thoughts and actions helped inspire later, authoritarian forms of nationalist leadership. A third set of ideas also struck particularly deep chords in France, though it spread far and wide: an obsession with national and European ‘decadence,’ blamed on both internal and external causes. The imperative to stop the rot became one of the main rallying cries of radical nationalism, especially its right-wing forms. According to Charles Maurras (1868–1952) and his fellow founders (in 1899) of the far-right Action Française, national regeneration demanded an end to democracy, the return 37 See John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 38 Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895).

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to “natural inequality” and hereditary monarchy, and a renewed struggle among Europe’s nations for land and other resources.39 These ideas helped generate another doctrine that figures prominently in nationalist thinking during the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. In his The Psychology of Peoples Le Bon proposed that the human species consists of superior and inferior ‘races.’ Though he distinguished races primarily by their “mental constitutions” and cultural artifacts, his theories also contain elements of biological determinism.40 An earlier figure, the aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), had already pioneered race thinking in his 1,400-page An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1848), which was soon translated into English and other languages. Unlike cultural and ethnic ideas, the idea of race in social theories was inherently hierarchical: races were never different-yet-equal, but always higher or lower. In the century’s last decades, defenders of race doctrines discovered a useful ally in science. Social Darwinists began to espouse the idea that human individuals and groups are involved in a constant, evolution-driven struggle against each other.41 Most nations contained too much obvious artifice to be protagonists of biological struggles for survival, but races – ostensibly the primordial human groups – could play that role. Racial doctrines spread fast in academic, political, and military circles across Europe and North America. They inflected not just the vocabulary of radical nationalists, but also a wide spectrum of political discourse. It was soon quite commonplace to suggest that national hierarchies were determined by the quality of any given nation’s core biological ‘race.’ As Gilbert Murray, an Australian-born British scholar, Liberal Party activist, and internationalist supporter of the League of Nations explained in 1900, There is in the world a hierarchy of races . . . those nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others, and the lower work of the world will tend in the long run to be done by the lower breeds of men. This much we of the ruling colour will no doubt accept as obvious.42

Rather than being simply a radicalized version of ethnic ideas, then, racial thinking hooked up just as easily with enlightened-leadership forms of 39 Charles Maurras, “The Future of French Nationalism,” in The Nationalism Reader, ed. Omar Dahbour and Micheline Ishay (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995), 216–221. 40 Gustave Le Bon, Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1894). 41 See Chapter 12 by Gregory Radick on Darwinism and Social Darwinism. 42 Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977), 96.

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nationalism. To those currently at the top, race doctrines offered a neat way to naturalize and stabilize contested national pecking orders. Even if wars and imperial competition weakened their states, racially superior nations could keep their top-dog status and justify expansion to control inferior races. The latter’s resistance might make life hell for their superiors, but science still made clear who was boss. Racial thinking thus became one of the main ideological strategies of international positioning and re-positioning in Europe and beyond, and was used as a justification for aggressive imperialism. But, since race doctrine predicted the decay of the entire human species if inferior ones ran amuck, it also had a desperately paranoid side. Fears of political and international decline were increasingly projected onto minorities, who were now cast not just as outsiders with suspect loyalties, but also as purveyors of racial decay. The main targets of racial paranoia within Europe were the Jews. Their time-tested identity served as a model for nation-builders who wanted to forge similar bonds among their people. But it also appeared threatening to new, unsettled nations like the German, “whose type,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), “is still weak and undetermined, so that it could easily be effaced.”43 Nietzsche wanted to expose what he saw as the idiocies of German and European nationalism at the end of the century, observing that national thinking had become mere herd-thinking, “bovine nationalism.” Other intellectuals, most of them on the left, also decried the normalization of radical nationalism. But it was growing harder than ever for Europeans not to see themselves as national and racial rivals locked in a struggle for survival. The national ideal was well on its way to conquering the world. But it was at risk of being conquered, in turn, by power politics and hierarchical doctrines – the very things that the first nationalisms had so creatively opposed.

43 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 102–103 and 162–169.

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Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy jennifer pitts The nineteenth century saw the rise of global imperial political structures and the advent of industrial capitalism, with its hierarchically structured global economy. European political control expanded from roughly a third of the earth’s territory in 1815 to 85 percent in 1914. An economic “great divergence” between the economies of Europe and Asia, which had been comparable in their most advanced regions in the eighteenth century, opened in part thanks to European conquest of agricultural land in the new world and the forced deindustrialization of colonies such as India.1 European observers interpreted these changes as evidence of European superiority, and the admiration for non-European civilizations that had been comparatively common among eighteenth-century thinkers all but disappeared. Discourses of civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness, played a newly central role in conceptions of human society, which varied from universalist theories in which all societies were considered as progressing in similar fashion, if at different paces, along a spectrum from less to more advanced social and political organization, to accounts, often racialized, that held modern civilization to be uniquely available to Europe. Views of empire varied accordingly, from projects of a civilizing imperial mission or of the global spread of European civilization through settler colonies, to defenses of imperial rule on the grounds that non-European societies were not, and might never be, capable of self-rule. Many critics of empire likewise presumed the superiority of European civilization. *

I am very grateful to Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, Adam Kuper, and Lisa Wedeen for comments on a draft of this chapter. 1 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Britain and France, the dominant imperial states, were also the major sites of imperial theorizing, with considerable intellectual traffic between them, and this chapter will therefore focus primarily on British and French thought on empire. British thinkers, as subjects of the global hegemon and members of a society in which political change, including the extension of the franchise, occurred relatively peacefully, tended to conceive of their empire in more confident terms than those in France, anxious in the wake of Napoleon’s illfated project of conquest and the apparent defeat of French aspirations to global dominance.2 British thought on empire in the nineteenth century may be summarized as a story of the development and quick dominance of imperial liberalism, with its commitment to the use of imperial power for the purpose of civilizing and improving colonized societies. A mid-century crisis of imperial liberalism, brought on in part by its own internal tensions, resulted in challenges from those who believed liberalism’s civilizing aims were unattainable. The final decades of the century witnessed a proliferation of imperial ideologies and critiques that adhered to a much starker vision of international racial hierarchy than had been the case for earlier liberals. While in France we find the same trend toward an increasingly racialized view of human difference, the political and policy shifts were to some extent in the opposite direction, toward a more overt civilizing mission by the end of the century. One theme in what follows will be the ambivalence of liberal and radical critics of empire and imperialism, few of whom can be characterized as outright anti-imperialists.3

Early Liberal Thought on Empire Liberal thinkers and political actors were among the most influential commentators on empire in the first half of the nineteenth century, including James and John Stuart Mill and T. B. Macaulay in Britain and Alexis de Tocqueville in France. Liberalism, a capacious ideological category that included free-trade and laissez-faire economic views alongside others’ 2 P. J. Marshall, “Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: I, Reshaping the Empire,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), 1–18, pp. 1–2. 3 While some writers had begun to refer to the British Empire in the eighteenth century, for the first half of the nineteenth the term “empire” referred in British discourse more often to Napoleonic France; “imperialism” came into common usage in the 1870s to describe Disraeli’s policy of expansion. See Richard Koebner and H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 144–148.

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support for some redistribution of wealth and collective ownership, and a similarly broad range of views on political subjects such as extension of suffrage or religious establishment, likewise spanned a remarkably broad spectrum of views about empire through the end of the century, from authoritarian to civilizing to emancipationist.4 J. S. Mill’s profound involvement in the theorization, administration, and politics of the British Empire left significant intellectual legacies, even as later thinkers turned away from some of his key commitments, including his hostility to biological racism and his faith in an improving empire that would prepare its subjects for self-government. The “entanglement” of his political and social thought with empire deeply shaped his liberalism, with lasting consequences for liberal theory.5 Above all, Mill left his mark as a theorist of civilization and progress, who believed European civilization was distinguished from so-called savage and barbarous societies by its uniquely progressive historical dynamic, its capacity for self-development, its fostering of social cooperation, and the existence of well-developed nationalities that he believed were indispensable to modern politics and statehood.6 Mill was heir to several strands of eighteenthcentury thought on history, progress, and reform, most notably Scottish Enlightenment theories of societies’ development through the stages of hunting (savage), pastoral (barbarous), agricultural, and commercial society, and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, with its emphasis on societal improvement through legislative reform and codification. But where each of these traditions had in an earlier generation supplied robust grounds for criticizing European imperial expansion, in the hands of Mill, his father James Mill, author of the influential History of British India (1817), and other liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century, their combination produced an emphatic defense of despotic European government as indispensable to the progress of backward countries.7 Although, James Mill argued, Britain could never “govern India but with infinite loss to this country . . . we earnestly hope, for the sake of the natives, that it will not be found necessary to leave them to their own direction.”8 James was a more unapologetic authoritarian, but his son agreed 4 Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” in Duncan Bell, Reordering the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 62–90. 5 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Liberalism, Nation, and Empire,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 232–260. 6 John Stuart Mill, “Civilization” (1836), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991) (hereafter cited as CW by volume), CW, vol. XVIII, 117–147. 7 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 8 James Mill, “Affairs of India,” Edinburgh Review, XVI (April 1810), 128–157, p. 154.

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that “[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”9 Like Mill’s, the career and thought of the liberal writer and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of the Clapham evangelical, abolitionist, and first governor of Sierra Leone Zachary Macaulay, were entangled with empire.10 The younger Macaulay, who, unlike Mill, worked in India as an East India Company administrator, intervened influentially in several key imperial debates, including the dispute over the language of instruction for Indian higher education, in which Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) made the case in favor of Anglicizing with fierce disdain for Indian knowledge: “What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth: it is the bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error.”11 Mill did not take a prominent part in these debates, but, while he was more sympathetic to the use of Indian vernaculars for scientific instruction, he shared Macaulay’s condescension toward nonEuropean civilizations. Paternalist in its conception of the colonial government, with a consistent concern about abuses of “natives” by European settlers, and assimilative in its aspirations for the future of colonized peoples, their brand of imperial liberalism could support the so-called “Black Act” (1836) that abolished the legal privileges European settlers in the countryside enjoyed and subjected them to local laws on a par with Indians, a law fiercely opposed by most British residents in India. Mill argued that the protection of the “Natives of India” from abuses by Europeans, among other threats, was one of the government’s foremost duties, and he insisted that “our empire in India . . . will not exist for a day after we shall lose the character of being more just and disinterested than the native rulers and of being united among ourselves.”12 A commitment to this vision of benevolent empire arguably blunted Mill’s and other liberals’ ability to perceive the structural features of imperial injustice, above all imperial governments’ lack of accountability to the governed and an ingrained sense of cultural and racial superiority on the part of imperial agents. Mill’s proposed responses to failings of imperial governance repeatedly entailed more oversight from the central government 9 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in CW, vol. XIX, 567–568. 10 Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 11 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” first published in George Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan, 1864), 415. 12 See John Stuart Mill, “Minute on the Black Act” (1836), in CW, vol. XXX, 14–15.

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and better education of its agents, but not greater accountability to, much less political rights for, governed populations (whether Indians, or blacks in Caribbean colonies).13 A related tension in Millian liberalism lay in the notion that despotic rule was a legitimate and effective means to prepare colonized societies for self-government. This view relied on a bifurcation between societies in which freedom was to be the grounding principle and those relegated, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, to an “imaginary waiting room of history” where freedom was deferred indefinitely.14 French debates about empire in the first half of the century were likewise dominated by an emerging liberalism, one closely informed by British intellectual developments, but they differed from debates across the Channel in being shaped both by anxiety about France’s inferiority to Britain in status, power, and political stability and by the post-revolutionary republican tradition, with its emphasis on national unity, political virtue, and the glory of the republic. Members of the first generation of French liberals (Germaine de Staël, Simonde de Sismondi, Jean-Baptiste Say, Benjamin Constant) were fierce critics of Napoleon’s imperial exploits and of slavery, which he restored in French colonies in 1802. They held colonies to be a great financial burden on European peoples, though sometimes justifiable nonetheless, and they placed great, and arguably naïve, faith in the possibility of equal and non-coercive commerce among states of different levels of economic and industrial development.15 The political-economy critique of empire, stressing France’s own material interests rather than questions of justice toward the conquered, would remain the dominant strain in the wake of France’s conquest of the city of Algiers from its Ottoman rulers in 1830, during the extension of French domination throughout Algerian territory, and up to its incorporation as “French territory” under the 1848 constitution. As one prominent liberal critic of the conquest, Xavier de Sade, argued, “I see perfectly the advantages we could gain from several provinces on the Rhine . . . If someone can show us that we could gain the same fruits from our possession in Algiers, I will join 13 Although Mill argued in the wake of Governor Eyre’s atrocities in Jamaica that England should “suspend the power of local legislation altogether, until the necessary internal reforms have been effected by the mother country,” he did hold that the events in Jamaica showed the need for voting rights for blacks in the post-Civil-War American South; Mill, letter to Rowland G. Hazard, November 15, 1865, in CW, vol. XVI, 1117. 14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 15 See, for example, Benjamin Constant, Discours de M. Benjamin Constant à la Chambre des Députés (Paris: J. Pinard, 1828). Say, like James Mill, believed British rule in India was costly for Britain but beneficial for India: Jean-Baptiste Say, Historical Essay on the Rise, Progress and Probable Results of the British Dominion in India (London, 1824), 31ff.

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the ranks of its most decided partisans.”16 The rare exceptions included the legislator Amédée Desjobert, who argued that justice demanded selfgovernment for Algeria, and the Algerian businessman and legal scholar Hamdan ben Othman Khodja, who went to Paris to argue his case and published Le Miroir (1833), an impassioned and self-consciously liberal denunciation of the conquest. He demanded the “liberal emancipation” of his country and European respect for Algerian nationality that would match the liberal enthusiasm for the independence of Belgium or Poland.17 But criticism of the Algeria conquest was muted and short-lived: The languages of liberalism and republicanism were invoked more in support of imperial expansion than against it. In contrast to righteous British justifications of imperial rule as improving its subjects even if at considerable cost to the metropole, French arguments stressed the glory to the French nation of “propagating civilization” and “enlighten[ing] a continent,” as well as the dangers of a popular sense of the nation’s decline that would come from abandoning colonial aspirations.18 Such arguments were developed by Mill’s friend and correspondent Alexis de Tocqueville, both the leading liberal theorist of midnineteenth-century France and one of the French legislature’s foremost experts on Algeria and proponents of its conquest, who insisted on the historic importance of the “question of Africa” (“Algeria is today our greatest affair”) and more broadly the global vocation of European empires.19 “Do you know what is happening in the Orient? An entire world is being transformed . . . the old Asiatic world is vanishing; and in its place we see the European world gradually rising. Europe, in our day . . . attacks . . . from all sides, puncturing, enveloping, subduing. Do you believe that a nation that wants to remain great can witness such a spectacle without taking part?”20 While Tocqueville deployed the liberal 16 Xavier de Sade, speech of April 3, 1833, Archives Parlementaires, 82, 190; David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870,” Past and Present, 210(1) (2011), 155–186. 17 Hamdan Khodja, Le Miroir, ed. Abdelkader Djeghloul (Arles: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 1985); originally published as Sidy Hamdan ben-Othman Khoja, Aperçu historique et statistique sur la Régence d’Alger, intitulé en Arabe le Miroir (Paris: Goetschy fils, 1833). On the global circulation of liberal thought also see C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: NineteenthCentury Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 18 Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, “Colonie,” in Dictionnaire politique (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), 234; and Gaëtan de la Rochefoucauld, speech of April 29, 1834, Archives Parlementaires, 89, 488. 19 Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” Review of Politics, 25(3) (1963), 362–398. 20 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Second discours sur la question d’Orient” (speech in the Chamber of Deputies of November 30, 1840), in Écrits et discours politiques, vol. 3.ii

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language of civilization and barbarism, and hoped that European rule might bring progress to “semi-barbarous” people such as the Algerians, he was more clear-eyed than his British contemporaries about the violence of imperial rule and its tendency in practice to barbarize rather than civilize its subjects.21 The republican coloring of French liberalism, in which the flourishing of the French republic was a paramount political value, made French defenses of empire more candidly self-interested and more willing to embrace violence than contemporary British defenses that relied on universalistic justifications of benevolent rule. It also, arguably, made them better able to recognize that the violence of conquest vitiated schemes for benevolent rule, and readier to acknowledge non-Europeans as political actors rather than merely objects of European administration. Another recurrent feature of imperial liberalism is the way in which it figured liberalism at home as requiring imperial expansion and domination abroad. Most straightforwardly this was for economic reasons, as in the constellation of liberal arguments for empire in the pre-1848 German lands explored by Matthew Fitzpatrick in Liberal Imperialism in Germany: as sources of raw materials, markets for the surplus of goods produced in the industrializing metropole, and lands of opportunity for emiserated peasants and urban laborers.22 While liberals were more embattled in other European states, elsewhere too they developed theories of empire, particularly in Spain and the Netherlands, which had old and wellestablished overseas empires, whose preservation and expansion liberals tended to support, often aggressively, sometimes with discomfort and internal division. The Netherlands betrayed a pattern of liberalism at home parasitic on colonial illiberalism, for the forced cultivation of cash crops for the world market in the Dutch East Indies underwrote the development of modern state infrastructure in the metropole, under the liberal regime.23 There were also reasons of political (ed. André Jardin, 1985), in Œuvres complètes, series ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–), 290; for an analysis of such rhetoric of colonialism as sexual violence, see Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State,” UCLA Law Review, 57(5) (2010), 1477–1536. 21 Tocqueville, Écrits et discours politiques, vol. 3.i (ed. André Jardin, 1962), in Œuvres complètes, series ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–), 505. 22 Matthew Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (eds.), German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and, for a series of essays on imperial liberal thought beyond France and Britain, Matthew Fitzpatrick (ed.), Liberal Imperialism in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 23 Josep Fradera, La nación imperial (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2015); and Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, “Imperialism after the Great Wave: The Dutch Case in the Netherlands East Indies,

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self-interest: Empire enhanced the nation’s international reputation and furnished a collective political project at a time when the entry of ever larger numbers into the community of voters was thought to threaten the cohesion of the polity. Political actors, including liberals, in Italy and Germany came to see overseas empire as a key feature of British and French geopolitical dominance, which as vulnerable new states they must at all costs imitate. In contrast to Britain, where liberalism arose in a context of global dominance and confidence, across the continent liberal nationalism developed amid a variety of geopolitical fears: of Russian and Prussian expansion, and of territorial claims by competing nationalities. Many liberals in central Europe saw themselves as champions of national emancipation from others’ imperial domination, even as their own projects of national consolidation met almost inevitably with charges of their own imperialism.24 Empire, then, could be imagined as economically and politically stabilizing in a way that made liberal politics feasible. Liberals differed in the degree to which they acknowledged the possible hypocrisy in this position of sacrificing countless distant others for the sake of liberalism in Europe. The standard response, that only some were ready for liberal politics and that empire would prepare the unready, was offered even by liberals who had shown themselves all too aware of the failure, or emptiness, of imperial promises to lay the groundwork for self-government. The evolution of thought on settler colonies too reflects a shift toward a more explicitly racial imperial project. As Duncan Bell has noted, the distinction commonly made by nineteenth-century thinkers between settler colonies and other imperial territories “encodes a problem,” for it threatens to erase the key similarity that both involved the “violent dispossession of and rule over indigenous peoples.” And yet “the distinction is important for without understanding the use to which it was put by historical agents, it is impossible to map the imaginative geography of empire.”25 Edward Gibbon Wakefield and other early-nineteenth-century advocates for settler colonies focused on economic opportunity and on poverty, attributed to “our present redundancy of population,” in the metropole.26 Wakefield, a self-styled 1860–1914,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe, ed. Matthew Fitzpatrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 25–46. 24 Eric Kurlander, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire: Liberal Imperialism in Mitteleuropa, 1890–1918,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe, ed. Matthew Fitzpatrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 141–66. 25 Duncan Bell, Reordering the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 212. 26 [E. G. Wakefield], A Letter from Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia, ed. Robert Gouger (London: Joseph Cross, 1829), v; [E. G. Wakefield], The British Colonization of New Zealand (London, 1837); and Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

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disciple of Bentham’s, made a name for himself promoting government-led schemes of colonization, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. These early English proponents of settlement colonies tended to downplay the conquest and domination of indigenous populations and to treat imperial land claims as based on the “cession of unoccupied lands . . . obtained by contract.”27 In French debates, the entanglements of settler colonialism with direct domination were more overt. Tocqueville wrote of “domination” and “colonization” as the two, mutually indispensable, pillars of French success in Algeria.28 The utopian socialist Saint-Simonians were among the greatest mid-century enthusiasts of Algerian colonization, on the grounds of both relieving urban poverty in France and undertaking an ambitious civilizing agenda.29 The contradictions of France’s colonial policy, simultaneously integrative and subordinating (Algeria was declared legally part of France in 1848, while Muslims were denied citizenship until 1946) would plague the “imperial nation-state” throughout its existence.30

Crises of Liberal Imperialism and the Hardening of Racial Thinking Imperial liberals in the early nineteenth century were opponents of biological racism who fought for the abolition of slavery, which was finally achieved in the British empire by 1838 (in a process that began with legislation of 1833) and in the French in the constitution drafted following the 1848 revolution. Projects of imperial expansion and consolidation in fact gained considerable support and momentum from anti-slavery sentiment, as abolitionists supported the enhancement of the British navy required to capture slave ships in 27 [John Ward], A Statement of the Objects of the New Zealand Association (London, 1837), 4, quoted by Mark Hickford, “Decidedly the Most Interesting Savages on the Globe: An Approach to the Intellectual History of Ma¯ori Property Rights, 1837–1853,” History of Political Thought, 27(1) (2006), 121–167, p. 130; and see Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 28 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria” (1841), in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 61–63. 29 Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1843); and Osama W. AbiMershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 30 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 387–464.

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the wake of the anti-slave-trade treaties of the 1810s, the expansion of a global imperial legal and bureaucratic apparatus, and the extension of British rule in West Africa.31 The internal tensions of imperial liberalism were perhaps earliest apparent in the fraught responses of white abolitionists to the challenges faced by post-abolition colonial societies. For Tocqueville, the glory of abolishing slavery in the French Empire was equivalent to the glory of conquering Algeria, and could serve a similar function of inspiring French pride in and commitment to their liberal state. But liberal emancipation did not necessarily entail equal liberty for the newly freed; Tocqueville, like many liberals, considered it “no tyranny” to pair abolition with strict limitations on landownership by former slaves in order to keep down the cost of labor on sugar plantations.32 Among the British, disappointment with the complexities of postemancipation society brought out racism among the evangelical abolitionists who had been among the most ardent champions of slaves in the British empire. As Catherine Hall has shown in pathbreaking work on Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, the reformist optimism of the generation that came of age in the 1830s soon gave way to a “bleaker view of racial others.” By the 1850s, “thinking about race was shifting away from ideas of black men and women as brothers and sisters, to a racial vocabulary of biological difference.” Abolitionists’ vision of universal brotherhood (itself a fraught notion that could accommodate a belief in white superiority), and their faith that the emancipated slaves would soon become a self-governing and economically thriving independent peasantry, withered in the face of planter recalcitrance, drought, disease, and economic decline, being replaced by a sense of disappointment in the freed slaves and a willingness on the part of many to defer black suffrage indefinitely.33 31 Derek Peterson (ed.), Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Lauren Benton, “Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39(3) (2011), 355–374; and Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, A Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 32 Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Emancipation of Slaves” (1843), in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 199–226. 33 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–21; and Catherine Hall, “Reconfiguring race: the stories the slave-owners told,” in Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British SlaveOwnership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 163–202.

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The virulent racism to which Thomas Carlyle gave voice in his anonymous “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849) (republished in 1853 under his name and with the belligerent change in title from “Negro” to “Nigger”), though it was neither typical of nor particularly well received in British public debate, “marked a watershed,” as Hall has put it, in that it “spoke the unspeakable, and changed the discursive terrain.”34 Mill denounced as “damnable” Carlyle’s argument that “one kind of human beings are born servants to another kind,” and he disputed Carlyle’s racism on both empirical and moral grounds.35 Carlyle’s text presaged a shift in the public discourse such that it soon became customary for liberals among others to speak of “the lower races.” As Stuart Hall has argued, cultural differentialism and biological racism were not two different systems but rather “racism’s two registers,” often in play at the same time; the increasingly widespread belief in deep, nearly unbridgeable, cultural differences among peoples was not an alternative to racism but another facet of it.36 Close on the heels of these struggles around emancipation, a series of crises in the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s further challenged the liberal imperial agenda and encouraged its critics. The Sepoy rebellion (or Indian Mutiny as it was called by the British at the time) in 1857 and subsequent British massacres of Indian civilians were followed by the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, with its brutal suppression by Governor Edward John Eyre. As Thomas Metcalf has written of the 1857 rebellion, “a year of bitter racial warfare left an abiding mark” in mutual mistrust and hatred between Britons and Indians, hardened racism, and unleashed fantasies of violence among the British in India, feelings shared though sooner moderated in Britain. The episode led to the abolition of the British East India Company and the assumption of direct governance of India by the Crown, considerably transforming the place of the British Empire in the national imagination. A small contingent of thinkers pressed the case that egregious and longstanding British violations of political morality and the law of nations were to blame for the Indian rebellion, especially Lord Dalhousie’s increasingly aggressive use of the policy of “lapse” to seize territory for the empire when native rulers died without heirs; but on the whole British public opinion was remarkably unified in the belief that Indians had rejected or 34 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 379. 35 John Stuart Mill, “The Negro Question” (1850), in CW, vol. XXI, 85–95, p. 93. 36 Stuart Hall, “The Multi-Cultural Question,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Books, 2000), 209–241, p. 216; and see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects, 17.

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shown themselves unfit for the benefits of European civilization.37 The Eyre case more clearly polarized British political society, with prominent liberals including Mill, now a member of Parliament, John Bright, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer joining the Jamaica Committee that sought to try Eyre for murder (though the Committee’s counsel, James Fitzjames Stephen, held that Eyre’s actions had been morally if not legally justified); while an opposing committee for Eyre’s defense included Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin.38 These crises exposed the internal weakness of imperial liberalism, for, as Karuna Mantena has argued, “when the project of liberal reform encountered resistance, its universalism easily gave way to harsh attitudes about the intractable differences between people, the inscrutability of other ways of life, and the ever-present potential for racial and cultural conflict.”39 The tensions in liberal responses to imperial crisis emboldened critics who rejected their moral universalism and reformism in favor of more frankly authoritarian rule and racial hierarchy. Two somewhat different reactions and attempted resolutions to the tensions within Millian imperial liberalism can be seen in the work of two men who were among his most prominent successors in Victorian intellectual life as well as major figures in the Indian administration (and themselves lifelong friends), Henry Maine and James Fitzjames Stephen. Maine addressed the inconsistencies of liberalizing despotism by amplifying the distance between progressive and backward societies and effectively abandoning the civilizing mission in favor of policies that would protect traditional societies against the dislocations of modernity.40 Stephen, in contrast, maintained that, despite liberal cant about the freedom of modern representative democracy, all government ultimately rested on coercion, and that the empire in India held profound lessons for Britain in its greater rationality and order: “to compare the Indian penal code with English criminal law is like comparing cosmos 37 For criticism, see Henry E. J. Stanley, The East and the West: Our Dealings with our Neighbours (London: Hatchard & Co., 1865) and Francis W. Newman, “Our Relation to the Princes of India,” Westminster Review, 13(2) (1858), 453–477. 38 Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962); Rande W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Catherine Hall, “Competing Masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and the Case of Governor Eyre,” in White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 255–295. 39 Karuna Mantena, “Mill and the Imperial Predicament,” in J. S. Mill’s Political Thought, ed. Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 298–318, p. 299. 40 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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with chaos.”41 And indeed the modernization of the British state in the nineteenth century “often reflected theories, experiences, and practices worked out originally in India and then applied” at home.42 The Eyre controversy took place in a context of widespread social and political unrest around the passage of the second Reform Bill in 1867 and Fenian agitation for Irish independence, including the explosion of a bomb in London, prompting the suspension of habeas corpus in 1866 and again in 1867. It was in response to such unrest that Disraeli first successfully used a show of imperial aggression (in a military expedition to Abyssinia in 1868) to unify the British public and suppress tensions among classes, a strategy he was to cultivate over the next decade, declaring Queen Victoria Empress of India in 1877.43 To those who feared that Britain was losing international standing by remaining aloof as Prussia expanded on the European continent, Disraeli responded with a global vision of British power – “England has outgrown the continent of Europe. Her position is no longer that of a mere European Power. England is the metropolis of a great maritime empire, extending to the boundaries of the farthest oceans.”44 Although Gladstone’s critique of Disraeli’s imperial brutality and overreach – “Beaconsfieldism” – was a key feature of the Midlothian campaign that returned him as prime minister in the 1880s, in the end he added more territory to the empire than Disraeli did.45 Colonial conquest required colonial knowledge, and the new disciplines of the human sciences in the second half of the century – ethnology and anthropology, linguistics, colonial medicine – were, as anthropologists began to argue in the 1960s, deeply implicated in both the justification and the conduct of empire.46 Professional ethnography may even be seen as “a 41 James Fitzjames Stephen, “Codification in India and England,” The Fortnightly Review, 18 (1872), 654. 42 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4. 43 Freda Harcourt, “Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: A Question of Timing,” The Historical Journal, 23(1) (1980), 87–109. 44 The Times, July 14, 1866, p. 10. 45 C. C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996); and Peter Cain, “Radicalism, Gladstone, and the Liberal Critique of Disraelian ‘Imperialism,’” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215–238. 46 Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge; History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Nicholas Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and

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specific offshoot of a wider field of colonial intelligence.”47 Adam Kuper’s Chapter 17 in this volume notes that two competing research programs coexisted in anthropological circles, one committed to the biological unity of the human species and inclined to view differences among peoples in terms of evolution from a common primitive starting point; and another that claimed there to be deep differences among human groups and that was particularly invested in the idea of the Indo-European language family and its apparent connection to an “Aryan” race. While these to some degree corresponded to commitments, respectively, to a civilizing imperialism and a more authoritarian strand, we have seen how readily even the former abandoned assimilationist aspirations in the face of setbacks. German anthropology, freer from imperial entanglements for much of the century than its British and French counterparts, was at first less invested than they were in evolutionary and hierarchical thinking and more pluralistic in its interpretation of human diversity. Even during Germany’s imperial period (1871–1918), it has been argued, “the overwhelming majority of German ethnologists and anthropologists were liberal champions of cultural pluralism,” though around the turn of the twentieth century they began to abandon these commitments, so that by the end of World War I “a narrowly nationalistic and overtly colonialist orientation became virtually hegemonic.”48 This was in a sense to reverse the trajectory of some influential French anthropologists toward a new pluralism rooted in a functionalist approach: As the young ethnographer and sociologist Marcel Mauss argued in 1900 in an inaugural lecture in a course on the “history of religion of uncivilized peoples,” “there are no uncivilized peoples, only peoples with a different civilization.”49 Among the new social-science disciplines was international law, whose contributions to European thinking about empire lay both in accounts of the closed nature of the international legal community, which nearly all nineteenthcentury jurists restricted to “civilized” European states and their white colonies, Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origin of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 47 Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 163–183, p. 167. 48 Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny, “Introduction: Rethinking German Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1–30. 49 Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, ed. Victor Karady, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968–1974), vol. III, 229–230, reprinted from “Leçon d’ouverture à l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions des peuples non-civilisés,” quoted in Martin Staum, Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire 1815–1848 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 186.

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and also in the development of a legal framework for colonization.50 International lawyers were prominently involved in the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885) that codified the various European states’ territorial claims in the wake of the Scramble for Africa, none more so than Sir Travers Twiss, who championed the rights of the Belgian king Leopold II’s private association, the International African Association, to sovereignty in the Congo, giving legal cover to the most notoriously brutal and destructive colonial regime in Africa.51 The territory, declared the Congo Free State in 1885 under Leopold’s personal rule and private army, was immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s searing Heart of Darkness (1899), which drew on his experience on the Congo River as a steamer captain for a Belgian trading company. As Chinua Achebe has explored, the racist liberalism espoused by the novel’s narrator, Marlow, and ambiguously by Conrad himself, who erects an unstable ironic distance from his narrator, dehumanizes his African characters, renders them inscrutable, and crudely deploys them as images of the savagery into which Marlow/Conrad, in a typically liberal ideological move, fears Europeans themselves have fallen in their imperial exploits.52 The idea of “Greater Britain,” or the union of the United Kingdom with its settler colonies “as a single transcontinental political community” was, as Duncan Bell has shown, a major preoccupation of the late Victorian theorists of empire, among them the radical politician Charles Dilke (Greater Britain, 1868, and Problems of Greater Britain, 1890), the historian J. R. Seeley (The Expansion of England, 1883), and the conservative man of letters and Carlyle devotee J. A. Froude (Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, 1886). New organizations to structure imperial debate included the Colonial Society/Royal Colonial Institute (founded 1868) and the Imperial Federation League (1884–1893), though political federation was just one of a number of institutional programs advanced by advocates of Greater Britain.53 For many of those invested in the idea, 50 Martti Koskenniemi, Gentle Civiliser of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Casper Sylvest, “International Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” British Yearbook of International Law, 75(1) (2004), 9–70; and Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 51 Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Justification of King Leopold II’s Congo Enterprise by Sir Travers Twiss,” in Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire, ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 109–126. 52 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Massachusetts Review, 18(4) (1977), 782–794; Maya Jasanoff argues that Conrad combined such racism with remarkable perceptiveness, indeed clairvoyance, about the dynamics of globalization in Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin/Random House, 2017). 53 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6 and 23.

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attention to the settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) allowed them to argue for a global British polity as a political and economic association of free, (implicitly or explicitly) white communities and to sidestep the questions of domination and emiseration that dogged discussions of India and Egypt, particularly in the wake of the devastating famines of the late 1870s through the 1890s.54 Seeley was typical of this discourse in ignoring the indigenous populations in the settler empire: “If England and her colonies taken together make, properly speaking, not an Empire but only a very large state, this is because the population is English throughout.” It was in the settler empire that the future of “England” lay if the state were to avoid being reduced “to the level of a purely European Power looking back, as Spain does now, to the great days when she pretended to be a world state.”55

Critics of Empire Some key features of the radical critique of imperial practice “remained remarkably constant” from Paine through Hobson, as Gareth Stedman Jones has written: “its depiction of the colonists, its exposure of the corrupt arrangements between government and trading companies, its attack upon indefensible monopolies, [and] its highlighting of the cost to the tax-payer.”56 Radicals from Richard Cobden to John Atkinson Hobson also shared the concern that imperial despotism would come home to roost. This political argument often produced a preference for settler colonies over territories with large indigenous subject populations, but it rarely generated arguments for emancipating the latter.57 And yet, if we understand imperial thinking to mean a commitment to a global hierarchy in which the West is licensed by its claims to superior civilization to exercise power over extra-European peoples and territories, much radical thought, however “anti-imperial” in selfconception and despite its critique of existing imperial institutions, was itself imperial. Radical and socialist visions of global order tended toward multilateral arrangements, in which the “West” as a whole, or under the guise of 54 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001). 55 John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), 301 and 304–305. 56 Gareth Stedman Jones, “Radicalism and the Extra-European World: The Case of Karl Marx,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in NineteenthCentury Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 186–214, p. 186. 57 Miles Taylor, “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19(1) (1991), 1–23.

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the “international community,” exercised tutelage over “backward” peoples, both for the sake of their own development and, it was sometimes argued, in stewardship of the natural resources in their territories that they were not yet in a position to exploit efficiently. In the first half of the century, the free-trade critique, associated above all with Cobden, maintained that expenditure on imperial defense was money wasted, as British trade would find markets, and British capital employment, as easily outside the empire as within it.58 But Cobden, as he made clear at the outset of an 1843 parliamentary speech on colonial trade, “was not opposed to the retention of colonies any more than [the honorable] Gentlemen opposite. He was as anxious as any one that the English race should spread itself over the earth; and he believed that colonization, under a proper system of management, might be made as conducive to the interests of the mother country as to the emigrants themselves.”59 Marx combined searing criticism of the violence, “atrocious extortion,” and ruinous misgovernment of the British in India and the French in Algeria with the view, expressed in the Communist Manifesto as well as in his articles of the 1850s for the New York Tribune, that colonial destruction was, like that of capitalism itself, an inevitable stage of historical development that would pave the way for such stagnant societies to be subjected “to the common control of the most advanced peoples.” Britain, he argued, “has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating.”60 But the 1857 Sepoy rebellion arguably initiated a change in Marx’s thinking about non-Western societies, leading him to attribute more vitality to non-European social forms than he had and perhaps to imagine alternative developmental trajectories.61 Disraeli’s glorification of empire galvanized a radical critique of “Imperialism” as a policy that recalled the populist authoritarianism of continental figures such as Napoleon III in that it would “magnify the 58 Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 59 Richard Cobden, House of Commons, June 22, 1843, Hansard, 3rd series, 70, cols. 205–212. 60 Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Tribune, July 22, 1853; reprinted in the Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 663 and 659. 61 Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Gabriel Paquette, “Colonies and Empire in the Political Thought of Hegel and Marx,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 292–323; and Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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Crown on the one hand, and the wishes of the masses on the other, and should make light of the constitutional limits on either.”62 As Gregory Claeys has shown, the most thoroughgoing critics of British imperial practice on the British left were the Positivists, the British followers of Auguste Comte who followed his notion of a religion of Humanity and adhered to his view that “[t]he fundamental doctrine of modern social life is the subordination of Politics to Morals.”63 The Positivists, prominently the Oxford scholar Richard Congreve and the prolific author Frederic Harrison, denounced Disraelian imperialism for its preoccupation with the splendor and the interests of the imperial state and its indifference to, or even glorification of, the violence the empire required. Congreve advocated the “revocation of that foolish title of Empress” and urged Indians to “make it clear to the English that our rule is fundamentally unacceptable to you.”64 Claeys stresses the novelty of the Positivists’ diagnosis of the source of imperial expansion in nefarious financial interests, a line of critique that socialists would develop and J. A. Hobson would make famous. Although they proudly considered themselves anti-imperialists, however, the Positivists’ resemblance to liberal supporters of empire was profound: Most shared a belief in the superiority of Western civilization and the view that European civilization was the telos (or the closest approximation of it) toward which all human societies should be striving; and a belief that only with Western leadership and through Western agency could the immature peoples of the non-white world progress. They likewise shared the view that existing imperial rule should be designed to be self-canceling in the long run: that imperial institutions should incorporate native officials as expeditiously as possible, that the purpose of imperial rule was to prepare subject peoples for eventual self-government, but that immediate emancipation was unwarranted. Their differences from imperial liberals lay more in the details of 62 Spectator, April 8, 1876, reprinted in Peter Cain, Empire and Imperialism: The Debate of the 1870s (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 158. 63 Auguste Comte, as quoted on the title page of Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, Edward Henry Pember, John Henry Bridges, Charles Alfred Cookson, and Henry Dix Hutton, International Policy: Essays on the Foreign Relations of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866). 64 Both quoted by Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75. The following treatment of the Positivists is indebted to Claeys’s work on these thinkers, though where he insists on the “antiimperial” nature of their thought, I will stress their considerable continuities with strands of imperial liberalism; also see Gregory Claeys, “The ‘Left’ and the Critique of Empire c. 1865–1900: Three Roots of Humanitarian Foreign Policy,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 239–266.

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implementation – in a more detailed and perhaps quicker timetable – than in fundamental disagreement. And while many Positivists shared broadly liberal views about the nature and purpose of the Western civilizing mission, some also held what we might call the post-liberal preoccupation of thinkers like Henry Maine with the fragility of native societies in the face of Western incursion.65 Another line of radical criticism, developed most thoroughly by Herbert Spencer, tended to stress empire’s dangers to liberties at home rather than its injustices to conquered societies (though the latter were noted); and to see the expansion of late-nineteenth-century European empires not as driven by the dynamics of modern industrial capitalism but rather as dangerous and atavistic imports from the east, a theme Joseph Schumpeter would later echo.66 This critique associated empires with Oriental despotism and posited a contrast, one with a history stemming back to Montesquieu, between the political and commercial freedom distinctive to modern Europe and the practices of subjugation, ostentation, and glorification of the monarch that were said to be typical of Asian societies, and that, it was feared, Disraeli was importing into Britain by way of the empire in India. As in Montesquieu, despite the essentializing contrast between a free Europe and a despotic Asia, the polemical force of this radical critique depended precisely on the worry that Europe was not secure in its freedom but in danger of becoming “Asiatic.”67 Late-nineteenth-century authors could be deeply divided on questions of imperial policy while adhering to very similar views of the superiority of European civilization. As noted above, the great innovation of socialist thought on empire from the 1870s onward was the development of a theory and critique of capitalist exploitation as the underlying cause of imperial expansion. What was missing from most Positivist and socialist accounts of empire, from Richard Congreve through Eduard Bernstein to the Fabians and J. A. Hobson, was a more thoroughgoing critique of the structural liabilities of imperial rule, especially rule by a metropolitan society that considered itself superior to the subject population. This meant that most critical strands of British thought on the empire held out the hope that, duly reformed, rule by Europeans over nonEuropeans was not only inevitable but also desirable. The reforms varied 65 Claeys, Imperial Sceptics. 66 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Meridian Books, 1955). 67 Herbert Spencer, “Imperialism and Slavery,” in Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 157–171, p. 162; and Herbert Spencer, “Barbaric Art,” in Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 265–266.

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with the diagnosis. Some believed the evils of imperial expansion lay in the dynamics of capitalism toward underconsumption and the development of surplus capital at home, which drove capitalists to seek markets and investment opportunities elsewhere. The “bondholder” theory of imperial expansion gained support on the left with Gladstone’s 1882 invasion of Egypt, widely seen as undertaken to protect the financial interests of British investors and creditors; the event marked Gladstone’s decisive split with the critics of Disraelian imperialism and led many on the left to conclude that Tories and Liberals were equally guilty of imperial crimes.68 The account of capitalist imperial expansion was developed by socialists such as the unconventional Marxist (and sometime Tory) Henry Mayers Hyndman, who popularized the “drain” theory according to which Britain had brought on Indian poverty and famine by a combination of private plunder, excessive taxation, maladministration, opium farming on a massive scale, and the destruction of local manufactures through the imposition of British goods.69 The drain theory was also championed by Dadabhai Naoroji, a former mathematics professor and longtime activist for Indian emancipation elected as a Member of Parliament in 1892, who undertook meticulous statistical analysis to show that Britain had long emiserated India by extracting tens of millions of pounds each year from the country, “draining away the life-blood in a continuous stream” and then “cover[ing] up the wound” with “the plaster of the high talk of civilization, progress and what not.”70 The solution to this global phenomenon of capitalist domination was not, for most of these thinkers, immediate emancipation of or self-government in the non-white colonies but rather reform of imperial governance for the benefit of the subject peoples.71 Some, including Hyndman and the Fabians, believed reform should happen within the framework of the existing British empire; for others including Hobson, individual states could not be trusted to 68 A. G. Hopkins, “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882,” The Journal of African History, 27(2) (1986), 363–391. 69 Henry Mayers Hyndman, The Bankruptcy of India: An Enquiry into the Administration of India under the Crown (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1886); and see Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, 140–159. Hyndman saw the conquest of Egypt as a further capitalist pretext for the enrichment of the British well-to-do at the expense of India (see his 1882 address to the East India Association, Henry Mayers Hyndman, “Why Should India Pay for the Conquest of Egypt?,” Journal of the East India Association, 15 [1883], 145) and the Boer War as likewise a scheme to expand capitalist domination. 70 Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), viii and 211; see Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination, 293–297. 71 Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule, 202.

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govern their empires for the welfare of their subjects and so had to be replaced by European protectorates. The horrors of the Boer War (1899–1902) led Hobson to produce the most sustained and powerful critique of imperialism of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Britain, and the insights and limits of his critique are a good indication of the extent to which even the most perceptive and implacable critics of imperial pretensions shared the presupposition of a hierarchy of civilizational development and the need for more “advanced” (European) societies to assist in the development of others.72 Four features of his argument are noteworthy: the connection he drew between domestic inequalities and imperial dynamics; his exposure (similar to Naoroji’s) of the sham of liberal pretensions to improve the lives of imperial subjects whether economically or politically; his dissection of the “psychology of jingoism” both in its elite form and in its mass forms; and his acceptance, despite these criticisms, of some form of internationalized imperial rule over various nonEuropean societies, which culminated in his support for the League of Nations’ Mandate system.73 He argued that without radical redistribution of wealth within European societies, industrialists and financiers would be driven in their search for customers to colonial adventurism and would exploit the military power of the state to advance their private ends, to the cost of the nation at large. Further, the dispossessed European masses would be vulnerable to militaristic nationalism, to the temptation of promises that they might live “like ‘independent gentlemen’ . . . upon the manual toil” of even more thoroughly subordinated populations in the colonies and elsewhere outside Europe, and to the racist manipulations of the “imperialist oligarchy” deploying “menaces of yellow workmen.” But, like many other radicals of the time, he often referred uncritically to “backward” societies or “lower races,” and he defended the right of Europeans, under appropriate constraints, to retain control of natural resources in Africa and elsewhere on the ground that local societies could not be relied upon to make the most efficient use of them. Just because such arguments had been abused by 72 I draw on Jennifer Pitts, “Hobson and the Critique of Liberal Empire,” Raritan, 29(3) (2010), 8–22; also see Peter Cain, Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance 1887–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Michael Freeden (ed.), Reappraising J. A. Hobson: Humanism and Welfare (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); on Hobson’s thought on settler colonies, see Duncan Bell, “Hobson, Hobhouse, and Liberalism,” in Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 341–362. 73 John A. Hobson, Confessions of an Economic Heretic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), 30; and see A. F. Mummery [and John A. Hobson], The Physiology of Industry (London: John Murray, 1889).

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“Rhodesian mine-owners or Cuban sugar-growers . . . it does not follow that these motives under proper guidance are unsound, or that the results are undesirable.”74 A fine line thus divided Hobson from overtly imperialist socialists including Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, or George Bernard Shaw, who defended a muscular socialist imperialism expounded in the collection he published in 1900, Fabianism and the Empire. Hobson and the Fabians shared the view that less advanced peoples had no exclusive right over their territories and the natural resources they contained, but that more advanced Europeans had the right to develop those resources. If for Shaw such views led to “patriotic” support for the British empire, they led Hobson to call for supervision over protectorates by the international community, a multilateral European imperialism ultimately instituted under the League of Nations Mandate System.75 Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin extended Hobson’s critique to a full-fledged denunciation of capitalism as parasitic and inherently imperialist: Its commitment to an unlimited accumulation of capital generated a logic of overproduction of goods and underconsumption by the exploited proletariat that meant it was impossible to realize profits in a closed system, so that non-capitalist economies had to be drawn in as new markets and reservoirs of labor, until the eventual breakdown of the entire global system.76

Conclusion Europeans were inclined to think of World War I as a watershed, both in the violence it unleashed and in the aspirations for peace and international cooperation that its horrors animated. But the war was susceptible to another, bleaker but more prescient, interpretation. In April 1917, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the seemingly unprecedented violence of the war in fact had ample precedent across the colonial world, and that as long as the competition for colonial exploitation and the culture and ideology of white supremacy that had caused it remained unchecked, the European civilization that dominated the globe would persist on its destructive, and self-destructive, course: 74 John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: J. Nisbet, 1902), 334–335 and 241. 75 On which, see Susan Pedersen, Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 76 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzwald (London: Routledge, 2003 [1913]); and Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) (New York: International Publishers, 1939 [1917]).

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As we see the dead dimly through rifts of battle smoke and hear faintly the cursing and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men say: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming terrible is the real soul of white culture . . . Is then this war the end of war? Can it be the end so long as its prime cause, the despising and robbery of darker peoples sits enthroned even in the souls of those who cry peace? So if Europe hugs this delusion then this is not the end of world war – it is the beginning.77

The persistence of empire, of European and white commitments to racial hierarchy, particularly in the increasingly important Anglosphere of Britain and its former settlement colonies, was to have profound ramifications across the twentieth century both in the domestic politics of many countries and in the inequalities of the global order.78

77 Noting that domination was as old as human society, Du Bois argued that European colonial exploitation was new only in the extent of its ambition (its “heaven-defying audacity”) and in its pernicious discovery of an “eternal world-wide mark of meanness – color.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” The Journal of Race Development, 7(4) (April 1917), 434–447, pp. 437, 439, and 445. 78 Marilyn Lake and David Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011); John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (eds.), Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (New York: Routledge, 2015).

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Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy jennifer pitts The nineteenth century saw the rise of global imperial political structures and the advent of industrial capitalism, with its hierarchically structured global economy. European political control expanded from roughly a third of the earth’s territory in 1815 to 85 percent in 1914. An economic “great divergence” between the economies of Europe and Asia, which had been comparable in their most advanced regions in the eighteenth century, opened in part thanks to European conquest of agricultural land in the new world and the forced deindustrialization of colonies such as India.1 European observers interpreted these changes as evidence of European superiority, and the admiration for non-European civilizations that had been comparatively common among eighteenth-century thinkers all but disappeared. Discourses of civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness, played a newly central role in conceptions of human society, which varied from universalist theories in which all societies were considered as progressing in similar fashion, if at different paces, along a spectrum from less to more advanced social and political organization, to accounts, often racialized, that held modern civilization to be uniquely available to Europe. Views of empire varied accordingly, from projects of a civilizing imperial mission or of the global spread of European civilization through settler colonies, to defenses of imperial rule on the grounds that non-European societies were not, and might never be, capable of self-rule. Many critics of empire likewise presumed the superiority of European civilization. *

I am very grateful to Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, Adam Kuper, and Lisa Wedeen for comments on a draft of this chapter. 1 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Britain and France, the dominant imperial states, were also the major sites of imperial theorizing, with considerable intellectual traffic between them, and this chapter will therefore focus primarily on British and French thought on empire. British thinkers, as subjects of the global hegemon and members of a society in which political change, including the extension of the franchise, occurred relatively peacefully, tended to conceive of their empire in more confident terms than those in France, anxious in the wake of Napoleon’s illfated project of conquest and the apparent defeat of French aspirations to global dominance.2 British thought on empire in the nineteenth century may be summarized as a story of the development and quick dominance of imperial liberalism, with its commitment to the use of imperial power for the purpose of civilizing and improving colonized societies. A mid-century crisis of imperial liberalism, brought on in part by its own internal tensions, resulted in challenges from those who believed liberalism’s civilizing aims were unattainable. The final decades of the century witnessed a proliferation of imperial ideologies and critiques that adhered to a much starker vision of international racial hierarchy than had been the case for earlier liberals. While in France we find the same trend toward an increasingly racialized view of human difference, the political and policy shifts were to some extent in the opposite direction, toward a more overt civilizing mission by the end of the century. One theme in what follows will be the ambivalence of liberal and radical critics of empire and imperialism, few of whom can be characterized as outright anti-imperialists.3

Early Liberal Thought on Empire Liberal thinkers and political actors were among the most influential commentators on empire in the first half of the nineteenth century, including James and John Stuart Mill and T. B. Macaulay in Britain and Alexis de Tocqueville in France. Liberalism, a capacious ideological category that included free-trade and laissez-faire economic views alongside others’ 2 P. J. Marshall, “Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: I, Reshaping the Empire,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), 1–18, pp. 1–2. 3 While some writers had begun to refer to the British Empire in the eighteenth century, for the first half of the nineteenth the term “empire” referred in British discourse more often to Napoleonic France; “imperialism” came into common usage in the 1870s to describe Disraeli’s policy of expansion. See Richard Koebner and H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 144–148.

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support for some redistribution of wealth and collective ownership, and a similarly broad range of views on political subjects such as extension of suffrage or religious establishment, likewise spanned a remarkably broad spectrum of views about empire through the end of the century, from authoritarian to civilizing to emancipationist.4 J. S. Mill’s profound involvement in the theorization, administration, and politics of the British Empire left significant intellectual legacies, even as later thinkers turned away from some of his key commitments, including his hostility to biological racism and his faith in an improving empire that would prepare its subjects for self-government. The “entanglement” of his political and social thought with empire deeply shaped his liberalism, with lasting consequences for liberal theory.5 Above all, Mill left his mark as a theorist of civilization and progress, who believed European civilization was distinguished from so-called savage and barbarous societies by its uniquely progressive historical dynamic, its capacity for self-development, its fostering of social cooperation, and the existence of well-developed nationalities that he believed were indispensable to modern politics and statehood.6 Mill was heir to several strands of eighteenthcentury thought on history, progress, and reform, most notably Scottish Enlightenment theories of societies’ development through the stages of hunting (savage), pastoral (barbarous), agricultural, and commercial society, and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, with its emphasis on societal improvement through legislative reform and codification. But where each of these traditions had in an earlier generation supplied robust grounds for criticizing European imperial expansion, in the hands of Mill, his father James Mill, author of the influential History of British India (1817), and other liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century, their combination produced an emphatic defense of despotic European government as indispensable to the progress of backward countries.7 Although, James Mill argued, Britain could never “govern India but with infinite loss to this country . . . we earnestly hope, for the sake of the natives, that it will not be found necessary to leave them to their own direction.”8 James was a more unapologetic authoritarian, but his son agreed 4 Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” in Duncan Bell, Reordering the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 62–90. 5 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Liberalism, Nation, and Empire,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 232–260. 6 John Stuart Mill, “Civilization” (1836), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991) (hereafter cited as CW by volume), CW, vol. XVIII, 117–147. 7 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 8 James Mill, “Affairs of India,” Edinburgh Review, XVI (April 1810), 128–157, p. 154.

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that “[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”9 Like Mill’s, the career and thought of the liberal writer and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of the Clapham evangelical, abolitionist, and first governor of Sierra Leone Zachary Macaulay, were entangled with empire.10 The younger Macaulay, who, unlike Mill, worked in India as an East India Company administrator, intervened influentially in several key imperial debates, including the dispute over the language of instruction for Indian higher education, in which Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) made the case in favor of Anglicizing with fierce disdain for Indian knowledge: “What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth: it is the bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error.”11 Mill did not take a prominent part in these debates, but, while he was more sympathetic to the use of Indian vernaculars for scientific instruction, he shared Macaulay’s condescension toward nonEuropean civilizations. Paternalist in its conception of the colonial government, with a consistent concern about abuses of “natives” by European settlers, and assimilative in its aspirations for the future of colonized peoples, their brand of imperial liberalism could support the so-called “Black Act” (1836) that abolished the legal privileges European settlers in the countryside enjoyed and subjected them to local laws on a par with Indians, a law fiercely opposed by most British residents in India. Mill argued that the protection of the “Natives of India” from abuses by Europeans, among other threats, was one of the government’s foremost duties, and he insisted that “our empire in India . . . will not exist for a day after we shall lose the character of being more just and disinterested than the native rulers and of being united among ourselves.”12 A commitment to this vision of benevolent empire arguably blunted Mill’s and other liberals’ ability to perceive the structural features of imperial injustice, above all imperial governments’ lack of accountability to the governed and an ingrained sense of cultural and racial superiority on the part of imperial agents. Mill’s proposed responses to failings of imperial governance repeatedly entailed more oversight from the central government 9 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in CW, vol. XIX, 567–568. 10 Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 11 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” first published in George Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan, 1864), 415. 12 See John Stuart Mill, “Minute on the Black Act” (1836), in CW, vol. XXX, 14–15.

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and better education of its agents, but not greater accountability to, much less political rights for, governed populations (whether Indians, or blacks in Caribbean colonies).13 A related tension in Millian liberalism lay in the notion that despotic rule was a legitimate and effective means to prepare colonized societies for self-government. This view relied on a bifurcation between societies in which freedom was to be the grounding principle and those relegated, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, to an “imaginary waiting room of history” where freedom was deferred indefinitely.14 French debates about empire in the first half of the century were likewise dominated by an emerging liberalism, one closely informed by British intellectual developments, but they differed from debates across the Channel in being shaped both by anxiety about France’s inferiority to Britain in status, power, and political stability and by the post-revolutionary republican tradition, with its emphasis on national unity, political virtue, and the glory of the republic. Members of the first generation of French liberals (Germaine de Staël, Simonde de Sismondi, Jean-Baptiste Say, Benjamin Constant) were fierce critics of Napoleon’s imperial exploits and of slavery, which he restored in French colonies in 1802. They held colonies to be a great financial burden on European peoples, though sometimes justifiable nonetheless, and they placed great, and arguably naïve, faith in the possibility of equal and non-coercive commerce among states of different levels of economic and industrial development.15 The political-economy critique of empire, stressing France’s own material interests rather than questions of justice toward the conquered, would remain the dominant strain in the wake of France’s conquest of the city of Algiers from its Ottoman rulers in 1830, during the extension of French domination throughout Algerian territory, and up to its incorporation as “French territory” under the 1848 constitution. As one prominent liberal critic of the conquest, Xavier de Sade, argued, “I see perfectly the advantages we could gain from several provinces on the Rhine . . . If someone can show us that we could gain the same fruits from our possession in Algiers, I will join 13 Although Mill argued in the wake of Governor Eyre’s atrocities in Jamaica that England should “suspend the power of local legislation altogether, until the necessary internal reforms have been effected by the mother country,” he did hold that the events in Jamaica showed the need for voting rights for blacks in the post-Civil-War American South; Mill, letter to Rowland G. Hazard, November 15, 1865, in CW, vol. XVI, 1117. 14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 15 See, for example, Benjamin Constant, Discours de M. Benjamin Constant à la Chambre des Députés (Paris: J. Pinard, 1828). Say, like James Mill, believed British rule in India was costly for Britain but beneficial for India: Jean-Baptiste Say, Historical Essay on the Rise, Progress and Probable Results of the British Dominion in India (London, 1824), 31ff.

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the ranks of its most decided partisans.”16 The rare exceptions included the legislator Amédée Desjobert, who argued that justice demanded selfgovernment for Algeria, and the Algerian businessman and legal scholar Hamdan ben Othman Khodja, who went to Paris to argue his case and published Le Miroir (1833), an impassioned and self-consciously liberal denunciation of the conquest. He demanded the “liberal emancipation” of his country and European respect for Algerian nationality that would match the liberal enthusiasm for the independence of Belgium or Poland.17 But criticism of the Algeria conquest was muted and short-lived: The languages of liberalism and republicanism were invoked more in support of imperial expansion than against it. In contrast to righteous British justifications of imperial rule as improving its subjects even if at considerable cost to the metropole, French arguments stressed the glory to the French nation of “propagating civilization” and “enlighten[ing] a continent,” as well as the dangers of a popular sense of the nation’s decline that would come from abandoning colonial aspirations.18 Such arguments were developed by Mill’s friend and correspondent Alexis de Tocqueville, both the leading liberal theorist of midnineteenth-century France and one of the French legislature’s foremost experts on Algeria and proponents of its conquest, who insisted on the historic importance of the “question of Africa” (“Algeria is today our greatest affair”) and more broadly the global vocation of European empires.19 “Do you know what is happening in the Orient? An entire world is being transformed . . . the old Asiatic world is vanishing; and in its place we see the European world gradually rising. Europe, in our day . . . attacks . . . from all sides, puncturing, enveloping, subduing. Do you believe that a nation that wants to remain great can witness such a spectacle without taking part?”20 While Tocqueville deployed the liberal 16 Xavier de Sade, speech of April 3, 1833, Archives Parlementaires, 82, 190; David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870,” Past and Present, 210(1) (2011), 155–186. 17 Hamdan Khodja, Le Miroir, ed. Abdelkader Djeghloul (Arles: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 1985); originally published as Sidy Hamdan ben-Othman Khoja, Aperçu historique et statistique sur la Régence d’Alger, intitulé en Arabe le Miroir (Paris: Goetschy fils, 1833). On the global circulation of liberal thought also see C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: NineteenthCentury Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 18 Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, “Colonie,” in Dictionnaire politique (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), 234; and Gaëtan de la Rochefoucauld, speech of April 29, 1834, Archives Parlementaires, 89, 488. 19 Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” Review of Politics, 25(3) (1963), 362–398. 20 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Second discours sur la question d’Orient” (speech in the Chamber of Deputies of November 30, 1840), in Écrits et discours politiques, vol. 3.ii

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language of civilization and barbarism, and hoped that European rule might bring progress to “semi-barbarous” people such as the Algerians, he was more clear-eyed than his British contemporaries about the violence of imperial rule and its tendency in practice to barbarize rather than civilize its subjects.21 The republican coloring of French liberalism, in which the flourishing of the French republic was a paramount political value, made French defenses of empire more candidly self-interested and more willing to embrace violence than contemporary British defenses that relied on universalistic justifications of benevolent rule. It also, arguably, made them better able to recognize that the violence of conquest vitiated schemes for benevolent rule, and readier to acknowledge non-Europeans as political actors rather than merely objects of European administration. Another recurrent feature of imperial liberalism is the way in which it figured liberalism at home as requiring imperial expansion and domination abroad. Most straightforwardly this was for economic reasons, as in the constellation of liberal arguments for empire in the pre-1848 German lands explored by Matthew Fitzpatrick in Liberal Imperialism in Germany: as sources of raw materials, markets for the surplus of goods produced in the industrializing metropole, and lands of opportunity for emiserated peasants and urban laborers.22 While liberals were more embattled in other European states, elsewhere too they developed theories of empire, particularly in Spain and the Netherlands, which had old and wellestablished overseas empires, whose preservation and expansion liberals tended to support, often aggressively, sometimes with discomfort and internal division. The Netherlands betrayed a pattern of liberalism at home parasitic on colonial illiberalism, for the forced cultivation of cash crops for the world market in the Dutch East Indies underwrote the development of modern state infrastructure in the metropole, under the liberal regime.23 There were also reasons of political (ed. André Jardin, 1985), in Œuvres complètes, series ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–), 290; for an analysis of such rhetoric of colonialism as sexual violence, see Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State,” UCLA Law Review, 57(5) (2010), 1477–1536. 21 Tocqueville, Écrits et discours politiques, vol. 3.i (ed. André Jardin, 1962), in Œuvres complètes, series ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–), 505. 22 Matthew Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (eds.), German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and, for a series of essays on imperial liberal thought beyond France and Britain, Matthew Fitzpatrick (ed.), Liberal Imperialism in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 23 Josep Fradera, La nación imperial (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2015); and Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, “Imperialism after the Great Wave: The Dutch Case in the Netherlands East Indies,

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self-interest: Empire enhanced the nation’s international reputation and furnished a collective political project at a time when the entry of ever larger numbers into the community of voters was thought to threaten the cohesion of the polity. Political actors, including liberals, in Italy and Germany came to see overseas empire as a key feature of British and French geopolitical dominance, which as vulnerable new states they must at all costs imitate. In contrast to Britain, where liberalism arose in a context of global dominance and confidence, across the continent liberal nationalism developed amid a variety of geopolitical fears: of Russian and Prussian expansion, and of territorial claims by competing nationalities. Many liberals in central Europe saw themselves as champions of national emancipation from others’ imperial domination, even as their own projects of national consolidation met almost inevitably with charges of their own imperialism.24 Empire, then, could be imagined as economically and politically stabilizing in a way that made liberal politics feasible. Liberals differed in the degree to which they acknowledged the possible hypocrisy in this position of sacrificing countless distant others for the sake of liberalism in Europe. The standard response, that only some were ready for liberal politics and that empire would prepare the unready, was offered even by liberals who had shown themselves all too aware of the failure, or emptiness, of imperial promises to lay the groundwork for self-government. The evolution of thought on settler colonies too reflects a shift toward a more explicitly racial imperial project. As Duncan Bell has noted, the distinction commonly made by nineteenth-century thinkers between settler colonies and other imperial territories “encodes a problem,” for it threatens to erase the key similarity that both involved the “violent dispossession of and rule over indigenous peoples.” And yet “the distinction is important for without understanding the use to which it was put by historical agents, it is impossible to map the imaginative geography of empire.”25 Edward Gibbon Wakefield and other early-nineteenth-century advocates for settler colonies focused on economic opportunity and on poverty, attributed to “our present redundancy of population,” in the metropole.26 Wakefield, a self-styled 1860–1914,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe, ed. Matthew Fitzpatrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 25–46. 24 Eric Kurlander, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire: Liberal Imperialism in Mitteleuropa, 1890–1918,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe, ed. Matthew Fitzpatrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 141–66. 25 Duncan Bell, Reordering the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 212. 26 [E. G. Wakefield], A Letter from Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia, ed. Robert Gouger (London: Joseph Cross, 1829), v; [E. G. Wakefield], The British Colonization of New Zealand (London, 1837); and Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

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disciple of Bentham’s, made a name for himself promoting government-led schemes of colonization, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. These early English proponents of settlement colonies tended to downplay the conquest and domination of indigenous populations and to treat imperial land claims as based on the “cession of unoccupied lands . . . obtained by contract.”27 In French debates, the entanglements of settler colonialism with direct domination were more overt. Tocqueville wrote of “domination” and “colonization” as the two, mutually indispensable, pillars of French success in Algeria.28 The utopian socialist Saint-Simonians were among the greatest mid-century enthusiasts of Algerian colonization, on the grounds of both relieving urban poverty in France and undertaking an ambitious civilizing agenda.29 The contradictions of France’s colonial policy, simultaneously integrative and subordinating (Algeria was declared legally part of France in 1848, while Muslims were denied citizenship until 1946) would plague the “imperial nation-state” throughout its existence.30

Crises of Liberal Imperialism and the Hardening of Racial Thinking Imperial liberals in the early nineteenth century were opponents of biological racism who fought for the abolition of slavery, which was finally achieved in the British empire by 1838 (in a process that began with legislation of 1833) and in the French in the constitution drafted following the 1848 revolution. Projects of imperial expansion and consolidation in fact gained considerable support and momentum from anti-slavery sentiment, as abolitionists supported the enhancement of the British navy required to capture slave ships in 27 [John Ward], A Statement of the Objects of the New Zealand Association (London, 1837), 4, quoted by Mark Hickford, “Decidedly the Most Interesting Savages on the Globe: An Approach to the Intellectual History of Ma¯ori Property Rights, 1837–1853,” History of Political Thought, 27(1) (2006), 121–167, p. 130; and see Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 28 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria” (1841), in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 61–63. 29 Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1843); and Osama W. AbiMershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 30 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 387–464.

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the wake of the anti-slave-trade treaties of the 1810s, the expansion of a global imperial legal and bureaucratic apparatus, and the extension of British rule in West Africa.31 The internal tensions of imperial liberalism were perhaps earliest apparent in the fraught responses of white abolitionists to the challenges faced by post-abolition colonial societies. For Tocqueville, the glory of abolishing slavery in the French Empire was equivalent to the glory of conquering Algeria, and could serve a similar function of inspiring French pride in and commitment to their liberal state. But liberal emancipation did not necessarily entail equal liberty for the newly freed; Tocqueville, like many liberals, considered it “no tyranny” to pair abolition with strict limitations on landownership by former slaves in order to keep down the cost of labor on sugar plantations.32 Among the British, disappointment with the complexities of postemancipation society brought out racism among the evangelical abolitionists who had been among the most ardent champions of slaves in the British empire. As Catherine Hall has shown in pathbreaking work on Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, the reformist optimism of the generation that came of age in the 1830s soon gave way to a “bleaker view of racial others.” By the 1850s, “thinking about race was shifting away from ideas of black men and women as brothers and sisters, to a racial vocabulary of biological difference.” Abolitionists’ vision of universal brotherhood (itself a fraught notion that could accommodate a belief in white superiority), and their faith that the emancipated slaves would soon become a self-governing and economically thriving independent peasantry, withered in the face of planter recalcitrance, drought, disease, and economic decline, being replaced by a sense of disappointment in the freed slaves and a willingness on the part of many to defer black suffrage indefinitely.33 31 Derek Peterson (ed.), Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Lauren Benton, “Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39(3) (2011), 355–374; and Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, A Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 32 Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Emancipation of Slaves” (1843), in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 199–226. 33 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–21; and Catherine Hall, “Reconfiguring race: the stories the slave-owners told,” in Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British SlaveOwnership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 163–202.

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The virulent racism to which Thomas Carlyle gave voice in his anonymous “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849) (republished in 1853 under his name and with the belligerent change in title from “Negro” to “Nigger”), though it was neither typical of nor particularly well received in British public debate, “marked a watershed,” as Hall has put it, in that it “spoke the unspeakable, and changed the discursive terrain.”34 Mill denounced as “damnable” Carlyle’s argument that “one kind of human beings are born servants to another kind,” and he disputed Carlyle’s racism on both empirical and moral grounds.35 Carlyle’s text presaged a shift in the public discourse such that it soon became customary for liberals among others to speak of “the lower races.” As Stuart Hall has argued, cultural differentialism and biological racism were not two different systems but rather “racism’s two registers,” often in play at the same time; the increasingly widespread belief in deep, nearly unbridgeable, cultural differences among peoples was not an alternative to racism but another facet of it.36 Close on the heels of these struggles around emancipation, a series of crises in the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s further challenged the liberal imperial agenda and encouraged its critics. The Sepoy rebellion (or Indian Mutiny as it was called by the British at the time) in 1857 and subsequent British massacres of Indian civilians were followed by the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, with its brutal suppression by Governor Edward John Eyre. As Thomas Metcalf has written of the 1857 rebellion, “a year of bitter racial warfare left an abiding mark” in mutual mistrust and hatred between Britons and Indians, hardened racism, and unleashed fantasies of violence among the British in India, feelings shared though sooner moderated in Britain. The episode led to the abolition of the British East India Company and the assumption of direct governance of India by the Crown, considerably transforming the place of the British Empire in the national imagination. A small contingent of thinkers pressed the case that egregious and longstanding British violations of political morality and the law of nations were to blame for the Indian rebellion, especially Lord Dalhousie’s increasingly aggressive use of the policy of “lapse” to seize territory for the empire when native rulers died without heirs; but on the whole British public opinion was remarkably unified in the belief that Indians had rejected or 34 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 379. 35 John Stuart Mill, “The Negro Question” (1850), in CW, vol. XXI, 85–95, p. 93. 36 Stuart Hall, “The Multi-Cultural Question,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Books, 2000), 209–241, p. 216; and see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects, 17.

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shown themselves unfit for the benefits of European civilization.37 The Eyre case more clearly polarized British political society, with prominent liberals including Mill, now a member of Parliament, John Bright, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer joining the Jamaica Committee that sought to try Eyre for murder (though the Committee’s counsel, James Fitzjames Stephen, held that Eyre’s actions had been morally if not legally justified); while an opposing committee for Eyre’s defense included Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin.38 These crises exposed the internal weakness of imperial liberalism, for, as Karuna Mantena has argued, “when the project of liberal reform encountered resistance, its universalism easily gave way to harsh attitudes about the intractable differences between people, the inscrutability of other ways of life, and the ever-present potential for racial and cultural conflict.”39 The tensions in liberal responses to imperial crisis emboldened critics who rejected their moral universalism and reformism in favor of more frankly authoritarian rule and racial hierarchy. Two somewhat different reactions and attempted resolutions to the tensions within Millian imperial liberalism can be seen in the work of two men who were among his most prominent successors in Victorian intellectual life as well as major figures in the Indian administration (and themselves lifelong friends), Henry Maine and James Fitzjames Stephen. Maine addressed the inconsistencies of liberalizing despotism by amplifying the distance between progressive and backward societies and effectively abandoning the civilizing mission in favor of policies that would protect traditional societies against the dislocations of modernity.40 Stephen, in contrast, maintained that, despite liberal cant about the freedom of modern representative democracy, all government ultimately rested on coercion, and that the empire in India held profound lessons for Britain in its greater rationality and order: “to compare the Indian penal code with English criminal law is like comparing cosmos 37 For criticism, see Henry E. J. Stanley, The East and the West: Our Dealings with our Neighbours (London: Hatchard & Co., 1865) and Francis W. Newman, “Our Relation to the Princes of India,” Westminster Review, 13(2) (1858), 453–477. 38 Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962); Rande W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Catherine Hall, “Competing Masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and the Case of Governor Eyre,” in White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 255–295. 39 Karuna Mantena, “Mill and the Imperial Predicament,” in J. S. Mill’s Political Thought, ed. Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 298–318, p. 299. 40 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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with chaos.”41 And indeed the modernization of the British state in the nineteenth century “often reflected theories, experiences, and practices worked out originally in India and then applied” at home.42 The Eyre controversy took place in a context of widespread social and political unrest around the passage of the second Reform Bill in 1867 and Fenian agitation for Irish independence, including the explosion of a bomb in London, prompting the suspension of habeas corpus in 1866 and again in 1867. It was in response to such unrest that Disraeli first successfully used a show of imperial aggression (in a military expedition to Abyssinia in 1868) to unify the British public and suppress tensions among classes, a strategy he was to cultivate over the next decade, declaring Queen Victoria Empress of India in 1877.43 To those who feared that Britain was losing international standing by remaining aloof as Prussia expanded on the European continent, Disraeli responded with a global vision of British power – “England has outgrown the continent of Europe. Her position is no longer that of a mere European Power. England is the metropolis of a great maritime empire, extending to the boundaries of the farthest oceans.”44 Although Gladstone’s critique of Disraeli’s imperial brutality and overreach – “Beaconsfieldism” – was a key feature of the Midlothian campaign that returned him as prime minister in the 1880s, in the end he added more territory to the empire than Disraeli did.45 Colonial conquest required colonial knowledge, and the new disciplines of the human sciences in the second half of the century – ethnology and anthropology, linguistics, colonial medicine – were, as anthropologists began to argue in the 1960s, deeply implicated in both the justification and the conduct of empire.46 Professional ethnography may even be seen as “a 41 James Fitzjames Stephen, “Codification in India and England,” The Fortnightly Review, 18 (1872), 654. 42 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4. 43 Freda Harcourt, “Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: A Question of Timing,” The Historical Journal, 23(1) (1980), 87–109. 44 The Times, July 14, 1866, p. 10. 45 C. C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996); and Peter Cain, “Radicalism, Gladstone, and the Liberal Critique of Disraelian ‘Imperialism,’” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215–238. 46 Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge; History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Nicholas Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and

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specific offshoot of a wider field of colonial intelligence.”47 Adam Kuper’s Chapter 17 in this volume notes that two competing research programs coexisted in anthropological circles, one committed to the biological unity of the human species and inclined to view differences among peoples in terms of evolution from a common primitive starting point; and another that claimed there to be deep differences among human groups and that was particularly invested in the idea of the Indo-European language family and its apparent connection to an “Aryan” race. While these to some degree corresponded to commitments, respectively, to a civilizing imperialism and a more authoritarian strand, we have seen how readily even the former abandoned assimilationist aspirations in the face of setbacks. German anthropology, freer from imperial entanglements for much of the century than its British and French counterparts, was at first less invested than they were in evolutionary and hierarchical thinking and more pluralistic in its interpretation of human diversity. Even during Germany’s imperial period (1871–1918), it has been argued, “the overwhelming majority of German ethnologists and anthropologists were liberal champions of cultural pluralism,” though around the turn of the twentieth century they began to abandon these commitments, so that by the end of World War I “a narrowly nationalistic and overtly colonialist orientation became virtually hegemonic.”48 This was in a sense to reverse the trajectory of some influential French anthropologists toward a new pluralism rooted in a functionalist approach: As the young ethnographer and sociologist Marcel Mauss argued in 1900 in an inaugural lecture in a course on the “history of religion of uncivilized peoples,” “there are no uncivilized peoples, only peoples with a different civilization.”49 Among the new social-science disciplines was international law, whose contributions to European thinking about empire lay both in accounts of the closed nature of the international legal community, which nearly all nineteenthcentury jurists restricted to “civilized” European states and their white colonies, Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origin of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 47 Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 163–183, p. 167. 48 Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny, “Introduction: Rethinking German Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1–30. 49 Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, ed. Victor Karady, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968–1974), vol. III, 229–230, reprinted from “Leçon d’ouverture à l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions des peuples non-civilisés,” quoted in Martin Staum, Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire 1815–1848 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 186.

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and also in the development of a legal framework for colonization.50 International lawyers were prominently involved in the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885) that codified the various European states’ territorial claims in the wake of the Scramble for Africa, none more so than Sir Travers Twiss, who championed the rights of the Belgian king Leopold II’s private association, the International African Association, to sovereignty in the Congo, giving legal cover to the most notoriously brutal and destructive colonial regime in Africa.51 The territory, declared the Congo Free State in 1885 under Leopold’s personal rule and private army, was immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s searing Heart of Darkness (1899), which drew on his experience on the Congo River as a steamer captain for a Belgian trading company. As Chinua Achebe has explored, the racist liberalism espoused by the novel’s narrator, Marlow, and ambiguously by Conrad himself, who erects an unstable ironic distance from his narrator, dehumanizes his African characters, renders them inscrutable, and crudely deploys them as images of the savagery into which Marlow/Conrad, in a typically liberal ideological move, fears Europeans themselves have fallen in their imperial exploits.52 The idea of “Greater Britain,” or the union of the United Kingdom with its settler colonies “as a single transcontinental political community” was, as Duncan Bell has shown, a major preoccupation of the late Victorian theorists of empire, among them the radical politician Charles Dilke (Greater Britain, 1868, and Problems of Greater Britain, 1890), the historian J. R. Seeley (The Expansion of England, 1883), and the conservative man of letters and Carlyle devotee J. A. Froude (Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, 1886). New organizations to structure imperial debate included the Colonial Society/Royal Colonial Institute (founded 1868) and the Imperial Federation League (1884–1893), though political federation was just one of a number of institutional programs advanced by advocates of Greater Britain.53 For many of those invested in the idea, 50 Martti Koskenniemi, Gentle Civiliser of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Casper Sylvest, “International Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” British Yearbook of International Law, 75(1) (2004), 9–70; and Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 51 Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Justification of King Leopold II’s Congo Enterprise by Sir Travers Twiss,” in Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire, ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 109–126. 52 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Massachusetts Review, 18(4) (1977), 782–794; Maya Jasanoff argues that Conrad combined such racism with remarkable perceptiveness, indeed clairvoyance, about the dynamics of globalization in Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin/Random House, 2017). 53 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6 and 23.

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attention to the settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) allowed them to argue for a global British polity as a political and economic association of free, (implicitly or explicitly) white communities and to sidestep the questions of domination and emiseration that dogged discussions of India and Egypt, particularly in the wake of the devastating famines of the late 1870s through the 1890s.54 Seeley was typical of this discourse in ignoring the indigenous populations in the settler empire: “If England and her colonies taken together make, properly speaking, not an Empire but only a very large state, this is because the population is English throughout.” It was in the settler empire that the future of “England” lay if the state were to avoid being reduced “to the level of a purely European Power looking back, as Spain does now, to the great days when she pretended to be a world state.”55

Critics of Empire Some key features of the radical critique of imperial practice “remained remarkably constant” from Paine through Hobson, as Gareth Stedman Jones has written: “its depiction of the colonists, its exposure of the corrupt arrangements between government and trading companies, its attack upon indefensible monopolies, [and] its highlighting of the cost to the tax-payer.”56 Radicals from Richard Cobden to John Atkinson Hobson also shared the concern that imperial despotism would come home to roost. This political argument often produced a preference for settler colonies over territories with large indigenous subject populations, but it rarely generated arguments for emancipating the latter.57 And yet, if we understand imperial thinking to mean a commitment to a global hierarchy in which the West is licensed by its claims to superior civilization to exercise power over extra-European peoples and territories, much radical thought, however “anti-imperial” in selfconception and despite its critique of existing imperial institutions, was itself imperial. Radical and socialist visions of global order tended toward multilateral arrangements, in which the “West” as a whole, or under the guise of 54 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001). 55 John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), 301 and 304–305. 56 Gareth Stedman Jones, “Radicalism and the Extra-European World: The Case of Karl Marx,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in NineteenthCentury Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 186–214, p. 186. 57 Miles Taylor, “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19(1) (1991), 1–23.

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the “international community,” exercised tutelage over “backward” peoples, both for the sake of their own development and, it was sometimes argued, in stewardship of the natural resources in their territories that they were not yet in a position to exploit efficiently. In the first half of the century, the free-trade critique, associated above all with Cobden, maintained that expenditure on imperial defense was money wasted, as British trade would find markets, and British capital employment, as easily outside the empire as within it.58 But Cobden, as he made clear at the outset of an 1843 parliamentary speech on colonial trade, “was not opposed to the retention of colonies any more than [the honorable] Gentlemen opposite. He was as anxious as any one that the English race should spread itself over the earth; and he believed that colonization, under a proper system of management, might be made as conducive to the interests of the mother country as to the emigrants themselves.”59 Marx combined searing criticism of the violence, “atrocious extortion,” and ruinous misgovernment of the British in India and the French in Algeria with the view, expressed in the Communist Manifesto as well as in his articles of the 1850s for the New York Tribune, that colonial destruction was, like that of capitalism itself, an inevitable stage of historical development that would pave the way for such stagnant societies to be subjected “to the common control of the most advanced peoples.” Britain, he argued, “has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating.”60 But the 1857 Sepoy rebellion arguably initiated a change in Marx’s thinking about non-Western societies, leading him to attribute more vitality to non-European social forms than he had and perhaps to imagine alternative developmental trajectories.61 Disraeli’s glorification of empire galvanized a radical critique of “Imperialism” as a policy that recalled the populist authoritarianism of continental figures such as Napoleon III in that it would “magnify the 58 Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 59 Richard Cobden, House of Commons, June 22, 1843, Hansard, 3rd series, 70, cols. 205–212. 60 Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Tribune, July 22, 1853; reprinted in the Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 663 and 659. 61 Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Gabriel Paquette, “Colonies and Empire in the Political Thought of Hegel and Marx,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 292–323; and Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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Crown on the one hand, and the wishes of the masses on the other, and should make light of the constitutional limits on either.”62 As Gregory Claeys has shown, the most thoroughgoing critics of British imperial practice on the British left were the Positivists, the British followers of Auguste Comte who followed his notion of a religion of Humanity and adhered to his view that “[t]he fundamental doctrine of modern social life is the subordination of Politics to Morals.”63 The Positivists, prominently the Oxford scholar Richard Congreve and the prolific author Frederic Harrison, denounced Disraelian imperialism for its preoccupation with the splendor and the interests of the imperial state and its indifference to, or even glorification of, the violence the empire required. Congreve advocated the “revocation of that foolish title of Empress” and urged Indians to “make it clear to the English that our rule is fundamentally unacceptable to you.”64 Claeys stresses the novelty of the Positivists’ diagnosis of the source of imperial expansion in nefarious financial interests, a line of critique that socialists would develop and J. A. Hobson would make famous. Although they proudly considered themselves anti-imperialists, however, the Positivists’ resemblance to liberal supporters of empire was profound: Most shared a belief in the superiority of Western civilization and the view that European civilization was the telos (or the closest approximation of it) toward which all human societies should be striving; and a belief that only with Western leadership and through Western agency could the immature peoples of the non-white world progress. They likewise shared the view that existing imperial rule should be designed to be self-canceling in the long run: that imperial institutions should incorporate native officials as expeditiously as possible, that the purpose of imperial rule was to prepare subject peoples for eventual self-government, but that immediate emancipation was unwarranted. Their differences from imperial liberals lay more in the details of 62 Spectator, April 8, 1876, reprinted in Peter Cain, Empire and Imperialism: The Debate of the 1870s (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 158. 63 Auguste Comte, as quoted on the title page of Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, Edward Henry Pember, John Henry Bridges, Charles Alfred Cookson, and Henry Dix Hutton, International Policy: Essays on the Foreign Relations of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866). 64 Both quoted by Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75. The following treatment of the Positivists is indebted to Claeys’s work on these thinkers, though where he insists on the “antiimperial” nature of their thought, I will stress their considerable continuities with strands of imperial liberalism; also see Gregory Claeys, “The ‘Left’ and the Critique of Empire c. 1865–1900: Three Roots of Humanitarian Foreign Policy,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 239–266.

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implementation – in a more detailed and perhaps quicker timetable – than in fundamental disagreement. And while many Positivists shared broadly liberal views about the nature and purpose of the Western civilizing mission, some also held what we might call the post-liberal preoccupation of thinkers like Henry Maine with the fragility of native societies in the face of Western incursion.65 Another line of radical criticism, developed most thoroughly by Herbert Spencer, tended to stress empire’s dangers to liberties at home rather than its injustices to conquered societies (though the latter were noted); and to see the expansion of late-nineteenth-century European empires not as driven by the dynamics of modern industrial capitalism but rather as dangerous and atavistic imports from the east, a theme Joseph Schumpeter would later echo.66 This critique associated empires with Oriental despotism and posited a contrast, one with a history stemming back to Montesquieu, between the political and commercial freedom distinctive to modern Europe and the practices of subjugation, ostentation, and glorification of the monarch that were said to be typical of Asian societies, and that, it was feared, Disraeli was importing into Britain by way of the empire in India. As in Montesquieu, despite the essentializing contrast between a free Europe and a despotic Asia, the polemical force of this radical critique depended precisely on the worry that Europe was not secure in its freedom but in danger of becoming “Asiatic.”67 Late-nineteenth-century authors could be deeply divided on questions of imperial policy while adhering to very similar views of the superiority of European civilization. As noted above, the great innovation of socialist thought on empire from the 1870s onward was the development of a theory and critique of capitalist exploitation as the underlying cause of imperial expansion. What was missing from most Positivist and socialist accounts of empire, from Richard Congreve through Eduard Bernstein to the Fabians and J. A. Hobson, was a more thoroughgoing critique of the structural liabilities of imperial rule, especially rule by a metropolitan society that considered itself superior to the subject population. This meant that most critical strands of British thought on the empire held out the hope that, duly reformed, rule by Europeans over nonEuropeans was not only inevitable but also desirable. The reforms varied 65 Claeys, Imperial Sceptics. 66 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Meridian Books, 1955). 67 Herbert Spencer, “Imperialism and Slavery,” in Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 157–171, p. 162; and Herbert Spencer, “Barbaric Art,” in Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 265–266.

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with the diagnosis. Some believed the evils of imperial expansion lay in the dynamics of capitalism toward underconsumption and the development of surplus capital at home, which drove capitalists to seek markets and investment opportunities elsewhere. The “bondholder” theory of imperial expansion gained support on the left with Gladstone’s 1882 invasion of Egypt, widely seen as undertaken to protect the financial interests of British investors and creditors; the event marked Gladstone’s decisive split with the critics of Disraelian imperialism and led many on the left to conclude that Tories and Liberals were equally guilty of imperial crimes.68 The account of capitalist imperial expansion was developed by socialists such as the unconventional Marxist (and sometime Tory) Henry Mayers Hyndman, who popularized the “drain” theory according to which Britain had brought on Indian poverty and famine by a combination of private plunder, excessive taxation, maladministration, opium farming on a massive scale, and the destruction of local manufactures through the imposition of British goods.69 The drain theory was also championed by Dadabhai Naoroji, a former mathematics professor and longtime activist for Indian emancipation elected as a Member of Parliament in 1892, who undertook meticulous statistical analysis to show that Britain had long emiserated India by extracting tens of millions of pounds each year from the country, “draining away the life-blood in a continuous stream” and then “cover[ing] up the wound” with “the plaster of the high talk of civilization, progress and what not.”70 The solution to this global phenomenon of capitalist domination was not, for most of these thinkers, immediate emancipation of or self-government in the non-white colonies but rather reform of imperial governance for the benefit of the subject peoples.71 Some, including Hyndman and the Fabians, believed reform should happen within the framework of the existing British empire; for others including Hobson, individual states could not be trusted to 68 A. G. Hopkins, “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882,” The Journal of African History, 27(2) (1986), 363–391. 69 Henry Mayers Hyndman, The Bankruptcy of India: An Enquiry into the Administration of India under the Crown (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1886); and see Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, 140–159. Hyndman saw the conquest of Egypt as a further capitalist pretext for the enrichment of the British well-to-do at the expense of India (see his 1882 address to the East India Association, Henry Mayers Hyndman, “Why Should India Pay for the Conquest of Egypt?,” Journal of the East India Association, 15 [1883], 145) and the Boer War as likewise a scheme to expand capitalist domination. 70 Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), viii and 211; see Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination, 293–297. 71 Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule, 202.

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govern their empires for the welfare of their subjects and so had to be replaced by European protectorates. The horrors of the Boer War (1899–1902) led Hobson to produce the most sustained and powerful critique of imperialism of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Britain, and the insights and limits of his critique are a good indication of the extent to which even the most perceptive and implacable critics of imperial pretensions shared the presupposition of a hierarchy of civilizational development and the need for more “advanced” (European) societies to assist in the development of others.72 Four features of his argument are noteworthy: the connection he drew between domestic inequalities and imperial dynamics; his exposure (similar to Naoroji’s) of the sham of liberal pretensions to improve the lives of imperial subjects whether economically or politically; his dissection of the “psychology of jingoism” both in its elite form and in its mass forms; and his acceptance, despite these criticisms, of some form of internationalized imperial rule over various nonEuropean societies, which culminated in his support for the League of Nations’ Mandate system.73 He argued that without radical redistribution of wealth within European societies, industrialists and financiers would be driven in their search for customers to colonial adventurism and would exploit the military power of the state to advance their private ends, to the cost of the nation at large. Further, the dispossessed European masses would be vulnerable to militaristic nationalism, to the temptation of promises that they might live “like ‘independent gentlemen’ . . . upon the manual toil” of even more thoroughly subordinated populations in the colonies and elsewhere outside Europe, and to the racist manipulations of the “imperialist oligarchy” deploying “menaces of yellow workmen.” But, like many other radicals of the time, he often referred uncritically to “backward” societies or “lower races,” and he defended the right of Europeans, under appropriate constraints, to retain control of natural resources in Africa and elsewhere on the ground that local societies could not be relied upon to make the most efficient use of them. Just because such arguments had been abused by 72 I draw on Jennifer Pitts, “Hobson and the Critique of Liberal Empire,” Raritan, 29(3) (2010), 8–22; also see Peter Cain, Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance 1887–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Michael Freeden (ed.), Reappraising J. A. Hobson: Humanism and Welfare (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); on Hobson’s thought on settler colonies, see Duncan Bell, “Hobson, Hobhouse, and Liberalism,” in Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 341–362. 73 John A. Hobson, Confessions of an Economic Heretic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), 30; and see A. F. Mummery [and John A. Hobson], The Physiology of Industry (London: John Murray, 1889).

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“Rhodesian mine-owners or Cuban sugar-growers . . . it does not follow that these motives under proper guidance are unsound, or that the results are undesirable.”74 A fine line thus divided Hobson from overtly imperialist socialists including Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, or George Bernard Shaw, who defended a muscular socialist imperialism expounded in the collection he published in 1900, Fabianism and the Empire. Hobson and the Fabians shared the view that less advanced peoples had no exclusive right over their territories and the natural resources they contained, but that more advanced Europeans had the right to develop those resources. If for Shaw such views led to “patriotic” support for the British empire, they led Hobson to call for supervision over protectorates by the international community, a multilateral European imperialism ultimately instituted under the League of Nations Mandate System.75 Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin extended Hobson’s critique to a full-fledged denunciation of capitalism as parasitic and inherently imperialist: Its commitment to an unlimited accumulation of capital generated a logic of overproduction of goods and underconsumption by the exploited proletariat that meant it was impossible to realize profits in a closed system, so that non-capitalist economies had to be drawn in as new markets and reservoirs of labor, until the eventual breakdown of the entire global system.76

Conclusion Europeans were inclined to think of World War I as a watershed, both in the violence it unleashed and in the aspirations for peace and international cooperation that its horrors animated. But the war was susceptible to another, bleaker but more prescient, interpretation. In April 1917, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the seemingly unprecedented violence of the war in fact had ample precedent across the colonial world, and that as long as the competition for colonial exploitation and the culture and ideology of white supremacy that had caused it remained unchecked, the European civilization that dominated the globe would persist on its destructive, and self-destructive, course: 74 John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: J. Nisbet, 1902), 334–335 and 241. 75 On which, see Susan Pedersen, Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 76 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzwald (London: Routledge, 2003 [1913]); and Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) (New York: International Publishers, 1939 [1917]).

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As we see the dead dimly through rifts of battle smoke and hear faintly the cursing and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men say: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming terrible is the real soul of white culture . . . Is then this war the end of war? Can it be the end so long as its prime cause, the despising and robbery of darker peoples sits enthroned even in the souls of those who cry peace? So if Europe hugs this delusion then this is not the end of world war – it is the beginning.77

The persistence of empire, of European and white commitments to racial hierarchy, particularly in the increasingly important Anglosphere of Britain and its former settlement colonies, was to have profound ramifications across the twentieth century both in the domestic politics of many countries and in the inequalities of the global order.78

77 Noting that domination was as old as human society, Du Bois argued that European colonial exploitation was new only in the extent of its ambition (its “heaven-defying audacity”) and in its pernicious discovery of an “eternal world-wide mark of meanness – color.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” The Journal of Race Development, 7(4) (April 1917), 434–447, pp. 437, 439, and 445. 78 Marilyn Lake and David Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011); John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (eds.), Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (New York: Routledge, 2015).

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Rethinking Revolution: Radicalism at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century claudia verhoeven The long nineteenth century ended badly for everyone, but radicals were left especially black and blue and battered. This is how we picture Europe’s revolutionary men and women in the late summer of 1914: scales ripped from their eyes, mouth agape, shocked and awed by the apocalypse of the “century of progress.” For Lenin, who would emerge from this catastrophe as one of the leading figures of the “age of extremes” (1914–1991), the war both was and was not expected. Along with everybody else in Europe’s fin de siècle, Lenin had been scouring the skies for portents of the end for years. But when it finally arrived, it wasn’t what he had had in mind. War he had anticipated. But not that the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) would approve its government’s request for war credits. The SPD was Europe’s most influential Marxist party and the undisputed leader of the continent’s most powerful left-wing organization, the Second International, which just a few years earlier had officially resolved to oppose any war between European nation states. As Trotsky later recalled, Lenin was so stunned by the collapse of the social democratic movement before the surge of European nationalisms that he thought the news about the SPD’s support for the war must be fake.1 Some on the left knew better than that. Figures as diverse as George Bernard Shaw, Leon Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg had warned of a hidden conservatism at the core of German-led social democracy at least a decade earlier. Indeed, the SPD’s own Eduard Bernstein had noticed it, though the conclusion he drew was different from that of critics like Trotsky and Luxemburg, who urged a renewed commitment to revolutionary tactics. Bernstein, in a series of articles published in the 1890s that exploded into the infamous “revisionist controversy,” called on the SPD to drop its revolutionary rhetoric and soberly 1 See Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 236–237.

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face the fact of its own reformism. But the European left, attached as it was to a heroic self-image that had been forged in times more precarious than those of the belle époque, was not ready to hear it. Residual self-image, or inertia of form, is in fact one of the most characteristic features of the turn-of-the-century left. It is true that Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project already found this to be the case for the “age of capital” (1848–1875), or even for the whole of the nineteenth century, which he saw as fundamentally out of sync with itself, “incapable of responding to its new technological possibilities with a new social order.”2 But it is also true that, by the end of the century, the condition had grown more acute, and the patient more aware of his fate should a cure not be found. This is why one of the radical left’s most unshakable habits at this time is a constant calling itself to account and issuing of demands that it shake off the past, be present-minded, and face the future boldly. Radicals across the continent shared this modernist mindset. Where they differed was in their visions of the future.

Terms Radicalism, from the Latin radicalis, meaning “of or related to a root,” n. radix, of a plant or a word; also the source of “eradicate,” to tear something out by its roots.3 Marx: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.”4 His definition plays with the double meaning of the verb fassen, meaning both “to grab” and “to understand,” thus implying not only a brutal removing, but also the kind of deep thinking that is facilitated by going back to the beginning. Such thinking need not mean restoring the truth of a thing after years of corruption; it is rather a returning that enables what Russian formalists called “estrangement” (ostranenie), making a thing look different from how it usually appears, thereby liberating it from what it seems to be essentially. Radical thinking thus allows one to recognize that first nature was once second, but it can also simply resuscitate older notions capable of producing intellectual effects when they are brought into collision with present-day ideas. It should as such be useful to recall that “radical,” before it began in the nineteenth century to mean some combination of “extreme” 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 26. 3 “radical, adj. and n.” and “eradicate, v.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press). 4 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Collected Works, trans. Jack Cohen et al., 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 2005), vol. III, 182.

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and “unwilling to compromise” – and in this guise to be applied to leftleaning politics – at an earlier date meant “fundamental to or inherent in the natural processes of life, vital.”5 Therefore this chapter, given the aforementioned inertia of form, thinks of radical as opposite to the desiccated and dead, and above all as a readiness to rethink what matters most. While on the topic of terminology, there is one related matter that should be addressed before delving into radicalism’s intellectual history in the decades before World War I: its esoteric discourse. The language of the left at this time is chockfull of terms and phrases that nearly burst with meaning and can seem to substitute for whole arguments; it is a language consisting of phrases so “conventional,” Lenin wrote, that “like a nickname, it becomes legitimized by use, and becomes almost a common noun.”6 Today, most readers will not know these old nicknames, much less feel the sting that came with being accused of “voluntarism” or “attentism”; of being called a “Blanquist” or “Bernsteinist”; an “opportunist,” a “revisionist,” or a “renegade.” In fact, this language already hindered radicals at the time: “Everybody complains that discussions about Socialism are generally exceedingly obscure,” wrote French Syndicalist Georges Sorel in Reflections on Violence (1908).7 But the passing of time has exacerbated the problem. Take a sentence like this, from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902): “The writer of these lines knows very well that the St. Petersburg Economists accused Rabochaya Gazeta of being Narodovolist (which is quite understandable when one compares it with the Rabochaya Mysl).”8 It is a short sentence that calmly proclaims its own self-evidence, but the four major terms that constitute its truth – the St. Petersburg Economists, Rabochaya Gazeta, Narodovolist, and the Rabochaya Mysl – will not be “quite understandable” to most modern readers at all. Sorel’s own Reflections, incidentally, is just as crammed with pages that cannot possibly be immediately intelligible to anyone but a late-nineteenth-century Francophile. The point is that it takes time to learn the language of the turn-of-the-century left, and it is important to remember that radicals, though for the most part professional writers, were first and foremost political workers for whom the point of philosophy was to change the world; they had their eyes on the future, but not always its readers. 5 “radical, adj. and n.,” OED Online. 6 Vladimir Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 54. 7 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004), 64. 8 Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 156.

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“The Long Era of Progressivism” “The long era of progressivism” is how Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek, in their introduction to Lenin Reloaded, describe the period under examination in this chapter.9 Historiographically, this is not controversial, but to some radicals then living, it might have come as a surprise. From the early 1870s to the early 1880s, the left suffered a series of devastating setbacks that affected its movement right up to the very end of the century. The most important of these were the defeat of the Paris Commune in France, the enactment of the Anti-Socialist Laws in Germany, and the repression of populism (narodism and narodovolism, i.e., the movement in both propagandist and terrorist guise) in Russia. It is true that in Germany, Bismarck’s legislation had the unintended effect of drawing socialists closer together and heroizing their movement, but the French left after the Commune was devastated and divided. As for Russia: “The dead eighties,” Trotsky simply said.10 Plus it was at this time that Marx died – not that anyone noticed.11 Because the left was at that time still supported by a collective and utopian “principle of hope,” as Traverso recently underlined, these defeats did not engender defeatism.12 Still, palpable optimism returned only in the early 1890s with the emergence of mass politics and successes of labor. Both were rooted in the fact that most European states widened the franchise, whether prodded by reform (Britain after the Reform Act of 1867) or compelled by revolution (Russia after 1905). Thus, while in the early 1880s there were really no socialist and labor parties to speak of, within two decades, they dotted the continent. Just as Reinhart Koselleck argued that during what Germans call the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) plural histories coagulated into a single sense of History, so Eric Hobsbawm noted that, during the “age of empire” (1875–1914), “the plural ‘working classes’ were fused into the singular ‘working class.’”13 And if the experience of the French Revolution was the main motor of the first transformation, then the labor movement animated the second. However, the same can be said about working-class consciousness as about modern history’s universal standard time: It took a while to 9 Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction” to Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 10 Trotsky, My Life, 94. 11 See E. R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), 23. 12 See Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6 and more generally the Introduction and Chapter 1. 13 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 131.

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take, and until it did, heterogeneity reigned. At the time, this was obscured by the successes of the Second International: “The International!” wrote the anarchist Élisée Reclus, “Since the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the earth, no achievement was more important in the history of man.”14 Nowadays though, it is customary to indicate the left’s divisiveness by relating the peculiar circumstances of that organization’s founding moment: On the centenary of the French Revolution in Paris, those who would come to be known as “orthodox” Marxists held their conference at the Rue Rochechouart; the “Possibilists” (those who thought it possible to cooperate with the government, i.e., reformists) met at a competing congress in the Rue Lancry; and the anarchists repeatedly interrupted both.

Populism (Narodism and Narodovolism) After the repression of the Paris Commune, Europe’s revolutionary energy seeped east, where Russia during the late 1870s and early 1880s became radicalism’s most vital site. At the end of this activist phase, which produced for the world a new revolutionary tactic known as terrorism, Marx and Engels would proclaim Russia, that least likely candidate, the “vanguard of the revolutionary movement in Europe.”15 Populism – with which terrorism in Russia is most closely associated – is an ideology rooted in the philosophy of history of Alexander Herzen, and in the 1870s also linked with the strident writings of Petr Tkachev, the “Russian Blanquist” (after Auguste Blanqui, the century’s greatest revolutionary conspirator). What Herzen crucially provided in Russian intellectual history was a prototype for the theory of permanent revolution Trotsky made famous half a century later. In his despair over the revolutionary failures of 1848, Herzen turned on its head an old thesis proposed by Petr Chaadaev: Russia, unlike Europe, had no past – but for this very reason, Russia was free. Herzen thus rethought Russia’s backwardness as an advantage: “we are independent, because we possess nothing.”16 With nothing to lose, Russia was free to forge ahead and into the future. Indeed, into whatever future, or better yet, into the

14 Élisée Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus, ed. and trans. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 150. 15 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Collected Works, vol. XXIV, 426. 16 Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore & The Russian People and Socialism: An Open Letter to Michelet, trans. Moura Budberg and Richard Wollheim, respectively (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 199.

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fullness of the present, for Herzen’s post-1848 writings are radically antiteleological; there certainly are no prerequisites to fulfill before achieving “‘progress in the future.’”17 “There is no libretto,” he writes in From the Other Shore (1850), and “the future does not exist.”18 That said, Herzen did also have a particular future in mind: It would dawn in the east, where the ancient peasant commune had saved itself for centuries for the arrival of its perfect modern match, European socialism. Nevertheless, Herzen generally held that in history “everything is ex tempore,” and wherever “sacred discontent” finds its path blocked, “genius will pave a new one.”19 Far less free of mind than Herzen, Tkachev spent the 1870s calling on the intelligentsia to introduce violence into politics. Contrary to narodist expectations, the Russian narod failed to revolt during the turbulent mid-century decades, and Tkachev began to insist that, in fact, revolution occurs only when a minority decides it “does not want to wait.”20 Largely unconcerned with history, he was all the more enamored with individual will: “not waiting until the course of historical events indicates the minute [for the revolution], [the revolutionary] chooses it himself.”21 Tkachev promoted voluntarist violence because he sensed that time was running out. During these decades, Russia had finally begun to industrialize, thus reducing, as Tkachev saw it, the chances that Russia might escape the politico-economic structural violence of European modernity. Thus, Tkachev argued, this moment, when capitalism had not irrevocably enmeshed itself with the autocracy quite yet, was the very last to take advantage of Russia’s backwardness: Through violence, revolutionaries should seize the state and use its apparatus to transform the ancient peasant commune into a modern socialist utopia. In short, “sacred unrest” having found its path blocked, “genius” should pave a new one by means of terrorism. In a sense, Marx and Engels’s embrace of the terrorist organization Narodnaia Volia after its 1881 assassination of Alexander II was untimely: Not only had the organization already been demolished when they declared 17 Herzen, From the Other Shore, 37. 18 Herzen, From the Other Shore, 39 and 34. 19 Herzen, From the Other Shore, 39. Translation mine. The Budberg translation reads “genius will blast a path,” but the original is less explosive. See Alexander Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk, 1955), vol. VI, 36. 20 Petr N. Tkachev, “Zadachi revoliutsionnoi propagandy v Rossii,” in Revoliutsionnyi radikalizm v Rossii: Vek deviatnadtsatyi, ed. E. L. Rudnitskaia (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1997), 330. 21 Tkachev, “Zadachi revoliutsionnoi propagandy v Rossii,” 331.

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Russia to be the revolutionary avant-garde, but their support of Russian populism also came at the very moment when the man who would come to be known as the “father of Russian Marxism,” Georgi Plekhanov, began to very thoroughly critique his narodist-turned-narodovolist comrades, most formidably in Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Differences (1884). As far as Russia’s historical development went, however, the populists, Plekhanov, and Marx and Engels were more or less on the same page. There is a famous moment in the preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels make public what had already been communicated in a private letter to the ex-terrorist Vera Zasulich, namely that, “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other,” then the peasant commune could “serve as the starting point for communist development,” the implication being that Russia could skip certain historical stages.22 As the translator of this edition, Plekhanov was well aware of this argument, and he actually cited it in Socialism and the Political Struggle in order to correct the “absurd conclusion” that Russian revolutionaries attributed to Marx that “Russia must go through exactly the same stages of historical and economic development as in the West.”23 Plekhanov’s problem with populism thus had nothing to do with its Herzenesque rejection of historical stages – and this would in fact remain the case for radical Russian Marxism – but everything with “Tkachevism,” which he understood as “the idealisation of the Russian peasantry borrowed from [the anarchist Mikhail] Bakunin” plus Blanquism, a doctrine that “substitutes [its] own conspiratorial skill for history.”24 In other words, from Plekhanov’s perspective, “Tkachevism”/Narodovolism disregarded Marx and Engels’s qualifying clause: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West.” This was also to say that Tkachevism, unbeknownst to itself, was already obsolete, that revolutionaries who continued to support narodovolism after Narodnaia Volia’s demise were passéist: “Russian socialism still wears a long Bakuninist pigtail down its back,” Plekhanov ruled, and was driven by a “hackneyed” Blanquism.25 It remained Marxism’s official verdict on 22 Marx and Engels, “Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 426. 23 Georgi Plekhanov, “Socialism and the Political Struggle,” in Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), vol. I, 68–69. 24 Georgi Plekhanov, “Our Differences,” in Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), vol. I, 168 and 120. 25 Plekhanov, “Our Differences,” 114 and 120.

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populist terrorism into the twentieth century: Trotsky, for example, thought that the early-twentieth-century Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (Narodnaia Volia’s descendants) were pathetic ghosts of a bygone age, unaware that their pseudo-heroic struggle was “already the property of history.”26 Practically, however, Marxists’ attitude toward this matter was more complicated and above all context-dependent. During the Revolution of 1905, for example, Lenin, who had long argued against terrorism, suddenly began to promote violence of which the “normal evaluation” was that it was “anarchism, Blanquism, the old terror [i.e., the terrorism of the 1870s and 80s],” though not before – this matters – radically rethinking this violence as “partisan war.”27 In its classical incarnation as “terrorism,” however, populist violence had a much closer connection with anarchism than it did with Marxism.

Anarchism Anarchy – from the Greek an, meaning “without,” and archy, “rule” – is an alternative to humanity’s oldest, strongest, and worst habit: hierarchy. It means “chaos” only to those who believe nothing but government can ensure order. Late-nineteenth-century anarchists understood anarchy instead as the form of life proper to a “society of friends” who were free from want and whose cooperation was evolutionary, never ossified or formalized.28 They also insisted that, rather than being utopian, anarchy already existed in myriad practices (cooperatives, associations, and unions). What Bakunin called “the cult of the state” was therefore an anachronism whose continued existence was a side-effect of humanity’s residual self-image – ingrained over centuries of subordination – as being dependent on “authority – a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.”29 Anarchism was linked to Russian populism not least because Bakunin was a key theorist for both. The collapse of the First International in the 1870s, and the conflict between Marx and Bakunin that contributed to it, fall outside of the scope of this chapter, but suffice it to say that if they agreed on the end – social 26 Leon Trotsky, “Krakh terrora i ego partii,” in Sochineniia, 20 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926), vol. IV, 351. 27 Vladimir I. Lenin, “Partizanskaia voina,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 45 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958–1965), vol. XIV, 5. 28 Errico Malatesta, “Anarchy,” https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/malatesta-anar chy-1891/. 29 Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom,” in Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 234; and Michael Bakunin, God and the State (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 28. The original term is vlast’, which can also be translated as power.

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revolution – they disagreed on the means, above all the temporary “dictatorship of the proletariat,” regarding which Bakunin wrote that “no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself.”30 During these years of conflict, if socialism had more traction in its industrialized north, Bakunin’s reach stretched more effectively throughout Europe’s agricultural south, especially Italy and Spain, but also Switzerland, where anarchism’s other major Russian theorist, Peter Kropotkin, spent time in the early 1870s and, after a few years back in Russia, until the early 1880s, collaborating there especially with Reclus and Errico Malatesta. During this period, anarchism became, as Anderson put it, “the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical Left.”31 During the ère des attentats (the 1880s–1890s), anarchism was closely associated in the popular imagination with “nihilism,” as the terrorism of the Russian populists was called in Europe. Bismarck, for one, assumed there were links between nihilism and the attempted assassinations of Wilhelm I, which provided the immediate impetus for the Anti-Socialist Laws. But not all terrorists were anarchists and, more importantly, not all anarchists were terrorists. There were, though, some real links between Russian terrorists and European anarchists, for example Kropotkin, because Kropotkin, after having soaked up anarchism’s cooperative spirit from his work with the Bakunin-influenced Jura Federation, spent the mid 1870s in Russia, where he was active as a populist propagandist. By the time Narodnaia Volia emerged, Kropotkin was back in Switzerland, but he had close personal ties to the terrorists, and in pamphlets such as “The Spirit of Revolt” (1880) lauded the “daring” action of “lonely sentinels” because “[o]ne such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.”32 The next year, Kropotkin attended the Anarchist Congress in London, which officially adopted “propaganda by the deed” as an acceptable revolutionary tactic. But there is much more to anarchism than Bakunin’s famous “passion for destruction,” and scarcely an anarchist article was published during these years that did not try to correct the common misperception.33 That said, there 30 Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. and trans. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 179. 31 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005), 2. 32 Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002), 39–40. 33 Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, 57. On the misperception, see Malatesta, “Anarchy”; Kropotkin, Anarchism, 61 and 295; and Peter Kropotkin, Direct Struggle against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), 197.

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is no shortage of violent expressions against the state in anarchist writings, which advocated “the eradication of every form of government” (Reclus); “the reduction of the functions of government to nil” (Kropotkin); and “overthrow[ing] the government, all governments” (Malatesta).34 The most systematic assault on the state, however, can be found in Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1873) and “God and the State” (1882). “A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable,” he writes in Statism and Anarchy.35 Later anarchists echoed these pronouncements: Malatesta’s pamphlet “Anarchy” (1891) proclaimed government to be “by its nature oppressive and plundering,” and for Kropotkin “revolutionary government” was an oxymoron.36 For this reason, anarchists rejected “possibilism” and generally refused to cooperate with political parties, opting instead to work with revolutionary labor unions. It is therefore perhaps best to think of anarchism not as one political ideology among many, but rather as the radical antipolitical ideology par excellence. As Reclus noted, “It is in fact our struggle against all official power that distinguishes us most essentially.”37 This is not to say that anarchists did not identify with brethren radicalisms. Kropotkin, for one, explained anarchism as “the left wing” of socialism, the “nogovernment system of socialism,” and “communist.”38 But, as Reclus underlined, unlike other revolutionaries, anarchists did not want a “conquest of power.”39 Anarchists, however, opposed not only political authority, but rather all authority, especially social. In their sensitivity to all kinds of “prejudices” – a frequently recurring term in their writings40 – anarchists in fact sometimes seem closer to psychoanalysts than to contemporary political thinkers. “Social tyranny,” notes Bakunin, “dominates men by customs, by mores, by the mass of prejudices, by the habit of daily life, all of which combine to form what is called public opinion. It overwhelms the individual from birth.”41 Social authority is as such even more difficult to defeat than the state, because its power works invisibly, not at the level of thought, but of reflex. “[W]e are always in danger

34 Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, 120; Kropotkin, Anarchism, 46; and Errico Malatesta, Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 42. 35 Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 178. 36 Malatesta, “Anarchy”; and Kropotkin, Anarchism, 237–238. 37 Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, 123. 38 Kropotkin, Anarchism, 285 and 46; and Kropotkin, Direct Struggle against Capital, 203. 39 Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, 121. 40 See Kropotkin, Anarchism, 239, 244, and 146. 41 Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom,” 239.

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of relapsing,” Bakunin warned – hence the need to nurture what he identified as one of humanity’s key faculties: “the desire to rebel,” which, in combination with “the power to think,” secured freedom.42 Unlike liberalism, which posits individual freedom as its Archimedean point, anarchism insists that freedom postdates the historical emergence of society. “Society is the root, the tree,” thus Bakunin, “and liberty is its fruit.”43 Hence anarchists also always distinguished between “individualism” (“the struggle between individuals”44) and “individualization,” which they understood as the natural outgrowth of an instinctual sociability characterized by mutual aid rather than a vulgar-Darwinian survival of the fittest.45 For this reason too anarchy was not utopian, but rather, Kropotkin insisted, “the next phase of evolution.”46 As this language already indicates, Kropotkin – along with Reclus, who like Kropotkin was a scientist by training – sought to do for anarchism what Marx and Engels had done for socialism: scientize it. But whereas Kropotkin’s anarchically understood evolution – especially as presented in Mutual Aid (1902), his longue-durée analysis of sociability and solidarity among animals and humans – was revolutionary, what would come to be known as “evolutionary socialism” was reformist.

Evolutionary Socialism Historians directly link Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws and the SPD’s early radicalism: “When in 1890 German Social Democracy emerged from the darkness of the previous twelve years,” writes Hall, for example, “it was convinced not only of its fundamental irreconcilability with the bourgeois system, but also of the impending collapse of the capitalist order.”47 The expression of this mood was the Karl Kautsky and Bernstein coauthored “Erfurt Program,” drafted as soon as it was legal again to meet and publish after Bismarck’s legislation lapsed in 1890. According to Sassoon, it “became one of the most widely read texts of socialist activists throughout Europe,” and, writes Schorske, “enshrined Marxism as the official gospel of German Social Democracy.”48 The “Erfurt Program,” however, is Michael Bakunin, God and the State, 23 and 9. Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom,” 236. 44 Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 69. See Kropotkin, Anarchism, 285, 157, and 167. 46 Kropotkin, Anarchism, 47. Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation, and Social Democracy: The SPD Press and Wilhelmine Germany 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15. See also Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 3. 48 Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 1996), 11; and Schorske, German Social Democracy, 4. 42 43 45 47

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a schizophrenic document. It is divided into two sections: The first is a theoretical account of the coming revolution (without, however, mentioning the word, or stating how this unmentionable would come about), the second, a practical list of demands to be attained by means of political struggle in the present. The tension between the two would haunt European Social Democracy throughout the decades leading up to World War I. Kautsky, whom Sassoon identifies as the author of the program’s theory section, is perhaps best remembered today from the title of one of Lenin’s texts: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918). Before the war, however, Kautsky was the SPD’s “quasi-official intellectual leader,” and his book-length compendium to the “Erfurt Program,” The Class Struggle (1892), was “the accepted summa of Marxism.”49 It is easy to see why. Written in fast-paced, simplified language, the text reveals its readers to themselves as necessary, powerful, and heroic political actors – and it radiates optimism: “The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable.”50 Trotsky, who penned a respectful eulogy for Kautsky in 1938, nevertheless noted with some disdain that, “After he had accepted Marxism as a complete system, Kautsky popularized it like a school-teacher.”51 But The Class Struggle already contained the seeds of the SPD’s destruction. It is peppered with scientific certainties that foreshadow the party’s transformation into what would come to be known as “vulgar Marxism,” for example when Kautsky writes that economic crises “are periodically brought on, with the certainty of natural law, the moment production reaches a certain stage.”52 In short, from the start, evolutionary gradualism was already freeing itself from revolutionary rupture, though Kautsky long maintained a balancing act along the razor’s edge between reform and revolution. His suturing of what were in fact two irreconcilable strategies remained a matter of course until Kautsky’s co-author of the “Erfurt Program” definitively ripped them apart. The “revisionist controversy” erupted in 1896–1898, when Bernstein published a series of articles critical of the status quo in the SPD’s theoretical organ, Die Neue Zeit (The New Time). He followed them up with the 1899 publication of Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, which appeared in English, tellingly, as Evolutionary 49 Schorske, German Social Democracy, 5; and Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, 11. 50 Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), trans. William E. Bohn (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1910), 117. 51 Trotsky, My Life, 214. 52 Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 71.

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Socialism. In this, one of the key texts of the left during this period, what Bernstein essentially did was extract his pragmatist-reformist half of the “Erfurt Program” from Kautsky’s theoretical-revolutionary framework. Evolutionary Socialism insisted, on the basis of the optimistic economic situation of the 1880s and 1890s, that Marxism’s crisis and collapse theory was incorrect: The condition of the working class was not getting worse, nor were capitalism’s contradictions becoming more intense. Instead of focusing on some far-off revolution that might never happen, Bernstein wrote, his book contained a “strong accentuation of what in Germany is called Gegenwartarbeit – the every-day work of the socialist party – that work in the furrows of the field which by many is regarded as mere stop-gap work compared with the great coming upheaval.”53 The infamous phrase he would never be forgiven read as follows: “I frankly admit that I have extraordinarily little feeling for, or interest in, what is usually termed ‘the final goal of socialism.’ This goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me, the movement is everything.”54 Hell broke loose. Bernstein was of course dishing out unpleasant truths, including that workers were more heterogeneous socially and less cohesive ideologically than social democratic discourse acknowledged. But he was convinced that being honest was more progressive: The “duty of the disciples” was critique, he declared, not “everlastingly repeating the words of their masters.”55 Moreover, the number of opponents who were willing to compromise would increase “if the social democracy could find the courage to emancipate itself from a phraseology which is actually outworn and if it would make up its mind to appear what it is in reality to-day: a democratic, socialist party of reform.”56 What Bernstein recommended was, in fact, what the SPD had already been doing. Hobsbawm even asserts that the existing SPD was “more moderate” than Bernstein.57 There is an oft-cited line from a letter SPD secretary Ignaz Auer sent Bernstein in response to the latter’s controversial publications: “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them.”58 Indeed this was key: As Luxemburg 53 Edward Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, trans. Edith C. Harvey (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1911), xxii. 54 Edward Bernstein, “The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution,” in Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898, eds. H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 168–169. 55 Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, 26. 56 Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, 197. 57 Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York: The New Press, 1973), 156. 58 James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 94–95.

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pointed out in one of the articles that would eventually be bundled as Reform or Revolution (1908), Evolutionary Socialism was the “first attempt to give a theoretic base to the opportunist currents common in the social democracy.”59 But at a series of congresses, the indignant SPD and eventually also the Second International officially denounced “revisionism.” With that, social democracy won the battle for its self-image, but of course ultimately – in 1914, after its infamous vote – lost the war.

Fabianism The British Fabians present a kind of mirror-image of the German social democrats. Whereas the SPD’s revolutionary rhetoric concealed a reformist practice, the Fabian Society’s official gradualism obscured the fact that its membership, though it did include real opportunists like Sidney Webb, consisted of eccentrics who were politically far harder to categorize: most famously, besides the alreadymentioned Shaw, William Morris and H. G. Wells, whose respective revolutionary energies were mobilized for the writing of fiction both utopian and scientific, e.g., News from Nowhere (1890) and The Time Machine (1895). The historiography always presents Britain as a paradox, the place that, given its most advanced stage of industrialization, should have produced the strongest and most radical working-class movement, but did not. Frequently cited among the more important reasons for socialism’s downturn during the “age of capital” are – besides the very fact that this was the age of capital – the failure of Chartism and the success of Britain’s labor unions: The first ensured that Britain became one of very few places in Europe not to be rocked to its core by the 1848 revolutions, and the second, that workers set themselves goals no higher – and no more political – than “five pennies more per hour,” as Kautsky once put it sarcastically.60 By the 1870s–early 1880s, E. P. Thompson writes, there was nothing British about the term “socialism” anymore, and it was “[m]ost frequently used as a bogy-word to cover the ‘outrages’ of the Commune, the terrorist methods of the Russian nihilists – bomb plots, assassination, dynamite.”61 Left-leaning political organizations did re-establish themselves 59 Rosa Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike, ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 100. 60 Cited by Richard B. Day, “Introduction – The Historical Origin of the Epression ‘Permanent Revolution,’” in Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, ed. and trans. by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 45. 61 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 317.

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over the next two decades, but Trotsky, for one, did not mince words about their contributions to international socialism: “British Marxism,” he quipped drily, “was not interesting.”62 Perhaps most characteristic of this “boring” British left was the Fabian Society (1883), which, as the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” detail in Shaw’s commemorative stained-glass window design suggests, is not quite what it appears to be. The Society was a gathering ground for socialist-in-all-butname intellectuals whose declared purpose was “spreading the . . . opinions” outlined in its Shaw-penned Manifesto, as well as “discussing their practical consequences.”63 As that already implies, this conversationalist manifesto does not have quite the oomph of its communist predecessor, but it is certainly fair enough – and it has humor, for example when it advocates for equal rights with the declaration “That Men no longer need special privileges to protect them against Women.”64 The Fabians eventually founded the London School of Economics (1895) and the journal New Statesman (1913), but their preference for “the long taking of counsel” was eventually deemed as “untimeous delay” even by some of its own members, who then veered off in various directions, for example toward the Socialist League, which was cofounded by Morris.65 From the perspective of revolutionary historiography, the Fabians have a bit of an image problem: They function as a synecdoche for a Britain that was tolerant enough to provide refuge for revolutionary exiles from Herzen to Marx to Verlaine, but itself was all about small, slow, and safe transitions. Additionally, they are saddled with the unenviable burden of having infected Bernstein with their gradualism during his visit to England, which is to say that they stand at the source of the revisionist controversy. But the Fabians are a bit stranger than all of this suggests. The Society took its name from a Roman general, Fabius Maximus, derisively dubbed “Cunctator” – the “Delayer” or “Procrastinator” – for the slow, small war strategy of exhaustion he adopted during the Second Punic War: Rather than confronting Hannnibal’s more numerous forces head-on, Fabius Maximus attacked his enemy’s rearguard. It is worthwhile to remember the roots of this name, so as to understand that the gradualist Fabians, who are usually seen as the least revolutionary of the European social 62 Trotsky, My Life, 145–146. 63 Bernard Shaw, “A Manifesto,” Fabian Tract, No. 2 (1884), 1. See Fabian Tracts, Nos. 1–114, published by the Fabian Society from 1884 to 1903. 64 Shaw, “A Manifesto,” 2. 65 “Why Are the Many Poor?,” First Epigraph to Fabian Tract No. 1.

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democrats, saw themselves as waging guerrilla war. Thus one of two epigraphs to their first tract, “Why Are the Many Poor?,” reads For the right moment you must wait, as FABIUS did most patiently, when warring against HANNIBAL, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as FABIUS did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.66

This actually describes Lenin far better than it ever did any Fabian, but nevertheless, keeping the Fabians’ self-image in mind, goes a long way toward explaining the strange catastrophe of Shaw’s essay “Transition” in Fabian Essays, an 1889 bestseller whose unexpected success was rooted, according to Society secretary Edward Pease, in the fact that it domesticated socialism for the British, and that it did so in “plain language.”67 But in cauda venemum, the poison is in the tail: After an eminently reasonable exposition of gradualism, Shaw suddenly declares that this approach is “sordid, slow, reluctant, and cowardly” and that “militant organisation of the working classes and insurrection,” even if momentarily abandoned by English Socialists, remains “the only finally possible alternative.”68 It doesn’t jibe with the rest of the Fabian Essays, but it does echo the sweeping rejection of the contemporary world that had already appeared in Shaw’s Manifesto: “That we had rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the present one has been.”69 Morris, in a review of Fabian Essays, rightly wrote that Shaw’s “criticism of the modern capitalistic muddle is so damaging, his style so trenchant, and so full of reserves of indignation and righteous scorn, that I sometimes wonder that guilty, i.e., non-Socialist, middle-class people can sit and listen to him.”70 Sometimes though, people only hear what they see, just as in the case of the SPD, some only saw what they heard.

Russian Marxism Such was the impact of Narodnaia Volia that both the autocracy and the revolutionary movement continued to contend with its specter for decades. The autocracy was so focused on fighting an organization it had in fact already destroyed that it failed to recognize the new enemy: Marxism. 66 “Why Are the Many Poor?” 67 Pease, The History of the Fabian Society, 90. 68 George Bernard Shaw, “Transition,” in Fabian Essays in Socialism (Boston: Ball Publishers, 1911), 182–183. 69 Shaw, “A Manifesto,” 2. 70 William Morris, “Review of Fabian Essays in Socialism,” Commonweal, 6(211) (January 25, 1890), 28–29; www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/commonweal/01-fabia n-essays.htm.

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“Marxian books were published one after another,” wrote Lenin, and “nearly everyone became a Marxist” – but for the revolutionary movement as a whole it was nevertheless “a great wrench to abandon the captivating impressions of these heroic traditions.”71 Lenin himself also struggled with the move from populism to Marxism, especially because his brother Alexander had been a second-generation member of Narodnaia Volia and was executed in 1887 for his participation in a plot to assassinate Alexander III. After 1917, Lenin’s transition was represented as a clean break triggered by the trauma of his brother’s death, for example in Petr Belousov’s 1951 painting “We Will Take a Different Path,” which depicts young Lenin, having just received news of his brother’s execution, staring boldly into the Bolshevik future. It is, however, entirely possible to see Lenin as combining within himself the two ideologies, especially in terms of his infamous notion of the revolutionary “vanguard.” The same is true for Luxemburg and Trotsky, whose Revolution of 1905-influenced works resound with the echoes of populism’s philosophy of history. Lenin’s 1902 What Is to Be Done? is infamous for its “authoritarian” demand for a small, secret, and centralizing organization of “professional revolutionaries,” and it is usually read as a text that foreshadows the split of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks at its 1903 congress, as well as the Bolsheviks’ power grab in October 1917. But Lenin’s arguments should be seen in their immediate context, which was the European-wide struggle between “revisionist” and “orthodox” Marxists.72 The first 100 pages of What Is to Be Done?, in fact, are for attacking – in Lenin’s typically relentless, inexhaustible, and micro-managing way – every misstep ever taken by “Bernsteinism,” first in its European, then its Russian guise. Lenin obviously felt he had to chop his way through a veritable jungle of rhetorical obfuscation. He and his friends had been accused of being “conservative,” of “Narodovolism,” and of “obsolete doctrinaire” Marxism.73 Meanwhile all his opponents wanted – it seemed reasonable enough – was “freedom of criticism,” but what this really meant, he argues, was “freedom for an opportunistic tendency in Social-Democracy.”74 The answer to the question that is the title of this famous pamphlet only comes at its end. It reads: “Liquidate the Third Period.”75 This means Russian Social Democracy should transcend the “vacillation” that had characterized 71 72 73 74

Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 173. See esp. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (Boston: Brill, 2006). Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 57, 156, and 55. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 54 and 56. 75 Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 175.

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the movement since it had been in the grips of what Lenin variously calls “legal Marxis[m],” “concealed Bernsteinis[m],” or “opportunism.”76 If it manages this, Lenin says, then “the place of the rearguard of opportunists” – a nice touch, given the Fabians’ explicit embrace of Cunctator’s tactics – “will be taken by a genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.”77 To create this vanguard, what was needed were “people whose profession is that of a revolutionary.”78 Why “a committee of professional revolutionaries”?79 And why should this committee be “as secret as possible”?80 Suspicions of Lenin’s vanguard have always had their source in what even at that time were called his “antidemocratic” ideas.81 But Lenin’s anti-democratic ideas were related to Russia’s anti-democratic traditions: Russia was not Germany, he underlined, and adopting the transparency that characterized German Social Democracy would mean real risk. Secrecy was for self-defense: The movement was so unorganized that it was vulnerable to infiltration by the police and, hence, large-scale arrests such as happened during the 1890s. Further, whereas his critics worried that a committee of professional revolutionaries “may too easily throw itself into a premature attack,” i.e., reveal themselves to be Blanquists or Narodovolists, in fact, argued Lenin, the movement needed centralization precisely to curb voluntarism.82 Besides, readers should not fret, Lenin stressed: “I apply [these remarks] first and foremost to myself,” noting that he had once belonged to a circle whose members, but for their amateurism, “might have been able to say, paraphrasing a well-known epigram [by Archimedes], ‘Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!,’” before concluding, in a heroizing move, “[Our] task is not to degrade revolutionaries to the level of an amateur, but to exalt the amateur to the level of a revolutionary.”83 In all this, Lenin constantly and explicitly looked to the Germans, who had long understood that the movement needed “firm and steadfast leaders.”84 Just three years later, however, the Revolution of 1905 would – with the rethinking of two old tactics by Luxemburg in The Mass Strike (1906) and Trotsky in Results and Prospects (1906) – turn the relationship between German and Russian Social Democracy on its head.

76 77 79 81 83

Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 174, 62, 99, and 56. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 175. 78 Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 137. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 146. 80 Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 137. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 147. 82 Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 158. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 150. 84 Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 145.

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Luxemburg was explicit that with The Mass Strike she meant to inject the spirit of 1905 into European and especially German Social Democracy. During the years between the Commune and the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg reminded readers, Engels’s arguments against the strike were “characteristic of the attitude of international social democracy.”85 As such, Kautsky’s Class Struggle could announce matter-of-factly that the strike (and the boycott) were “weapons . . . inherited from a previous age . . . and insufficient for the modern proletariat.”86 However, Luxemburg insisted there was no such thing as “the” mass strike.87 Her theoretical work on this tactic, as such, was an effort to radically de-essentialize the phenomenon on the basis of what was for her the exhilarating experience of 1905. Like Lenin in What Is to Be Done?, as well as in his writing on partisan war, Luxemburg devoted many pages to deconstructing contemporary assumptions about the strike by anarchists, syndicalists, and trade unionists – they all got it wrong. Because context matters most, Luxemburg warned, the strike was not “a kind of pocketknife that can be kept in the pocket clasped ‘ready for any emergency,’ and according to the decision, can be unclasped and used.”88 Instead, the Revolution had matured the general strike into the mass strike, and thus “opened a new epoch in the development of the labor movement.”89 And so now, she argued, in a manner characteristic of thought stretching back to Herzen, “The most backward country of all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries.”90 The only one to go farther with this argument than Luxemburg was Trotsky in Results and Prospects (1906). Trotsky’s idea of what at that time he still called “uninterrupted revolution” essentially updated Marx’s reading of populism for a newly industrialized and revolutionary Russia: If in the 1880s, as Marx and Engels had written, a Russian revolution supported by a European one would allow the commune to serve as the starting point for communist development, then in the context of the Revolution of 1905, Trotsky argued, such complementary events would enable the proletariat to transform “the temporary political domination of the Russian working class into a prolonged Socialist 85 87 88 89 90

Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, 112. 86 Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 184. Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, 120. Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, 116. Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, 112. Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, 164–165.

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dictatorship.”91 These ideas, in the preface to the 1919 edition of Results and Prospects, Trotsky would reformulate as “the tactics of permanent revolution.”92

Syndicalism Given its venerable revolutionary heritage, France should have been able to produce a socialist alternative to the German variant in the late nineteenth century, but, because the suppression of the Commune left thousands of leftists dead or demoralized, it was instead, as Sassoon put it, “weak in theory and organizationally divided.”93 To appreciate why it is tempting to say that if Sorel had not appeared on his own, it would have been necessary to invent him, even just listing the barely distinguishable names of the no fewer than nine socialist parties active in France during the decades before the war would do. As if this were not enough, French socialists were divided from the labor movement, which was organized into the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). In the Charter of Amiens (1906), the CGT declared itself to be “outside of all political schools,” and while it would participate in political struggles in pursuit of the workers’ well-being, its real commitment was to the “complete emancipation” of the working class by means of the general strike.94 To this movement of revolutionary trade unions (syndicates), Syndicalism, Sorel bound his name. If Lenin meant to “liquidate the third period” by means of an “exalted” vanguard, Sorel would see the whole of the left resurrected by a new “myth.” Like many of his contemporaries, Sorel worried about the decadence of bourgeois society and, also like many of his contemporaries, he thought violence might be able to reverse the tide: “Two accidents alone, it seems, would be able to stop this movement [of degeneration]: a great foreign war . . . or a great extension of proletarian violence.”95 We will leave aside “a great foreign war,” since no leftist at this time desired that, even if this was the strand that attracted erstwhile socialist Mussolini to Sorel. A “great extension of proletarian violence,” Sorel argued, would have the effect of sharpening class conflict, which in turn would re-heroize the bourgeoisie, which would drive capitalism closer to

91 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 31. 92 Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, 31. 93 See Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, 12. 94 See “The Charter of Amiens” at www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens .htm (accessed September 14, 2016). 95 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 86.

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perfection, which in turn meant closer to revolution. The problem was that the proletariat seemed unwilling or unable to extend its violence – because the proletariat had also lost its heroism. Sorel’s Reflections on Violence too is a critique of the inertia of form. This is why Sorel, unlike most of his contemporaries, appreciated Bernstein – and understood why he was so upsetting to the Germans: “Very few people understood that Bernstein’s declarations were courageous and honest actions, intended to make the language of Socialism accord more with the real facts. [But with] the new policy, heroic characters, sublimity, and convictions disappear!”96 Sorel was for “heroic characters,” etc., but they had to accord “with the real facts,” which, in “opportunist” German social democracy, they did not. In France, too, “real facts” were the problem: The experience of failure in 1848 and especially in 1871 had thoroughly de-romanticized revolution, which is to say that it had shattered the “national epic” that was 1789. But without the epic, people think about “brutalities” and “tragedies.”97 The Commune, in short, had made the working class afraid. Sorel also roots “opportunism” in the Commune, because it “brought the country back to practical, prudent, and prosaic conditions,” and then moved parliamentary socialists to proclaim that “they have only one passion – hatred of violence.”98 This kind of rhetoric was not going to compel anyone to act. In spite of the fact that Sorel saw parliamentary socialists as effete, he fully expected them to turn violent – and an especially hateful and vengeful kind of violent at that – should they get hold of the state. This is because Sorel placed them in a tradition dating back to the Inquisition, the Old Regime, and the Terrorists of 1793, all of whose excesses he attributed to their faith in the “God-State, to which they sacrificed so many victims.”99 By contrast Syndicalism, a movement in which Sorel had not been active prior to writing Reflections on Violence but with which he now threw in his lot, belonged to an anti-statist tradition: “Syndicalists do not propose to reform the State, as the men of the eighteenth century did; they want to destroy it, because” – and here, where one might expect the entry of Bakunin into the text, Sorel instead summons Marx – “they wish to realize this idea of Marx’s that the Socialist revolution ought not to culminate in the replacement of one governing authority by another minority.”100 Also, acts of proletarian violence, thus 96 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 214. 97 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 103. 98 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 101 and 104. 99 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 111. 100 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 116.

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Sorel, were “purely and simply acts of war . . . and everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of vengeance.”101 To smash the state, Sorel, following the Syndicalists, placed his bets on the general strike. The general strike was for him a “framing of a future” to galvanize the people to act.102 Examples Sorel gives of other earlier efforts to “frame” the future include the Christian apocalyptic myth, Luther and Calvin’s “dreams of Christian renovation,” and the “mad chimera” that was Mazzini’s idea of Italian unification.103 The “drama of the general strike,” Sorel argued, functioned analogously: It was “the myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised, i.e. a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society.”104 Sorel’s arguments would famously be taken up by Walter Benjamin in his Critique of Violence (1921) – but not by the left in 1914: When war was declared, the Second International did not summon the left to strike, and the “foreign war” easily outpaced “proletarian violence.”

Coda: Toward Third Internationalism As Lenin noted in the first footnote to What Is to Be Done?, by the turn of the twentieth century Europe’s left had been internationalized.105 But while it seemed to have developed its own lingua franca, leftists did not always agree on the meaning of its basic vocabulary, nor really what constituted the grammar of the future. What August 1914 therefore tragically revealed was that modern socialism was not yet internationalist enough, perhaps not yet “mythical” enough, and then the sun around which much of revolutionary Europe had revolved suddenly looked like a white dwarf, not a red giant. Whatever happened to the radical left during the month that followed seems to have been entombed in the century’s wreckage. It left no significant marks on the historiography. But what has, especially of late, is this: On a Saturday in early September 1914, Lenin rose, walked into the Berne library, sat down at a desk – first with Hegel’s Logic, as Žižek and others have shown, then with Clausewitz’s On War, as Schmitt noted106 – and re-launched 101 103 105 106

Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 115. 102 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 124. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 126. 104 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 127. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin, 54–55. See Žižek’s “Introduction” to Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2002), 4; Savas Michael-Matsas, “Lenin and the Path of Dialectics,” in Lenin Reloaded, 101–119; Stathis Kouvelakis, “Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s The Science of Logic,” in Lenin Reloaded, 164–204; and Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate

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the revolutionary project. The following year found Europe’s defeated leftists joking as they train-traveled up the Swiss mountains toward the antimilitarist Zimmerwald conference that, half a century after the founding of the International, the sum total of internationalists could still fit in four coaches.107 The anarchists, it should be said, were not on board. But these leftists were laughing again and, as Trotsky wrote, “laying the corner-stone of the revolutionary [Third] International.”108

Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2007), 51. 107 Trotsky, My Life, 249. 108 Trotsky, My Life, 150. Trotsky actually writes this phrase about Lenin, who was physically absent, but by means of drafts, notes, and conferences determined the spirit of the “Zimmerwald left.”

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